The Wigs That Shocked Toronto
Plus a new Simcoe Day tour about the Simcoes, a secret museum, and more...
It was a chilly evening in 1914, one of those snowy nights in early March when the temperature plunges and the winter feels like it will never end. But inside the Princess Theatre on King Street, a blast of springtime colour was about to appear. As people settled into their seats for the performance, three women were spotted in one of the boxes. You could hardly miss them. On their heads was a sight so shocking it would make the front page of the next day’s newspaper and leave the audience struggling to concentrate on the play. The women were wearing brightly-coloured wigs. Toronto had never seen anything like it before.
These days, of course, those wigs wouldn’t exactly cause a sensation. But a century ago they were on the cutting edge of fashion. Bright wigs were all the rage in Paris and London. Just a week before that memorable night at the theatre, The Toronto Daily Star reported the trend had reached New York City. “A green one and a purple one were the pioneers, and they created quite a stir in the tea-rooms of the Ritz-Carlton and the McAlpin… Actresses were the first to ‘break the ice,’ with the brilliant tresses. Society is expected soon to adopt the fad.”
But north of the border, people worried our city might not be ready for such a radical new look. A few customers had asked about the wigs, but there were few sales. “Toronto people were just a little conservative,” one hairdresser explained. “They were afraid of the colors Paris and London are wearing.” One salon had stocked a few of the new dos, but hesitated to put them on display, “meditating with itself nervously if Toronto is yet ripe to endure the sight of an old rose coiffure on the head of the wax lady in the window.” Shops even made them available to rent for those too timid to commit. When someone finally did buy the city’s first purple wig, it made headlines; even the bravest Torontonians hadn’t opted for anything more daring than a relatively subdued red.
The Star warned its readers, “The brick red hair you see flashing like a misplaced danger signal in a limousine on Yonge Street is neither an affliction nor a deception — it is a transformation. It is leading the way for the purple transformation which will shortly probably transform Yonge Street into a transfixed row of spectators.”
Still, the first wigs made their appearances behind the closed doors of private functions. The Star reported that one brave woman wore a vermillion wig to a bridge game. But it was the crowd at the Princess that would bear witness to the wigs’ public debut, with the arrival of the city’s first coiffured kaleidoscope.
The theatre stood on King Street where it meets University Avenue today. When it first opened in 1880, the Princess was the herald of a new age: Toronto’s first major venue for live theatre and the first building in the city to run on electricity. It’s where Mary Pickford made her stage debut as a young girl, on her way to becoming one of the most famous movie stars in the world. It was one of Toronto’s premier venues well into the 1900s — a place to see and be seen. There was nowhere better to unveil an eye-catching new look.
That winter night in 1914, a theatre company from London was in town. They were presenting a pair of plays based on the works of Charles Dickens: The Cricket on the Hearth and A Christmas Carol. The starring role of Ebenezer Scrooge was being played by Tom Terriss, an actor who led a fascinating life. His father had been a famous Shakespearean performer who was murdered by his deranged protégé, stabbed to death at the stage door of a West End theatre. At first, Terris hadn’t followed in his thespian father’s footsteps. As a teenager, he tried his luck as a sheep farmer in Australia, then sailed around the world twice, toured North Africa on a bike, worked in a Colorado silver mine and as a clerk at the London Stock Exchange before finally turning to the stage. After his run as Scrooge, he would embark on a film career, becoming a movie star and director who worked with Charlie Chaplin and Lionel Barrymore. He’s even said to have been present at the moment when Howard Carter opened King Tut’s tomb, among those who survived its alleged curse.
But when Terriss appeared on stage at the Princess, the audience wasn’t focused on him. They were watching the women in the wigs.
And so was a reporter from The Toronto Daily Star. “BRIGHT-HUED WIGS WORN BY WOMEN IN THEATRE,” a frontpage headline announced the following morning. “It is no disparagement of Mr. Terriss’ acting to say that many of the audience took a much greater interest in the hair innovations in the box than they did in the actor on the stage.”
Each woman was wearing a different colour. One blue, one red, one white. “All three were very stylishly dressed, and, in each case, the wig was in striking and vivid contrast to the costume worn. The effect of the white wig was distinctly pleasing, and that even of the red, though certainly daring, was not altogether unsightly. But the Alice blue wig was bizarre and odd in the extreme — as much an abnormality as is the green carnation.”
The audience, it seems, could not tear their eyes away. “From all quarters of the house opera glasses were leveled on the bewigged trio. The ladies bore the scrutiny — some of it not of a very good-natured kind — with the utmost composure. Indeed, they seemed to like it.”
