Bruce Bell, History Columnist –
One of my favourite Christmas stories is about George William Allan, son of one of the wealthiest families in Ontario, who decided to help children living on the mean streets of Toronto.
As legend has it, on Christmas Eve 1870 George walked along Front Street from his home on the corner of Front and Frederick Streets towards St. Lawrence Market. On the way he encountered children huddled in doorways trying to escape the cold.
After living a life of privilege, George determined on Christmas Eve to help Toronto’s growing numbers of homeless youth. He decided to donate his townhouse to become the Newsboys’ home, where young boys were given newspapers to sell on the streets and at night a place to eat and sleep; then a radical idea.
Many wealthy people in 19th-century Toronto and the rest of the British Empire didn’t think that the lower classes and especially children should be educated or even looked after by government, as they might grow up and take over society, leaving the privileged classes throneless.
Within a year George Allan’s Newsboys’ Home had become a refuge for up to 20 young, orphaned boys, offering hot meals and warm beds. Not nearly enough room for all the homeless children of Toronto, but it was a start.
In a mere 50 years the city had grown from a quaint agricultural town of 10,000 people to a vast polluting industrial city of a quarter million. It was a time of immense growth – and even greater despair, as encapsulated in Charles Dickens’s classic story A Christmas Carol.
The great English writer visited Toronto in May 1842, staying at the American Hotel at Front and Yonge Streets. About his visit he wrote, “The streets are well paved, and lighted with gas; the houses are large and good; the shops excellent. There is a good stone prison here; and there are, besides, a handsome church, a court-house, public offices, many spacious private residences”.
A year after visiting Toronto, Dickens published A Christmas Carol, in it, three ghosts visit mean old Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve, showing Scrooge how his life would play out if he didn’t reform. Dickens wrote the story just as the Industrial Revolution was sweeping across the world, rearranging the social landscape.
George Allan’s act of generosity led the way for another remarkable man to leave his mark on Toronto’s history.
In 1874 poor and starving 10-year-old John Joseph Kelso arrived in Toronto with his family to escape horrendous poverty in Ireland. The following year John Joseph (JJ as he became known) skipped school and got a job at James Bain’s bookstore on King Street East, around the corner from the Newsboys’ home.
As JJ grew older he was often sickened at the sight of young shoeless boys not fortunate to live at the Newsboys’ home, forced, as he would famously say, to “demean themselves and give the money to their parents or unscrupulous elders to buy liquor.”
At college, JJ Kelso became a bright student and eventually got a job as a newspaper reporter at The Globe, where his writing exposed the gruesome world of Toronto street children.
Kelso, once a poor destitute street child, also founded the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto in 1891, giving hope to vulnerable children. Kelso had previously established the Toronto Humane Society in 1887 and the Fresh Air Fund in 1888, providing excursions to Toronto Island for poor women and children.
In 1911 Kelso become a founder of the still active Central Neighbourhood House, built to bridge the gap between rich and poor by having workers live communally in urban slums with those they wanted to help.
The two philanthropists, extraordinary men from different backgrounds, made Toronto a safer place for children and eventually helped establish Children Aid Societies the world over.
As a tribute to George William Allan after his death in 1901, the city renamed the Horticultural Gardens to Allan Gardens, which it’s known as today. JJ Kelso, after a life dedicated to helping Toronto’s poor and destitute, died on September 30, 1935.
It’s not known if George Allan, the opposite of Ebenezer Scrooge, ever met Dickens when the great writer was in Toronto. But as an avid reader, no doubt Allan would have read A Christmas Carol, which perhaps inspired him to help the less fortunate.
It all began with a walk along Front Street on a snowy Christmas Eve in 1870. As Tiny Tim observed in A Christmas Carol, “God Bless Us, Every One!”
