Varsity's Soldiers: The University of Toronto Contingent of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, 1914−1968 9781487518103

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VARSITY’S SOLDIERS The University of Toronto Contingent of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, 1914−1968

THE CANADIAN EXPERIENCE OF WAR Series Editor: Mark Humphries This series of monographs, essay collections, and edited primary sources illuminates connections between war and society in Canada, focusing on military operations as well as the experience of civilians and non-combatants. It is supported by funding from the Laurier ­Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies (LCMSDS) at Wilfrid Laurier University.

ERIC McGEER

Varsity’s Soldiers The University of Toronto Contingent of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, 1914−1968

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©  University of Toronto Press 2019 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4875-0352-9   Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

_____________________________________________________________________ Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Varsity’s soldiers : the University of Toronto Contingent of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, 1914–1968 / Eric McGeer Names: McGeer, Eric, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20190095016 | ISBN 9781487503529 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Canada. Canadian Army. Canadian Officers’ Training Corps. University of Toronto Contingent – History – 20th century. | LCSH: Canada. Canadian Army. Canadian Officers’ Training Corps – History – 20th century. | LCSH: University of Toronto – History – 20th century. | LCSH: Military education – Ontario – Toronto – History – 20th century. | LCSH: Education, Higher – Ontario – Toronto – History – 20th century. | LCSH: Toronto (Ont.) – History, Military – 20th century. Classification: LCC U444.T67 L1 2019 | DDC 355.0071/1713541–dc23 ___________________________________________________________________________________

The Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies generously provided financial assistance for the publication of this book. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii List of Abbreviations  ix Commanding Officers  x Introduction 3 1  “Old K”: The University Rifle Company and Its Legacy, 1861–1914 18 2  Born and Raised in War: The University of Toronto Contingent, 1914–1919  70 3  Soldiering on in Peacetime: The University of Toronto Contingent, 1919–1939  119 4  “The Child of the Last War”: The University of Toronto Contingent, 1939–1945  159 5  A Vital Link: The University of Toronto Contingent, 1945–1968 208 Notes  255 Bibliography  351 Index  367

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Acknowledgments

A good many people deserve notice for their help and advice during the writing of this book. It is a pleasure to begin by expressing my gratitude to Professor (Emeritus) Robert Spencer of the University of Toronto and Professor (Emeritus) Terry Copp of Wilfrid Laurier University for inviting me to write about a subject that I came to find of ever-increasing interest and significance as I went on. Both read and commented on the manuscript as it took shape, and I hope that the finished product represents a fair acquittal of the debt I owe to them. For their reviews and suggestions, I wish to acknowledge the two anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press. I have very much enjoyed working with the UTP acquisitions editor Len Husband, to whom I offer my thanks for his steady support of this project from beginning to end. I am grateful to UTP for putting this book in the hands of freelancer Barry Norris, to whom I extend my deep gratitude for the care he took in copy-editing the manuscript. And finally, a special thanks to Wayne Herrington and Marilyn McCormack for their hard work in checking the text and the photographs. I am equally grateful for other contributions along the way. Professor Geoffrey Hayes of the University of Waterloo was kind enough to read the fourth chapter and to offer useful references from his research on the selection and training of Canadian officers during the Second World War. My friends Doug Hope, John Parry, and John Rosolak took on the role of informed general reader and helped to ensure the clarity of presentation in a book intended for as wide an audience as possible. For their perceptive reading and observations, I convey my thanks to all three. I was also very fortunate at the outset that my former student Madeleine Holt was available as a research assistant. It is in no small measure due to her resourcefulness that I was able to find and shape the raw material out of which this book was made.

viii Acknowledgments

Through the good offices of Colonel (Ret.) Chris Corrigan at the Royal Canadian Military Institute and Colonel (Ret.) Geordie Beal of the 48th Highlanders of Canada, I was able to contact a number of COTC alumni who spoke about their experiences as trainees. For generously sharing their time and reminiscences, I wish to thank Tony Ahrens, Bill MacFarlane, Bruce Matthews, Tony Partington, and Bob Robertson, and to acknowledge the helpful contributions of the now deceased Peter Cameron, John Clarry, Bill Heath, Strachan Heighington, John Larke, and John Lowndes. My fondest memories of the time spent working on this book will always be associated with the people in the University of Toronto Archives. A more friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable staff would be very hard to imagine. Harold Averill put his unrivalled knowledge of the university and its archival holdings at my disposal on countless occasions, while he generously took the time to read each chapter as it rolled off the assembly line. So did Loryl MacDonald in the course of her many duties, which on my behalf included arranging access to the collections I needed and advising me on the proper use and citation of archival sources. Marnee Gamble and her colleagues Maureen Morin and Paul Armstrong deserve my special thanks for their assistance in locating and providing the photographs included with the text. I cannot fail to note the ever-courteous assistance of Tys Klumpenhouwer, Karen Suurtamm, Barbara Taylor, and a succession of student interns, all of whom earned my respect and admiration for the help they offered not only to me but to every visitor to the archives. There is a wealth of intellectual and human capital in the university archives, and scholars at any level in any field would be well advised to avail themselves of the resources and guidance to be found there. My final and most heartfelt acknowledgments go to my wife and children. All too often the time spent in research and writing was time away from them, and without their cooperation and patience this book could not have been written. To Sylvia, Sarah, and Colin, I offer my affectionate thanks.

Abbreviations

CEF Canadian Expeditionary Force DND Department of National Defence FASE Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering JSUTC Joint Services University Training Committee NDHQ National Defence Headquarters NRMA National Resources Mobilization Act NCO non-commissioned officer OTC Officers Training Corps / Officer Training Centre (Second World War) OSTC Overseas Training Company ROTP Regular Officer Training Plan RSO Resident Staff Officer SAC Students Administrative Council UTRA University of Toronto Rifle Association

Commanding Officers

University of Toronto Contingent Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, 1914−68 1914–25 1925–6 1926–30 1931–5 1935–45 1945–6 1946–7 1947–50 1950–4 1954–8 1958–62 1962–6 1966–8

Lieutenant-Colonel W.R. Lang Brigadier-General G.S. Cartwright Lieutenant-Colonel T.R. Loudon Lieutenant-Colonel J.R. Cockburn, MC, VD Lieutenant-Colonel H.H. Madill, OBE, VD Lieutenant-Colonel W.S. Wilson Lieutenant-Colonel M.B. Watson Lieutenant-Colonel W.L. Sagar Lieutenant-Colonel L.S. Lauchland Lieutenant-Colonel A.S. Michell Lieutenant-Colonel A.C.M. Ross, CD Lieutenant-Colonel R.A. Spencer Lieutenant-Colonel G.W. Field

VARSITY’S SOLDIERS The University of Toronto Contingent of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, 1914−1968

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Introduction

“I have set forth the lessons of experience, but it is up to you to adapt them to the demands of the moment and to the circumstances.” These words appear in a military manual written over a thousand years ago by a Byzantine emperor famed for his prowess in war and for his development of a formidable army recruited and trained in accordance with a clearly defined tactical doctrine. His treatises are among the many works of military science produced in the tenth century that tell us what Byzantine strategists considered it necessary for their commanders to know. Within this wide realm of instruction, the exercise of command received a good deal of attention – what characteristics the general should possess or cultivate, what technical competence he must acquire, how he should deal with various contingencies, and how he should ensure the discipline and obedience of his men. Commanders going on campaign are known to have consulted these handbooks, and the scions of aristocratic families were expected to have read them as part of their military apprenticeship. Useful and necessary as these treatises were held to have been, however, their authors, in relating the lessons of the past to the realities of the present, constantly reminded the reader that their precepts and procedures could never be applied by rote in all situations. Time and again they emphasized the importance of a commander’s initiative, discretion, and ability to diagnose and react to the events before his eyes, capacities that cannot be taught yet must be learned if he is to lead his army effectively. To read the Byzantine treatises is to be impressed by the blend of theoretical knowledge, the human element, and practical experience in the formation of commanders, and above all by the conviction that military science fostered independence of thought and initiative on the battlefield.1 Reference to the example of a long-defunct empire might seem an odd starting point for a book about the University of Toronto Contingent

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of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps (COTC). Yet it goes to show that the subject of military training in an academic environment can be approached from various perspectives and take readers in any number of directions. When Professor (Emeritus) Terry Copp and Professor (Emeritus) Robert Spencer asked me if I would be interested in writing the history of the Toronto Contingent, I had to confess that I knew next to nothing about the university’s military past (or for that matter, its history as a whole), even though I had walked by the Soldiers’ Tower countless times during my undergraduate years and written several examinations in the old Drill Hall. To make matters worse, despite a deep interest in the field, I was not a specialist in Canadian history. But after speaking with Professor Spencer, the contingent’s second-to-last commanding officer, and doing some preliminary reading, I felt that a work devoted to the COTC would reopen a significant chapter of the university’s history, one that would also be relevant to readers interested in higher education in Canada and the part the country’s universities once played in the selection and training of officers for the armed forces. And since the Canadian Army is neither the first nor the last to seek the elusive formula of moral, intellectual, and technical qualities in its leaders, the experience of the University of Toronto Contingent of the COTC might well make for instructive comparison with military education in other times and places. What follows has evolved into something larger than at first envisaged. Although the main aim has been to provide a narrative history of the Toronto Contingent, which for official purposes began on 2 November 1914, and ended on 31 May 1968, it became clear early in my research that the roots of the university’s military tradition went much deeper. The five and a half decades of the COTC represent but the second of two eras in a century-long history of campus military units that originates with the formation of a volunteer rifle company in 1861 and includes the creation of an engineer company in 1901 and the Rifle Association in 1904. The story of the University of Toronto Contingent would be incomplete without an account of these precursors, which, though of considerable interest in their own right, created a tradition of military service at the university, born of a sense of duty to alma mater and to country, that was inherited and perpetuated by the COTC. Nor, of course, did the COTC exist in isolation. Its history was affected by the interplay of contemporary events and reactions, policies, priorities, and attitudes, both on campus and in the world beyond its confines, as well as by the young men who filled its ranks, the officers who administered it, and the succession of presidents from Falconer to Bissell who regarded the officer training program as the university’s worthy contribution to the

Introduction 5

welfare of Canada. The book has as a result become something closer to a military history of the University of Toronto, focusing primarily on the COTC while attempting to enlarge the reader’s appreciation of the role that military training and education played in the lives of thousands of Varsity students between 1861 and 1968. The story falls naturally into five parts: three eras of peace and two of war. Of these the chapters on the World Wars will likely command the keenest interest. These were unquestionably the hardest challenges the university has ever faced, taxing its resources and resolve to the utmost and wrenching it in new and uncertain directions. The saga of the COTC during the Great War unfolds like the university’s Iliad, full of heroic zeal at the beginning, slowly turning into a struggle of grim endurance as the glory fades in the unceasing slaughter, and ending, its ardour spent, in a spirit of resignation and mourning rather than of triumph. The patriotic fervour, the rush to the colours, and the call of duty that led to the creation of the Toronto Contingent in the fall of 1914 make the first year of the war perhaps the most dramatic time in the university’s history; but the spirit and assumptions of 1914–15 did not long survive the collision with the war’s realities. A few months of drill and a few days of field exercises could not prepare even the most dutiful and able of student soldiers to be junior officers in the trenches: further training overseas and exposure to the conditions of battle were needed to turn COTC products into the capable lieutenants and captains so many proved to be. Furthermore, the contingent formed in response to the demands of the war as conceived in 1914 could not maintain its numbers or provide the training seen to be necessary by early 1916. As the COTC itself devolved into a basic training unit for students obliged to comply with the Military Service Act, two offshoots carried on its work and fulfilled its promise as a source of well-trained, university-educated officer candidates. The selective and rigorous Overseas Training Company furnished several drafts of junior officers who won praise for their performance with British and Canadian forces. The company also spawned the University Tank Battalion, which required engineering or other technologically adept students for this revolutionary weapon. The 67th (Varsity) Battery likewise met the demand for mathematically or scientifically inclined students in the artillery, which had come to be recognized as the dominant arm in battle. The transition from the COTC to the Overseas Training Company and the 67th Battery reflects the transformation of the raw Canadian Expeditionary Force into the highly professional, highly effective Canadian Corps. It was the success of these two descendants of the COTC that made the strongest argument for the continuation of the Toronto Contingent after the war.

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Figure 0.1.  COTC platoons at drill on the Front Campus during the winter of 1914−15. UTA A1968-0003/006(7.8)

In contrast to the emotional undulations of the Great War, the records of the COTC during the Second World War have all the fever pitch of a quarterly report, yet they tell of a far greater and more concerted contribution to the national war effort. Thanks to the efficiency and experience of the COTC’s officers and the university administrators, the University of Toronto ran one of the largest basic training centres in the country while combing out potential officer material for all arms and services. It is no overstatement to say that, without the cooperation of the COTC, the universities could not have coped with the regulations of the National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA) regarding military training and service. The arrangements negotiated in 1940 by the university’s president, Canon Henry John Cody, enabled the federal government to administer the NRMA through the COTC and the universities to continue as institutions of higher education and research with minimal disruption. Neither this greatly expanded role of the COTC nor its collaboration with National Selective Service after 1942 in channelling university students into the armed forces or essential war industries has received due recognition in studies of Canada’s war policies. What is more, the effort of the Toronto Contingent’s officers,

Introduction 7

particularly in 1942–3, to train students to the highest standards with the expectation that they would go on to the army’s Officer Training Centres should lead to a reassessment of the COTC. The secondary literature on officer training in the Second World War, echoing passing judgments made at the time, tends to downplay the worth of the university training units, but Toronto’s record indicates that at least one contingent, and quite possibly others, ironed out its initial difficulties and instituted a serious and demanding training regime designed to produce sound officer material. The steps taken by the contingent’s officers to equip undergraduates with the practical skills they would need as officer candidates, and by the university to ensure that these young men saw themselves as leaders motivated by a sense of duty and a clear understanding of the Allied cause, demonstrate just how valuable a university training scheme could be. The arguments articulated by President Cody and others in favour of a “both … and” approach to the technical and moral dimensions of an officer’s training are of

Figure 0.2.  The greatest march-past in the University of Toronto’s history. COTC trainees approach the reviewing stand in front of University College, 19 October 1940. UTA A1968-0003/004P

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lasting relevance to a question revisited many times since the end of the Second World War. Each of the chapters on military training during the peacetime eras casts light on the university’s history from a new angle. The celebrated K Company, filled by students and officered by their professors, earned a lasting place in university lore with its participation at the Battle of Ridgeway in 1866. A company of The Queen’s Own Rifles for thirty years, “Old K” offered its members entry into a wider social, athletic, and professional milieu at a time when student clubs and associations were few and far between. Among the alumni whose advancement in the militia began with K Company were Malcolm Smith Mercer, who was to command the 3rd Canadian Division from 1915 until his death in action the following year, and John Taylor Fotheringham, one of the founders of the Canadian Army Medical Corps. When support for extracurricular parade ground soldiering faded at the university in the early 1890s and K Company was transferred downtown, there was a brief hiatus in campus military activity until the government turned

Figure 0.3.  Composite photograph of the 1887 complement of K Company, set in front of University College. UTA A1968-0003/010P(309)

Introduction 9

to the university as a source of recruits for specialized corps. The company of engineers raised in 1901 marked this change in priorities and heralded the long affiliation between the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering and the COTC, which drew upwards of half its enrolment and two-thirds of its commanding officers from the professional schools clustered along the southern side of the campus. In turn the creation of the Rifle Association three years later satisfied a desire for a limited form of military training. It proved highly popular among students who saw instruction in marksmanship as a combination of competitive recreation and camaraderie on the one hand, and the healthy cultivation of self-discipline and patriotism on the other. Strange as it is to say, but war was an aberration to the COTC. It was always meant to be a peacetime training program, voluntary and selective, yet it was to act as such in two very different post-war periods. The Toronto Contingent had to start from scratch in 1919 to re-establish itself on a campus weary of war and averse to all things military. Despite the initial lack of interest, Ottawa’s refusal to spend a cent over the irreducible minimum allotted to the military, and the onset of the Depression, Toronto maintained one of the largest and most successful officer training corps in the British Empire during the inter-war years. Not only did the COTC preserve a modicum of military professionalism in a decidedly unmilitary time, it also stood firm – in fact, grew – in the face of the pacifist and anti-war groups that multiplied on campus during the 1930s – a fact that should lead us to reconsider student attitudes and opinions in the years before the Second World War. The Toronto Contingent’s return to peacetime training after 1945 began much more promisingly. To procure well-educated, technically qualified officers equal to the demands of modern warfare, the Department of National Defence (DND) and the universities abandoned the old British model of the officer training corps and remade the COTC into a truly national program designed to qualify officers for the army, navy, and air force. Although the COTC was unable to supply officers in the numbers sought, the Toronto Contingent’s standards of training are

Figure 0.4.  The University of Toronto Contingent assembled on the Front Campus, 1931. UTA A1968-0003/0026

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evident in its theoretical syllabus and the impressive ratings its cadets achieved in summer training at the corps schools. When, as a result of a sweeping change in Canadian defence policy in 1957, the COTC began to decline in numbers and importance, the contingent’s officers upheld its tradition of service and presented a forceful case for the continuation of the program. Somewhat surprisingly, it was not the radicalization of Canadian campuses nor any flagging commitment on the part of the universities that led to the termination of the COTC in 1968. Rather, it was the growing disenchantment at DND towards a program that no longer seemed worth the cost. In hindsight the decision to part ways with the universities looms as a mistake that furthered the estrangement of the military from Canadian society and contributed to the problems of morale and leadership the army encountered in the 1990s. It will be evident from the foregoing that the history of the Toronto Contingent is situated at a busy intersection. A number of themes

Figure 0.5.  Members of the University of Toronto Contingent standing in front of a Bren carrier, garnering publicity for the COTC Ball, sometime in the 1950s. UTA A1968-0003/003P(260)

Introduction 11

crisscross in each chapter and give the subject greater depth and scope. Although here entwined with the history of the University of Toronto, the COTC holds a place in the history of the Canadian Army, particularly the militia (or reserves), and in the history of military education in Canada. The students who drilled with K Company or joined the Rifle Association, and their counterparts who worked their passage through the COTC in peace and war, typified the citizen-soldiers who gave body and life to the “militia myth” cherished by Canadians of another time. They subscribed to the ideals of patriotism and civic duty that elevated the part-time militia volunteer above the professional soldier as the paragon of Canadian martial virtue. Illusory as the militia myth was, and as passé as this notion of good citizenship now seems, one cannot help but admire the dedication of the officers, all of them professors or members of the professions, and the students, all of them pursuing a degree, who, in return for modest remuneration, kept the Toronto Contingent going in good times and bad and carried the tradition of service before self into their civil and militia careers. Whatever their motives in joining or serving the COTC, money and fame can be safely discounted. The association between the COTC and the militia was the contingent’s greatest strength and ultimately its greatest vulnerability. Simply put, as long as Canadian defence planning relied on a small professional core that could be augmented by a militia given sufficient time to mobilize and train, the COTC was a practical and relatively inexpensive way to obtain reserve officers. But when the concept of “forces in being” came into effect, calling for the rapid deployment of regular forces, the size and role of the reserves dwindled, and with them the utility of the COTC. Throughout its existence the COTC waxed and waned with the fluctuations in defence policy (and spending), whether the semi-starvation of the military during the inter-war period, the rare peacetime expansion of the Canadian Army in the 1950s, and the near extinction of the militia in the 1960s. Hence the history of University of Toronto Contingent is the history, not of an immutable monolith, but of a remarkably adaptable organization that, in its fifty-four years, lived four different lives. The rift between regular force “professionals” and militia “amateurs” also coloured perceptions of the COTC, which in the eyes of the former was seen as a less arduous path to an officer’s commission. Real soldiers went to the Royal Military College (RMC), and real officer training included a heavier dose of professional indoctrination and rote training than that administered in the COTC. And yet, as Richard Preston points out in the preface to his history of RMC,2 the emphasis

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on military acculturation and discipline, necessary to inculcate reflexive obedience and to place corporate ahead of individual interest, has at times clashed with the educational dimension of training that aims to develop an officer’s powers of reasoning and independent thought. The COTC encountered this problem of reconciling training with education from the opposite end. The academic content of the COTC syllabus, taught by university staff to university students, played to the strengths of all involved, whereas the limited time and facilities for drill and practical training restricted opportunities to acquire the habits of military discipline and routine. Perhaps the real balance lay between the things that can be learned quickly and the ones that take longer. Even if the COTC was more an academic than a vocational school for officers, the fine record of Toronto’s COTC products in 1944–5 and the performance of its cadets with Canada’s NATO brigade in the 1950s put truth in the truism that there is more than one way to go about moulding officers – especially out of the intelligent, motivated volunteers who represented the first of the COTC’s two principal assets. The second was the contingent’s officers. By day professors of history, classics, geography, German, architecture, engineering, dentistry, or medicine, they knew and understood the students, while as long-serving militia officers or veterans (in many cases both), they taught from experience, not just textbooks. Their realms of experience and expertise enabled the Toronto Contingent to offer a wide curriculum of training that developed the technical skills of officers and the intellectual formation of leaders. In closer focus, however, the history of the Toronto Contingent has been woven into the life of the university. The beginning and the end of the COTC coincide with two watershed events in the university’s history: the outbreak of the Great War and the cultural shift of the 1960s. In between lie the recovery and brief upsurge of the Roaring Twenties, the hardships and anxieties of the 1930s, the full commitment to a second war effort, and two decades of unprecedented growth beclouded by the tensions of the Cold War. As far as possible, I have attempted to take the reader back into those times by letting the dramatis personae guide the narrative and set the tone. The primary sources coalesce into a rich body of material that in its immediacy recaptures the larger and lesser drama of the everyday and presents the story through a contemporary lens. It also peoples the narrative with figures deserving recognition for their services to the COTC, the university, and the country, as well as those with minor parts whose “bottom-up” commentary complements, and not infrequently offsets, the “top-down” perspective of the official records. From all this emerges the history of a campus military

Introduction 13

training unit that held firm to its ideals and traditions throughout the changes and shifts that marked the university’s course from 1914 to 1968. The COTC not only embodied the ideals of duty and service that the university long proclaimed and acted upon in two World Wars; it also enriched student life, whether adding solemnity and military pageantry to Remembrance Day or other formal ceremonies, stating its case in debates or disputes, starting a band that entertained the student body at dances, parades, and football games, or hosting an annual ball that for many years was one of the university’s most anticipated social events. The story of the university’s military past has been written mainly from sources concentrated in the University of Toronto Archives. The most important of these are the records of the Toronto Contingent transferred to the archives upon the dissolution of the COTC in 1968, the dossiers on military training kept by the Office of the Registrar, and the correspondence in the files of the Office of the President. The clippings files, compiled into a record of events, organizations, and alumni, constitute another profitable source of information, as do the papers, diaries, memoirs, interviews, and collections bequeathed to the archives by individuals connected in some way with the COTC. A number of university publications, most notably the annual reports issued by the Board of Governors and the president, the yearbook Torontonensis, the University of Toronto Monthly, and of course the student newspaper, the Varsity, provide a wealth of detail. The archives also contain a plentiful photographic collection that has ensured that the story of the COTC is preserved as vividly in image as in word. It stands to reason that a history of the Toronto Contingent would depend heavily on University of Toronto materials, just as the history of any COTC contingent will be based primarily on its home university’s archives. Two points need be made in this connection. First, the university archives and publications contain an enormous amount of material on the COTC, much of it neglected for decades. Once I realized that the holdings pertaining to the Toronto Contingent were scattered throughout the archives, it became a secondary purpose of this project to identify the material relevant to the university’s military history. Second, reliance on Toronto sources did not preclude the use of others, most notably those contained in Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and the Directorate of History and Heritage (DHH) at National Defence Headquarters. The collections in Ottawa and Toronto often overlap, since the Toronto files retain copies of the correspondence or documents sent from National Defence Headquarters or DND. Only after the Second World War did the COTC become a truly national, centralized program

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that put all contingents on the same footing, regardless of the size and resources of each university. At this stage the holdings in LAC and at DHH become indispensable to the study of the Toronto Contingent as it was integrated into the revamped COTC of the post-war era. The Joint Services University Training Committee headed by the president oversaw Toronto’s training units, but its role was restricted, as direction of the COTC passed to the liaison committee established between the universities and DND in the 1950s. Since my subject was the University of Toronto Contingent, not the COTC as a whole, the search for records and sources was comprehensive at Toronto, selective in Ottawa. No matter their provenance, the primary sources lead to an unsparing assessment of the Toronto Contingent. Although proud of the unit and ever ready to defend its record, the contingent’s officers did not blind themselves to its imperfections and shortcomings. Committee records show that, when things did go wrong, the officers did not sidestep the problem but dealt with it directly. For their part, the students, whether members of the contingent or outsiders, were just as candid in their opinions, but as long as they were not grinding a political or personal axe, their criticisms were usually constructive or fair, often good-humoured. On that note, readers familiar with the Varsity in its post-1960s version might raise an eyebrow at its frequent use as a source of information and barometer of student opinion. To be sure, there were always editors or contributors with bees in their bonnets, and by the late 1950s there were clear signs that the newspaper was setting off on a one-way trip through the looking glass. Be that as it may, in its first eighty years the Varsity was a newspaper, not a screed, and taken with a grain of salt it presents an interesting and rounded view of student life and attitudes. The relative paucity of secondary material on the COTC is another reason for the preponderance of university sources. I followed the path marked out by Professor Spencer in his overview of the University of Toronto Contingent published in 2009,3 and was guided by the parallel histories of the contingents at Queen’s and Western Ontario.4 Dan Byers’s MA thesis on the COTC from 1912 to 1935 was very useful for the early period,5 but aside from an article or two and brief surveys on university websites,6 there is not a great deal on the COTC per se. Many avenues of research lie open, but it seems best to proceed one book and one topic at a time. This history of the Toronto Contingent is one step towards filling this gap in the literature, and is meant to inspire other scholars, especially those at the outset of their career, to explore a rich yet uncharted field of research. Copious as they are, the notes serve what I trust will be a useful purpose in pointing the way to sources and

Introduction 15

subjects ripe for greater investigation. To mention two in particular, the university’s air and naval training units, introduced in 1941 and 1942 and resurrected after the war, for reasons of space receive no more than passing mention in this book; both deserve full treatment elsewhere. So do, for instance, the subjects of conscientious objectors and women’s units, for which there are thick and unexploited files. Beyond the confines of the University of Toronto, the history of other university contingents, first and foremost those at the French-speaking institutions, and the COTC in general should appeal to scholars interested in the military side of Canada’s universities. In the preface to his history of the University of Toronto, a work that steadily rose in my estimation for the clarity and order the author imposed on a very long and increasingly complex tale,7 Professor Martin Friedland declared that the history of the university is the history of Toronto, the history of Ontario, and the history of Canada. Something similar could be said of the history of the Toronto Contingent, which belongs as much to the history of Canada’s army as to the history of Canada’s universities. This book should find a niche somewhere between Friedland’s volume, the various histories of the university’s colleges and faculties,8 and the biographies of the two presidents most closely associated with the history of the Toronto Contingent: Robert Falconer and Henry John Cody.9 All these works help to place the story of the COTC within the larger ambit of the university. The context widens when the story is informed by scholarship of the calibre of Brian McKillop’s Matters of Mind10 and the research into Canadian students undertaken by Paul Axelrod, John Reid, Catherine Gidney, Paul Stortz, and Lisa Panayotidis.11 The COTC appears in many of these studies, but usually in a cameo role and only insofar as it bears on the experience of students during the World Wars. This book, however, should contribute to our understanding of students and military training during the equally interesting times of peace. The military historical background of the Toronto Contingent and its antecedents has been provided by a number of general works, of which the most useful is Jack Granatstein’s Canada’s Army,12 and by studies focusing on particular events or topics. Chief among the latter are Yves Tremblay’s Instruire une armée and Geoffrey Hayes’s recently published Crerar’s Lieutenants dealing with officer training before and during the Second World War,13 the collection of essays on military leadership assembled by Bernd Horn and Stephen Harris,14 and the sections discussing the approaches to officer training in the post-war period in the publications of Peter Kasurak and Andrew Godefroy.15 Within these studies, the COTC comes in for a share of attention; now this account

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of the Toronto Contingent should both complement and expand upon the existing literature. This narrative history of the University of Toronto’s military units advances no particular thesis or argument. It might, however, help to remedy a condition Christopher Andrew, historian of Britain’s MI5, has diagnosed as HASDD (Historical Attention Span Deficit Disorder): the peculiarly twenty-first-century conceit that the experience and wisdom of the past have no relevance to the present. It appears in mild form among Canada’s armed forces and universities, where the history of the COTC has been largely overlooked – oddly so, since every issue of the Canadian Forces’ professional journals seems to carry at least one article on officer selection and training, military education, leadership, the ethical and moral dimensions of command, the state and future of the reserves, or civil-military relations, all topics where the example of the COTC might offer some lessons or insight. If the Canadian Forces are to take part in coalition warfare or return to their hallowed peacekeeping role (just as illusory as the militia myth, but never mind), and if the growth of sophisticated technology or cyber warfare requires intelligent, responsible, highly skilled practitioners, would it not make sense to seek officer candidates among educated, cosmopolitan, technically adept university students, drawn from a wide array of cultural backgrounds and inspired by the traditions and ideals of the old COTC? The recent introduction of the Civil Military Leadership Pilot Initiative at the University of Alberta holds out the welcome possibility that what Sir Robert Falconer called the “mutually beneficial relationship” might once again take root in Canadian universities and serve the country’s interests as well and as honourably as did its predecessor. Half a century after its demise, the University of Toronto Contingent has been all but forgotten at the university it represented so proudly for so many years. The dedication of a plaque in front of the contingent’s old headquarters at 119 St George Street (now home to Woodsworth College) has gone some way to preserving the memory of the university’s military heritage. One aim of this book is to stir awareness of the other places on campus where the genius loci of the COTC resides. The commendable efforts of the Soldiers’ Tower Committee to renovate and enhance the principal monument commemorating the sacrifice of Varsity’s men and women in two wars have also rekindled interest in the university’s role in the defence of Canada, as evident in the increased attendance on Remembrance Day and the frequency of visitors to the Memorial Room. But the story of another monument honouring the first university students to take up arms in defence of their country has never been told in full. The resplendent memorial window overlooking

Introduction 17

the East Hall of University College commemorates three members of K Company who were killed fighting against the Fenians in June 1866. Few who gaze at this window know, however, that it was dedicated in 1910, and is a replacement of the original memorial, dedicated shortly after the battle. The story of the first window is connected with the two most memorable events in the university’s history before the First World War: the Battle of Ridgeway that occasioned the memorial, and the great fire that destroyed it in 1890. The memorial’s significance to contemporaries and the sense of duty that impelled a later generation to make good its loss say something about the world the students lived in, and do much to explain the place of military training at the university in that day and age. And so it is there that I begin.

Chapter 1

“Old K”: The University Rifle Company and Its Legacy, 1861–1914

“Distinguished young men of great promise” On 5 October 1891 Sir Daniel Wilson, president of the University of Toronto, gave what would be his last Inaugural Address to students and faculty convened in the old Library Hall (now the East Hall) of University College. He stood in a place that had once housed the rich accumulations of a lifetime’s scholarly endeavours, all “swept away in a single night” by the fire that had raged through the east wing of the college twenty months before. The destruction of the library, his museum and collections, his notes and drawings, and more than half the main building had been a catastrophe to which the president, despite his advanced age – he was nearly seventy-six – and failing health, responded with characteristic fortitude, and vigour.1 He had the university functioning again the Monday after the fire, and he resolved to cast the “dire conflagration” as an opportunity to create something grander and greater out of the ruins. In keeping with his determination to maintain the continuity of university life, Wilson delayed the 1891 Convocation until it could be held in the restored building. And so it was, but not in the proper setting, for the fire had left Convocation Hall, in the northeast corner of University College, a gutted shell bereft of its elegant side windows and its focal point high in the north wall. As befit the occasion, Wilson dwelt at length on the work of renovation and the expansion of the university’s resources to inspire among the students a “yearning for the large excitement that the coming years will bring.” But towards the end of an address looking confidently to the future, he paused to make special reference to the loss of a link to the past, and to an event that, until the fire, had been the most significant in the university’s history: “Among the effaced mementoes of our own brief history as a University, I trust the graduates will recognize that a



“Old K” 19

sacred duty devolves on them to replace the memorial window, which in the old Convocation Hall perpetuated the memories of those of our undergraduates whose lives were sacrificed in gallant defence of our Canadian frontier against Fenian invaders. The east window of the hall in which we now assemble has been reserved for its restoration there.”2 The old man spoke from the heart. He himself had drawn the design for the original window commemorating the students killed in the battle against the Fenians at Ridgeway on 2 June 1866 and honouring the volunteers of the University Rifle Company who had taken up arms to defend “the sacred soil of Canada” against all who threatened it.3 He had been a long-time friend and ally of Henry Holmes Croft, professor of chemistry, the first captain of the company; he had been a colleague of John Bradford Cherriman, professor of mathematics, the first lieutenant of the company; and he had both taught and worked closely (if not always harmoniously) with Adam Crooks, Ontario’s first minister of education, who had served as the company’s first ensign. Present among his audience were prominent veterans of the University Rifle Company, including James Loudon, professor of physics and Wilson’s successor as president of the university, who had been called out in 1866; William Henry van der Smissen, university librarian and professor of German, one of the volunteers wounded at Ridgeway; and William Hodgson Ellis, professor of chemistry, who had been taken prisoner. Assenting nods and upward glances surely followed as Wilson pointed to the place where the new memorial window would be set. The students forming the largest part of Wilson’s audience had not been born when the battle was fought, yet most would have understood his appeal for a restored Ridgeway memorial. Four months before, the Veterans of ’66 Association had staged a grand ceremony to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle.4 Ten stalwarts of the University Company had marched alongside their old comrades in arms through the streets of Toronto to the Volunteer Memorial, on the west side of Queen’s Park. A crowd of 30,000 had gathered there to hear speeches recounting the events of 1866 and praising the exemplary loyalty and courage displayed by the sons of Canada. In the four columns it devoted to the occasion, the Globe singled out for special mention “the Varsity boys.” Boys indeed, since half of the Canadian volunteers at Ridgeway were less than twenty years of age. They, of all the troops involved in the battle, had advanced the farthest against the enemy and suffered the heaviest casualties: three dead, four wounded, three taken prisoner, amounting to one-third of their total strength. To add further renown to the Varsity boys, the day’s principal speaker was John Morison Gibson, himself a University Company original, combatant at Ridgeway, and

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the foremost example of a distinguished alumnus and citizen-soldier, whose service had stamped his passport into the world of law, politics, and business.5 Pride in the performance of the University Company alternated in the minds of those old enough to recollect other scenes from the most dramatic days in Toronto since the 1837 Rebellion. The first reports of Fenian activity in March 1866 had put the whole city on a war footing. The government hurriedly sent four carloads of muskets, and all militia units were mustered. As No. 9 Company of The Queen’s Own Rifles, the University Company turned out for drill each day; one student, George Hunter Robinson, recorded with amusement in his diary that members of the company attended class in uniform, while one of their officers, Professor Cherriman, wore a sword that clanked along the floor as he paced back and forth during his lectures. The threat soon subsided, only to materialize again in late May, when Fenians gathered on the American side of the Niagara River, across from Fort Erie. The university year was ending and the students were either finishing exams or had already gone home, so it was with some difficulty that the officers dispatched in the early morning of 1 June to muster the company collected just twenty-seven men to send with The Queen’s Own. The regiment was carried by steam and rail to Port Colborne, and from there set out to confront the invaders. Robinson’s diary entry for 3 June encapsulates the flurry of reactions in Toronto as reports of the battle poured in: Yesterday was a stirring day in Canadian annals. The Fenians did cross the Niagara and a fight between our troops and these rascals took place. Toronto is in a state of the greatest excitement. From early morning yesterday to the present the streets have been thronged. Especially around the offices of the Leader, Globe and Telegraph is the crowd found. Everyone seems anxious to hear about their friends. Poor Forbes was wounded in the arm but we can hear nothing definite. Some of the College boys are wounded and some taken prisoners. I wish I had been there. I feel halfashamed to be living in peace when so many that I know are perilling their lives for their country. I never saw such scenes as Toronto now presents. Affectionate farewells, hurried parting tears, strong men bowed down, and women swooning are a few of the things that everywhere met me. Our cause is hopeful so far. I never had any doubt of success. It is so hard to write a coherent account of this.6

Even as more troops were being rushed to the frontier, the steamer City of Toronto was plying its way homewards with the wounded and



“Old K” 21

Figure 1.1.  “Canadian Volunteer”: colour sketch of a University Rifle Company soldier by Arundel Charles Hill (B.A. 1867), initialled and dated on 4 April 1866. UTA P1978-01010(03)

the dead. The Globe noted the solemn effect of all the city’s bells tolling at slow intervals; nearly fifty years later, the caretaker of the university recalled ringing the great tower bell continuously from the time the steamer left Niagara until it reached Toronto late in the evening.7 In the darkness a silent multitude lined the waterfront. “Lanterns held here and there at intervals gave a weird vastness to the crowd, and … gave

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some idea of its wonderful extent.”8 The wounded were brought off and conveyed to their homes. Then, as though by common intuition, the crowd parted to make way for the five coffins reverently borne to the waiting hearses. The bodies of two of the three students killed in the battle – William Fairbanks Tempest and Malcolm McKenzie – were transported to the university to lie in state through the day, Monday, 4 June.9 The next day the entire city came to a halt as the funeral cortege, half a mile long, proceeded from the Drill Shed on Simcoe Street to St James Cemetery, where Toronto’s fallen were laid to rest. In an editorial entitled “The Moral of the Funeral,” the Globe declared that these young men had sacrificed their lives “to preserve their birthright and to save their country from being overrun by a horde of robbers” and decried the “attempt to force this country into a political connection with their neighbour by means of border troubles.” Viewed in this light, resistance to the Fenians reaffirmed the choice Canadians had made: “The autonomy of British America, its independence of all control save that to which its people willingly submits, is cemented by the blood shed in battle on the 2nd of June.”10 Pride in their contribution, and a firm belief in the cause for which they had fought, led the university authorities to act quickly to enshrine the memory of the volunteers. The shock of the loss must also have spurred efforts in this direction. At a time when faculty and students numbered fewer than three hundred, the deaths of three university men, known to all, would have reverberated throughout that small world. Before the month was out, the vice chancellor, Adam Crooks, the University Company’s ensign, had introduced a statute in the university Senate calling for “the erection of a Memorial Window, or other suitable Testimonial in the Convocation Hall to perpetuate the memories of the Undergraduates … who fell so gallantly, when repulsing the Fenian invaders” and adding the provision that the wounded together with those who took part in the engagement should also receive recognition.11 A select committee, including the university president, Reverend Doctor John McCaul, Professor Croft, and Doctor Wilson, saw the project through to completion. At the window’s dedication during the Convocation ceremony on 16 November 1866, McCaul, after offering some reflections on the untimely deaths of the “distinguished young men of great promise” – as the Latin inscription “egregi summaeque spei adolescentes” eulogized them – summoned the four men wounded at Ridgeway to come forward and unveil the window. Set within three Gothic arches, the window’s middle panel featured the combined arms of the University of Toronto and University College in the centre, with the crests of the university and the college above and below. The side arch



“Old K” 23

on the right presented a branch of laurel with clusters of maple leaves above and below, while the arch on the left featured a branch of cypress, similarly adorned with clusters of maple leaves. As a whole it formed a dignified composition blending symbols of patriotism, mourning, learning, and the arts, and in the figure of the Roman goddess Minerva, wisdom and war – all appropriate to the events, persons, and institution commemorated. Looming over the old Convocation Hall, visible to the world outside, for a quarter of a century the memorial window reminded beholders of the first time the faculty and students of the university had rallied together to serve their country and shed their blood in its defence. The arches that framed it can still be seen at the northwest end of University College,12 immediately adjacent to the site where, by apt coincidence, a far larger testament of service and sacrifice would one day take shape as the Soldiers’ Tower memorial. Compelling as it was, Wilson’s appeal for a restored window went unfulfilled for nearly twenty years. Many reasons account for the

Figure 1.2.  The first Ridgeway Memorial Window, dedicated in 1866, overlooking the original Convocation Hall housed in the northeast corner of University College. UTA A1965-0004/031

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delay – one is the demise of the University Company itself. A lesserknown but irreparable effect of the fire had been the destruction of the company’s equipment, which had been stored in an armoury on the second floor of the college’s east wing.13 The loss compounded the already pressing difficulty of maintaining a company based some distance from its regiment and of balancing the demands of militia service with those of the academic year, a combination of factors which led to the decision to sever the university’s connection with The Queen’s Own. The hiatus in military training on campus proved to be brief, but it occurred at a time when great undertakings and expenditures – such as the completion of the new library, the construction of Convocation Hall, the addition of new faculties and facilities, and the reform of the university government – took precedence in the minds of the university’s leaders. Much of the driving force behind these initiatives came from the newly established Alumni Association, which, upon achieving the major projects on its agenda, turned to the “sacred duty” of replacing the window. The alumni had entertained the idea for some time. The catalyst appears to have been a reunion dinner on 5 June 1907 of the class of 1866, which prided itself on having “graduated twenty-eight strong in the Fenian Raid year, when the sword was mightier than the pen.”14 The reminiscences stirred by this occasion presumably spilled over into the annual meeting of the Alumni Association the next day, at which several graduates of ’66, including veterans of Ridgeway, were in attendance. A discussion arose concerning “the desirability of steps being taken by the Association to erect, in the Main Building, a Memorial Window,” and resulted in the appointment of a committee to bring the “too long neglected” project to fruition.15 The members set to work in two stages, first to approve a design for the window, then to determine how to meet the cost. Since “patriotic considerations demand the execution of the Memorial in Canadian workmanship,” the Toronto firm of Robert McCausland and Son, which had made the original window four decades before, was asked to submit a preliminary sketch and estimate. After some modifications by the committee, the design was accepted, as was the price, quoted at $1,600. To raise this sum, the Alumni Association used its ever-expanding network to solicit donations to a special Memorial Window Fund. When contributions from graduates fell a third short, an appeal to undergraduates helped to close the gap. It was gratifying to receive a handsome amount from the Officers’ Mess of The Queen’s Own Rifles in memory of the old connection with the University Company. So effectively did the association canvass for funds that the shortfall eventually became



“Old K” 25

a small surplus, sufficient to permit the insertion of a tablet below the window bearing an inscription in Latin, which translated reads, “The Alumni of the University placed this monument to restore the monument previously destroyed by the fire. 1910.”16 Two decades after the fire and half a century after the Fenian raid, the unveiling of the new memorial window on 20 June 1910 bore witness to the evolution of the university from one part into the sum of many. In 1866 the memorial’s dedication had been a uniquely University College affair. The federation of Victoria College with the University of Toronto in 1890, followed by that of Trinity College in 1904, added new chapters to the Ridgeway saga. Both colleges were conspicuous by their presence in the ceremony. In his address, the Reverend Nathanael Burwash, chancellor of Victoria College, gave a stirring account of the battle in which he had served as a chaplain ministering to the wounded and dying. “I have done my duty,” was the last conscious thought Burwash attributed to the students killed at Ridgeway, whose moral example would endure: “by this memorial window we are to continue to generations yet to come the lesson of these three young men: Do your duty.” The nominal roll of the University Company was then read out, whereupon a handful of old Trinity men were invited to come forward. Trinity College, of course, had been an adamantly separate entity in 1866, when it too sent a contingent of student volunteers to fight in the ranks of The Queen’s Own against the Fenians. It was a point of pride that an ensign from the Trinity College Rifle Company had at the last minute been assigned to lead the University Rifles during the battle, and had acquitted himself well in that role. The company had long since ceased to exist, but members of the Trinity College Rifles or their families had been among the most prompt and generous supporters of the Memorial Window Fund. In recognition of the college’s worthy part in the defence of Canada, the names of the Trinity students who had fought at Ridgeway were likewise read out “amid expressions of appreciation from the audience.” When it is recalled that the federation of the denominational colleges with the “godless” university had not come about easily or altogether amicably, these nods to Victoria and Trinity from the East Hall of University College served to affirm the unity of an increasingly composite university.17 The ceremony also displayed the advanced prestige of the university, a far cry from the rather isolated institution of the 1860s. The diffusion of its influence throughout the Dominion had been aided in no small measure by its militia connections. In the words of one historian of the university, “the University Rifle Company … served as a nursery for officers and non-commissioned officers in the militia all over

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Canada.”18 Many of these citizen-soldiers had gone on to become the leading financiers, bankers, lawyers, and public servants of the time, sometimes all in one, as in the case of John Morison Gibson, the “Grand Old Man of the Canadian Militia,” who in his twin capacities as president of the Alumni Association and lieutenant governor of Ontario was called upon to unveil the memorial. Above all The Queen’s Own Rifles was the regiment that had drawn the majority of student soldiers into its ranks. The university and the regiment had parted formal ways in 1893, but The Queen’s Own continued to enlist a good number of university men. By 1910 it was the smartest and most socially prominent militia regiment in Toronto, perhaps in Canada, and the memorial’s unveiling had been scheduled to fall within the weeklong celebrations of the regiment’s fiftieth anniversary in June. For its part The Queen’s Own spared no effort to lend a “soul-stirring” aspect to the ceremony. A guard of honour from the regiment’s current K Company, the continuation of the old University Company, stood beneath the memorial window, the regimental band performed during the proceedings, and no less a personage than Sir Henry Pellatt, commanding officer of The Queen’s Own, read the Honour Roll. Memories of the long affiliation with The Queen’s Own and the donation to the window fund made it all the more appropriate that the regimental crest, absent in the 1866 window, occupied a place in the new memorial. “We are on the whole gainers,” confided Sir Daniel Wilson to his diary in February 1892 as he surveyed the university’s recovery from the fire. His words might have applied equally well to the new memorial. It struck one observer who knew both as more luminous than its “sombre-coloured” predecessor; and while it retained some features of the old window, notably the heraldic images and the Latin inscriptions composed by McCaul, the three great symbolic figures emblazoned in the new window made a much bolder proclamation of the ideals represented by the student in arms. The imposing Minerva in the central panel, modelled on the famous statue of Pallas Athena in the Parthenon, personifies wisdom, victory, and the arts of peace and war. The left panel contains the image of a student clad in a toga and holding a scroll, hearkening to his country’s call; the same student appears in the right panel as a Roman soldier, drawing his sword in defence of his homeland. The memorial exudes the confidence of the university in its core principles and in its ambition “to train men who are perfect citizens” of “a nation known as one that while cultivating the arts of peace was ready and capable to defend both Canada and the Empire.” Yet, as cherished and secure as these convictions were, no one today can look upon the memorial without a sense of foreboding that the optimism



“Old K” 27

and great certainties of 1910 belong to an era destined for a shattering end. Along the pedestal beneath Minerva’s feet runs a quotation from the Roman poet Horace: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (sweet and proper it is to die for one’s country), which less than a decade later could never be read the same way again. The prelude on the Ridgeway memorial leads into the first phase of the university’s military history, a significant chapter in its own right and necessary background to the story of the University of Toronto Contingent of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps.19 The contingent that sprang to life overnight with the advent of the Great War did so on a campus with a proud military tradition reaching back over half a century, and whose faculty and students had in times of crisis responded with alacrity to patriotic appeals and the call to arms. The story of the University Rifle Company and its successors displays the manifold effects of military involvement on the university long before 1914, not only on its growth as an institution but also on the lives of its members whose university careers included military training and service. It also ushers onstage many of the people who would later be instrumental in establishing the COTC, adapting it to the exigencies imposed by the First World War, and sustaining it during the lean years of the inter-war period. The creation of the University Rifle Company, the part it played in university life, and the legacy it bequeathed in many ways anticipate the history of the COTC, and so it is to the forebears of the University of Toronto Contingent that I now turn. “A good thing in every way” The young men who took up their studies in the Michaelmas term of 1861 were, like their counterparts in 1914 and 1939, about to see their lives altered by distant events in which they were implicated by virtue of their connection and loyalty to Britain. Born about the time of the union of the Canadas in 1841, they were the English-speaking inhabitants of a colony whose identity stemmed from British traditions and ideals made all the more venerable by contrast with the unruly republicanism of the United States.20 They were students of a university created by Royal charter who sat at the feet of professors born in Britain. As British North Americans they subscribed to a historical narrative peopled by Loyalists who, in rejecting the American Revolution, had given Canada its raison d’être, by sturdy Upper Canadian militiamen who had repulsed the American invaders in 1812, and by a succession of soldiers, politicians, and churchmen who exemplified the rightness of all things British. They also lived in anxious times, when recurrent

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tensions between Britain and the United States made Canada a likely target for American reprisals or annexation. The recent outbreak of the American Civil War had rekindled animosities in the Northern states towards a seemingly pro-Confederate Britain, which in turn took umbrage at the seizure by a Union vessel of two Southern commissioners from a British mail steamer in November 1861. For six weeks the Trent affair, as it was called, kept the Northern states and Britain poised on the brink of war, and forced Canadians to confront the all-too-real possibility of an American invasion.21 Bouts of military enthusiasm were not infrequent in pre-Confederation Canada, but the rush to the colours in 1861, “reminding one of the armed men that sprang from the teeth of the Cadmeian dragon,” marked a high point in the history of the Canadian militia.22 Volunteer companies, often formed by members of the same profession or trade, multiplied throughout the country. The patriotic fervour that swept through Toronto peaked in mid-December during the most ominous days of the crisis. It was at this moment, with the term and examinations finished and the students free of tasks, that the first of many memorable figures in the long military history of the University of Toronto stepped forward. In later years, when to have been a University Rifles original was to have been with Henry V at Agincourt, recognition as the company’s founder was an honour highly sought.23 The earliest and most trustworthy accounts, however, identify Henry Holmes Croft as the moving spirit behind the creation of the company.24 “A thorough Englishman in feeling and sentiment,” in manner and appearance this bespectacled scientist with his bird’s nest beard presented a most unwarlike aspect, but as the son of the deputy paymaster-general of the ordnance under the Duke of Wellington, he had grown up among soldiers and retained memories of childhood encounters with the hero of Waterloo and other old warriors of the Napoleonic age. In his twenty years at the university he had won great affection among his students and colleagues, so that it was no surprise, given the temper of the times, that his impassioned appeal for a company of riflemen “was cheered to the echo” by the members of the university assembled at his bidding in the old Convocation Hall. By the time the meeting ended, the ranks of the newborn University Rifles had been filled. Croft was elected captain that very day, the first of five professors to command the company. “Ready to take his part with pen or sword, and would make each of them mighty in its place,” Daniel Wilson set a worthy precedent by enlisting as a private, as did his fellow professor George Buckland.25 It fell to Croft and other newly minted militia officers to attend the sessions hastily set up by regular officers to teach neophyte commanders



“Old K” 29

the art of transforming earnest citizens into passable soldiers. He at least had observed “the fascinating evolutions of the parade ground” in his youth, and he was prudent enough to secure the services of a Waterloo veteran as the company’s first drill instructor. One company original recalled the scenes that followed, of professors and students shedding academic distinctions in the common acquisition of military training: [D]rill was immediately commenced, many of the Professors taking their places in the ranks with all the dignity of full privates, evincing a most laudable desire to reconcile their characteristic propriety with the mistakes inevitable to recruits, and practically illustrating the fact that a man may be deeply read in classics, infallible in mathematics, profound in history, or eminently skilled in metaphysics, and yet acquire at his first few drills but a faint idea of the precision necessary to a proper execution of the preliminary part of the performance, vulgarly known as the “goosestep,” while he remains in blissful ignorance of the vast mass of military knowledge yet to be acquired in the shape of “fours” and “squares,” “marching” and “counter-marching,” “open columns,” and “columns en masse.”26

In the end the Trent affair was settled without recourse to war, but the passing of the crisis by no means precluded the possibility of others. Throughout 1862 the independent companies continued to train while being organized into local regiments. In Toronto an assortment of companies raised from the city’s merchants, artisans, civil servants, and tradesmen coalesced into the Second Battalion, Volunteer Militia Rifles, shortly to become The Queen’s Own Rifles of Toronto.27 This regiment had begun as a somewhat unwieldy collection of four Toronto companies and two based outside the city; now, with the resurgence of the volunteer spirit, it grew into a truly city regiment with ten companies. Taking their place among this cross-section of Toronto’s citizen-soldiers were the members of the “University and College Rifle Company,” which was gazetted on 5 May 1862 and subsequently incorporated within The Queen’s Own Rifles on 21 November that year. For official purposes it was first posted as No. 9 Company, under which designation it fought at Ridgeway. In March 1872, when letters replaced numerals in the regiment’s organization, it became K Company, the name by which it was known to a generation of students and to live on in university lore.28 Over the next thirty years the University Company maintained its affiliation with The Queen’s Own, yet always at a remove. The facilities

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used by the regiment – the Drill Shed on Simcoe Street (completed in 1864) and the Denison rifle range (on the site of the Exhibition Grounds) – lay some way from the university in a day and age when transporting a sizable body of recruits through the city was no easy matter. Distance and the separate rhythms of academic life reinforced the unique character of the University Company throughout its existence, and from its inception led it to rely on its own resources.29 The open expanses around the college afforded plenty of room for training exercises and manoeuvres, while the old Convocation Hall could accommodate company drill in inclement weather. Practice in marksmanship, the ne plus ultra of the militiaman’s skills, was held in the secluded confines of the nearby Rosedale ravine, although the budding sharpshooters were not averse to placing oyster cans on the fenceposts west of the college and trying their luck from the upper windows of the residence.30 Given the youthful exuberance of the students in arms, it speaks well of Croft’s tutelage that teams from the company claimed first prize in several inter-regimental shooting matches; the British officer appointed in 1864 to inspect the volunteer militia corps pronounced

Figure 1.3.  A little recreational shooting practice from the windows of the men’s residence (then on the west side of University College). From University of Toronto Monthly, vol. XXI, no. 6 (1920−1), p. 251.



