No Ordinary School: The Study, 1915-2024 9780773597648

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No Ordinary School

No Ordinary School The Study, 1915–2015

c ol l e e n g ray With the assistance of Jill de Villafranca,

Mary Liistro Hébert, Eve Marshall, and Susan Orr-Mongeau

Published for The Study by McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

Unless otherwise indicated, images in this volume appear courtesy of The Study’s archives and from members of The Study Community.

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015 isbn 978-0-7735-4635-6 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-9764-8 (epdf)

Images appearing on the following pages display: Page ii Braeside Page xii The Study, 1921 Page 2 Seaforth Playground, 1930s Page 156 Gym demonstration, Braeside, n.d. Page 164 100th anniversary formation

Legal deposit third quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. A special edition published for The Study bears isbn 978-0-7735-4642-4.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Gray, Colleen, 1951–, author No ordinary school : The Study, 1915–2015 / Colleen Gray ; with the assistance of Jill de Villafranca, Mary Liistro Hébert, Eve Marshall, and Susan Orr-Mongeau. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. Text in English; The Study mission statement, presentation letter, and preface in English and French. isbn 978-0-7735-4635-6 (bound).–isbn 978-0-7735-9764-8 (epdf) 1. Study (Private school)–History. 2. Private schools–Québec (Province)–Westmount–History. 3. Girls’ schools–Québec (Province)– Westmount–History. 4. Girls–Education–Québec (Province)– Westmount–History. 5. Gascoigne, Margaret. I. Villafranca, Jill de, author II. Hébert, Mary Liistro, author III. Marshall, Eve, author IV. Orr-Mongeau, Susan, author V. Title. VI. Title: Study, 1915–2015. le4.m65g73 2015

371.82209714'28

c2015-903568-6 c2015-903569-4

Contents

The Study Mission Statement / vi Presentation Letter from James McDonald / viii Preface by Jill de Villafranca, Mary Liistro Hébert, Eve Marshall, and Susan Orr-Mongeau / x Acknowledgements / xiii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

“Things that Really Matter,” 1878–1913 / 3 “A Real School,” 1913–1919 / 12 Days of Promise, 1920–1929 / 25 The Great Depression, 1930–1939 / 37 “The Good War,” 1939–1945 / 53 A Golden Age, 1946–1960 / 63 A World Turned Upside Down, 1960–1970 / 78 A Time to Question, 1970–1983 / 89 A Time to Define, 1983–1997 / 102 State of the Art, 1997–2003 / 122 Challenging Times and New Horizons, 2003–2014 / 139 Into the Future / 153 Notes on Sources / 157 Select Bibliography / 165 Index / 167

The Mission

We guide each Study girl towards reaching her fullest potential by fostering fine scholarship, instilling the love of learning, and developing well-rounded leadership qualities in a global-minded, diverse environment where both the individual and the community are valued.

Mission Guider les élèves de The Study pour qu’elles atteignent leur plein potentiel en prônant un enseignement de qualité propre à faire naître le goût d’apprendre, afin de développer un bon sens de leadership dans un environnement diversifié et ouvert sur le monde où la personne comme le groupe sont pris en compte.

The Study’s Vision

The Study builds on a rich tradition of innovation to be the top independent bilingual all-girls school in Montreal by creating an institution-wide culture of: Innovation through teaching and learning practices that encourage intellectual curiosity, Autonomy through self-efficacy and leadership, and Excellence in all pursuits, be it academics, sports, or the arts, while contributing to the global community.

Vision de the Study The Study se fondera sur une tradition riche en innovation pour occuper la première place dans les écoles de filles bilingues et indépendantes de Montréal en créant une culture à l’échelle de l’établissement caractérisée par : L’innovation grâce à des pratiques d’enseignement et d’apprentissage qui encouragent la curiosité intellectuelle. L’autonomie par la confiance en soi et la conduite. L’excellence dans tous les domaines, scolaires, sportifs, artistiques, tout en contribuant à la collectivité.

Presentation Letter from James McDonald

It is an honour to present this book documenting the first 100 years of The Study’s history to the entire Study Community. For us, this work has been awaited for some time and we are grateful it is now in our hands. We are also pleased to know that our publisher believes our history will be of interest to people beyond our immediate community: those who are interested in the history of Westmount and Montreal, the history of education, and perhaps those whose concentration is in women’s studies. So I would welcome you to the Study Community as well. I believe that anyone who reads this book will come to understand that The Study is, in fact, no ordinary school and that we have managed, over the first 100 years, to foster a culture of attention to the needs of each student while at the same time being sure she understands the need to do her very best both for herself and her community. Remarkably, we have placed ourselves squarely in the context of the needs of the times and have become innovative in our responses to those times. As we embark on our next century, the school is again reimagining itself in light of our desire to offer the kind of education we feel is most appropriate for the families whose daughters we serve and for the society as a whole. Thus the book is a celebration, not only of an institution but also of all who have been part of the institution over the past 100 years and who continue to be part of our future. On behalf of the current Board of Governors as well as past and future boards I would like to say congratulations on a century of achievement and a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has been part of this remarkable school.

James McDonald Chair, Board of Governors

Lettre de présentation de James McDonald

C’est pour moi un honneur de présenter cet ouvrage qui retrace les cent premières années de l’école à toute la communauté de The Study. Nous attendions ce livre depuis quelque temps, et nous nous réjouissons de l’avoir en main maintenant. Nous sommes également très heureux de savoir que notre histoire puisse, d’après l’éditeur, attirer bien des gens hors de notre cercle immédiat : les personnes qui s’intéressent à l’histoire de Westmount et de Montréal, à l’histoire de l’enseignement ou encore peut-être celles qui se concentrent sur les études Féminines. Je leur souhaite donc la bienvenue dans notre communauté. Quiconque lira ce livre se rendra compte, je pense, que The Study est, indéniablement, une école qui sort de l’ordinaire et qu’au cours des cent dernières années, elle est parvenue à instaurer une culture attentive aux besoins de chacune des élèves afin de s’assurer en même temps que celles-ci réalisent leur plein potentiel, tant pour ellesmêmes que pour leur communauté. The Study a su se situer magnifiquement bien dans le contexte des besoins de l’époque et a su trouver des réponses novatrices à ces moments là. Alors que nous allons aborder le prochain siècle de notre histoire, l’école se réinvente de nouveau afin d’offrir l’éducation que nous croyons la mieux adaptée aux familles que nous desservons ainsi qu’à la société dans son ensemble. Ce livre est donc une célébration, non seulement la célébration de l’école, mais aussi de tous ceux qui y ont apporté leur contribution au cours de ces cent dernières années et qui continuent à faire partie de notre avenir. Au nom du Conseil des gouverneurs, celui du présent, mais aussi ceux du passé et du futur, j’aimerais vous féliciter pour ce siècle de réussites et remercier du fond du cœur tous ceux qui ont participé à la vie de cette remarquable institution.

James McDonald Président, Conseil des gouverneurs

Preface

For several years we have known that someone had to extend the wonderful book that former headmistress Katharine Lamont had written during her retirement. It became clear that it would take a professional researcher/historian to do the job justice. As the 100th Anniversary of The Study loomed, we knew this would be the ideal time to find the right person to do the job. We were very fortunate to find Dr Colleen Gray, who has made the entire project a reality. The history of any institution is inevitably about how that institution is an expression of its times. In the case of The Study, we have found that the world wars, the Great Depression, the Women’s Movement, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, and the changing demographics of Quebec, to mention a few, have all had an impact on the school, and it is important to place the school in the context of all those events. What we find is a remarkably resilient and adaptable school that is more than just responsive and adaptable, but leads the way. This is one way in which The Study is “no ordinary school.” The other way in which The Study is “no ordinary school” is its people – past, present, and (we are sure) future. Because the history of The Study is about so many people, we realized early on that there are many perspectives on every event, every policy, and even on every teacher and head of school. But we cannot bring them all to the conversation by any means. And some of the history is so very recent that it will take time to gain a historical perspective on it. Since the introduction of the Bilingual Programme, the school has become increasingly bilingual, and the presence of many francophone and allophone families has brought an enriched

culture with it. To reflect this evolution, we would have liked to write increasingly in French. However, this was impossible for several technical reasons related to the publishing of the book. We very much regret this. There are many people who appear in the book, and we thank them for their time and thoughtfulness in allowing Dr Gray to interview and quote them. Other people appear as members of groups such as a sports team, a committee, a faculty, or a parent body. Scores of people have had a profound impact on the school and have invested great amounts of time and money in making the school what it is. We cannot mention every name but it does not diminish their importance. This book is a celebration of all of you, and we are deeply grateful. We also want to thank those who have explicitly supported this effort through their donations of funds to pay for the work of researching and writing and to offset the cost of production. We hope this celebration of our school and its people, its past and our hopes for the future, will be a suitable means of marking 100 years of educating young women. Jill de Villafranca, Mary Liistro Hébert, Eve Marshall, and Susan Orr-Mongeau September 2015

Préface

Depuis longtemps déjà, nous savions qu’il faudrait donner une suite au merveilleux livre que l’ancienne directrice Katharine Lamont avait écrit durant sa retraite. Pour rendre justice à un tel ouvrage, il était évident qu’il fallait une chercheuse professionnelle doublée d’une historienne. L’approche du centenaire de l’école nous a semblé le moment propice pour trouver la personne idéale capable d’effectuer cette tâche. Nous avons eu la grande chance que Mme Colleen Gray puisse faire de ce projet une réalité. L’histoire d’un établissement porte inévitablement sur la manière dont il a été le miroir de son temps. Dans le cas de notre école, nous avons réalisé que les deux guerres mondiales, la grande dépression, le mouvement féministe, la Révolution tranquille et l’évolution démographique du Québec, entre autres, avaient exercé une influence sur notre institution et qu’il était important de resituer l’école dans le contexte de tous ces évènements. Ce que nous découvrons, c’est que The Study n’est pas seulement une école incroyablement résiliente et adaptable, qui ne se limite pas à réagir, mais qui ouvre la voie. C’est une façon pour The Study de se distinguer et de ne pas être « une école comme les autres ». Elle se différencie également des autres écoles par son équipe, que ce soit celle du passé ou du présent et, nous en sommes sûrs, celle de l’avenir. Comme tant de personnes sont associées à cette histoire, très vite, nous avons compris qu’il existait de multiples perspectives sur un évènement, une politique, et même un professeur ou une directrice. Cependant, il est totalement impossible de les mentionner toutes. D’autre part, certains aspects de l’histoire sont si récents qu’il faudra du temps pour avoir assez de recul pour en témoigner.

