A Cyclopædia of Canadian Biography: Brief biographies of persons distinguished in the professional, military and political life, and the commerce and industry of Canada, in the twentieth century
History
A Cyclopædia of Canadian Biography: Brief biographies of persons distinguished in the professional, military and political life, and the commerce and industry of Canada, in the twentieth century
Canada -- Biography
Grand First Principal of the Grand Royal Arch Chapter of Canada, 1894-5,
and Provincial Grand Prior, Ontario Centre, Sovereign Great Priory of
Canadian Knights Templar, 1882; was Grand Representative of the Grand
Lodge of England in Canada, having been appointed to succeed Sir John A.
Macdonald in that office on the latter’s death, 1891; indeed, every
honor at the disposal of his fellow-craftsmen had been accorded him. In
September, 1902, in commemoration of the coronation of His Majesty King
Edward, the Duke of Connaught (q.v.) then and now Grand Master, was
pleased to confer the honorary rank of Past Grand Warden of England upon
several eminent personages, including the subject of this sketch. For
many years Mr. Robertson was president of the Canadian Copyright
Association and rendered important services in that regard, and also
Vice-President and President of the Canadian Associated Press, and Hon.
President of the Toronto Press Club. He was present, with his wife, by
invitation, in Westminster Abbey, at the coronation of King Edward and
Queen Alexandra. As an author of Masonic works, Mr. Robertson is well
known, having written the “History of the Degree of the Cryptic Rite in
Canada,” etc. (1888); “History of the Knights Templar of Canada, from
the Foundation of the Order to the Present Time” (1890); “Talks with
Craftsmen” (1893); “Freemasonry in Canada,” 2 vols., 1,000 pages each
(1899). He was a contributor to the U.C. College Memorial Volume, 1893,
edited the “Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe, wife of the First
Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, 1792-6” (1911), as a press notice
said, “The book of the year, a superb work,” and the author and compiler
of “Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto” (7 vols.). In 1888 the ambulance
system in Toronto was unsatisfactory, and with a view to making it
efficient, he imported from London, Eng., a modern ambulance, fully
equipped, and presented it to the city. There are about sixty ambulances
in Canada made from this model. The presentation marked a new era in
this branch of humane work. He later gave a collection of 4,000 Canadian
historical pictures to the Toronto Public Library, the largest
collection of its kind in the world, valued at $150,000. In January,
1917, he acquired and presented to the Public Library a magnificent
ornithological collection of birds and game of Canada, done in
water-color by William Pope, an English sportsman and artist, who
resided for forty years at Port Ryerse, Ont. This collection of
water-colors is pronounced by eminent Canadian biologists to be equal of
and in some respects superior to, the work of Audubon. Mr. Robertson
later added to this another collection of Canadian birds, exquisite
reproductions in color of hundreds of birds that are not in the Pope
Collection, so that the entire collection is unparalleled in Canada. He
founded and gave three magnificent silver cups, made by eminent British
silversmiths, from special patterns, for the promotion of cricket,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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