The collection primarily documents the life and work of Laura Brandon's mother, Mary Constance (Greey) Graham, who was born at Toronto on 3 July 1916. Her parents died when she was young and she was raised by her extended family. She attended Miss Edgar and Miss Cramp's School in Montreal, Bishop Strachan School in Toronto and the University of Toronto, from which she graduated with first-class honours in Philosophy with an option in English or History, the University's most academically rigorous course.
Mary toured Europe in 1938 with her sister Elizabeth before settling in London, England. During the war, the sisters belonged to a group of ex-patriate Canadians revolving around Canada House that included Alison Grant, George Grant, Lester B. Pearson, Hume Wrong, Vincent and Alice Massey and Kathleen Moore. The group included diplomats, members of the military, people employed in the intelligence services and in various other types of war work. Mary worked successively for MI5, Britain's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency; Canadian military intelligence in Ottawa; British Security Coordination in Manhattan; and finally for MI6, Britain's secret intelligence service. Mary then worked for the United Nations in London and Geneva from 1945 to 1948.
In 1952, Mary married Gerald Sandford Graham, a fellow Canadian who was Rhodes Professor of Commonwealth History at King's College, London. The couple remained in England where they raised three children. Mary died in England on 8 August 2009.
The collection also documents the life and work of Laura Brandon's maternal aunt, Elizabeth Lucy (Greey) Ashton Edwards. She was born at Toronto on 1 June 1914, attended the same schools as her sister Mary and graduated from the University of Toronto in Arts. She worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, and studied biochemistry with Professor Jack Drummond at University College London. While in England, she contracted tuberculosis and returned to Canada to convalesce. Elizabeth then worked on the development of oxygen suits for the Royal Canadian Air Force. She returned to England after the war, where in 1948 she married Michael Ashton Edwards, an electronics engineer. The couple moved to the island of Jersey in 1955. After Michael died in 1962, Elizabeth converted their cottage into Maison des Landes, a hotel for handicapped people, that she ran until 1978. Elizabeth died in England in September 2010.
The collection also includes a small amount of material relating to Kathleen Margaret (Howitt) Graham, an abstract impressionist painter known professionally as K.M. Graham. She was born at Hamilton, Ontario on 13 September 1913 and graduated from Trinity College, the University of Toronto in 1936. She was married to Dr Wallace Graham, the brother of Gerald Graham. K.M. Graham took up painting after her husband's death in 1962. Her paintings hang in the permanent collections of many Canadian galleries. She died at Toronto on 26 August 2008.
The collection includes records documenting the early education of Mary and Elizabeth Greey. Their Personal correspondence with a great number of individuals, many of whom are referred to only by nicknames. Researchers should consult the indexes of correspondents found in the collection, which identify these nicknames and provide short descriptions of the individuals.
The collection also documents several canoe trips in Algonquin Park and Temagami, Ontario that Mary and Elizabeth undertook with a group of female friends in the 1930s. In the summer of 1937, the sisters and three other women made a trip by horse along the Peace River in the Rocky Mountains. During the trip, they met up with a group of students from Toronto's Upper Canada College, who were following a similar route organised by one of their teachers, Nicholas Ignatieff. The Peace River trip is documented by the participants' daily diaries, route maps, photographs, a 16mm colour film and other miscellaneous documents.
The collection also includes a series of oral history interviews that Laura Brandon recorded with her mother and aunt in the early 2000s. The topics covered in these interviews range from family history to the women's wartime activities, the Canadian expatriate community in Britain and Gerald Graham's academic career.
Researchers should be aware that in the finding aid, Mary and Elizabeth Greey are identified by their birth names until their marriages, after which they are identified by their married names.
'Girl quintet starts expedition to northern wilds,' Toronto Star (20 July 1937), p. 3.
Paula Adamick, 'It was the centre of everything,' Ottawa Citizen (11 May 1998), p. A4.