Depuis la mise en place du programme bilingue, l’école est devenue progressivement bilingue, et de nombreuses familles francophones et allophones ont contribué à enrichir sa culture. Pour faire sentir cette évolution, nous aurions aimé écrire davantage en français. Néanmoins, cela s’avère impossible, pour plusieurs raisons techniques liées à la publication de l’ouvrage. Nous le regrettons beaucoup. Un grand nombre de personnes figurent dans ce livre, et nous tenons à les remercier pour le temps qu’elles ont accordé à Madame Gray durant les entrevues et pour leurs réflexions qui sont citées. D’autres sont mentionnées en tant que membres de groupes, qu’il s’agisse des équipes sportives, des comités, du personnel enseignant ou des représentants des parents. De nombreuses personnes ont eu une profonde influence sur l’école et ont investi beaucoup de temps et d’argent pour en faire ce qu’elle est. Même s’il est impossible de les mentionner toutes, cela ne diminue en rien leur importance. Ce livre se veut une célébration pour vous tous et l’expression de toute notre reconnaissance. Nous tenons également à remercier ceux qui ont explicitement soutenu ce travail au moyen de leurs donations de fonds pour couvrir les frais de recherche et d’écriture et pour le coût de production. Nous espérons que cette célébration de notre école, de ses membres, de son passé et de ses espoirs pour le futur, sera une belle façon de marquer ces cent années consacrées à la formation de jeunes femmes. Jill de Villafranca, Mary Liistro Hébert, Eve Marshall et Susan Orr-Mongeau septembre 2015

Acknowledgements

Essential to the writing of this history was the 100th Anniversary Book Committee, which not only encouraged my journey into The Study world but also generously provided insights at every stage. Specifically, through Eve Marshall and Mary Liistro Hébert I was drawn into the complex world of a headmistress, and by Jill de Villafranca, into Study parents, and the workings of the Study board. Susan Orr-Mongeau tirelessly supported the project at every step of the way with her excellent administrative skills and her knowledge of The Study community. Belinda Hummel, with her amazing organizational skills, continuously supported the project, and with good-natured tolerance of the disorder involved in writing a history such as this in a very short time. Pattie Edwards was always ready to share her extensive knowledge of Study Old Girls, with good humour. Ellen Yambouranis at the reception desk promptly and at a moment’s notice arranged working space. Always smiling. Susan Papini unearthed a few rare and important documents. Amalia Liogas and Mary Milligan enriched the project by generously sharing many of their photographs.

I am deeply indebted to so many other people in The Study community. Head Nancy Sweer welcomed me into the school, as did administrators, teachers, and support personnel alike with warm and friendly smiles. People are what make The Study more than just a school. Crucial to the backbone of this history were the interviewees who generously shared their time and their memories and by doing so, not only widened my horizons, but infused the book with voice and texture. I am indebted to the generosity of so many individuals outside of The Study, whose time and expertise greatly facilitated my photographic research: Oliver Mahoney, archivist at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; Doreen Lindsay, president of the Westmount Historical Association; Linda d’Anjou and Marie-Claude Saia, photographic and copyright technicians at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Lori Podolsky, acting university archivist at McGill University; Montreal writer and editor Mark Abley; Patricia Desjardins, coordinator of photo and video services at the Montreal Gazette; and Pamela Miller, former history of medicine librarian of the Osler Library at McGill University.

xiv

I am also indebted to Professor John Zucchi from McGill University and Gretchen Brabander who read and commented upon parts of the manuscript. Dr Lawrence Mussio provided formative direction in the writing and structuring of an institutional history outside of the academy. The cheerful and skilled assistance of managing editor Ryan Van Huijstee, production manager Elena Goranescu, and rights and special projects manager Julia Monks at McGill-Queen’s University Press certainly lightened the load. Of course, any errors or omissions are my own responsibility. The generous assistance of two particular benefactors must be acknowledged. First, the significant donation from Helgi and Ian Soutar made all the difference. The bequest from the estate of Mary Stavert Hugessen, ’51, was indeed fitting, and without it the book could not have appeared in its present format. The following benefactors also deserve thanks: Ann (Markham) Birks, ’66 Brian and Leslie Dunn Robert W. and Heather Faith Sheila and Michael Hayes Mary Liistro Hébert Marigold (Savage) Hyde, ’48 Joan (Fraser) Ivory, ’51 Claire (Fisher) Kerrigan, ’42 David Kostiuk and Jill de Villafranca Phyllis (Bronfman) Lambert, ’44 Sharon Law-Klinkhoff Eve Marshall

Acknowledgements

Willa (Birks) McDougall, ’48 Martha (Morgan) McKenna, ’46 Barbara (MacKenzie) Molson Susan Orr-Mongeau Jill (McConnell) Price, ’51 Sandra Schlemm Deirdre (Molson) Stevenson, ’51 Nancy Lewis Sweer Ursula (Johnston) Trudeau, ’49 Barbara Whitley, ’36

No Ordinary School

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“Things that Really Matter” 1878 –1913

As a young student in Nottingham, England, during the 1880s, Margaret Gascoigne reflected on how much she would like to teach someday and have a school of her own. Many years later she recalled her dream of a school in which girls would be happy and learn things that really mattered. Miss Gascoigne, who was born on 3 August 1876, could have been no more than a child when she made this solemn pronouncement. It was in response to what she called “the pretentious” school to which she had been sent at the insistence of her aunts, who came to join the Gascoigne household. This school was kept by a lady who was a typical Victorian head mistress, unpredictable in temperament and assisted by a staff of the poorest type of teachers imaginable. In the England of the day, the craze for examinations was just beginning. From the time that Miss Gascoigne entered that school, her education consisted of merely cramming for the Oxford Local Examinations. How she hated the textbooks and the lessons and the papers on literature and Shakespeare and history, surely enough to create a lifelong distaste for any of these studies! As for arithmetic and mathematics, they were taught so badly that she could never understand even their basic elements.

The weekly afternoon lesson in art was presided over by a doddering gentleman who ensured that everything was drawn straight from copies. According to Miss Gascoigne, the one saving grace of this school was music, which was well taught – high praise, indeed, from a woman who would come to be known later in her life as an accomplished musician, who would not only entertain but influence generations of girls with her gifts. More than eighty years later, Miriam Tees recalled, “She was singing this beautiful song … I was transported and I think that it transported me for life … I remember this wonderful experience of listening to this gorgeous … big contralto voice and singing this beautiful piece [from Handel’s Messiah].” How different this institution was from the school she had attended near her home when she was only seven years old! It was run by an old Scottish lady, Mrs Laing, and her three daughters, gentlewomen who were cultured, intelligent, and of the “old school.” Miss Gascoigne remembered them fondly in memoirs she did not live to finish, how musical they were, how they pleasantly read aloud, and how they all wrote in a beautiful hand. According to Miss Gascoigne, there was nothing superficial about such a school that taught

Nottingham: Walter Fountain and Lister Gate. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

literature and music so thoroughly and soundly, and where everyone was very happy. Was it this experience and the contrast with her later “superficial and pinchbeck” school that laid the foundation for Miss Gascoigne’s own flexible and humane philosophy of education? And was it this influence that she would eventually put into practice, not in her native England, but many years later, in the distant city of Montreal, in her very own school that became known as The Study?

A Changing World for Women Fortuitous circumstances, in part, ensured that Miss Gascoigne would realize her dream, for the world into which she was born in 1876 was a changing world for women. When Queen Victoria was crowned in 1838, No Ordinary School

women were second-class citizens. By the time of Miss Gascoigne’s birth, although the vote for women was still in the distant future, women could own property. Significant as well was the revolution in middle-class education for girls such as Miss Gascoigne. Set in motion by such educational reformers as Frances Mary Buss and Dorothea Beale, high standards of discipline and intellectual training for girls challenged prejudices that rigorous study would damage their mental and physical health – particularly their reproductive systems. By the 1890s, an increasing number of secondary schools offered to girls the same educational opportunities that boys enjoyed. At the higher level, eleven university colleges were open to both men and women, while five colleges throughout England had been established for women only – among them Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford, which Miss Gascoigne eventually would attend. This unexpected revolution, confined predominantly to middle-class women, challenged Victorian notions that daughters were destined to be only wives and mothers. Indeed, the phenomenon of these “new women” moving out of the home into schools of higher learning and then into the workforce was increasingly becoming not only accepted practice in many middle-class households, but also respectable. Once again, Miss Gascoigne was fortunate that her solidly middle-class parents not only supported, but were able to finance her education. Her father, Thomas, like his father before him, was a prosperous Nottingham hosiery manufacturer, who had married Rebekah Houghton, a farmer’s daughter from Lancashire. In addition to financing Miss Gascoigne’s

Governess and pupils, 1873. (Mary Evans Picture Library) Nineteenth-century educational reformers Dorothea Beale (top right) and Frances Mary Buss (bottom right). (Dorothea Beale: Courtesy of Cheltenham Ladies’ College; Frances Mary Buss: North London Collegiate School Archives)

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Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 1886. (By kind permission of the principal and fellows of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford)

education, Thomas Gascoigne supported a growing brood of six children – of whom Margaret Gascoigne was the eldest – in a respectable middle-class Victorian home at 13 All Saints Street in Nottingham, where the family lived throughout and beyond her girlhood. As superficial and pinchbeck as Miss Gascoigne considered her education to have been, and as bitterly as she complained about it, it was certainly a cut above No Ordinary School

the education received by previous generations of girls routinely sent to finishing schools designed to prepare them for marriage and motherhood. Miss Gascoigne’s education provided her with a solid foundation and the ability to make concrete choices about her future. Certainly it enabled her, throughout her teens, to be actually torn between two very different ambitions, both firmly supported by her parents: going to college

at Oxford or studying music in Germany. Her decision was clinched when she took and easily passed what she described as a “not very stiff ” local Oxford entrance examination. In 1894, at the young age of sixteen, Miss Gascoigne relinquished her dreams of a music education in Germany and entered Lady Margaret Hall. Her stay would be brief. A concussion caused by an accident forced her to return home. Following her recovery, in 1895 she re-enrolled at Lady Margaret Hall, and this time she stayed.