The two men who accompanied them, however, did not seem quite as thrilled with the attention. And the reporter took note of how genuinely angry the hairdos seemed to make the crowd. “It is to be hoped that much of the comment on the part of the audience, with regard to their headware, did not reach the ears of the trio in the box. Probably it did not, for the ears were mostly covered by the wigs. But a good deal of such comment was of a curiously frank and outspoken kind. And one needed to be no conjuror to arrive at the conclusion that their unwigged sisters regarded the innovation with not a little hostility and that their merriment at it was not unmixed with malice.”
Maybe those cautious hairdressers had been right. Perhaps Toronto wasn’t ready to live in a world where people dared to wear bright wigs.
In the months to come, talk of colourful coifs would pop up in the paper from time to time, but before long there was much more serious news on the front page. The First World War broke out that summer. Bright wigs must have seemed entirely at odds with the suffering of the age. It would be decades before they became a familiar sight on Yonge Street, with the arrival of the neon hairdos of the 1980s.
As for the Princess Theatre, the building survived the scandal of the wigs, though not much longer than that. It burned down the following year. And while it was rebuilt, it would eventually be torn down when University Avenue was extended south right through the spot where it stood. But by then, it had helped transform the neighbourhood around it. The Princess was the first big theatre to open, but its success attracted others. More than a hundred years after those three wigs made their shocking debut, that stretch of King Street is still home to Toronto’s Entertainment District today.
A New Simcoe Day Tour About The Simcoes!
We’re just a couple of weeks away from our next long weekend. And since the upcoming Civic Holiday is recognized as Simcoe Day in Toronto, I thought it would be the perfect time to create a new walking tour about our city’s founding family. LOVE, DEATH & THE SIMCOES will explore our city’s past through stories about the fascinating couple, their children and their pets. We’ll walk in the footsteps of those who were here in the late 1700s while talking about everything from scandalous rumours to heartbreaking tragedy to the family’s complicated legacy, which we’re still wrestling with more than 200 years later.
When: Simcoe Day! Monday, August 7 at 3pm.
Where: Meet outside the main entrance to Fort York (250 Fort York Boulevard). I’m not yet 100% sure where we’ll finish, but I suspect it will be at the Simcoe Wave Deck on the waterfront.
Price: Pay what you like!
If you aren’t already a paid subscriber to the newsletter and you’d like to make the switch, all you have to do is click the button below. This newsletter is a ton of work! Only about 4% of readers have made the switch so far, which basically means that by offering a few dollars a month you’ll be giving the gift of Toronto history to 25 other people — in addition to getting perks like 10% off my online courses:
The Crime Dog & The GBOAT Go To Cooperstown
Two new players were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown this weekend, and both of them are former Blue Jays. Fred McGriff is a Toronto legend, of course, for the role he played during the team’s early successes in the 1980s — and for being an important part of the trade that boosted them into the World Series. But while Scott Rolen was only here for a year-and-a-half beginning in 2008, he left a lasting legacy as well.
Those were the golden days of the Blue Jays blogosphere, when sites like Drunk Jays Fans, Ghostrunner On First, The Tao of Stieb, The Mockingbird, The Southpaw and Hum and Chuck were pioneering a whole new way to follow the team: online. Those blogs helped reawaken my obsessive baseball fandom after years of not paying much attention to the Jays. And those writers — Drunk Jays Fans in particular — are what helped inspire me to start my own blog about one of my other interests: Toronto history. So you can draw an unlikely but direct line between the Jays of those days and this newsletter.
Scott Rolen was a favourite of the Jays blogs back then, what with his spectacular defense, impressive bat and very un-jock-like interest in reading the working-class odes of Upton Sinclair. It earned him the nickname of the GBOAT — the Greatest Blue Jay of All-Time — half-jokingly at first, but less and less so as time went on. All of which helps this induction weekend feel particularly meaningful.
Drunk Jays Fans’ Andrew Stoeten has marked the occasion in his own newsletter,
, by sharing some of the writing his blog was doing about the GBOAT back then:QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
KNOCKERS, BLOCKERS, SCHEMERS, OBSTRUCTIONISTS AND NIT-WITS NEWS — The most recent edition of Jamie Bradburn’s newsletter digs up an editorial from 1929 that reads as if was written in 2023. “The whole atmosphere of the city is permeated with the negative force, everywhere is met a psychology which might be described as ‘the desire for failure.’ Every progressive attempt or suggestion immediately meets organized opposition.” Read more.
