ROBINS, Frederick Burton

Frederick Burton Robins bought the Armour family farm on Yonge Street in 1911 for an upmarket subdivision north of the city. The First World War took the plan off the table. In 1917 he donated a section of the acreage to the Royal Flying Corps instead, and the RFC opened the Armour Heights field there that summer as the first School of Special Flying in the British Empire. His own 1914 Tudor-Revival house on the highest point of the estate survived the subdivision that eventually went up around it. It stands today as the officers’ mess of Canadian Forces College on Yonge Street, and is the last physical trace of the Armour Heights Field era.

Early life

Robins was born at Stroud, Ontario, on 5 August 1866. He moved to Toronto as a young man and in 1885 entered the real-estate business — a move that, over the next three decades, would make him a wealthy man.

Orange Order

His lodge affiliation was with Loyal Orange Lodge No. 275, the same Toronto lodge to which Francis Henry Medcalf and John Shaw had belonged.

Toronto Scottish Regiment

Robins held an honorary lieutenant-colonelcy with the Toronto Scottish Regiment, a militia affiliation that sat alongside his business career in the Toronto commercial establishment of the 1910s and 1920s.

Armour Heights

Robins acquired the Armour family farm on Yonge Street in 1911. The property lay north of the City of Toronto boundary in what was then York Township. His plan was to develop it as an upmarket residential subdivision — Armour Heights — and in 1914 he commissioned a Tudor-Revival country house on the highest point of the land as his own residence.

The First World War intervened. Instead of pressing ahead with subdivision work on a large estate north of the city during a wartime construction freeze, Robins gifted a portion of the Armour Heights acreage to the Royal Flying Corps in 1917 for use as a flying field. The RFC’s School of Special Flying, established at the new Armour Heights Field that summer, was the first of its kind in the British Empire — a dedicated course for advanced pilot instructors, using aerobatic technique developed by Major Robert Smith-Barry.

The American aviator Amelia Earhart, then stationed in Toronto as a volunteer nurse’s aide with the Canadian Red Cross during the 1918 influenza epidemic, was a regular visitor to the field in her off-duty hours. The Prince of Wales — later briefly Edward VIII and, after the abdication, the Duke of Windsor — stayed at Robins’s Armour Heights house during the Prince’s 1924 Canadian tour.

Postwar, the RFC field closed and the Armour Heights development resumed under a revised plan.

Death

Robins died in Toronto on 18 October 1948, at the age of eighty-two.