Oxford By the time Miss Gascoigne entered Lady Margaret Hall, women had been accepted at Oxford, albeit reluctantly, for almost twenty-five years. Once again, circumstances favoured Miss Gascoigne, who would benefit from the trail blazed by predecessors quietly and persistently fighting the establishment to ensure a precarious place for women. These first Oxford women crowded into rented rooms over a baker’s shop in Little Clarendon Street, attending chaperoned lectures given by dons sympathetic to women’s education. Miss Gascoigne, on the other hand, entered Oxford on more secure terms – into an established Anglican college that was emerging from its modest origins as a small Christian community, and was in the throes of dramatic expansion in response to its burgeoning enrolment. This does not mean that Miss Gascoigne’s Oxford was an easy experience for women. True, some of the most antiquated rules had been abolished by her time. Women, for example, no longer had to be accompa-

nied by chaperones at lectures, although chaperones were still mandatory for private sessions with tutors. Moreover, women still were required to enter lecture halls by a private staircase and sit apart from male students, who occupied the main section of lecture rooms. There also remained a distinct difference between the lifestyles of male and female students. Male students lived in suites with manservants to attend to them, while women lived simple, nun-like existences, in a milieu where stringent economies prevailed, an ideal preparation for the austere lifestyle Miss Gascoigne would pursue as headmistress of The Study many years later. Although rigidly supervised – women were expected to behave with modesty and decorum within and outside of the college and above all never to attract attention to themselves – this does not mean that there no was room for fun. Former students never forgot the night when the school principal, Elizabeth Wordsworth, forgot her latchkey and was caught by a policeman climbing into a window. Young Oxford women did not perceive their restrictions as either strange or unusual, for rigid supervision remained an integral part of their Victorian upbringing. Rather than focusing upon restrictions, these young women viewed their “peculiar” presence at Oxford as a great opportunity to expand their intellectual and social horizons. Taught by some of the finest minds that the world of learning had produced, women at Oxford in the late nineteenth century – including Miss Gascoigne’s generation – were pioneers, embracing their new-found freedoms. At Oxford Miss Gascoigne found her spiritual home and some of the strongest influences of her life. “Things that Really Matter,” 1878–1913

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Group photo, Lady Margaret Hall, 1897. Miss Gascoigne is seated on the ground in the front row, on the right. (By kind permission of the principal and fellows of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford)

Miss Gascoigne read Classical Moderations, and although she did not receive a ba degree – women at Oxford were only given a piece of paper testifying to their work – she obtained honours standing in a subject for which she had a lifelong passion. In later years, at her own school, Miss Gascoigne would read Latin poetry aloud to her pupils and ask, “Can’t you hear it?” Some couldn’t. However, at least one student, Barbara Whitley, who always hated Latin, clearly remembers the day when Miss Gascoigne took over the Latin class for an ill teacher. Miss Gascoigne repeated the word puella with such affection that this became one Latin word that Miss Whitley never forgot. Another notable influence was Miss Gascoigne’s relationship with Elizabeth Wordsworth, an Anglican clergyman’s daughter, niece of the British poet William Wordsworth, and the first principal of Lady Margaret Hall. Few documents remain connecting Elizabeth Wordsworth to Miss Gascoigne. However, according to Katharine Lamont, a volume of Miss Wordsworth’s essays was found in The Study library with a letter from the principal pasted in the front of it. The letter began, “Dear Margaret,” and it invited her to lunch, thirty years after she had left college. This raises intriguing questions not only about the relationship between the two women, but about the possible sustained and extended influence of Miss Wordsworth upon Miss Gascoigne. In addition to being the first principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Miss Wordsworth was a prolific author in her own right. Throughout her life she lectured extensively, passionately advocating an education for women that developed character as well as intellect – a philosophy Miss Gascoigne herself

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Elizabeth Wordsworth, principal of Lady Margaret Hall, 1879–1909. (By kind permission of the principal and fellows of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford)

“Things that Really Matter,” 1878–1913

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would put into practice in later years at The Study. Surely those who knew both women could not avoid remarking upon the similarities between them. Like Miss Wordsworth, Miss Gascoigne was known by some as a quietly controlled woman, of cultivated mind and exquisite taste, sane in her viewpoints, with a lively sense of humour. Moreover, both women were staunch Anglicans who would, in their own way, nurture successive generations of strong and successful women. However, one must be careful not to exaggerate the similarities between the two individuals. Miss Gascoigne may well have revered and been influenced by Miss Wordsworth. Yet those who knew Miss Gascoigne also recognized a strong woman in her own right, fortified by her own opinions and ideas. Nothing illustrates this more vividly than the development of Miss Gascoigne’s own pedagogical philosophy. Miss Wordsworth advocated books over teachers, while Miss Gascoigne’s eventual success rested upon her ability to attract gifted teachers such as Miss Seath, Madame Gaudion, and Miss Blanchard, teachers who retained sustained and long-term connections with The Study over decades. This tradition continues to this day. Miss Gascoigne was a serious student who left her imprint upon Lady Margaret Hall. In an obituary for Miss Gascoigne, in The Brown Book, the annual college journal for Lady Margaret Hall alumnae, former tutor and then vice-principal Annie Maude Stella remembered Miss Gascoigne as an extraordinarily teachable young woman. If she seemed hopelessly puzzled by some new and difficult piece of work, one lesson

No Ordinary School

would be enough to clear it up, and she never needed help in that particular point again. Miss Gascoigne’s acute intelligence and determination would make her a demanding teacher and administrator with high standards she expected of both herself and others. These qualities would also leave an indelible imprint on the foundations of The Study.

Uncertain Times Margaret Gascoigne graduated from Lady Margaret Hall in 1898 into a world opening up to women. While other female Oxford graduates of her generation would distinguish themselves in national and international circles as scholars, social activists, and writers, Miss Gascoigne, true to her original pronouncement, turned to teaching, although her success proved to be uneven. Over the next thirteen years, she worked as a governess to the Wakefield family at Sedgwick House, Kendal, living quite happily in a separate house on the estate. Two subsequent posts as a governess proved less desirable, so she turned to classroom teaching, serving as “sometime second mistress” at Howell’s School at Denbeigh, Wales, and as a teacher at St Margaret’s School for Orphans in Bushey, Hertfordshire. By all accounts, these were not satisfying years for Miss Gascoigne, who had vowed to open her own school, and they left her with the feeling that she was not making the most of her potential. And indeed, by some of the standards of her day, she was not. Working as a governess or even teaching in someone else’s

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school meant “playing second fiddle,” something a nephew would later remark that “Aunt Margaret” would never do. Many ambitious English women who were teachers dreamed of opening up their own schools. And they did. However, competition must have been steep in a milieu where private, independently owned schools were expanding and flourishing, and where start-up money for a woman of the middle class may have been hard to come by. Moreover, Miss Gascoigne would also discover that employment opportunities for female graduates of Oxford were more limited than for female graduates from degreegranting universities. Quite simply, employers often did not know how to assess an Oxford certificate that was not an official degree. Stifled by these circumstances, Miss Gascoigne may well have heard of more favourable opportunities in the colonies – in Canada where educated British women, no matter what their college, were preferred as employees over Canadian women, and questions about Oxford certification were never asked. In 1913, just before her thirty-sixth birthday, after answering an advertisement for a teacher from Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s School (ecs), Margaret Gascoigne packed up her belongings and embarked for Montreal.

“Things that Really Matter,” 1878–1913

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“A Real School” 1913–1919

Montreal In 1913, Margaret Gascoigne landed in a vibrant, cosmopolitan Montreal. Situated on an island at the confluence of three rivers, Montreal had, like all great cities, experienced turbulent transformations throughout its history. For thousands of years, semi-nomadic native tribes had roamed the St Lawrence Valley, temporarily establishing agricultural villages and then moving on. In the seventeenth century, French mystics founded Ville Marie, a marginal agricultural settlement also serving the French Empire as a fur-trading post and entrepôt to the West. After more than a century of conflict between the French and the British Empires, the 1763 British conquest definitively disrupted the French imperial presence in Canada. At first a trickle and then a stream of immigrants from the British Isles slowly began to transform Montreal into an English-speaking colony of the British Empire – with a distinctive French presence. But nothing would alter the Montreal landscape more than the nineteenth-century industrial revolution. Gigantic projects such as the Lachine Canal and the Victoria Bridge fortified by Montreal’s central location at the

hub of an expanding North American railway network ensured that, by the end of the century, the city would be, after New York, the second most important port in North America, and Canada’s most significant industrial and commercial centre. It would remain so until the 1970s, when Toronto would assume the lead as the economic powerhouse of Canada. At the time of Miss Gascoigne’s arrival, the geography of this dynamic city reflected the fierce linguistic and racial divisions that continued to define it for decades. Montreal was split into two distinct cities, with Boulevard St Laurent segregating the mainly francophone population to the east from the predominantly anglophone inhabitants to the west. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russians, Syrians, Italians, and Chinese were beginning to emigrate to Montreal. Developing their own communities between the “two nations,” this “third solitude” was beginning to diversify the city’s linguistic and racial divisions and was destined to become a major force in Montreal, and indeed, The Study itself. Miss Gascoigne settled in Montreal’s Golden Square Mile, a fashionable, staunchly British neighbourhood delineated by Atwater Avenue to the west,

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Bleury Street and Park Avenue to the east, Mount Royal Avenue to the north, and de la Gauchetière Street to the south. The area – The Study neighbourhood until 1960 – was filled with tree-lined streets, grand homes, and mansions of the people who then controlled 70 per cent of Canada’s wealth. This was the very heart of wealthy English-speaking Montreal, beginning to spill over into Westmount and surrounding areas. A genteel and solidly British world, it was also a

The Victoria Bridge. Miss Gascoigne landed in a vibrant, cosmopolitan Montreal, which had been indelibly altered by the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. (S. Russel. McCord Museum)

“A Real School,” 1913–1919

Sherbrooke Street in winter, Montreal, 1896. Miss Gascoigne settled in Montreal’s Golden Square Mile, the heart of the wealthy English-speaking community. (William Notman and Son. McCord Museum)

world in which Gascoigne would have been comfortable. Quickly she began making friends and connections as she set out to establish her own school.

Tenuous Beginnings and Auspicious Times Miss Gascoigne’s early days in Montreal, like her postOxford years, were not auspicious. Between the time of her immigration to Montreal and the opening of her school in September 1915, Miss Gascoigne meandered from one possibility to the next. True to her ambition, and as early as 1914, she had a prospectus printed up, optimistically advertising the opening of her own school “for girls of the age of 7 years and upwards.” However, the advent of the First World War intervened. By 1915, Miss Gascoigne had applied and been refused for the position to replace Miss Hardy as principal of Trafalgar School for Girls. She subsequently resigned her post as Latin teacher at ecs. Determined that she would not return to England until she had made a success of things in Canada, she borrowed twenty dollars, rented a room in the Grosvenor Apartments on Sherbrooke Street, and took in private pupils for coaching. She even applied – without success – for a teaching position out west, and for a time she returned to working as a governess. These were tenuous albeit fortuitous beginnings for Margaret Gascoigne also discovered that, as in England, times were changing for middle-class women in Canada. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canadian women had fought

Miss Gascoigne (left) and friends at Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, 1920–22. Word continued to spread about this “dynamic and enthusiastic Miss Gascoigne” who proved adept at making important connections and friends.

long, hard, and often divisive battles for the right to vote. By 1918, all female Canadian citizens had received the full suffrage in federal elections. A year later, women were permitted to stand for election to the House of Commons. By 1922, all provinces – except for Quebec – had granted the suffrage to women. Quebec feminists Thérèse Forget Casgrain and Idola St-Jean

“A Real School,” 1913–1919

Miss Gascoigne’s first prospectus, cover and interior, 1914.

PROPOSED SCHOOL FOR GIRLS TO BE OPENED IN M O N T R E A L IN SEPTEMBER. 1914

by

Miss MARGARET GASCOIGNE (CLASSICAL HONOURS. O X F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y )

formerly senior mistress of ST. MARGARET'S, BUSHEY. ENG. sometime student of LADY M A R G A R E T HALL. OXFORD.