“Old K” 31

the University Rifles “the most perfectly drilled and disciplined volunteer company he had ever seen.”31 The $100 prize for efficiency that gave these accolades real meaning would have been all the more gratefully accepted as a means of defraying expenses since, apart from the weapons and ammunition supplied by the government, volunteers had to meet the not inconsiderable costs of uniforms and accoutrements out of their own pocket or by subscription. The University Company stood ready to do its part when troubles resurfaced during the waning stages of the American Civil War. The repercussions of the raid on St Albans, Vermont, on 19 October 1864 by Confederates operating from Canada and the first hints of the Fenian menace led the government to send troops to monitor the frontier. University men were among The Queen’s Own detailed for these duties, and Croft even took temporary command of the regiment in Toronto when detachments were stationed in the Niagara Peninsula during the winter of 1864–5. Service to country, however, could also serve the interests of the university. Coupled with the “pardonable pride” that the student soldiers took in their role as guardians of their country’s honour and liberties was the notion that “an hour each week in acquiring a knowledge of the use of arms” provided “a pleasant and healthful recreation when wearied with the almost incessant brain work required of a University man.”32 The point bears noting. As genuine as the volunteer impulse was, the students of the 1860s enjoyed few outlets from their academic pursuits and strictly regimented daily routines: “during this period the students were few in number but picked specimens of the intelligence of the country: their principal business was study, their recreation, walking. They had no gymnasium, except an old shed that stood to the north of the steward’s house, no telephone, movies, phonograph, electric light or radio, no automobiles.”33 Nor was the university as tightly knit as its small numbers might imply, since most students were compelled to seek affordable lodging outside the college and, not without reason, tended to resent the favoured few with the means to live in residence.34 The Literary and Scientific Society, launched in 1854, had gone some way towards promoting the students’ cultural refinement and sense of college spirit, but it was not until the late 1870s that clubs, associations, fraternities, and athletics started to add some much-needed variety to student life.35 Esprit de corps, or lack thereof, was a related concern during the university’s early years, which the Rifle Company did much to address. Such was its attraction that from 1872 to 1877 the university supported two companies, reverting to one when other options began to compete for student membership.36

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Figure 1.4.  Students in an idle moment in front of University College, ca. 1880. UTA B1986-0105

Not all the student volunteers in The Queen’s Own belonged to University College, nor were the University Rifles the first or only s­ tudent company to be formed. In the fall of 1860, Major Robert Brittain D ­ enison, scion of an influential Toronto family known for its inveterate loyalty to Britain, ceaseless agitation for a standing militia, and antipathy towards the United States (“revolutionary doctrines run wild”),37 had taken it upon himself to raise a company from Trinity College. Family traditions and connections aligned with Trinity’s emulation of English university precedents. Denison’s father, Colonel George T. Denison, had raised a cavalry unit and an artillery battery; his brother, George Taylor ­Denison, founder of The Queen’s Own, epitomized the nineteenth-­ century Canadian militia officer. Robert himself was a devout churchman, ­ public servant, and soldier with a son and nephew at Trinity.38 In turn Trinity’s eagerness to form a company showed its fidelity to its lodestar Cambridge, which in March 1860 had established the first English university corps to be enrolled in the volunteer m ­ ovement that flourished anew in Britain in the wake of the Crimean War.39 Gazetted on 3 June 1861, the independent Trinity company entered the world clad in grey uniforms with scarlet facings patterned after those worn by



“Old K” 33

Figure 1.5.  Portraits of the Commanding Officers of the Trinity College Rifle Company, No. 8 Company of The Queen’s Own Rifles. Note the redoubtable Colonel Robert Denison in the centre. Malcolm Smith Mercer, a K Company alumnus, is in the lower row, second from the right. UC Archives Ph3438MCD7F118

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the Cambridge corps,40 later adopting the rifle green uniform of The Queen’s Own when it was listed as No. 8 Company of that regiment in November 1862. “It was a good thing in every way … which while affording exercise and amusement, tended greatly to increase and intensify the esprit de corps which has always characterized the men of Old Trinity.”41 As at University College, military training at Trinity filled a void in student life: “we had no gymnasium, no baseball, no tennis, no football, no hockey, nothing but cricket.” Fortunately the college grounds, located in the open fields on Toronto’s western outskirts, lent themselves as well to drill as to cricket, and the spacious ravine behind the college offered a natural shooting gallery.42 The company‘s first parade, in February 1862, took place at Toronto’s old Crystal Palace beneath the approving gaze of the city’s leading citizens, including the adjutantgeneral and doughty old John Strachan, founder of Trinity and lord bishop of Toronto. The former showered praise on the volunteers for their fine turnout and performance; the latter delivered an address sprinkled with recollections of his experiences during the War of 1812, which, among other things, had made him a zealous proponent of the notion – the militia myth – that the innately peaceful and industrious citizens of Upper Canada had rallied as one in 1812 to defend their homes and birthright, and that with minimal assistance from British regulars had seen off the “democratic rabble” of the predatory United States.43 Well might have Strachan waxed nostalgic, since the Trinity men before him, shouldering their vintage muzzle loaders, must have seemed faithful replicas of the stouthearted yeomen who had saved Canada fifty years before. During the fifteen years of its existence, when Trinity enrolled fifty students at most, the company’s fortunes reflected the ebb and flow of the volunteer movement. Forty-nine former and current students joined when Denison raised the company; forty were present for the first inspection; and, in the hour of need, sixty-two volunteers made up the strength of the company during the Fenian raid in 1866.44 But the fever of volunteerism in Canada tended to abate as quickly as it arose. In 1864 and again when the Fenian menace ebbed, the Trinity company, like many others, became temporarily “disorganized” until a series of captains, all company originals, restored its efficiency by mandating three nights of drill a week and impressing on their fellows the necessity of keeping up its numbers. Redesignated as I Company in 1872, the Trinity Company remained on strength with The Queen’s Own, always standing on the left of the line during parades in recognition of its deployment at Ridgeway. Over time, however, the strain that



“Old K” 35

military duties put on academic work eroded the proportion of Trinity men to the point where it was no longer feasible to support a uniquely college company. The Trinity College Rifle Company was disbanded in 1876, but the college’s tradition of military service did not end with it. I Company carried on as a “downtown” company, drawing recruits from all walks of life, yet always retaining a quorum of Trinity recruits. A handful of Trinity men were eligible for the Canadian General Service Medal, awarded to participants in the Northwest campaigns of 1870 and 1885, and the college evinced considerable pride in its members who served in the South African War, several with great distinction.45 “Their baptism of blood and tears” The Fenian raid made 1866 the annus mirabilis in the history of both university companies. Where today the Fenians seem little more than a drinking club with rifles, contemporaries saw these Irish-American paramilitaries as the most worrisome threat to Canada to arise out of the uncertain aftermath of the American Civil War.46 Canadian relief at the swift demobilization of the huge, battle-hardened armies of the North was offset by reports of preparations by the Fenian Brotherhood to seize Canada as a means of levering Ireland from British control.47 As many as ten thousand ex-soldiers of both the Union and the Confederacy were said to be rallying under Fenian banners “to go and capture Canada, for we’ve nothing else to do,” although by the time the invasion commenced the Fenians’ dwindling numbers and resolve had revealed their true colours as a loosely knit association of Irish expatriates, rather than a serious military force. Nevertheless, when word came early on 1 June that fifteen hundred Fenians – in fact there were no more than six hundred – had crossed the Niagara River at Fort Erie, British and colonial troops were dispatched to repel them. A force of British regulars reached the village of Chippawa, north of the Fenian bridgehead, while Canadian militia, including The Queen’s Own, were sent south to Port Colborne. To contain the invaders, the two forces were instructed to converge at the village of Stevensville, a move anticipated by the Fenian commander, who decided to intercept the weaker column proceeding from Port Colborne. At dawn on 2 June the Canadian militia arrived by train at the hamlet of Ridgeway, whence they marched out on the road to Stevensville. At about 8 a.m. they ran into a line of Fenian skirmishers. The battle that followed has been described many times, and requires only a brief review here for the part played by the university companies.48 The Trinity Company (No. 8) was deployed on the Canadian left

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and suffered no casualties; the University Company (No. 9) was kept in reserve before being sent out to the right flank to drive in the Fenian skirmishers. They pushed forward against the enemy, who fell back some way until the momentum of the fighting abruptly swung against the Canadians. The sighting of two or three mounted Fenian scouts led Colonel Alfred Booker, the Canadian commander, to order The Queen’s Own to form square in expectation of a cavalry charge. The confusion that arose from this mistaken and unrectifiable order panicked the inexperienced Canadian militia, who broke and ran when the Fenians charged on foot. No. 9 Company found itself stranded on the part of the field where the fighting was heaviest and as a result suffered the highest number of casualties of any militia company in the battle. The university volunteers extricated themselves as best they could from their predicament, and joined the throng streaming back down the road to Ridgeway. The Fenians chose not to press their advantage, but retired to Fort Erie, where they brushed away the desultory resistance offered by a small militia detachment. With the prospect of superior numbers closing in, however, the Fenians contented themselves with their

Figure 1.6.  K Company (then No. 9 Company) photographed shortly after the Battle of Ridgeway, June 1866. UTA B1973-1128:0001



“Old K” 37

accomplishments, and withdrew across the river to the United States in the predawn hours of 3 June. The university companies remained on duty until late June before returning to a rapturous welcome in Toronto. No Trinity volunteers appear to have left eyewitness descriptions of the battle, nor did the college, spared the loss of any of its members, hasten to memorialize their contribution to the defence of Canada. The University Company, however, had received its “baptism of blood and tears” that day, and it cannot be accidental that the participants who recorded their experiences were the ones who had been wounded, taken prisoner, or witnessed their comrades’ death in action.49 If in later years Ridgeway faded in public memory, the university never forgot, nor was it allowed to.50 Lists of the undergraduates who served in 1866 appeared in calendars, yearbooks, and periodicals; when the name of one volunteer was left out of a list published in the Varsity, the oversight was duly corrected in a subsequent issue.51 One personal account that escaped notice is an unsigned article published in the student newspaper seventeen years to the day after the battle.52 The author can be securely identified as William Henry van der Smissen, who fought as a private at Ridgeway and suffered a near fatal wound. “Old Vander,” a short, stocky, nearsighted specimen, and one of the university’s more memorable characters, rose to captain of K Company in the 1870s and basked in the glow of his soldierly exploits during his long career at University College.53 He helped to organize the University Rifle Association in 1904, and at seventy years of age answered the call in 1914 by representing the faculty at the first drill sessions arranged on the university grounds. Proposing to set forth a first-hand account of an event that was fading into “only a half-remembered legend, told in fragments,” van der Smissen salted his tale with recollections of the emotions felt by a raw volunteer and the jarring, random sensations of being under fire for the first time. In his telling, nothing could stand in the way of the young volunteers eager to confront the invaders. When the understrength company was at first ordered to remain in the city, “inglorious ease being so little to their taste,” the student soldiers on hand protested so vehemently that they were allowed to accompany The Queen’s Own. Their indispensability to the university, however, warranted keeping Captain Croft and Lieutenant Cherriman behind in Toronto.54 The company was likewise prepared to go to war without the portly van der Smissen, at least until he prevailed on Croft to give him the last available uniform. Off he went on the disjointed overnight journey to Ridgeway, which left The Queen’s Own companies tired and hungry as they undertook the march to Stevensville. They doggedly tramped on, expecting to meet

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with the regulars directed to the same destination. Instead they came upon a well-positioned enemy firing from good cover and forcing the militia to deploy on open ground. Van der Smissen advanced with the University Rifles on the right flank as they drove the Fenian skirmishers back to within fifty yards of their main barricade. The company was so far in front of the Canadian line that the students did not hear the misbegotten order to form square. Finding themselves isolated and low on ammunition, they heeded the call to retire, even though they had to do so across the enemy’s line of fire. It was during this retreat that van der Smissen received his wound and crawled away in search of shelter, although, in a manner worthy of a silver medal classics student, he made sure to keep his rifle lest he be deemed a coward like the ancient warriors who in their haste to escape threw away their shields. The Fenians, assuming he was not long for this world, a dim prognosis that van der Smissen shared for a time, treated him humanely enough, giving him water, placing him in the shade, and at one point protecting him from being shot by a “prognathous type with hair cropped according to the most unmistakable gaol-pattern.” He was eventually carried to a nearby house, where he staunched the flow of blood from his wounds and decided to survive, “having quite recovered my love of life.” The next day he was brought back to Toronto. Van der Smissen’s article also aimed at a larger purpose. Were it not for the loss of life, Ridgeway might seem in retrospect little more than a sham fight staged by nineteenth-century regiments for public entertainment. Fought without artillery, cavalry, or the latest weaponry, and cruelly exposing the defects in the Canadian militia,55 it was a battle that in scale and lethality scarcely amounted to a couple of minutes at Shiloh or Gettysburg. Once emotions had calmed, adverse commentary and unflattering comparisons began to circulate. Spasms of martial ardour notwithstanding, the militia was often subject to scorn from critics who derided amateurs “playing at soldier” and downgraded Ridgeway from a battle to a brawl. Such disparagement provoked a rejoinder from van der Smissen, who devoted his final paragraphs to redeeming his comrades’ reputation. To the detractors he replied that the volunteers had engaged a more experienced enemy of equal if not greater numbers, on ground not of their choosing, yet had fought with discipline and courage until a combination of bad luck and mistaken judgment turned the tide against them. Moreover, what they lacked in professionalism they made up in fighting spirit, for the volunteers had performed far more creditably than the regulars of the “too late battalion,” who, through the tardiness and incompetence of their commander, never so much as laid eyes on the enemy. Rather than puncture the hallowed militia myth, Ridgeway



“Old K” 39

Figure 1.7.  Composite photograph of K Company in 1883, set against the Volunteer Memorial commemorating those who fell in battle against the Fenians in 1866. The memorial still stands by the northeast corner of the Gerstein Science Information Centre.

gilded it further: “the Volunteers were sent forward into the very teeth of danger, with the greatest despatch, the regulars with the most cautious slowness; and Colonel Peacocke … was careful to let the Volunteers rush into the post of danger, and to spare his men, whose business it was to fight.” No matter the outcome, the point stood that the militia had risked life and limb in defence of their country. The University Rifles, in fulfilment of their duty and in their sacrifice, had once again demonstrated the mettle of the Canadian volunteer. “The finest and most patriotic of Toronto’s youth” Except for the members of K Company selected for service with The Queen’s Own in 1885, the University Rifles never saw action

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again after Ridgeway. Over the next twenty-five years the company settled into the routines of amateur soldiering in peacetime or, perhaps more accurately, into the rather agreeable milieu of the social and political clubs the urban militia regiments tended to become. Improved relations with the United States quelled fears of invasion and cooled the martial zeal of the citizenry during the 1870s and 1880s – the “dead period” in the history of the Canadian militia, when government expenditures on defence shrank by half and the young country turned to the tasks of building the transcontinental railway and settling the West.56 In this relatively untroubled era, militia regiments had to present attractive conditions of service if they hoped to draw recruits and maintain their efficiency. They also had to structure their year so as not to impose too great a burden on part-time soldiers busy with civil careers or working for employers ill-disposed to requests for time off to meet militia obligations. The Queen’s Own set two seasons for drill, the fall months being used

Figure 1.8.  Composite photograph of the 1880−1 University Company (K) of The Queen’s Own Rifles. The portrait is of interest for the inclusion of the company’s former officers (and founders), shown at the far left: left to right, Henry Holmes Croft, John Bradford Cherriman, and Ridgeway veterans William Henry van der Smissen and William Hodgson Ellis (sixth from left).



“Old K” 41

for recruiting, training, and field manoeuvres, capped by the annual inspection in November, the spring months being used to prepare for the grand review staged in celebration of the queen’s birthday on 24 May. The winter months were reserved for classroom instruction aimed at helping men to obtain non-commissioned rank or to earn a certificate qualifying them for a commission. Throughout the year, a circuit of dinners, reunions, parties, drama productions, regimental visits, and clubs provided entertainment and recreation. Ever in competition with the other city regiments to attract into its ranks “the finest and most patriotic of Toronto’s youth,” The Queen’s Own offered a wealth of enticements, including a band, a minstrel club, a bachelors’ club, a revolver association, a lacrosse team, and a football team – in an 1883 game against the Montreal Garrison Artillery, nine of the fifteen players on the victorious Queen’s Own squad came from K Company.57 Each company established its own routine, tapering the schedule of drills, exercises, inspections, and social events to fit with the circumstances of its members. So it was with K Company, whose twentieth anniversary year of 1881–2 encapsulated the collective experience of the student volunteers. A series of notices in the Varsity opened with a report of a bumper crop of recruits, giving a list of the fifty freshmen who registered with Captain Alfred Baker.58 Company drills twice a week commenced with the beginning of term; battalion drills at The Queen’s Own’s armoury took place on Wednesday evenings, with K Company earning praise from the regiment’s commanding officer, Colonel William Dillon Otter,59 at the end of the first season for its fine performance and turnout.60 The fall season also included a “Military Athletic Sports” competition open to all members of the active militia, held at the Exhibition Grounds in early September, skirmishing matches or sham fights in October and November, and battalion and company rifle matches in which privates, officers, and former members competed for prizes of quite some value donated by the university faculty or other benefactors.61 Spring drills resumed in early March, with K Company showing steady improvement in performance and numbers as The Queen’s Own rehearsed for the grand military review to be held that year in Kingston. The ceremonies marking the queen’s birthday often conflicted with the examination period and prevented the university company from attending the capstone event of the militia year, which drew regiments from all over the province. Happily, though, this year the company expected to send forty-five of its members.62

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Figure 1.9.  Members of K Company pose for a photograph during a route march, sometime in the 1880s. UTA B1980-0022:0002

Two occasions stood out in the social round of that anniversary year. The annual dinner in February brought current and former company members together at the National Club.63 Among the eminent guests invited by Captain Baker were company original and now university vice chancellor William Mulock and Colonel Otter, who had inspected or reviewed K Company on many occasions. Otter’s speech teemed with compliments for the efficiency of the volunteers and their “fine physical appearance” during the previous season’s parades, and concluded with exhortations to keep up the good work. The protocol of toasts, songs, and speeches – honouring the queen and her representatives, the regiment, the officers, the army, navy, and volunteers, “Alma mater,” and on, and on, and on – takes us back to a time when postprandial oratory and a fine voice ranked high in the social graces. The final toast paid tribute to “Our Fallen Comrades,” still fresh in memory. Once the formal part of the program had ended, those in attendance adjourned to another room for cards, music, and refreshments sponsored by the captain. Indeed the volunteers’ undisguised preference for strong drink sometimes raised heads in the Temperance Union as it essayed to gain a foothold at the university.64 The student soldiers set great store by these sumptuous banquets, and not just for the repast. One year, when, owing to lack of funds, no annual dinner could be held, its absence was bemoaned as a missed opportunity “to entertain the officers, renew old friendships, and build good feelings throughout the year.”65



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The Conversazione, a combined ball and exhibition held every February, marked the other highlight of the 1881–2 year. The tour of exhibits included the University Company’s newly refurbished armoury, which, with its handsome appointment and practical arrangement, drew many interested visitors during the evening’s festivities. The weapons, uniforms, and accoutrements were artfully placed and organized to ensure tidy storage and accurate record keeping, while the room itself was now better lit and heated.66 Credit for introducing these improvements at an acceptable cost went to Captain Baker and to one of the company’s mainstays for much of its existence. This was Robert McKim, an Irish-born veteran of the Crimean War who served the university in various capacities for nearly thirty years, principally as bedel of University College from 1862 to 1892.67 His military bearing and intrinsic dignity enabled him to deal firmly yet courteously with the students, who in turn retained affectionate memories of their gentlemanly custodian. As armoury sergeant he ran a tight ship. His “soldier’s ideal sense of duty” ensured that the annual inspections satisfied the exacting standards of Colonel Otter and kept the company running smoothly as officers came and went.68 Clerical work, unglamorous yet invaluable, was the key to a company’s efficiency, and the University Company seems to have been most fortunate in the abilities of its quartermasters.69 Crafting the history of K Company from the notices in the Varsity is akin to assembling a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces, but the fragmentary picture that emerges suffices to display the routines and aspirations, and the strengths and weaknesses, of the student volunteer company. Military training was fully endorsed by President Wilson and other influential figures for its physical and mental benefits;70 and as long as the company drew its captains from the staff and its officers from its own ranks, enrolment stayed high – as many as fifty-five in some years, and never below thirty. Attendance badges for company drill and payment for battalion drill kept numbers up as the academic year wore on, although the students, being students, needed the occasional nudge, gentle or sharp, to turn out.71 The constant turnover of members, too, meant that the quality of recruits varied from year to year. One former member, reminiscing forty years later, recalled that, “in those days we were not very keen soldiers. We were ‘slackers’ at drill I am afraid, and ‘K’ Co. … had anything but a good name for regularity and neatness.”72 There were times when extra drill sessions for recruits had to be arranged to ensure the company’s smart appearance at church parades or the Garrison parade – public spectacles in which K Company strove to outshine its sister companies and those

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of the rival city regiments.73 Rifle practice twice a week honed the accuracy of the company’s marksmen, whose performance in competitions was always taken as a measure of the University Company’s place among its peers. Even more flattering to the company’s reputation were the candidates who passed the examinations required for non-commissioned rank and the alumni whose training with the University Company enabled them to qualify for commissions in The Queen’s Own or other regiments.74 Two company alumni stand out as examples of influential citizens combining distinguished militia careers with equally distinguished professional lives. Malcolm Smith Mercer, of Second Ypres fame, joined K Company as an undergraduate (1881–5) and rose to the rank of lieutenant. He subsequently continued his ascent in The Queen’s Own while maintaining a successful legal practice, and succeeded Sir Henry Pellatt as lieutenant-colonel of the regiment in 1911.75 His contemporary John Taylor Fotheringham, a classics student between 1879 and 1883, served as a sergeant in 1881–2, and in like fashion played a prominent part in the Canadian militia as he built a medical career in civilian life. He helped to develop the Canadian Army Medical Corps and was a leading advocate of officer training corps when the idea was first raised in 1909.76 Throughout its existence, K Company was well served by officers who upheld the unit’s pride in its achievements and presentation, not only by drill and discipline but also by fostering a sense of comradeship. This they did by organizing activities or social events, in which they invested considerable effort and not a little of their own resources. Lieutenant Ernest Gunther, for instance, one of several officers commended in the Varsity for their exertions on the company’s behalf, conducted the field day exercises in November 1885 while his wife prepared dinner for the ravenous young men invited to his home afterwards. Two weeks later he covered the cost of dinner for twenty-five competitors in the company rifle match. We hear of him again in March 1888 acting as director of amusement in the company’s first “smoking party,” which entertained sixty current and former members.77 But officers willing to go to such lengths tended to be the kind of men who found it hard to serve two masters. It was a sign of the strain upon devoted officers when Baker stepped down as captain in December 1883 saying his “onerous duties in connection with the college” prevented him from giving the company the time it needed.78 Two well-regarded officers, Lieutenant George Acheson and Colour Sergeant Peter McEachern, cited the same conflict of responsibilities when they resigned after rendering “invaluable service” over several years.79 Baker’s resignation closed a chapter in the company’s history, for he was the last of the five teaching staff to serve as captain. As tutor in mathematics and University College



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registrar, he knew, and was known to, all the students – a corollary benefit to his role as captain to recruit and supervise the University Company. Whenever possible, his successors, capable and dedicated officers posted from The Queen’s Own, were graduates of the university, but they were not fixtures on campus and therefore could not have the same familiarity or suasion among the students. “The Varsity men … of that leal Company” “Since the morning of Saturday, March 28th, when each student as he entered the college was startled by the regimental order posted upon the door, calling upon the members of ‘K’ Co. to muster at 9 a.m. for active service, there has been little thought of or talked about but the rebellion.”80 Although rumblings out of the northwest had not gone unnoticed in Toronto, news of the outbreak of rebellion in late March 1885 took the city and the university by surprise. This internal threat to the Dominion prompted as reflexively patriotic a reaction as had the Fenians twenty years before. The Varsity deemed it worthy of record that, on a few hours’ notice, the university had presented a well-drilled company of fifty-two men for active service and that a further forty men had enrolled in a proposed corps of scouts to be used in guerrilla warfare.81 Since The Queen’s Own stood first among the city regiments judged fit for service, 275 of its members were organized into a select force of four companies, one of which included twenty privates and five officers from K Company. Five officers and four privates with previous service in K Company served in other units, giving the university a total of thirty-four students and graduates eager to “acquit themselves as bravely as did their predecessors in the engagement at Ridgeway in June 1866.”82 After a rousing send-off from their fellow students packed in among the cheering crowd at Union Station, the “K”s embarked on the journey west. What began as a comfortable train ride with a hero’s welcome at every stop turned into a gruelling anabasis once the troops had to splice the unfinished sections of the rail line together with convoys of sleighs or marches on foot. Even where the line was complete, the journey into the teeth of late winter inflicted agonies on the men transported in cars that left them exposed to the winds and freezing temperatures: The cars were flatcars, boarded at the side To keep you from going sideways overboard; The ends were free; the view was circle-wide, Better than observation cars afford; While all the open sky was requisitioned To make them adequately air-conditioned.

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The story of the Northwest campaign did not lack for narrators, but only one elected to tell it in verse and metre modelled on medieval epic. The author of these lines, George Henry Needler, was a nineteen-year-old corporal in K Company who went on to a long career as professor of German at the university and became one of the pillars of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps.83 His academic output was comparatively small, his one notable contribution being a poetic translation of the interminable Nibelungenlied, whereas in retirement he poured forth a stream of publications, a number of them devoted to the Riel Rebellion.84 Deciding that the 1885 campaign merited an epic of its own, he composed a versified memoir of his experiences, The Battleford Column, which, in 131 rhyming stanzas, carries the hardy young Siegfrieds of The Queen’s Own, led by Colonel Otter (“the Bayard of his country”), through the “wonder vast” of the prairies to the twilight of the rebellion on the banks of the North Saskatchewan:85 Last clash at arms on our North Continent Twixt Red and White, the curtain here was rung On the long drama; the fading light now spent, Here fell the Red Man’s goetterdaemmerung: A fitting stage the spreading prairie’s sward By waters rune-wise whispering “Battleford.”

Needler’s Teutonic flourishes aside, the student soldiers did their alma mater credit with their fortitude on campaign and their performance in battle. The leg of the journey along the north shore of Lake Superior must rank among the worst ordeals ever undergone by Canadian soldiers, yet the accompanying Varsity correspondent could report that “the conduct of the men has been simply admirable. Not a single case of intoxication or misconduct of any kind, and all thoroughly willing and cheerful; hardship seems to have no effect except to make them more contented; they certainly are a fine lot of fellows.”86 The stoicism and comradeship of the volunteers saw them through the hardships that confronted them on the trek to Battleford, and the handful of university men who took part in the engagement at Cut Knife Hill fought bravely in circumstances that could easily have spelled disaster for less resolute soldiers.87 The “Varsity men … of that leal Company” returned without loss of life to Toronto in July, having upheld the reputation won by the University Rifles at Ridgeway. As had their predecessors, the heroes of 1885 went on to further renown in the coming years. Needler humorously recounted that his first “fatigue” duty was to detail a party of five future worthies for latrine duty: Forgive my mention of the circumstance. It’s just because in retrospect I see



“Old K” 47 What men of note my party picked by chance Were destined all in later life to be: A doctor, judge, professor, bishops twain Got started right trench-digging on the plain.

One of the “bishops twain” was Private George Exton Lloyd, the company’s only casualty in the Northwest campaign, who suffered a severe wound at Cut Knife while assisting a comrade. In the course of a long church career in western Canada, he helped to establish a settlement at Lloydminster, so named in his honour, and became bishop of

Figure 1.10.  The members of K Company who served in the Northwest Rebellion campaign of 1885, shown here on the front steps of University College. The man standing in the centre is the poet and soldier Sergeant George Henry Needler who would later command the university’s Overseas Training Company during the First World War.

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Saskatchewan. The other “twain” was Private Edward Campion Acheson, who won fame for going to Private Lloyd’s rescue at Cut Knife. He served as chaplain of K Company during the campaign, and afterwards rose to become Episcopalian bishop of Connecticut. His son, Dean Acheson, was US secretary of state under President Harry Truman.88 Last Roll Call The suppression of the rebellion by a wholly Canadian volunteer force restored the reputation of the militia and for a time made the case for its utility. There was even talk at the university of forming an independent battalion of four to six companies, which would take its place in the active militia and multiply the already impressive number of universitytrained officers across the country.89 The leading advocate of this proposal was far ahead of his time in stressing the need for a drill shed on campus if the university were to support extensive military training: “such a drill shed could be utilized as gymnasium and for meetings in connection with the college, to the extent that the university authorities could see their way to paying a portion of the cost and giving a site.” The absence of such a facility, however, not to mention the means or the will to build one, nullified the possibility of a university battalion, just as it was to stall the creation of an officer training corps and hinder military training at the university until 1939. The idea, precocious and overly ambitious, went no further. As the latest burst of military enthusiasm faded away, K Company ambled on in its familiar routine of drill, field exercises, competitions, and social occasions. The notices in the Varsity chronicling the company in the late 1880s convey the impression of an institution firmly embedded in university life that continued to draw a healthy number of recruits and to send men on to militia careers.90 Then came the fire in February 1890 and the loss of the company’s equipment and stores,91 a blow from which it never fully recovered despite the strenuous efforts of its officers to keep K Company going. The Queen’s Own carried on without the university men during the spring and summer of 1890 in the expectation that the company would get back on its feet during the 1890–1 academic year.92 Although compelled by lack of uniforms to parade in mufti,93 the company had by this time managed to replace its arms and accoutrements, now stored in a provisional armoury that had been set up in a room beneath the residence dining hall. The Varsity sounded optimistic notes concerning the company’s return to efficiency during the year,94 and even though the following year began with an appeal for recruits that alluded to the lingering effects of the fire, the company’s



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Figure 1.11.  The last portrait of K Company as the University Company, 1891−2. At the far right is the venerable Robert McKim, Armoury Sergeant and Bedel of University College for thirty years.

“zealous attempt to present a good appearance” brought commendation for its turnout, parades, and armoury inspection during 1891–2.95 Like the revived university envisioned by Sir Daniel Wilson, K Company seemed on the verge of a new era. The officers’ hard work got the company off to a good start in the fall of 1892. Numbers were decent, with thirty to forty men present on parade, the armoury inspection met Colonel Otter’s famously high standards, and “despite fears the new men might not do well … the company still maintains its proud reputation.”96 But the conclusion of the fall drill season in November marked the end of the University Company, for by then The Queen’s Own authorities had come to a decision they had been weighing for some time. The Empire broke the news that the regiment intended to withdraw K Company from the university and convert it into a normal “downtown” company, based at The Queen’s Own’s armoury and no longer filled exclusively by university recruits.97 The reason for this peremptory severance of ties, according to the Empire and the Canadian Military Gazette, lay chiefly in “the little interest … taken in the company by the professors at the seat of learning” and “the apathy and extreme indifference as to the welfare of the company shown by the University Council,” which, according to later accounts, refused to provide a new armoury “and put every obstacle in

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the way and discouraged the men from joining.”98 Although the university records themselves are strangely mute on the end of K Company, there are grounds to surmise that from the faculty’s perspective military training interfered with academic work. The only current reference to the issue in the Varsity has one of the officers attributing the company’s decline partly to the increased difficulty of examinations, which in turn might account for his subsequent reference to “the apathy of the college dons” towards the company.99 Years later, in an editorial that no doubt repeated concerns voiced in 1892, the Varsity referred to the difficulties facing students enrolled in the militia, citing the conflicts with the school year and exams and the inconvenience of the June military camps to undergraduates trying to finance their education with the money they earned during the summer months.100 The Queen’s Own, for its part, appears to have been frustrated by the university authorities’ refusal to grant the company “any assistance, no matter how slight,” while the captain posted from the regiment, “not being a university man, has not been supported as he might have been.” Now that the other city regiments – including the newly established 48th Highlanders – were vying for members and the government had its eye out for inefficient corps to excise from the militia rolls, it was not in the interest of The Queen’s Own to maintain a company that, despite the progress made since the fire, was a shadow of its former self in both attendance and performance. The commentator in the Canadian Military Gazette did not mince words: “they do not give the time necessary to get up their work; they are not available more than half of the season, owing to lectures and exams, etc., interfering with the drill nights … if there is not enough stamina in the Varsity men to keep up the standard of the Company, let it drop for good rather than let its glorious record be tarnished after so many years and such an eventful history.”101 The decision met with disappointment, some protest, but no real opposition.102 By January 1893 the company’s equipment had been transferred to The Queen’s Own’s armoury and the majority of the rank and file retired “so that the personnel of the company will be almost totally changed.”103 It remained only to expend the company’s funds on a farewell banquet, which drew sixty-five current and former members to Webb’s Parlour on Yonge Street to feast and reminisce until the command “Dismiss” was given and the University College Company’s history brought to an end. It was some consolation that The Queen’s Own undertook to reserve the new K Company as much as possible for university men and that a number of current members had promised to stay on. True to their word and the traditions of the old University and College Rifles, three officers and sixteen privates from the university



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remained on the roster of the reorganized company when spring drill began in March, while many more Varsity men were expected to enrol in the next recruiting season.104 Long after its severance from the university, K Company remained a magnet for student volunteers – in 1906 the company included recruits from University College, the School of Practical Science, the Law School, the Dental College, and no less than

Figure 1.12.  Invitation to K Company’s farewell banquet in January 1893. UTA A1972-1242

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fifteen from Trinity College – and a fondly remembered apprenticeship in many a soldier’s career: “it is surprising at any large camp to count up the number of officers who trace back their military beginnings to ‘old K’ as it is affectionately called.”105 “There is much military enthusiasm within the University” During the rest of the 1890s, the sound of drill and the spectacle of undergraduates in uniform were absent from campus life. If K Company was gone, it was not forgotten, and its memory nourished the hope that military training one day would be reinstituted at the university. For the time being the proven impracticability of a university-based rifle company, as well as the view in military circles that the Canadian militia needed a massive dose of professional competence, rather than yet another collection of parade ground soldiers, told against the replication of K Company. With the appointment of the reform-minded Frederick Borden as minister of militia and defence in 1896,106 and the renewed enthusiasm for soldiering spawned by the South African War (1899–1902),107 new paths for military training opened at the university. The formation of the Toronto Field Company of Engineers in 1901 responded to the militia’s paramount need for professional service corps, while the organization of the University Rifle Association in 1904 provided students with rudimentary military instruction without subjecting them to the time-consuming obligations of militia service. Both filled the gap left by the departure of K Company, both perpetuated its legacy, and in 1914 both would supply the necessary framework and leadership for the nascent officer training corps. The story of these two precursors of the COTC begins with the appointment of James Loudon as president of the University upon the retirement of Sir Daniel Wilson in June 1892. Loudon’s fourteen years in office cannot be said to represent an altogether happy segment of the university’s history. From beginning to end he was beset by a troop of troubles that, although not always of his own making, were exacerbated by his peculiar gift for disaffecting nearly all with whom he dealt.108 To read his speeches is to discern something of his strengths and weaknesses as president: logical, industrious, and devoted to academic progress, yet stiff, single-minded, and utterly unconnected with the audience – “I am sometimes asked why I do not choose more popular subjects for my Convocation addresses.” Yet his tenure was not without achievement and lasting importance. The Galbraith Building, Lash Miller Chemical Laboratories, McLennan Physical Laboratories, Ramsay Wright Laboratories, the Haultain Building – the names of his



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contemporaries echo down the years in the university’s toponymy, attesting to the great expansion of applied science, mining, and engineering that Loudon did so much to promote.109 He was a champion of scientific research who saw it as the university’s mission to produce graduates fit for the task of developing Canada’s resources and industry. He was also, it will be recalled, a University Rifles veteran of 1866 who regarded drill “as one of the most useful of athletic exercises, both in its physical and moral effects,” and while president he cast about for ways in which the university might come to some mutually beneficial arrangement with the Canadian militia. Intermittent musings by Loudon and other members of the university about a successor to K Company took on a more serious tone with the outbreak of war in South Africa and culminated in a meeting of the University Council in December 1900.110 What emerged was a request to Frederick Borden that “authority be granted for the formation and equipment of a Corps of Engineers, to be recruited from among the undergraduates.” Pointing out that no corps of engineers yet existed west of New Brunswick, Loudon retailed the advantages of an engineer company raised and trained at the university. Not only was there a large pool of potential military engineers among the students enrolled in the “scientific departments” and the School of Practical Science, “there is ample accommodation in the University Buildings for Armouries and stores, and the grounds are well suited to all kinds of field works. There is also a large ravine for bridging” – which in 1901 meant that the equipment would be kept in the basement of the gymnasium, then located a stone’s throw to the north of University College, and conveniently close to the open fields beyond, cleft by the long, deep ravine whose contours may still be seen today along Philosopher’s Walk. “There is much military enthusiasm within the University,” stated Loudon in conclusion, “and the occasion appears favourable for the direction of this enthusiasm into some permanent and useful channel.”111 These strong selling points centred on the man put forward as the ideal choice to lead the university engineers. To ensure that the recruits received the training proper to soldiers and sappers, “the Council further recommends that Professor Lang be appointed to the command.” Attached was a record of service listing the qualifications for the post that William Robert Lang, professor of chemistry, brought as Captain Lang, seconded to the Canadian militia from the 1st Lanarkshire Royal Engineers: twelve years of regimental service; certificates in drill and military engineering, tactics, organization, and equipment; equitation; and, most recently, “special emergency training of four weeks at the School of Military Engineering, Chatham.” Not included in this résumé

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but doubtless made known to the minister by Colonel Otter and Sir Henry Pellatt, who knew of Lang and supported the idea of a university company of engineers, was his experience at Glasgow commanding the University Company of the 1st Lanarkshires. It augured well for the prospective Toronto Field Company that the Glasgow undergraduates had shown “evidence of the most careful and intelligent training, and the capacity to carry out difficult engineering operations with very limited resources.”112 Lang was in his first year as head of the Chemistry Department, having come to Toronto in the summer of 1900 on the strength of solid but unexceptional academic credentials. It is clear from the testimonials supporting his candidacy that his other assets – his military pedigree, air of command, and overall presentability (“he is a gentleman by upbringing and well accustomed to mixing with good society”) – counted for as much or more in the selection process, coinciding as it did with the university’s approaches to the Department of Militia and Defence about establishing a corps of engineers.113 As a scientist Lang did no research of note and was never wholly content with his lot at the university, yet by all accounts he was an engaging lecturer whose manner and clarity of exposition in the classroom served him equally well in field training. Soldiering, and the company of soldiers, brought out the best of his personal qualities and professional abilities, so that any verdict on Lang’s career must take full account of his threefold contribution to the university as the founder of the Toronto Field Company of Engineers, the first commander of the COTC, and the first director of military studies. For the next twenty-five years he would be the single most influential figure in the military history of the University of Toronto. A black-bordered letter of 24 January 1901 – the Victorian Age had expired with the eponymous monarch two days before – conveyed Borden’s favourable reply to Loudon’s proposal. The willingness of the university to support a company of engineers converged with the minister’s aims to create the service units necessary to sustain an active field force and to provide the militia with specialized officers. Here was the opportunity to obtain for these purposes university graduates possessing the requisite blend of military training and technical expertise.114 With the support of the Militia Department, the Toronto Field Company of Engineers quickly took shape. Recruitment was well under way by 1 May, when the company was gazetted, and its stores and equipment arrived during the summer. If the company was fortunate to have a commander of Lang’s ability, it was equally so in the selection of its officers, particularly Sergeant Alfred Williams, who was



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Figure 1.13.  Colonel William Robert Lang, shown here in 1914 in his capacity as Officer Commanding, University of Toronto Contingent. UTA A1968-0003/006P(7.24)

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already something of a legend on campus as a physical trainer and athletic instructor.115 He was one of two officers transferred from the 48th Highlanders to act as quartermaster and drill instructor when the company undertook preliminary training at the beginning of the 1901–2 academic year. Two weeks under Williams’s eye enabled the recruits to make a creditable first public appearance during a Royal visit that October, whereupon concentrated instruction in military engineering began. Basic skills in “knotting and lashing” were covered in the first term, military topography, fortifications, fieldworks, and bridging in the second. When examinations ended in May, the full complement of fifty-five sappers and three officers went into camp at Garrison Common for twelve days of basic and advanced training, including construction, demolition, and signalling. Colonel Otter, now in command of the Toronto military district, and an officer of the Royal Engineers were on hand to gauge the company’s progress. Their commendation brought the company’s first year to a successful end. All the participants gratefully acknowledged “the hearty manner in which Captain Lang took part in the work of the camp, and the kindly interest he displayed in the comfort of the men and the success of the outing.”116 The king’s uniform had become a familiar sight once again around the university, as the Varsity was pleased to report in December 1901. This was but one expression of the warm welcome accorded to the return of military service at the university, which could now claim the honour of providing the first student company of engineers in the Dominion. Although preference was given to candidates from the School of Practical Science,117 the company proved so popular that in most years it had a surplus of applicants. Over its first two years the Toronto Field Company took root and flourished within the university. Its performance in the city military tournament in 1903 won it acclaim as a worthy successor to the old K Company. Like their illustrious forebears, “these young men scatter all over Canada, taking with them the valuable military knowledge gained at the college, and are able and willing to organise similar corps elsewhere when the time comes.”118 In a manner equally worthy of “old K” in its heyday, the sappers made their own robust contribution to student life, hosting an annual dance, always well attended, holding an annual banquet to foster camaraderie, and fuelling the competitive spirit of interfaculty athletics by fielding teams in various sports. The Varsity noted that the “organization of the Engineering Corps which revives the ancient tradition of ‘K’ Company, the pride of the students in the old days,” went beyond the reintroduction of military training at the university.119 In 1903, when the company became



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Figure 1.14.  Members of the university’s Engineer Company posing on a pontoon bridge constructed during field exercises in November 1904. From Torontonensis, vol. VII (1905), p. 351.

the nucleus of an expanded city corps of engineers, its headquarters were moved to the new armoury on University Avenue. The 2nd Field Company, Canadian Engineers, came into being with a strength of six officers and 106 other ranks, half of whom belonged to the university section, which continued to recruit from the student body. The undergraduates did drill once a week and field training every second Saturday with the downtown section during the autumn season, which ended with a sham battle or demonstration of skills in November, usually involving a bridging exercise on the Humber or Credit rivers.120 They also attended the divisional training camp held in June at Niagaraon-the-Lake to do courses in military engineering and to carry out such practical duties as maintaining the camp’s water supply and communications.121 Special courses might also be arranged during the year to enable company members to obtain certificates in military engineering given by the Dominion government. What began so promisingly at Toronto soon inspired other universities. By 1907 McGill was offering courses in military studies that

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included specialized instruction for engineers, Dalhousie had formed a company of engineers, and in 1910 Queen’s followed suit by establishing its own corps of engineers, which evolved into the 5th Field Company, Canadian Engineers. The value of these university companies shone forth in 1914, when the Canadian Expeditionary Force found in them a plentiful source of trained manpower for its engineering units.122 The Toronto Field Company from the beginning had set out to produce engineers who could pass the acid test of their profession: “bore a hole with a saw and cut a plank with a gimlet.” Ten years on, the company’s record bore witness to “the great adaptability of the Canadian soldier,” as shown by the resourcefulness engrained in the university’s sappers, the most famous of whom were pioneers of Canadian aviation, Douglas McCurdy and Frederick Baldwin. It also furnished proof of Lang’s organizational and training abilities, which he had continued to refine by spending his summers in Scotland in camp with the Royal Engineers. He commanded the university section until 1910, when he received promotion to lieutenant-colonel in charge of the divisional engineers in the Toronto military district. Leaving behind a successor, Major Percy Biggs, who, like all the company’s officers, had begun his military career with the university engineers, Lang carried on with his efforts to develop the branch of the service whose foundations he had helped to lay. By the time he assumed command of the COTC at the university in 1914, there were three field units of engineers in the Toronto district, where none had existed a decade and a half before. “It is still the patriotic duty of every Canadian to learn to shoot” In March 1904 the Canadian Military Gazette, which had hailed the formation of an engineering company at the university three years before, announced with equal approbation that the undergraduates were on their way to becoming “the latest disciples of the noble art of shooting straight.”123 This was in reference to a recent meeting at which students and professors had discussed the formation of a rifle club. Two old captains of K Company, van der Smissen and Baker, were on hand to lend their support, as was James Loudon, who was elected honorary president of the association that grew out of the proceedings. Officers chosen from all faculties and colleges to ensure representation throughout the university set to work to attract membership. Under the aegis of the Militia Department, the University of Toronto Rifle Association was inaugurated in the spring of 1904, with preparations already under



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way to procure rifles, ammunition, and access to firing ranges for the 1904–5 academic year.124 It was an instant success – by far the most popular of the university’s many extracurricular activities. After just one year of existence the Rifle Association became the largest civilian rifle corps in the country, with 350 members (including 25 professors). By 1909 the “most flourishing of all civilian rifle associations in Canada” and “the most rapidly growing of the university associations” boasted over 400 members, whose attendance at the ranges dwarfed that of all other rifle clubs.125 The reason for its remarkable prosperity is not hard to locate: “no athletic association offers such tremendous inducements to its members.”126 For an annual fee of one dollar, each member was entitled to the use of a rifle and one hundred rounds of ammunition supplied by the government. The Rifle Association (like all rifle clubs, generously subsidized by the Militia Department) covered return fares between Union Station and the Long Branch Rifle Ranges, as well as expenses for storage, scorebooks, and various necessities; and a militia officer qualified in musketry was appointed each year to give instruction in the techniques of rifle shooting for novice and advanced marksmen alike. To avoid the busier portions of the academic year, the six-week shooting season started in October and ended in mid-November, when the annual competitions were held. A raft of prizes dangled enticingly before the eyes of Rifle Association members, who could compete individually, in faculty or college teams, and, from 1908 on, as Varsity representatives in the inter-university matches that began against McGill and quickly expanded to include Queen’s, Dalhousie, and other universities.127 It was no coincidence that the Rifle Association was created just seven months after Frederick Borden presented his plan for a national militia force of a hundred thousand volunteers. Four men in ten would actually do militia training, while the other six would acquire basic skills in marksmanship against the day when an invasion or emergency compelled the Canadian militia to mobilize in full strength.128 In keeping with this scheme, the Rifle Association provided rifle training but remained a civil organization, requiring entrants to take the Oath of Allegiance but subjecting them to no military liabilities in peacetime. In contrast to the Toronto Field Company of Engineers, specialists recruited in limited numbers from a specialized faculty, the Rifle Association was open to all members of the university who, in the spirit of the times, might wish to combine edifying recreation with patriotic duty. It offered soldiering at a happy minimum to those university students without the time or inclination to enrol in the militia, yet ready to

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serve their country in time of need. It was faultlessly Canadian: voluntary, unobtrusive, and inexpensive. “[T]he University Rifle Association hampers itself with no trammels of pomp and formality … in his four years at college a man may equip himself, quietly and scientifically, with a knowledge of arms which will make him useful to Canada … without marring his usefulness in time of peace.” Moreover, the ammunition was free.129 For the unathletic, rifle shooting held out an alternative form of physical and mental exercise and, as such, a welcome diversion from the daily grind of academic study. In broader terms, however, this paramilitary training was deemed valuable, if not essential, in inculcating habits and virtues beneficial to young men – in this case students of a university in the most Imperial city in the British Empire (“the air we breathe is Imperialist air”), where the ideals of manliness, citizenship, duty and service, and loyalty to king and country were as loudly propounded as anywhere in the upper echelons of Canadian society.130 But these ideals did not go unchallenged, and it is consistent with the debates swirling at the time – and resuming at various intervals throughout the existence of the COTC – that the officers of the Rifle Association saw fit to argue the case for their unit against those who opposed this or any form of military training at the university as “a step in the direction of militarism.”131 The often-to-be-repeated charge that military training increased the likelihood of war drew the often-tobe-repeated rebuttal that it was necessary to face facts and, in the spirit of “defence, not defiance,” prepare for all contingencies in unsettled times. Pointing to the simmering tensions in Europe that the recent Hague Conferences had done nothing to allay, one Rifle Association supporter declared that “it is still the patriotic duty of every Canadian to learn to shoot.”132 Threats of war aside, the civic and moral utility of military training constituted the strongest argument in its favour. The university should do its share to “foster a strong, healthy public spirit,” groom future leaders, and interest its students in the defence of Canada, the senior Dominion of the Empire whose mission civilisatrice was no less than the task appointed by history. The discipline imparted even by a modicum of military training bred obedience, deference, and respect for authority, “qualities … often none too evident in the Canadian character.” This last went to the heart of the matter for the advocates of military training in schools and universities. The country’s youth must be ready to fight on two fronts, externally against foreign foes and internally against the vices in oneself. The latter was the all-important struggle, which military training helped a man to win by checking idleness, self-interest, and materialism, and by reinforcing nobler commitments, born of industry, selflessness, and high-mindedness, not only to the



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security of the Dominion, but also to the pursuit of the greater good, be it in politics, the ministry, or one’s avocation.133 Wholehearted involvement in university life, including in the Rifle Association, pointed one in the direction of the greatest good. As one strident editorial in the Varsity put it, after inveighing against the “lamentable selfishness” rampant among undergraduates, “be loyal to your class, your College, and Old Toronto. Patriotism will follow.”134 By 1910 the university section of the field engineers and the Rifle Association between them counted upwards of five hundred members. Only because the association had to cap enrolment when demand exceeded the supply of rifles did the proportion of university men in some form of military training (roughly one in six) not go higher. The popularity of the Rifle Association seemed to indicate a growing appetite for military service among undergraduates, and over the next few years a number of initiatives to establish formal military instruction were to follow. “In pleasing combination with the straightening manly exercise that all students need so much,” the officers giving instruction in the use of the militia’s new weapon, the Ross rifle, began in October 1911 to introduce the elements of military drill to Rifle Association members.135 This slight but noteworthy increment coincided with a course of military lectures, arranged between the university’s Board of Governors and the Militia Department, and sponsored by the Canadian Defence League, which ran through the 1911–12 academic year.136 Designed to inform students about the Empire’s military organization and the science of war, the lectures were meant to serve a further end by highlighting the need for university-trained candidates in the officer ranks of the militia. If the different branches of the service were to work effectively in tandem, where better to draw officers capable of coordinating arms and services than from “men used to seizing on the broad significance of things, and to analyzing details to fit in with more general ideas.”137 The next year, to expand on the success of the university engineers, the militia authorities offered a twelve-day course to students currently enrolled in the militia to enable them to qualify for a commission, ideally in a proposed “Canadian Universities Regiment” then under consideration by the minister of militia.138 All of this forms the immediate background to the efforts to establish an officer training corps at the University of Toronto, a project also under way at other Canadian universities.139 The birth pains of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps and the stillborn first attempt at Toronto now enter the story, but for the moment the role of the Rifle Association in the years before the Great War should be underlined.

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Its rise in popularity sharpened the debates concerning military training at the university, which echoed the polarized opinions in the wider ambit of Canadian society.140 Proponents saw the Rifle Association as a vital contribution to the Dominion’s military readiness and the seedbed for a revived university battalion; the anti-militarists regarded it as the instrument by which to transform the university into a latter-day Campus Martius. Two points deserve emphasis here, however, with an eye ahead to the university at war. Between 1904 and 1914 hundreds of undergraduates received training in marksmanship through the Rifle Association, and thus possessed the soldier’s primary skill when the call to arms came. When the COTC was hurried into existence in the autumn of 1914, the Rifle Association’s organization and staff provided the cadre. Every last one of the captains and lieutenants appointed to the COTC companies distributed throughout the colleges and faculties were current or former members of the Rifle Association.141 “It lies with the country to provide adequate funds for the training of its future Militia Officers” In February 1909 the president of the University of Toronto, Robert Falconer, received a letter from Henry W. Mickle, a former member of K Company who had gone on to a prosperous legal career after graduating in 1882. The purpose of Mickle’s letter was to pass on to the president the feeling among alumni connected with the engineer company “that it would be of public service if a training corps of officers were established at the university.” The recent formation of an officer training corps at both Oxford and Cambridge had piqued the interest of Canadian militia authorities, one of whom, the aforementioned Colonel John Taylor Fotheringham, wished to consult with Falconer in advance of a trip to Ottawa to look into such a program at the University of Toronto.142 Falconer himself appears to have been thinking along the same lines, for he had lately applied to Brigadier-General Otter, now chief of the general staff, for details about McGill’s new course of instruction in military subjects leading to qualification for a commission in the Imperial forces. The regulations on commissions and the McGill program sent in return noted that the Militia Department was encouraging Canadian universities to adopt the British scheme, open as it was to “such chartered universities in the Colonies as have established courses of military instruction approved by the Army Council.”143 With this in mind, Falconer wrote to Fotheringham to express his support for an initiative he considered of great benefit to the country, as long as the militia authorities took due notice of the special circumstances of a student



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corps and – this above all – the university’s inability to absorb the cost of training and facilities.144 On his return from Ottawa, Fotheringham submitted a report outlining the scheme and urging its adoption by the university. Since the report intimated that the Dominion government was prepared to provide funds for drill halls and equipment, Falconer appointed a committee on military education whose members, many of them old K Company alumni, upon reviewing the report presented a petition to the university senate requesting that “it give effect to these proposals.”145 Falconer was then in the second year of his presidency. He was by birth a Nova Scotian and by profession a Presbyterian minister, Biblical scholar, and college principal whose appointment in 1907 has been viewed ever since as a turning point in the history of the university.146 In the wake of the reform of the university government the year before, which invested real power in the office of the president, the selection committee broke with the past by opting for an outsider, free of residue from the turbulent Loudon years, and a younger man, with the energy and promise of a long tenure to lead the university into a new era. Although he was the first to admit his lack of military experience, Falconer strongly supported military training at the university throughout his twenty-five years in office.147 A Canadian nationalist content in the bosom of the British Empire, the president lined up with those churchmen and educators who regarded training as an exercise in character development and a civic duty. By virtue of his office he also wore the mantle of honorary president of the Rifle Association, a titular role which he took seriously. He made every effort to attend rifle competitions and to emphasize the association’s valuable contribution to the national interest when writing yet again to the Militia Department for more rifles and reimbursements.148 On the other hand, he never lost sight of his responsibilities, and the limits of his authority, as president of a provincially funded institution. Desirable as an officer training corps might be, both Falconer and the university’s Board of Governors, which oversaw management and finances, held firm to the principle that defence was the preserve of the Dominion government. “The university will be glad to do its best to further the establishment of such a unit apart from the outlay of money,” wrote Falconer in one of several letters on the subject, adding in another that he could not divert funds from the provincial purse for purposes that came under Dominion control.149 The universities would supply the personnel, the government the funds for training them. The British officer training corps appealed to Canadian soldiers and educators.150 The Militia Department welcomed it as a solution to a

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problem common to Britain and Canada. The Territorial Army, or volunteer reserve force that emerged from the comprehensive reorganization of the British Army after its travails in the South African War,151 would need junior officers in great numbers were it ever called upon to support the Regular Army in the event of a European war, a possibility that by 1908 seemed increasingly likely. The principal architect of the army reforms, Secretary of State for War Richard Haldane, sought to ensure a supply of lieutenants and captains by creating an officer training corps composed of contingents established at schools and universities willing to institute “a standardised measure of elementary military training” under the direction of the War Office. It was a national training scheme combining theoretical and practical components, the former consisting of lectures covering all topics necessary for officer qualification, the latter of instructional parades, musketry, field exercises, and attendance at the annual military camps. Candidates could then write examinations to obtain certificates qualifying them for a commission in the Territorial Army. In face of the deep-seated aversion to compulsory service in Britain, the training corps remained voluntary and did not require members to serve upon graduation. It aimed instead to develop a pool of sufficiently qualified young men who, if need arose, could be quickly moulded into competent officers. The adoption of such a program in Canada would meet the same demand for accredited junior officers and skirt the same resistance to compulsory military service. If, in Borden’s plan, the high school cadet corps and rifle associations generated raw material for the Canadian militia, an officer training corps would produce future militia officers “whose conception of things military … would be higher than what we often see to-day in our volunteer battalions.”152 For the universities an officer training corps offered a way to prepare young men of “the right stamp” for positions of military leadership analogous to the responsibilities of active citizenship they were expected to assume in Canadian society. It accorded with the ideal of service that Falconer believed should inspire the University of Toronto to fulfil its promise as the largest and, pace McGill, most influential university in the country.153 Toronto was quick to take a leading role in negotiating the terms on which the officer training corps should be established in the universities. In March 1910 the president’s military committee forwarded to Ottawa a memorandum that made plain the university’s intention to become the cornerstone of the officer training corps. So great was support for the idea, claimed the committee, that no fewer than four companies of one hundred men each would make up the Toronto Contingent. It followed that a training scheme this



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ambitious would require a drill hall and armoury on campus, facilities that, the committee was given to understand, the Dominion government stood ready to provide.154 Here, however, the wish was father to the thought, for the committee was proceeding on rather flimsy assumptions about the government’s financial commitment to the officer training corps.155 Falconer seemed to have realized as much when he admitted to one of the committee members that “it is expecting a good deal to have the government provide a special drill hall including armoury and stores,”156 yet this did not deter him from asking the Board of Governors to prepare an estimate for the site and construction of an armoury.157 Just as the Militia Department was completing a first draft of regulations, Falconer wrote to Borden in November 1910 to remind the minister of his pledges of financial aid and to press the point that, if the project were to be a success, “the students should have a building for their training which would be attractive.” The combined price of a site and building came to $90,000, which, as Falconer cautioned, probably erred on the low side.158 Falconer’s insistence on the Dominion government’s responsibility for the cost of an armoury was not just a matter of federal versus provincial responsibility. During the early years of his presidency the university’s finances were so corroded by inflation and decreasing revenues that by 1910 he was contemplating a deficit of $40,000.159 When his committee met to review the first draft of regulations for the officer training corps early in 1911, the members scrutinized the yearly grants and supplements offered by the government and calculated a shortfall of nearly $1,400, “an expense the university is not prepared to undertake.” The financial contributions for the upkeep of the corps were deemed “quite inadequate,” all the more so since, surprisingly and disappointingly, the draft said not a word about funding for drill halls or armouries. An amended version, reiterating Toronto’s willingness to form an officer training corps as long as the government provided funding for an armoury and its maintenance, was sent back to Ottawa on 3 February 1911.160 The next day Falconer wrote in confidence to Principal William Peterson of McGill to urge solidarity on the question of financial support: “if the universities can take united action in this matter it may be well for us to do so.”161 While Falconer was rallying his fellow presidents, Borden was attempting to clarify any misapprehensions at Toronto with regard to the Militia Department’s financial assistance. In a letter to Falconer, the minister stated tactfully that he had made no promises concerning money for drill halls, nor could the department undertake so great an expenditure at a time when costly civic armouries were under

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construction in Montreal and Toronto. Moreover, what Borden did for the University of Toronto, he would have to do for all universities participating in the program, which multiplied expenses far beyond the department’s capacity to meet them.162 Still, Borden felt that an agreement was “not beyond the region of hope,” and after reviewing the replies from the universities to the first draft, he had a second draft of regulations sent out in April. The accompanying letter noted the department’s efforts “to give every advantage and assistance to the universities consistent with financial limits and obligations on the Militia Department in relation to general expenditures.”163 This directed attention to the most important change in the new draft, which stated that “the Dominion Government … will contribute towards the construction of any Drill Hall by a university or college, one half the cost of the building.” The offer narrowed the gap between the two sides, but did not close it. The University of Toronto committee’s emendation made their position definitive, and ultimately irreconcilable with the government’s: “strike out words ‘one half’ … and add words ‘and site’ after ‘building.’”164 Even though negotiations over funding had reached an impasse, the universities’ response to the second draft did help to lay the foundations of the corps.165 The most felicitous result from this second round of discussions was the adoption of the term “Canadian Officers’ Training Corps,” coined by McGill in preference to “Canadian University Regiment,” which no one in the Militia Department seems to have realized condensed into “CUR” – hardly an acronym to attract recruits or append to the names of officers gazetted in the Militia List. To satisfy Toronto’s demand that its officer training contingent be accorded the same status as city regiments, the department awarded the COTC pride of place at the head of all the infantry regiments in the Militia List. Minor adjustments concerning the pay, supplies, and allowances granted to the corps settled the other arrangements between the government and the universities. In the minds of the university respondents, the second draft of regulations established the basis for the COTC if only the financial question could be resolved. Speaking for the University of Toronto, colonels Lang and Fotheringham sought to bring the government round to the universities’ position by arguing that full financial support of the COTC was a good bargain. “The financial conditions … will entail less charge upon the public funds than does an Infantry Regiment,” while in return the government stood to gain a supply of capable officers and the opportunity “to mould public opinion along better lines with regard to the country’s defence.”



