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History
Thomas Arthur Reed, musician, author, and historian, was born on 25 September, 1871 and was raised in Toronto. He was the son of William and Isabella Joyce Reed. He attended Dufferin School and Jarvis Collegiate Institute before entering the Toronto Conservatory of Music, where he obtained an ATCM (Gold Medal, Theory) in 1900. He then entered Trinity College, Toronto, and graduated with a Bachelor of Music in 1901. He became an organist at St. Augustine’s Church and started a choir. Reed had been a pupil of Augustus Vogt, the organist at the Jarvis Street Baptist Church, and in 1894, when Vogt founded the Mendelssohn Choir, Reed become the Choir’s secretary, a position he held for close to thirty years. In 1906 Reed began working at the University of Toronto as a clerk in the bursar’s office and in 1914 was appointed secretary of the Athletic Association, a position he held until his retirement in 1947. Reed also served as a member of the executive committee of the Corporation of Trinity College, president and member of the York Pioneers, and a
member of the Ontario Historical Society.
Reed was an authority on the early history of Toronto and, from 1921, lectured extensively on the history of Toronto to audiences around the city. He used lantern slides during these lectures and was reported to have a collection of over six-hundred pictures and photographs documenting Toronto from its beginnings in the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He annotated programmes of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, 1909-1929. He authored "Our Royal Town of York" (1929); "The Historic Value of Street Names" (1939); "The Scaddings, a Pioneer Family" (1940); "The Blue and White" (1944), a record of fifty years of athletics at the University of Toronto; and "A History of the University of Trinity College, 1852-1952" (1952). His wife, Claudia, established a scholarship in his name at Innis College, University of Toronto.
Reed married Claudia Marguerite Stuttaford (b.1897) on 22 June 1920. Their daughter, Eleanor Margaret, married John Blake Gartshore in 1947.
Thomas Arthur Reed died on 12 March, 1958 in Toronto and Claudia Reed died on 15 April 1988 in Ancaster, Ontario. Eleanor Gartshore died in Ancaster on 11 November 1980.