I

T has been suggested that there is room in Montreal for another School for Girls of the age of 7 years and upwards. Miss Gascoigne, who has many years' experience of teaching and of organisation in girls' schools in England, is prepared to start such a school in September next. The aims of the school would be:— I. To train the children in concentration and in clearness and accuracy of thought. Special attention would therefore be given to Mathematics and to Analytical Grammar. II. To developc taste in Literature, Music and Art. Great attention would be paid to clearness of enunciation in reading aloud and in the repetition of poetry. Class singing and ear training would be part of the regular school curriculum. A multiplicity of subjects would be avoided and the homework would be carefully adapted to the health of each girl. Opportunity would be given to older girls to specialise in a very few subjects, but it would be considered essential that every girl should devote a certain amount of time either to Mathematics or Latin. Miss Gascoigne would be glad to answer any further questions or to call upon parents or meet them by appointment.

FEES

Entrance fee for all pupils For girls or boys from 7 to 9 years, For girls from 10 to 12 years, For girls over 12 Stationery -

- $ 5.00 120.00 150.00 180.00 3.00 aS^lm

Fees to be paid in advance, in two instalments, on October 1st and January 1st.

Three months' notice would be required before the removal of a pupil. The school year would be from the middle of September to the middle of June. There would be holidays of about a fortnight each, at Christmas and at Easter.

would continue the battle until 1940, when at last Quebec women were granted the right to vote in provincial elections. Restrictions upon women were loosening in other areas as well. By the end of the nineteenth century, gradually and reluctantly Canadian universities had opened their doors to women. In 1872 Grace Annie Lockhart at Mount Alison University became the first woman in the British Empire to receive a university degree. Other universities would soon follow suit. McGill dropped the barriers in 1884 when Lord Strathcona provided financial support for the first McGill programmes open to women. The programme, appropriately named “Donalda” after its founder, admitted these “Donaldas,” to the Arts and Science Faculty at McGill as occasional, part-, or full-time students. As in the England of Miss Gascoigne’s day, McGill imposed and rigorously enforced restrictions upon women. Although women had the same professors and courses as men, they pursued their studies at different times and in different rooms. In 1898, Lord Strathcona endowed the Royal Victoria College with $1 million. Slowly but surely, middle-class girls were being educated to take their matriculation – their high school exams – with university as their goal. Some of these girls would gravitate to Miss Gascoigne’s school. Times were auspicious for other reasons. The nationwide economic depression Miss Gascoigne initially encountered was soon dispelled by the advent of the First World War. Moreover, the first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed unprecedented population growth. To meet the demand of a growing, prosperous, essentially British segment of Montreal, new

private schools were emerging – ecs joined Trafalgar School for Girls, which had been established in 1884, while Lower Canada College (lcc) and Selwyn House were founded to educate boys in 1909 and 1913 respectively. Buoyed by these favourable circumstances and undaunted by her initial lack of success, by 1915, only two years after emigrating to Montreal, Miss Gascoigne remarked to her friend, Mrs Stansfield. “Ethel, I think I will start a school.” “Well,” replied Mrs Stansfield, “you can have Ellen.” “Well,” retorted Miss Gascoigne, “that’s one.” And so The Study was born.

“The Real School” From the outset, Margaret Gascoigne’s new enterprise seemed to fit right into the Montreal scene, in spite of the competition from ecs and Trafalgar. Only a year after her school’s installation on Drummond Street, Miss Gascoigne decided that two classrooms were needed. In June 1916, the school moved into a “nice little apartment” on Durocher Street. Word continued to spread about this “dynamic and enthusiastic” Miss Gascoigne. By the summer holidays there were so many applications for the next year that the school had to move once again, this time into a larger apartment in the same building. Like the Drummond Street location, the Durocher space proved to be short-lived. Very soon, with twenty or so pupils, the small apartment was bursting. Parents began to advise Miss Gascoigne to look for more spacious quarters. Ever responsive to the winds of change, “A Real School,” 1913–1919

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Miss Gascoigne’s first “real” school, 758 Sherbrooke Street West, and classrooms, 1917–18.

Miss Gascoigne considered several options before renting a house on the south side of Sherbrooke Street, just west of Guy – at number 758. It was a terrace house next to the Grove Apartments. The house stands to this day. It had pleasant rooms, and an apartment on the top floor where Miss Gascoigne initially lived. When the school opened for the summer term of 1917, there were approximately twenty-two girls. By the commencement of school in September, fifty-six girls had arrived – a far cry from the six students who just two years previously had appeared for lessons at Miss Gascoigne’s rented rooms on Drummond Street! When this school opened on Sherbrooke Street, Miss Gascoigne would look around her, at the rooms and the students, and say with a broad smile, “Now I have a real school.” The girls called this “real school” “Gassies,” or “The Gasworks.” According to Katharine Lamont, Miss Gascoigne would have liked to have called it Godolphin after the English girls’ private school headed by Mary Douglas, an English pioneer of education for girls. Like Miss Gascoigne, Douglas believed in the absence of petty rules, the power of self-discipline, and the right use of freedom. Miss Gascoigne, however, always called her school The Study. And so it remains. Legend tends to focus on the “glorious fluidity” of those early Gascoigne years. And indeed, it is true that on Drummond Street, from the outset, “fluidity” was a distinctive feature of Miss Gascoigne’s enterprise. During those early years, school life unfolded simply and casually in a very cheerful room with two large windows, blue homespun curtains, a blue carpet, with light blue coverings to match, and six folding tables.

Every morning, the students came very early, often arriving while Miss Gascoigne was still at breakfast. The children would come in to say “Good morning” and then run upstairs to get the room ready for school, placing the tables and chairs in two rows and arranging the books neatly on the tables. When all was ready, one of the children would come down to fetch Miss Gascoigne from the dining room. When the small children’s lessons ended at eleven, six girls came to the school for lessons in history, English, and Latin. Apparently haphazard and without system, the school seemed to work. The classroom, which may have been a bed-sitting room, contained the grand piano, which can be found in The Study to this day. Miss Gascoigne would play tunes at the request of the students and to the clapping of their hands. Books were expensive and scarce, so Miss Gascoigne read literature and poetry aloud for the girls to memorize. This fluid approach continued to prevail in Gascoigne’s first “real” school on 758 Sherbrooke Street West. Spontaneity and stimulus were the watchwords, reflecting Margaret Gascoigne’s formative and persistent determination that girls be happy and learn things that really mattered. The timetable and the curriculum were not rigidly fixed. Anything might happen at any time. Sometimes music dominated the entire morning. The children would sit on the floor while Miss Gascoigne played Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, or the tune of their choice. Judith Dobell Berlyn recalls her mother, Isabel Barclay Dobell, often speaking about the dynamism of those early Gascoigne years: “If Miss Gascoigne was visited at the school by a globetrotting friend, she would rush to the foot of the stairs, clap her “A Real School,” 1913–1919

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20

Study students, c. 1917–18. This is the first photograph of an Old Boy to appear in The Study Archives. (Back row, left to right) Esmond Peck, Barbara Pitcher, Muriel Jamieson Cantlie Patch, Stella Frosst Alexander, Margaret Rawlings Hart; (front row) Caro Molson Angus, Lilia Sims Henderson, Peggy Forbes, Charlotte Stairs Starkey, Kathryn Wood.

No Ordinary School

hands loudly, and summon everyone to the gym. The wider world beckoned. It was a wonderfully exciting place, and Study girls needed to get the feeling for the wealth of possibilities it had to offer. Hearing tales of a visitor’s travels was far too important; learning in class could wait.” Learning took place everywhere. There were sketching trips with Miss Seath in warm weather to Mount Royal, filled with fun and good humour. On one occasion, several of the girls’ shiny new camp stools collapsed most unexpectedly, undoubtedly to shouts of laughter. Visits to exhibitions at the Art Gallery (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) occurred regularly. The girls thrived in this fluid atmosphere. There was a sense of excitement in the air in the starting of something new. “Remember these walls,” Miss Gascoigne would counsel. “This house has never been a school before. First impressions are important; we must create an atmosphere.” To focus on this “glorious fluidity,” however, is to concentrate on an exceptional dimension of The Study; it is to belie the nascent school’s structured features. The Study was a professional enterprise. By June 1918, The Study boasted ten highly qualified teachers, many of whom were university graduates, a far cry from the Durocher Street school, whose teaching staff consisted solely of Miss Gascoigne and Mlle Boucher (later Madame Gaudion). In the same year, a school calendar outlined academic dates for the approaching Christmas, Easter, and summer terms. Also by 1918, students were organized into Upper and Lower Schools, and then subdivided into forms, along the lines of the British private school system. By 1918,

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The first Study Chronicle, 1917–18, front and back covers. By 1918, Study students were producing their own school newspaper. The front cover, in which the children form the letter S, as well as the crest on the back cover, were designed by art teacher Ethel Seath. Trilliums, the school emblem, twine around the title.

the first head girl, Margaret Aylmer, and the first prefect, Margaret Black, proudly represented the students as the Study day unfolded, beginning with prayers, scripture readings, hymns, and announcements. Like most schools during this era in which religion was a central feature of many people’s lives, The Study’s foundations were distinctly Christian. The school’s motto, extracted from Piers Plowman, by the

fourteenth-century English poet William Langland, speaks of Christian love of learning and the quest for truth. The school emblem was chosen not only because the trillium is a Canadian flower, but because, as the trinity flower, it was also at the centre of a spiritual legend. From 1926 onwards, generations of Study girls assembled in their school uniforms at Christ Church Cathedral for hymns, prayers, and sermons. This “A Real School,” 1913–1919

The story of the school emblem, by Isabel Barclay Dobell, from The Study Chronicle, 1924–25.