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In passing on his committee’s revisions, Falconer warned the Militia Department that the university’s Board of Governors would not accept the financial terms offered by the government on the grounds that, since the proposed corps was to the benefit of Canada, “the Dominion should bear the whole cost of site and armoury.”166 There the matter rested until a change of government wrought by the election of September 1911 revived hopes of an agreement. The new minister of militia, Colonel Sam Hughes, was as zealous a believer in military training as any congregant in the church of the militia myth. Within weeks of his appointment he set about revitalizing his cherished force of citizensoldiers by arranging a conference on militia affairs.167 Delegates from the universities were invited to contribute their recommendations on the COTC, which they were only too pleased to present to a minister more likely to accede to their renewed requests for full funding. In this they were to be disappointed, however, for when yet another amended draft of regulations went out in December the Militia Department’s offer remained the same: half the cost of a building, nothing for the site. Toronto’s response, transmitted by Colonel Lang, was terse and unequivocal – “regret that University cannot assume any financial obligation concerning the COTC” – and referred the Militia Department to the minimum demands laid before the minister at the recent conference.168 Falconer duly went through the motions of presenting the Militia Department’s proposal to the university’s Board of Governors, with the results he had predicted. The board approved the establishment of the COTC but would not “go to any expense for a building or its maintenance, nor will they provide a site.” From there the proposal went to the university Senate, which appointed its own committee in June 1912 to consider the communication from the board. In a report signed by Ridgeway veteran William Hodgson Ellis, the Senate committee likewise expressed its support of a military corps in connection with the university, but for the reasons stated by the board and other reasons pronounced itself “unable to recommend the adoption of the proposal submitted by the Department of Militia and Defence, dated December 19th, 1911.”169 In a word, stalemate. During the autumn of 1912, while the university Senate was conclusively rejecting the government’s terms, McGill, having set aside its demands for a drill hall, went ahead with the first officer training corps outside the British Isles.170 Toronto could only look on with envy as the McGill contingent flourished and others were begun on the Laval campuses in Quebec City and Montreal. The dying embers of the COTC at Toronto were occasionally fanned into flame by hopeful

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reports in the Varsity of government funding for a drill hall,171 random efforts to locate provisional facilities,172 and by a story published in the Globe in December 1913. As part of his plan to obtain militia officers from the universities, Colonel Hughes was turning to private donors, such as Lord Strathcona at McGill and Major Reuben Wells Leonard at Queen’s, for money to finance armouries and parade grounds.173 Whatever hopes this held out for Toronto were immediately quashed by Falconer, who declared that the matter was “out of the question on account of financial stringency.”174 It was not only the lack of money, however, that undid the first attempts to establish the COTC at Toronto. It came down, in the end, to a lack of interest among the students. According to Maurice Hutton, principal of University College, few would be willing to take the course prescribed, rigorous as it was, since the students of the day felt no great urge or need to do serious military training. They saw no impending threat of war or invasion, and they lived in a country largely unconcerned with defence thanks to its geography and cordial relations with its neighbour. In his view, “students would not find the time to devote to military matters of the type proposed.” True enough, for he spoke at a time when they seemed more intent on scandalizing their elders with their addiction to the tango, while displaying a want of purpose, lack of seriousness, shallow flippancy, and a host of other vices that drove some observers to despair.175 Hutton was no pacifist. He was one of the most influential figures at the university and a founding member of the Canadian Defence League, who never ceased from toil in promoting military and physical training among the country’s youth.176 Coming from him, these remarks amounted to an admission that the advocates of the COTC had overestimated the enthusiasm for military instruction at Toronto. As one Varsity editorial put it, “even the strong encouragement shown in almost every possible way has not resulted in producing any great military spirit among the student body as a whole.”177 One warning sign that the students’ martial ardour did not go much beyond the Rifle Association was the fate of the aforementioned course in military instruction. Brought in to set the stage for the proposed officer training corps, the widely publicized lecture series attracted few students and barely made it to the end of its first and only year.178 Ever since 1861, the history of the university had revealed time and again that, whatever militaristic fever coursed through the student body, it was low grade at best, surging in times of crisis and quickly abating afterwards. “Canadians are not a martial people,” asserted the Canadian Military Gazette, “not martial to the extent of making great sacrifices before the time of actual conflict has arrived. When that time has arrived they will do



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everything that may be reasonably expected of them.”179 This appraisal of the Canadian character certainly held true for the university volunteers of 1866 and 1885 and, if anything, understated the case for their counterparts in 1914. The crisis that the COTC needed to spur its growth at Toronto was about to end one era in the university’s military history and open another.

Chapter 2

Born and Raised in War: The University of Toronto Contingent, 1914–1919

“You cannot be as merry as yesterday nor as blithe as we hope you will be in the world’s tomorrow” The students enrolled for the 1914–15 session came back to a campus utterly transformed in mood and outlook from the lively, somewhat insouciant place it had been a mere five months before. Over the summer an astonishing chain of events set in motion by the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and culminating with Germany’s bold gamble to send its armies through neutral Belgium in a bid to defeat France with one blow had drawn Britain and its Empire into a major European war. Much had already happened in the eight weeks between the outbreak of hostilities on 4 August and the opening of term on 30 September. The failure of the German offensive to achieve a quick victory had given Britain the chance to mobilize its forces at home and abroad. What was to become known as the Western Front was slowly hardening into shape as the opposing armies dug in along a line running from the North Sea to the Swiss border. “The university reopens amid the gloom of a world-wide calamity,” intoned the first Varsity editorial of the year, while the report on President Falconer’s inaugural address observed that “there seemed to be a more sober wave of thought sweeping the undergraduate mind than is customary at the beginning of term.”1 Even as the university convened in late September, the First Contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) was preparing to set sail for England with over two hundred Varsity men in its ranks. Hundreds more had begun drilling on campus in anticipation of the call for a Second Contingent. In his speech, delivered on 29 September to a hushed audience overflowing the confines of Convocation Hall, Falconer dwelt at length on the causes of the war and declared that Britain had had no choice other than to side with France, whether



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or not Germany violated the neutrality of Belgium. He took pains to emphasize that the British Empire was not taking up arms against the people of Germany, but against the disease of “Prussian militarism” that had infected them and now so endangered the world that “it must be cut out with the sword.” Not for Falconer the economic or political implications of the conflict – there was far more than material interest at stake in this, “the greatest of moral struggles”: “The soldier and the official … have Prussianised Germany and would Prussianise the world. They would kill democracy and the culture based on freedom and would deify force. This war is a clash of two ideals of life, and one or the other must go. It must be a fight to the finish. If we lose, then all that we stand for disappears – the right of the individual weak or strong to develop in freedom his God-given powers, the right of nations, however small, to enjoy their own democracy, the conviction that justice is enthroned above brute force.” After a nod to the men about to go overseas, Falconer concluded by impressing upon his listeners that the war demanded more of the university than its manpower. Now as never before the students had a duty to set an example of sacrifice and to comport themselves in a manner worthy of the premier university of Canada in a time of world crisis: “Do not be light-hearted. You cannot be as merry as yesterday nor as blithe as we hope you will be in the world’s tomorrow. The world is in agony – let this agony reach the depths of our nature also, so that it may purge our selfishness.”2 “The University of Toronto will do its share” In this emotionally charged atmosphere – “the Nation involved with the Empire in a life-or-death war of the world,” the university rallying to a cause fully endorsed by the leading spiritual, political, and intellectual figures of the day, who portrayed the war both as the defence of civilization and as a stern but ultimately beneficial antidote to the moral ills of society3 – the University of Toronto Contingent of the COTC was brought into being. The readiness of the university authorities to brush aside the obstacles that had stymied the COTC two years previously, the efforts that led to the corps’s official establishment on 2 November 1914, and the instantaneous, overwhelming response among the faculty and students make up the first part of the story, but to be fully appreciated the creation and growth of the Toronto Contingent must first be set in the context of the university at war. Falconer stood first among the university principals who believed that, as institutions of higher learning and research and supported by public funds, the universities must take a leading role in support of the

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war effort.4 From the outset he would devote the University of Toronto’s human, intellectual, and scientific resources in ever greater measure to meet the growing demands on men, morale, and medical and technical innovation.5 The professional schools and the sciences – medicine, dentistry, engineering, forestry, pharmacy – could provide the expertise and technology for specialized or support services, whereas the professors of history, classics, political economy, and theology could use their erudition and powers of oratory to illuminate the causes and meaning of the war and thus bolster morale and recruiting.6 The university was in these ways responding to the challenge hurled at its feet early in the war not only to define its contribution to the national effort, but also to “preserve the spirit of service among the people.”7 It followed that the university’s most abundant resource, its able-bodied and educated young men, should provide leadership on the battlefield. Although in the course of the 1914–15 academic year approximately five hundred undergraduates withdrew to go on active service,8 both Falconer and the Militia Department discouraged the formation of a separate university battalion in the belief that men of higher education should be the ones to “give intelligent direction to the common human virtues of courage and self-sacrifice.”9 In his haste to establish a COTC at Toronto, Falconer was seeking above all to ensure that the Varsity students and alumni who went to war did so in a role commensurate with the qualities of character and intellect deemed proper to university men. As for the students, the military spirit long dormant within them had been reactivated by the call to arms. Everything predisposed them as sons of Canada and the Empire to respond. In a city 85 per cent British by birth or descent, the members of the university were themselves almost exclusively of British stock: of the 4,428 men and women registered in 1914–15, fewer than 100 bore non-British surnames.10 Despite efforts to attract students from farther afield, the university was still a very insular place. One in three came from staunchly patriotic Toronto, nine in ten from Ontario, the province that prided itself on being the most loyal in the Dominion.11 Their education affirmed this innate allegiance to Britain.12 The program in English literature guided students from the rudiments of Anglo-Saxon through to the Victorians without so much as mentioning a single American author (Canadian literature, for academic purposes, did not exist); the programs in history, political economy, and philosophy reposed on similarly anglocentric foundations. The study of the classics adhered to the prescriptions at Oxford and Cambridge and, as filtered through a British lens, offered pertinent analogies with the present situation. Britain was Athens, wellspring of democracy and individualism, saviour of Greece from Persian



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tyranny, confronted by warlike, conformist Sparta, forerunner of Prussianized Germany; the British Empire was striving to avoid the fate of the Roman, whose fall to barbarous hordes from across the Rhine had given way to the Dark Ages. What students heard in the lecture halls during the week reverberated from the pulpits on Sunday morning in the general summons to defend the ideals and inheritance they had been brought up to cherish.13 Yet this British tradition, extolled in an academic setting prizing reason over emotion, also enshrined liberty of thought and resistance to the excesses of patriotism.14 The Varsity spoke for the students when, in the interests of “decent British fair play,”15 it took up cudgels against the city newspapers baying for the dismissal of three German-born professors,16 and again when it insisted that “the whole glory of the British system is that it is voluntary,” leaving each man free to decide for himself whether to enlist or not.17 For all the frivolity and hedonism that had dismayed their elders before the war, the students were not a rebellious lot.18 They did not challenge received wisdom on the causes and significance of the conflict, nor was there anything in recent Canadian experience to disabuse them of romanticized, heroic notions of war.19 They were idealistic, as students tend to be, and eager for the chance to act on their ideals, but their purpose held to preserve the world, not to change it. Most came from homes of modest means and comfort; some among them had hardly known a moment’s recreation in their lives before they entered university.20 By far the great majority were the sons of tradesmen, merchants, manufacturers, labourers skilled and unskilled, clerks, shop owners, clergymen, teachers, salaried employees, and farmers, who went to university in the hope of becoming engineers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen.21 Most worked during the summer to earn money towards their fees and expenses, no easy thing to do as costs rose and wages sank in the depressed economy before the war.22 In other words, unlike their counterparts at the English universities, the young men at Toronto (and other Canadian universities) entering the officer training corps were not the cloistered heirs of wealth or privilege, elevated by class distinction and raised in the expectation that they would as a matter of course start life at the top or in time of war assume command. They were instead regarded as officer material by virtue of their educational attainments and career ambitions, which it was now their duty to divert into the service of their country. In numbers and spirit the volunteers who flooded into the University of Toronto Contingent of the COTC would soon furnish the most convincing proof that, true to the pledge made in the first Varsity headline of the war years, the university was doing its share.23

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“The present great emergency has finally succeeded in bringing into being a training corps within the University” Three weeks into the term, President Falconer gave notice that classes would be cancelled at noon on 21 October so that he could make a special announcement to all men of the university in Convocation Hall.24 In a tumultuous scene reminiscent of Croft’s appeal for a University Rifle Company fifty-three years before, to an assembly “packed with healthy and alert young Canadian manhood,” Falconer read out a telegram from the Department of Militia and Defence authorizing the formation of a Canadian Officers’ Training Corps at the University of Toronto. His simple but compelling words that followed – “we expect the men to come forward now” – inspired “a sort of glorious pandemonium” among the students. They issued their loudest cheer when the president declared that all academic work would henceforth cease at 4:00 p.m. to allow the men enrolled in the COTC to take their courses of drill and instruction. One suspects that it was not just patriotic fervour that fuelled their response, but also the prospect of a longer sleep in the morning, since a good many of the twelve hundred students already undertaking military training had been rising with the dawn to fit in an hour of drill before chapel, breakfast, and classes.25 The way now lay open for the university to implement a training scheme that served complementary ends, providing the Militia Department with a pool of officer candidates likely to be needed by the spring of 1915, while accommodating Falconer’s preference that the students combine military training with their studies at least until the end of the academic year. Falconer’s announcement capped the strenuous efforts to establish a COTC that had begun shortly after the war broke out. The university was not in session and Falconer not yet back from Europe when, on 18 August 1914, about sixty Varsity men gathered in the Round Room at University College to discuss the formation of a university battalion. Nothing could be formally arranged until the president returned, but for the time being the old link with The Queen’s Own enabled two companies of university volunteers to drill with the regiment and trawl for recruits as the students trickled back for the forthcoming school year.26 The two members of the university’s committee on military education who presided at the meeting, Dr John Fotheringham and Professor William Hodgson Ellis, supported this arrangement as a first step towards the eventual goal of forming an officer training corps. Since the government also took the view that the universities could best assist the war effort by providing units for training officers, Falconer lost no



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time upon his return in reviving negotiations for a COTC at Toronto.27 Determined to have the authorization of a contingent coincide with the opening of term, he came straight to the point in his petition to the minister of militia, Colonel Sam Hughes: “The state of war now forced upon us makes it advisable that Military Training be provided in the University of Toronto.” All previous impediments vanished. Reminding Hughes that the university had accepted the COTC in principle two years before, Falconer skimmed over the once-intractable issue of funding and asked only that the minister arrange temporary accommodation for arms and accoutrements. The university would provide a nine-company battalion enrolled under the supervision of faculty members, rooms for offices and classes, and the names of the officer commanding and the company captains. Training and organization would be left to the instructional cadre of the Toronto military district. Hughes, who tended to act first and plan later, undertook in return to have the government furnish all the necessary equipment.28 Confident of the government’s approval, Falconer and his military committee set about creating the equivalent of “a large Military College organised in battalions and companies for instructional purposes.” It was their good fortune to have in the Rifle Association the framework for such a project, since the association was represented by company or section throughout the university and so already had an administration in place to oversee recruitment and organization. The Rifle Association immediately set to work clearing the ground for the Toronto Contingent.29 Its constitution was amended so as to make the association the medium through which enlistment and instruction would be managed until the COTC was granted sanction – every member sworn in by the Rifle Association joined on the understanding that he would take preliminary instruction in drill and become a member of the COTC upon establishment of the corps. What rifles and ammunition the association had in stock were rationed among the growing numbers of recruits requiring instruction in musketry. The association performed its most valuable service in arranging an impromptu Officers’ Qualifying Class to train instructors for the COTC. Under the direction of Lieutenant George Bramfitt of the 2nd Field Company, Canadian Engineers, some twenty professors – among them George Needler, Alfred De Lury, Malcolm Wallace, Henry Madill, Edward Kylie, names synonymous with the creation of the University of Toronto Contingent – metamorphosed into captains and lieutenants as they wheeled and stamped in their shirtsleeves for three hours a day in the late September warmth. A week before term began, the Rifle Association put up signs inviting students to attend courses qualifying them for duty as sergeants and corporals:

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Figure 2.1.  Early COTC volunteers at Victoria College with sticks for rifles. UTA A1968-0003/005P(7.15)

“If you ever had a chance to do anything for your country, it is now.”30 One quick to heed the call was Frederick Banting, who combined service as a drill sergeant with his studies in medicine until he became eligible to enlist in the Canadian Army Medical Corps in December 1916.31 The promise of a COTC spurred recruiting once the term began. Falconer, together with Professor Velyien Ewart Henderson, president of the Rifle Association, and Colonel Lang, who was already slated for command of the contingent, made the rounds of the colleges and faculties to explain the function of the COTC and to encourage undergraduates to do the course of training while they completed their year. It was going to be a long war – by October 1914 it was already styled the Great War – so Toronto should emulate the worthy example of the officer training corps at the British universities, which had sent thousands of junior officers into the service of their country. There were also exhortations to uphold the university’s primacy among its peers: “McGill and Queen’s have already formed corps, and it is not for Toronto to follow, but to lead them.”32 These appeals tapped pride in country and alma mater so



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effusively that the numbers soared beyond the maximum enrolment set for the contingent, even though, much to the chagrin of Principal Hutton, the men at University College were slow to rouse themselves from the pacifism in which they had been “absolutely plunged and drowned up to August last.”33 By contrast, Victoria College soon had 150 men out for drill two days a week, Trinity had 84 men enrolled, and nearly every last one of the divines at Wycliffe signed up after the first recruiting session.34 Interest in the COTC ran highest in the professional schools, which, owing to the influence of Fotheringham at the Faculty of Medicine and Henderson at the Royal College of Dental Surgeons, quickly established training companies for their respective service corps.35 Not surprisingly, given the connection with the 2nd Field Company, Canadian Engineers, the heartiest response came from the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Engineering, which contributed two-thirds of its students to the corps.36 The Engineering Society took up the work of recruiting among its undergraduate members and netted nearly five hundred volunteers, “this being the largest percentage of any Faculty of a Canadian University to join the C.O.T.C.”37 In six weeks of furious improvisation the University of Toronto had by mid-October assembled a still-burgeoning contingent that added suasion to Falconer’s requests for official approval.38 In Ottawa Hughes was no less busy improvising. He steered applications from the universities into the proper channels, with a nudge to encourage their fulfilment; however, all ran up against the problem that the minister had promised more than his overextended department could deliver. The reply to Toronto stated that a contingent would be authorized only when accommodation and equipment could be made available.39 This time the university was willing to compromise. Falconer informed the officer commanding the Toronto military district that the university would provide a makeshift armoury housing equipment and uniforms for up to six hundred men in the basement of the Medical Building.40 That solved Toronto’s half of the problem, but for its part the government was hard pressed enough to outfit the men going overseas, and despite Hughes’s promises had no arms or uniforms to give to the university, nor would it for quite some time to come. Even after Falconer appealed directly to Prime Minister Robert Borden for assurance that the COTC would be instituted forthwith at Toronto, a guarantee that would further the work of recruitment already under way, the military authorities insisted on withholding permission until equipment was available.41 So strong was the demand for COTC contingents at Toronto and other universities, however, and so forcefully did Falconer and his fellow presidents plead their cases that the Militia Department soon

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gave way on the point.42 On 17 October the adjutant general confirmed the authorizing of the establishment of the COTC at Toronto, with the proviso that “arms, equipment, and ammunition not demanded until after embarkation second contingent Canadian Expeditionary Force.”43 General Order 177 followed on 2 November authorizing a body of nine companies to be designated as the University of Toronto Contingent. It had taken “the present great emergency” to bring about an agreement on terms far less favourable to the university than those rejected in 1912, but the COTC had finally come to life at Toronto – clad in mufti, inadequately quartered, and with rifles enough for one man in six. “Left, Right, Left, Right, Marching on the campus Left, Right, Left, Right, Marching along the Don” The dramatic sight of the campus alive with military activity, the enthusiasm it generated, and the patriotic pride and purpose it displayed made the early days of the COTC the most memorable in its history. “The University of Toronto, unlike the rest of my native city, seemed an armed camp,” wrote Raymond Massey sixty years later, recalling his experiences as a first-year man at Victoria College. “Like almost everybody else, I at once joined the Officers’ Training Corps.” His brother, Captain Charles Vincent Massey, who had taken a commission with The Queen’s Own, had the first of Victoria’s two companies organized and drilling with the dawn within the first few days of term;44 and in a platoon composed mainly of Methodist divinity students, one of Raymond’s few comrades not of the cloth was Lester Pearson. Like many of the new students that fall, Pearson had yet to reach the age of military service and therefore found it necessary to bide his time in the COTC until old enough to enlist.45 The future actor, governor general, and prime minister – three of the many notable Canadians to pass through the ranks of the COTC – added their exertions to “the snappy movements of the hundreds of men on the front campus during the afternoon drill hours,” in scenes mirroring the initiation of the University Rifles into the artes militares half a century before: The ground once consecrated to football signals and “offside” rulings now resounds to cryptic observations passed by rigid gentlemen in modest brown – “No! your other left!” or “Now, then, you on the right, don’t get lost!” It is all very mysterious. Come closer and we shall see even more startling developments. In the corner of the University porch two professors in Arts wrangle over the subtleties of “forming squad on the left” until they are interrupted by a colleague in Science, burning to display



Born and Raised in War 79 a new theory on the subject of “extended order drill.” Undergraduates in lectures exchange nice points in musketry until their instructor brings them to “attention” with a raucous “Steady! What is going forward?”46

The novelty of learning the business of the soldier, “on which for the time the nationality and the self-respect of Canada depend,” braced the spirits of the volunteers as they made do without the soldier’s panoply for nearly the whole of the contingent’s first year. The photographs of the fledgling COTC published in the Varsity show the rank and file in civilian dress and armed, if at all, with wooden rifles. “Unwillingness to endure disappointment is unpatriotic,” Falconer reminded the COTC men, who gamely carried on drilling in the “most homely and sober garb, without anything of the pomp and circumstance which generally give a zest to volunteering.”47 Recognizing the importance of a true soldierly appearance, Falconer pressed the Militia Department for uniforms, but the delay was extended by the very success of the contingent, which by December had taken in nearly twice as many members as first anticipated.48 Repeated assurances that uniforms with distinctive COTC markings had been requisitioned allayed the students’ impatience,49 but the lack of rifles and ammunition soon began to chafe. Two days before the COTC was authorized, the Rifle Association received notice that its dwindling stock of ammunition could not be replenished for the time being, nor could any more rifles be supplied. This shortage, coupled with the increased use of the ranges at suburban Long Branch by units training for overseas, put a temporary halt to shooting instruction and compelled the association to publish a statement in the Varsity explaining the situation and outlining the stopgap remedies.50 Lest the onset of winter prolong the interruption in musketry training, the Rifle Association cast about for an indoor range on the university grounds, and eventually converted the theatre in Hart House into a miniature shooting gallery. This facility, which was afterwards developed into a sophisticated school for marksmanship, relieved the congestion at the civic ranges. The small drill hall improvised in one of the Hart House gymnasiums served a similar purpose by allowing companies to continue their training indoors during the winter, when the civic armouries were in great demand.51 The same spirit of making the best of things runs through the descriptions of the “profitable and happy experiences” of field days and route marches that lent welcome variety to the routines of drill. Each Saturday morning saw “motley crews” from the various colleges set off north along Avenue Road, then swing east along St Clair Avenue to make their way through Leaside to the heights overlooking the Don River.

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Figure 2.2.  The spirit of the early days of the COTC, echoed in the words of the marching song published in The Varsity, 28 October 1914, p. 2.



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The rumpled, wooded terrain was well suited to exercises in attack and defence, constructing fieldworks, skirmishing, and sham fights that introduced a modicum of practicality into their training, even if these exercises tended to evince more enthusiasm than tactical skill. “All I can say, gentlemen, is that it’s a fine day to be out, anyway,” was Colonel Lang’s summary after reviewing a typically spirited but untidy set of manoeuvres.52 The season ended with a great sham battle at High Park in which the seven hundred participants displayed the university’s newfound bellicosity to the members of the press in attendance.53 The marches out and back also gave ample occasion to serenade all within hearing with the “Marching Song of the O.T.C.” (“Left, Right,

Figure 2.3.  A map from December of 1914 (preserved in the papers of FASE Professor Clarence Richard Young, a COTC officer in two wars) outlining tactical exercises conducted in the north Toronto area of Cedarvale. UTA B1978-0001/008(02)

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Left, Right, Marching on the campus; Left, Right, Left, Right, Marching along the Don”), which served notice that the indomitable student warriors from Canada were on their way to take up the matter of Belgium with the kaiser. It occurred to certain people that the Varsity men intent on rescuing Belgium would benefit from a command of French – not necessarily to hold their own in conversation with les Pléiades, but to employ practical idioms and apt military terminology. “Human lives by the thousand will hang upon the knowledge of French possessed by both officers and men,” the Varsity reported Colonel Lang as saying, and for a few weeks the “life or death” matter of easing communication between Tommies and poilus became something of an obsession in the student newspaper. Editorials and letters fulminated on the necessity of teaching French to the members of the COTC and called upon the French Department to draw up lists of words with pronunciation guides.54 Falconer voiced his support for instruction in French, but warned of the strain on the department as it coped with the absence of three professors who had returned to France to fight for their country. The remaining staff managed nevertheless to offer French courses to the soldiers throughout the academic year and, with the help of the German Department, to prepare compendia of common words and phrases for use with friend or foe. One such, The Soldier’s Word and Phrase Book, “compiled by a committee of well-known teachers from actual experience of soldiers’ needs,” listed the vocabulary by which to purchase food, identify wounds or ailments, ask directions, tell time, request assistance (“Aidez-moi à creuser une tranchée” – “Help me dig a trench”), and through shrewd interrogation distinguish a genuine “réfugié belge” from an insidious “Deutscher Spion.”55 How useful any of this proved to be is open to question, but the concern with language instruction illustrates perfectly the academic cast of mind and earnest naiveté at work in the first year of the COTC, before the realities of the war exposed the limited value of campaigning in north Toronto or proficiency with the temperamental Ross rifle in the dry, unharried setting of the shooting range. The organization of the Toronto Contingent evolved as the corps expanded through the fall. The nine companies of the contingent as first constituted included two each from University College (A, B), Victoria College (C, D), the Faculty of Medicine (F, G), the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering (H, I),56 and one composed of students from Wycliffe, Trinity, and St Michael’s Colleges (E). On 15 December 1914, General Order 202 authorized the addition of three more companies, one combining recruits from forestry and applied science (K), one representing dentistry (L), and one drawn from institutions on the northern



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Figure 2.4.  COTC trainees in mufti pause during a field day in Leaside, fall 1914. UTA A1968-0003/006P(7.3 / 7.4)

Figure 2.5. Field kitchen at a COTC training exercise in Leaside, fall 1915, with all cadets in uniform at last. UTA A1968-0003/006P(7.14)



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edge of the university – the Faculty of Education and McMaster University (M). The latter was at this time a Baptist foundation housed in McMaster Hall (now the Royal Conservatory of Music) whose faculty and students had decided they could best respond to the present crisis by applying to the Toronto Contingent of the COTC. Professor William Stewart Wallace, a figure of renown in the annals of the University of Toronto who began his teaching career at McMaster,57 had taken the officers’ qualifying course in September and immediately put his instructional skills to use as a captain in charge of eighty recruits. Little more than a stone’s throw from the grounds where the Toronto companies drilled, McMaster could easily allow its students to take part in the training sessions, field exercises, and parades held by its neighbours. The only drawback was a place at the end of the line for rifles and uniforms.58 In March 1915 the twelve companies became a baker’s dozen. Section 31 of the regulations governing the COTC made membership in the contingent open to “gentlemen who, though not students of the University, are desirous of gaining the certificate of proficiency” – in other words, to alumni wishing to combine infantry training with courses required for officer qualification.59 Acting on behalf of the graduates resident in the city, in December 1914 the University Club offered to raise a company for the Toronto Contingent, which attracted upwards of four hundred former university men residing in the city. With fifteen hundred members the contingent was already well over strength, but the chance to “form another valuable link between the past and present members of the University” led to an agreement between Falconer and the military authorities to put the alumni into a supernumerary company subject to the administration and discipline of the COTC.60 Since permission to form N Company came late in the academic year, the graduates had to wait until the fall of 1915 to begin formal training alongside the undergraduate companies. Being organized and trained entirely by university staff gave the members of the Toronto Contingent “a double measure of confidence” in the officers who led them.61 Here the COTC drew from the best traditions of the old K Company, when the familiarity between officers who were professors and students who were privates strengthened the unit’s identity and esprit de corps. Colonel Lang was the obvious choice to command the contingent, and upon his return to the university in September he was released from all teaching duties for the duration of the war. Although he would have much preferred to go to France, his work in building the COTC made him “the animating spirit of the enterprise” and the principal reason for its success. The tireless Lang

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Figure 2.6. A COTC field day in Leaside, with practice in marksmanship, fall 1914. UTA A1965-0004/029(129.16 / 129.12)



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was everywhere that first year, recruiting, organizing, training, reviewing, lecturing, and advising Falconer in the university’s dealings with the Militia Department. His immediate subordinates, Major Charles McVicar, Major Arthur Le Pan, and Captain George Bramfitt, had taken commissions before the war and knew how the army worked. Several of the company captains and lieutenants (Needler, Massey, Henderson, Madill) also had commissions or previous military experience, while the others had successfully completed the officer qualifying course.62 But it was equally important to have capable non-commissioned officers (NCOs) to carry out the daily orders and give close supervision to the rank and file. The contingent was fortunate to have as its senior NCO a man fleetingly mentioned in accounts of the first year, yet who possessed the efficiency and strictness necessary to make soldiers out of students. Like the esteemed Robert McKim before him, Sergeant Major James F. Christie, the university’s constable since 1904, was known to and greatly respected by the undergraduates for his firm but fair exercise of discipline, which, in his case stemmed from seven years with the Scots Guards and active service in the Boer War. His time in the ranks, and his air of authority, made him an effective drill instructor and an example for the novice corporals and sergeants to follow.63 It was due to the efforts of these officers that by the end of the first term the Toronto Contingent had evolved from “perhaps the most awkward collection of individuals that ever mustered” into a body that “represents a high standard of regimental efficiency,” at least in the eyes of the Varsity.64 A sharper judge of these matters awaited in the person of the governor general, the Duke of Connaught, who was to inspect the contingent in a grand ceremony to be held in the civic armoury on University Avenue on the evening of 22 January 1915. To ensure a fine showing, all twelve companies spent the preceding week drilling in the cold and snow to master “the new experience of battalion parade.”65 When the time came for the COTC to show its paces, the governor general was gracious enough to overlook the civilian clothes and minor missteps and to congratulate the fifteen hundred young gentlemen drawn up before him on “the splendid example you are showing to the whole of Canada” and “the splendid patriotic spirit shown by the University.”66 This roundly praised début was a fillip to morale and marked the first milestone in the contingent’s history. Midway through the 1914–15 year the University of Toronto had established by far the largest COTC in Canada and in so doing had accelerated the spread of officer training in universities throughout the country – even the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph applied for a COTC affiliated with Toronto.67 By January all but a few members had attended the

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number of drills mandated by the COTC regulations, and could now begin the course work prescribed for officer qualification; and there was talk of “going under canvas” with the McGill COTC in a great spring camp that would add two weeks of practical training to the syllabus of drill and lectures.68 The contingent had come a long way in a short time, but it was also becoming clear that the demands of military training were forcing the university to make unprecedented adjustments to its academic routines and standards. “Now that we have got it, it is not unimportant to consider for a moment what we have got” The enthusiasm that propelled over half the university’s male undergraduates into the COTC was not necessarily matched by awareness of the regulations to which they were now subject. Recruitment at Trinity, for instance, proceeded briskly even though “quite a number were puzzled as to the requirements of such an organisation.” It was hardly surprising that joining the contingent in the frenzied early days was a step into the unknown, but uncertainty as to the terms of service in the COTC, its workings and purpose, and the prospect of its members going – or being sent – overseas lingered well into the contingent’s first year. As late as February a Varsity headline could still proclaim, “O.T.C. Service Roll and its obligations not well understood.”69 It fell to Lang and his staff to clarify the choices facing the undergraduates, whether to enlist at once or to complete their year, and whether to rest content with basic training or to add the work of officer qualification to their courses of study. At the same time, the university had to cope with the pressure put upon it by the rapid growth of the COTC, particularly with regard to conflicts between military and academic priorities and the strain upon the university’s resources. One point could not be made emphatically enough. The young men who enrolled in the Toronto Contingent put themselves under no obligation to go to the front. The opening editorial in the October issue of the university’s monthly magazine informed readers that the COTC was not part of the organization for war and could not be called out for service at home or overseas. “There is absolutely no catch in the oath taken,” was the Varsity’s reassurance to the unsure, the ones still hanging back in December for fear that entering the COTC made them liable for active service. On the other hand, the members of the contingent were at liberty to volunteer for active service if they so wished. Many did when opportunities to go overseas came beckoning in the first months of 1915.70



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Should a man abide by his oath to train with the COTC for the full university session, he could follow one of two paths. The first was to fulfil the requirements of an “efficiency” candidate by attending no fewer than forty instructional parades of forty-five minutes’ duration and taking the requisite training in musketry. It was important that all those who signed the service roll honour their commitment since the government offered a grant of five dollars for every member deemed “efficient.” These capitation grants made up the contingent’s income, and so any member who withdrew had to pay either the full amount of the grant or the proportion remaining at the time he was discharged so as not to reduce the contingent’s financial support.71 The second, in keeping with Lang’s description of the COTC as “a fruitful source from which to draw junior officers for Militia regiments,” was to undertake the advanced work of a “proficiency” candidate seeking to obtain officer qualification. Certificate “A,” the passport to a lieutenant’s commission and further qualification for the rank of captain (certificate “B”), required members to take practical and theoretical instruction in every aspect of a subaltern’s duties.72 The syllabus outlined at the beginning of the second term involved weekly lectures and extensive readings from assigned textbooks, in this case the Field Service Regulations, Infantry Training 1914 and Colonel Otter’s The Guide, the Canadian militia officer’s bible ever since its first edition appeared in 1880.73 Where squad drill hammered reflexive obedience into students not known for their docility, and physical training made hardy specimens out of sedentary bookworms, the academically structured military course on tactics and organization presented a stern but familiar challenge.74 “Plugging,” or cramming for examinations, was an old habit made useful again when the course was condensed to allow time for the military examinations to be inserted into the last month of the session. The proficiency candidates taking the certificate “A” course were in effect doing the equivalent of a pass subject in the curriculum in addition to their attendance at drill and normal course work. By February there were calls for the university to clarify its position on dispensations for students going on active service or COTC members trying to balance military with academic commitments. The Varsity assiduously recorded the privileges granted at other universities to students training or enlisting for active service, and as the end of the year came into view the question of Toronto’s recognition of military service for academic credit became more acute.75 The imminent departure of three hundred undergraduates with the Second Contingent, and the burden on COTC members having to do one military examination before the regular examinations and a second afterwards, factored in the decision. Falconer believed in showing “the utmost consideration” to

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students putting duty before degree, even going so far as to sanction special convocations for 1915 graduates leaving before completion of their final year, but he was also conscious of the university’s responsibility to maintain its standards. After discussions with the Senate and the faculty councils, Falconer agreed to grant the full year to students accepted for active service, on the condition that their attendance and academic performance had been satisfactory. Fourth-year volunteers in good standing would receive their degree. To ease the minds of COTC members opting to tackle the final examinations before taking up the toils of war, a bonus of up to 10 per cent, calculated against their attendance at drill, would be awarded in each of their subjects. All faculties and departments set their examinations early so as to allow the Toronto Contingent to complete its training and qualifying examinations in the spring camp at Niagara scheduled for the first half of May.76 “Disarranging the sacred curriculum to admit an unacademic activity,” to echo the Varsity,77 was not the university’s only concession to the interests of the COTC. At a time when the annual deficits ($87,000 in 1914–15 alone) imposed “the most rigid economy” on every department and restricted expenditures to those absolutely necessary to keep the uni­­ versity functioning, Falconer had to meet the costs of the contingent out of already depleted coffers. Even the pittances allotted to the COTC (such as the $250 to furnish a storeroom in the basement of the Medical Building) bit deeply into the budget.78 Although private donors, including the Massey family, funded a commissariat and field kitchen and the students held concerts, theatrical productions, and parties to raise funds for the COTC,79 the university counted on turning red ink to black when the government paid out the capitation grant. The first annual inspection in April 1915 registered 1,359 members as “efficient,” and thus entitled the Toronto Contingent to a sum of nearly $7,000, but the money was slow to come. Falconer had to ask the Militia Department in ever more insistent tones for payment before receiving Hughes’s personal assurance “that all necessary action has been taken” – eight months after the fiscal year had ended.80 The problem of storage space and classrooms nagged at the administration throughout the year, and could not be solved by half mea­­ sures since the numbers were so overwhelming. Only Convocation Hall could house the nine hundred students attending the military lectures, and when the uniforms and rifles finally arrived in late February, they came in such quantity that the ad hoc storeroom in the Medical Build­­ ing no longer sufficed. Dean Ellis at the Faculty of Applied Science helpfully interceded to convert the basement of the Mining Building into an armoury and a classroom into an orderly’s room.81 In short, what the university had got in the COTC would have been anathema before the war. By the end of its first year the COTC had



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encroached upon the curriculum, diverted professors and students from their academic tasks, drawn its funds from the financially straitened university, and taken over buildings and grounds. All of these impositions were accepted without demur in the interests of the war effort, and would be as long as the war lasted, but over time both the university and the COTC would change drastically as the pressures of the war mounted and forced a university officer training corps designed for peacetime to await the end of hostilities to be constituted in the form and on the terms originally intended for it. “Undoubtedly the camp was the year’s event in the C.O.T.C.” A series of church parades and battalion drills in the final weeks of the term and the writing of the certificate “A” examination by nearly seven hundred candidates in early April bestowed a sense of accomplishment on the Toronto Contingent at the end of the most eventful year in the university’s history. The long-awaited arrival of uniforms and equipment had given the students the look and feel of real soldiers and heightened their anticipation of the real soldiering in store for them at the Niagara military camp. Signs posted around the university drove home the importance of going under canvas for two weeks of intensive work that would consolidate the lessons learned over the previous seven months. The admonition that “no man’s training is complete without the camp” applied equally to those intending to go on active service and to proficiency candidates hoping to complete their officer qualification by taking the practical examination at the end of the second week. All were reminded that the term had been shortened by three weeks to allow them to go.82 The government’s intention to hold a camp for the Toronto and McGill contingents of the COTC had been rumoured as early as October. Both universities took up the project with the Militia Department in January 1915. It was after Falconer had confirmed arrangements in a personal interview with Hughes in late February that the president undertook to have the university complete all academic work a month earlier than usual.83 Over a thousand students from Toronto and six hundred from McGill were expected to attend. Then, just three weeks before the contingent was to leave, the newspapers reported that the government had cancelled all militia camps, including the one planned for the COTC, for the reason that units going on active service had greater need of the Niagara Commons. Unwilling to forsake all that the university and the students had sacrificed to make the camp possible, Falconer at once wrote to Hughes to plead against “a very serious decision that will work irreparable damage to a movement which began so auspiciously and which has promised to be of great future usefulness to

Figures 2.7.  COTC cadets and the band assemble on the Front Campus for the journey to Niagara Camp, 3 May 1915. UTA A1968-0003 / 005P(7.21) / A1968-0003/006P



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the university.” A letter sent directly to Prime Minister Borden pointed out that the members of the COTC had continued training through the winter and written their examinations earlier than usual with a view to completing their qualifications at the camp. The abrupt cancellation, warned Falconer, “will mean a severe blow to the success of the movement next year.” These remonstrances had the desired effect, but only after two weeks of uncertainty had led many students to make other plans for the summer. By the time Hughes notified Falconer by telegram on 26 April – “Have arranged to train University Corps” – the number of Toronto men still able to attend had dwindled to seven hundred.84 The departure of the Toronto Contingent for Niagara on the m ­ orning of 3 May 1915 received considerable press coverage. Led by the newly formed band, the students marched through the streets lined with crowds to the steamer waiting to carry them to their destination. Amid the excitement and pageantry of the occasion, however, there stirred the first inklings that “the logic of events might make it mean for them what it meant and still means for the Canadians who only a few months ago went to Valcartier, to Salisbury, to France, and to Belgium.”85 Reports of the recent battle at Ypres, the gas attacks and the stubborn resistance of the Canadians, had been followed by casualty lists that sent ripples of shock and grief through the city of Toronto. “It is a magnificent but terribly sad experience through which we have gone,” wrote Falconer in his letter to Hughes thanking the minister for his intervention on behalf of the COTC camp. Although all accounts of the “Niagara Military University” described the experience in the jocular tones typical of military humour, one participant coming to the end of his narrative put away all whimsicality to emphasize the change in outlook wrought by the news of the war: “Had any critic of Canadian manhood been present when the heroic tales of Langemarck and the Lusitania were being pored over in the candlelight of every tent, he would have seen the iron of the old fighting breed steal into the faces and set the jaws of many a youth, and he would have asked no further explanation of the grim determination with which the men executed every detail of their work.”86 From reveille to lights out, the men followed a strict training regime that graduated from drill and musketry in the first week to tactical exercises and full-scale field manoeuvres in the second.87 Hughes and members of his staff inspected the corps, as did the governor general, and specially appointed officers conducted the practical examinations for the Proficiency certificates. By general consensus the camp was held to be a great success. “Hardened by such manoeuvres, shining from frequent inspections … we were received back home with great applause.”88 Years later the camp was “still the talk of the older men around Varsity,” who no doubt remembered it all the more idyllically as the last happy occasion of their pre-war lives.89

Figure 2.8.  Scenes from the Niagara Camp, 10 May 1915. A COTC company halts by the side of the road while another continues the route march. A signals company stands to in front of its tents. UTA A1968-0003/002P



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As the camp came to a close, and with it the Toronto Contingent’s first year, many of the members who had now honoured their obligations to the COTC decided that the time had come to enlist for active service, either with the university companies raised to replenish the ranks of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry90 or in other branches of the service, particularly the artillery batteries and specialized corps that recruited among university men.91 Of the 1,868 undergraduates and graduates who entered the rolls of the Toronto Contingent in 1914–15, one third would return for the 1915–16 year. The haste to get overseas was evident in the results of the certificate “A” examinations, which, when announced in August, disclosed that 153 candidates, less than a quarter of those who had written, had passed. This result raised questions about the value of the COTC, which were explained away by the difficulty of the examination and by the fact that the students had covered two years of proficiency work in less than one. It seemed, too, that they had not taken the qualification course as seriously as their regular courses, since military instruction counted for no academic credit at Toronto.92 Most had considered the course an interesting addendum to their physical training, but nothing to expend much effort on, since it was becoming clear through the winter of 1915 that the holders of certificate “A” were just as likely as anyone else to go into the ranks and work their way up from there.93 This in fact proved to be the case, since two-thirds of the successful candidates received their commissions after a spell in the trenches and further training in England. Nevertheless an overview of this vanguard suggests that the cream rose to the top. Collation of the list published in the University of Toronto Monthly with the Roll of Service leads to some names of note – Hume Wrong, distinguished professor and diplomat; Eric Haldenby, who won the Military Cross at Hill 70 and left his successful architectural firm to return to his country’s service in 1939 as commander of the 48th Highlanders; Arthur Bourinot, poet and literary historian – and an impressive assortment of lieutenants and captains whose service careers betoken the remarkable diaspora of Varsity men along the Western Front and to the far corners of the Great War in East Africa, India, Mesopotamia, and even China.94 The combination of officer training and university education proved beneficial to the men from the professional schools, who adapted their skills to the technical advances accelerated by the war. Lieutenant James Roy Cockburn, a graduate from applied sciences, specialized in sound ranging while serving with the Royal Engineers in France and the Middle East, where he was awarded the Military Cross – he will reappear as commander of the Toronto Contingent in the 1930s.95 Another applied sciences student, Lieutenant William Dean, was mentioned in despatches for his work with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in anti-submarine patrols. Tunnelling

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and signals companies drew from the science and engineering graduates, who also made good pilots, observers, and artillery spotters. Many of the medical students, such as Lieutenant Frederick Johnson, served at the university’s No. 4 General Hospital in Salonica before returning to Toronto to complete their courses. Johnson himself went back overseas to employ his skills with the Canadian and British field ambulance services, and as medical officer of the 2nd Battalion won a Military Cross at the Canal du Nord in September 1918. The primary purpose of the COTC to provide infantry officers was fulfilled in those who performed effectively in the role for which they had been groomed. Lieutenant Gordon Dallyn led his men through the battles of Passchendaele, Amiens, Arras, and Cambrai until wounded in the action that earned him a Military Cross; Lieutenant Edwin Howell of the 75th Battalion won a Military Cross at the Drocourt-Quéant crossing; Lieutenant William Hearst entered the war on the Somme in 1916, and saw it through all the way to Mons in November 1918. There were others whose courage and devotion in the performance of their duty account for the high mortality rate among junior officers in the Great War. Lieutenant Geoffrey Snow insisted on leading an attack despite his wounds, and died outside the Schwaben Redoubt at Courcelette; Lieutenant Richard Brown won a Military Cross at Vimy Ridge, and fought through Lens and Hill 70 only to die of wounds at Passchendaele; Lieutenant Harold Leach, winner of a Military Cross at Passchendaele, was killed in action during the Canadian advance in September 1918. The numbers alone attest to the collective gallantry of these “originals” – eighteen killed, thirty-eight wounded, gassed, or invalided, nineteen Military Crosses (and five other awards, including two from foreign governments), twelve Mentioned in Despatches, and more than thirty whose service records connect their names with the battles that enshrined the reputation of the Canadian Corps.96 “The university is shrinking day by day” To contemporaries, no less than to observers a century later, the first week of January 1916 would stand out as the watershed in the history of the university and the COTC during the Great War. The old year had ended with Prime Minister Borden’s announcement that Canada’s army must double in number to half a million;97 the university ushered in the new year with a fresh call to arms: “We must not deceive ourselves with vain hopes that the end of the war is in sight,” wrote Professor James McMurrich on the Varsity’s first page of 1916. “[M]en and more men are needed.”98 The stream of undergraduates departing for



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active service now became a torrent. Where, during the autumn of 1915, the weekly COTC notices had listed the men “struck off strength” in twos and threes, the exodus that began in January subtracted as many as sixty a week from the nominal roll as members enlisted as privates in local battalions, transferred to specialized corps, or took commissions in the Canadian and Imperial forces. The contingent that stood 1,781 strong in October 1915 had shrunk by half when the annual inspection was held at the end of another truncated academic year. Most of the remaining members, who had stayed only to complete their courses, soon left for overseas. By Falconer’s count, in September 1916 nearly thirteen hundred members of the COTC were on active service.99 By the winter of 1916 “the old atmosphere had vanished and a restless spirit was abroad.”100 The “minions of Mars” were still everywhere to be seen, but they tended more and more to be strangers, either recruits in the city regiments training on the grounds or junior officers taking instruction in the Provisional School of Infantry, installed in the old Technical School. Intercollegiate sports had been cancelled for the duration, courses ran out of students, and the few entertainments to be found were those staged in support of the war effort.101 Advertisements in the Varsity that once touted the latest fashions gave way to renderings of student officers sporting smartly cut uniforms made to order by the city’s finest tailors. The forays into humour by the Varsity’s endearingly irreverent columnist “The Dope Fiend” amusingly but pointedly depicted the gravitational pull of the war and the coarsening effects of military ways on student decorum: “Professors stop in the middle of their lectures and exhort their unhappy auditors to enlist,” while outside, amid the bellows of leather-lunged instructors and the contagious cursing and expectorations of the rank and file, “the bronze clad feet of hundreds of budding officers pulverise the snows of yesteryear into powder.”102 One of the last items the Varsity ran that session looked back wistfully to the final issue of March 1914, contrasting the haunting afterglow of a happier time two short years ago with the grey solemnity of the present.103 “What a change the war has wrought!” – and this was before the Somme. The records of the COTC for 1915–16 chart similar fluctuations in mood.104 Despite the pronounced drop in the university’s enrolment, particularly among male students in the upper years, the organizational work of the previous session and the beneficial experience of the Niagara camp augured well for the Toronto Contingent’s second year.105 The officers were better qualified, there were plenty of certificate “A” men to serve as NCOs, and over half of the incoming recruits had done rudimentary drill. Its teething troubles behind it, the corps quickly resumed

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the routines developed the year before, with each company drilling three afternoons a week and taking part in a rotation of route marches and field day exercises spread over eight Saturdays.106 In clearer recognition of the demands of the COTC, which at Toronto were heavier than at McGill,107 and to offer an incentive to members flirting with the proficiency examination, the university Senate extended its grants of academic standing to allow one credit for the military course, on the condition that the student complete the approved syllabus and pass the examination.108 The numbers and morale of the contingent crested in November when more than thirteen hundred members turned out for church parade. Under the admiring gaze of the crowds lining the route, they marched in a circuit round the precincts of the university to Convocation Hall, where Principal Hutton delivered an address calling upon the COTC to supply “recruits, recruits, recruits, and ever fresh recruits – recruits for the front” and to lead the way in a just cause.109 The timing of this grand review could not have been more fortuitous, since it followed closely upon “the greatest honour that has befallen the C.O.T.C. to date” – namely, a request from the Imperial War Office in London for a list of COTC members deemed suitable for commission in British regiments.110 Notices of COTC graduates obtaining commissions in overseas battalions, and periodic tallies of the members on active service, had been featured in university publications as proof of the contingent’s utility.111 Yet no matter how the proficiency examination results of the previous spring were rationalized, the disappointingly low number of successful candidates still rankled, and gave rise to feelings in the press and among the students that the COTC involved more effort than it was worth. One professor who canvassed student opinion found a general satisfaction with the COTC among those he consulted, but reported “as widespread the feeling that the results of last year’s Examinations failed to correspond at all with the merits of the men; that good work in the University Corps does not meet with the reward it does in the six weeks courses of the military schools, and may bring a man nothing at all.”112 It was therefore all the more gratifying to receive the request from the Imperial War Office, which validated the work of the COTC as no other authority could have done. “This letter is by far the most satisfactory compliment paid to the COTC since its formation,” proclaimed the Varsity, which on 10 December 1915 published the names of the thirty-one men recommended after a review of applications by Falconer and the district officers in Toronto and personal interviews with the chief of the general staff in Ottawa.113 This much-publicized group,



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the first of three such drafts of officers (amounting to eighty-five men) sent to England in 1915–16, became a source of pride for the university and gave substance to the reputation of the COTC.114 The first appeals for recruits in autumn 1915 had claimed that “graduates of such a corps as commissioned officers have a prestige not held by any other, save perhaps the [Royal Military College].” Now there was irrefutable evidence to justify the assertion that “C.O.T.C.” opposite a name in the Militia List conferred twofold distinction as a qualified officer and a university man.115 November 1915 marked the apogee of the First Contingent. From this point on, its very success in mobilizing the university’s manpower led, ironically but inevitably, to a swift decline in numbers and a muchaltered role. The camaraderie of the early days evaporated during the first six months of 1916 as the last of the originals left for active service. The students also saw less of Lang, Le Pan, Bramfitt, Massey, and the other demiurges of the COTC, whose talents were put to wider use in the various schools of instruction in the Toronto military district.116 The novelty of military training had long since palled, and the once keen enthusiasm and sense of adventure seemed out of place now that the casualty lists were lengthening and each issue of the Varsity confronted readers with the loss of yet another friend or familiar. The catch phrases of 1914 exalting duty, voluntary service, and the dictates of individual conscience took on coercive overtones. If a country of not quite eight million was to put half a million men in arms, calculated Professor Velyien Henderson, no less than 10 per cent of the eligible male population of English Canada would have to step forward, “a number which we have learned can only be reached by severe moral and social pressure, if not compulsion.” As unmarried males of military age, students had a special obligation to sign up so as not to put the onus on married men with dependants. Henderson ventured the prediction that the following year the university’s population would “consist of women, the medically unfit, and a few ‘slackers,’ men whom no gift of white feathers will send to the front.” He soon retracted these last words, but his comments and the reaction to them portended the clashes shortly to come over compulsory service and the hostility towards “slackers” or “pink tea gentlemen” skulking in the safety of their classrooms.117 In March 1916 a student parade was set upon by soldiers enraged by the sight of able-bodied men not in khaki who, unbeknown to their assailants, were in fact members of the COTC – in civilian garb since the regulations forbade wearing the uniform when not on military duty – or students intending to enlist as soon as the academic year ended.118

