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- Bio - https://recherche-collection-search.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/Home/Record?app=fonandcol&IdNumber=141750&ecopy=
van Sickle, Vernon, 1910-1960 : Vernon van Sickle was born in Bedford, England, in 1910 to Canadian parents and educated at Uppingham. He went to California as a young man to learn how to make films. Deported from the United States for working without a work permit, he ended up in Canada around 1927. He spent a year at the University of British Columbia and then supported himself doing odd jobs through the Depression, while trying to establish himself as a writer. During this period he was active in the Vancouver West End Community Writers Centre, whose members also included Dorothy Livesay. His interest in literature and film led to a friendship with the author Malcolm Lowrey, and during the late 1930s he began a literary work called "Vaudeville", a satire on the anxieties of Canadian cultural life and mass culture in a modern, technological world. He was active, along with the painter Jack Shadbolt, in the Film Survey Group of Vancouver (later the Vancouver Film Society), functioning as its programmer until 1947.
Van Sickle left Vancouver around 1948, after meeting his second wife, Shirley, who had moved to Vancouver from Montreal, where she attended McGill, spending her summers working in Ottawa with John Grierson at the National Film Board. Together they went first to Toronto and then to Ottawa, where they collaborated with Walter Michel, an engineer at the National Research Council, and his wife, Harriet, to form the Ottawa Film Study Group in 1951. He continued to work on "Vaudeville", which he tried unsuccessfully to publish. The van Sickles moved to Toronto in 1953 and Vernon van Sickle died of cancer in 1960.
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Singing Our Family Song
1910 - 1960 (50 years)