The School Emblem As you all know the Trillium, or Trinity Flower as it is sometimes called, is our school emblem. This flower was chosen for our emblem for two reasons; principally of course because it is a Canadian flower, but also on account of the beautiful legend which is attached to it. Long years ago, so the legend says, there lived far away in the mountains an old hermit, who was very fond of flowers. In his garden, besides the many kinds of plants and healing herbs, there grew two crab apple trees from whose fruit the hermit used to make a cure for the sick. For two successive years, however, the apples were stolen and though he searched throughout the countryside he could not find the thief. Sorely troubled by the theft of his fruit, for he could no longer make his healing remedy, he returned to his hut on the mountain side. A short time after this a plague broke out in the village, and one day as the hermit was going about administering to the stricken people he came to a house where a boy lay dying. The hermit gave the boy some of his precious medicine and in time he recovered. Now this boy was the apple thief and when he was well again and found out who his benefactor was, in order to make up for the wrong he had done, he resolved to help the hermit to take care of his garden. As the years went by the hermit became blind and the work of the garden fell gradually more and more into the hands of the boy. He planted the flowers and weeded the garden and often roamed far away over the hills in quest of new plants and herbs. One day when he returned home the hermit told him that he had had a wonderful vision. "I dreamed," he said, "and I thought I was standing in this garden, when a pilgrim came up to me and put a flower into my hand, and immediately my sight was restored." And when the boy asked him what the flower was like he replies. "It was as white as driven snow, and it had three petals, three sepals and three rich green leaves. High and low the boy searched for the flower but it was in vain, nowhere, not even in the most secret recesses of the mountain valleys, where many strange things grew, could he find it. But it chanced that one autumn morning while he was working in the garden, a man dressed in pilgrim's weeds ascended the rugged mountain path and put the root of a flower into his hand. "It is the root of the Trinity Flower," he said, "when it blooms thy master's sight shall be restored," and vanished whence he had come. But the boy stood transfixed with mingled feelings of fear and joy, for the face of the man was that of the Angel of Death. The boy planted the root and soon the snow came and covered the ground with a white mantle and all things withered and died: but the Trinity Flower down in the warm depths of the earth took root and in the early spring it grew. One night the boy found that the bud was ready to burst and he told the hermit, now old and infirm, that on the morrow he should see at last. Very early the next morning the boy came and picked the flower, which had burst into bloom during the night, and, as the hermit had said, its petals were three in number and as white as snow. Quietly he entered the hut and laid the flower on the couch by the hermit's sleeping form and went out into the garden to wait. Presently the hut door opened and the hermit, his face transfigured by a wonderful light, walked slowly down the garden path, and as he passed the boy he said "I see now" and on reaching the gate he disappeared. All day long the boy waited for him but he never returned and when the sun set behind the ridge of the purple hills he got up and went into the hut. Without all was happiness and joy; spring had come and the world had awakened from her long winter's sleep but on the couch within, the hermit's dead body lay cold and still, the Trinity Flower clasped in his hand. Isabel Barclay, Age 15, Mu Gamma

ritual contrasted sharply with the ecs closing ceremony, which was distinctly secular, staged as it was at the Ritz on Sherbrooke Street, and attended by girls all dressed in white. The Study closing ceremony remains true to its foundations, as a religious ritual, to this very day (see chapter 11, “The Study Closing Service” vignette). Legend also tends to depict Miss Gascoigne’s views of education as ethereal and undefined. On the contrary, however, they were based firmly upon some of the most radical educational philosophies of the day, as propounded by such scholars as Kenneth Richmond and Arthur Clutton-Brock. Like them, Margaret Gascoigne envisioned education as a search for truth and beauty, the cultivation of the love of the spirit in the young. Granted, some of Miss Gascoigne’s dayto-day pedagogy represented practical responses to financial and social exigencies of her times. Thus, while theoretically she decried examinations, if parents insisted upon matriculation exams for their daughters, then matriculation would be offered. Art, music, and poetry may have been central to her pedagogical vision, but science was not excluded. Indeed, the 1927 board minutes find Miss Gascoigne seeking permission for the purchase of scientific apparatus for the teaching of physics. Women’s education may have been her passion, yet, over the years, boys appeared sporadically on The Study register, and they would continue to do so until their definitive exclusion during the Marshall era. Miss Gascoigne also had no use for competitions and prizes.

However, competition there certainly was. The 1918 Study Chronicle reported that the Study’s first hockey team was formed that year, and late in the season a basketball team was assembled. It also mentioned that after the summer holidays, with prizes in mind, many students brought collections of natural objects to the school. Nancy Reid’s carefully mounted collection of insects, accompanied by a descriptive essay gained Dr Jackson’s prize of a beautiful book. Dorothy Benson won a prize for the best pair of knitted socks, and Margaret Peck for a story. Christmas writing prizes went to Margaret Aylmer, Gertrude Dick, Margaret Hyde, Lilia Sims, and John McConnell. Compromise aside, Miss Gascoigne never abandoned her ideals that music, art, and poetry should be studied not as accomplishments for refined young ladies but integrated into an educational vision based upon the love of and search for truth. Education for Miss Gascoigne was meant to last a lifetime. It was an education, in the words of so many Old Girls, that taught them not “what” to think, but “how” to think.

first recorded school closing, june 1918 The School Closing was held on Friday, June the seventh in the Assembly room, which had been made very charming with an abundance of garden flowers. The room was well filled, for besides the school there were about sixty guests present, and several of the old girls. Our great object was to The Assembly Room, 758 Sherbrooke Street. avoid formality and fuss. The girls wore their ordinary school tunics and we began with the regular morning prayers and roll-call. After roll-call, Miss Gascoigne read the names of the Sixth Form girls who left at Easter and made special mention of Margaret Aylmer who, as first Head-girl, won the esteem of everybody … Miss Gascoigne then expressed her satisfaction with the good work done by the girls and by the Staff during the year and declared that never before had she enjoyed a year’s teaching so much. She felt the spirit at which she had been aiming had really been developed: a spirit of good-fellowship, loyalty and the love of books and knowledge … The last event was the singing of some delightful little French songs by the Lower School. In the midst of this the girls presented Miss Gascoigne with two volumes of Groves’ Dictionary of Music. While the girls were dispersing, Miss Gascoigne said a few words to the guests on the year’s work and the objectives of the school. The morning closed with an exciting game of basketball which showed that our girls are not entirely “dedicated to closeness and the bettering of the mind.” Helen A.E. Willis, ma The Study Chronicle, 1917–18

“A Real School,” 1913–1919

A.Y. Jackson, A Copse, Evening. (cwm 19710261-0186. Beaverbrook Collection of War Art. Canadian War Museum)

the study and the great war Study records reveal little about Study life and the First World War, this landmark event of the twentieth century that profoundly scarred an entire generation throughout the Western world. Certainly fragments of its influence seep through the records. The sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 by German submarines set off alarm bells, stranding many in Canada for the duration of the war. Many of these were girls who could not return to their own schools abroad, and they gravitated to The Study. One individual, Peggy Duggan from Scotland, became Miss Gascoigne’s first matriculation student, and it was her lead in the provincial exams that enhanced Miss Gascoigne’s burgeoning reputation and attracted other students to her school. We do know that one Study girl, Percival Mackenzie, was named to honour her father’s best friend, Percival Molson, who had been killed in the trenches in France in 1917, and is perhaps best known for his influence in the construction of the Molson Stadium at McGill. Elizabeth McArthur, editor of the first issue of The Study Chronicle, published in 1918, apologizes for the fact that “it cannot be longer, but because of the scarcity of paper, we all agreed that it would not be patriotic to have a large magazine published in war time.” Study girls knitted socks for soldiers overseas, and in 1918, Dorothy Benson won a prize for her creation. Beyond this, the sources are silent.

And yet, this does not mean that the Great War did not profoundly affect The Study community. How could it not? Canada was awash with the war. Individuals of British origin eagerly flocked to sign up for king and country. From the Patriotic Fund to Victory Bond campaigns and parades, volunteer work and rationing, English Montreal declared its support and sympathy for the mother country. As much as the war years had burst open with joyous patriotism in honour of the empire, they were also scarred by shock and sorrow at the growing list of the maimed and the fallen. In Montreal, fierce disagreements over conscription led to bitter divisions, violence, and even one death. It is also well known that grief and disbelief pervaded the postwar years. How could this have happened? Throughout Canada, war memorials and ceremonies glorifying the fallen desperately attempted to give meaning to the ultimate sacrifice, and Montreal was no exception. Indeed, year after year, Study girls gathered at Christ Church Cathedral for the school’s closing ceremony, facing the reredos behind the main altar dedicated to the glorious dead. Many Old Girls still recall how the war cast its dark shadow over The Study and their lives. Miriam Tees, a Study student throughout the 1930s recalled, “We were always reminded about the war. Everyone talked about it all of the time. And then of course they were afraid it was going to happen again because of Hitler.” Claire Fisher Kerrigan experienced the impact of the First World War more personally: “World War I was awful. There were so many people killed. The numbers were just astounding. My mother’s sister’s husband was killed … Dad was one of the first pilots in the Royal Canadian Air Force … He was there and he had blasted his knee … He had an open running war wound for 60 years.” No Old Girl is alive today to actually recount the ecstasy of Armistice Day on 11 November 1918. Fire trucks drove through the streets of Montreal sounding their sirens, while an estimated 200,000 people lined the sidewalks all the way from Viger Station to Fletcher’s Field, where the troops were decorated. It is impossible to believe that The Study community did not, like the rest of the world, heave a sigh of relief that at long last the war was over.

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Days of Promise 1920–1929

The Great War destroyed forever the world as it had been known, ushering in a new age of technology, consumerism, and rebellion against the values of the Victorian age. Certainly Montrealers would have been aware of a changing world. By 1920 airplanes were flying overhead and voices were being transmitted through the air, bringing the world into people’s homes by an apparatus that became known as the radio. Middle- and upper-class Montrealers, including many Study families, enjoyed the fruits of the new consumer society. Electrical appliances and the telephone became ordinary household items, and the automobile, a familiar sight, had begun to crowd Montreal streets. There was a sense of change and excitement and prosperity in the air. It was a new age. The Mount Royal Hotel, inaugurated in 1922 on Peel Street, boasted 1,046 rooms and cost $10 million to build. Here, throughout the 1920s, very often members of the newly formed Study Old Girls’ Association (soga) would congregate after graduating from The Study. Montreal’s grandiose new city hall, with its marble hall of honour and intricately carved wood, opened on St James Street. An illuminated cross lit up Mount Royal.

The Golden Square Mile, the location of The Study, was also in the throes of change. Although still predominantly a residential district, since the late nineteenth century, a business section had been developing on its southern edge, on Dominion and Philip’s Square and St Catherine Street, where legendary stores such as Birks, Morgan’s, and Ogilvy’s had been open for

The Canal, Montreal, by Ethel Seath, 1924. Montreal may have been a rapidly industrializing city, but art teacher Ethel Seath vividly recorded some of its remaining pastoral sections.

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business for decades. Indeed, the completion of the Sun Life Insurance building on Dominion Square in 1914, then the tallest building in the British Empire, was a sign of the times, as robust commerce continued to grow and spread.

Prosperity and Consolidation The Study stepped into its first full decade with a flourish. Stable times encouraged the incorporation of The Study under Quebec legislation in 1922. On the one hand, this meant that Miss Gascoigne was no longer sole owner of the school. On the other, incorporation endowed The Study with official legal status and a secure institutional presence in the Montreal educational world. In the same year, a board of trustees was formed to assist the headmistress with school finances and to offer advice. This body became the school’s first board of governors. The school prospered. In 1923, Ellen Stansfield became the first girl to go through The Study from the first to the sixth form. By the end of the decade, Miss Stanley, a permanent secretary, complete with a brand new mimeograph machine, was firmly in place. Enrolment increased, as did the fees, said to be the highest among all of the English private schools in Montreal. In 1926, with 156 students, The Study was running at full capacity, and by 1928, prospective students were being placed on a waiting list. Times for women continued to improve. For the first time in history, Quebec women actually could vote in federal elections, and by 1929, Canadian No Ordinary School

women were declared “persons” in the eyes of the law. Female enrolment in universities was on the increase, as more universities opened up their professional schools to women. Between 1884 and 1919, a mere 184 women had graduated from McGill. By 1920, the figure had risen to 329. This does not mean, however, that the issue of women and higher education no longer sparked controversy. Throughout the 1920s, the McGill Daily continued to debate whether or not women had the constitutional ability to endure the rigours of university work. The fact also remained that more than ten times more men than women graduated from McGill. Nevertheless, throughout the 1920s, many Study graduates moved on to university – to McGill, the University of Toronto, Bedford College at the University of London, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. Indeed, The Study had become a place noted for high academic achievement, a catapult, if one wished, to higher education.