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Members of the corps sent indignant letters to the newspapers protesting the use of the term “slacker” against men unable to enlist for reasons of family or employment in essential war work.119 There was in fact no reason to doubt the willingness of Varsity men to “rescue the world not by words but by deeds.” No fewer than 917 graduates and 665 undergraduates had enlisted by January 1916.120 The renewed call for volunteers, however, sparked one last debate over the COTC as the university’s “big thing” and main conduit into military service.121 The regulations and conditions of the corps now seemed ill-suited to the stern test of the times. It did not entail enlistment for overseas, although candidates applying to write the proficiency examination received permission to do so on condition that they pledge to go on active service; it imposed a great deal of work without guaranteeing a commission (not that all members wished to obtain one in the first place); it dispersed its members instead of keeping them together in one Varsity unit; it trained officers for the infantry, a branch of the service with waning appeal.122 With Falconer’s blessing the Students’ Administrative Council held a series of meetings to gauge students’ preferences concerning recruitment and training at the university. A proposed Varsity infantry battalion for overseas service was ruled out as neither practicable nor popular – like their fellows at Queen’s and the Ontario Agricultural College, the students would much rather fire cannons than rifles.123 After a month of lively consultation, a consensus formed around a set of recommendations put forward by Colonel Lang.124 The COTC would carry on for the rest of the year to allow the proficiency candidates to take the examinations. Once the session ended, however, men willing to go overseas as commissioned officers or NCOs could be channelled into an Overseas Training Company, while those preferring the artillery could form a battery to consist, as much as possible, of Varsity recruits. The Students’ Administrative Council presented these proposals to Falconer with the request that he secure authorization from the Militia Department.125 This the president was more than ready to do, not only to stimulate recruiting by catering to the students’ desires, but also to ensure that a Varsity battery stood among the artillery units raised by the other universities and that a concentrated course of officer instruction, unique to Toronto, would further demonstrate the university’s leading contribution to the war effort.126 Falconer submitted the proposals in person and in writing to the Militia Department, which promptly authorized both units.127 The decision to create the Overseas Training Company and the 67th, University of Toronto, Battery sprang from the realization that by the spring of 1916 the COTC as initially constituted had exhausted its



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resources and potential. The contingent saw 125 of its 274 proficiency candidates obtain certificates in the March examinations, and within a few weeks had sent all but a handful of its members into active service.128 It would henceforth have to draw from a well running dry. Male enrolment for the 1916–17 session plunged to half its number two years before.129 The once-overflowing Toronto Contingent embarked on its third year with just 524 men enrolled. Most were either under age or unfit for military service. In view of the diminishing raw material and the insatiable demand for frontline volunteers, there was little point in combining academic work with an officer training program that commenced with each academic session and lapsed during the summer. The proficiency course was roughly shoehorned into the second term and then discontinued once the last group of twenty had taken the examinations. During its third and last year of voluntary enlistment, the COTC functioned as “a preparatory organisation” inculcating drill, discipline, and physical fitness into first-year men and others without previous training to give basic instruction to those intending to go overseas and to push the undecided in the same direction.130 The task of training prospective officers would be taken up by the Overseas Training Company; the long-standing wish for a distinctly Varsity unit would be fulfilled in the University of Toronto Battery. “University men and their friends are finding excellent training and congenial company in this University unit” The University of Toronto Overseas Training Company (OSTC) was authorized on 21 March 1916 and took shape immediately upon completion of the academic year in April. (The acronyms OSTC and OTC were used interchangeably in reference to the Overseas Training Company; I use the former to avoid confusion with the OTC acronym of the Officers Training Corps.) Professor and Captain George Henry Needler, who personified the legacy of K Company and the heroic early days of the COTC, returns to the narrative as the officer placed in charge of the OSTC. His fellow professor and second in command, Captain Malcolm Wallace, was another mainstay of the COTC who had taken charge of one of the companies at University College in 1914. Both saw the OSTC as the ideal means by which to apprentice the right sort of men for the officers’ guild. They promptly issued a call for 150 recruits “with the qualities and education of a gentleman” to apply to a unit that could guarantee its best candidates a commission and placement in any one of the branches of the Imperial forces, where the demand for lieutenants was far greater than in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Admission

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was not readily granted: after a mandatory personal interview the OSTC took only those judged likely to make efficient officers or NCOs, and therefore drew the majority of its complement from university men (most but not all transfers from the COTC) or from the professions (“a friend in a bank or a graduate of Osgoode Hall”).131 To this “congenial” Toronto nucleus, however, a good number of outsiders would be added over time, giving the company a remarkably hybrid character. As it sent men on and took in others, the OSTC came to include volunteers from other Canadian universities and a sprinkling of recruits from Britain and ten other countries or colonies. Once recruited to strength in June 1916, the company took up quarters in the men’s residence at Victoria College and installed its headquarters in the Mining Building.132 The Overseas Training Company was the quintessence of the COTC – “an unusually fine body of carefully selected men” – yet it differed from its parent organization in two key respects. The OSTC recruited and trained continuously, and as a unit of the CEF it obliged its members to serve overseas. Its principal aim was to supply candidates for commissions in the Imperial forces, where ultimately one-third of the 1,053 men trained in the OSTC ended up. The company’s pool of talent also attracted the attention of the Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Naval Air Service, and the CEF, all of which trawled for recruits from the OSTC;133 and when Prime Minister Borden agreed to send a Canadian force to Siberia in 1918, thirty-one volunteers from the OSTC joined.134 A further indication of the company’s status was the constant demand for its members to serve as temporary instructors in the military camps at the Exhibition Grounds, Borden, and Niagara.135 Although Needler laconically described the company’s work as “taking men in at one end and giving them a certain amount of training and passing them on to the Infantry School,” other accounts show that this preliminary training was intensive and exacting. Each day included an hour of physical fitness, followed by drill at all levels, musketry, bayonet fighting, signals training, and deployment of forces. Three to four lectures a week covered the theoretical parts of the course, while weekly route marches (of 18–20 miles) and tactical exercises tested the stamina and skills of aspiring lieutenants. Specialized short courses in weapons and reconnaissance at the military camps rounded out their training, at which point the candidates would complete their course work in the Provisional School of Infantry and write the examination.136 Every three to four months a draft of officer candidates, carefully vetted by the company’s officers, Colonel Lang, and the chief of the general staff, would proceed to England, where they spent two or three months in the schools of the service they intended to join. The cadets who retailed their experiences in the Varsity warned of an



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Figure 2.9.  Members of the Overseas Training Company practise digging trenches north of the Forest Hill area of Toronto, 1917. UTA B1984-0028: 0012 / 0013

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Figure 2.9.  (continued). The model trenches completed.

even more demanding regimen in this last phase of training, one sending word back that “men who are not prepared for hard work and strenuous drill should not cross the Atlantic.”137 By January 1917 the OSTC had already sent four drafts of officers to England, and to keep up the influx of recruits could point to this growing total as proof that the company had no trouble “placing” successful trainees.138 As its reputation grew, so did the number of applicants, with the result that the availability of places could not satisfy the demand.139 In the early spring of 1918 the thoughts of the Militia Department turned to the OSTC, this time with a view to raising a unit to be styled First Canadian Universities Tank Battalion. The tank, first and rather clumsily employed on the Somme, had given dramatic proof of its potential at Cambrai in November 1917. Despite their mechanical troubles and horrendous operating conditions, these behemoths offered a way out of the impasse of trench warfare, and as a new weapon, technically challenging and tactically inchoative, the tank required a high standard of personnel capable of mastering its workings and putting it to most effective use. University men, especially those familiar with technology and engines, made obvious candidates for such a unit, the first of its kind in Canada and the kernel of the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps.140 The call went out in late March to all Canadian universities to raise three companies comprising 87 officers and 700 men, “5% and 2% of whom should have technical mechanical qualifications.” Toronto and McGill were invited to



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contribute one company each, which would go by the university’s name; the third would be formed from volunteers from the other universities.141 The appeal to university men was not only for the purpose of obtaining mechanically inclined recruits, however, since the Militia Department did not wish to see the CEF lose trained infantrymen through transfer to the tank battalion. A draft of OSTC officer candidates about to head overseas was therefore reassigned to assist Captain Needler in organizing Company A of the University Tank Battalion. The allure of tanks was irresistible. Within two weeks the company’s full complement of 186 men and 16 subalterns, all from the OSTC or the COTC, was enrolled and quartered in the men’s residence at Victoria College.142 Training began immediately under the supervision of the battalion’s commanding officer, LieutenantColonel Richard Denison, whose name and lineage evoked memories of the old Trinity College Company. He kept Falconer well informed about the university’s newest venture into modern warfare, commenting favourably on early signs of high morale and efficient work: “The Company recruited by your University appears to be the most popular one, at the present time, and I am pleased to say, making splendid progress, being a very good class of men, and they are taking to soldiering very kindly.”143 A further report, sent in confidence to Falconer by the company’s commander, Major Wilfrid Mavor, reassured him of the unit’s safe arrival in England and initiation into the mysteries of the iron juggernauts at the Imperial Tank Training Camp during the summer of 1918.144 But the opportunity for this largely OSTC contingent to make Canada’s debut in armoured warfare never came, for the Armistice was signed just as the University Tank Battalion was preparing to embark for France.

Figure 2.10.  University of Toronto members of the First Tank Battalion, May 1918. UTA B1989-0052/001(02)

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Throughout the two and a half years of its existence, the OSTC was a fixture within the university, doing much of its training on campus and selecting its officers and NCOs mainly from the COTC. In carrying on the work of the Toronto Contingent, the Overseas Training Company also kept alive its parent unit’s old prestige and élan. It provided the guard of honour for the governor general on his official visits to the city and for Colonel Theodore Roosevelt when the former president came to speak at Convocation Hall shortly after the US entry into the war.145 “In the training schools of England it seems to be the rule according to authentic reports that University of Toronto Overseas Company men head the lists” – the OSTC’s record in sending its members into the Imperial forces highlighted the predominant role of the University of Toronto in filling 423 of the 457 appointments offered to Canadian officer cadets in the British Army, which tended to put greater faith in university officer training corps than did the CEF.146 In a letter of appreciation sent to Falconer after the war, the secretary of the Army Council was directed to express the War Office’s thanks for “the patriotic spirit shown by these Cadets that reflects great credit on the University authorities, as well as on the officers of the University Contingent, Canadian Officers Training Corps.”147 The lustre added by the OSTC to the university’s reputation was gratefully acknowledged by the Varsity when the company was demobilized shortly after the Armistice.148 The sense of gratitude encompassed more than the company’s contributions to the war effort. On a war-weary campus “tinged with staleness,” coping with coal shortages, the influenza epidemic, and the burden of a conflict with no end in sight, the hale and hearty young men of the OSTC had put some of the colour back into university life with their enthusiastic participation in athletics and entertainments. They fielded the teams to beat in intramural sports, claiming the 1917 Mulock Cup in football, and sportingly took on all comers in friendly contests against the other contingents training on the university grounds. After trouncing the air force cadets in soccer and rugby (teasing the vanquished with chants of “RAF, RAF, RIP!), they gladdened Canadian hearts by handily defeating a team of American cadets and their professional pitcher in a series of baseball games.149 The OSTC also put on concerts and skits to raise funds for the Red Cross, and gave full support to the Victory Loan drives that increased in number and urgency after 1917.150 This esprit de corps inspired the publication of a short-lived but interesting gazette, The KitBag of the O.T.C., stocked with songs, poems, jokes, and bits of news that provided some levity for the present and captured memories for the future.151 The “grin and bear it” tone, half catching, half setting



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the mood of the time, cloaked a serious message in a humorous guise, reminding the Varsity soldiers of the duty incumbent upon them as representatives of the OSTC and the university. They must lead by example in trying times – no complaining, no slipping in discipline and appearance, no letting down the side, and no respite until the war had been seen through to its only acceptable conclusion. It was one thing to keep chins up in 1914, quite another by 1918; and in the glow of the long-awaited victory the tributes to the OSTC and its commanding officers spoke for the wider appreciation of the company as the embodiment of the university’s resolve to carry on to the end. “The 67th Battery … still retains its identity as a unit under control of the University” The formation of university artillery units in early 1916 reflected a trend that compounded the reinforcement crisis in the CEF. It becomes ever more apparent from the notices in the Varsity that infantry battalions, including the Princess Patricias, were having difficulty attracting recruits from the universities, until then a plentiful source of manpower. Chief among the branches of the service competing for educated men was the artillery, which already in 1915 had advertised fruitfully in the Varsity for volunteers for the 25th, 26th, and 43rd Batteries – this last a strongly Presbyterian unit kept to the straight and narrow by forty “ministerial fledglings” from Knox College who had done their preliminary training in the COTC.152 Whereas university men might find their skills underutilized in the ranks of the infantry, gunners required technically adept brains as well as youthful brawn to perform effectively in an arm whose crucial supporting role in trench warfare was by now clear. The technical challenge of artillery service, and the not-unwelcome prospect of fighting at long range rather than at close quarters, heightened the artillery’s appeal to the inquiring mind. With an average strength of 130 men, a battery seemed the unit most conveniently raised and replenished from a single source, the consideration uppermost in the arguments of the students who pressed for a University of Toronto battery. Once authorized the 67th Battery was flooded with recruits hoping to carry the university’s banner to France and Flanders, but the Varsity gunners were not destined to serve together in a distinct formation. The 67th was formed just too late to be included in the establishment of the 4th Division of the CEF, and consequently would act as a depot battery, “sending drafts as necessary for reinforcements.” Although the Militia Department pledged to do its best to satisfy Falconer’s request that each draft of Varsity gunners be kept together on active service,

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the University of Toronto was never, to the regret of its members, to be “directly represented at the Front by any particular combatant unit.”153 The agreement between the Militia Department and Falconer specified “the formation of a Battery of Artillery to be called the University of Toronto Battery, the university providing the rank and file, Officers to be selected by the General Officer Commanding from university graduates already qualified in Artillery.” The first proviso was flexible, as inevitably it had to be. Of the first complement trained at the Niagara and Petawawa camps during the summer of 1916, three out of four were students or graduates of the university (many of them transfers from the COTC), who came in such quantity and quality that Falconer sought permission to have the unit recruit to overstrength. Between June and August the 67th was able to despatch three drafts totalling two hundred men overseas. The battery returned to Toronto badly in need of an infusion, which, on a campus drained of eligible recruits, was slow to materialize. As was the case with the OSTC, the 67th was increasingly diluted by “congenial” outsiders (“You can consider yourselves University men now, as you are in a University unit”),154 but the wish to preserve its core identity stirred the Varsity, the Students’ Administrative Council, and even Falconer himself to publish impassioned pleas in autumn 1916 calling on undergraduates “to redeem and retain the University character of this unit.”155 The appeals for volunteers in the only unit bearing the university’s name now invoked a motive far more visceral than duty, honour, or patriotism. Lists of Varsity men killed in the battles at Sanctuary Wood and Courcelette had filled the pages of the student newspaper during the fall of 1916 – here was incentive enough: “Let the memory of these our own brethren dry your eyes and nerve you to vengeance – yes, vengeance, and let your willing service in this become the instrument of the Lord to whom alone vengeance belongs.”156 The recruiting and training cycle of 1916–17 set the pattern for the following year.157 The spring graduation followed by the scattering of the students during the summer made for a barren autumn. The battery slowly built up its numbers during the academic session, when it trained at the Exhibition Camp, and by February was able to resume sending drafts of men overseas. The end of examinations in April released a new wave of recruits eager to do the intensive summer training at Camp Petawawa. Despite the fluctuations in manpower and frequent changes in personnel, the sailing lists record that, by the autumn of 1918, this depot battery had sent 856 men, more than half of them members of the university, into active service with the Canadian Field Artillery. Although formed as an alternative to the COTC, the



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Figure 2.11.  Members of the 67th (Varsity) Battery doing calisthenics in front of Convocation Hall, spring 1917.

67th owed a measure of its success to the Toronto Contingent, which, in addition to a source of trained recruits, supplied the battery with its first commanding officer, three lieutenants, and, most helpfully, five seasoned NCOs. Events were to show that the second proviso – requiring the battery to be commanded by officers who were graduates of the university, nominated by the competent military authorities and approved by Falconer – was cast in iron. The first to be placed in command, Lieutenant William J.T. Wright, a 1912 graduate, member of the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Engineering, and a COTC original who passed the first certificate “A” examination in May 1915, fully justified his selection with his efficient handling of the unit during its first ten months. His tenure, however, was disturbed by an incident, glossed over in accounts of the 67th Battery, that nearly ruptured the connection with the university and involved Falconer in the turmoil that led to the dismissal of the chaotic Sam Hughes from the Militia Department.158 The unit was operating smoothly under Wright, attaining a high standard of proficiency, when in late July Colonel Lang wrote to Falconer

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to inform him of a “bombshell” – to wit, the Militia Department’s appointment of Captain Edward P. Johnston as officer commanding the 67th Battery and the assignment of Lieutenant William P. Mulock to the unit.159 Both were first-year undergraduates, young and unready for their roles, who had been “foisted upon” the 67th in flagrant disregard of the university’s prerogatives.160 It was obvious to Lang “that political influence has been brought to bear,” with the result that “the Battery is being very much misused.” Lang’s protests were loudly seconded by Captain Needler, who declaimed against “the unbearable humiliation and indignity” visited upon the well-regarded Lieutenant Wright. With the interests of the OSTC equally in mind, he put it plainly to Falconer that, if the 67th Battery was subject to outside meddling, “it is no longer a university organization and should not have the university’s name attached to it.” It was Hughes’s doing, of course, in a manner all too consistent with his meddling in appointments or promotions. The “Mad Mullah” was currently in England, leaving his subordinates to deal with the rockets that Falconer fired into the corridors of the department.161 The president had long cultivated the administrator’s art of expressing strong emotions in measured language. His tartly worded missives condemned the injustice done to Lieutenant Wright and bemoaned the damage done to the battery’s morale: “Already the evil effect has been produced and I have received strong protests.” One can discern from their replies that the recipients sympathized with his complaints and were well aware that Hughes had violated the terms of the agreement – General Gwatkin even intimating to Falconer that, if the state of affairs in the Department persisted much longer, he would no longer wish to remain in his position – but they were powerless to act in the matter. Nor upon reconsideration was the parliamentary secretary prepared to undo the minister’s handiwork.162 Falconer therefore armed himself with a copy of the agreement and in September went to Ottawa to beard the returned Hughes in his den.163 No record of the meeting seems to have been kept, but the result speaks for Falconer’s success in reasserting the university’s control over the appointment of the 67th Battery’s officers. Johnston was put in charge of an overseas draft, and ended up a major in the Royal Garrison Artillery, in which, to his credit, he served capably in both Palestine and Flanders. Mulock went to another training battery. Wright was restored to command of the 67th Battery, which he held until March 1917, when he insisted on accompanying a draft to France. Correspondence concerning his successor and all subsequent appointments indicates that for the rest of the Battery’s existence the Militia Department, mercifully



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rid of Hughes in November 1916, adhered to the terms of the agreement with the university.164 A brief coda rounds out the story. Johnston’s mother, “grieved and hurt beyond words by the treatment my dear son has received,” wrote a letter to Falconer upbraiding him for depriving her son of command of the 67th and demanding that the president wield his influence to have him placed in command of another battery. Falconer did her the courtesy of a prompt and candid response. He pointed out that the young man should not have accepted a position for which he was neither qualified nor approved. What influence he had used had served to rectify an injustice to a fellow officer of proven competence whose appointment had gone through the proper channels. Furthermore, Falconer refused to intervene on Johnston’s behalf, for that would make him guilty of the same political manipulation he had gone to such lengths to counteract.165 Herein lies the larger significance of the episode. As president of the University of Toronto, Falconer had extensive connections and intercessory powers. His files bulge with requests for assistance or recommendations, yet his replies show that, when exercising his influence, he put the merits of the petitioners and integrity of the university ahead of personal concerns. The same considerations governed the administration of the COTC and its two subsidiary units, which Falconer and his military committee made every effort to quarantine against the contaminants of favouritism, patronage, or any outside interference that might infect the university’s signature military organizations. With what the Varsity described as the widely recognized university spirit pervading its ranks, the 67th Battery was the closest thing to a “pals battalion” that the University of Toronto raised during the Great War. Even after the gunners it produced were widely dispersed on active service, their common background and their months together in training fostered an “agreeable companionship” among its members that lasted for more than six decades. The 67th (Varsity) Battery Association began with a reunion dinner in 1919 and carried on until 1983, when the last handful of members donated the association’s remaining funds to charity and deposited the papers “preserving the name and fame of the 67th” in the university archives.166 Among these comprehensive holdings are the issues of Battery Banter, the association’s annual newsletter, which chronicled its activities and events from 1933 to 1979 and often published reminiscences and diary extracts from members whose enlistment in the 67th set them on a path to Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele – “a dreadful place, not much to gain or lose, but it had to be taken” – and on to Amiens and the Hundred Days. These records

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show the 67th Battery Association to have been the most durable and closely knit of the ex-servicemen’s clubs formed on campus after the war, no doubt because it furthered the unique comradeship of a unit that, in contrast to its counterparts, had grown out of the wishes of the students and, to a greater extent than the COTC and OSTC, had given Varsity men the chance to demonstrate their allegiance to both country and alma mater. “Military training is now a University subject” Eclipsed by the OSTC and the 67th Battery, the Toronto Contingent of the COTC spent the 1916–17 academic year in a sort of limbo. Much depleted in strength, its founding officers on duty elsewhere, it lacked the cohesion and purpose of its first two years. Once the pride of the university, the corps now drew adverse commentary as the second-best option for university men, since only those unwilling or unable to go overseas would join it. “Why train large numbers of men who do not intend to enlist?” chided the Varsity in October 1916, posing a question to which the COTC offered no satisfactory answer over the months that followed.167 Although the annual summaries of the contingent’s activities put a brave face on its attempts to give awkward freshmen and unfit seniors a semblance of martial vigour, the Varsity sent readers (then and now) scurrying for a dictionary when it categorized the COTC’s performance: “Indecision and fasciculation is the curse of any institution and the C.O.T.C. of last year proved no exception … the fact remains that the C.O.T.C. as a whole was a bungle.”168 The malaise afflicting the Toronto Contingent that year arose from more than its internal failings. As the Dominion government closed its hand round the nettle of conscription, the Militia Department turned its back on the COTC, cutting off the annual grants for militia training in May 1917 and cancelling the officer training courses. By now the CEF had more officer material than it needed, and henceforth would fill all vacancies with battle-hardened men risen through the ranks, as opposed to student trainees holding “certificates purporting to qualify them as officers.” The introduction of compulsory military service also rendered the COTC superfluous as a recruiting body, since all Toronto students judged fit for overseas service would be registered and called up by the authorities in Military District No. 2. The Militia Department had no objection to universities keeping their contingents intact to offer basic drill to their students, as long as they made no further requests for funding or equipment;169 but with regard to the immediate priorities of enlisting and training soldiers for the front, officer training corps served



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no further use – except at American universities, which, upon the US entry into the war in April 1917, found themselves in the same position as their Canadian counterparts three years before. Requests for qualified instructors came pouring in to Falconer, who consulted with the Militia Department on the choice of men to be sent.170 All were returned soldiers, and most had done their initial training with the COTC.171 The passage of the Military Service Act on 29 August 1917 sounded the death knell for the COTC at the smaller universities, which in any case no longer had the wherewithal to maintain their contingents. Toronto, however, both by circumstance and by choice, was able to refashion the COTC to serve the interests of the university and the war effort. There were still upwards of 850 male undergraduates on campus at the beginning of the 1917–18 session, more than enough to justify a contingent that could prepare men under age for their coming military duties and provide training for all students physically able to undertake it. Such a contingent would benefit medical and dental students in the final two years of their programs, who could do military training in preparation for service in the Army Medical and Dental Corps. The continuation of military training on campus would also forestall the university’s critics, sure to be aroused once more by the recriminatory debates over compulsory service. The steps Falconer took to inject fresh impetus into military training at Toronto, however, were intended above all to help pave the way for conscription, a measure he fully endorsed as fair and necessary once the tide of voluntary enlistments ebbed in the second half of 1916. Aware of the delicacy of Prime Minister Borden’s position, and eager to assist “in deepening a sense of national purpose,” Falconer sought to ensure “that the University should take her share in the leadership of the country in this regard.”172 Toronto was neither the first nor the only university to make military training compulsory – by early 1917 six had already done so and others were entertaining the notion – but a move in this direction would reinforce the already strong support for conscription in the universities, the city of Toronto, and the province of Ontario. In December 1916 Falconer signed a resolution from the Caput – the university’s disciplinary board – calling for universal military training in the university and requesting the Board of Governors “to authorise such measures as may be found necessary to this end.” A concurring resolution from the university Senate the next month lent academic sanction to the proposal and left final approval in the hands of the board. In May 1917, the same month that Borden returned from England convinced that the successful prosecution of the war required the imposition of conscription, the Board of Governors presented its own resolution supporting compulsory military instruction. It was a

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sharp break with the past, both as a departure from the hallowed tradition of volunteerism in Canada and an act without precedent in the history of the university.173 Military training was now integrated within the curriculum as a course of instruction that students were obliged to take and to abide by its rules and regulations. All male students enrolled for the 1917–18 session had to present themselves for a medical examination by the physical director.174 Those deemed unfit for military training were to do a course in physical education to remedy their defects, while those incapable of doing physical training could apply for an exemption, as could anyone with the moral fortitude to bear the stigma of a conscientious objector – “as yet none of this genus has appeared,” reported the Varsity with icy satisfaction. Students “who passed the doctor” were attested in the COTC and assigned to one of the three companies that met twice a week for an hour and a half to put its members through elementary drill and weapons training. Attendance and neatness on parade were the main criteria for success in the course and were therefore strictly monitored. Students who did not attend 80 per cent of the drills faced academic penalties and, if eligible for overseas service, might be turned over to the military registrar for enlistment.175 Medical and dental students liable to the draft were allowed to finish their courses provided they attended the military training classes.176 Woe betide those who did not, as four “tooth-pullers” found in March 1918 when their claims for exemption were denied for lack of attendance at drill and, pour encourager les autres, were inducted for overseas service.177 Since the task – and the not inconsiderable expense – of instituting compulsory military training fell to the university alone,178 the organization and personnel of the Toronto Contingent were absorbed into a new Department of Military Studies, which was “to have a director and as many instructors as the Board may authorise and pay.” With one eye on the continuation of military training for the duration of the war and the other on the resumption of the COTC once the war was over, Falconer appointed Colonel Lang to be director of military studies in June 1917.179 As the liaison between the military and the university authorities, Lang prepared two memoranda, one for the officers of the COTC, the other for Falconer, to explain the procedures for the 1917–18 year.180 The Toronto Contingent of the COTC would administer the course of military instruction under the auspices of the Department of Military Studies. The COTC would provide each company with officers and NCOs to carry out the prescribed training, and record the attendance and progress of each member. After outlining the organization of the course, Lang concluded with a firm reminder to the officers that their



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duties “can not be undertaken in any half-hearted manner. Military Training is now a University subject and must be treated as conscientiously and thoroughly as would be any other academic subject.” It was a faint echo of the spirit of 1914. Compulsory training did not bring out the same cheerful earnestness that characterized the first volunteers, nor did universal military training work to the benefit of all. The Varsity reported that, of the 886 men examined at the beginning of the session, just 142 – less than 20 per cent – were assigned to Category A as fit for combatant units.181 Even had they wished to, the great majority of the male undergraduates stood little chance of doing military service, much less being sent overseas. Not surprisingly many fretted at the inconvenience and seeming pointlessness of mandatory drill. Grumbles in the Varsity and the occasional impertinence to officers revealed the undercurrents of resentment among the students.182 The COTC files contain an interesting document detailing the “objections and unsatisfactory features” gleaned from the students during the 1917–18 year.183 Complaints centred on the uniforms as ill-fitting, uncomfortable hand-me-downs that, even more annoyingly, were indistinguishable from CEF uniforms, making the students targets for ridicule from returned men and, on occasion, subject to arrest on the street by the military police, who mistook them for soldiers without a pass. Many found the training boring and redundant, no different from the drills already done in high school. Universal training led to unwieldy classes of 200–250, too large to meet indoors in inclement weather; and because drill was rigidly timetabled between 4:00 and 5:30 p.m., the frequent lack of coordination between faculties and departments resulted in scheduling conflicts and overcrowding in the limited space available. What students resented most was the loss of their own time, either from having to remain on campus or travel quite some distance to attend the late afternoon drills.184 This cahier de doléances presents a very different picture from the one drawn in the official reports of the corps’ activities, yet all could agree on one point, that the training had improved the overall fitness of the students: “This was noticeable at the opening of the Fall term of 1918, when the students of the previous year who came up again for a physical examination were invariably placed in a higher category.”185 If anything should be made compulsory, ran more than one opinion, it was gym class.186 Even if the experiment in compulsory military training was not altogether a happy one, it did clarify thoughts on the shape the COTC should assume after the war. The students’ complaints made the case that the COTC functioned best as a voluntary and selective unit, not least because “a considerable percentage of the students are for one reason

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or another neither of the type nor of the character likely to make creditable and efficient officers.” For purposes of recruitment and morale, the officers and NCOs should be members of the university staff, more adept at dealing with students than the imported drill sergeants whose profanity and caustic attitude had grated on the sensibilities of educated young men and hardened their opposition to compulsory drill.187 The scope of COTC instruction should be extended beyond infantry to include other arms and services, which could draw candidates combining military with professional qualifications, particularly in engineering, medicine, and dentistry. Musings on the future of the COTC at Toronto coincided with the broader discussion of the program. Early in 1917 a committee appointed by the National Conference of Canadian Universities had circulated a questionnaire among the institutions with COTC contingents. The replies showed just how idiosyncratically the COTC had been run, tailored as it was to conditions in a widely varying group of eighteen universities, each pursuing different policies with regard to the time allotted to military instruction, academic credit, staff participation, compulsion, facilities, and government assistance. The committee’s report noted the generally favourable attitude towards continuing the COTC, and recommended “that efficiency and cooperation in the work be obtained by adopting a uniform course of training throughout all universities and colleges.”188 For the moment, however, all this lay somewhere beyond the horizon. The war trudged on, and so did compulsory training, pausing only when the first wave of influenza and a shortage of coal forced the university to close temporarily in the winter of 1917–18, and again when the second, more virulent wave of the influenza epidemic swept over the city in the fifth October of the war.189 “A new day of peace is bursting upon us, and it is a happy, happy day” The train of events that began with the great Allied offensive in August 1918 brought as sudden and sweeping a change over the university as had the onset of war in the summer of 1914. Students returned for the 1918–19 session cautiously but increasingly hopeful that, after four years and many false dawns, the day of final victory was at hand. Excitement at the prospect of victory was curbed, however, by feelings of sorrow at a death toll higher than in any previous campaign – one of every six University of Toronto men killed in the Great War fell during the war-winning advance of the Hundred Days. The relief and



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jubilation felt throughout the university on 11 November found simple, moving expression in the Roll of Service: “the long agony was over … and for a day all gave themselves up to common rejoicing.” With “a new day of peace bursting upon us,” as Falconer hailed the occasion, the whole flow of the previous four years suddenly reversed as a university geared for yet another year of war now hastened to restore itself to its proper state as an institution of higher learning. The efforts to send its young men overseas were now devoted to bringing them back and reabsorbing them into a session already disrupted by the influenza epidemic and the unforeseen end of the war, and to improvising courses for the returning men eager to resume their studies.190 As swiftly as it had mobilized in 1914, the university dismantled its training apparatus and bade farewell to the air force cadets and other trainees who had so recently given the grounds the appearance of a bustling military camp in the heart of Toronto. The continuing appeals to buy Victory Bonds reminded everyone that the war still exacted treasure even if the bloodletting had ended; but with the fighting over, the students’ half-hearted compliance with the orders summoning them to the still-mandatory drills stiffened into outright refusal. By January 1919, “student opposition to the existing regulations was so vociferous that the Students’ Administrative Council approached the Caput with a view to having these regulations suspended.”191 Although neither the Caput nor Falconer wished to terminate the course in military instruction, this was one case where discretion was the better part of valour. The students were voting with their feet, and a host of more urgent priorities now beset the university. Falconer therefore announced that, “without accepting as valid all the objections raised by the [Students’ Administrative Council] … the regulations requiring military or physical training are suspended for the rest of the current session.”192 The wartime COTC, the second great era in the university’s military history, had come to an end. “What pictures shall we keep in our memories of these four years,” wrote Falconer in the first full month of peace after the Armistice, “the first forming of the C.O.T.C., their first review, 1,500 strong in plain clothes by H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught; the departure of the early batteries, the 25th, the 26th, the 67th detachments … the drafts from the Overseas Officers’ Training Corps; the first Tank Company.”193 In all retrospectives the COTC and its offshoots came first among the university’s many contributions to the war effort. Strangely, however, despite the painstaking tabulation of the 5,651 Varsity men and women who served, and the commemoration of the 628 who died on active service, no precise tally of the men who passed through the Toronto Contingent

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can be given.194 An admittedly provisional reckoning, assembled from the notices in the conjoined Roll of Honour and Roll of Service, confirms the central role of the COTC in “affording opportunity to many willing hands and hearts to do their best or to give of their substance for the winning of the war,”195 above all in upholding the conviction that university men had a duty not just to fight but to lead. Less than 30 per cent (1,538) of the university’s men served in the ranks. Two-thirds of these were undergraduates who for the most part appear to have enlisted directly, since few list “C.O.T.C.” in their service records even though it is likely that a good many of those who signed up after 1916 did at least some training in the contingent. Of the 4,113 who served as officers, 726 were promoted from the ranks during the war (mainly from the university companies of the Princess Patricias or the 67th Varsity Battery), leaving 3,387 who entered service at the level expected of university men. Of these, nearly half (1,690) include “C.O.T.C.” in their service records, the great majority belonging to the large contingents of 1914–15 or 1915–16. Roughly one in three (197) of the university’s war dead are known to have enrolled in the COTC.196 Although some allowance must be made for errors or omissions in the compilation of these records, the significance of the COTC, practical and symbolic, in the university’s experience of the Great War needs no elaboration. Yet the numbers say only so much. In the spirit of his predecessor McCaul, who lamented the deaths of his “distinguished young men of great promise,” Falconer was moved to write sadly: “we have lost many of our best.” To read the brief obituaries in the Roll of Honour, with their testaments to the courage and character of so many struck down in the prime of youth, is to realize that the impact of the war on family, university, city and country, is beyond calculation.

Chapter 3

Soldiering on in Peacetime: The University of Toronto Contingent, 1919–1939

“The order of ceremony is under the direction of the C.O.T.C.” Armistice Day 1924. In the pale, slanting light of a November morning, a crowd estimated at two thousand stood in silent remembrance of the Varsity men at rest in France and Flanders. They had come in such numbers both to pay their respects to the dead and to lend their presence to a ceremony of particular significance to the University of Toronto. For the first time since the end of the war, and five years since the Duke of Devonshire had laid the cornerstone on the first Armistice Day in 1919, the faculty and students congregated before the monument raised to perpetuate the memory of the war dead and the meaning of their sacrifice. The Soldiers’ Tower now stood complete as the university’s testament to the ideals – service, valour, honour, loyalty – exemplified and passed on by the fallen heroes whose names were carved into the wall of the adjoining arcade. The location enhanced its symbolism. Built between University College and Hart House, the memorial connected a building representing the university’s past to another heralding its future, two eras linked yet set apart by the Great War. The first service to be held “in the beautiful old world atmosphere of the university’s new Campo Santo” proved to be a poignant, historic event made all the more memorable by the presence of the University of Toronto Contingent of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps.1 The inaugural ceremony at the Soldiers’ Tower was also meant to set the precedent for Armistice Day commemoration at the university. Until then the anniversary of the war’s end had been observed faithfully, and most reverentially, but there had as yet been no fixed place or time for the general service of remembrance. To ensure that the ceremony would be well attended and fittingly conducted, the Alumni Association, which had taken charge of the memorial’s construction

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and the annual services, issued appeals through President Falconer and the Varsity urging all to attend and, in recognition of the contingent’s primacy of honour in the university’s war record, entrusted the arrangements to the COTC. “Even if it be at some personal sacrifice to their convenience,” all members of the corps were required to attend the preparatory drills, where, under the close eye of Colonel Lang, they rehearsed their part in the proceedings.2 At 10:45 a.m. on 11 November the entire contingent, led by its band, set off from its headquarters on College Street, along the road winding through the campus to its assigned place before the memorial. The brief, simple ceremony followed the protocols that had by this time become standard on that day and have changed but little ever since: a hymn, the Last Post, two minutes of silence, Reveille, and the laying of wreaths. So complete was the stillness that the great bell at City Hall a mile away could be heard in all its solemn clarity as it sounded the eleventh hour. Throughout the service, two members of the corps garbed in Great War helmets and uniforms stood with bowed heads in front of the panels listing the dead. The rest of the contingent, wearing the white cap bands that now distinguished officer cadets,3 offered in their tidy performance of the rituals of military mourning an apt tribute to the students who had become soldiers ten years before. The service that commenced with the arrival of the COTC ended with its departure once the last wreath was laid, but, as was common in the years just after the war, many in attendance lingered for some time afterwards, deep in thought or private sorrow. The 1924 ceremony was as meaningful for the COTC as it was for the university. It confirmed in the eyes of all the return to robust good health of a body that had very nearly given up the ghost at the end of the war. A grand total of fourteen names appear on the roll from the 1919–20 session, the first full year of peace, when the students, understandably weary of all things military and desperate not to forsake entirely the long deferred joie de vivre of their university days, flung themselves into everything but the COTC. Yet thanks to the support of President Falconer and the efforts of the indefatigable Colonel Lang, the contingent had clung to life and with each passing year had increased in size and scope. By the 1924–25 session, the contingent had nearly two hundred members working towards lieutenant’s or captain’s qualifications in the infantry, engineer, and medical corps. Over the next five years courses in artillery, signals, and even aviation would be introduced to prepare officers for those branches of the service. Even if the peacetime contingent seemed a far cry in numbers and appearance from its fabled wartime ancestor, the COTC, under the aegis of the Department of Military Studies, nevertheless established itself by the mid-1920s as an integral part of the university and a reliable source of officers for the militia and the Permanent Force.



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Figure 3.1.  Armistice Day, 11 November 1925, with the University of Toronto Contingent marshalled before the Soldiers’ Tower. UTA A1965-0019/001(024)

The rehabilitation and growth of the COTC paralleled the university’s return to normal in the years after the war and its vibrancy in the second half of the 1920s. This first stage in the history of the inter-war contingent would come to an abrupt end, however, with the onset of the

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Great Depression. The penury of the 1930s curtailed the COTC’s activities and wrung even greater measures of resourcefulness and dedication from its officers and members. The hard times were disquieting times as well. The rise of the dictators and the threat of another war rekindled the concerns that had first surfaced in the 1920s as the hope of a better world emerging from the Allied victory faded into disillusionment. The reputation of the fallen remained inviolate, the Soldiers’ Tower an ever-present reminder of their “sublime heroism and sublime martyrdom.” Yet as early as 1924 the Varsity editorial on the Armistice Day service questioned the worth of the sacrifice, and expressed a sentiment widely amplified by the post-war generation of Canadian students: “we feel that civilized people should adjust their differences without loss of life.” In an eerily prescient admonition, the editorialist warned that “twenty years from now we, the youth of today, will be the rulers of our country. Before we plunge our youth into an abyss of death let us remember what we ask them to sacrifice … so that we shall hesitate to consider, before we marshal our youth to further heroism and further martyrdom.”4 Each November triggered a spate of articles and editorials in the student newspaper that echo the changing reactions to the Great War and provide the most vivid contemporary perspectives on the COTC.5 Armistice Day (renamed Remembrance Day in 1931) was the one occasion in the academic year when the university’s military unit held centre stage. Objections to the participation of the COTC – not to mention its very existence – reveal the growing presence of anti-war groups at Toronto and other universities during the 1930s, which saw in the COTC the embodiment of their worst fears. In 1925 Falconer could look back on the dedication of the Soldiers’ Tower as an auspicious day on which “the faculty, students, and Canadian Officers’ Training Corps all united to pay their respects to those whom the tower commemorates”;6 ten years later the president of the Alumni Association had to take to the pages of the Varsity to explain the evolution of Remembrance Day services at the university and to justify the place accorded to the COTC. The same issue featured a headline, “Students reject militaristic Armistice ceremony,” that introduced one of several articles describing the plans of the Student Christian Movement to hold an alternative service on 11 November focusing on the theme of peace and pointedly eschewing any trace of military commemoration. Remembrance Day would become an annual catharsis at the university as tensions found release in sharp exchanges. Pacifists denounced the COTC as “a school for murder” and demanded its abolition. Supporters of the contingent



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riposted by equating pacifism with moral cowardice and insisting that military preparedness offered the only effective deterrent to war.7 It is against this background of two contrasting decades, the recovery and vitality of the 1920s, followed by the hardships and anxieties of the 1930s, that the story of the COTC between the wars unfolds. The second birth of the contingent and its operation in peacetime might make for a less stirring tale than the chanson de geste of 1914–18, but it culminates in two achievements of lasting credit to the University of Toronto men who persevered in the thankless task of maintaining an officer reserve in a country averse to military training and expenditure save when absolutely necessary. The COTC made ends meet out of the annual grants from the Department of National Defence, and acquired discretionary funds only because the members returned most of their pay to the corps – no small sacrifice during the Depression. Through careful investment of surplus funds, the Toronto Contingent accumulated the money eventually used to build a proper drill hall in the summer of 1939, just in time to receive a new wave of students in need of training. Yet even before enrolment in the COTC skyrocketed upon Canada’s declaration of war on 10 September 1939, the contingent had already rendered invaluable service to the university and to the country. Over the preceding twenty years, over a thousand Varsity men had passed the qualifying examinations set by the War Office in London, forming a significant portion of the ten thousand students across the country who qualified with the COTC between the wars and were registered as provisional subalterns in 1939.8 Many now came forward to train, instruct, and officer an army that, for the second time in twenty-five years, was being created almost out of nothing. The Canadian Army could hardly have been less prepared than it was at the outbreak of the Second World War. What semblance of readiness it had it owed in no small measure to the COTC. “It is to be regretted that military training has taken a step backward instead of forward” The end of the Great War left the COTC betwixt and between. It had outlived its usefulness in wartime, and in the busy euphoria of peace it seemed to have long overstayed its welcome on campus. Toronto maintained the largest of the three university contingents still in existence during the 1918–19 session, but the sight of khaki was vanishing by the day. The OSTC had been disbanded two weeks after the Armistice and its quarters in Burwash Hall so swiftly reconverted into a men’s

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residence that “the military aspect had gone entirely.”9 Falconer’s reluctantly issued emancipation proclamation freeing students from compulsory drill emptied the training contingent of all but twenty stalwarts who preserved the COTC in name only while their former comrades bade a dry-eyed farewell to the parade ground and joined the rush to bring back “the good old days.”10 University administrators, scrambling to absorb the waves of discharged servicemen returning to resume their studies, hurriedly repossessed the facilities lent to the military, and pressed Falconer to recoup the sums expended by the university to carry on training without government assistance after 1917. It would be quite some time before the COTC itself closed its books on the war, as the final settlements of back pay, insurance claims, and the disposal of personal effects occupied the contingent’s paymaster well into the 1920s.11 Given the welcome release of the war’s grip, the utter lack of interest among the students, and the far more urgent priorities of the moment, few would have been surprised or sorry had the COTC simply faded away in the return to normal.12 The first eighteen months of its peacetime existence were to prove a critical stage in the revival of the COTC across the country.13 Its will to live was strongest at Toronto, where a contingent, reconstituted as a voluntary unit and integrated within the university curriculum, figured prominently in the plans for the post-war era. Falconer was quick to make this intention clear. In January 1919 he sent a letter to a member of the Board of Governors admitting defeat on compulsory drill, but expressing the hope “that when our officers get back, especially those who had so much to do with originating the C.O.T.C. they may be able to carry on a regular C.O.T.C. in such a way as that it will attract a large number of students to join it.”14 His hopes were pinned, of course, on Colonel Lang, whom Falconer promptly undertook to have reconfirmed as director of the Department of Military Studies. It will be recalled that the Board of Governors had approved the creation of the department and Lang’s appointment in 1917 as measures necessary to continue military training at the university for the duration of the war. Falconer now proposed to attach the department to the Faculty of Arts and to introduce military studies into the courses of instruction. A joint committee of the Senate and the Board of Governors was formed to draft the regulations for this new subject. Tabled for final approval by the president’s Committee on Military Affairs in March 1919, the proposal called for “two courses of training and study counting as a subject for the Arts Degree and leading to the C.O.T.C. certificate ‘A’ or ‘B’.” The courses were to be “of a highly educative nature confirming the systematic study (and practical work where necessary) of organization,



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administration, tactics, strategy, topography, military history, military law, the law of nations affecting war, and other military subjects.”15 The emphasis on technical content in these courses and the eventual extension of the military studies option to students in engineering and medicine fit with the trend at Toronto, as at other Canadian universities after the Great War, towards professional education and the development of specialists in practical fields.16 The student working towards a militia certificate was seeking the equivalent of a licence to practise that complemented his university degree and opened the way to a career in military or public service. But qualification also required drill with the COTC; and here the regulations introduced for the 1919–20 session offered an incentive to combine classroom instruction with membership in the corps. Even the least soldierly undergraduates, in an honest moment, would have conceded that the training imposed in 1917 had improved their overall health. Compulsory drill was gone, but in its place came a course in physical fitness, featuring supervised instruction in gymnastics, swimming, and games. “A man’s influence and ambition will carry him only so far as his body will take him,” declared Dr. James Barton, the university’s physical director and first among the apostles of the new dispensation on student fitness, at the end of a report urging the university to take the lead in implementing compulsory physical education.17 This reprise of the old theme of a mens sana in corpore sano marked another shift in universities and schools after the war, as military drill gave way to physical education as the incubator of personal and civic virtue.18 Barton’s program called for students to undergo a medical examination and take two hours of exercise a week, which Falconer and the Board of Governors agreed to make mandatory for all undergraduates in the first and second years. One suspects, however, that the governors, contemplating a surge in numbers and the potent alchemy of worldly veterans mingling with callow undergraduates, also regarded compulsory physical education as a way to channel the energies of restless young men into the healthy recreation on offer in the magnificent new Hart House. But just as military studies could be substituted for less alluring subjects in the academic curriculum – religious knowledge headed the list – so too could students elect to take weekly drill in the COTC in lieu of physical training if they so desired. Recast in this form, the COTC might well appeal to the enthusiastic and lure the reluctant. Military education and training were now options within the curriculum, not burdensome addenda to the student’s day, and might contribute to an academic degree while satisfying the new physical fitness requirement. Electives in the Department

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of Military Studies and drill with the COTC might also strike the otherwise disinclined as the lesser of two inescapable evils. Hopes ran high that these provisions would bring about “the successful rehabilitation of the C.O.T.C. on a firm basis and its reorganisation along even more extended lines than in 1914-1915,” but a number of factors conspired against such a phoenix-like rise from the ashes. The military courses had been approved too late to be included in the 1919–20 calendar, nor did they contain a section on the revamped COTC. The publicity given at the beginning of the academic year to the “pioneering” Department of Military Studies – “no student looking forward to public life in the British Empire can afford to miss its opportunities” – could not dispel the all-too-recent memories of the hated “tramp, tramp, tramp” of compulsory drill. No one, least of all the returned men, wanted to hear of “the advantages that training would give were another conflict foisted on the world” – surely as thorough a misreading of the current mood as there could be.19 All of twenty students enrolled in military studies; fourteen opted for drill in lieu of physical training.20 The contingent, in short, had been reborn prematurely. Lang admitted as much at the end of the 1919–20 session: “The military activities of this University have suffered from the general reaction common to all militia units since the war and efforts to enrol students for a systematic course of training were unsuccessful.”21 It was just as well that military studies did not reel in great numbers that first year, for there would have been nowhere to put them. Lang had cast about for quarters in the spring of 1919, training his sights first on the Dining Hall, then on the lower floors of the Physics Building, but both requests were declined the minute the letters emerged from their envelopes.22 Demand for space was acute as enrolment rose by a third, compelling overwhelmed departments to use kitchens, residences, and other rooms “in which students should not be required to take instruction.”23 The Department of Military Studies would have been reduced to vagrancy had it not been within Lang’s authority as director of chemistry to commandeer classrooms in the Chemistry Building and install the COTC across the road in the basement of the Mining Building. This state of affairs could not go on indefinitely, of course, nor could Lang’s dual monarchy as head of two departments. The terms of his appointment as director of military studies had not explicitly stipulated that he relinquish his position in chemistry. He apparently expected to carry on in both capacities until Falconer somewhat belatedly forced the issue in the spring of 1920. Lang was all but severed from the Department of Chemistry, and directed by the Board of Governors to devote his attention entirely to military studies and the COTC. The rather peremptory



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handling of this reassignment added a bitter aftertaste to the barren first year of peacetime officer training.24 To Lang’s credit as a man and a soldier, however, he set aside his own disappointment, cast in his lot with military studies,25 and dutifully applied himself to the task of laying the foundations for a more propitious second year. “I am led to understand that No. 184 College St. will shortly be available for University purposes” The COTC, in Lang’s analogy, was to the Department of Military Studies what the laboratory was to a science department: the place where the theoretical lessons of the classroom were tested and applied in practice.26 To concentrate the teaching of the department and the practical work of the corps in one central location and to have the facilities necessary for specialized instruction and the operation of a military unit were the prerequisites he deemed essential to the success of the enterprise when first he sought accommodation for his department. “Otherwise,” he warned, “the difficulties attendant on parades, instruction and lectures – all of which require material of some sort – will be very great and will not tend to popularize the department but the reverse.”27 His prediction had been borne out in 1919–20 and bid fair to come true again the following year unless suitable quarters could be found. Nestled into a corner lot beside the Chemistry Building was a former private residence that the university had purchased in 1916. The old Schomberger house at 184 College Street, with twenty-three rooms, had served as a makeshift women’s residence during the war, and was then leased to St Andrew’s College on the condition that “possession be given up … on three months’ notice if required for University purposes.”28 Getting wind that the house would be vacated at the end of the 1919–20 session, Lang at once wrote to Falconer “to ask for the favourable consideration of this request that these premises be allotted to me.” The house, perched on the southernmost edge of the campus, lacked as much as it offered, but it would at least put a roof over the contingent’s head: “While more centrally situated premises would be preferred – students coming from all colleges to these courses – the house now asked for would provide at least temporarily that home which any department aiming at successful development requires.” The president’s reply, although refraining from any immediate commitments in the face of the “tremendous pressure of accommodation on every side,” ended with a wink of assent: “I will, however, keep your letter.” When the use of 184 College came up for allocation, Falconer championed Lang’s cause before the Property Committee. Meanwhile,

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to help stake the contingent’s claim, Lang, with the assistance of Lieutenant Charles Wright, professor of architecture and COTC quartermaster, submitted drawings outlining the modestly priced conversion of the house into a headquarters for the Department of Military Studies and the COTC.29 The final say rested with the Board of Governors. Always kindly disposed towards inexpensive solutions, the board approved the request in June 1920 and allotted a sum not to exceed $500 for the necessary alterations; however, happy for the chance to kill three birds with one stone, the board shortly afterwards also granted space at 184 College to the Alumni Association and the Records Office.30 Be it ever so humble, and shared, and crowded, the house at 184 College was nevertheless the first real home that the University of Toronto Contingent had ever had. As the contingent grew and diversified during the 1920s, the inadequacies of these quarters grew ever more vexing, yet as the initially temporary home became permanent, it came to reflect the contingent’s character and quaint pride in doing more with less. Allowances from the university and from Ottawa provided for basic maintenance and occasional improvements to the building.31 Donations from friends of the university stocked the department’s library and reading room. To offer the students technical instruction “at no expense to the public,” Lang invited expert officers willing to accept a letter of thanks from the president in return for their services; he also coaxed the loan of tables, chairs, maps, and textbooks from the Militia Department.32 On the other hand, the students had to learn a vital part of the officer’s trade without a proper map room, for which no money could be got, and there was no place in the university’s building projects for a drill hall.33 The COTC secured permission to use a lawn down the street for drill in good weather, which sufficed for a few weeks each fall until the elements drove the companies into the old Gymnasium, the Mining Building, or the Engineering Building – any port in a storm. The long trek across campus for the arts students attending classes in military studies was offset by the shortened march to the University Avenue armoury where the COTC conducted its battalion parades and inspections. Spartan conditions and ad hoc arrangements aside, however, the greater benefit of a distinct home soon emerged as the department and the COTC began to attract “some of the best student material in the University.” Officer training, according to Lang, drew the type of student who “takes philosophically the lack of adequate accommodation and optimistically thinks of the day when his successors will have a suitable building on the University grounds. He knows that the Empire requires hard service from its sons and that it deserves



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Figure 3.2.  The COTC contingent and band photographed beside their headquarters at 184 College Street in 1924. Seated in the centre of the front row is Colonel Lang. To his right is James Roy Cockburn who commanded the contingent from 1930 to 1935; to his left, Henry Harrison Madill, Officer Commanding from 1935 to 1945. At the far left of the front row is SergeantMajor William Hunt whose efficiency and economy saw the contingent through the hardscrabble inter-war years. UTA A1968-0003/005P

most from those to whom most has been given.” The figures backed up these words, written when the Toronto Contingent was gaining notice for the quantity and quality of its members. Over two hundred and fifty attended the final parade in March 1923, and all thirty-seven candidates who sat the War Office examination that year were reported to have passed. The following year, three hundred and fifty presented themselves for the annual inspection, while fifty-six of fifty-seven candidates passed the examination, giving Toronto an enviable record of success it was to maintain throughout its two decades in the cramped but oddly stimulating environment at 184 College.34

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“With a view to establishing and maintaining the C.O.T.C. as a valuable military organization and utilizing to the fullest extent the academic instructions existing at the Universities” The COTC had been the foster child of the universities ever since the Militia Department had cut off funding to militia units in 1917. The all-consuming tasks of maintaining the CEF at peak efficiency and then of demobilizing over half a million men left the Militia Department no time for reflection on the future of the COTC until March 1920, when a circular sent out by the new director of military training, General Andrew McNaughton,35 indicated the government’s interest in resuming standardized officer training and qualification at the universities. The universities, for their part, had kept the door open by appointing a committee, of which Falconer was a member, “to wait on the Minister of Militia regarding support for the O.T.C.”36 The time had come to take up negotiations once again, and so the subject of military training at the universities was added to the agenda of the Seventh Conference of Canadian Universities, to be held at Laval, Quebec, in May 1920. Representatives from the Militia Department were invited to listen and respond to a set of preliminary recommendations drafted by Colonel Allan Magee of the McGill COTC.37 Both documents received a close reading from Lang as he assisted Falconer in his preparations for the conference. Twenty years of fashioning soldiers out of students had made Lang aware of the factors that set the COTC apart from the regular infantry schools. This experience led him to propose a number of revisions to the plans and regulations for a renewed officer training program.38 He began by insisting that the syllabus be as comprehensive and demanding as the one followed at the infantry schools, to avoid tainting the COTC as a back stairway to a commission in the militia or the Permanent Force. Furthermore the pass standards, which McNaughton had set rather low, must be raised so as to present students “who have the habit of study” with a challenge equal to their scholarly abilities. Not to do so, he warned, “will adversely affect the qualification and will not popularize the C.O.T.C.” Lang went on to recommend that the corps’s appeal and utility be broadened by adding engineer, medical, artillery, and signals units to the uniquely infantry model laid out in the existing regulations, as such diversification would tap the full potential of the COTC as a source for junior officers in all arms and services. Interesting, rigorous courses playing to the aptitude and technical education of the students; practical fieldwork; healthy inter-service rivalries; smart uniforms; decent pay; recognition of their attainments – Lang’s advice reveals his