DEMOLITION NEWS — The destruction of the old Unilever Soap Factory has begun despite effectors to save the historic complex and have at least part of it incorporated into a new development. As I wrote last summer, a soap factory has stood on that spot near the mouth of the Don River for more than 100 years. Kimia Afshar Mehrabi wrote about the demolition this week. Read more.
SECRET MUSEUM NEWS — And that’s not all from Kimia Afshar Mehrabi, who also took us inside one of my favourite little hidden gems of downtown Toronto. The Friar’s Music Museum is hidden away inside the Shopper’s Drug Mart at Yonge & Dundas Square (a building which used to house Friar’s Tavern, one of the legendary music venues of the Yonge Street Strip). The current exhibit explores the history of Caribbean music. Read more.
STUNNING LIBRARY NEWS — In his Toronto Star column last weekend, Shawn Micallef explored one of the country’s most spectacular libraries: The Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, “the downtown concrete room that bears witness to some of Toronto’s most famous — and infamous —struggles.” (It also has a special place in my heart as the setting of the opening of the first chapter of The Toronto Book of Love.) Read more.
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
BABY POINT UNCOVERED WALKING TOUR
July 29 — 3pm — Étienne Brûlé Park — Heritage Toronto
“Travel an ancient transportation route through a Garden Suburb. Led by archaeologists, this walk will expose the Indigenous presence buried along the Humber River in Baby Point, including settlements like the 17th-century Seneca village of Teiaiagon, and address the area’s colonization and early 20th-century transformation into a garden-inspired residential community by developer Robert Home Smith.”
$9.85
ART & ARCHITECTURE UNCOVERED WALKING TOUR
July 29 — 11am — Guild Park — Heritage Toronto
“Explore the scenic beauty and unique history of Guild Park on tours featuring specially commissioned sculptures and architectural fragments salvaged from the destruction of historic Toronto buildings.”
Free — $10 donation suggested
ON THE EDGE OF A CITY: TORONTO IN 1833 WALKING TOUR
August 19 — 10:30am — Meet at St. James Cathedral — Town of York Historical Society
“In this walking tour, explore the surviving built environment of the original 10 blocks of Toronto and discover how the Town of York, which started with a population of a couple hundred residents, became the City of Toronto in 1834, with a population of just under 10,000.”
$17.31 for non-members; $11.98 for members
DEATH, VIOLENCE & SCANDAL IN YORK WALKING TOUR
August 19 — 2pm — Meet at St. James Cathedral — Town of York Historical Society
“In this walking tour, explore the scandalous side of Little Muddy York as we walk through the surviving built environment of the original 10 blocks of Toronto and learn about the intriguing stories that would have been the gossip of the day.”
$17.31 for non-members; $11.98 for members
MR. DRESSUP TO DEGRASSI: 42 YEARS OF LEGENDARY TORONTO KIDS TV
Until August 19 — Wed to Sat, 12pm to 6pm — 401 Richmond — Myseum
“The TV shows of your childhood hit closer to home than you might think. From 1952 to 1994, Toronto was a global player in a golden era of children’s television programming. For over four decades, our city brought together innovative thought leaders, passionate creators and unexpected collaborations – forming a corner of the television industry unlike any other in the world. Toronto etched itself into our collective consciousness with shows like Mr. Dressup, Today’s Special, The Friendly Giant, Polka Dot Door, Degrassi, and more. Journey through Toronto’s heyday of children’s TV shows in this playful exhibition.”
Free!
ROOT OF THE TONGUE BY STEVEN BECKLY
Until August 27 — Wed to Sun, 11am to 5pm — Montgomery’s Inn
“Root of the Tongue is an exhibition of new artworks by Steven Beckly. Situated within Montgomery’s Inn, it consists of evocative images, sounds, and sculptural objects inspired by the Chung family, Chinese market gardeners who resided there in the 1940s. Considering their intimate roots to the site as well as the racism and xenophobia they faced during that time in Canada, Root of the Tongue explores the vegetable garden as fertile grounds for rituals of care and cultivation, ripe with symbolism and queerness.”
Free!
TORONTO’S MAYOR FROM MUDDY YORK TO MEGA CITY
September 21 — 7:30pm — Montgomery’s Inn — The Etobicoke Historical Society
“Frank Nicholson will help us see the history of Toronto unfold through the careers of some of the sixty-five chief magistrates the city has had since being incorporated in 1834, including our first mayor, William Lyon Mackenzie, the leader of the Rebellion of 1837, and Mel Lastman, who oversaw the amalgamation of the city and its suburbs creating Megacity, our current city, twenty-five years ago.”
Exclusively for members of the Etobicoke Historical Society; an annual membership is $25.