Seaforth Success also meant change. Burgeoning enrolment once again necessitated another move. This time, with the purchase of the Ewing house on the corner of Côtedes-Neiges Road and Seaforth Avenue in the fall of 1922, the move would be more permanent. Destined to become known, with great fondness by those who attended it, as simply “Seaforth,” it was discovered one day in 1920 when Miss Gascoigne and Miss Seath, in search of larger quarters, went up the Côte-des-Neiges hill to view the Ewing house. They came back and their

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“Seaforth.” In 1922, The Study found a permanent home with the purchase of the Ewing house on the corner of Côtedes-Neiges Road and Seaforth Avenue. This would be the location of The Study for the next forty years.

eyes were shining. They had found the home that would be The Study for almost the next forty years. Initially, Miss Gascoigne, as sole owner of The Study, rented the Ewing property for one year. Then five generous parents lent Miss Gascoigne $5,200 to renovate, guaranteeing investors interest at 5 per cent, with a promise to repay within six years. Very soon it became obvious that the house was suitable for a school. This time the newly formed board of governors

arranged financing. By floating a bond issue to parents and friends, the board raised a $23,000 down payment for the Ewing house, which was valued at $45,000. Mr Ewing, and later his estate, held a mortgage for The Study on the balance at the rate of 6 per cent. The mortgage was to be paid off by 1932. At the time of the purchase of “Seaforth,” Côte-desNeiges Road was not the congested artery it is today, lined with high-rise apartment buildings, business Days of Promise, 1920–1929

Montreal from the Mountain, by Fred H. Holloway. This view, drawn from the slopes of Mount Royal in the 1840s, represents the approximate location of The Study, where Côte-des-Neiges Road and Atwater meet today. (Library and Archives Canada, c-13587)

complexes, and the Montreal General Hospital. Yet neither was it still covered with orchards and fields and livestock, as it had been during the French and then the early British regimes. Rather it was somewhere between. Although it was predominantly residential, on rare occasions, cattle drives could still be spotted pushing down Guy across Sherbrooke Street and then on to slaughterhouses and packing plants along the river in Griffintown. Gwen Marler Harris’s memories clearly resurrect the pastoral surroundings of the early Seaforth school: “I grew up across the street from the Montreal General … Where the hospital is now was a No Ordinary School

beautiful private estate with a beautiful white house you could only see in wintertime because the trees were so lush. They had a farm, and I used to hear a rooster when I woke up in the morning in the springtime.” Seaforth proved to be an ideal location. In spite of its pastoral ambiance, just around the corner was Sherbrooke Street, where much was happening. Known as the Champs-Élysées of Canada, it was Montreal’s most prestigious artery, showcasing luxurious homes and parades and processions in carriages and sleighs. In 1913 the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts opened its doors, and it continued to be a regular venue for Study excursions with Miss Seath. Seaforth was also within walking distance of other important institutions and facilities connected with The Study: McGill University and churches of various denominations. Both the ymca on Drummond Street and St James the Apostle Church on St Catherine Street would prove crucial to the school’s indoor activities, and then, of course there were the wide open spaces of Mount Royal. For children living in or near the Golden Square Mile, Seaforth was in easy walking distance. However, by the end of the First World War, families were beginning to move into the suburbs – into Westmount and surrounding areas. Study girls from Westmount fondly remember, during the thirties and forties, going to and from school either on foot, hiking up Atwater Hill, taking the tram – four rides for a quarter – or piling into a parent’s automobile. Sheila Mappin Arthur fondly recalls her journeys to Seaforth: “There were few private cars. So streetcar, walking, hiking, hard work going up the hills of Atwater and Guy because

the streets were made of cobblestone. One day Martha Chadwick and I were waiting for the bus at Sherbrooke and what we called Guy … We would be picked up by a milkman going home in a horse-drawn milk wagon, and he drove us all along Sherbrooke Street [to Westmount] … We had a lovely time.” At first it was believed that the building was just perfect. Everyone had “just picked up everything and walked up the hill,” and settled in. The school was painted in “gay colours,” and Miss Seath hung pictures everywhere. There was plenty of room to spare. To the right of the entrance was the principal’s office and beyond that a space reserved for forms 1A and 1B. At the end of the hall near the entrance was a kitchen and the door to the lockers. Up the winding narrow staircase – with the seemingly infinite number of stairs – were rooms for the older girls. Initially Miss Gascoigne lived on the third floor. However, very soon it was realized that Seaforth’s facilities were inadequate for the school’s burgeoning enrolment. By 1925, schemes were in the offing to raise money to build an Assembly Hall, in addition to a much-needed gym. With energy and enthusiasm that would become characteristic of The Study community, bazaars, held in 1925 and 1926, and a concert, directed by Miss Willis, raised over $2,000 for the assembly fund. By 1928 the school proudly displayed a brand new Assembly Hall. Designed by the distinguished Montreal architect Percy Nobbs, it boasted a real stage, flanked by Corinthian columns, and stairs from the stage to lockers and a dressing room beneath, in a space that became known as the “dungeon.” The final cost was $14,500.

29

The new Assembly Hall, Seaforth, designed by Montreal architect Percy Nobbs.

The Assembly Hall was also intended to serve as a gymnasium, and basketball hoops were attached to the walls. All too soon it was realized that the gym was not the required size for playing “proper” sports, or, in fact, for the staging of many Study activities – “real” plays and Girl Guide meetings. Throughout the 1920s, talk of building a new gym remained as good intentions only, and the school made do. Over the years, gym demonstrations, drills, dances, even basketball games played out in the Assembly Hall, while more serious activities were staged elsewhere. Seaforth also proved to be a work in progress. Three years after it was purchased in 1922, there was a serious suggestion that perhaps it should be pulled down, for the windows were draughty and the heating Days of Promise, 1920–1929

30

bills enormous. By 1927, overcrowding forced the Lower School into a rented house across the street. The school set out in search of land, eventually purchasing the Ogilvie House, on Côte-des-Neiges Road, just behind Seaforth. By 1929, a stone passageway connected the Ogilvie House, which became the Lower School, to the original Seaforth, dubbed the Senior School. The passageway was decorated by Percival Mackenzie, who graduated from The Study in 1935. In a letter sent to The Study on 15 July 1993, Mackenzie wrote, “[Miss Gascoigne] relegated me to the studio and Miss Seath (who was of course another mentor and became a good friend after Miss Gascoigne died). I was taken out of Math class (not a good idea in the long run) and allowed to paint the walls of the passage between the two buildings. I had a lovely time.” The purchase of the Ogilvie House considerably improved the Study infrastructure. In addition to the much-needed space, it also gave The Study a “large well-lighted art room,” used by the entire school, a staff room, and a prefects’ office. But this new edifice, like the original Seaforth building, while temporarily relieving some of the overcrowding, also proved to be a work project in the making. In 1929, the basement was flooded with so much water that the students could not venture downstairs to hang up their coats. Repairs proceeding, one after the other, could not stem the tide of infrastructure woes that would persist until The Study at last moved to the Braeside building in Westmount in 1960.

No Ordinary School

A Total “Study” World The image of the “flapper” – the young girl flagrantly indulging in drinking, smoking, wild dancing, and party-going – haunted society throughout the 1920s as many openly flouted Victorian norms. Miss Gascoigne’s 1921 address to parents mirrored larger societal concerns about the distractions of social engagements – moving pictures or ice cream parlours, teas, and evening parties. In no uncertain terms, Miss Gascoigne reminded parents of their responsibility to map out their children’s time outside of school with suitable occupations such as music, drawing, riding, and preparation of school work. This does not mean that The Study played no role, in the words of Miss Gascoigne, in “keeping girls both proper and busy,” for this was also an era of persistent and stubborn Victorian norms, an era that still considered it natural for young girls to be strictly supervised. Indeed, in these uncertain times, private schools were expected more than ever to fulfil their traditional role – to provide a total and socially acceptable world for their students. The Study was no exception. This pattern began with everyone looking the same. Study girls must have been a distinctive sight, traversing the Golden Square Mile, wearing ordinary tunics – makeup and jewellery not allowed – venturing to and from school, to outings and extracurricular activities, and at the end of the year, off to the closing ceremony, established in 1926 at Christ Church Cathedral on St Catherine Street. Here the girls would say prayers and sing hymns, many of which have endured and have become enshrined in many Old Girls’ memories.

houses In 1922, The Study became the first private school in Montreal to adopt the house system, a traditional feature of English private schools. At this time, the senior school was divided into two houses in memory of two exemplary students: Mu Gamma after Margaret Gordon, and Kappa Rho after Kathleen Rosamond. By 1928, in response to the school’s increased enrolment, the house system was expanded to include two other houses: Beta Lambda after Beatrice Lyman, and Delta Beta after Dorothy Benson. The house system worked simply: plus points were awarded for excellents, for work well done, while minus points were given for contravening school rules: forgetting a book, submitting inferior work, showing up to school late, or being dressed in an untidy uniform. At the end of every week, points were tallied and a house winner declared. The house system engaged the entire senior school in friendly rivalry. It also instilled a wider sense of responsibility and belonging to a collective community. Kin groups across generations, belonging to the same house, augmented group identity and loyalty. The house system also bonded children in the Lower School to the Upper School and gave them an incentive to advance to the higher grades. With this system, discipline did not always descend from above. Rather, it emerged from within the group. If your house lost points, it was because you had let your house down. The house system, albeit with modifications, remains a defining feature of Study life. Returns or the point system have been eliminated and the house system has become more activity oriented. The main task of house leaders, now known as “The Force,” is to foster school spirit and a sense of school pride. At weekly assemblies “The Force” announces upcoming events, updates on house points, or boosts house spirits with roaring cheers. The house system also embraces the entire school from kindergarten to grade eleven, with the younger girls now known as “The Mini-Force.” The house system has deeply influenced generations of girls. To this day, for example, Claire Fisher Kerrigan maintains that it was the house system that encouraged her to think beyond herself, about the welfare of the larger group, and probably influenced her in her choice of social work as a profession. To Katie Kostiuk almost twenty years later, houses are still important. According to Kostiuk, the house system contributes to a sense of lifelong sorority among the girls; it is an enduring bond.