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understanding of the constituency from which the peacetime COTC would recruit and the importance of emphasizing the professional and intellectual advantages it offered to able and ambitious young men. Lang’s purpose was to open the Militia Department’s eyes to the means of attracting students into the COTC and making the best use of their talents. Falconer’s was to ensure that the government bore the cost. It was the same argument on the same grounds that he had made ten years before, but the circumstances had since changed and were about to change again. Before the war the universities had envisioned very large contingents requiring considerable funding, whereas now even a university of Toronto’s size would support a contingent on a much smaller scale and at far less expense, using the equipment left over from the war and making do with the resources already at hand. Neither Falconer nor any of his fellow presidents so much as touched the old chestnut of money for drill halls.39 The financial aid they requested from the government was limited to the salaries of instructional and administrative staff and the costs of maintaining the buildings used by the COTC. Speaking for the military, Sir Willoughby Gwatkin, chief of the general staff, stated “that the General Staff was ready to co-operate in every way, and would render such financial assistance as could be secured,” an assurance which seemed to satisfy all present.40 Although no conclusive agreement on funding was reached, the 1920 conference did pave the way for the resumption of officer training at Canadian universities. The university presidents and the military delegates used the occasion to plight their troth to the peacetime COTC, the former hailing its benefits in forming officers, gentlemen, and good citizens; the latter affirming its importance as a source of officer material should the need arise.41 The universities carried on under their own arrangements with the government for four years before a general policy came into effect regarding funding for the COTC. The reasons for the delay and the agreement eventually reached take us ahead of the main story momentarily, but require brief review for the effect on the University of Toronto Contingent. Gwatkin’s pledge of financial support in 1920 had been made in all sincerity, but with little inkling of what the future held for military spending in Canada. The election of 1921, resulting in a Liberal government under the unmilitary and anti-military William Lyon Mackenzie King, marked the onset of a long drought for the Canadian militia, which found itself expected to combine efficiency with the most stringent economy.42 Hard pressed to provide even rudimentary training for the country’s militia units, yet forced to spin straw into something

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like gold, the recently amalgamated Department of National Defence took due notice in 1924 of “the very useful function in connection with military training in Canada that the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps is performing.”43 The progress made by the COTC since 1920, and the results – 456 candidates from nine universities passed the qualifying examinations in 1921–22 – warranted “some assistance … to the various Universities in order that satisfactory accommodation should be provided for their Contingents of this Corps.” The financial aid that the department saw fit to extend took the form of a yearly disbursement, calculated against the value of the buildings used by the COTC and the size of the contingent. The sum was paid out on the condition that the contingent complete the prescribed training, and subject to the military appropriations approved by Parliament in each fiscal year. It was a cumbersome funding formula, administered jointly by the Departments of National Defence and Public Works, that defrayed the COTC’s maintenance costs. This, coupled with the annual pay and capitation grants given to efficient members of the contingent – about $10 to $15 per man – represented the extent of government support for officer training: roughly $3,500 a year at Toronto during the 1920s, and $5,000 annually for the more diversified contingent of the 1930s.44 No great amount for any one university contingent, yet collectively no small portion of a tight budget when extended to all participating universities, investment in the COTC brought a good return in the eyes of military authorities attempting to compensate for an ill-served militia by developing a cadre of “scientifically trained officers who have completed a period of consecutive and systematic military training, on academic lines, of a nature calculated to produce good officers.”45 The intended ripple effect of the COTC was set out in 1925 by General James MacBrien, chief of the general staff, in an address to the University of Toronto Contingent. After praising their fine performance at the annual inspection and their results in the War Office examinations, he encouraged the members to put their own training to use after graduation by offering their services in turn as trainers to the militia.46 Modest though it was, the financial support to the COTC remained constant in bad times and worse. A decade later, in the depths of the Depression, when military spending dwindled to a fraction of what it had been when the funding arrangement came into effect, Colonel James Roy Cockburn, a COTC original risen to command of the Toronto Contingent, gave an interview to the Varsity in which he described the purpose of the corps as “maintaining a reserve force of officers grounded in fundamental military principles,” and declared that “the Department of National Defence at Ottawa looks upon the C.O.T.C. as one of the



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most important branches of the service, and it stands among the last to be affected by the curtailment of expense in that Department.”47 That a woefully underfunded department still ranked the COTC high among its priorities is, if nothing else, a reminder not to overlook the role of the universities, Toronto chief among them, in supporting officer training and preserving at least some measure of military professionalism in Canada during the inter-war period.48 “Not since the war has the Corps made such a good showing” The resurgence of the Toronto Contingent in the early 1920s coincided with the gradual stabilization of the university after a long disruption. The war had taken a great deal out of people, much more than at first they knew. In December 1920, contemplating the third Christmas since the Armistice, the Varsity published a moving editorial on the feeling of unrest among students still struggling with a deep sense of loss, not just for their absent fellows but also for the world they had known before 1914.49 But as the returned men left upon completing their studies, and the university as a whole regained its balance, the Department of Military Studies and the COTC began to draw plentifully from a student body ever more removed from the trauma of the war. The surge in membership that began in the 1920–21 session rewarded the efforts to put military training on solid ground after the forgettable first year. From then on the numbers rose until the limits placed on funding and the insufficiencies of 184 College capped official enrolment at 275, a total the contingent nearly always reached between 1925 and 1939 and could easily have exceeded in most years.50 This ascent owed something to Falconer’s steadfast support and to the favourable publicity given by the Varsity in the contingent’s formative years. It owed much more, however, to the “zeal and energy” shown by Lang and his subordinates in making military studies an attractive yet serious academic option and in finding ways to boost the popularity of the COTC.51 When it became evident at the beginning of the 1920–21 year that timetabling conflicts kept many students from taking military instruction, Lang invited those still interested to speak with him about specially arranged classes.52 In subsequent years he deferred the start of the regularly scheduled military courses until the students had settled into their routines and could find room for duplicate classes.53 Without this willingness to accommodate the students, the Department of Military Studies would have been a much less busy place – nearly half (61) of the 140 enrolled in 1923–24 attended special qualifying classes, while 49 of the 174 enrolled the following year availed themselves of the same

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opportunity.54 Similar flexibility guided the schedule for the two hours of COTC drill required each week, as the companies held off training until mid-October so that the students’ other commitments could be taken into account when determining the times. It helped immeasurably that military studies was identified with a figure as affable and courteous towards the students as Lang. As an officer, gentleman, and instructor, he was not alone in advertising the reputation and achievements of the COTC.55 Falconer’s hope that the officers associated with the corps’ heroic early days would give new impetus to military training was fulfilled by several distinguished veterans now with the university’s teaching staff. Returning with the rank of major, the aforementioned James Roy Cockburn (along with Captain William Wright of 67th Battery fame) guided C Company’s evolution into a unit for prospective military engineers; Major Waring Cosbie, recipient of a Military Cross with the Canadian Army Medical Corps at Vimy Ridge, commanded B Company, reserved for students in the final two years of their medical studies; Lieutenant Kenneth Conn, a decorated infantry officer, took charge of the arts men in A Company; as well, Major Henry H. Madill and Major Thomas R. Loudon rejoined the contingent to serve as adjutant and second in command, respectively – Loudon would succeed Lang as officer commanding in 1926, and Madill would take over from Cockburn in 1935. Although very much a homegrown unit that prided itself on promoting from within, the Toronto Contingent benefited from outside officers attached for instruction – most of all from General George S. Cartwright, who brought a wealth of knowledge from his remarkably varied career with the engineers in Canada, India, the Middle East, and on the Western Front.56 Lang engaged him in 1921 as a special lecturer – in other words, at no cost to the university – to teach military history and other subjects the university faculty could not cover.57 His largely unremunerated services contributed to the high rate of success in the qualifying examinations and were gratefully recognized by Lang in his annual reports. So indispensable did Cartwright become that he was asked to stay on as Lang’s successor as director of military studies, where he remained until his retirement at age seventy-one in 1937. Three years later, however, he insisted on heeding his country’s call a second time and returned to the department as an occasional lecturer. The contingent did not thrive by work alone. The most inspired step to attract members and to cement the COTC in the affections of the university was the resurrection of the band in the fall of 1920. As well connected in musical circles as he was in the military, Lang was able to secure the services of Captain John Slatter, director of music of the 48th



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Highlanders, who had formed a short-lived contingent band early in 1915.58 A remarkably effective teacher, Slatter was able to select and train a marching band within four weeks of the term’s opening – his ability to transform a gaggle of inexperienced musicians virtually overnight into an orderly, harmonious ensemble never failed to amaze throughout his twenty years with the university.59 Its appearance was warmly greeted by the Varsity, which noted that bands had become “salient features” in American colleges and expressed the hope that a COTC band would in like fashion enliven Toronto’s scene and offer undergraduates a new outlet for their musical talents.60 During its first year, the band played at COTC parades or ceremonies only, but its role and presence steadily increased after 1921 as it helped to fuel the renewed passion for intercollegiate sports. By performing at games against rival Queen’s or McGill, and entertaining the crowd at half-time, the band raised the profile of the COTC and earned a small profit from the fees paid by the Athletic Association.61 By the mid-1920s as many as eighty hopefuls competed for fifty places each October, and those chosen received

Figure 3.3.  The COTC band proceeding to the Remembrance Day service in 1937. Visible at the far right is the bandmaster, Captain John Slatter of the 48th Highlanders of Canada. UTA A1968-0003/009(028)

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permission to substitute participation in the band for drill or physical education. Growing demand and popularity, however, put greater strain on the bandsmen and the COTC’s finances.62 Even though tag days organized by the Students’ Administrative Council and the annual spring recitals that filled Convocation Hall netted goodly sums, the effort and cost of maintaining “the Varsity’s snappy little band” eventually outran the resources of the COTC. After assuming two identities as the COTC and Varsity Band in 1926–27,63 the band waxed and waned until taken firmly in hand by the Students’ Administrative Council at the beginning of the 1932–33 session.64 It seemed a justifiable return for the money spent on new uniforms and instruments to have a truly university band that buoyed morale in dismal times. The Blue and White Band, the one organization on campus that drew members from every corner of the university, flourished anew under Slatter’s continuing tutelage and represented Varsity at sporting and festive occasions throughout the 1930s.65 It was always built around a solid nucleus of military musicians, who simply changed uniform to play at all COTC parades and ceremonies.66 When enough time had passed and the sight of students in khaki piqued curiosity once again, the new COTC began to claim its share of attention. It was a sign that the contingent was back on its feet that, by 1923–24, the Varsity was opening not with appeals for recruits but with details of the military studies program and glowing accounts of the corps’ record in the previous year’s examinations.67 In addition to the usual reports on the COTC’s activities throughout the session – initial organization, drill and shooting hours, Remembrance Day rehearsals, supplementary classes for the November and March qualifying examinations, and preparations for the final inspection and pay parade – the student newspaper occasionally ran items out of the ordinary, as when it inquired into the possibility of women’s enrolling in military studies or the COTC.68 This was a question decades ahead of its time, but one which Lang did not dismiss out of hand. In theory, women could join, though none as yet had shown any inclination to do so, and while the practical side of military training such as musketry or drill would likely hold no attraction, he supposed that the general lectures “might afford some moderate amount of interest to certain women students.” His hypothesis was never put to the test, however, and the corps remained a male preserve almost to the end of its days. The ”husky band of Canada’s hope” was one of the good-natured tags hung on the contingent that speaks for its general acceptance among the students.69 War weariness had not translated into opposition to the COTC. The university publications of the early 1920s registered



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no protests against the revival of military training at Toronto. The contingent’s growth and qualification record instead were hailed as proof that the ideals of the wartime COTC endured at the university and inspired those who came after.70 Still, when compared to its illustrious predecessor, the peacetime contingent seemed like new wine in an old bottle. A contributor to the University Monthly who observed the awkward commotion of the rank and file (“thin ones, stout ones, big heads, small heads, tall and short”) assembling for the final parade of 1923 ended with these thoughts: One’s mind goes back a few years to a campus covered with drilling students – students who gave up rugby and soccer to learn squad drill and section drill and company drill, and who wondered if the War would be over before they got across. They studied and drilled after hours and had no uniforms and few rifles till they enlisted with service units. They were in earnest. But these young men take military service as an agreeable option in their courses. Apart from a few veterans, they’re not soldiers, they don’t look like soldiers, they never will be soldiers. That morning their rifle movements were well done, they marched well, the Colonel said they did very well before the General Officer inspecting. But somehow they are different from the O.T.C. of 1914.71

More bemused than critical in tone, the article nevertheless contains a grain of truth about the strengths and weaknesses of the COTC as a volunteer, but not a select, contingent in a peacetime academic environment. It followed a curriculum set by the War Office in London. A young man interested in officer qualification typically did a year’s work in the COTC during his freshman year. He did have to pass a basic fitness test and be of a certain height (5 feet 6 inches); he was obliged to attend 80 per cent of the weekly drill periods to receive full pay as “efficient”; and he had to be ready to meet the War Office requirements in drill and musketry in order to pass the practical section of the examinations.72 The candidate began course work in military studies during his second year, with a view to qualifying for a certificate “A” while maintaining his efficiency status in the COTC. If successful, and if he so chose, he could carry on during his third year to complete the course work for the certificate “A” examination. Students in the fourth year were no longer required to enrol in the COTC, but could take either regular or special courses to prepare for their “A” or “B” qualifications. The core syllabus remained much the same during the inter-war period. Course 1 began with the military organization of the British Empire and the sinews that held it together; it then took the students

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through the basics of strategy, tactics, field operations, and military history. Course 2 covered these and other subjects on a more advanced level, emphasizing staff work, administration, and the coordination of arms and services. Students in possession of certificate “A” (Infantry) could proceed to Course 3 if they wished to try the certificate “B” examination, but once the program began to expand, candidates in artillery, engineering, and medicine were channelled into specialized courses for qualification in these branches of the militia.73 Although the academic work was done through the Department of Military Studies, the COTC supplemented the standard courses by offering advanced instruction in artillery survey, signals, machine guns, and map reading.74 Physical standards aside, the real sifting took place during the intensive review classes that groomed candidates for the written examinations set by the War Office. Only those judged capable of success were allowed to proceed,75 although in more than a few cases it was easier to decipher the Rosetta Stone than to mark their papers. The British examiners, while impressed with the results, were aghast at Canadian penmanship (“careless and illegible writing – so as to have been almost useless from the point of view of a military report”) and spelling (“rashions” for “rations,” “banot” for “bayonet,” “inflate” for “enfilade”). Lang and Falconer, like so many in the teaching profession before and since, threw up their hands at such howlers but resigned themselves to the view that, beyond emphasizing the value to the modern officer of writing the king’s English in a good hand, there was not a great deal to be done.76 The predominantly academic character of officer training was made all the more lopsided by the absence of field days and route marches of the sort so often mentioned in the days of K Company and the wartime COTC. This could not be helped. The building program of the 1920s filled much of the open space on campus while the expansion of an increasingly populous Toronto pushed the city limits well beyond the old campaigning grounds at Cedarvale or the Don Valley. The provision in the COTC regulations allowing members to attend the summer militia camps was, unfortunately, largely moot, since this one opportunity to get out of the classroom and into the field frequently fell victim to the budgetary axe. Intellectually demanding though it was, peacetime officer training was tennis without the net, lacking the challenging and necessary exercises that tested stamina and mental agility under realistic conditions. The closest many infantry officer cadets came to the practical business of war was “a moving picture … a unique innovation in the teaching of battle drill,” courtesy of the War Office, that



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demonstrated the correct methods for a company in attack: advancing in diamond formation, Lewis gunners on the flanks, hurling smoke bombs to blind the enemy, and closing in “to try conclusions with the bayonet.” The film had the added, if unintended, benefit of dramatizing the fog of war, since the misty conditions in which it was made combined with the effects of the smoke bombs to becloud the British regulars performing the simulation. Nevertheless, all who saw it pronounced the film “of quite some interest and real value in training.”77 Lack of proper facilities as a hindrance to training runs as a leitmotif through Lang’s annual reports (and those of his successors), yet within its limits by 1925 the COTC at Toronto had matured along the lines laid out five years before. The medical and engineer companies were by now solidly established alongside the infantry company, and specialized instruction in signals and artillery was about to be added to the COTC syllabus. Falconer led the chorus of praise for the COTC’s progress at the final parade of the 1924–25 session, and paid lengthy tribute to Lang for his devotion to a contingent judged by the military authorities as second to none in the country. The president’s words meant a great deal to the officer commanding, consoling him as they did for the diversion of his academic career and for the lack of official recognition for his contribution to the war effort.78 These encomia also made a fortuitous valediction, for just a few days after attending the 1925 Armistice Day service with the corps in which he took such pride, Lang died suddenly of a heart attack – brought on, say the words on his gravestone, by “the overstrain of his war service.” His death, at age fifty-five, cast a shadow of grief over the university and was reckoned “a distinct national loss” by the Canadian Military Gazette: “At a time when military affairs in Canada are at a very low ebb, when many have given up disgusted and many more discouraged, it was of real importance to the country to have such an inspiring driving force as his work at the great Ontario seat of learning.”79 Classes were cancelled on the afternoon of his funeral, held at Convocation Hall and conducted with full military honours. Over four hundred past and current members of the COTC escorted the gun carriage that bore Lang to his final resting place in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. “When nearing the grave, the band, playing the Dead March, halted and formed a lane through which the corps moved. The evening was by this time far advanced, and the slender white trunks of the beeches on the surrounding land stood out in the November twilight.” A firing party stepped forward to fire three volleys over the grave, whereupon the members of the contingent remained at attention until the mourners dispersed. Then they turned and marched away, the last to leave.80

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Figure 3.4.  Escorted by members of the Toronto Contingent, Colonel Lang’s funeral cortege sets off from Convocation Hall to Mount Pleasant Cemetery, 23 November 1925. UTA A1965-0019/001(021)

It was a final testimony to Lang that the contingent he bequeathed in perfect working order carried on without a hitch the day after his funeral; but it deepened the regret at his untimely passing that he did not live to see the full fruits of his labours as the COTC went on to flourish with the times. The Roaring Twenties became audible in Canada midway through the decade. When economic prosperity ever so briefly loosened the purse strings in Ottawa, the Toronto Contingent was permitted to increase its establishment by broadening the range of instruction and opening its doors to members of other militia units wishing to qualify for officers’ certificates through the COTC.81 The reputation of the COTC stood high once again as the University of Toronto approached its centenary in 1927, a milestone that served to highlight, among other traditions, the “prompt and unselfish sacrifice and service given by the men of this university to their country” from the Fenian raids to the Great War. The ceremony in which the COTC would best represent this side of the university’s history was the dedication of the carillon set within the belfry of the Soldiers’ Tower.



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To mark this crowning event of the centenary celebrations, the contingent’s officers set aside funds for a bell in honour of Colonel Lang that complemented the memorial tablets already laid in his memory and that of K Company.82 Given the significance and the setting, it was appropriate that the entire contingent, thoroughly rehearsed beforehand, paraded at the ceremony on 6 October 1927. Embodying a tradition of service to alma mater and country going back over sixty years, the student soldiers presented the general salute, and marked the end of the proceedings by smartly marching off as the bells pealed one hundred times, “one stroke for each year of the university’s life.”83 “This bugle was the first to call the Toronto University COTC to arms” The Varsity’s readership in the 1926–27 session will have noticed a somewhat closer focus on the COTC than in years previous. One set of articles in particular reflected the entwined military and historical interests of the paper’s editor that year, a fourth-year student and commissioned officer in the Active Militia by the name of Charles Stacey. Having taken a liking to soldiering in his high school cadet corps, he joined both the COTC and the Rifle Association upon entering the university in 1923–24 and earned his certificate “A” (Infantry) through the Department of Military Studies the following year. He continued his qualification work after enlisting in the Canadian Corps of Signals, and successfully completed the certificate “B” course in 1927.84 It is to his reportage that the university owes a full appreciation of “as important a relic of the part played by the University of Toronto in the Great War as there is in existence.”85 COTC originals in attendance at the 1926 Armistice Day service would have heard a sound that transported them back to the heroic early days. After the contingent had reversed arms and bowed heads, “the ‘Last Post,’ the requiem of every good soldier of the King, rang out, clear and true, sounded on the historic Goodman bugle by a bugler stationed in the gallery at the summit of the Tower.”86 The same instrument that sounded “Reveille” two minutes later echoed the calls of a decade before when a COTC recruit, Ambrose Harold Goodman, filled a void in the contingent by becoming its first bugler. As Stacey pieced together the story from Goodman’s mother, the Varsity men training at the Niagara camp “had neither bugle nor bugler” and so, faute de mieux, rose, mustered, and marched to calls issued by Goodman on his mouth organ. This decidedly unmilitary means of transmitting commands was rectified when the young man brought his father round to the view

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that a bugle and some lessons would enable him to answer the desperate appeal for a real bugler. In the hands of its musically adept owner, the bugle became the first used to summon the COTC to parade.87 From here the story takes a sad turn. After receiving his lieutenant’s commission in the COTC, Goodman enlisted in an active service battalion and went overseas in 1917. He declined a safe billet in England out of the conviction that it was his duty to serve in the front lines. On 8 August 1918 he was wounded by shellfire while leading his platoon in the great offensive at Amiens, and died a week later. In a letter to G. Oswald Smith, compiler of the university’s Roll of Service, Goodman’s father wrote, “Harold was a very wholesome boy, but 21, and excelled in the outdoor sports … His violin, banjo, and piano which gave so much pleasure to his circle are silent, and this intensifies our loss, and being an only child made it very hard for me to let him go.” The loss of his son was a blow from which the father never recovered.88 In the desolation of his grief he lasted little more than a year; but before his death he and his wife donated the bugle, inscribed with its pedigree and owner’s name, to the Toronto Contingent of the COTC. The provenance of this relic, brought to full light by Stacey, inspired him in his joint capacity as editor of the Varsity and COTC member to propose that the “Goodman bugle” be played at the 1926 service, as indeed it was, so majestically and hauntingly.89 This appears to have been the first of several occasions on which the living voice of the original contingent was raised at an Armistice Day service during the inter-war years. The rest of the time the bugle resided in the display case in Hart House, where Stacey had chanced upon it.90 To the undergraduate Stacey, the Goodman bugle was no “mere curio,” but “a concrete symbol alike of the loyalty and readiness of the men of the university in that time of crisis and of the supreme sacrifice which so many of them made in defence of the Empire.” For all the magisterial detachment even then apparent in his concise, erudite prose, Stacey wore his heart on his sleeve when it came to the legacy of the student soldiers of the university and the citizen-soldiers of the country, whose exquisite gallantry deserved to be remembered as “a thing apart,” uncontaminated by the cynicism and disenchantment that had come creeping in since the end of the war.91 He wielded his editorial pen to call for proper respect to be shown to the university’s war memorial and the country’s military past,92 a worthy and permanent home for Canada’s war art,93 illumination by night of the memorial wall at the Soldiers’ Tower,94 the cultivation of an authentically Canadian national spirit neither borrowed from the British nor aped from the Americans,95 and, to mark the university’s centenary, the presentation



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of colours to the COTC – the protocol for which Stacey used his militia connections to investigate, only to see the proposal reluctantly turned down because of cost.96 Stacey departs from the story of the University of Toronto Contingent upon his graduation in 1927, but the young scholar and COTC graduate, who went on to become the doyen of Canadian military historians, will return to these pages. No one acknowledged more frankly the shortcomings of the inter-war militia and its training methods, yet looking back in his memoirs he spoke of its redeeming value in “laying a foundation on which something important could be built in a crisis.”97 The COTC that he knew formed one of the main supports of that foundation when the crisis came in 1939. Forty years after Stacey passed out of the COTC, when the program that had served the university and the country so well came under threat of cancellation, he would take up his pen to warn against severing a vital link between the universities and the armed forces and extinguishing the lone organization on campus that still upheld “the ideals of loyalty and service to one’s country.”98 “C.O.T.C. starts to fly” Anyone succeeding the legendary Colonel Lang was stepping into very large shoes, but in Major Thomas Richardson Loudon the Toronto Contingent came under the command of an equally charismatic figure with deep roots in the university and its military units. The son of William J. Loudon, professor of applied mechanics, and grand-nephew of the aforementioned university president James Loudon, “Tommy” Loudon spent more than half a century in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering (FASE), entering as a freshman in 1901 and retiring as head in 1954. He was present at two military creations, first as a student with Lang’s Toronto Field Company of engineers, then as one of the professors who dusted off their old drill manuals to serve as training officers with the embryonic COTC in the fall of 1914.99 He enlisted in the CEF and went overseas in 1916, seeing action at the Somme, Cambrai, and Passchendaele before being wounded and invalided home to Canada in 1918. When Lang undertook to revive the COTC in 1919, he saw Loudon’s war record and rapport with the students as assets to the contingent and invited him to return as second in command.100 A veteran who appealed to all veterans of the Great War to work in unison for peace, yet a citizen-soldier who regarded university officer training as necessary to safeguarding the exemplary liberties of British subjects and reducing the threat of war through military readiness, Loudon was also something of a visionary in a faculty dedicated

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since its inception to the development of Canada’s human and material potential.101 The FASE took great pride in two of its most famous alumni, Casey Baldwin and Douglas McCurdy, Canada’s equivalent of the Wright brothers, and the faculty’s interest in aeronautical science had been further stimulated by the school of military aeronautics established on campus to train pilots for the Royal Flying Corps during the war.102 Long entranced by flight himself, Loudon believed that aviation would enable Canadians, with their “birthright of airmindedness,” to overcome the challenges of distance and geography in a country so vast, a view shared by his colleague John H. Parkin, who in 1923 constructed a wind tunnel for use in teaching aerodynamics.103 The development of aeronautical science at Toronto coincided with the growing demand for pilots in the fledgling Royal Canadian Air Force. To find the necessary combination of youth and aptitude, the RCAF turned to the universities for its trainees, specifying students enrolled in applied science or engineering who were also members of the COTC. Candidates qualifying for instruction would attend three consecutive summer training sessions at Camp Borden, receiving pay, uniforms, quarters, and, if successful, “wings” and the chance for a commission in the RCAF.104 Once the training scheme got fully under way after 1923, Loudon leapt at the opportunity to make flying another option in the COTC. Between 1925 and 1931, the Toronto Contingent sent twenty-nine candidates into the Provisional Pilot Officer training program that the RCAF ran during the summer interval.105 All six of the student engineers who led the way in 1925 completed the course and got their wings in 1927. One of them, J.T. “Jack” Dyment, embellished this collective success by winning the Sword of Honour for the highest standing and proficiency in the 1925–27 cohort – he would go on to a distinguished career as chief engineer of Trans-Canada Airlines (now Air Canada), one of several FASE graduates who made Canada a world leader in civil aviation.106 Eager to advance the shared interests of the RCAF, the university, and Canadian aviation in general, Loudon approached the Department of Defence about an air force section in the Toronto Contingent; however, such specialized instruction, not to mention the hazards involved in air training, went beyond the remit of the very earthbound COTC. Finding that door closed, Loudon opened another. He embarked on an even more ambitious project to form a flying club at the university, which would combine course work under Professor Parkin in “The Elements of Aviation” with four hours of flight instruction at the Toronto Flying Club. Although the trainees would come from the COTC and costs would be met out of contingent funds, Loudon stated that the club served no direct military purpose, aiming instead to train



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pilots for the tasks of civil aviation and to keep potential aeronautical engineers in Canada.107 The flying club took wing with fifty members in 1928–29,108 and entered its second year with plans to acquire its own aeroplane. Then it all ended. The course in aeronautics had to be suspended when Parkin unexpectedly left at the beginning of the 1929–30 session to pursue his work with the National Research Council. Flying clubs perished in the financial crash that silenced the Roaring Twenties. Loudon kept his eulogy brief: “For a time real progress was made … but then everything went broke and that was the last of the University Flying Club.”109 Two years after the demise of the flying club, the RCAF’s summer training program met the same fate when it was cancelled for lack of funds in February 1932.110 So ended the COTC’s first foray into a realm above and beyond the army’s horizons. Although circumscribed by strict budgets and limited openings in the RCAF even at the best of times, the Provisional Pilot Officer training scheme could also be said to have laid a foundation on which something important could be built in a crisis – as would be proven true in Toronto’s case in 1940 when Loudon became one of the architects of the British Commonwealth Air Training Program, and again in 1943 when he took command of the University of Toronto Air Corps. Yet to judge from the experience of the University of Toronto, it would appear that closer coordination between the universities and the RCAF in the 1920s might have yielded greater results. Dismayed at the perceived lack of interest in pilot training among the students, the Department of National Defence sent a letter to Falconer in 1929 asking why so few had responded to the RCAF’s call. Requested to respond for the president, Cartwright and Loudon insisted that the COTC had done everything possible to attract students into aviation, and pointed to the creation of the flying club as the clearest proof of its efforts in this direction. The problem, they argued, lay with the RCAF, which tended to advertise the few places in summer training late in the academic year and to notify successful applicants after they had of necessity made other plans: “It is the delay and uncertainty that keeps candidates from coming forward.” The COTC respondents might also have mentioned that despite these unhelpful procedures the university had eleven men slated for summer training in 1929 and had recently seen three graduates awarded commissions in the RCAF.111 The impression that the RCAF and the university were two organizations separated by a common language becomes stronger still from another exchange of correspondence in the mid-1930s. Loudon had relinquished command of the COTC in 1931, but retained his connection with the contingent as a member of the university’s military

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committee. As the prospect of war loomed ever larger, he took the view that Canada’s principal role should be in the air, and resumed his efforts to arrange pilot training through the COTC. He broached the subject with General McNaughton, whose reservations overcame his initial interest once he read the memorandum solicited from the senior air force officer, Air Commodore G.M. Croil. Croil’s verdict that a flying training school in conjunction with the universities would be a prohibitively expensive distraction led Loudon in turn to propose a modified plan to introduce the ground instruction portion of air force training into the COTC at Toronto. This, too, was rejected on the basis of a cost estimate that struck Loudon as absurdly out of proportion to his simple request for officers and NCOs to assist in “the ground course work given in the C.O.T.C. to encourage our young men to take up flying qualifications … [I]s there no possibility of the air force helping us with this?”112 Not quite yet, as it stood then. Loudon pressed on nevertheless, obtaining his pilot’s licence in 1936 at age fifty-three, when most aviators had long since hung up their goggles, and, even more remarkably for an academic of his vintage, branching into another field of research in order to reintroduce aeronautics into the FASE curriculum.113 By 1937–38, when with fresh urgency the RCAF began combing the universities for recruits once again, he had succeeded in setting up a ground course for COTC members willing and able to qualify as pilots after graduation.114 As the country belatedly prepared for a much dreaded but inexorable second clash of arms, Loudon’s efforts to establish air training presaged the contribution the university would soon be making towards the Commonwealth air forces. “Something like the reign of Anti-Christ has come over large parts of Europe” The Varsity editorial marking the arrival of 1933 offered none of the cheer that one might expect in a student newspaper hailing a new term and a new year.115 It dwelt instead on the plight of so many people left impoverished and demoralized by a Depression now entering its fourth year, with no remedy or end in sight. Beyond the relatively sheltered precincts of the university, a third of the population looked forward only to “another stage in the progressive decline of their material and physical circumstances and a steady deflation of any former hopes that remain.” In face of the widespread deterioration of “health, industry, and social ideals” and the government’s manifest inability to do anything about it, the only surprise was that no one had yet resorted to radical measures or revolution – steps not without justification, argued



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the editorialist, since the old order of democracy and capitalism had wrought nothing but catastrophe. “One generation lost and incapacitated in the Great War! Another, hardly matured, being ruined by a Great Depression!” And still, though it scarcely seemed possible, the darkness was deepening. Not four weeks after this cri de cœur was published, the most hideous of the progeny spawned by the war and economic collapse, Adolf Hitler, was named chancellor of Germany. The story of the COTC during the 1930s is inseparable from the economic and political crises of that decade. The corps, to borrow an apt phrase applied to the universities in general, “marked time” through the Depression, holding on until better days arrived.116 Thrift and selfreliance came naturally to an organization long accustomed to operating on a shoestring. The textbooks lent out each October were collected at the final parade for use by the next year’s classes; the Department of Military Studies drew its own maps and built its own sand table to demonstrate tactics; and, of course, the COTC members returned their pay to the corps to help with its upkeep. If one man deserves recognition for keeping the contingent alive on starvation rations, it is Sergeant-Major William Hunt, yet another of the career soldiers whose strict yet avuncular manner endeared him to the students. His legendary efficiency as quartermaster can be measured in the astonishing calculation that, between 1919 and 1939, the costs for lost uniforms, equipment, and stores in the Toronto Contingent amounted to less than fifty dollars.117 Despite the belt-tightening and a temporary reduction in the number of units,118 the COTC kept up all branches of training and even introduced formal mess dinners to instruct officer cadets in the etiquette of such occasions.119 More important, its remarkable academic proficiency testified to the corps’ ability to maintain the highest standards – 85 per cent of the Toronto candidates passed the certificate “A” (Infantry) examinations in 1935, compared with pass rates of 62 per cent among British OTCs and 82 per cent among the contingents at other Canadian universities. In the other “A” and “B” branches, 78 per cent of Toronto’s examinees passed, in flattering contrast with 67 per cent of British and 75 per cent of other Canadian candidates.120 These figures are all the more impressive when it is noted that, after 1933–34, the vast majority of the students attending lectures in the department were COTC members taking two hours of military instruction a week in addition to their own academic work. Although military studies for academic credit remained on the calendar, only those students enrolled in the Pass Arts course (as opposed to the Honours course) were permitted to select this option between 1934 and 1939.121 All others, including students in medicine and science, who wished to take the courses

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Figure 3.5.  The University of Toronto Contingent drawn up on parade at the University Avenue Armoury, March 1937. UTA A1968-0003/003(254)

leading to officer qualification did so of their own volition in special classes set up outside the fixed timetable periods. There were over one hundred such students in 1936–37, 136 the following year.122 To remark upon this is to recognize the commitment to the COTC at the University of Toronto, on the part of both students and the administration, in the years when well-founded fears of another world war gave rise to pacifist movements on campus that mobilized opinion against all things military and, for the first time in the contingent’s history, openly called for the abolition of the COTC. The protests against the COTC drew vigorous responses from the contingent and its supporters that, when factored into the studies of student life and attitudes in the 1930s,123 present a neglected side of student opinion on the most troubling and divisive concern of the time. The pacifist movement at Toronto (and other universities) was at its most active – that is, vociferous – from 1931 to 1937. Although never very large in numbers, the various organizations rooted in church or



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political bases – the Student Christian Movement, the Anti-War Society, the Student Peace League, the Pacifist Club, the Fabian Society – received extensive, not to mention favourable, coverage in the Varsity, and basked in the glow of the national figures who came to argue for demilitarization and disarmament in campus debates and demonstrations. Agnes Macphail was a frequent visitor in these years, as was J.S. Woodsworth, whose nephew Kenneth Woodsworth played a prominent role in the peace movement while a student at Victoria College from 1932 to 1936 and later as head of the Canadian Youth Congress. The origins of the peace movement at Toronto went back to 1921, the year the vanguard arrived in the form of the Student Christian Movement. Pacifism did not attract much attention, however, until the late 1920s – the strange time of doubt and repentance ten years after the war, when the rightness of the Allied cause no longer seemed as clear and the hopes vested in the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaties, and the Briand-Kellogg Pact palled in the disappointment at the failed transformation of the post-war world.124 When it seemed that the financial crash threatened to bring everything else down with it, the peace movement gained momentum among students alarmed, not unreasonably, at the possibility of another war inflicting on them what the Great War had done to their elders.125 Canadian pacifists did not have an easy time of it. They suffered, however, not from opposition, but from the lack of Canadian arms manufacturers, militarists, and interventionists to oppose. The country had no munitions industry to speak of, spent next to nothing on its barely visible military, and, while paying the most earnest lip service to internationalism and collective security, recoiled from anything resembling concrete action. This left the COTC to serve by default as a target for the anti-war groups on campus. In leaflets, letters, and editorials they inveighed against training that bred oppressive obedience instead of independent thought in university men (“there is nothing so deadening to personality and individual initiative as military discipline”), ridiculed the cynicism of a contingent that “roped in the unthinking mob” by dangling pay and an easier alternative to physical education in front of them, and demanded that the funds allotted to the COTC be directed to the relief of poverty.126 If the Varsity is taken as a barometer of student opinion, opposition to military training became more strident after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931. The event we see today as the harbinger of all that was to come galvanized the advocates of peace and disarmament and brought the first impassioned calls for “abolishing the C.O.T.C. and the removal of guns from the campus.”127 From this point on, the elimination – or at least the reduction – of the

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Figure 3.6.  President Cody with the officers of the University of Toronto Contingent, 11 November 1937. On his left is Colonel Madill, the Officer Commanding. On Madill’s left is Major William Wilson, who would command the Second Battalion during the Second World War. On Cody’s right is Major M. Barry Watson, Head of the Department of Military Studies and Chief Instructor of the COTC from 1940 to 1945. UTA A1968-0003/003(236)

COTC formed a central plank in the peace movement’s platform,128 and a decidedly hostile view of officer training became the norm in the student newspaper and other publications. The shift in attitude is evident by omission as well. For the first time since the end of the war, the Varsity did not run the customary editorial reflection on Remembrance Day in 1931. The next year the COTC found itself engaged in a running dispute that lasted until nearly the end of the decade. To those with pacifist leanings, the Remembrance Day service commemorated the men whose cause had been peace and whose sacrifice “obliges us to carry on with peace as our object,” but to the COTC the service evoked “the spirit of courage, service and sacrifice” that those who came after had a duty to emulate.129 These competing claims to the meaning of



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11 November marked out the positions the two sides would take over the next few years; it also drew the new university president into the fray. The Reverend Henry John Cody had succeeded Falconer at the beginning of the 1932–33 session, taking over in the most unenviable circumstances as the Depression set in and radical stirrings among students and professors challenged the established order and traditions. Cody, who assumed office at age sixty-four, was a Victorian among students barely old enough to remember the Great War. Firm in his convictions – “we owe a duty of service and sacrifice to our country; we are not mere recipients of its privileges and bounty” – he openly delighted in his role as honorary colonel of the COTC and evinced his pride in the contingent by attending all of its social and public events.130 Yet Cody was also a fair man, as demonstrated repeatedly by his willingness to listen to those with whom he disagreed and to defend their right to express dissenting views, as long as they did so responsibly.131 He set great store by Remembrance Day. One of his first acts as president was to appoint a committee to report on student complaints about the ceremony and to suggest appropriate changes. Although the committee members showed little patience for demands that Remembrance Day be cancelled altogether, dismissing these as “the offspring of immature minds burdened with a little education and confident of correcting the mistakes of prior generations,” they did recommend altering the role of the COTC. It would appear that the contingent had slipped in its performance at recent services, owing, the committee felt, to insufficient time to rehearse for an occasion that came early in the academic year. Since these poor showings detracted from the dignity of the ceremony – “there is nothing so farcical as undrilled troops” – the committee proposed that a select honour guard represent the COTC at future services.132 This change was accepted, but in 1935, when the Student Christian Movement pressed for the removal of all military trappings from the Remembrance Day service, neither Cody nor the Alumni Association budged from their view that the COTC deserved a prominent place in the ceremony.133 It is not irrelevant to note that, in the years when parallel Remembrance Day services were held, the traditional ceremony featuring an honour guard from the contingent far outdrew the alternative, non-military ceremony. Although the student peace movement at Toronto campaigned with some effect to promote its cause, it did not achieve what peace organizations at other universities managed to do – as, for instance, at Saskatchewan, where pressure from student pacifists led to the withdrawal of course credit for COTC participation and a sharp reduction in contingent numbers.134 This was certainly not for lack of effort. The

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peace movement staged countless meetings, debates, and rallies, and, most memorably, published an editorial in the Varsity urging women to resist “the primitive appeal of uniforms and colourful display” by shunning the COTC Ball, “the outstanding social event of the year for our campus militarists … a direct glorification of war,” which, to the consternation of campus pacifists, had been hailed as one of the gala affairs in the university’s social calendar ever since its resumption in 1931.135 This revival of Lysistrata ended with the warning that the women who encouraged militarism by attending would rue their folly as the widows and bereaved mothers of the next war. The failure, however, of this dire admonition to dampen enthusiasm for the COTC Ball, coupled with the surveys of student opinion recorded in the Varsity, indicates that the peace movement, for all its zeal, was in the main preaching to the converted. Beneath the breathless headlines proclaiming student opposition to the COTC, military service, or Canada’s participation in any future conflict, the accompanying articles present a more nuanced set of responses (to very leading questions): a few students vehemently denounced war, a few argued in favour of preparedness, but most did not give the matter much thought at all.136 It says a

Figure 3.7.  The well-attended COTC Ball, held in the Great Hall of Hart House, 12 February 1938. UTA A1968-0003/001P(056)



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great deal about student priorities that the men and women canvassed in two separate surveys in February 1934 offered a range of opinions on the COTC, but were unanimous on one point: “the COTC throws a darn good dance.”137 Relations between the COTC and the peace movement were for the most part civil. Strong feelings at times boiled over into intemperate exchanges, but both sides gave as good as they got, and when at their best maintained a sense of humour and fair play.138 It should not be forgotten, however, that, for every student in the peace movement, there was another in the COTC, and that although support for pacifism fluctuated, the Toronto Contingent remained remarkably stable. Here it is pertinent to recall historians’ characterization of Canadian students during the 1930s. They were not the children of affluence, but young adults aware of their great good fortune to be at university and hoping to use their education as a springboard to a secure profession.139 Most had little time for radicalism or political causes, choosing instead to concentrate on what they had come to university to do, while making sure to enjoy the diversions of campus social life. This broad observation is not without particular relevance to the COTC at Toronto. The contingent was anchored in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, in professional schools disdainful of political activism – and, for that matter, the sermonizing of student ideologues140 – and was commanded between the wars by officers who were professors of science (Lang), engineering (Loudon, Cockburn), and architecture (Madill). Two of its four companies were reserved for engineering and medical students, who, taken together, made up more than half the contingent in the late 1930s.141 One of the two arts companies was reserved exclusively for students from University College, then at the height of its academic reputation.142 In other words, the composition of the University of Toronto Contingent of the COTC attests to a hitherto unrecognized but significant cohort of serious, realistic students who elected to take military training, many at the expense of their own spare time and against the drift of fashionable opinion – not easy things for young undergraduates to do. With the shadow of war lengthening, the Toronto Contingent redoubled its efforts to promote its usefulness and to explain its workings to undergraduates unfamiliar with the conditions of service in the COTC. In 1937, at the suggestion of the university’s military committee, the contingent set aside funds for the publication of a brochure outlining the COTC’s objectives and the advantages it held out to young men “who place public good above personal interest” and were willing to serve and defend “a strong and united British Empire … one of the greatest instruments in stabilizing and maintaining the peace of the

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Figure 3.8.  COTC parade and drills (artillery, engineers, machine gun crews) at the University Avenue Armoury, March 1937. UTA A1968-0003/ 001(057) / A1968-0003/003(261)



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world.”143 The handsomely produced booklet was well received by the Department of National Defence, which recommended that copies be distributed among all COTCs across the country.144 But in raising the contingent’s profile and demonstrating the importance of its work, the COTC had no more persuasive spokesman than Hitler himself, whose malignant regime Cody decried as “something like the reign of Anti-Christ.”145 Nor was it lost on the students that the senior officers of the COTC had all served in 1914–18 and were undeniably sincere in their assertion that they sought to secure peace by the necessary precaution of preparedness. No sane person wanted war, wrote Cartwright, but by now the record showed that pacifism and disarmament only fed the ambitions of dictators who made weaker nations their prey and would desist from aggression only when confronted with a show of strength.146 Few could disagree after the fall of 1938. The university had convened “under world conditions of appalling seriousness” as the Czechoslovak crisis brought the European powers to the brink of war.147 The initial relief at the result of the Munich conference soon gave way to shame at the craven capitulation to Hitler’s demands and disgust at the barbaric rampage of the Kristallnacht pogrom two months later.148 To the lasting credit of the university’s students, they had from the beginning perceived in the persecution of the Jews the true nature of the Third Reich;149 and when in March 1939 Hitler shed all pretence of honouring his agreements by devouring the rest of Czechoslovakia, the students who opposed war in the abstract accepted the necessity of confronting an enemy not just of their country but of human decency itself.150 The noticeable increase in attendance at the supplementary military courses during the late 1930s portended the numbers to come when the inevitable day arrived. As the COTC braced for the second great influx in its history, the question uppermost in everyone’s mind was where to put them all. “I would propose … that the University purchase the property at 119 St. George Street and that it be made available for the Department of Military Studies and the C.O.T.C.” The Department is in need of more lecture-room accommodation … also of a place in which drill and practical instruction can be carried out during the winter … this is necessary if the possibilities of the Department are to be fully exploited … The drill carried out by the C.O.T.C. is greatly handicapped by the lack of suitable accommodation … Owing to the increased numbers of the C.O.T.C. the premises at 184 College Street are strained to their limits … Facilities for practical training are lacking … The

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dream of the C.O.T.C. is that some day a public spirited citizen or citizens will come forward and make a gift of a drill hall to the University for the use of the C.O.T.C.

For the better part of two decades the Department of Military Studies and the COTC made do with wholly insufficient quarters. During the second half of the 1920s, the successful revival of the contingent and the prosperity of the times had kindled the hope that the university, or some benefactor, might provide the facilities necessary for military education and training to reach their full potential. To dwell on this became pointless once the Depression hit, and for several years the annual reports that had reiterated the general frustration at the lack of resources forbore to mention the difficulties under which military studies and the COTC laboured. The 1937–38 report, however, notes that, as a result of voluntary enrolment in the special classes, “the attendance at the various courses of lectures overtaxed the capacity of the available quarters.” It was not only the growing number of students, but also the number of courses offered by the department (fourteen), in addition to the regular drill carried out by the COTC, that brought the problem of suitable accommodation to the fore once again. The COTC was at this time under the command of Colonel Henry Harrison Madill, a 1912 graduate of the university and yet another of the COTC originals whose service with the Toronto Contingent spanned three decades and two world wars.151 An architect by training, Madill had risen from assistant professor to head of the School of Architecture while developing his practice in a firm he and a colleague had founded. His long experience in military training and his professional expertise (and contacts) came together most fortuitously now. The COTC had to find a building on or near the campus that could be converted into a headquarters; any such building also had to stand on a lot large enough for a drill hall. Since there was little vacant real estate in the area – not that the corps had the time or the money to buy and build on it – the most expedient solution lay in purchasing one of the private residences on the streets bordering the university. Madill kept his eye on St George Street, which, in contrast to its appearance today, was still a predominantly residential street running along the western edge of the university. Two properties came up for sale, one in 1937 at 108 St George, the other the following year at 112 St George, but the attempts to purchase them fell through when a fraternity nabbed the first house and the Board of Governors balked at the asking price for the second.152 These disappointments turned out to be blessings in disguise, however, when, at the beginning of January 1939, a property



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“even more suitable for the requirements of the C.O.T.C. than the properties which have previously been considered” came on the market. With the demand for accommodation growing more acute by the day, Madill at once sent a letter to Cody entreating his support for what was little less than a godsend to the COTC.153 The property in question was at 119 St. George, where one of the most stately homes on the street occupied a spacious lot. It belonged to a Mrs Barbara Robertson, whose husband, Irving Earle Robertson, had died in 1932. Without children, and perhaps predisposed to the university and the COTC as a result of her husband’s having been a Toronto graduate, a veteran of the Great War, and an ardent patriot,154 Mrs Robertson indicated her willingness to sell the property to the university for the sum of $30,000. After inspecting the house, Madill informed A.D. Le Pan, the buildings superintendent of the university and a COTC mainstay since 1914, that “the accommodation provided by the large residence could be adapted with very little alteration and the building is in an excellent state of repair.” Better yet, “the lot is 120' × 200' and provides ample room for the construction of a Drill Hall.” With the enthusiastic backing of the Military Committee, Madill proposed that the university purchase the property and make it available for combined use by the Department of Military Studies and the COTC. In return the annual grant from the government to cover maintenance fees at 184 College would be redirected to 119 St George; and out of its own funds the contingent would meet the costs of the necessary alterations to the house and pay for an adjoining drill hall, an expenditure estimated at $15,000.155 Less than two weeks after Madill made these representations, the Property Committee of the Board of Governors had obtained a formal valuation of the property and deemed the terms of Mrs Robertson’s offer acceptable.156 The next step was to submit drawings for the approval of the Military Committee and to put out tenders for the alterations and construction. Madill’s architectural firm drew up the plans, but with an ear to the ticking clock he secured permission to approach a limited number of contractors for bids on the general contract and appliances.157 In the meantime the contingent’s financial officers liquidated the Dominion of Canada bonds in which all surpluses had been invested since the 1920s to provide the funds for the long-desired, long-deferred, drill hall. In gratitude for his efforts to procure the facilities the contingent so desperately needed, the Military Committee asked to extend Madill’s tenure as officer commanding by a year so that he would see the inauguration of the new headquarters while in his post.158 The work was nearing completion when Canada went to war in September 1939. Ironically the

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headquarters and drill space the COTC had dreamt of for twenty years were shortly to prove inadequate to the needs of a contingent swollen overnight to six times its normal size.159 “The Royal Visit … occasion of the last peace-time parade of the University of Toronto C.O.T.C.” The Second World War did not take the university by surprise as had the Great War twenty-five years before. Throughout the 1938–39 session, the feeling that the peace of the world was on borrowed time was never far from mind. “During the two minutes of silence … I shall be wondering if, a year from now, we shall be holding Remembrance Day or looking forward to another Armistice,” mused one student before the 1938 service, who no doubt spoke for many more.160 The serious approach to their classroom work and drill instruction seemed even more pronounced among the students enrolled in the COTC; and for the first time in many years a dose of realistic training entered the curriculum when the contingent was invited to witness a demonstration in battle drill staged by the Royal Canadian Regiment.161 But with the sense of foreboding came a sense of purpose and unity, solidified by the Royal Visit in May 1939. There was initially some uncertainty regarding the participation of the COTC in the university’s plans to host the king and queen on 22 May, since the contingent normally disbanded after the final pay parade in March. So integral to the university’s reputation, however, and so symbolic of its service to king and country was the Toronto Contingent that the officers made special arrangements to have the COTC furnish the guard of honour for the king and queen during their visit to the campus and for the corps to line the Royal couple’s route past the southwest entrance to Hart House, next to the Soldiers’ Tower.162 On one of the most momentous occasions in the university’s history, when thousands of Torontonians came to demonstrate their loyalty and common resolve to face what all now knew must be faced, the Toronto Contingent fully deserved the prominent role it was asked to play in its last peacetime parade.

Figure 3.9.  The University of Toronto Contingent assembled for the occasion of Their Majesties’ Visit on 22 May 1939. UTA A1968-0003/0024

Chapter 4

“The Child of the Last War”: The University of Toronto Contingent, 1939–1945

“We must be up and doing” The University of Toronto entered the Second World War with none of the excitement and urgency that had infused the student body twenty-five years before.1 On a campus dominated by the sombre eminence of the Soldiers’ Tower, there was no reflexive outburst of patriotic enthusiasm, no rush to get overseas, no repetition of the scenes that had made the fall of 1914 so memorable.2 The storm, in President Henry John Cody’s words, had been gathering for some time, and now that it had broken the response was to be measured and pragmatic. “Calmly we must survey the situation and decide what part we are best fitted to play in the scheme of national defence,” counselled the first Varsity editorial of the 1939–40 session, echoing the president’s opening address in tone and precept. Canada could go to war with a clear conscience, Cody declared before the solemn audience in Convocation Hall, secure in the conviction that Britain and its allies had made every effort to preserve peace, and now undertook “to defend all that is sacred to man” in an unwanted but unavoidable struggle against “such evil things as brute force, bad faith, oppression and persecution.” For the time being, however, the students, and the university at large, were to carry on with their work. The military authorities in Ottawa had advised Cody and his fellow presidents that it promised to be a long war, whose result would be determined as much by advances in science and technology as by force of arms. The universities would best meet the country’s needs by turning out large numbers of “intelligent and physically fit young men able to enter those branches of the service which most require them.”3 Cody therefore urged the students to stay in good physical condition, to act in accordance with the temper of the time, and to finish their degree before going into war work or on active

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service. “Meanwhile, take your course in the Officers’ Training Corps with a view to gaining the Officer’s Certificate.”4 Cody ended with the prediction that “this will be a strange year for us all.” He was more right than he knew. In 1914 the university had convened with the war fully joined and the outcome, it seemed, hanging in the balance. In 1939 the university opened just as the Germans and their Soviet accomplices were completing the conquest of Poland, but the conflict that began with an attack in the east did not straightaway metastasize to the west. The “Phoney War” – the deceptive lull in hostilities that coincided with the 1939–40 session – allowed the university to ease military training into the curriculum without the disruption wrought by the levée en masse twenty-five years before. It also sustained the Dominion government’s initial hope that Canada might wage a war of limited liability, thereby sparing the nation a second culling of its young men and a second conscription crisis,5 and the universities a second exodus of their best and brightest. Yet if the Varsity’s rallying cry of 1939 – “we must be up and doing” – hardly breathed the fire of 1914, the reaction of the students impresses nevertheless, given that they knew far better than had their predecessors what war was likely to mean. The sixfold increase of the corps testifies to their sense of duty, but it was not until the astounding German victories in the spring of 1940 jolted Canada into full throttle that the COTC truly evolved into a wartime organization. The COTC of 1939–40, following orders issued on the eve of war to continue with its normal task of preparing university men for commissions in the Non-Permanent Active Militia,6 might be fairly described as the last of the inter-war contingents, operating along the same lines but with a larger establishment. This approach was to change when the simmering war in Europe erupted just as the academic session was ending. The fall of France and the mortal peril to Britain impelled the Canadian government to pass the National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA) in June 1940, which, in imposing universal military training, placed far heavier responsibilities on the COTC and entailed a wholesale restructuring of a unit that now took in every fit male on campus. The COTC was nothing if not a very protean being throughout its existence, changing shape and role as circumstances dictated; and although the second wartime contingent did not spring into being with the same spontaneity as had its predecessor in 1914, its rapid expansion in size and scope during the fall of 1940 stands out as no less remarkable a stage in its history. “The war made any effort at recruiting unnecessary” The three weeks between Canada’s declaration of war and the opening of the 1939–40 session made a welcome gift of time to the COTC.