The houses were named after exemplary students, selected by Miss Gascoigne herself.

Cast of Sheridan’s Rivals, presented by the Dramatic Club on 14 April 1926 to support the Study Library Fund. Back row (left to right): Hope Richardson, Mary Riordon, Charlotte Macfarlane, Jane Leggat, Phoebe Nobbs, Ruth Crandall; front row (left to right): Nancy Savage, Ann Hyde, Margaret Peck, Isabel Barclay, Betty Kemp, Charlotte Stairs.

Student institutions reinforced a sense of belonging to a collective “total” Study world. In 1921, Miss Gascoigne created the first Study student parliament. Through democratically elected representatives, the girls formulated rules that, when approved by the headmistress, became “our” rules. The introduction of the house system in 1922, a traditional feature of English private schools, reinforced this sense of collective loyalty (see vignette “Houses”). Certainly The Study kept students occupied. Although officially school lessons ended by one o’clock, a flurry of activities consumed the girls’ spare time. Study girls were active in No Ordinary School

the building and management of the school. Girls joined the Dramatic Club, founded in 1926, and donated money raised from their first presentation of the Trial of Henry VIII, and The Rivals by Sheridan, to the library fund. The girls also helped to stage bazaars to raise money for the library and the new assembly. This involvement ensured that the library was not just “The Study Library,” or the new assembly was not just “The Study Assembly,” but “our” library, “our assembly.” A diverse sports programme also engaged Study students, in spite of lingering debates among physical education teachers and doctors about the biological fitness of women for physical activity. The Study turned away from these antiquated discussions and responded to the positive and changing attitudes towards women and physical fitness. This was, after all, the golden age of sports for young women. Throughout the twenties, sports and women were all over the news. This fever peaked in 1928, when, for the first time, women competed in the Olympic Games in Amsterdam, and a Canadian, Ethel Catherwood, won the gold medal for the high jumping event. At the heart of Study physical education was the Swedish Drill. Pioneered in the early years of the twentieth century by feminist activist Martina Sofia Helena Bergman Osterberg, the drill promoted therapeutic gymnastic exercises believed to contribute to good health among girls. But sports were also about healthy competition. The Swedish Drill cup had to be won, while two sports cups, donated by Miss Seath and Miss Gascoigne, inspired the girls to practise running and throwing and jumping, in eager anticipation of the

33

The 8th Company of Girl Guides, 1925–26.

annual sports day held at Mount Royal. This event remains in place to this day. Many Study basketball players graduated from shooting hoops in an in-house league to assume a place in the Montreal Private Basketball School League. They played fiercely, in spite of occasional “disgraceful attendance” at matches and a consistent losing record against Trafalgar, Weston School, and ecs. The team, however, soldiered on, and in 1929 The Study finally defeated Weston. In 1925, the school hockey team was revived, and every afternoon team members played at the Coliseum.

Offered for the first time during the decade were lacrosse, tennis – both singles and doubles – badminton, and high ball. Girl Guides also reinforced this sense of a collective Study world. After much controversy, in 1910 Girl Guides was formed in London, England, as a response to a group of girls dressed in makeshift uniforms and badges, protesting their exclusion from the Scouting movement, until this time dominated by boys. Scouting had captured the imagination of all youth, emphasizing as it did service to the community and country, Days of Promise, 1920–1929

34

adventure, and the British Empire. Quite simply, girls refused to be excluded. However, the formation of Girl Guides represented a compromise between the more manly scouting activities and proper female occupations. As an offshoot of the scouting movement, Guides focused upon outdoor adventure. However, it remained specifically tailored for girls, encouraging as it did such womanly activities as cooking, sewing, nursing, and childcare. Girl Guides spread rapidly, and by 1912 there were Guide companies in every province in Canada, including Quebec. Study girls formed the 8th company, headed by Old Girl captains, Ellen Stansfield and then Dorothy Benson. Study Guides engaged in charitable activities. They raised funds and gave parties for poor children in St George’s parish and at St Mary’s mission. They enjoyed sporting events and picnics on Mount Royal, and eagerly anticipated the annual competition for the Honour Flag and the First Aid Shield, which they won numerous times throughout the decade. Fiercely loyal to The Study, the girls substituted their own Study ties for the triangular Guide ties until headquarters advised them otherwise. “Guides were great fun,” laughed Miriam Tees, who became a Guide captain after graduating from The Study in the early 1940s. Like the House system, Girl Guides also bonded the younger Study girls to the older ones. The possibility of “flying up” to Girls Guides offered an incentive for young Brownies to work hard and earn their badges by learning how to wash up tea things, plait their hair, sew and darn, and eventually cook over an open fire.

No Ordinary School

It was a busy world to be sure, but not always picture-perfect or highly structured. Several generations of Old Girls remember leaving school and, in spite of instructions to go straight home, heading out for the drugstore for ice cream or sodas. According to Barbara Whitley, “We were encouraged to go straight home … we would go below the school to get the best seats on the streetcar going home … there used to be a drugstore to get ice cream sodas at Guy and Ste Catherine and we would get down there if we could.” After all, girls would be girls.

The Study Old Girls’ Association Cementing this Study world was soga. Founded by Kathleen Rosamond in 1923, the organization’s formative mandate was to “interest the girls in the school after they leave and help the school in any way by raising funds.” Initially, soga launched an ambitious programme. However, the girls soon discovered that it was far too challenging for so few members to undertake. And yet, in spite of this change of direction, the roster of their activities is impressive. They returned often to the school. They acted as Guide captains and Patrol leaders for the 8th Guide Company. They took initiative and approached the board about fundraising for the new assembly, and they even staged a booth at the bazaars to raise money. soga met often in those early years, at teas poured by Miss Seath and Miss Gascoigne at the Mount Royal Hotel. Members wore soga pins and blazers. They

Study Old Girls seeing off Kathleen Bovey and Charlotte Stairs, who are about to sail for England en route to a year at Château Mont Choisi in Lausanne, Switzerland, September 1927. (From left) Charlotte Macfarlane Detchon, Pat Budden, Kay Bovey Ransome, Isabel Barclay Dobell, Charlotte Stairs Starkey, Aileen Stairs White, Margaret Stairs Budden, Jane Leggat McInnes, and Peggy Forbes.

36

Two views of soga’s first Minutes Book, 1924.

were a solid and diverse group. Some Old Girls became debutantes and attended the round of parties and balls in the Golden Square Mile, designed to find suitable mates for young men and women. Others married and had children; some remained in Montreal, moved elsewhere in Canada, to the United States, or even abroad. Others travelled. Some motored around England, and visited France, Spain, and Switzerland. They went off to Art School in Boston and New York, to the Slade School in London, or studied at the Museé des Beaux Arts in Montreal. They became nurses and teachers or did volunteer work. And they won prizes: Norah Rosamond for her poetry at the Oxford Poetry Contest, Beatrice Lyman took the Lieutenant-Governor’s Medal for History at McGill, and Dorothy Benson became the Junior Ladies Amateur Skating Champion of Canada. Indeed, they were ideal role models for Study girls, privileged women of their times, beneficiaries of their social positions and the expansion of freedom for women. By the end of the decade, The Study emerged as an incorporated Montreal institution under the direction of a distinguished board of governors with a vested interest in seeing the school flourish. With its charismatic founder Miss Gascoigne at the helm, its new infrastructure in place, account books consistently showing a surplus, and a solid contingent of teachers, some of whom would remain with The Study for decades and become legends in their own right – Madame Gaudion, Miss Blanchard, and Miss Seath – the future was full of promise. What could possibly go wrong?

4

The Great Depression 1930–1939

Buddy can you spare a dime? Once I built a railroad and made it run Had it race on time Once I built a railroad, now it’s gone. Brother can you spare a dime? (As sung by Barbara Whitley in an interview, June 2013)

The panic began with the crash of the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929. One by one, the economies of the Western world ground to a halt, and once the downward spiral began, it seemed to take on a life of its own. Throughout Canada, breadlines lengthened and charitable organizations collapsed under the weight of unprecedented demands of human want and misery. Persisting throughout the 1930s, the scourge refused to go away and would be lifted only by an economy jumpstarted by the brutal demands of another European war. The Great Depression hit Montreal, the country’s largest urban centre, hard. It was a dark time. Thousands, thrown out of work, joined the many other thousands of Canadian men riding the rails from city to city across the country looking for work that they

would never find because, quite simply, it did not exist. Many others remained behind in a Montreal that would be immortalized in Gabrielle Roy’s classic novel, The Tin Flute, a stark and moving portrait of poverty in the working-class district of Saint-Henri. And then there were the homeless. Margaret Westley, in A Remembrance of Grandeur, noted how the eastern slopes of Mount Royal, on Fletcher’s field, were covered with the unemployed, who slept under newspapers in the summer, and in the moonlight, it looked like a “huge graveyard, with flat white stones.” Society was in turmoil as people attempted to grapple with the visible human tragedy that would not go away. Radical opinions raged on the left and the right side of the political spectrum against the backdrop of grim, silent, and not-so-silent human misery. Notable Montreal figures such as the McGill University law professor F.R. Scott, who would become the husband of 1926 Study graduate Marian Dale, posed radical alternative solutions as successive governments grappled with Band-Aid responses to a situation no one could understand. Marian Dale, through her paintings, would also critique the faceless inhumanity of capitalism. Eventually realizing that the Public Charities Act

38

of 1921 could not possibly meet the needs of the tens of thousands of unemployed, Camillien Houde, the iconic mayor of Montreal, instituted a plethora of direct relief and make work projects, and the now familiar landmarks – the Botanical Gardens, the Atwater Market, and the Lookout on Mount Royal – appeared, one by one, on the Montreal landscape. By 1942, the City of Montreal was bankrupt.