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The refurbished headquarters and the drill hall received their finishing touches while the contingent and the Department of Military Studies settled in at 119 St George. After tending to their daily tasks, the officers and NCOs spent their evenings shedding old habits as they hastily rehearsed the new infantry drill they would presently be teaching. A War Advisory Board, counting five of the contingent’s founding fathers among its twelve members, was set up to assist students in fitting military training into their academic programs.7 To absorb the wave of recruits, the contingent’s commanding offer, Colonel Madill, requested and received permission to double the number of undergraduate companies to eight – four containing men in the third and fourth years, four the first- and second-year students – and to add four more to accommodate the graduates and staff members clamouring to join the COTC. There were to be two streams of instruction: graduates would take officer training alongside the senior students in a condensed one-year course, while students in the junior companies would proceed at the usual pace of the two-year course. The revised syllabus no longer prepared candidates for the British War Office “A” and “B” certificates but for the more immediately relevant examination for promotion to lieutenant in Canada’s Non-Permanent Active Militia. Drill schedules were set and permission obtained from all faculties to have students released from classes by four o’clock each afternoon.8 Undergraduates keen to secure a place in the COTC had been signing up even before formal registration began. When the floodgates officially opened on 26 September – the busiest single day for voluntary recruiting in its history – students, graduates, and staff poured into the contingent in such numbers that enlistment had to be suspended after two weeks and the numbers capped at eighteen hundred. Twice as many would have enrolled had there been room. Some unable, or not yet ready, to join the COTC did the next best thing and enrolled in the Department of Military Studies, which, in addition to its regular courses, arranged special voluntary classes for graduates of Toronto and other universities. No fewer than 1,964 students, nearly twenty times the pre-war number, took instruction in military studies, either in the accelerated stream or the normal curriculum.9 Women, too, had seen the war coming. In circumstances less pressing, and with foreknowledge of the eventual scale of Canada’s war effort, the university at this point might have adopted a proposal calling for the enrolment of female students in the COTC. In the spring of 1939, Margaret Hyndman, a Toronto barrister acting as secretary for the Provisional Committee for the Voluntary Registration of Canadian Women,10 had approached Cody about the possibility of women’s taking instruction in non-combatant roles through the COTC.11 Preliminary

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discussions with the military authorities concerning the use of women in industry or national service had opened the committee’s eyes to “a wide field for women in war,” especially in administration, where female staff could release deskbound men for active service. To make the case “that women experienced in business offices would, with the training that is given in the Officers’ Training Course in administrative details, qualify for most of the office positions in the army,” Hyndman canvassed professional women across the country. The responses indicated that “there would be no difficulty in getting girls to take such a course as we suggest, if the course were available at the University of Toronto.” For their part the military authorities, among them Major Watson of the Toronto Contingent, “were only too glad to help” support the proposal to employ trained women in auxiliary roles. Even Prime Minister Mackenzie King pronounced himself “considerably impressed” when Hyndman put the idea to him directly.12 The timing, however, worked against this potentially useful scheme. The discussions took place during the politically sensitive period just before the war when the government was anxious to avoid signalling any commitment in advance of events. In a letter to Cody, Hyndman surmised that in these circumstances the military authorities would keep a low profile and “accede to a request for women training, as long as they don’t have to come out into the open and take any initiative themselves.” This left matters at a standstill. Once war was declared and the tide of volunteers engulfed the contingent, thoughts of opening the COTC to women gave way to the demands of the moment. The hope of enlisting female undergraduates would be realized in another form, when the University of Toronto Women’s Service Training Detachment was established in October 1940 for the purpose of preparing “young women of superior intelligence” to serve as “officers and instructors in any women’s auxiliaries to the fighting services.”13 The 5,048 male students registered at the university made a promising source of junior officers. The intelligence of young men pursuing higher education and the technical aptitude of those in the scientific or professional faculties could be safely assumed. No less important, the undergraduates appear to have been as sound in body as they were in mind, to judge by the reports from the University Health Service. These form a collective profile of the male undergraduates who, it will be recalled, were required to take physical training during their first two years. The first-year students of 1939–40, for example, had an average height of 5 feet 9 inches, an average weight of 144 pounds (noticeably lean by today’s standards), and a high standard of health overall, as revealed by the physical examinations at the beginning of the year,



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which found 95 per cent of the incoming students fit for military training. Consistent with the upward trend in height and weight apparent through the late 1930s, 155 of the incoming students stood over 6 feet and weighed an average of 160 pounds.14 These prospective subalterns were not only fit, but ready to serve for reasons that most accepted and few discussed. A residual loyalty to Britain among students still largely British by descent, the nature of the enemy and the issues at stake, and a sense of duty to country and the legacy of the Canadian Corps, flicker through the pages of the Varsity, yet faintly – far closer in spirit to the resigned determination of 1918 than to the idealistic fervour of 1914.15 During its second great awakening, the COTC had reason to be grateful for the extra facilities made available to it and for the guiding precedents of 1914–15, all of which enabled the contingent to commence training by the third week of term. The corps was equally grateful for the offers of assistance from Great War veterans too old for active service but anxious “to get into the picture somewhere” as instructors or trainers.16 Only a few of these offers were accepted, however, since it was more practical to delegate the task of instruction to the teaching staff or qualified cadets present on campus. Among the latter was John Clarry, a second-year student who, on the strength of a certificate “A” obtained in 1938–39, was inserted in front of the accelerated class to explain the workings of the Army Service Corps. It was hard enough, he recalled, to stay one step ahead of his charges, harder still to ignore the fact that he was ten years younger than some of the graduates he was teaching.17 One lecturer who doubled as an instructor in the COTC was the painter and future war artist Charles Comfort. His reminiscences many years later dwelt on the strange contrast in his teaching duties: I, for instance, was on the teaching faculty of the university and I had had military experience, so I was immediately – well, I volunteered in the Canadian Officers Training Corps and was accepted. I finally received a militia commission in the Canadian Officers Training Corps, University of Toronto Contingent, and I found myself in the unusual position of possibly one hour discussing with the class the mechanics of Venetian painting at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and then in the next hour I would be talking about the range and power of the two-inch mortar. I was teaching infantry weapons at the same time, and it was a tremendous conjunction of ideology in thinking that couldn’t possibly go on. But this is what happened to me, and it was the busiest time and we had – I had these classes to run. I was still doing outdoor painting and keeping that up. I still had to prepare material for my classes at the university. I had to prepare material for the COTC. I had to go to the summer camps.18

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The most laborious task in the early stages involved the copying and distribution of the teaching materials. In a day and age when the replication of printed material by manual typewriter, carbon paper, and stencils barely outpaced a medieval scriptorium, the demand for texts and training pamphlets was met by a volunteer clerical staff and the purchase of a Gestetner “multigraph” machine, both arranged by the Students’ Administrative Council.19 Where textbooks were lacking entirely, the contingent officers, true to form, put together their own Elementary Drill Manual to explain the new system and asked Major (and Professor) C.R. Young, a 1914 original, to work up his lectures on military law into a booklet that proved so useful that it was recommended for the militia and the Canadian Active Service Force.20 The other shortages made it seem like 1914 all over again. The neglect of the pre-war army meant that first claim on what few stores and equipment there were went to the units headed overseas, leaving the COTC as motley in appearance as it had been in its first incarnation. On Remembrance Day, the sole occasion in 1939–40 when the entire contingent turned out on parade, the sight of a few officers in uniform sprinkled among fourteen hundred unarmed cadets in plain clothes made it painfully clear how bare the cupboard was and would be for some time to come. Uniforms came at the end of the year, but only in numbers sufficient for the NCOs and the three hundred cadets slated to attend the Niagara camp. Once the initial rush subsided, formal instruction in the various options open to trainees – artillery, engineering, signals, infantry (rifle and machine gun), ordnance, medical and dental corps – took them through the subjects tested in the First Paper, “common to all arms,” and the Second Paper, “special to arm.” Comparison of the numbers enrolled in each of the arms and services gives rise to the suspicion that more than a few Great War elders wise in the ways of survival had taken the next generation aside to impart the advantages of fighting at long range, since a third of all examinees sought qualifications in the artillery. The candidates in the condensed course put in seven to ten hours each week to cover map reading, administration, organization, and fieldworks in time for the December examination.21 The workload in the junior course required three to four hours a week to prepare for the First Paper in March. The results tabled in the annual report attest to the diligence, and in a good many cases, to the persistence of the students in both streams.22 In recognition of the burden upon the students doing the one-year course, and to reward those who saw it through to a successful conclusion, the Senate followed the precedent set in the first war by authorizing faculty “to give due consideration … to the work,



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over and above their ordinary academic requirements, done by those undergraduates who will have fulfilled the requirements of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps.”23 The written examinations in March brought the classroom side of officer training to an end for the 1939–40 session. Practical examinations in drill, marksmanship, and field tactics came after the term, once the officer candidates had completed their training at the spring militia camps arranged by Military District No. 2 or the COTC instructional camp at Niagara. Measured by past and current standards, it had been a productive year for the Toronto Contingent. It had grown into the largest and most diversified of all the COTCs across the country and was, in the opinion of those in their second go-round, an improvement upon its Great War predecessor. “We are bigger and far more efficient in this war than we were during 1914–18,” Major Watson assured the Varsity in February 1940, “and we are training the men as officers this time, whereas in the last war they were given only the bare rudiments of military training, such as would fit them only to be privates.”24 The ensuing requests from the militia and the Active Service Force for graduates of the officers training program, particularly in engineers and infantry, repaid the hard work of the Toronto Contingent’s staff.25 Even so, it had been a oddly untroubled year. Looking back over the first academic session of the new war, the editors of the student newspaper remarked on the relative normality of campus life, in contrast with the hurly-burly of 1914–15, recaptured in old articles reprinted in each issue of the 1939–40 Varsity.26 What seemed more a waiting game than a fully fledged conflict had impinged on the university just once, in late November, when Pilot Officer Gregory Maher, a 1939 graduate who had earned four certificates with the pre-war COTC, was killed in a training accident.27 The first death of a Varsity man on active service saddened but did not shock a university inured by the experience of the Great War to the loss of its young men. The real shock was to come in the spring of 1940, just as the academic session was ending, when in a mere six weeks the German Blitzkrieg undid nearly everything the Glorious Dead had died to achieve, and brought Britain and the Empire face to face with defeat.28 “A very military atmosphere surrounds the University this year” The first Niagara camp of the second great war could not but evoke parallels with the storied expedition twenty-five years before.29 Two weeks of army routine, field exercises, and weapons training, interspersed by inspections by the district military commanders and a visit from

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President Cody, fostered a similar sense of camaraderie and adventure among the three hundred Varsity men under canvas. But in the same way that the reports of Second Ypres had darkened the horizon in 1915, so the news from Europe, worsening with every bulletin, filled everyone with dread: “Beneath the long days and evenings of outdoor life and light amusements was an underlying tone of awful seriousness for the news that made everyone run to the nearest radio as soon as a few minutes of leisure allowed was of terrible import. On the day the unit arrived in camp Italy entered the war and at the beginning of the second week France fell and Britain faced the German might alone. In a sense these events cast a pall over the first camp the Contingent had held since last the same enemy pounded at Britannia’s gates.”30 Military service had been voluntary when the cadets left for Niagara. By the time they returned, it was the law of the land. The National Resources Mobilization Act, passed on 21 June 1940, mandated conscription for home defence and compulsory military training for all men in the designated age and fitness categories. As the instrument of full-scale mobilization the NRMA is the starting point in studies of recruitment and conscription in Canada during the Second World War, and yet the role of the universities, first and foremost Toronto, in formulating the government’s policy tends to be overlooked.31 The arrangements negotiated by President Cody, acting in his dual capacities as head of the leading university in the country and chairman of the National Conference of Canadian Universities, made it possible for Canada’s universities and colleges to conduct what amounted to a parallel training system within their curricula. In a nutshell, after the summer of 1940, the COTC was the NRMA by another name.32 The result of the universities’ efforts “to prepare the youth of Canada to bear their part in the defence of their country” is equally worthy of record. One need look no further than Toronto, soon to become in numbers no less than in range of instruction one of the most active training centres in the country. By expanding the framework of the COTC the university would provide military training on three different levels to nearly four thousand students and graduates in 1940–41 alone.33 In the present grave emergency no university president could object to compulsory military training. Indeed, some had felt even before the crisis that a step in this direction would clarify matters for students unsure as to what the government really wanted them to do.34 There was concern, however, that the Department of National War Services’ intention to call up as many as thirty thousand men between the ages of twenty and twenty-four each month for thirty days of training would wreak havoc on the academic year. To align the interests of the government



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and the universities, and to find a way for students to complete their degree while taking training “equivalent to that given to men called out under the regulations,” Cody conferred with the military authorities throughout the summer of 1940.35 The agreement to which the two sides came more than satisfied the government’s requirements.36 All undergraduates liable for call-up under the War Services Act could discharge their obligation by doing half the prescribed training through the COTC during the academic year, and the other half by attending a training camp for two weeks in the summer. This answered the call of duty, but the decision taken at the conference of Canadian universities in Ottawa on 9 September to impose military training on all physically fit male students ages eighteen and over went above and beyond. “It was the nearest thing to a unanimous voice of the universities which we have yet had … [W]e felt we should give a lead right across Canada,” stated Cody upon his return to Toronto, explaining that he and his peers, including the heads of the three French-speaking institutions, “considered the action advisable both as a gesture at the present stage of the war and in view of possible later requirements.”37 The day after his return, the Board of Governors decreed compulsory military training for all male undergraduates at the University of Toronto.38 The war was no longer remote nor the rhetoric subdued when the students reconvened for the 1940–41 session. With all eyes turned towards the battle in the skies over Britain, Cody declared that, “at the very crisis of our fate … this grim struggle must be the background of all our academic work this year.” The students to whom these words were addressed now had a double task before them: to work towards their degree and to abide by the new rules on military training. How they were to do so was spelled out in a military supplement published in the year’s first issue of the Varsity.39 Toronto’s “largest military effort in a quarter of a century” began with a great triage. Every male student on campus was registered. If not a conscientious objector or divinity student, a foreigner, married, under age eighteen or over twenty-five, or already enlisted, he was siphoned into one of the three units operating under the banner of the COTC.40 Returning students with a year’s training under their belts, along with applicants approved by a selection board, went into the Officers Training Battalion (OTB) on the condition that they would go on active service or into the Reserve Army after obtaining their officer qualifications and degree. Those between twenty and twenty-four without previous training went into the Auxiliary or Training Centre Battalion (TCB), in which they would train on campus during the academic year and attend the Niagara camp in June. The two battalions between them

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absorbed three-quarters of the male students, leaving about nine hundred eighteen and nineteen-year-olds. Not yet of age for call-up, their time would come soon enough, and so to groom these future trainees the university created a preparatory battalion based at Hart House and run jointly by the COTC and the Athletic Association.41 Since most underage men were first- and second-year students obliged in any case to do two hours of supervised exercise a week, basic drill and marksmanship were now made part of their physical training course.42 The Officers Training Battalion perpetuated the COTC. Its fourteen hundred members received uniforms, reported to the contingent headquarters at 119 St George, and followed an upgraded training syllabus. The old organization by companies representing the colleges and faculties was replaced by a more practical division into arms and services, to which strict quotas were applied. Artillery was still coveted, but demand far exceeded the supply of places. The infantry lay claim to half the officer cadets; a third were earmarked as gunners or engineers, while the rest were parcelled out among the signals, ordnance, service, medical, and dental corps. Drill and classroom instruction two evenings a week supplemented by training exercises on Saturday afternoons readied them for the First and Second Papers, to be written in December and March, respectively.43 All OTB men were obliged to attend the Niagara camp to complete their qualification as a second lieutenant in the Reserve Army. They would then be added to the list of candidates awaiting placement with an active service unit. For its part the TCB, grandly hailed as “the most spectacular of the Corps’ work,”44 rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s. The burden Toronto assumed in operating (in numbers) the largest basic training camp in the Dominion shows that the government was getting much the better of the bargain.45 The university provided all the resources. The Board of Governors, which had just allotted $10,000 for additional storerooms and lecture halls at 119 St George, now put Hart House – the only building big enough to accommodate an expected complement of fifteen hundred – at the disposal of the COTC for use as the headquarters of the new battalion.46 Ten days into the term, under the gaze of President Cody and the officers of the COTC, all Varsity men subject to the NRMA turned out for the organizational parade on the Front Campus. Once sorted into six companies and thirty platoons, the “Auxbattmen” – the latest neologism in the student lexicon – were informed that they would be putting in seven hours of training a week to complete a syllabus combining drill, weapons training, and route marches with lectures in military law, tactics, and administration. All were given to know that anyone failing to attend would leave himself



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Figure 4.1.  Mandatory training begins. The largest body of student soldiers ever assembled at the university lines up on the Front Campus, 19 October 1940. UTA A1968-0003/004P

liable for call-up to a government training centre, no matter the effect on his studies.47 In November “the largest mass medical examination in the history of the University” was carried out by twelve doctors from Military District No. 2. Over a thousand were judged to be in sound condition, 365 were ruled fit for training after remedial exercise, and 142 were rejected.48 The COTC was fishing in a small pond when it came to staffing this vastly enlarged contingent. With the sudden expansion of military training across the country, competent officers were in short supply. Rarer still were officers attuned to the niceties of handling university students, who tended to see themselves as a breed apart and, as the unhappy experience of 1917–18 had shown, were quick to resent imported drill sergeants as uncouth martinets. The lack of uniforms, equipment, and facilities would hardly ease the task of straightening the crooked timber of academic conscripts doing their clumsy best – “more

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than a few recruits, greener than an Irish shamrock … trying so hard that they stand motionless and as stoical as a gargoyle”49 – but, as so often in the contingent’s history, former officers and alumni were ready to heed the call of the COTC and their alma mater. Appointed to command the TCB was Lieutenant-Colonel William Stewart Wilson, yet another senior COTC officer with deep roots in Toronto’s military past.50 He had begun his soldiering with The Queen’s Own Rifles before the Great War and broke off his studies in engineering to go overseas in 1916. He saw action at Vimy Ridge, Lens, Hill 70, and Passchendaele before being wounded in March 1918. After repatriation he completed his degree, became secretary of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, and joined the staff of the COTC in 1927. As second in command from 1935 on, he was due to succeed Madill in 1940, but in the new set of circumstances Madill retained command of the OTB while Wilson took charge of the Training Battalion.51 Major William S. Wallace, now the university librarian, returned to the contingent he had helped to create in 1914 to act as Wilson’s second in command; the chief instructor was Major G. Ritchie Lane, a Great War veteran who had attained officer rank in the COTC during his undergraduate days; another original, Major William J.T. Wright of the old 67th Battery, returned to take the largest company under his wing; and General George Cartwright, the former COTC commander, came out of retirement to give lectures in tactics through the Department of Military Studies. Most of the company commanders were new faces, but all were Great War veterans and graduates of the university. True to the civic virtues of another time, they were professional men by day (an accountant, a dentist, the chief librarian of Toronto, a lawyer, a high school principal, and his vice-principal) and militia officers by night, who now came forward “to prepare men for the struggle to come.”52 The OTB likewise benefited from the loyalty of Varsity alumni with proud war records and prominent civic profiles, the most famous of whom was Conn Smythe, the managing director of Maple Leaf Gardens and a major in the militia. He commanded one of the OTB’s two artillery companies in 1940–41 and served as an instructor at the June camp.53 In the words of the University Monthly, the great worth of these senior officers lay in the example they set in “offering their services to the Corps and giving so generously of their time in order that the military training needs of the University may be met.” Their willingness to perform these duties for token remuneration made for a closer link with the students, who were hard pressed to meet the commitments and expenses that compulsory training imposed.54 Whereas the men



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called up to the NRMA camps were paid, fed, quartered, and given uniforms by the government, students leading “a double life combining study with training” received nothing at all.55 It was not simply a matter of making them feel like soldiers by outfitting them with uniforms and boots, argued Wilson in one of several petitions to the military authorities, but of recognizing the plight of students training in their own clothes and shoes, which, if ruined by wear and tear or inclement weather, many could not afford to replace.56 And it was only fair, argued the COTC officers, that students in both battalions receive an academic bonus, since otherwise the women and exempted students would have a decided advantage over those devoting several hours a week to military instruction.57 This consideration for their men on the part of officers who, as university staff, understood their situation, apparent again in Wilson’s decision to complete the syllabus by the end of February to give the students time to study for their examinations (and allow more than a few laggards to make up for parades missed),58 goes some way to explain why, in a trying first year, only one egregious case came before the Court of Discipline established by the Board of Governors to ensure compliance with the regulations on military training.59 After dispensing with the “tedious but necessary preliminaries,” the two battalions got straight to work to take advantage of the favourable weather while it lasted. “On every reasonably pleasant fall afternoon, platoons or groups of students in uniform could be seen all over the campuses and in any other spot which could be found, doing their best to learn a little squad drill – or, on occasion, to avoid it.”60 Signallers transmitted messages by semaphore across the Front Campus, gun teams assembled and sighted wooden field pieces in Queen’s Park, and the infantry worked with the engineers to turn the then-vacant lot south of St Hilda’s College into a trench system garlanded with barbed-wire entanglements. Most of the training was done on Saturdays to avoid conflicts with the academic timetable. The Training Centre Battalion spent afternoons at drill or on route marches, while the OTB used the whole day to make the long march out to High Park to rehearse field tactics. These simulations were closely coordinated with their classroom learning, as can be seen from the textbook prepared by the instructors. The Army Work Book, distilled from “a maze of manuals and pamphlets” by Major Bertram E. Tolton and Captain Walter A. Bryce, two high school teachers serving as company commanders, was one part catechism, employing a question-and-answer format to help aspiring second lieutenants digest essential information, and one part practice examination, using contour maps of High Park for tactical exercises of increasing difficulty to test the candidate’s skills

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and resourcefulness. It was a textbook that catered to students used to memorizing the times tables or Latin paradigms, yet in its day the Army Work Book was hailed for instructional methods that guided the trainee from rote to applied knowledge and aimed “to develop the soldier as a thinking individual reacting to emergencies in the correct automatic sequence.” On these merits the manual was recommended for general use in officer training courses when it came out as a formal publication early in 1941.61 Unfortunately for the OTB, the opportunities to translate learning into practice were limited to a few weekends in the fall. The onset of “abominable” weather in December and forbidding cold in January drove both battalions inside, the officer candidates to the lecture rooms at 119 St George to prepare for their qualifying papers, the Auxbattmen to the capacious armoury on University Avenue to continue drill and weapons training.62 Although the two battalions proceeded along separate lines towards separate objectives, they did intersect on several occasions. The annual COTC Ball in February was a combined operation in which “the men and officers of the Officers’ Training Battalion and the Training Centre Battalion joined forces for the attack and defeat of the forces of Gloom.” The festivities included the debut of the COTC Pipe Band, which had been formed when the musical program of the COTC, “so necessary for adequate training in marching and so colourful and helpful to morale,” was revived at the beginning of the 1940–41 year. Under its old leader, Captain John Slatter, the university brass band became a military band once more, made up of sixty-five members from the TCB who accompanied the battalion on route marches and played at all contingent parades and ceremonies.63 The COTC’s most memorable moments came early in the year. On 19 October 1940 “the largest massed student force yet seen on the University of Toronto campus” paraded down University Avenue, across Wellington Street, and back up Spadina Avenue to the Front Campus, where Brigadier Eric Haldenby, embodying the reputation of the Great War COTC, took the salute as the two battalions swept past the reviewing stand on the front steps of University College. So long was the column formed by the three thousand Varsity men that it took nearly half an hour to pass a given point. A second joint parade, held in November and reviewed by General C.F. Constantine of Military District No. 2, reinforced the feeling on campus that the university had finally rolled up its sleeves.64 Moreover, the spectacle of the entire COTC drawn up alongside the Women’s Training Service Detachment at the Remembrance Day service – during the war years as much a show of force as a commemorative ceremony – inspired the Varsity editorialist to assert that the current generation of students had not forsaken the sacrifice of



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Figure 4.2.  Students digging trenchworks and stringing barbed wire (on the site of what is now Massey College) as part of their weekend training during the 1940–41 school year. UTA A1968-0003/004P

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an earlier war, but had taken up the torch in a manner worthy of their forebears of 1914–18.65 From an official perspective the expansion of the COTC into a training centre worked to the advantage of all concerned. In a report to district headquarters, Madill stated that “this method of training is permitting hundreds of young men to continue advanced education along with their military training. As the majority are in scientific, engineering, medical and dental courses, this is most important. They are in great demand by the forces and by industry. Thus a real contribution to Canada’s war effort is being made.”66 This mutually beneficial arrangement remained intact when revisions to the NRMA in the first half of 1941 extended the training period to four months and service for home defence for the duration of the war. Once again Cody played a leading part in harmonizing university and government interests. Having ensured that the trainees currently doing the thirty-day syllabus would not be affected, he secured an agreement allowing students to defer call-up as long as they were enrolled in the COTC while pursuing their degree.67 Undergraduates troubled by rumours of full summer training were relieved to learn that the regulations left them time to earn their tuition, thanks in large part to staff at Toronto who brought the students’ dependence on summer employment to the president’s attention during his discussions with the government.68 Under the terms of the revised agreement, all students in the age brackets liable for call-up would be exempt from summer training if they attended the two-week COTC camps in June.69 The strain of completing their training requirements and written papers before tackling their final examinations was reflected in the wan faces of the 1,456 students waiting to board the SS Cayuga on 8 June 1941. It was the largest contingent the university had ever sent to Niagara and, to judge from the official accounts, one of the busiest.70 “A taste of the real thing” reinvigorated young men eager for some outdoor activity after months of intramural training. The OTB devoted each day to “special to arm” exercises for infantry, engineers, artillery, and signals; the TCB rounded off the training syllabus with marksmanship, fieldcraft, and route marches. The searing heat made the afternoon parades and inspections nigh unbearable, but afterwards, when the cool of the evening settled upon “the ancient elms and lovely green lawns of the old camp, with its outpost-of-Empire atmosphere,” the men relaxed until the Last Post sounded. Then “the haunting strains of Lights Out would linger over the tent tops, and lights one by one would disappear and merge with the darkness.” The two battalions returned to a sweltering Toronto on 22 June. “The city seemed to swim in a mirage of humid air” as the Varsity men



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Figure 4.3.  COTC engineer cadets constructing dugouts and bridges during the Niagara Camp training in June 1941. UTA A1968-0003/004P

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tramped up University Avenue in full battledress to the Front Campus, where the order to dismiss ended their ordeal and brought the most ambitious year in the military history of the university to a close.71 It marked the zenith of the Toronto Contingent. Never before had the university had so many students enrolled in military training, and never again would the totals match those of 1940–41. Just two years before, the COTC had been a voluntary unit of fewer than three hundred members, squeezed into shared accommodations on the edge of the campus, with a permanent staff of two. It now consisted of two large battalions and a subunit, each with its own staff and headquarters in the heart of the university and, from the impetus of compulsory training, had expanded to well over ten times its pre-war size. Enrolment in the Department of Military Studies was 40 per cent higher than it had been in 1939–40 and twenty-five times higher than in the last year of peace. The numbers that gave the greatest satisfaction were those confirming the COTC’s accomplishment of its primary task of preparing men of “suitable type” for commissions in the Canadian Army. Two thirds of the Toronto candidates who wrote the First and Second Papers got through the “stiff marking” at the Department of National Defence, and as of 30 June 1941 a total of 504 COTC members had received appointments in the arms and services.72 Military training was by no means the only domain in which the university swung into high gear; nevertheless, in this time of renewed purpose, “the chief and best known representatives of the University’s war-effort continue to be the students-in-uniform of the C.O.T.C.”73 “It does little matter what dreams a-shatter The student’s martial mind: For now bayonets and drill, like a seltzer pill Sizzle, leaving dreams behind” The story of the wartime contingent has been told so far from the top down, from sources emphasizing, not unjustifiably, the COTC’s remarkably swift expansion and transformation. By contrast, the reactions of the trainees, recorded at the time or many years later, put the story in human terms and, in a broader perspective, illustrate campus attitudes towards the COTC and the war in general. Basic training was an experience shared and described by names of note – the poet Earle Birney, the budding playwright Mavor Moore, the historian Kenneth McNaught, future university president Claude Bissell and his friend Ernest Sirluck, who would become a Milton scholar and dean of the graduate school, and famed comedians Johnny Wayne (then Lou Weingarten) and Frank



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Shuster. Discernible in these recollections, and a feeling to which the majority of their peers would have admitted if pressed, is a certain relief that the university training scheme, burdensome as it was, had either settled matters for them or offered a clean slate. The overage Birney, for instance, felt he had a stake in the war since his wife was Jewish, but conspicuous service in the COTC also helped the old “Trotskyite troubadour” shed a no longer fashionable political skin;74 the academically adrift Moore yearned to play a hero’s role “in the eternal battle between good and evil”;75 the pacifist McNaught took his first step on the road to Damascus;76 and Bissell and Sirluck found themselves of like mind with the men in the graduate company. Assuming, correctly, that it would be a long climb back after 1940, they carried on with their academic pursuits while biding their time in the COTC until it made sense to enlist for overseas service.77 For all the comic relief they supplied, Wayne and Shuster were both MA candidates in English literature who took their military responsibilities seriously.78

Figure 4.4.  President Cody (in uniform, holding a cane) with the officers of the University of Toronto Contingent, 1942. Colonel Madill and Colonel Wilson sit to his left; Major Watson is to his right. In the top row, second from the right, is the artist Charles Comfort. The poet Earle Birney is second to the left at the right end of the fifth row.

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If martial ardour did not do so, mandatory training certainly roused their critical faculties. Most barbs, little more than “the rueful banter of men doing something they didn’t like,” had blunt tips, but there were some with sharper points. Sirluck, never one to mince words, characterized the directing staff as “a few retreads from the First World War and some younger people who knew little more about the army than we did,” and he dismissed the training as “uneven and often uncertain.” His skill in marksmanship ended up working against him when his reward for defeating his bumptious company commander in a shooting contest turned out to be an adverse lesson in the politics of promotion. The glacial progress through an obsolete syllabus and the amateurishness of the 1941 Niagara camp added to his exasperation.79 Still, “positive offsets to the wasted time and botched and incompetent training” balanced his view of the COTC. On the credit side of the ledger, he entered his reassurance that he was doing his duty, his introduction to a wider, intellectually stimulating group of young men, and the beginnings of lasting friendships and associations. The training also showed marked improvement from one year to the next. In 1941–42 the battalion was organized into advanced and basic companies, uniforms and equipment having finally arrived, and “the rudiments of fighting” assumed a greater place in the syllabus.80 Sirluck himself commanded a platoon during his second year, and he portrayed the 1942 Niagara camp in a much more favourable light, noting the closer relevance of the lectures and the more realistic exercises conducted by a staff a year older and wiser in its approach.81 He completed the advanced syllabus, and after passing his qualifying examinations, was sent, along with Bissell and “a few dozen others,” to the officer selection and appraisal centre at Trois-Rivières, Quebec.82 Sirluck was not the only charter member to take a dim view of the Training Centre Battalion’s inaugural year. Ten minutes into his first parade, one conscript was already counting down the remainder of his sentence (“only a hundred and nine hours fifty minutes more”), while his equally miserable comrades “mumbled destruction to our well-wishers” – to wit, the NCOs, all “recent graduates, exercising as much of their new-found ‘wisdom’ as they could muster … vociferous in their description of us auxiliaries – ‘conscripts,’ ‘suckers,’ ‘buck privates.’”83 The mumblers grew more voluble over the year. Trainees bridled at corporals and sergeants little older than they were, who compensated for the insecurity of inexperience with imperious bluster and whose limited repertoire consigned their platoons to the same old routines again and again. Insolence, sullen resentment, an outright lack of cooperation, finely calculated tardiness, exaggerated yawns



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during lectures, and frivolous conduct at drill were forms of defiance employed by malcontents resentful of compulsory training yet wary of flouting the rules on attendance. Incidents of such behaviour were symptoms of the battalion’s main ailment: too few seasoned officers to manage too unwieldy an enlistment.84 As the training improved and the officers grew into their job, however, the performance and behaviour of the trainees led the Varsity to report in December 1941 that “things are better than last year” and that “ninety percent of Training Centre Battalion men are doing their work seriously.” In the ranks, the tables were turning. The Varsity admonished students who clowned at drill (“there is no laughter in Europe these days”) and called upon the officers to crack down on miscreants whose lateness or childish antics interrupted the progress of the rest.85 And where the university’s disciplinary committee had been inclined to lenience in 1940–41, it was lex dura sed lex in 1941–42. Four students were expelled that year for failing to comply with the regulations on military training.86 Even with the best of wills, not all students could devote equal time and effort to military training, nor did it make sense for them to do so past a certain point. Medical and dental students would do the armed forces and the country far more good as properly qualified practitioners than as partially trained general service recruits. To forestall an anticipated shortage of doctors and dentists, the courses in medicine and dentistry were accelerated in 1941–42 and students in the upper years exempted from training to allow them to concentrate on their clinical work.87 Proposals to exempt science and engineering students, especially if they had already done a year or two of basic training, also gained force that year. A confidential survey of deans at eight universities warned that students in these faculties were buckling beneath the weight of their academic and military responsibilities, and called for some relief for men in the upper years. Interestingly, the one positive report came from Toronto, where the close and long-standing association of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering with the COTC explains the relative efficiency with which the academic and military timetables were integrated. The dean of the faculty, Major C.R. Young, well placed to assess the situation from a professional and military perspective, recommended that training be mandatory only in the first two years of the engineering course and then reduced or eliminated.88 It was a matter of first things first, he argued, since an engineer could be trained as a soldier more quickly than a soldier could be trained as an engineer. He also supported the government’s decision to grant exemptions from the June camp to FASE students hired for summer work in essential war industries.89 So began a gradual process by which students

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in professional fields became subject to different regulations regarding their military training. These adjustments served the national interest, but not without a centrifugal effect on the Toronto Contingent, since the companies of both battalions tended more and more to operate in isolation, each according to its circumstances, and hence as strangers to one another. The constant turnover of officers, as much as 50 per cent each year, plagued the Training Centre Battalion from beginning to end. Finding good officers solved only half the problem, since the cream rising to the top was quickly skimmed off.90 They were eager to go, since promising officers were by nature ambitious types spoiling for active service, whereas postings to the COTC were regarded as a dead end. At the NCO level, the only way to replenish the supply was to appoint provisional corporals and sergeants from students in their second year of training. This gave prospective officers the chance to train and manage men, but it also put them in a delicate position vis-à-vis their friends and peers. The always interesting Halt! column, launched in 1940–41 to record “the doings of the awkward squad,” departed from its normally humorous outlook midway through 1941–42 to remind trainees of the uncomfortable situation of the student officers, who went from sitting among their classmates in lectures one hour to barking commands at them on the parade ground the next. Trainees could make the sergeant’s lot a happy one by acting like soldiers at drill and showing consideration to the NCOs, who, to be fair, were learning on the job and had started in the ranks just like everybody else. For their part, the student officers were advised not to compromise their authority by turning a blind eye to friends late or absent on parade or indulging trainees in a bid for popularity. Their rank required them to be respected rather than liked.91 The more piercing criticisms directed against the Training Centre Battalion could also be interpreted as negative ways of sending a positive message. A much publicized debate at University College in January 1942, contending that “the present system of training at the University of Toronto is unsatisfactory,” prompted the Halt! columnist, himself a member of the battalion, to make the space a forum for discussion. The responses reveal a grudging acknowledgment that the training was necessary and a general awareness among the students of their good fortune in being allowed to continue their studies under the current arrangement. On the other hand, what they wanted was not “half-baked military drill,” but useful and practical instruction “in the methods of modern, mechanized warfare … for the real job they have to do.”92 In short, it was a matter of energetic, intelligent young men



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yearning for a challenge that a university-based training system could not wholly provide.93 Nor did the war itself exert much pull. The country’s, and the university’s, level of involvement in 1941–42, the third year of the war, hardly bore comparison to the third year of the previous war, which had begun during the Somme and ended at Hill 70, with Passchendaele in the offing. Although it was by now a world conflict as a result of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor six months later, a Varsity editorial early in 1942 hit the nail on the head when it stated that, “as far as Canada has been concerned, being at war has meant almost nothing in a military sense.”94 The country was facing a plebiscite on conscription for overseas service, its navy and air force were playing an ever-greater part, and yet the dominant reality was that the Canadian Army was sitting idle in Britain with little likelihood of going into action anytime soon. If the students appeared apathetic about training, it was because they saw little reason to trouble themselves about the war, at least for the time being. Hard fighting undoubtedly lay ahead, and the day of victory was as yet indistinct, but with the Soviets and Americans in the Allied camp the outcome seemed a foregone conclusion, so much so that minds were already turning to the problems awaiting solution in the post-war era.95 Even after the scare of 1940, it was not a surge, but the absence, of antiGerman feeling that struck one professor who remembered the very different mood of 1914;96 and where it would have taken a brave student indeed to declare himself a conscientious objector in 1916–17, this time round a handful of young men substituted 110 hours of first-aid training or clerical work in the COTC for military instruction without exciting controversy.97 Worried that too many of their fellow students were simply going through the motions, the Varsity editors took it upon themselves to run what must be reckoned the most extraordinary issue in the paper’s history. In the spirit of “it could happen here,” the 15 December 1941 edition conjured up the spectre of a German invasion of Canada. In this “grim hypothesis” the University of Toronto just happened to be the Schwerpunkt of the Nazi assault.98 “Canada Under German Rule” blared the apocalyptic headline over a photograph of “our beloved Fuehrer” saluting his triumphant storm troopers from the front steps of University College. Hart House lay in ruins, blasted by Luftwaffe bombers, the Soldiers’ Tower had been demolished by a direct hit, and German soldiers were mopping up resistance and clearing the decks for Canada’s absorption into the Third Reich. Only the Jews stood to suffer more than the students and professors who were now reaping the rewards of their blithe indifference

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to the Nazi threat. The fate meted out to the students of Prague and Warsaw was about to befall Canada’s intelligentsia – imprisonment, forced labour, executions. The University of Toronto was to be closed for three years in punishment for its temerity in resisting, however feebly; and when it reopened, only pure-blooded Aryan males schooled in National Socialist principles would be allowed back in. Women had no need of education beyond a physical training course preparing them for their role as broodmares for the master race. The Varsity henceforth would be published under Nazi editorship and chart the university’s conversion to a German-speaking bastion of New Order Kultur. The first step in this direction had already been taken: the gossip column known as “Champus Cat” reappeared as “Kampus Kat” (signed by the sinister “Stuermer”) and made its debut with a suitably vicious cautionary tale about the fate in store for those who opposed the Teutonic juggernaut. One episode in this nightmarish vision involved the COTC. A small band of officer cadets, out on a night training exercise when German paratroopers landed, went down fighting in a gallant last stand on the Back Campus. Alas, the hastily mobilized, confused units milling about at Hart House (presumably the Training Centre Battalion) could not so much as fire a shot, since the ammunition issued for their rifles was of the wrong calibre – the most plausible scenario in the whole story – and made easy prey for the crack troops of the Wehrmacht. It was the university in a nutshell: unrealistic, unconcerned, unready, unequipped, and unavailing – all of which was meant to force each student to confront the questions posed by the editors. Am I putting forth my best effort in my studies, in my military training? Am I aware of my responsibilities as a student, citizen, and prospective soldier” Am I staying informed about the current situation? Am I donating blood to those in need overseas, or money to the war effort? To boil it all down to the core question, am I really doing my part? Whatever they made of this “stimulus to thoughtful action,” all but a few members of the TCB could in good conscience have answered the last question in the affirmative. They were doing what the government had told them to do, and they were keeping to the path of duty without wandering off into enthusiasm or disobedience. The last Halt! column of the 1941–42 session adduced the waning complaints and criticisms as evidence that, “on the whole the contingent is running well,” but the most convincing proof that the students were doing their part resided in the four thousand Varsity men listed on active duty by the end of June 1942.99 Most were products of the COTC who had conformed to the letter of the law while at university and honoured its spirit by enlisting for overseas service upon completion of their degree. They



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Figure 4.5.  Time to get serious about military training − or else. Perhaps the most arresting front page in the history of The Varsity (published on 15 December 1941).

might have set off on their military career with nary a backward glance at the Training Centre Battalion, but they took with them the rudiments of soldiering and an array of skills necessary to an army building up for the test to come.

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“The role of the C.O.T.C. for the academic year 1942–43 differs considerably from that of previous years” To a much greater extent than in the Great War, when the University of Toronto Contingent functioned as a largely autonomous unit, during the Second World War the role and operation of the COTC were shaped by policies originating in Ottawa. The NRMA was the first and most influential of the policies that yoked the universities and the COTC to the national war effort, with the result that the Toronto Contingent grew into a two-tiered unit providing basic and advanced training for all male students. So it would remain until the end of the war, but the COTC was to remake itself in 1942–43, this time in reaction to two separate yet overlapping demands: the first from National Defence Headquarters for officers in the rapidly expanding Canadian Army, the second from the National Selective Service for personnel in the armed forces and skilled labour in essential industries. In coping with these demands, the contingent and the university wrestled with the interlocking questions that came to the fore in 1942–43. What was the right balance between the measurable technical skills required of officers and the quicksilver of human qualities necessary in leaders? How great a preference should be given to practical, scientific fields of study developing the technology and skills necessary to win the war, as opposed to the arts curriculum, which cultivated the individual as well as the ideals and principles for which the country was fighting? What made a university training corps a uniquely valuable source of officers, and how did this in turn justify the university’s commitment not only to the applied sciences, but also to the cultural heritage of the past? The most interesting year in the wartime contingent’s history began with a report sent by Colonel Madill to President Cody on 10 August 1942.100 In laying out the COTC’s objectives for the coming session, Madill announced a slight but telling change in nomenclature. Its two principal parts were henceforth to be known as the 1st and 2nd Battalions, a neutral redesignation meant to eliminate the “unjust and unwarranted differentiation” between the Officers Training Battalion and the less-esteemed Training Centre Battalion and to imply a coherent sequence from basic to advanced levels of instruction. Men with a full year of training would go into the 1st Battalion, those without into the 2nd. All male students ages nineteen and older were obliged to join one or the other. The underaged were welcome to join if they wished. Although the COTC’s remit to train undergraduates in accordance with the NRMA regulations still held, staff would now sift through the contingent for “Potential Officer Material” (POM) – in other words,



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candidates to be recommended for the Officer Training Centre (OTC) at Brockville, Ontario, and specially trained so that, once there, they would be “on a more equal footing with candidates from the Canadian Army (Active) who have had long experience in this phase of training both in Canada and overseas.”101 This renewed emphasis on officer training came in response to the dilemma facing the army in the summer of 1942.102 When in April 1941 the government settled on a policy of selecting officers from the ranks, the COTC had received assurances that training in the corps would count as time in the ranks and that COTC candidates would receive equal consideration for entry to the OTCs at Brockville and Gordon Head, British Columbia.103 As the Canadian Army expanded in 1942, the demand for officers rose correspondingly, reactivating the debate over experience versus education as the decisive criterion in officer selection. Owing to the severe shortage of officers, especially in the technical arms, and the limited stock of candidates from the ranks, the COTC, already a fertile source, became almost by default the army’s main supplier.104 Quantity was one thing, however, quality another. COTC candidates gained admission to the OTCs on the strength of their university education and training, but, in the blunt verdict put to the contingent commanders at the annual conference in June 1942, “too frequently they do not compare well at first with candidates from the ranks of the Active Army.” Colonel Madill, who hosted the meeting, took this as an incentive to make four years of university training the equivalent of the four months’ training in the Active Army and the COTC into “a proving ground for O.T.C. candidates.”105 The Toronto Contingent would reassert its identity as an officer training unit and by its example strengthen the case for the university-educated officer candidate. There was to be no fork in the road to Brockville. “Our greatest job,” declared Madill, “is to select and train the Potential Officer for the Active Army,” and with this end in mind, fully overhauled, intensely practical courses of instruction were laid out for the “POMs” of the 1st Battalion. No longer would the COTC go by the syllabus leading to a commission in the Reserve Army, now ruled out as a destination for men in the highest age and fitness categories, and, following the recommendation of the Ottawa conference, no longer would candidates be evaluated solely by written examinations. Instead, various observations, tests, and simulations would identify la crème de la crème.106 The military issue of the Varsity that prefaced each academic session decreed that the 1942–43 crop of trainees must pick the arm or service to which they were best suited by their academic programs or aptitude. Students

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adept in mathematics or the pure sciences should pick the artillery or signals, others in the applied sciences or engineering might opt for the engineer, ordnance, or service corps, and so on. Yet they must add up to more than the sum of their technical skills. Each man envisioning a role as a combatant officer had first to take the measure of himself: “Do you possess the qualities of leadership, energy, tact, appearance, and the ability to accept responsibility and inspire confidence which are essential to the leaders of men in battle today?” He also had to be prepared to meet higher standards of fitness. “Hardening” and “physical toughness” were much-advertised features in the revised training regime, not just for Potential Officer Material but for all those being ushered into overseas service via the COTC.107 The loud insistence on rugged, practical training countered the view in certain quarters that university training produced nothing but spindly, unmilitary, privileged eggheads. If the Toronto Contingent was broadcasting its aim to develop physically fit, realistically trained candidates endowed by their education with useful technical or specialized skills – always the COTC’s trump card – it was also highlighting the moral fibre of young undergraduates cast for a larger part. For the first and only time in the 1939–45 war, echoes of Great War trumpets meet the ear, audible in the panegyrics to the leader in battle all trainees should aspire to become: “The health and life of an Army throbs in the heart of its junior officers or dies there … to them is entrusted the immediate and close command of the men … After all the plans are laid and the details worked out, it is the Lieutenant who faces his men and says: ‘This platoon will …,’ and it is the Lieutenant that the platoon follows while it does what it will do.”108 What validated the COTC was not the training per se, but the sort of young man who did his training in the corps, the professional and intellectual formation that shaped him, and his reasoned acceptance of his duty. The COTC, then as now, did not lack for detractors.109 The belief that its real purpose was to save appearances – “we would submit … that the C.O.T.C. is being run a visual proof to the general public that university students are not a privileged class” – was widely shared among the undergraduates, who were warned by those who had gone on to the OTCs not to acknowledge their connection with the COTC, “poohpoohed” as it had come to be by 1942.110 And yet no one examining the Toronto Contingent in the 1942–43 session could fail to appreciate the effort invested in producing candidates equal to any drawn from the ranks. Madill and his staff had certainly done their homework in shoring up the areas in which COTC men had been tried and found wanting. The deficiencies were itemized in a report prepared by Major



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G.R. Lane, chief instructor of the 2nd Battalion, in the wake of a visit (along with Madill and Watson) to the OTC at Brockville in early September 1942.111 Their observations were complemented by interviews with the commandant, Brigadier Milton Gregg, the instructors, and twenty-four COTC products from Toronto, whose criticisms and recommendations pointed to the weak spots most in need of improvement. Topping the list was the inadequacy of the physical training, which had left the Toronto candidates far short of the desired levels of strength and stamina. A tour of the Brockville assault course made the one used by the COTC at the Niagara camp “look like something that would appear more natural in the children’s playground.” The COTC graduates who had regarded drill as a tedious chore had since come to realize that, when done in the right spirit, “square-bashing” inculcated the reflexive discipline necessary to attain the standards of efficiency and “smartness” expected at Brockville: “every company doubles on and off each O.C.’s parade and doubles from each training area to the next at the end of each period.” The level of instruction also came in for some pointed criticism that gave the Toronto officers much to think about with regard to their candidates’ abilities in map reading, fieldcraft, battle drill, weapons handling, and platoon tactics.112 Revealing and remedial, if a little jarring, the annual conference and the visit to Brockville defined the place of the COTC in the great scheme of things. According to the director of national training, its object was to make a trained soldier, not a trained officer – in other words, to operate as a pre-OTC, preparing suitable candidates for the next stage. The point was duly noted in Lane’s report, but the Toronto Contingent’s officers sought not to meet but to exceed expectations. They took back with them copies of the Brockville syllabi and shaped the courses of instruction in accordance with the material taught at the OTC. Two thick files of lecture notes treating the subjects covered in officer training attest to the intellectual rigour of the 1942–43 curriculum, which, it bears repeating, the students did in addition to their academic coursework.113 Of particular interest are the sample examinations indicating the range and depth of knowledge that candidates were required to demonstrate. More significant, the comments appended to one examination, given in November 1942, list the methods adopted by COTC instructors to gauge not just the skills of candidates but also their composure. Information was given orally and not repeated, the aim being to have the trainee instantly absorb complex details – seven-digit map coordinates, troop dispositions, contours of terrain – then use them effectively and independently with no time for reflection. He was also told to give clear, specific references to weapons, units, or positions to

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avoid confusion when answering questions or issuing orders in tactical simulations. The instructor in this case remarked that administering examinations in such a way presented “as much a test of endurance and nerve as of military knowledge, and confidence is very important.” The “evolution of the wartime C.O.T.C. towards maximum efficiency” coincided with other developments that brought about “perhaps the greatest change visible in college life … the psychological metamorphosis which the typical denizen of the campus seems to have undergone.”114 It was the year when the University of Toronto became a hive of military activity, setting up its own air and naval training units,115 expanding the Women’s National Service programs, and hosting the experimental No. 1 Canadian Army University Course (CAUC). The term had just opened when the university received its first visitor of note, the war correspondent and one-time Varsity editor Ross Munro, whose eyewitness account of the Dieppe Raid highlighted the contributions made by the university’s soldiers to the “grandeur of Canadian gallantry.”116 The gallantry could not efface the appalling casualty list, which upon full tabulation showed that nine Varsity men had lost their lives, but it stirred a consoling sense of pride that the raid was a statement of the Allies’ intent to liberate the continent and that the Canadians had been picked to deliver the message. The students themselves seemed to have squared their shoulders now that the momentum of the war was shifting and Canada’s hour was approaching. The firmness of purpose made itself apparent right away. Whereas in 1940 it had taken more than half an hour to transform a “milling mob” into the semblance of a battalion, the COTC’s organizational parades at the beginning of October 1942 saw the 2nd Battalion form up on the Front Campus in just eighteen minutes and the 1st Battalion in no time at all on the Back Campus.117 Over the year, 387 COTC members would leave the university to go on active service, and 402 would be considered for officer training in all three services, the majority in the specialized corps of the army.118 It was also the year when the tensions of the war effort began to show. The university that had nearly run out of students in the First World War feared that it might run out of professors during the Second. By the end of the session, Toronto had granted leave to 225 teaching staff, whose absence for the duration raised concerns about a deterioration in instruction, especially in the heavily populated professional faculties.119 Unease of a kind not yet felt during the war surfaced on the very first page of the 1942–43 Varsity. In one column, the registrar, A.B. Fennell, responded to the not-unfounded rumour that students who failed to maintain their academic standing would forfeit their



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deferments; in another, Professor Walter T. Brown, principal of Victoria College, defended the place of the humanities in a university at war.120 Cody’s opening address betrayed the president’s sensitivity to a swelling chorus of complaint that too many students were using the “protective colouration” of the COTC to hide from their true responsibilities. His reply insisting that “the university is not a haven of refuge for those who seek to avoid their solemn obligations, but a place where men and women alike are prepared for the better discharge of their obligations” was peppered with references to the number of Varsity men on active service or in training. Nevertheless, the perceived unfairness of an escape hatch open to some and not to others festered in the public mind. Why, as one city newspaper protested, should young men whose families could afford to send them to university enjoy a fouryear exemption from military service, especially arts students making no discernible contribution to the winning of the war?121 These were reactions to pressure felt throughout the country as the competing demands for manpower on the military and industrial sides of the war effort led the Dominion government to rationalize the allocation of skills and labour. Between March and December 1942, the task of assessing Canada’s human resources and directing them where they would best further the national interest was centralized in the National Selective Service program, which also assumed responsibility for recruitment under the NRMA.122 The solution to the manpower problem, as National Selective Service saw it, lay in curtailing employment in “non-essential” occupations in order to shunt greater numbers into “essential“ work, be it in the armed forces, industry, or agriculture. Applied to the universities, this policy, in its milder form, would comb students out of the “non-essential” arts curriculum and put them to more necessary tasks. In its more draconian form, it would suspend the arts curriculum altogether for the rest of the war. The obvious utility of technical expertise in wartime, coupled with the view that the humanities served no practical purpose other than to allow slackers to roam free in the groves of academe, tilted the scales against arts students, who could defer enlistment or war work only if they finished in the upper half of their class. A new sort of casualty list began to appear in the Varsity after the first term’s results were in, recording the number of students “plucked” at various universities.123 But if Varsity men and women enrolled in arts courses now found themselves subject to stringent requirements designed to “ruthlessly weed out incompetent and mediocre students,”124 precious in the sight of National Selective Service were their counterparts in the sciences, engineering, and other technical fields. These students were to be protected from call-up until they

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had completed their degree, and could go into the branch of the armed forces or industry for which they had registered their preference.125 The proposed restrictions on arts curricula, first bruited in the autumn of 1942, met with sturdy opposition at Toronto, marshalled behind President Cody and Professor Harold Innis.126 Cody held that the university curriculum must be a matter not of “either … or” but of “both … and.” The sciences, of course, were indispensable to winning the war and building a better world out of the ruins, he wrote, but the humanities, the lifeblood of the universities, gave meaning and purpose to the struggle. In employing all the brainpower at its disposal to defeat a totalitarian, inhumane foe intent on destroying the foundations of Christian civilization, the university, now more than ever, had a corresponding moral duty to safeguard “our cultural heritages from the past, for the personality of the man or woman, enriched from the past and by present human relations, is the most sacred and valuable of all possessions.” On a less exalted plane, this “both … and” approach held true for the university’s military training program. Where the sciences could produce technically proficient men for the specialized branches

Figure 4.6.  The COTC in a single image. Cadets in the Hart House Library, 1943. UTA A1973-0050/002(04)



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of the armed forces, the humanities in turn fostered “an intellectual discipline for the training of officers” and equipped leaders to deal with the human dynamics of military command.127 Since National Selective Service was prepared to make every provision for science students to complete their education and choose the form of service they were best qualified to enter, argued Cody, should not the arts students doing military training likewise be given the chance to serve in capacities where they could put their skills to good use? There was evidence to support such a policy: “The experience of many instructors in Officers’ Training courses is that as a general rule Arts graduates and undergraduates in the non-scientific courses display qualities of leadership and character which will make them efficient officers.”128 The debate pitting the sciences against the arts paralleled the conflict of opinion over the preferred sources and qualities of effective officers.129 The day after Toronto’s arguments for retaining the arts curriculum were presented at a special session of the National Conference of Canadian Universities (NCCU) in Ottawa, the commanders of COTC contingents meeting in the same city were favoured by a visit from the chief of the general staff, Major-General Kenneth Stuart. A staunch advocate for the educated officer, Stuart took the occasion to analyse training into its “moral, mental, and physical components.”130 The summary of his remarks, preserved in the minutes, is worth repeating for the emphasis he laid on strength of character: The moral factor develops a loyalty to one’s superior, to those one commands and to truth – a loyalty in the last case that might involve a struggle for the right against superiors. It develops also a confidence in his arms, in his superiors, in his men, in himself. It develops determination and a sense of duty. General Stewart [sic] was convinced that these were the most important characteristics we were trying to develop. There was also the mental side of training which developed knowledge, judgment, initiative, and acceptance of responsibility. And then physical training. The C.G.S. felt that too much emphasis was now placed on the physical side of training (Battle drill). When we are carrying out physical training we must not lose sight of the moral objectives. Discipline is a basic principle and may be defined as being in a trained condition. Enemy morale is based on fanaticism and fear. Our strength rests on confidence and understanding. C.G.S. [chief of the general staff] reported Canada overseas as confident and fighting fit. The Army has a responsibility to the state to release a man to civil life a better citizen.

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Although they expressed their findings in different terms, the merits of a “both … and” approach to officer training began to dawn on the personnel selection staff who evaluated the candidates sent to the OTCs. Preserved in President Cody’s files are the observations passed on to him early in 1944 by Captain Humphrey Carver, an instructor in the university’s School of Architecture whose path to army examiner at Brockville had begun in the Training Centre Battalion in 1940–41.131 They pertain not to the COTC, but to No. 1 Canadian Army University Course, which, as noted, was undertaken as a pilot project at the University of Toronto during the 1942–43 session.132 A farsighted and generous idea, the CAUC could be described as a COTC for high school graduates awaiting call-up. Rather than have promising students without the means to attend university let their talents decay, the university invited applicants to take first-year courses in technical subjects that would set them on their way to commissioned rank in the specialized branches of the army – and give them a foothold should they choose to pursue their education after the war.133 Of the 148 accepted, 120 graduated from the university phase of the course. Of these, 97 appeared before the Officer Selection and Appraisal Board, which approved half of them (49) for officer training. In reviewing the reasons two out of three eventually fell by the wayside, Carver pointed to one inescapable conclusion: “The kind of education provided in the Course was not effective in stimulating their leadership qualities.” Most had foundered on the rock of character, which should have come as no surprise given that they were not yet twenty years of age. Be that as it may, the inability to demonstrate evidence of strong personality, intellectual ability, maturity, motivation, or stability had sunk not only these candidates, but many others before them. It was time to reassess the priorities of officer training. To focus solely on technical aptitude was to deprive candidates of the greater benefits of a university-based training program: A period of University education cannot change inherent native characteristics such as intellectual calibre or stability – nor can it, perhaps, greatly accelerate the process of maturation. The development of character and personality, however, may be regarded as essentially the educational function of a University. The ability to think and to act with decision and self-confidence, the whetting of ambition to assume responsibility, the directing of motives and purpose. These have been the traditional aims of University life and no less important than the acquisition of pure knowledge. In so far as the No. 1 C.A.U.C. concentrated on the technical and scientific subjects and provided no higher education, in the fullest sense of the term, it appears



“The Child of the Last War” 193 to have failed to provide young Officer Candidates with the very thing which they required and the very thing which Officer Candidates have characteristically lacked. The fact that the No. 1 C.A.U.C. syllabus was designed on the technical school lines seems to have risen from the idea that a mechanized war requires officers trained in scientific technique. The fact is that (apart from the technical corps, Royal Canadian Engineers and Royal Canadian Ordnance Corps) there is no Army job that cannot be learned by an intelligent man with a Grade XII education and a normal mechanical aptitude. The essential quality for combatant leaders in a mechanized war is still, as it always has been, the ability to lead men rather than the ability to service machines. The special contribution of a University course in war-time should therefore be education in leadership.

Carver ended his report with the recommendations that any future syllabus include “a broad exposition of history, civics, sociology, etc., in order to develop a sense of obligation to the country and an understanding of the issues that are being fought out; a training in self-expression so that a Candidate can stand up before a group and speak with assurance and so that he can express himself accurately and fluently in writing; and a programme of vigorous team sports so that Candidates can develop physically and learn practical leadership in the field.” Every word of this accorded with the program followed by the Toronto Contingent during 1942–43, which, in addition to the emphasis on the officer’s character, included courses on military writing (using a textbook prepared by Major William S. Wallace) and a full schedule of recreational and team sports arranged with the cooperation of the Athletic Association.134 Reports such as this and the remarks of General Stuart vindicated the arguments Cody had made on the symbiosis of the arts and sciences in the university curriculum. They also supported the view prevailing throughout 1942–43 that leadership grew out of education. But there was still “some danger in some quarters of underestimating the value of the C.O.T.C. as a source of supply for officers.”135 Not all were convinced that the universities produced officer candidates equal to those from the ranks, nor were “college boys” greeted with open arms by the training staff at the OTCs. To some degree they had brought upon themselves the hostility they encountered. In 1942 the Halt! columnist had reproached fellow students who “looked down” on the NCOs and privates from the Active Service Force present on campus. The “quiet scorn” exhibited towards them must cease, he warned, lest it “deepen the imprints of bitterness felt by men who are only too aware of a class

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line of demarcation separating them from us.”136 COTC trainees with their noses in the air would have been wise to heed these words, since the scorn was returned with interest once they became the despised outsiders. The innocent suffered with the guilty. The aforementioned Ernest Sirluck recalled the vindictiveness of the NCOs at the Officer Selection and Appraisal Centre at Three Rivers, whose methods seemed designed “to humiliate and punish us for being privileged.” The trainers openly delighted in the discomfiture of their charges since “it confirmed their a priori view that as officer cadets drawn from civilian life we were a pampered and unfairly privileged lot, and justified their plans to make us pay for it.” But the tormentors might have done just as well to ignore the mote in the cadets’ eyes and cast the beam out of their own, for they were acting out of class resentments often more imagined than real. Sirluck himself belies facile generalizations about pampered, privileged young men sauntering through university into officer rank. He had known harder times than most, both as the son of an immigrant farmer in Manitoba and as a Jew impeded by institutional and casual discrimination at nearly every step in his academic and military career.137 Assumptions rather than facts distorted opinions of COTC candidates at higher levels as well. In the spring of 1943 President Cody wrote to Minister of National Defence J.L. Ralston to protest an announced change in the regulations. COTC candidates with engineering degrees had been informed that they were to spend an indefinite period in the ranks of the Active Army and appear before the officer appraisal boards even after “a long and rigorous training” at university. The loss of their exemption from service in the ranks came as a deep disappointment to young men who had worked very hard at their technical and military education, only to see fellow COTC graduates in medicine and dentistry take commissions upon enlistment and their peers who had opted for the navy or air force sprint along the inside track to commissioned rank and active service. Ralston’s reply assured Cody that the current engineer graduates would not be subject to the new rule, but the minister went on to defend the decision with the claim that “experience has shown that the academic standing of C.O.T.C. candidates does not compensate for the training, experience and military knowledge which can only be acquired by the potential officer having had some service in the ranks of the Active Army, including training as a N.C.O.” Then came something of a bombshell: “in this connection it has been found that the numbers of failures and repeats at the O.T.C.’s has been considerably higher (approximately double the percentage) amongst C.O.T.C. candidates entering with provisional commissions than amongst the



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more highly trained candidates who had completed both Basic and Advanced Training.”138 Cody and Madill “viewed most seriously” this alleged rate of failure, as they had been led to believe that the standing of COTC candidates from Toronto was excellent, with only three men (none an engineer) said to have failed out of the hundreds sent on to the OTCs.139 Determined to correct any defects in the Toronto Contingent, Madill and his staff set out to obtain precise totals and percentages. The information they collected simultaneously relieved and galled. “There is no record of a single failure of a C.O.T.C. candidate for the Royal Canadian Engineers from this District,” reported the district engineer officer for Military District No. 2, who added that he had learned of no case where a COTC candidate had had to repeat. In fact it was largely owing to the cooperation of the Toronto Contingent that more than half of all candidates sent to the OTCs as reinforcement officers for the Royal Canadian Engineers had come from this one military district.140 The discrepancy between supposition and fact stemmed from the surprising lack of any attempt at the OTCs to keep a record of results achieved and the reasons for them, much less to distinguish between candidates from the various COTC contingents. To make matters worse, Madill had found during his visit to Brockville “that members of the staff, in their minds, had included as C.O.T.C. candidates those who had come from university centres or were graduates, but had little or no military training and had nothing to do with the C.O.T.C.” Tactfully skirting the question of how such men had got anywhere near the OTC in the first place, Madill had pointed out this misapprehension to the staff, who then “realized the unfairness of some of the remarks they had passed.” Still, the damage had been done: “Similar remarks had, no doubt, been made to officers from National Defence Headquarters.” Madill’s report, addressed to Cody and intended for Ralston, contained two recommendations: first, a precise record should be compiled, contingent by contingent, of failures at the OTCs in all arms so that adverse criticism could be directed at units in need of improvement, not at the COTC in general; second, the process of officer selection should be streamlined if the army was not to lose the best men to the more enticing air force or navy. Already the technical branches were receiving only those who could not get into the air or naval training units, a dilution of talent that, to those with ears to hear, would lead to the failure rates cited by the OTC staff and taken at face value by the minister. The results of Madill’s investigation did not alter Ralston’s stance concerning the route to be taken by officer candidates. His reply to Cody conceded that the figures quoted in his first letter had applied to the COTC as a whole, without differentiation among contingents, yet

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the salient point that exactly two engineer candidates from the universities (neither of them with COTC training) were reported to have failed appears to have made no impression upon him whatsoever. Although the number of commissions granted to candidates from the University of Toronto Contingent gave proof of its “very excellent contribution to the Army,” the basis for the change in policy remained the same: “It is again stated that high academic standing of Army Officers is not alone sufficient. More and more it is being borne out that training in the ranks is essential in developing a high calibre regimental officer. The experience gained in the fundamentals of soldiering, obedience and discipline, working with others as a team and the management of of men can only be gained by the great majority, while serving in the ranks.”141 The hard truth of the matter was that the Department of National Defence had lost faith in the COTC. If anything, the department viewed Toronto’s program and objectives as too ambitious, and felt that the contingent should confine its efforts to the basic training necessary for men entering the ranks. According to the director of military training, the time had come to review the whole approach to COTC training, since the results “do not warrant the continuance of this plan on such a large scale.” The question posed at the end of his memorandum – “Have the products of COTCs been the potential officer material desired or expected?” – led to one answer only, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.142 In the never-ending, never-resolved debate over the best recipe for officers, the pendulum had swung away from education towards experience in the ranks as the essential ingredient.143 The methods of selection and evaluation were also changing as the army sought to open the door to a broader range of candidates, now to be assessed by impartial “scientific” testing weighted more towards personality traits than towards educational background or qualifications. As of 16 July 1943 apprenticeship in the COTC exempted a man only from basic training in the Active Army. From this time on, COTC candidates had to proceed along the standard path to a commission that began with advanced training in the ranks and led to Brockville through the selection and appraisal centres.144 The law of supply and demand also came to bear on the COTC. In March 1943 forty Toronto men attending a lecture on signals had been told by the district officer that the Corps of Signals was “not ‘hard up’ for officers” and could afford to be fastidious in its choice of applicants, who, if accepted, faced nearly two more years of training in order to qualify for overseas service.145 By August it had become apparent that a year of feverish production had turned a shortage of officers into a surplus, an unforeseen boom that led the



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army planners to call for a slowdown in the assembly lines that were churning out more candidates than were needed.146 For the Toronto Contingent this concatenation of change during the summer of 1943 – different approaches to officer selection, a reduction in status, a sharp decrease in demand – had far-reaching implications and necessitated yet another adjustment in course as the war entered its fifth year. “One of the most important matters concerning your committee is the misnomer under which this Unit now functions – namely Canadian Officers’ Training Corps” The COTC worked best when the standards it set and the rewards it offered satisfied the students’ desire for military training commensurate with their abilities and ambitions. The two weeks at Niagara in June 1943, pleasingly low on ceremony and drill and devoted instead to specialized instruction and field exercises conducted with modern transport and equipment, exemplified the realistic training that motivated students to see and conduct themselves as real soldiers.147 In retrospect this camp was to be the high-water mark in the COTC’s esprit de corps, since the contingent’s officers were soon to face a decline in morale once the revisions in officer selection policy relegated the COTC to a basic training unit and deprived it of its trademark role. The challenge before Madill and his staff at the beginning of the 1943–44 session was of a very different order than the expansion of the contingent in 1940 and the rededication to officer training just the year before. They now had to inform the members of the 1st Battalion that officer qualification was no longer the goal of their training and that the syllabus had been pruned to prepare them only for the special to arm training done by all men in the ranks of the Active Army before proceeding to the corps training centres.148 The devolved COTC hardly set the pulse racing. The university-bred “POM” who descended from on high in 1942 had to resign himself in 1943 to starting at ground level at the back of a very long, very slow line. Only in the ranks, according to the revised standard version of officer selection, could the future platoon commander learn to handle weapons, follow orders automatically, and perform all movements “almost unconsciously,” so that when his time came he could understand the sentiments of his men, have full confidence in them, and count on their obedience to his orders. “This is the purpose of the socalled ‘monotony’ of basic training.”149 In all of this, however, the word “monotony” was the only one that registered. No amount of persuasion, no matter how impeccable the logic or reasonable the tone, could

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still complaints about the diluted, repetitious training that the students, and others, resented as a waste of time. Madill took to the pages of the Varsity to insist yet again on the benefits of the new COTC syllabus in response to criticisms aired by Principal Cyril James of McGill University,150 but the most candid yet sensible commentary concerning the COTC appeared in one of several Varsity editorials addressing the university’s military training system during the year.151 Complaints about the level of training, the editorialist rightly pointed out, expressed the general disappointment at the shrunken horizons of the COTC, which no longer qualified men as officers or prepared them for Brockville. While disgruntled trainees should not forget that their participation in the COTC allowed them to continue their studies and to bypass basic training if they were called up, was it not time, given the changes since 1940–41, to abolish drill for science students destined for war industries and for low-category men rejected for active service and unfit for home defence? The COTC would perform effectively only if training was restricted to the high-category men likely to put it to use. Everyone else had better things to do. The first relaxation of the regulations came in December 1943, when Cody agreed to a long-standing request from the FASE that science and engineering students with two years of training be allowed to reduce their commitment to an hour of drill a week.152 It was ironic that, in 1944, just as the fruits of its labours were becoming evident, the Toronto Contingent should find itself in the wilderness, relegated to last place in the army’s list of precedence,153 and demoralized by the general misunderstanding of its role and by the lack of appreciation for its accomplishments. The numbers should have spoken for themselves: by the end of June 1944, the COTC had sent over three thousand of its graduates into the arms and services, two-thirds of them candidates recommended for appointments as commissioned officers, and had shepherded nearly every science graduate since 1940 into the technical branches of the armed forces or into essential war work.154 But ever since the NRMA had thrust it into a role for which it was not intended, on a scale it was never meant to have, the contingent had struggled with problems that, in a time of ebbing morale, bulked ever larger. Fairly or unfairly, the reputation of the COTC had faded, with implications not only for its current state of health, but also for the period after the war when the continuation of military training at the university would come up for discussion. A cure for its malaise first required a diagnosis. Madill appointed a committee to submit an unofficial report presenting “certain ideas that it feels to be of fundamental importance to the welfare of the Contingent at this particular time” at the annual officers’ meeting on 22



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March 1944.155 In the committee’s judgment, the contingent’s troubles stemmed from the fact that the general public, the military authorities, the students, and even many of its members did not really understand what it was or what it did – not that they could be blamed for this state of unknowing. The Toronto Contingent defied simple classification. It had begun the war as a voluntary officer training corps, but had since come to operate as a compulsory basic training unit. It was the Senior Reserve Unit in Military District No. 2, yet it stood apart as a university contingent priding itself on its distinct composition and character. It was a contingent of the COTC, frustrated at being lumped in with other contingents of varying achievement. It was the largest contingent in the country, but lacked cohesion because of its numbers and multipartite training system. Crowning the pile of contradictions was the discordance between title and function: “The very badges that we wear lead to misunderstanding in the eyes of the public and in the eyes of the students themselves with respect to the true nature of the Unit.” The lack of “a common denominator” among COTC contingents and the misleading label were complaints neither new nor restricted to Toronto.156 It had been clear as early as 1941 that not all contingents met the same standards of training, nor could they have been expected to do so given the disparities among the country’s universities and colleges. Merely conforming with the regulations of the NRMA taxed the smaller institutions to the utmost; in their straitened circumstances, two years of basic training was all they could hope to offer and all their students were willing to stomach.157 Attempts at establishing national, uniform policies raised hackles at the French-speaking universities, ever en garde against the conscriptionist English majority.158 The surveys and correspondence that passed between the heads of the English-speaking universities indicate that each institution did its best with what it had. For all the hue and cry at meetings of the NCCU about standardized rules and training, the COTC was an aggregate of unequal parts run just as idiosyncratically during the Second World War as it had been during the First. The overall effect was to magnify the failings or inconsistencies of the COTC and to obscure its contribution, to the detriment, as we have seen, of a unit as dedicated to its work as was the Toronto Contingent. Save at the larger universities, the title Canadian Officers’ Training Corps misrepresented the nature and purpose of the training given to students. After July 1943 it rang hollow at all. An officer training corps that did not train officers was operating under false pretences that more than any other factor diminished its reputation and morale. Out of the Toronto officers’ meeting came an initiative that Madill took

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up with National Defence Headquarters and presented to the annual conference of the NCCU in June 1944. Starting with “University Training Corps” and working his way through to the more august “Canadian University Army Corps,” he sought and gained approval from the NCCU representatives to change the name of the COTC for the duration of the war, the better to reflect its actual role and at least nod in the direction of uniformity. On second thought, however, it seemed more advisable to keep the original name, ill-fitting though it was, since the war could not last much longer and the cachet of an officers training program would count for more if the COTC were to resume in the postwar era – a point revealing the strong commitment to peacetime training among the university presidents.159 A truly national COTC, maintaining the same standards across the country, was tomorrow’s project. In the here and now of 1944, the Toronto Contingent’s officers concluded that its identity and esprit de corps rested on its one unchanging foundation: “Your Committee feels that this Contingent should regard itself as a Reserve Army Unit, concerned mainly with Military Training of the Faculty, Graduates, and Undergraduates of the University of Toronto; and that it is a part of this great University, sharing its traditions and adding to its manifold contributions to the welfare of this Country and Empire.” And so, to remind one and all of the contingent’s deep roots in the university and the scope of its current effort, “it was decided that the best means of overcoming public misunderstanding was to have a vigorous policy of public relations in order to make the public at large aware of the magnificent work of the Corps in the past and to lay special emphasis on the contribution it has made in the present war.”160 In embarking upon a publicity campaign aimed as much at the student body as at the wider public, the contingent sought maximum exposure by taking out a full-page advertisement in the Globe and Mail, courtesy of the T. Eaton Company, which was sponsoring a series on Toronto’s reserve units. Colonel Madill, who as head of the School of Architecture taught design and draftsmanship, did the layout and artwork; Major William S. Wallace, university librarian and author of a handbook on military prose style, wrote the text.161 The result was “a very effective page” that appeared on 23 October 1944. A quartet of drawings above the escutcheon of the University of Toronto Contingent demonstrated the application of skills learned in the classroom to the tasks of the modern battlefield, where Varsity men “specially trained in the science of war” now served as engineers, artillerymen, doctors, and infantrymen prepared even for the hazards of chemical warfare.



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Figure 4.7.  The page summarizing University of Toronto Contingent’s history and contributions to the national war effort, published in the Globe and Mail on 23 October 1944. UTA A1968-0003/008

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Lining the right-hand side of the page were vignettes encapsulating the stages of the university’s military history from the Fenian raids to the Great War, including its farsighted continuation of military training during “the piping days of peace” that had provided a ready source of officers when the call came again in 1939. The Toronto Contingent had grown and evolved in response to the demands of the present war, offering training in ten different arms and services; and although not a fighting formation it could take “full pride in the fact that the rolls of all famous Ontario regiments and of corps in Canada and Britain bear the names of 3,186 officers and men who received their initial training in this, Canada’s largest University Unit.” Tucked into the corner of the page, a table of the decorations so far awarded to Varsity men bore witness to the wide distribution of COTC personnel among the armed forces and to their gallantry in action on land, at sea, and in the air. The advertisement was also intended to reconnect former members with the unit in which “they received their first taste of the army.” The T. Eaton Company donated two thousand copies, which were mailed out to as many COTC men as the contingent’s officers could track down in Canada and overseas. The mailing included a letter from Colonel Madill inviting recipients to send back word of themselves and their friends so that a gazette passing along items of interest to former and current members and bringing news of the university to its alumni on active service could reattach the threads broken when these men had set off, as the replies were to show, for every corner of the war. The C.O.T.C. Active Service Bulletin appeared in two editions, in April and June 1945, a propitious time to renew acquaintance with old comrades as Varsity servicemen overseas contemplated the journey home. A good many planned to resume their studies at the university upon discharge from the army, and it was with returning men in mind that both issues of the bulletin featured articles on the reabsorption and benefits policies the government had put in place for veterans wishing to pursue their education. These efforts to keep its records up to date and to collect information about its members lay the foundations for a War Diary that would tell the contingent’s story in full. Owing to the long wait for Canada’s army to enter the fray, the most persuasive testimony to the COTC’s worth came late in the war. Come it did, though, to be gathered into dossiers that, sadly, were never converted into a formal Roll of Service and Roll of Honour for the Toronto Contingent men who served and fell in the Second World War.162 Albums filled with clippings and photos record the experiences and exploits of the ones who fought in Italy and Northwest Europe, in battles just as hard and costly as those fought



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by their forebears in 1914–18. The list of honours reveals that 212 orders and decorations, including 26 Military Crosses, 5 Distinguished Service Orders, and 71 Mentioned in Despatches, were awarded to members of the contingent. In the end, just over 3,200 men trained in the COTC went on active service; of these, 156 died or were killed in action. The brief details provided about the fallen form the part that illustrates the whole. Forty-two completed or began their COTC training before 1939, the remaining 114 (with one exception) in the years between 1939–40 and 1942–43, the majority during the two academic sessions of 1940–41 and 1941–42. Seventy were killed serving in the air force, eleven in the navy, leaving seventy-five who served in the army. All but six of these men held commissioned rank, five as majors, eleven as captains, and fifty-three as lieutenants (only two are listed as privates), and four out of five were killed on service with the fighting arms – that is, the infantry (thirty-five), the armoured corps (eighteen), and the artillery (eight).163 When collated with the clippings files, these notices indicate that the Toronto Contingent had done its most important work by the time the Canadian Army was committed to battle in the summer of 1943, and that it fulfilled its promise as a source not only of technically competent officers in the specialized corps, but also of leaders in battle, among whom these four shall speak for all: Captain Tony Kingsmill, a graduate in chemical engineering who in Italy used a turretless Sherman tank to carry a Bailey bridge to the edge of the Gari River and another to push it across, thus supplying a crossing for the attack into the Liri Valley; Lieutenant Norman Ballard, a theology student whose courageous assault on a German outpost in Italy prised open the first breach in the Hitler Line; Lieutenant Frederick Goodman, a Trinity College graduate who neutralized an enemy strongpoint near Boulogne and captured forty prisoners; and Major James Swayze, a 1930 graduate in English and history from Victoria College who came back to join the COTC in 1939–40 and went on to distinguish himself in an action near Bergen-op-Zoom, in the Netherlands. Examples such as these did more than anything else to uphold the reputation of the COTC in the eyes of the 1944–45 membership and to rekindle the esprit de corps among the Varsity men whose service careers had begun in the often chaotic early days of the second wartime contingent. The former members on active service who contributed their personal notes to the COTC bulletins welcomed the opportunity to exchange news of themselves and their friends, and more than a few in retrospect commented on the value of their university training. Above all, however, it was the Globe and Mail advertisement with its bold display of the record of the University of Toronto Contingent that stirred

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awareness of what all those raw trainees had been a part. As a COTC alumnus risen to lieutenant-colonel in the US Army Medical Corps felt moved to say upon seeing his old unit’s story, “It is a proud one and it is an honour to have been a member.” “The end of the long weary journey seems to approach” Unlike the First World War, which had begun and ended with little advance notice, the beginning and the end of the war in Europe hove into view well before arrival. Hopes of an Allied victory by the fall of 1944 proved to be premature, but the feeling that the 1944–45 session would be the university’s last year at war lent a sense of anticlimax to the military side of campus life. The success of the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 had carried the Allies over the greatest hurdle and sealed the eventual result. News of D-Day came as the COTC was in training at Niagara. Colonel Madill took the occasion to offer the contingent’s prayers and heartfelt good wishes to the forces engaged in “this momentous struggle,” first and foremost the Toronto graduates in their ranks, and to remind the soldier-students that “we who remain should at this time re-dedicate ourselves to the purposes we are called upon to serve.”164 Upon resuming their work in September, the two battalions kept to their accustomed routines while short courses on weapons, transport, and NCO qualifications were offered to suitable trainees. Reductions in the number of hours to be spent in training, however, did not translate into relaxation of the rules governing attendance at drill – delinquents were still liable to expulsion.165 The Wartime Bureau of Technical Personnel and the Selection Board still dipped their nets into the engineer or signals companies of the COTC, but the catch would be limited to fifty or sixty at most, and it was made clear at the beginning of the session that there was no need foreseen for infantry officers.166 Needed or not, more than fifteen hundred students still came out on two weekday afternoons and on Saturdays to plough through “a broad and interesting syllabus” using the latest equipment and vehicles, now available in abundance.167 The war was coming to an end. So too was an era in the university’s history, as figures synonymous with Varsity’s military past faded from the scene. In October 1944, Sir William Mulock, present at the creation of the University Rifles in 1861 and the last living witness to the days of the Fenian Raids and Ridgeway, died at age 101. Sir Robert Falconer, the university’s greatest president and the exemplar of all that was best in an older Canada, had died the year before. His dramatic appeal on 21 October 1914 had created the Toronto Contingent, which gratefully remembered its founder and first honorary colonel as ”a good friend



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Figure 4.8.  COTC training exercises at Petawawa in 1944. The realistic conditions and improved equipment are evident. Infantry and engineer cadets prepare a ford; gun crews tow a field piece across a bridge. UTA A1968-0003/003(208) / A1968-0003/002P(195)

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and strong supporter of the C.O.T.C.” The attenuating links to the class of 1914 slipped still more when Major William S. Wallace retired for reasons of health; another mainstay, Captain T.A. Reed, also retired, having rendered invaluable service as paymaster for nearly three decades. The last of the originals to take his leave was Colonel Madill, who relinquished command in January 1945 owing to the pressure of his academic and professional commitments. In a long line of commanders remarkable for their dedication, Madill stands out for his achievements on behalf of the COTC, first in securing a proper headquarters and Drill Hall, and then in guiding the corps through an unprecedented expansion in size and scope while doing everything in his power to maintain the integrity of its training. His foresight and his unfailing cooperation enabled the university to weather its second storm far more efficaciously than it had its first, even as it ran the largest training centre in the country and made a much more concerted contribution to the national effort. It is all the more unjust, though perhaps inevitable, that Colonel Madill and the Second World War contingent are remembered, if at all, as epigones standing in the shadow of Colonel Lang and the First Contingent. Compared by numbers and efficiency, “the child of the last war” surpassed its illustrious parent in rising to the challenge of a longer, more demanding, and more complicated war. Madill had worked closely with President Cody during his ten years in command. The two men went back a long way, and in his warm expressions of thanks for Madill’s service to the Toronto Contingent, Cody ventured to say that their collaboration had deepened their old friendship. The president himself planned to step down at the end of the 1944–45 session, but would retain his cherished honorary colonelcy of the COTC, and so he ended his letter on the happy note that he and Madill would long continue to cheer on the contingent “from the sidelines.”168 Throughout its lifespan the COTC had no more ardent patron than Henry John Cody, who saw the contingent as the embodiment of the virtues he held most dear: duty, service, loyalty, sacrifice, and defence of the Empire and the traditions it stood for, which the war had summoned forth in greatest measure. It is fitting that this chapter end with an episode displaying Cody and the COTC at their finest. In the fall of 1942, sixteen students, all of them fully or partly Jewish, who had fled Germany and Austria before the war and been sent on from Britain to Canada, applied for admission to the University of Toronto. Cody, a man of profoundly Christian humanity who believed that Britain and its dominions must be havens for Jews and others persecuted by the Nazis,169 was eager to admit them, but ran into opposition from the more recalcitrant members of the Board of Governors and other



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organizations that objected to the unfair gaining of university places by foreign students regarded by some as “enemy” aliens, at the expense of young Canadian men. The technicality raised to deny these students admission was the board’s requirement that, under the NRMA, all male students had to take military training, which non-British subjects were not permitted to do. Madill and the COTC officers, however, working behind the scenes, secured confirmation from officials in National Defence Headquarters that the students could take training in the 2nd Battalion of the COTC, in which attestation was not required – in other words, members of this battalion did not have to swear allegiance to the king upon enrolment. With this impediment removed, and in face of the overwhelming support for the refugee applicants throughout the university, the holdouts on the board at last owned themselves beaten, and the students were admitted. To ensure that they would be immune from any attempt to revoke their status, the 2nd Battalion officers filed reports confirming their attendance at drill and their satisfactory progress through the training syllabus. In the fall of 1943 the COTC went a shrewd step further to preserve their immunity, this time seeking assurances that, as “declarant aliens” – that is, aliens stating their intention to become British subjects – the students could safely be attested in the 1st Battalion and continue their studies and training. It makes a pleasing conclusion to the story to relate that, in gratitude to the country and university which had taken them in, two refugee students went on to complete their training in the contingent and sought references from Cody when they applied for enlistment in the Canadian Army.170

Chapter 5

A Vital Link: The University of Toronto Contingent, 1945–1968

“The day is one of meditation tinged with relief and happiness” The COTC was still very much in harness when word of the German surrender reached Canada on Monday, 7 May 1945. Nearly five hundred forestry and engineering students had completed their year early to attend two-week special-to-arm courses at the Active Force Training Centres.1 The tank crews had gone to Borden, the mechanicians and signallers to Barriefield and Vimy, near Kingston, the infantrymen to Niagara, and the engineers to Petawawa. Billeted along with the latter in “the endless mass of huts” was the artillery wing of the Toronto Contingent, a group of eighteen apprentice gunners anxious “to have a go” with the tools of their trade. On the morning of 7 May they had been invited to witness the “power and adaptability” of modern artillery in a concentration scheme that featured batteries of howitzers and 25-pounders firing timed barrages and smoke shells. The awe-inspiring display was followed that afternoon by a lecture on artillery organization and codes, which for all its dry complexity was not without a certain drama of its own: About 1500 hrs an unusual incident took place. The door was opened and an officer appeared. A knowing glance passed between Lt. Warburton and this man, and the latter simply announced, “Normandy.” It was only later that we were to learn the hidden meaning of this word. A visible hush had fallen over the camp and we were caught in its spell. The answer, when it came, released suddenly the tension which had been upon us for five and a half years. With severe nonchalance V-E Day was proclaimed. Our hearts sang with joy, intermingled with sorrow for those who had made this day possible but who would never participate. That was the meaning of the code word “Normandy.”2



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The war diarist who recorded this scene was struck by the equally subdued response to the formal announcement made shortly afterwards that the war in Europe was over. Long anticipated, the “day of days” was spent in quiet reflection rather than celebration as the men thought back over the “slow, tortuous climb to ascendancy over our enemies” and pondered the “enormous psychological implications” that must result from “the terrible destruction vented on so great a portion of humanity.” Awareness that the defeat of Germany was but the first of two endings also kept emotions in check. “One thing, however, is made clear, namely that this camp will continue its military activities unabated, for there is yet the Pacific war to be fought and won – a war more terrible than even that which has passed.” The Canadian Army Pacific Force was already recruiting volunteers for the invasion of Japan, and would need a full complement of artillery and engineers to support it.3 With this final task in mind, the student gunners and sappers embarked upon their second week of training with even greater resolve than in the week before VE Day. In the meantime their peers still on campus had been writing their final examinations, doing their best to concentrate while keeping an ear out for a bulletin expected at any minute. The confirmed report of the German surrender touched off a delirious celebration in downtown Toronto that the students emerging from the morning examinations rushed off to join. Yet once the carillon in the Soldiers’ Tower had rung out the appropriate hymns and anthems, the afternoon examinations went on as scheduled, while the university quietly closed down in accordance with long-laid plans. The official VE Day, observed on 8 May, came and went “as peacefully as a Sunday,” and the mood was more pensive than jubilant when the university reopened the next day. The strain of an anxious wait had dissipated, noted the University Monthly, but “the joy was muted by continuing exams, the spectre of Japan still to be tackled, and the memory of the university’s fallen.”4 There were also disturbing signs that the list of the fallen might lengthen still. Accounts of the battle raging on Okinawa gave every reason to believe that the Japanese would fight to the bitter end, no matter how hopeless the odds against them, just as the Germans had. The prelude to the assault on Japan had not yet ended when over six hundred Toronto men set off for Niagara on 3 June to train with the latest weapons and equipment.5 While they were there, the NCCU, proceeding on the assumption that the war in the Far East would go on for at least another year, passed a resolution calling for compulsory military training to be continued through the 1945–46 academic session.6 Preparing to lead the University of Toronto through this final stage and into the second of its post-war transitions was Sidney Earle Smith,

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who had been appointed principal of University College as of 1 July 1944 in order to learn the ropes as Cody’s executive assistant and heir apparent.7 He had already succeeded Cody once before, as chairman of the NCCU in 1942, and in his capacity as president of the University of Manitoba (1934–44) had worked closely with Toronto on the policies concerning military training and the National Selective Service. The forty-eight-year-old Smith gave a new profile to the office. A lawyer, rather than a clergyman or scholar by vocation, a Maritimer with long experience in western Canada, he was also the first University of Toronto president to have seen war at the sharp end – in his case at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele with the Canadian Garrison Artillery. Although brought in to plot a course for the future and not a return to the past, the president-designate shared his predecessor’s conviction that the university had both a role and a duty to fulfil in maintaining an officer training program. To familiarize himself with the Toronto Contingent, “Gunner” Smith had accompanied Cody during a visit to the Niagara camp in June 1944, and chaired the meetings of the newly constituted Joint Services University Training Committee (JSUTC) during the 1944–45 session.8 His presence at the change-of-command ceremony in January 1945 underlined the committee’s declaration that the Toronto Contingent would be regarded as an integral part of the university for the duration of the war and beyond. Smith had been the driving force behind the resolution on compulsory military training adopted by the NCCU. Six weeks after taking office on 1 July 1945, however, he found himself in the awkward position of having to extricate the universities from this commitment. The sudden end of the Pacific war, effected by the dropping of the atomic bombs in early August, caught everyone by surprise and left little time to work “the small miracle of organisation” necessary to accommodate “a flood of ex-servicemen returning to a university which had made some preliminary plans but which wasn’t expecting them so soon, or in such great numbers.”9 Moreover, now that “things were folding up in a hurry,” no university president had the will to enforce a policy no longer warranted by the national interest. The federal government itself had suspended the NRMA in May, leaving the universities as the only institutions in the country that still required military training. “Why should the universities be more loyal than the Crown in the right of the Dominion of Canada?” queried Smith in a letter sent to his counterparts at McGill, Queen’s, McMaster, and Western Ontario the day after VJ Day. A little lawyering pried open the desired loophole. Recalling that the first draft of the NCCU resolution had endorsed compulsory training “until the end of the Japanese war,” a provision subsequently



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emended to cover the 1945–46 session only, Smith pointed out that, since the resolution had been predicated on the continuation of hostilities, the Japanese surrender had removed the basis of the commitment.10 A hastily convened meeting with representatives from the other universities ended with the understanding that, in the absence of any directive from the government, they would take their cue from Toronto. On 7 September 1945 the JSUTC adopted, with no dissenting vote, a resolution supporting the idea of “compulsory national service for all Canadian young men including University students,” but stating that until the government formulated such a plan the president would be “requested to advocate a system of voluntary training in the universities for the session 1945-46.”11 Notice of the decision went out forthwith. For the first time in five years the opening issue of the Varsity did not rehash the regulations on military training. Instead there appeared the liberating announcement from the Board of Governors that the Toronto Contingent would operate as a voluntary unit during 1945–46, offering officer training to men back from active service and basic training to newcomers.12 The other universities quickly followed suit, much to the annoyance of the historian of the Western Ontario Contingent, who devoted a couple of indignant pages to what he regarded as Smith’s reneging on the commitment to compulsory training and a return to the “disarmament nonsense” of the 1930s.13 These fulminations missed the point. The universities needed a clean start to an academic year rife with the challenges of readjustment and the incoming tide of returning veterans. In concurring with the president’s decision, the JSUTC at Toronto showed a firmer grasp of reality, not to mention keener memories. Anyone with a whit of political sense could deduce from the self-inflicted wounds of 1917 and 1944 that no Canadian government, least of all one led by Mackenzie King, would ever introduce anything resembling conscription in peacetime. All but two members of the JSUTC had been on staff since the Great War, and remembered the mass aversion to all things military after the Armistice.14 Anticipating a similar reaction, they deemed it prudent to let the COTC lie fallow until the universities, the armed forces, and the government made their way through “the throes of reorganisation from war to peace.” Compulsory training was gone, never to return, its passing marked by a last flick of the whip aimed at the men discharged from the COTC who neglected to hand in their uniforms and equipment. As of January 1946, roughly eight hundred students “who are NOT undergoing military training” were still ignoring the requisition orders published in the Varsity, leading an exasperated Colonel Wilson to ask the JSUTC to bar defaulters from writing their

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final examinations if the outstanding articles were not returned by the end of the term.15 Chasing after uniforms at least gave the COTC staff something to do, since, as had happened in the year after the Great War ended, the contingent became all but invisible in 1945–46, counting just fifty-seven members, among them twenty-six veterans, in its ranks.16 Nevertheless the COTC’s prospects were not nearly as bleak as they had been in 1919. The Toronto Contingent ended its second war not as a collection of the halt and the lame, but as a fully operational unit with a proper headquarters, an experienced staff, and a record of officer training in war and peace that earned it a prominent place in the plans for the post-war military. The second post-war contingent would not have to eke out an existence on bread and water in makeshift quarters, nor did the “clouded dawn” of the second post-war era permit reversion to the policies of isolationism and neglect of the military, much as the Mackenzie King government would have wished. The support for the COTC in the universities and the role envisioned for it by the general staff in Ottawa would lead to the establishment of a truly national officer training program and set the COTC on a new course by the end of the 1946–47 academic year. “I pray that Canadians will not lapse into a state of unpreparedness as we did in the Twenties” During the dry spell of the 1945–46 session, the contingent’s officers took the view that, once the government decided on the size and requirements of the country’s post-war forces, the COTC once more would attract its share of volunteers wishing to combine officer training with their education. The wisdom of this reculer pour mieux sauter approach was soon revealed. When the COTC began recruiting actively the following year, there were two applicants for every place in the Toronto Contingent. This response can be explained by the enhanced status and generous provisions of the remodelled COTC, discussed below, as well as by the fact that the contingent was drawing from a student population doubled in size by returned servicemen attending university thanks to the Veterans Charter.17 But the reasons for the COTC’s resurgence should also be sought in the nature and outlook of the students themselves in the years immediately after the Second World War. Comparison is instructive. In contrast with the post-1918 generation, which never really recovered from the trauma of the Great War, the students of the late 1940s, half of them back from overseas, put their generation’s war behind them and got on with their lives. Children during the Depression, young adults during the war, they did not pine



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for a lost world, but set out to make a future better than the past. Presented with the opportunity of a university education that most had never dreamt of having, the returned men opted in the main for practical courses leading to careers and applied themselves to their studies.18 Raised in hard times, they were not disillusioned by the war. As Smith observed, “there is not apparent in the present group of student veterans the scepticism and even the nihilism of many of the veterans of World War I.”19 The maturity of the student veterans, their serious, nononsense approach – qualities that endeared them to their professors and awed their classmates – impressed another witness to two postwar generations, Lester Pearson, who saw the second group as more level-headed and realistic. In a reflective moment seven years after the war, in his in augural speech as chancellor of Victoria College, he had this to say of the men who returned in 1945: “The sons of those who marched in 14–18 did not do less than their fathers, but there was a deeper questioning, I think, of the situation which made this second sacrifice necessary, as there was a deeper sense of privilege and obligation in those who came back to college for the second post-war period. The trumpets that sent us off 35 years ago had not blown in ’39 and the easy sense of fulfilment and triumph of 1918 was not, and we should give thanks for this, repeated in ’45.”20 Pearson put his finger on a defining trait of larger significance in the story to come. In his day, “deeper sense of privilege” meant “lucky to be here, and we know it.” This post-war cohort belonged to the last generation of Canadian students that did not regard higher education, prosperity, and security as its birthright. They were also among the last to attend university before the old ideals of citizenship – duty, public service, deference to authority, self-sacrifice, the strengthening of character and morality through education and religion – began to give way to a markedly different emphasis on the cultivation of the self, the distrust of authority, and the rights, as opposed to the responsibilities, of the individual.21 The university, the COTC, and the students still spoke the same language and subscribed to the same incentives and values. The new officer training program gave students the means to finance their education and held out the security of a career with a salary and pension.22 At the same time the COTC called for volunteers in terms that still carried weight, reminding young men of their obligation to defend their country and its way of life, “especially in these torturous days which lie ahead, if the present state of world politics is an indication.”23 This appeal was not made in a vacuum. The first Remembrance Day service after the Second World War elicited commentary that revealed the generally pessimistic outlook among students trying to fathom the

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Figure 5.1.  A tank and howitzer on the Front Campus as part of a display of military equipment publicizing the COTC, 1948. UTA A1968-0003/002P



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strange “twilight world, neither at peace nor at war” that had emerged out of the conflict.24 The rift between the Allied powers had been discernible even before the war’s end, and the already-dim hopes of a durable peace were evaporating as Soviet communism, a strain of tyranny as toxic and hostile to the Western democracies as Nazi Germany had been, tightened its grip on half of Europe. As the continent separated into two armed camps glaring at each other across an Iron Curtain, the likelihood, if not the inevitability, of another war persuaded the university’s staff and students of the need to maintain the COTC, albeit on a voluntary basis. The thought of yet another war sickened and divided the students, but if their generation agreed on one point, it was that military preparedness made the only reliable deterrent to aggression. Whatever their opinions on the international political situation, the students evinced nothing but contempt for the pacifist, disarmament, and appeasement policies of the 1930s that had caused the whole mess in the first place. And unlike the toothless, ineffectual League of Nations, the new custodian of the international order, the United Nations, was empowered to intervene militarily if necessary, meaning that Canada would have to maintain forces capable of supporting the UN or a coalition of like-minded allies in an unstable world.25 Two generations of Canadians had gone to war to preserve freedom and restore peace, and in face of the emergent Soviet menace it was not out of the question that a third might have to follow their example. It was, characteristically, a returned veteran who came straight to the point: “Let’s not get caught with our pants down three times in one century.”26 “The Army now regards the Canadian Universities as the principal source of new officer personnel both in the Regular and Reserve branches” The rebuilding years of the late 1940s stand out as the COTC’s era of good feelings, a time marked by close cooperation between the Department of National Defence and the universities, the implementation of a uniform and far more practical officer training system, and, in the case of Toronto, the impressive results achieved by a new slate of officers and the contingent they revitalized.27 No longer a label attached to an aggregate of loosely coordinated, disparate units dependent on the resources of their respective institutions, but a centralized program that put all contingents on the same footing, the COTC would enjoy a level of support and prestige it had not known in its previous peacetime incarnation. This it owed, on the one hand, to the universities’ contribution to the war effort, now better understood,28 and, on the other, to the “lessons learned” from the war that any future conflict would be decided

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by superior weaponry and technology, which in turn would require highly specialized officers to direct their use. The universities that had turned out so many technically and scientifically proficient men for the arms and services between 1939 and 1945 now seemed the logical, if not the only, places to obtain officers for the battlefield of tomorrow. Officer training, wrote Brooke Claxton, occupied him more than any other subject during his tenure as minister of defence from 1946 to 1954.29 This statement from the single most influential figure in the shaping of the post-war armed forces could well have been echoed by his predecessor, Douglas Abbott, and by the chief of the general staff, Lieutenant-General Charles Foulkes.30 The procurement of officers held such importance, since the Canadian Army had been informed in 1946 that, for budgetary reasons, it would have to make up in quality what it would not have in quantity. To be a viable military in this new age of warfare, its strategic concept of mobilizing the reserves around a nucleus of active units would require a well-educated, technically competent officer corps; but to develop and replenish this officer corps, a new approach and new schools of instruction were needed. Much of the discussion in 1945–46 centred on the future of the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, which had ceased taking cadets in 1942 and found itself in limbo at war’s end. Should it be reopened and expanded so as to furnish the army with its full complement of officers? Should it serve as a graduate school for officer candidates generated by the university COTCs? Or should there be parallel routes to an officer’s commission, one leading through RMC and the other through the universities? The universities would have provided all the officers for the post-war forces had Lieutenant-General Foulkes succeeded in carrying through the recommendation of the Chesley Committee, which he appointed in November 1945. Far more adept in the corridors of power than he ever was on the battlefield, and one of the few Permanent Force officers not to have attended RMC, Foulkes saw himself as a modernizer, rather than a traditionalist, and hence a proponent of the university, rather than the military college as the taproot for potential officers.31 He strongly favoured the committee’s proposal that RMC no longer accept entry-level cadets, but instead apply the final touches to university graduates sent on by the COTC. His support for this plan stemmed from a genuine desire to upgrade the standards of Canadian officers in light of the advancements in military technology and the necessity of close inter-service cooperation – Foulkes was by no means alone in believing that only accredited, degree-granting universities, as RMC then was not, could produce officers with the intellectual and technical



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acumen that the profession of arms now demanded. But also at work was an undercurrent of hostility towards RMC, resented by more than a few soldiers and civilians as an incubator of elitist, hidebound Permanent Force officers who disdained their militia counterparts. Now that the universities were opening their doors ever wider, a subsidized university officer training program ouvert aux talents would impress the public as more democratic and representative in taking young men from all levels of society and all parts of the country. Aware that he was dealing with politicians in whose eyes economy overrode all other considerations, Foulkes played up the cost effectiveness of the university option, which his calculations purported to show as far less expensive per capita than the RMC alternative.32 While Foulkes was stacking the deck in favour of the COTC, a meeting of the Joint Services University Training Committee in Ottawa on 13 November 1945 confirmed the universities’ willingness to assume the role envisioned for them, one that their spokesmen believed they were uniquely qualified to fulfil. Presidents from across the country – Milton Gregg of New Brunswick, Sidney Smith of Toronto, and James Thomson of Saskatchewan – conferred with representatives from the Department of Military Training and all three services to frame an agreement on principles and policy. A memorandum drafted by Thomson dealt “principally with the opportunity that should be afforded to undergraduates at Canadian Universities whereby they might undergo training and prosecute studies that would enable them to qualify as young officers either for the reserve or the regular branches of the armed services.” After citing the “all-important and decisive contribution” of the universities during the war as proof of the COTC’s fitness for the task ahead, Thomson condensed the argument for a university-based training scheme into these essentials: “(a) Under any conditions, all branches of the armed forces will require a regular supply of intelligent, well-educated young men with qualities of character and leadership to become officers. (b) Especially, under modern conditions, the need for scientific and technical training for all branches of the services is very great. (c) The Universities are the only institutions in the country likely to combine the qualifications of (a) and (b).”33 Two wars and twenty years of peacetime operation had taught the COTC a great deal. In laying out the contours of a new version Thomson and his fellow presidents drew from long experience in sorting what would work from what would not. Into the latter category went compulsory participation, repetitive drill, rote instruction, ersatz facilities, outdated equipment, and measly pay. To attract and retain the sort of young man the armed forces wanted, and to help him master his craft,

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they advised proceeding along the following lines: the university training scheme should embrace all three services, continuing the COTC and the University Naval Training Division and reviving the University Air Training Corps; all three units should adhere to a common policy but operate separately in accordance with the training requirements of each service; each unit should offer challenging, up-to-date courses of instruction with high standards and relevant content to enrich the student’s academic and military education, especially in engineering or the sciences, where the student could combine his civil and military training; and the armed forces should provide a director of training and an administrative staff to supervise the university units and programs. The main recommendation addressed the balance between theoretical and practical work: military training should lie light upon the students during the academic session, involving forty to fifty hours of lectures that might count as credit towards a degree if the universities saw fit, but the practical training itself should be undertaken in the summer months, when the COTC cadets would attend the corps schools and receive standard army pay. In other words, students would not be joining their older brother’s COTC with its “irksome routine” of weekly drill, button polishing, and cramming for the certificate “A” and “B” examinations, all for ten to fifteen dollars a year. The new syllabus encouraged young men in academically demanding courses to concentrate on their studies during the year and then to do realistic training during the summer while being treated and remunerated as real soldiers. Authentic training had always brought out the best in the COTC, and it was for this reason that Thomson and his colleagues made exposure to the real thing the linchpin in their plan. Their proposals impressed the service representatives at the Ottawa meeting, not least because they believed that the universities’ wholehearted cooperation in officer training would favourably influence public attitudes towards military service. Over the rest of the 1945–46 year, the military consulted with the three university presidents to develop their recommendations into a fully articulated training scheme to be tabled for discussion and approval at the annual NCCU conference scheduled for May 1946. This plan was not without weaknesses or opposition. When the RMC Club got wind of the proposed conversion of the college into little more than a finishing school for the COTC, it formed a delegation to press for the restoration of RMC to its original role. The ex-cadets-turnedlawyers-and-accountants spotted more than a little legerdemain in the cost estimates presented as the clinching argument for the university plan, which, along with the considerable political pressure the old boys



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could apply, prompted the appointment of a second committee, chaired by Brigadier Sherwood Lett, to reconsider the matter of officer selection and training.34 Throughout the late spring of 1946, the Lett Committee reviewed briefs and testimony that pinpointed the risks involved in placing officer training solely in the hands of the universities. Representatives from the army noted that the COTC did not oblige its graduates to go on for a regular force commission or into a military career. In the past those COTC graduates who chose to go on had tended to stay in the reserves, so that only pre-committed RMC cadets could be relied upon to meet the annual quotas for the active army. Other voices of experience from the universities warned that campus attitudes towards the military were often volatile and that impressionable students made a very unpredictable source of volunteers. The university plan, commendable as it was in many respects, had to be regarded as an experiment that might not work. With this in mind, the Lett Committee submitted a report calling for a more expensive but less risky “mixed” plan in which RMC, to be reopened as a cadet college, and the universities would both supply officers for the armed forces.35 In the meantime the plans for the revamped COTC had reached the stage where they could be presented in detail. Along with the heads of the navy and air force, Foulkes came to Toronto to unveil the new dispensation before the university presidents gathered at the NCCU conference. His introductory remarks dwelt on the reorganization of the Canadian Army, the educational standards now expected of officers, and the voluntary but selective recruitment of university men interested in officer training and a service career. Then came the specifics. The COTC program would be divided into two phases, spread over three years. Phase I (Theoretical) would consist of lectures on military science, covering the history, geography, economics, strategy, tactics, and weapons of war. The accent, however, would be on phase II (Practical), to take place over a sixteen-week period during the summer when the undergraduates would do general training in the military setting of the corps schools and then proceed to advanced instruction in the arm or service in which they had enrolled. During their practical training they would be housed and paid by the army to offset the loss of summer employment. They would also commence training with the status of officer cadets holding the provisional rank of second lieutenant. This was but the first rung on the ladder. Upon completion of three Theoretical and three Practical phases, the cadets would qualify as captains in the reserves or lieutenants in the active army. The new COTC would also be designed to take the interests of the university presidents into account. Still wrestling with the problems of

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post-war adjustment and overcrowding, they were much relieved to hear that the universities would host the training units without having to take on a disproportionate share of the costs and burdens. The Department of National Defence would assign a resident staff officer (RSO) to each unit to organize recruiting, give or arrange lectures, engage teaching staff or visiting lecturers, and provide course materials, all at government expense. This, and the fact that the practical training would be carried out at the army’s corps schools, not on campus, made equals of a very unequal group of institutions. Each university could, within its own lights and resources, integrate the theoretical phase into its curriculum, while the members of each university contingent would go through the same summer training regimen as the rest. A truly national officer training scheme had long been a desideratum among university presidents. With a government-funded, standardized program now on offer, the NCCU accepted “the sound plan of training” and appointed a committee to consult with the defence authorities during its implementation over the 1946–47 year.36 “The new C.O.T.C. programme … is rapidly re-establishing the Corps in the life of the University” Toronto lost no time in reorganizing its contingent. Before the term began, the Board of Governors adopted Smith’s recommendation that the new system of voluntary military training be authorized for the coming 1946–47 session. A publicity campaign announcing the COTC’s relaunch got under way with an article in the first issue of that year’s Varsity extolling the attractions of an officer training program unlike anything ever tried before.37 A few days later the student newspaper referred its readers to the pamphlets being distributed on campus together with the latest number of the Canadian Army Training Manual. Beneath the title “What the C.O.T.C. has to offer,” the pamphlet featured an illustration charting the student’s growth in stature as the holder of a university degree and an officer’s commission. The lengthy exposition in the army training manual itemized the advantages and career possibilities offered by the new training program, including “a position in a military research establishment for the bright science student,”38 an indication that the nascent Directorate of Defence Research (after 1947 the Defence Research Board) was also casting about for “personnel who have the intelligence and education required properly to understand, design, and employ future weapons.”39 In November 1946 representatives from the directorate and the armed forces spent four days on campus talking to the various faculties and student groups about the



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Figure 5.2.  The ideals of the post-war COTC encapsulated on the cover of the Canadian Army Training Manual in October 1946. UTA A1973-0051/115

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opportunities opening up in defence research.40 The visit was the occasion to encourage potential COTC volunteers to contemplate an ascent to the staff college level and beyond, one day to take a role in shaping the country’s defence policy.41 Despite these allurements the recruiting drive sputtered at first, and gained momentum only when the first RSO took up his duties in midOctober. Major Harry Appleton was a 1932 graduate of University College who had earned a commission in the pre-war militia and served with distinction in Italy and Northwest Europe. Described as “conscientious, calm and of equitable temperament,” he combined experience in administrative duties with remarkable industry.42 Over a period of six months, working without a full staff, and shuttling between the university and its satellite campus at Ajax, he screened more than 600 applicants, from whom he selected Toronto’s allotment of 262. He also managed to cobble seventy lectures into a provisional phase I that imparted the knowledge necessary to the cadets proceeding to the phase II training in the summer of 1947. He believed that these lectures should be vividly conceived and delivered, and wherever possible he invited returned veterans to speak from their experiences, even when these differed from the doctrine laid down in the textbooks.43 Appleton came to the contingent as the old order was changing, yielding place to a new by decree of the Department of National Defence, which stipulated that all COTC officers had to have served overseas. As it was, the older officers were ready to pass the baton and return to their academic duties. Appleton could report with some relief that his appointment of a new cadre of officers – five faculty members and four students, younger men but all veterans – had been carried out “with a minimum of hurt feelings.” The break with the past did not mean a break with tradition, however, since the wish to maintain a connection with an organization they had served for so many years led the notables of the ancien régime – Madill, Watson, Loudon, Cockburn, Wallace, Reed, et al. – to form the University of Toronto Contingent COTC Past Officers’ Mess, whose members continued to attend meetings of the JSUTC and to act as an informal advisory board.44 In selecting candidates suited by ability and temperament to military training, Appleton and his staff proceeded, as did all officers familiar with academe, from the assumption that they were dealing with undergraduates both intelligent and mercurial. Appleton’s comments on the theoretical syllabus submitted for review in April 1947 advised reducing the amount of rote material, better dinned into the cadets at the corps schools, and shaping the courses of instruction into the “broad,



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intellectual exercise … characteristic of a University study” that would lead to “a broader understanding of the nature of war.”45 On the other hand, he cautioned against conferring rank and privilege too hastily upon first-year cadets “who have not during their lifetimes been subjected to any great amount of regular, strict discipline – a few months of which will do them no harm and might do them much good.”46 He handpicked the first crop with care, since the “catalyst for the programme to unfold in full during 1947-48 … the initial and probably most significant year of the Canadian Officers Training Corps” would be the performance of the test cases sent to the Active Force corps schools in the summer of 1947. Aware that successful cadets would be the most persuasive advertisement for the officer training program, Appleton kept an eye out during his recruiting tours for mature students pursuing challenging degrees, favouring applicants in applied sciences over those in arts (“not usually the best men at the University”) and giving two-thirds of the places to ex-servicemen.47 The revised COTC crossed the start line in May 1947. The NCCU meetings that month included a presentation from the head of the University of British Columbia Contingent, Colonel Gordon Shrum (one of the Toronto Contingent’s originals in 1914), who reviewed the introduction of the program during the 1946–47 session. The figures indicated considerable progress to date. Twenty-one universities had contingents established, with a national enrolment of 2,180. As to be expected, Toronto had the largest contingent; unexpectedly, at least from today’s perspective, the next largest belonged to the Université de Montréal and Université Laval: between them the two francophone institutions accounted for nearly 20 per cent of the national total.48 Toronto also contributed the largest share (251) of the 1,500 cadets sent to the Active Force corps schools across the country for the closely monitored and much-publicized trial run of the COTC’s phase II.49 After a six-week basic training period, or a refresher course for those with prior service, the cadets moved on to the practical work in their respective corps, going through field training exercises with the latest equipment alongside active and reserve trainees. Many had been called, not all were chosen: the overall failure rate was 18 per cent, but the strikingly low proportion (3 per cent) in Central Command,50 where Toronto men formed the great majority of the cadets, testified to Appleton’s judicious selection methods and the value of the condensed theoretical syllabus he had gone to such lengths to provide.51 Since the whole venture would stand or fall by the verdict on the phase II experiment, the contribution of the Toronto Contingent to