The Study in Crisis The shock waves of the crash reverberated slowly on The Study. Armed with a surplus throughout 1930 and 1931, the school continued to engage contractors for repairs, and decorating went ahead as planned. Trees blocking the light on the side of the Upper School were cut down and the space was used to extend the playground. Two ground-floor classrooms were turned into a geography room, furnished with new maps and a large table on which to view them. New props – a throne, a table, and chairs – were added to the stage. Miss Gascoigne even received approval for and a stipend of $150 from the board to travel to an educational conference in Washington. In the following year, another $300 was granted to her to purchase articles in England that could be used in the school. But the signs were ominous. By October 1931, at least five pupils had withdrawn from the school without notice. By January 1932, Miss Gascoigne announced that twenty-five pupils would be leaving. More withdrawals were expected, as were fewer new applications for the approaching year. Faced with a No Ordinary School

L’Escalier, by Study Old Girl Marian Dale Scott. (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, A. Sidney Dawes Fund. With permission of Peter Scott. Photo by Christine Guest, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)

total enrolment of fewer than 150 girls, and concomitantly $10,000 less in fees, it was agreed unanimously by all board members that retrenchment was necessary. But what to do? Everywhere throughout Canada during the Depression, almost universally, employees agreed to either salary or hourly reductions, to almost anything in order to hold on to some type of employment. Study teachers were no exception. Initially the staff assented to a 10 per cent cut. And when this measure proved ineffective, the staff consented to more reductions, again and again and again. Enrolment continued to decline and expenditures were carefully watched. The telephone was disconnected, and the secretary, Miss Stanley, was told she had to make do with the original second-hand 1917 typewriter. Although Miss Gascoigne’s living quarters were guaranteed in her contract, in 1933 she relinquished her apartment and moved into the school. Subsequently, she too agreed to a salary reduction. Payment of bond interest to shareholders was stopped. By the 1933–34 session, it had become impossible to estimate enrolment for the upcoming year. Expenditures were once again reduced. Parents continued to withdraw their children from the school without notice. To be sure, some of the exits from The Study at this time were due to the normal practice of sending daughters off to boarding schools. The majority, however, clearly reflected the grim financial circumstances of many parents. The board faced an impossible situation, for the financial security of the school depended upon having a clear idea of enrolment for the ensuing year. What could be done? Initially, the prospectus was altered to ensure that parents,

on registering their children, clearly understood their unconditional responsibility for the entire year’s fees. But still the withdrawals continued. The board mustered its resources, revising, rewording, and re-emphasizing the withdrawal clause, but to no avail. Struggling parents, in turn, continued to report that, in the face of the deteriorating financial situation, it was impossible to guarantee their children’s return to the school. Could fees be reduced? Confronted by dwindling numbers and resources, the board capitulated: tuition was reduced and cautious parents assured that the usual notice regarding the removal of a pupil would not be strictly enforced. More than eighty years later, Miriam Tees remembers that dark time: “They did a lot of switching around of the classes. It was during the Depression, you know, and I think a lot of children were taken out of the school because their parents didn’t have any money … When we left The Study [in 1940] there were only two or three classes.” As the board grappled with the financial crisis and the need to maintain enrolment, thousands of dollars of unpaid fees accumulated. Once again, in spite of the school’s tenuous financial situation, the board adopted a lenient stance. Repeatedly throughout the 1930s, the same names appear on overdue accounts, and in response, the board permitted delay, partial payment, and, in some cases, even extended clemency. Only the most serious cases warranted consideration of a collection agency. It is also notable that no matter how grim the financial situation, bursaries to worthy students continued uninterrupted.

The Great Depression, 1930–1939

39

40

Miss Gascoigne in the early 1930s.

The Death of Margaret Gascoigne The year 1934 marked the darkest days of the Depression for The Study with the illness and then the death of its founder, Margaret Gascoigne. Photos of Miss Gascoigne in the early 1930s mask the strain she must have been under, as one student after another departed from her school. By 1933, however, although it was not generally known, her health had failed. In January No Ordinary School

1934, Miss Gascoigne underwent major surgery for cancer. She never officially resumed her duties. In the spring of that year, a group of mothers and some Old Girls sent Miss Gascoigne to Bermuda to recover. Barbara Whitley recalls this dark time, “When she was terribly ill – oh the poor soul – she went on a cruise. One of the teachers got this bright idea of having everyone knit a square in the school colours. The teachers would put it all together and she was to take this on the cruise – a big blanket to sit on the deck to take in the sun. Eventually she got these badly knitted hastily put-together squares in navy blue and white and yellow and green, and she was noble enough to take it.” On her return from Bermuda, Miss Gascoigne convalesced on the third floor of the school that been her life-long passion, surrounded by her beloved friends and colleagues, with the daily bustle of school life resonating below. By October 1934, Miss Gascoigne notified the board that she would no longer be able to continue with her duties. The board refused to accept her resignation. But the end came very quickly. On 16 November 1934 Miss Gascoigne passed away, leaving a community steeped in grief and disbelief. soga followers who had been so closely allied with Miss Gascoigne sought to preserve her legacy. With money collected from certain Study families and Old Girls, they commissioned Montreal artist Lilias Torrance Newton to paint Miss Gascoigne’s portrait, and they donated it to the school. To this day, the portrait stands in the new Study vestibule, and it evokes both comment and controversy. To some, it is a magnificent portrait of an austere headmistress of magnetic presence. However, for many it fails to capture so many

might form the basis of a fund to help towards fees of children who would otherwise be unable to come to the school.” And thus was born the Margaret Gascoigne Bursary.

A New Study Head: Mary Harvey

Miss Gascoigne, by Lilias Torrance Newton, commissioned by soga, mid-1930s

other dimensions of this woman – the warmth and the spontaneous enthusiasm that would resound in many memories over generations. Many Old Girls remember her as one of the greatest influences for the good in their lives. She taught her students to be true to themselves, to think for themselves, to form their own values, to hate sham, and to shun the second-rate. Her great generosity resounds in her will and across the decades: “If my friends would like to send flowers, I would rather that they made contributions which

On the death of Miss Gascoigne, a search committee was immediately struck. A heated debate ensued, reflecting a Canada of the day, a country of fierce lingering loyalties to Empire, in spite of the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931, granting the country official independence from the Mother Country. From where should The Study recruit a new head? Should a Canadian be chosen, who at least had been partially educated in England, or would an English woman already living in Canada and well-acquainted with the Canadian way of life be more suitable? Others argued in favour of an English head. After all, it was also argued, did not certain people believe that nothing good came out of Canada, and were not many children being sent to the school to acquire a good accent? It was agreed by all to proceed with great caution. A thorough search ensued, throughout England, Canada, and the United States, producing, in spite of imperial loyalties, a brilliant Canadian candidate: Mary Harvey, at that time head of staff at Rosemary Hall, Greenwich, Connecticut. An English specialist, educated at McGill and then Radcliffe College, she had taught for many years at Bishop Strachan School in Toronto, where she was house mistress and head of the English Department. The Great Depression, 1930–1939

41

42

Mary G. Harvey, 1934–1952.

Mary Harvey had enormous shoes to fill. The death of Margaret Gascoigne had left The Study stunned with grief. Who could possibly replace the legendary and flamboyant founder? Miss Harvey’s immediate success may have been due to the fact that she did not attempt to do so. Presenting herself as her own person, she stepped into the position with grace, ease, and efficiency. Barbara Whitley remembered Miss Gascoigne as a casual individual who wore sweaters and skirts and her hair always pushed back. Others warmly recalled the story about Miss Gascoigne appearing at the No Ordinary School

school with her cardigan on backwards. Mary Harvey, on the other hand, is remembered as strictly formal, with her austere manner and her proper business attire. Miss Harvey’s reputation soon spread. Although shy, she proved herself to be dignified, an excellent English teacher – and an efficient administrator. With Miss Harvey securely at the helm, the school moved on, albeit still steeped in financial crisis – and debt. Ironically, the death of Miss Gascoigne that had so devastated The Study community also helped to rescue it. The $20,000 life insurance policy she left to the school in her will reduced the mortgage and made funds available to keep the school going. The year 1936 also marked the beginning of a general economic recovery, albeit timid and tenuous, for the nation and The Study alike. Numbers began to increase and so too did revenues. The board moved to take advantage of the more fortuitous times to place The Study on a firm financial footing. Beginning in 1936, with the assent of most bondholders, the board scaled down bond issue and began to gradually reduce the school’s debt. Their initiatives, supported by Miss Harvey’s astute costcutting measures, ensured that, by the end of the decade, the worst of the crisis was over. By 1944, The Study was virtually debt-free.

Dark Days and Memorable Girlhoods The Study was an oasis in a sea of a disaster not suffered by everyone equally. For those who had not invested on the margin or managed to hold onto a secure job, life could be good. Falling prices meant that

homes could be purchased for almost nothing or at least rented on advantageous terms. A simple glance at ads in The Study Chronicle throughout the 1930s reveals that a life full of hope, plenty, and ease continued to be in reach of at least some Study families: exclusive summer vacations at the Manoir Richelieu; a cruise to the New York World’s Fair on the Duchess of Atholl; tempting fashions waiting to be purchased – “exciting, gay and practical clothing” – on the third floor of Eaton’s Department Store; and the very real possibility of opening up one’s own bank account at the Royal Bank of Canada. For the privileged, for those able to hold on, The Study continued to offer memorable, secure, and carefree girlhoods. Many Old Girls fondly recall their Study school days during the 1930s. “We were protected,” said Sheila Mappin Arthur. “It was the best education one could have.” For many girls, The Study was – and continues to be – a place where one made lifelong friends. Miriam Tees, however, remembers how, at times, making friends could be a struggle: “In the middle of my third year they moved me up to A. That was the worst experience of my life because nobody would speak to me. I asked the girl sitting behind me one day if I could borrow her eraser. She replied, ‘I only lend my eraser to people I like … ’ But then I got to know Sheila [Arthur] and then I had a good friend … we were always good friends from then on … you see, we’re rather old friends.” Sheila and Miriam became comrades-in-arms, mustering their resources to publish “Study Scribbles,” the first student-initiated Study publication. In this

43

Daughters of Study Old Girls, midsummer 1936. (Left to right) Martha Morgan (daughter of Margaret Molson), Sheila Ramsay (daughter of Marion Crawford), Peggy-Ann Macfarlane (daughter of Margaret Aylmer), Anne Morgan (daughter of Margaret Molson), Shirley McCall (daughter of Dolly Davidson).

charming, often hilarious document, the girls – albeit mostly without success – attempted to solicit contributions from the other students, parodied school rules in their Study Ten Commandments, and enumerated (with permission) the aversions of some of their teachers. The Great Depression, 1930–1939

44 THE STUDY CHRONICLE [ 33 ]

QTTUTlThV Q/P'ID TUICO TEC 51 UI oLxJKlooJLJco "The Canadian Times"

EDITORIAL

study commandments

The Editors and staff consider it a great honour that their notorious paper The Study Scribbles," formerly the "Fourth Form Weak-

WITR APOLOGIES TO MOSES

ly,» and a,so known as "The Canadian Time," '• ^^^^^^SSl C i' isfinallyto be appreciated by the Chronicle's 2 Thou shak not ^m ^^ ^ ^ public. Our paper is enjoyed by school and suitable ornaments excepting timepieces. staff alike, and even some of the prefects, 3, Thou s^a|t rcmcmbcr to place thy sash of regardless of their dignity, are known to have many colours round thy neck, and the condescended to favour it by a casual glance. badge upon thy chest.

There is always a steady stream of contribu- 4- Tllou sna!t not arrivc to° early nor yet too tions from all parts of the school, excepting of „ ^te f°r thc dai1^ Performance of thy tasks.

course, the staff, prefects and 99% of the girls. >' ^%^^d^*™£"t

It is especially enjoyed at hmch on Mondays and Wednesdays by those who stay. Definite proof of this Is found in thc amount of butter, etc., with which it is frequently returned.

fi> Thou shah nQt ^ unsccm;nglv in nor

shall

thy

mouth

utter

unnceded

words.

7. Thou shall not rob thy fellow-sufferers of their shoes, etc.

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