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Figure 5.3.  The summer sessions at the corps schools involved COTC cadets in challenging and realistic training. Here cadets are shown in mountain training and in firing exercises at “Mortar Vale.” UTA A1968-0003/ 002P(142) / A1968-0003/003P(270)



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its success counted for a great deal. After canvassing opinions on the first summer training phase, the Canadian Army Journal declared that the revised COTC had been “accepted” by the ultimate arbiters in such matters, the army’s officers and NCOs. The cadets themselves seemed well pleased by their experience, declaring that they would all do summer training again and support the COTC when they became taxpayers – the sort of endorsement not often heard from the young.52 Shortly afterwards Brooke Claxton stated during a visit to Toronto in November 1947 that the university officer training scheme (“the only one of its kind in the world”) now had top defence priority – as well it might, given that the army would have to rely on the universities for officers until the prospective tri-service colleges at RMC and Royal Roads turned out their first graduates. After praising the recent phase II training, the minister, partial to the COTC from his days in the McGill Contingent, spoke of the day when a fully realized national summer training program would bring cadets from the universities and the service colleges together to forge a close working relationship between the country’s Active and Reserve Force officers.53 Its overhaul complete, the Toronto Contingent was set to recommence full operation during the 1947–48 session. The opening issues of that year’s Varsity introduced readers to the new commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel William Lister Sagar, a professor of civil engineering with service in both world wars, and to a second RSO, Major G. MacLean Logan, a graduate of Mount Allison University who had been wounded four times in Italy while on active duty with the Cape Breton Highlanders.54 A feature article on the Toronto cadets’ experience in summer training enhanced the image of the COTC as a school for modern officers, rather than a glorified drill company.55 It was clear, too, that, in range and content, the phase I curriculum had kept pace with the times – although one might wonder who did most of the talking in the military history course, a case study of the Normandy campaign, in which a fair number of the students could claim first-hand knowledge of the events under discussion. Teaching all three levels of the theoretical curriculum and scheduling lectures for students taking courses on two campuses twenty-five miles apart exacted heroic efforts from the contingent officers, who had to repeat lessons as often as four times a week and offer makeup classes on Saturday mornings. Although pressed for time and space, Appleton and his staff, generously assisted by interested members of the university faculty, covered the entire phase I in twenty weeks.56 Their labours bore fruit as the first group proceeded through successive phases. Seven University of Toronto cadets earned the rarely accorded “outstanding” during the 1948 summer training phase, while the performance of the contingent as a whole was rated

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second-to-none. The next summer, fewer than 1 per cent of the three hundred Varsity men attending the corps schools were reported to have failed. Of the first graduating class in 1949, forty-five took commissions in the Active Army, another fifty in the Reserves.57 The resurrection of the COTC was accompanied by the development along similar lines of campus naval and air force training units. During the 1948–49 session, the tri-service training program devised by the Department of National Defence to foster “the happy state of cooperation that is so vital to a modern army” came into effect at the country’s universities and two service colleges.58 At Toronto, the “Untidies,” as the cadets of the University Naval Training Division were called, went through a three-year theoretical phase – carried out on the waterfront aboard HMCS York – and practical training phases at sea during the summer to receive commissions in the Royal Canadian Navy.59 After an absence of five years, the Royal Canadian Air Force returned to the campus in February 1949 to set up a detachment of 400 Squadron. From 1949–50 on, the members of the University of Toronto Squadron took theoretical training during the academic year and attended RCAF schools during the summer to qualify as air- or ground crew upon graduation. Although the university’s naval and air force units trained off-campus, they were administered together with the COTC, and to the furthest extent possible coordinated their efforts to support the common objectives of the tri-service training plan.60 By the 1949–50 year, the results certainly repaid the efforts and costs involved in reviving the COTC. More than two thousand cadets from across the country had attended the corps schools in the summer of 1949, along with their counterparts from the service colleges, all doing their practical training in the same way to the same standards. In the four years since its resumption the COTC had seen over twenty-three hundred of its members qualify as lieutenants, of whom more than half had gone into the reserves or supplementary reserves – that is, into the engineer or other specialized corps.61 The new system had also opened a path for young men not in attendance at university or a service college but who nevertheless could complete the COTC curriculum with an active or reserve unit.62 No one expressed greater satisfaction with the university officer training program and its results than the representatives of the Department of National Defence and the NCCU who concluded their annual meetings with hosannas to the spirit of cooperation shown by both sides.63 In taking stock of their own affairs, the officers of the Toronto Contingent saw grounds for satisfaction to date and reasons for concern ahead. The selection process, with its academic, athletic, personality,



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and leadership ratings, and the perceptive assessments of the RSO and selection committees accounted for much of the contingent’s success – “it is becoming apparent that our Officer Cadets are rather a fine lot.”64 The liaison between the university and COTC staff was another strength, most evident in the breadth and depth of the theoretical syllabus. The contingent drew from the expertise of professors from several departments who supplemented the teaching done by the RSO. The curriculum at Toronto was enriched by lectures on the Soviet Union from the university’s first instructor in Russian, Professor B.E. Shore, a reserve officer in the RCAF and one of the founders of the Department of Slavonic Studies in 1949,65 and on the political geography of the Middle East from Mr Ali Tayyeb, who had come to Canada from Pakistan on a Vincent Massey Fellowship and eventually rose to professor in the Geography Department.66 Still, the main reason for the contingent’s rise had been the high proportion of veterans in its ranks. Once they finished their studies, the contingent would lose not only a reliable source of officer material, but also a steadying presence among the “normal” students, who made up just 30 per cent of the COTC’s enrolment. As its composition changed, careful planning would be needed to find undergraduates of like maturity and aptitude if the contingent were to surmount the difficulties the officers foresaw. One was the heavy workload involved in the theoretical syllabus. It amounted to an extra course, demanding and detailed, that could be taught only in the late afternoon when the students were already “hungry and tired from a long day of being lectured to.” They received no academic credit for this work, for which reason it hardly seemed fair to impose the burden of an examination testing their knowledge of the material. The best approach was to present the curriculum in an interesting, engaging manner – for instance, having the students give short lectures, perform skits or simulations, and discuss rather than passively absorb the contents – and to set short tests or quizzes at the second- and third-year levels to ensure that the students took their work seriously. Less easily addressed was the problem of “unit spirit.” Something of the Toronto Contingent’s identity was lost in the general reorganization of the COTC. Fully integrated within a national program, the contingent’s members were dispersed among all the other cadets at the corps schools during the summer. Closer to home, it was no longer as visible a part of the university’s daily life now that its members did not wear uniforms or parade on campus; instead, COTC men in mufti resembled any other group of students going to class. The contingent itself assembled once a year, on Remembrance Day, when only the officers and guard of honour appeared in uniform. As

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far as most of its members were concerned, wrote Colonel Sagar, they belonged to “a fine summer time organization which irksomely obliges one to attend lectures from 1700-1800 hrs in the evening.” To reassert its proud tradition within the university and to regain its place in student affections, the contingent’s officers took the step of bringing back the “pre-war glamour” of the COTC Ball in January 1948 and making “the year’s most colourful event” a fixture in the social calendar.67 To keep the COTC in the news during the academic session, they contributed features to the Varsity describing the adventures of the Toronto cadets at the corps schools across the country. They also took another look at the matter of uniforms, drill, and a more military ambience in the theoretical phase to help prospective junior officers learn more about army routine and the world in which the men they would one day command lived and operated. As the COTC entered the 1950s, the problems rightly anticipated took on new dimensions. Recruitment fluctuated as student and public attitudes towards military service waxed and waned. At the same time the enlargement of the Canadian Army created a demand for officers that the COTC simply could not meet. Over time the initial promise of the university officer training program, reflected in the strengths of the Toronto Contingent, with its emphasis on character and wellroundedness, its high standards, and its complement of education and instruction, would fade in the eyes of more traditionally minded types in the Department of National Defence who measured the COTC’s utility by numbers only and favoured the technical rather than the academic side of officer training. More than one historian retracing the fits and starts of Canadian military education since the Second World War has pointed to the intellectual stasis that set in during the 1950s, with consequences that became painfully clear twenty-five years after the cancellation of the COTC.68 It is tempting, admittedly in hindsight, to see the rise, decline, and fall of the post-war COTC as the story of the road not taken. “There is nothing second rate about our profession” The address given by Major-General W.H.S. Macklin, adjutant general of the Canadian Army, to the university presidents gathered at the NCCU meeting at McGill in May 1951 marks the first of two turning points in the history of the COTC in the 1950s. Macklin began with the dire warning that Canada was passing through a terribly dangerous period in its history, faced now with the military threat from the



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Soviet Union and the spread of communist domination through terror, infiltration, and open aggression. In response to the attack on South Korea the year before, Canada was sending a brigade to the UN forces engaged there, and to deter Soviet aggression in western Europe had pledged to contribute troops to the newly formed NATO alliance. To meet these commitments, the Canadian Army had grown to twenty times its size before the last war, with the result that the regular and reserve forces would require five thousand new officers over the next three years. Most of them, Macklin hoped, would come from the universities: “We want our share of the brighter minds of the campus and the classroom.” The federal government was willing to expand the COTC in order to accept every suitable candidate for officer training, and had raised the pay rates for cadets in all levels to attract more applicants. He concluded by urging the presidents to impress upon the students the grave danger in which the free world stood so as to “stimulate them to train themselves and avoid it.”69 Macklin was preaching to the choir. All his listeners agreed that “the question of preparation for defence must be raised to a new level of serious urgency” and that students in fields useful to the armed forces should be directed into the COTC or encouraged to enter the services upon graduation. To promote the cooperation between the universities and the Department of National Defence in this vital matter, the NCCU decided to have its Military Studies Committee confer with the department’s Personnel Members Committee independently once a year in December to review policy and address problems concerning the university training programs. The minutes of these meetings would then be circulated among all participating universities for further discussion at the NCCU conference at the end of the academic session.70 The growth of the Canadian military in the early 1950s, the one time in Canadian history when the country maintained large standing forces in peacetime and spent unprecedented sums to equip and professionalize its army, was, however, a turning point at which the COTC did not fully turn. Despite the impassioned appeals, generous pay rates, and the efforts of the officers and university staff, the COTC in general – and the Toronto Contingent in particular – could not attract enough volunteers or steer enough of its graduates into the army to keep pace with the demand for officers.71 This is not to say that the Toronto Contingent did not run an effective program or continue to train its members to a very high standard. On the contrary, the contingent records show how hard the officers worked to bring in good recruits and to maintain an academically sound curriculum. But a number of factors told against their efforts.

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As predicted, the exodus of the veterans affected recruitment, but no one imagined how steep the decline would be. A table of figures preserved in Principal Smith’s papers indicates that COTC enrolment peaked at 415 in 1948–49 and then fell off, plummeting to a mere 82 in 1952–53.72 The figures also reveal a preference for the campus naval and air units, in which enrolment had remained stable owing, the contingent officers surmised, to the inclusion of the “summer cruise” in RCN training and the attractions of flight training and higher pay in the RCAF. At a time when the army was imploring the universities to increase the flow of junior officers, the drop in COTC intakes was all the more frustrating since, for the first time in its history, the Toronto Contingent lagged behind the other university units, including McGill’s, with which Toronto had always had an unspoken but palpable rivalry. The task of filling the enrolment quotas, largely a matter of winning over a new generation of students, would receive considerable attention from university and COTC staff. The recruitment crisis was further complicated by the changes to the COTC wrought by the new chief of the general staff, Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds, who succeeded Foulkes in January 1951. The antithesis of the modernizing Foulkes, Simonds was a traditionalist deeply attached to RMC and a Permanent Force soldier with no high opinion of his predecessor or the militia.73 To the COTC he was the pharaoh who knew not Joseph. His first edict took the shape of a ten-point memorandum listing the revisions he deemed necessary to the university training program – namely, lowering the entry requirements, extending the summer training period, shaping the theoretical curriculum more closely to the work done at the corps schools, and using cadets in the third-year phase as instructors to give them more experience in leadership and man management.74 Simonds set forth the principles behind these recommendations in his address to the NCCU in June 1952. After reiterating the army’s need for officers, he insisted that each candidate “begin his training by being made to go through what a private soldier must go through.” Only those habituated to instinctive obedience and the rhythms and routines of the army could lead and carry out their duties effectively, since experience had shown that when war comes “the old military virtues of discipline, marching and dignity have to be learned all over again.” The COTC should trim its theoretical curriculum and train cadets in time-honoured fundamentals, which, in his view, had been crowded out by superfluous material in the syllabus.75 That COTC cadets were starting too high and that their training should inculcate them “in real army ways” were judgments by no means restricted to Simonds,76 but his decisions came down in a manner



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typically his: peremptory, inarguable, and unilateral. He also gave no thought to the effects on the university contingents. The longer practical training period he proposed would compel students to complete their studies by mid-April and return to campus in mid-September with no time off at all – hardly an incentive to enrol. Lower entrance requirements meant lower standards and lower results, and compromised the integrity of the program. It was his decision to reduce the rank qualification of cadets completing the third phase from captain to lieutenant, however, that did the COTC real, if temporary, harm. The Toronto Contingent officers did not mask their annoyance at being blindsided by an announcement that left the RSO no time to explain the reasons for this change to the cadets affected by it. Their report for the 1951–52 year stated candidly that the decision “caused considerable indignation and a feeling that there had been a breach of faith,” so much so that thirty cadets quit at the end of their second year – a reaction that followed at other universities and that compounded the problem of the dropout rate.77 Although the NCCU and the Department of National Defence committees were quick to repair the lines of communication, this policy change by fiat set an unfortunate precedent. Within a few years the exception became the rule as DND began to make decisions concerning the COTC without prior notice, putting the contingents in a difficult situation and making their training programs all but unworkable. The soaring demand for officers also clashed with a shift in campus attitudes, already discernible in the early 1950s. The main impediments to recruiting, in the view of university contingent commanders, were the apathy of the Canadian public and the studied indifference towards the state of world affairs among the students.78 The more the alarms were sounded, the less they listened. Something of what the Toronto Contingent had to contend with emerged in a small but telling incident. Lieutenant Edward John Mastronardi, a 1950 arts graduate and a COTC product, earned a Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry in Korea in November 1951, but when the contingent officers sent a photo and a copy of the citation to the Varsity, the news editor declined to publish the story. Colonel Lauchland, the commanding officer, took the matter up with the newspaper’s staff only to be told that the award was “unimportant” and that the editors preferred to ”soft-pedal that sort of affair.” It was not the refusal to print an account of Mastronardi’s award that bothered him, specified Lauchland in a letter to Smith, but “the implications behind the refusal.”79 The wind was turning and the Varsity was tacking with it. In 1950 the editors had practically climbed on stilts to proclaim that they had nothing to say on Remembrance Day; a year later they barely mentioned the occasion, and over the rest of the

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decade the pieces that appeared on 11 November, while not opposing the commemoration of the fallen, expatiated on the waste, the pointlessness, the naiveté, the stupidity, etc., etc., of the sacrifice without any attempt to place the cost of either war in context. Behind the cynicism and simplistic moralizing was the understandable fear of another war in which both sides could deploy atomic weapons. The sorts of editorials that the “ban the bomb” reactions played a part in inspiring did not speak for all students, of course, nor did the Varsity’s editors protest the existence of the COTC on campus – that would come later – but they do herald the beginnings of the break with the preceding generation and the rejection of its values.80 The COTC made much of the service career to which it opened the way, but the profession of arms ran a poor second to the opportunities created by the economic upsurge of the 1950s. The Toronto Contingent found it much harder to send on engineers, doctors, science graduates, or anyone with a degree who gazed out over an ever-widening realm of choice in industry or business. The military had never gained the status of other professions, and the army was not regarded as the proper destination for the best and brightest when the country was not at war. The university registrar, Joseph Evans, a long-time staff officer in the contingent, felt that the key to recruiting lay in convincing parents, not students, that the officer training program led to a vocation as reputable as that of a lawyer or doctor: “Home and school should be told that a boy is not a failure simply because he wants to join the services.”81 He also pointed out that nearly half the incoming students were enrolling in arts, many because they had no idea what their ultimate goal was, and that first-year men shied away from the COTC for fear of taking on too many commitments. It was all well and good for the contingent to conduct recruiting campaigns at the beginning of term and to publicize its activities throughout the university year, but these efforts were too late and too limited in scope. Outreach had to begin much earlier, and extend much more widely, in order to inform and draw potential candidates. As the current RSO, Major W.S. Chamberlain, put it, “our most productive field of endeavour will be in the home and in the high school; in other words, if we are to obtain the proper type of officer cadet – and we want no other – his indoctrination to the subject of citizenship and his responsibilities to national defence must begin some considerable time before his first encounter with the university registrar.” Chamberlain made this remark in a report submitted to Principal Smith in the spring of 1954. It reviewed the opinions of the university’s Joint Services University Training Committee concerning a study of



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recruiting done for the McGill COTC by a consulting firm after the disappointing 1952–53 year.82 Although they found the study of interest, the Toronto officers felt that McGill was on the wrong track in pursuing quantity over quality. Intake was one thing, output another – fewer than 15 per cent of McGill’s COTC members joined the reserves, as opposed to 33 per cent of Toronto’s. Moreover, with its “wet” bar and location in the heart of the campus, “the McGill contingent is more of a social club than is Toronto and many of its members are not, and never will be, any great asset to the armed forces of the country.” To keep the COTC at Toronto on “a proper military basis” and to improve recruiting and esprit de corps, Chamberlain recommended that the contingent make greater use of university staff, especially those with war service, to explain its role and purpose; closely integrate the military with the academic program so that staff and students would view officer training as the exercise of responsible citizenship; and widen the membership of the JSUTC so that it had advocates in all colleges and faculties – students were more disposed to listen to faculty members who knew them than to strangers from the armed forces. He ventured one novel suggestion that he believed might have a positive effect on recruiting. His experience as RSO had taught him that the sons of fathers who had served during the war made better cadets than the sons of those who had not; therefore, since parental attitudes exerted considerable influence on a young man’s choices and character, he advised compiling a list of the students’ fathers with military service and sending them a letter outlining the COTC and the opportunities it offered. The contingent acted on these recommendations by taking a broader yet more focused approach to recruitment. It targeted the types the COTC wanted: sons of veterans, members of high school cadet corps or the army cadets, entrants into applied science and engineering, all of whom received letters inviting them to join the university training units.83 These direct communications, along with visits to high schools and closer liaisons with the corps schools and local militia units, succeeded in nudging enrolment back up to satisfactory levels by the 1954–55 session, after which the contingent’s numbers remained steady at ninety to one hundred a year. Adjustments to the theoretical curriculum also benefited unit morale. Instead of meeting by companies on separate nights, the whole contingent assembled one evening a week from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Each session opened with a brief drill period, followed by two lectures and a social time in which the cadets could discuss the lectures and get to know one another. Three professors from the History Department, John Saywell, James Conacher, and Robert Spencer – the latter two having worked with the Army Historical

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Section under Colonel Stacey84 – added informed perspectives to the military history courses, as did visiting lecturers from the Department of External Affairs to courses on current events. From the reports on the theoretical and practical phases, it would appear that the Toronto Contingent had struck the right balance between academic and military content, for its members continued to receive favourable assessments and garner awards – one in 1955 as the most outstanding cadet in the Army Service Corps, another the next year in the Ordnance Corps.85 By this time the COTC was operating in conjunction with a corollary program introduced in the 1952–53 session to address the shortage of university-educated officers. The Regular Officer Training Plan (ROTP) subsidized students at the tri-service colleges or at civilian universities in return for a pledge to enter the regular army upon graduation. The ROTP cadets enrolled at the universities came under the aegis of the COTC, trained alongside their COTC peers, and followed the same theoretical and practical curricula.86 When first proposed, the new program raised apprehension among university presidents that it put willingness to serve ahead of academic qualifications. Once the entrance standards for ROTP cadets were harmonized among all the universities, however, and the army stipulated that “the major proportion of selected candidates will be required to accept training in engineering and science faculties” – in other words, that only serious, capable candidates need apply – the students admitted via the ROTP performed more or less as well as their peers. For the COTC the establishment of the regular officer plan proved to be a mixed blessing. The ROTP soon became a plentiful tributary to the stream of officer cadets – by the summer of 1956 nearly half the three thousand officer trainees across the country were in the ROTP – and its addition to the COTC at Toronto supplemented the number of students taking military training by a quarter. Nevertheless the Toronto Contingent officers who integrated the ROTP within all three campus training units understood, not without misgivings, that from now on the COTC “would become solely a source of officer material for the reserve force.”87 They well knew that identification with the militia was a potential blot on the COTC’s escutcheon, and their concern was to be justified when the size and role of the reserves were drastically reduced in the late 1950s. This, as we shall see, was to signal the beginning of the end of the COTC, whereas the ROTP received full support from DND and survived the cancellation of the university reserves training program.88 Ironically the ultimate effect of the ROTP was to underscore the expendability of the COTC.



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“The cadets’ horizons were expanded, even well beyond Canada, by their participation in the COTC program” The history of the COTC in the post-war era benefits from the recollections and observations of some of the men who went through the officer training program. Their reflections on the COTC allow us to peer over the mountain of official documentation and into the experience of the trainees themselves, to see what they made of it, where it led them, and what effects it had not only in military service, but in their lives beyond. Three of the ex-COTC men from the 1940s were among the first accepted into the revised training program initiated in 1946–47.89 Too young to have gone overseas, they had all done cadet training in high school. This, and a tradition of military service in their families, sparked their interest in the COTC as a path to an army career, or as a way of keeping civil and military career options open. Back in the days when the young heeded their parents, paternal advice carried weight. One father thought that military training would lead his son to take a serious approach to his work at university; another pointed out to his that holding captain’s rank was the surest way to spend the next war in the relative safety of brigade headquarters. All saw the COTC as a means by which to earn their tuition fees and relieve their families of the expense of a university education. After filling out forms in the Drill Hall and meeting with Major Appleton, whom they recalled with affection and admiration, they sat through the theoretical syllabus and counted down the days to the first summer training camp. The practical training phases were by far the most memorable of their experiences in the COTC. The summer corps schools put them in a world peopled by real soldiers and mingled them with cadets from across the country, including young francophones, with whom they had to find a way to communicate.90 The training regime roused their sense of adventure, and lay bare the positive and negative aspects of army life. They described the regular officers and NCOs, all well acquainted with the sharp end, as tough but fair and helpful. One left a lasting impression with his calm disposal of a dud hand grenade thrown by a nervous first-timer; others gave thorough and effective instruction in weapons, vehicles, signals, map reading, and platoon tactics. It struck one trainee that as a student he learned from books but as a cadet he learned by doing. Practical training turned out to be an invaluable exercise in the application of acquired skills and knowledge, especially in assessing a situation, planning and organizing a solution, and then accepting or

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delegating responsibility for its accomplishment. There was an intellectual discipline in an “Orders Group,” which they would later impose in their professional careers, especially in meetings: observe a strict protocol in speaking, insist on clear presentation and analysis, stick to the point and excise extraneous information, set objectives, and assign tasks. Healthy competition in route marches, field exercises, and sports also sharpened the focus on achieving objectives through a combination of individual effort and teamwork. The button-polishing minutiae of army discipline sometimes grated, but these too fostered good habits in emphasizing pride in appearance, correct behaviour, and punctuality that proved beneficial in all walks of life. The younger cadets remembered being a self-conscious minority among the veterans who had joined the COTC. Most veterans had served in the ranks during the war and now leapt at the chance to become the ones giving the orders. They already knew a great deal of the training syllabus, and did not hesitate to speak out when they disagreed with the instructors. Somewhat sheltered beginners found them a little intimidating at first, self-confident and irreverent, much wiser in the ways of the world, but in time they came to appreciate the veterans for their avuncular interest in the “younger guys” and for the respect they showed them as volunteers willing to pick up where the veterans had left off. One cadet felt he learned what it took to be an officer from watching the veterans and noting how they conducted themselves, how they dealt with superiors and inferiors in rank, and when necessary how they operated in the margins of the rulebook rather than in the fine print. It was from them he came to understand that there could be individuality in uniformity, that he had to be able to work with people he did not know and sometimes did not like, that no one was interested in excuses, and that there were a great many intelligent, capable men whose education had consisted of the army and the war, so he had better recognize and make the most of his opportunities. Memories of the COTC were not unclouded. The one drawback frequently mentioned was that the officer cadets were teaching one another and not working with “other ranks” to rehearse realistic command scenarios. The cadets conducted tactical exercises without troops or simulations, but did not get nearly enough tactical handling of real platoons and weapons. Without this kind of leadership training, they ran the risk of becoming technical specialists instead of effective junior officers.91 Lesser complaints singled out some of the NCOs who seemed unnecessarily coarse and unrestrained in their use of language and liquor in front of young officer candidates. The standard of training personnel might also vary from year to year or from camp to camp. One



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cadet who opted for infantry spent three “boring” summers at Camp Borden, where the instructors appeared to have run out of course material. It might have been the luck of the draw, since his fellow cadets who went into other corps or to other camps enjoyed their training and the work that went with it. A trainee with the Army Service Corps at Petawawa likened one of his summers driving military vehicles all over northern Ontario to an extended camping trip. Borden, however, seems to have been a weak link early on. Strong criticism of the administration and level of training surfaced at the first meeting of the Military Studies Committee and the Personnel Members Committee in 1951 along with complaints that the instructors were lax in their assessment of COTC men and unqualified for anything beyond basic training.92 Disappointing as his own spell at Borden had been, though, the cadet in question drew the conclusion that “not everything in life comes with a bow on top” and that in the army one must take things as they were, not as one wished them to be. His experience did not dissuade him from earning his commission or joining the reserves shortly after graduation. The 48th Highlanders took him right away on the strength of his COTC record (“they knew I could do it”), and he was to find that his lieutenancy opened doors after he was admitted to the bar and began applying to law firms. The cadets who took COTC training in the 1950s and 1960s echo many of the positive comments voiced by their forebears of the late 1940s.93 Although their experiences and reactions were much the same, there were differences. In the 1940s, students found the COTC, but with the changes in recruitment methods, it was the other way around when these young men came to university a few years later. The application and assessment process is laid out in the service record kindly provided by one ex-cadet, as is his progression through three years of training that, in his and two other cases, culminated with his attachment to the Canadian brigade stationed in West Germany with the NATO forces. This record is the core to which the other personal accounts and documentary sources will be added to form a cumulative portrait of the cadet’s experience during the middle and later years of the post-war COTC. Apart from one, these accounts fit the profile of the recruits sought by the COTC, whether as members of a high school cadet corps, the sons of serving soldiers, or both. By the time our primary example applied to the COTC, the Toronto Contingent’s officers had come to have their doubts about the “M” test, finding that applicants who scored poorly on it turned out to be the best cadets, and so had engaged the services of a doctoral candidate in psychology, Captain J. Wainwright, to assist

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in the personnel selection process.94 This officer assessed character traits (enthusiasm, personality, appearance, ability to get things done, cooperation, and initiative), the RSO evaluated leadership potential, and the commanding officer gauged his academic potential. The candidate in this instance had the ingredients that the selection board was looking for: propriety in speech and manner, neatness, a good high school record, participation in sports, music, and school activities, steady parttime employment, a strong endorsement from his high school principal, five years in the cadet corps, including a summer at the national cadet camp in Banff, and a secure, congenial family background. Last but not least, he believed that “his parents would not object” to his joining the COTC. Shortly after beginning his training, he switched from the infantry to the armoured corps. It is interesting in this connection that the cadets who opted for the infantry had mixed feelings about their experiences, whereas those who trained with the engineer or armoured corps all looked back favourably on theirs. The armoured corps cadets recalled being treated as officers from the moment they arrived at the corps school, unlike some of their infantry counterparts who did not win acceptance as readily. The armoured corps nevertheless conducted a demanding training regime that subjected cadets to weekly assessments and put them under a certain mental and physical duress, not least because one man’s failings might affect the standing of a fourman tank crew. Grade inflation did not corrupt the marking process – if anything, the problem was grade deflation. Comparison of first- with second- and third-year marks indicates a weeding out process in which “average” represented real attainment.95 The reports rating our cadet’s performance in his first two practical phases at Borden and Meaford testify to his aptitude for this arm, both in the mastery of technical skills (wireless, driving, gunnery) and in the demonstration of sound military sense and leadership ability in tactical exercises.96 The consistently high assessments in his theoretical and practical training phases secured him a spot among the COTC cadets chosen for third-year practical training with the Canadian brigade in West Germany. The despatch of that unit late in 1951 “in furtherance of Canada’s undertakings under the North Atlantic Treaty”97 had created an opportunity to train selected RMC and COTC cadets in an operational setting. Six University of Toronto undergraduate subalterns went with the first batch of seventy-four trainees to “take over jobs of active force officers in armoured, engineer, artillery, infantry, ordnance, service corps, medical corps, electrical and mechanical engineer, dental corps and chaplain corps” with the 27th Canadian Infantry Brigade at Hanover



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Figure 5.4.  Training exercise with the armoured corps at Meaford, sometime in the 1950s. UTA A1968-0003/002P(119)

during the summer of 1952.98 There they saw some familiar faces, both former Toronto Contingent men now on active service and Major (now Lieutenant-Colonel) Appleton, who was acting as the Canadian liaison officer at the headquarters of the British Army on the Rhine.99 The employment of COTC cadets in officer roles did not go smoothly from the outset, however, since “their authority and power of command was questioned by the men,” and hence “at no time were officers of the COTC to be placed in charge of any independent body of men and were not to be used on patrol duties in Hannover or elsewhere.” Insubordination to twenty-year old second lieutenants sporting “C.O.T.C.” flashes will have surprised no one familiar with the rough and tumble lot of the 27th Brigade, who were themselves settling none too easily into a strange place and role.100 That first summer in Germany was another lesson in stoicism. Complaints about treatment and the lack of both command responsibility and free time met with the frank reply that

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Figure 5.5.  COTC cadets take part in a map-reading lesson in Germany. UTA A1968-0003/003P(224)

the system was still being worked out and that the tight leash kept on everyone would slacken once the brigade had been brought to heel.101 Despite the rocky start, the COTC continued to send seventy-five to eighty cadets to Germany each year over the next few years.102 By 1954 reports on the cadets’ experiences were much more encouraging, so that competition for places in each year’s quota was intense. The Toronto Contingent was allotted five or six spaces, with selection based on the applicant’s military and academic standing and the committee’s assessment of his ability to carry out the duties incumbent upon him as he filled in for serving officers on leave or temporarily reassigned. They ranged from the mundane necessities of daily administration to the more engaging tests of a junior officer’s knowledge and judgment. These involved serving on Boards of Inquiry and interrogating witnesses or weighing the facts of a case, and going on combined arms manoeuvres, firing and demolition exercises, and patrols. The atmosphere was much more conducive to inquiry, speaking up, and mixing



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freely with regular and regimental officers now that “unit commanders strongly favour the training of COTC and Service Colleges cadets within the Brigade.” The cadets in turn felt that their experience in Germany gave them what the corps schools in Canada had not: “Close contact with the men provided what they considered ‘most valuable lessons.’”103 Seven days’ leave to tour West Germany or visit neighbouring countries capped a training phase that all participants regarded as the summit of their COTC career. Decades later the three former cadets interviewed about their experiences in Germany expressed considerable pride in having shown what COTC candidates could do, proving that they could more than hold their own alongside the more highly touted ROTP and RMC cadets. “In-job training” in Germany was also a proving ground where the army and the officer cadets tested their compatibility. The ones selected for Germany were those the army had earmarked as potential regular force officers, and part of the purpose in sending them to the Canadian

Figure 5.6.  Toronto Contingent cadets sent to Germany for training mull over their travel opportunities in the summer of 1954. UTA A1968-0003/002P(147)

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brigade was to help them make up their minds about a service career. The service record of our cadet shows that his four months with an armoured regiment fell into two halves, the first taken up with administration and employment as transport officer responsible for managing a driver wheeled course and transferring the unit’s full complement of tanks from base to training zone, the second spent as a troop leader in a tank squadron. By the end of his training phase, he had seen everything the army deemed necessary for an informed decision. In his case and others, though, the reserves won out over the regular army, for two reasons. First, promotion in the regular army was by seniority, so that even a most capable junior officer would be treading water for quite some time; second, the cadets had noticed that the regular army was no place for young men hoping one day to marry and raise a family. The habits and skills acquired through the COTC transferred easily into other pursuits. The cadets whose training careers we have followed thought it better to embark on a professional career and return to the reserves once they had established themselves. One joined a major manufacturing company in which his ability to work without supervision, organize projects, and get results led him steadily upwards, a common story with many variations among other COTC graduates. Musing on his days in the Toronto Contingent, one ex-cadet (who had no interest in the military beyond the COTC) felt that the experience had been valuable in that it taught him quite a lot, but “what it does for Canada I really don’t know.” The question is worth pondering, leading as it does into the next section, which retraces the terminal decline of the COTC, since the arguments for or against maintaining the university training units came down to their cost effectiveness. Extrapolating from an admittedly small sample of ex-cadets, one might nevertheless suggest that the country recouped its investment many times over in ways that figures alone cannot tally up. All but one remained or involved themselves in the militia for years afterwards, faithful to an older ideal of useful citizenship that combined a professional career, public benefaction, and military service. One of the two lawyers who joined the 48th Highlanders spent his summers instructing in the national cadet camps and devoted countless hours of pro bono work to helping “dead end kids” through the regiment’s local outreach program. Another who went into the Toronto police force credited his COTC training with helping him learn how to defuse and take charge of situations. It cannot be entirely coincidental that, in thirty-two years on the job, he never once drew his gun. To step outside the ranks of the Toronto Contingent, the late Peter Cameron, a McGill alumnus, presents perhaps the finest example of what a COTC graduate went on to



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do for the country, not only in the corporate and public policy spheres, but also in a lifelong commitment to the military, rising to commanding officer of the 48th Highlanders, and working with several organizations and advisory committees dedicated to the defence and security of Canada. Two final observations are in order. Those who took COTC training in the 1950s and 1960s are a reminder that the antics of student radicals need not claim all the attention of historians who focus on the universities during those years. Simultaneously hundreds of Toronto undergraduates, thousands across the country, went quietly about their own business completing their degrees, doing officer training, and heading off to do their part in serving the public good. From the examples cited above, it would appear that they benefited society and their fellow citizens far more than their peers in the student movement ever did. They also showed what kind of officer the COTC at its best

Figure 5.7.  COTC cadets rapt with attention during classroom instruction − the photo is posed, of course, yet the quality of the COTC’s academic courses during the 1950s was very high at Toronto.

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could produce: one who was technically competent and yet more than that – the intellectually curious, sophisticated type that the armed forces representing a democratic society should seek to have. “[H]e must, in addition, possess a profound knowledge of human beings and the institutions they have created. He must be capable of measuring their merits and defects the better to offer judgment and counsel. An officer’s interest in the world about him and the knowledge he can acquire concerning it through private study after his daily duties have been discharged are and will be the measure of success in our Army.”104 “We have now reached the end of an era in Defence thinking” By the mid-1950s the COTC had made a strong recovery from the recruitment slump and, in concurrence with the ROTP, seemed poised to contribute a steady flow of officer candidates into the active and reserve forces. The records show that roughly three thousand young men were enrolled in officer training at the country’s universities or service colleges in 1955–56 and again in 1956–57, half of them in the COTC. Since a third of ROTP cadets were attending the universities, it meant that the COTC was supervising the training of some two thousand officer candidates overall.105 Not quite 10 per cent of the COTC graduates could be expected to take commissions in the Active Army, 20 per cent in the reserves, another 40 per cent in the supplementary reserves.106 The remaining third or so would take no further interest in the forces, although it was possible that some might circle back to the reserves after settling on a civil career. The summer training camps were bursting at the seams with officers and other ranks attending in unprecedented numbers now that the strength of the militia had risen from thirty-three thousand to forty-five thousand in less than a decade. The practical phase curriculum in place for COTC and ROTP cadets took them through basic training in drill and small arms (“common to all corps”) in their first summer, training pertinent to their corps during the second, and “on the job” training with a regular unit or establishment in their final year.107 The spirit of harmony reigned supreme once more at the meetings of the NCCU and DND committees, where it was agreed that most of the major problems affecting military training at the universities had been resolved and a new era of collaboration lay ahead. The buoyant tones in the Toronto Contingent’s records echo the general optimism about the COTC’s return to good health. Once again there were more applicants than places; there was a new stream of



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officer qualification for medical and dental students subsidized by the army; the ROTP was fully integrated with the COTC curriculum; and the consistently high grading of the Toronto cadets continued to be the contingent’s stock in trade.108 All the more startling, then, to encounter the very different mood and state of affairs in the reports for the 1957–58 session, the second turning point in the story of the post-war contingent. The year had begun with a steep reduction in the intake quota from forty-five to eighteen, ended with a 30 per cent decline in contingent strength and a pause in recruiting, and witnessed the reassignment without replacement of the RSO, whose removal placed additional burdens on a staff coping with drastic cuts in teaching and administrative assistance. So abridged in scope and purpose had the theoretical syllabus become that cadets learned no more than “the mere mechanics of a platoon commander’s job,” and were deprived of the much richer offerings that the university professors and visiting lecturers had so recently provided. The elimination of the military geography course seemed a particularly “retrograde step” in view of Canada’s involvement in Europe with the NATO forces, in Indochina with the International Control Commission, and in the Middle East with the UN. Was this not the very time to be developing junior officers capable of rising one day to the higher levels of strategic and political policy, who as undergraduate cadets should be encouraged to extend their intellectual horizons beyond their basic and technical training by acquiring a wide knowledge of history, economics, and contemporary events through their courses and reading?109 The shock of this abrupt retrenchment reverberated throughout the universities. They now had to deal with “new and far-reaching departures from the programme as it has been operating for the last ten years,” which had been foisted upon them with no advance warning, let alone consultation. The temperate language of the NCCU’s summaries of the discussions with DND’s Personnel Members Committee could not disguise the deep dissatisfaction with “the present arrangements for military training at the universities” and the lack of prior notice. Nor were the university committee members persuaded that the consequences of these changes had been taken fully into consideration. They had no choice but to accept the reasons for these decisions given by the DND spokesmen and the minister of defence, George Pearkes, in their explanations offered ex post facto. It was the end of one era in defence thinking and the beginning of another. After years of concentrating defence spending on the training and upkeep of a one-hundredthousand-strong army, half of it composed of reserves, the government now intended to use the military budget principally to maintain a

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regular army equipped with the latest weapons. This was in keeping with the new “forces in being” concept, first outlined in the summer of 1957,110 which was predicated on the belief that the next war would be a thermonuclear contest. In such an event a fully trained, fully equipped army had to be ready to respond the moment war broke out; there would be no time to mobilize and despatch the reserves, as Canada had done in previous conflicts. With its traditional role as a fighting force thus rendered obsolete, the militia instead would be “engaged in the battle for survival, required to bolster the morale of our people, to minimize the loss of life and to maintain essential services when the country is under air or sea bombardment.” To pay for the complex, costly weaponry and equipment the forces in being would need, the most stringent economies fell upon the reserves, which would be greatly reduced in number and reoriented for their new role in civil defence. The cost-cutting measures applied no less to the university contingents, whose importance was likewise diminished. Hence the vertical drop in enlistment quotas, removal of the RSOs and clerical staff, elimination of “frills” such as fees for outside lecturers, contraction of the theoretical syllabus, a shortened summer training period, and the rule that, from now on, all incoming cadets had to sign an “honourable undertaking” to serve at least three years in the reserves, provided there was a militia unit in their locality. There would also be every effort to encourage promising COTC men to transfer into the ROTP, now the preferred university officer training organization.111 If the push for thrift could not be disputed, coinciding as it did with the first economic slump since the end of the war, the ramifications of the new policy certainly cried out for clarification. The universities, firmly committed to campus military training and to their connection with the armed forces, posed some pointed questions. If, as DND claimed, the armed forces still prized university-educated officers, why divest the universities, especially the smaller ones, of the personnel and means necessary to conduct first-rate training programs in return for negligible savings? Why damage morale and disrupt recruiting with unexpected and drastic reductions that fed rumours that the COTC was on the verge of cancellation? Would the use of the reserves in civil defence entail a change in COTC training, or would the program, what was left of it, function along the same lines as before? Were the military policy makers in fact certain that the next war would take the shape they assumed it would? And could the government answer the question uppermost in the minds of all concerned: Whither the university units? The tepid response that the government had no plans to abolish



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the COTC “for the foreseeable future” did not set anyone at ease about the prospects for the university training program.112 Thus began the steady but ever more predictable descent of the COTC, first into irrelevance and then into extinction. What had taken just two years after the war to build up took ten to dismantle as the process of attrition, once started, proved to be irreversible. Marginalized by the ROTP, repeatedly denied increases in quotas and access to training resources (on the grounds that the regular army had the first and greater claim),113 and beset by false economies and passing whims about its operation (such as conversion into a one-year program to groom candidates for the ROTP), the COTC carried on dutifully nonetheless. Even in its very straitened circumstances the Toronto Contingent rallied in the early 1960s, maintaining its overall strength at eighty to one hundred each year, sending three or four cadets to Germany each summer, and producing its share of officers for the regular and reserve forces.114 The 1961–62 session was something of a milestone in the history of the contingent, for it was in that year that women were at last enrolled in the COTC. The call had gone out to students in household science and nursing to train as dieticians for the armed forces. The young women taken on strength would follow the same program as the male cadets, doing the theoretical syllabus during the academic year and practical training during the summer, all under the same conditions and at the same rate of pay.115 Despite intake quotas limited to fifteen to twenty entrants a year and an ever-shrinking program, the COTC continued to attract volunteers, and could easily have exceeded its miserly allotment. Once again adversity elicited the qualities of professionalism and perseverance that had carried it through its tribulations before. That interest in the COTC never evaporated at Toronto – nor, let it be said, at the other universities – even as campus attitudes towards the military hardened into outright hostility is further testimony to the dedication of the contingent officers and members who swam against the tide of increasingly radical opinion. The first manifesto demanding the expulsion of the COTC had accompanied a breathtakingly obnoxious screed on Remembrance Day 1959, but it was not until 1963, when the first protests against US involvement in Vietnam began to sound, that the hue and cry went up again.116 How far any of this affected the fate of the Toronto Contingent is difficult to ascertain. The COTC was so small and inconspicuous through the 1960s – it is hardly ever mentioned in the Varsity – that it seems not to have presented a worthwhile target for student activists, who had

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bigger fish to fry; and it was gone by the time the protest movement reached its peak. Whether the herd of independent minds eventually would have stampeded the COTC off the campus must remain an open question, since the various factions were usually too busy fighting with one another. One would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the reports of peace groups squabbling over the right way to stage a peace vigil, hold an alternative Remembrance Day service, or banish the evil Yankee capitalist war machine from the earth.117 On the other hand, the COTC did not receive a great deal of moral or other support from its purported allies, who sometimes gave the impression of vultures circling overhead. In 1960 the contingent’s Board of Trustees parried an attempt by the university to reappropriate the headquarters at 119 St George, deemed too large for the much-diminished unit, by asserting “a moral, if not legal, right to the use and operation of these premises over and above the rights normally granted to an ordinary tenant.” Speaking for the board, Colonel Madill reminded the university that, although it held title by virtue of its purchase of the property in 1939, the contingent had out of its own funds paid $37,000 for a drill hall and an addition to the house, an amount that had more than doubled the value of the property. Furthermore the university received an annual rent of over $5,000 from the Department of National Defence for the contingent’s use of the building.118 These facts and figures prolonged the COTC’s stay at 119 St George, but five years later, after the contingent had been summarily reduced by half, DND pruned expenses once more and ordered the COTC to relocate to less costly accommodation. Following a sojourn in the old Biology building, the contingent moved into cramped but serviceable quarters just up the street at 123 St George. Here it dwelt until the end of its days. What the COTC truly needed to survive were friends in high places in Ottawa. These it did not have. The Active Force officers and policy makers who had the ear of successive ministers of defence saw no need or use for a university reserves training scheme in their plans for a tightly budgeted regular army integrated within unified armed forces. The consensus at DND that the COTC had no meaningful contribution to make to the country’s military preparedness became abundantly clear on 30 December 1963 when Minister of Defence Paul Hellyer terminated recruiting and cut enrolment by half. These decisions, enacted without prior consultation, struck the COTC as tantamount to a breach of faith that “could not have been better designed to undermine public relations than if deliberate plans had been made.”119 Their immediate effect was to throw the current training year into disarray; more ominously they “cast a shadow of uncertainty” over the future role and



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function of the contingent.120 At Toronto the JSUTC convened for the first time in six years to review the rather dismal situation and, through the pen of the redoubtable Colonel Stacey, to “express its views in the strongest possible terms that the University-Armed Forces connection is vital to provide adequately trained officers to the Armed Forces at a time when increasing international demands are being made on the Canadian Armed Forces.” Two memoranda attached to the minutes of the meeting marshalled the arguments to be made in the discussions with the Personnel Members Committee in Ottawa the following June.121 In these and subsequent meetings, the COTC heads waxed valiant in fight, repeatedly pressing the points that the universities remained fully committed to the training programs and wished to preserve the quality and unique character of officer education in an academic environment. But how, they asked, could the COTC meet its objectives without the proper support, consultation, and cooperation? They were baffled by the contradictory proclamations emanating from DND assuring them, on the one hand, that the armed forces saw value in what the COTC was doing, but on the other imposing changes that to all intents and purposes sabotaged the program. They could not understand why DND was so oblivious to the damage it was doing to its credibility among the students training in, or interested in, the COTC, who were the ones most affected by the penny-pinching that saved the government paltry sums at great cost to the cadets’ morale and incentive. They warned of the estrangement between the universities and the armed forces, and between civilian and soldier, that would ensue if the military ended a long and priceless connection with the country’s campuses, leaving the field to the anti-militarists and worse, to the poor substitute (“useless sop”) of chairs in strategic studies and the like, which would only generate history or sociology theses that no one would read. And once broken, the link would in all likelihood never be restored.122 The flurry of discussions in 1964 resulted only in a stay of execution. The Toronto Contingent and the military committee of the National Conference of Canadian Universities and Colleges could do little more than express dismay at the interim training plan introduced in 1964–65, a very thin gruel drained of nearly all the nutrients the COTC required,123 and await word on the fate of the program. The writ of execution was delivered in instalments, first in the report of the Suttie Commission on the reorganization of the Canadian militia, which recommended that the COTC be abolished if it could not maintain a satisfactory flow of officers into the reserves, and then in a DND paper presented to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada in early 1967.124 It

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gave the military’s view of matters since the end of the Second World War, dwelling mainly on the failure of the COTC to provide officers in sufficient numbers for the expanded armed forces during the 1950s and for the refashioned regular and reserve forces after 1957. Since it no longer justified the cost of its operation, the program should be phased out during the 1967–68 academic year so as to enable current cadets to complete two-year training and the universities to arrange the termination of leases to DND. ROTP cadets would carry on with their education, but henceforth would be administered off-campus. The Toronto Contingent did not take this lying down. In March 1967 an ad hoc committee chaired by Lieutenant-Colonel A.C.M. Ross and Wing Commander J.W.F. Caron (of the university’s RCAF training unit) put together a forceful reply urging the continuation of the program.125 It reads as an elegy for the COTC. The authors invoked the long tradition of military service going back to the days of K Company, and argued that, to be “universal” in outlook, the university should support at least one organization embodying the ideals of loyalty and service to country and demonstrating that there were still staff and students proud to wear the queen’s uniform. From the army’s standpoint, it stood to lose a source of officers “with the different or broader approach obtained through a university education,” and risked being perceived as an entity unto itself, without the intellectual cross-pollination that the universities had once offered. Their report also presented a number of suggestions as to how the COTC could be run economically on a rational plan that took the size and resources of each participating college or university into account. It was no use. The genuine commitment from one side was unrequited on the other.126 The powers that be had reached the conclusion they wished to reach; all that remained was to give the order to commence a phasing-out operation. On 2 October 1967 the official announcement went out that all recruiting for the COTC would cease forthwith and that the university reserve training program would be discontinued as of 31 May 1968.127 The Toronto Contingent spent its last year completing the training in all phases for the handful of cadets still enrolled and assembling its files for deposit in the university archives. In the contingent’s last annual report, its last commanding officer, Colonel G.W. Field, a professor of German and an artillery captain during the Second World War, spoke for many when he wrote that, “at a time when training and technology are more complex than ever before it is to be regretted that the Department of National Defence is severing a vital link with the universities.”128 Twenty or so years later, when the consequences of the decision were manifesting themselves



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in rather displeasing ways, a former chief of the defence staff was to write that it should not have mattered if COTC graduates went on or not, since “they retained an important appreciation of defence issues,” quite unlike the current Canadian public and media. As for the armed forces, adrift and isolated and friendless, it was now all too apparent that “abandoning this system was, in medical terms, like performing a frontal lobotomy.”129 A “parade of proud memories” The COTC disappeared from the University of Toronto campus on 1 June 1968. Few outside the contingent took notice, for there was no ceremony to mark the passing of an organization that had represented the university so honourably for more than half a century. Although the Toronto Contingent faded from memory within a few years, the COTC continued to benefit students well into the 1980s. The Board of Trustees of the University of Toronto Contingent, stewards of the funds accumulated over the years from waived pay, investments, and interest, distributed bursaries or memorial awards to the dependants of former COTC members. The files of applications sent in response to the advertisements put out by the trustees attest to the generous financial aid extended to the sons and daughters of cadets who in many cases had themselves attended university on the strength of their COTC pay.130 Funds were also set aside for a plaque to be placed in front of 119 St George as a reminder that there had once been such a thing as the University of Toronto Contingent of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps. K Company, it will be recalled, went out in a blaze of culinary glory by lavishing its remaining funds on a sumptuous valedictory banquet. No such revelry eased the pain of the COTC’s demise seventy-five years later, but the Toronto Contingent did not take its leave without its own “parade of proud memories.” Fifty years to the month after the Militia Department had authorized the University of Toronto Contingent, a mess dinner held on 13 November 1964 assembled six of the original officers – three of whom also counted among the six former commanders on hand – and many other eminent guests to commemorate a tradition of service to Canada that represented a deeply significant part of the university’s heritage.131 On the front cover of the program is a photograph of the contingent’s officers grouped around President Falconer on the front steps of University College. It remains one of the most remarkable images in the university’s history and the one that best displays the spirit of the COTC in its first and most dramatic year.

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Figure 5.8.  Advertisement for the COTC memorial awards available to students whose fathers or grandfathers had served in the Toronto Contingent. The Varsity, 19 January 1969, p. 5.



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Figure 5.9.  Closing the circle. The photograph of President Falconer and the officers of the COTC in the dramatic first year of 1914−15 that appeared on the invitation to the Toronto Contingent’s fiftieth anniversary dinner in November of 1964. UTA A1965-0004/029(129.1)

It was meet and right on an occasion marking the contingent’s fiftieth anniversary that memories should cluster around the originals and the matchless early days. But as the story comes to a close, it is another memory, of the great levée en masse in 1940–41, that embraces within its compass the experience of all those who by choice or force of circumstance passed through the COTC and lived a part of their lives as soldiers. What the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps means to the history of the University of Toronto, and what it meant in the lives of countless Varsity men, was captured most memorably by Humphrey Carver in a passage that serves as our parting scene: Seeking a route to a useful wartime occupation I soon found my way to the “back campus” of the University of Toronto where a motley crowd of professors, artists, and assorted intellectuals marched up and down learning the rudiments of military routine from two high school teachers, Bert Tolton and Archie Bryce, a major and a captain in the reserve army.

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It was at least a declaration of one’s availability and, confronted by the impenetrable future, it was a comfort to share one’s innocence with such a congenial group of people. The back campus, behind Hart House, was a kind of jumping-off place from which, month by month, people started off on new lives and adventures. My immediate companions were Charles Comfort, the painter, and Felix Walter, professor of French, tall, dark, and handsome, and a fastidious left-wing intellectual. After each parade we would gather in Dorothy Walter’s living room and discuss our latest gift of knowledge from Bert Tolton. This was the point of departure for Charles’ distinguished career as a War Artist. From the outset, military detail had an extraordinary fascination for him. Everything he learned was documented, indexed, and filed away in his scholarly mind. His battlefield drawings and watercolours done in Italy are, I think, the most beautiful things he ever did and his unerring eye for detail gave them a special authority. Of our company, Felix Walter was one of the first to take off into a new life, to become an intelligence officer; this was a road that led him, after the war, to faraway places, to Paris and to Beirut and to a life very different from the bourgeois comforts of the Bloor Street apartment. In our ranks also was Earle Birney, the West Coast poet; I can still see his scrawny figure in the column marching up University Avenue as we returned from camp at Niagara, so breathless and almost strangled by the heavy pack on his back that one wondered if he would survive the next block from Queen Street to Dundas. He went off to Europe, far from strangled, and came back with his wartime novel, Turvey. Claude Bissell was also there on the back campus which he ruled twenty years later as president of the university. And in this motley company, too, were Wayne and Shuster, later to become great artists of the television theatre. So we all marched up and down the campus and learned to bark at one another like guardsmen and we all went to camp at Niagara and flung ourselves on the poison ivy. And, in the course of time, we all found our new wartime directions.132

Notes

Introduction 1 On the tactical treatises and the rich tradition of military science in Byzantium, see Gilbert Dagron, Le traité sur la guérilla de l’empereur Nicéphore Phocas (963–969) (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1986); Eric McGeer, Sowing the Dragon’s Teeth: Byzantine Warfare in the Tenth Century (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1995), 171–95; and idem, “Military Texts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys, with John Haldon and Robin Cormack, 907–14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 2 Richard Preston, To Serve Canada: A History of the Royal Military College Since the Second World War (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1991), 1–12. 3 Robert A. Spencer, “Military Training in an Academic Environment: The University of Toronto Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, 1914–1968,” Canadian Military History 18, no. 4 (2009): 32–50. 4 Kathryn Bindon, Queen’s Men, Canada’s Men: The Military History of Queen’s University, Kingston (Kingston, ON: Queen’s University, 1978); Hartley Munro Thomas, UWO Contingent, COTC: The History of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps at the University of Western Ontario (London: University of Western Ontario, 1956). 5 Daniel Byers, “The Canadian Officers’ Training Corps: Support for Military Training in the Universities of Canada, 1908–1935” (MA thesis, University of Waterloo, 1993). 6 Desmond Morton, “McGill’s Contingent of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps (COTC), 1912–1968,” Canadian Military Journal 10, no. 3 (2010): 37–47; Andrew Theobald, “Western’s War: A Study of an Ontario Canadian Officers’ Training Corps Contingent, 1939–1945,” Ontario History 98, no. 1 (2006): 52–67.

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7 Martin Friedland, The University of Toronto: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 8 See Claude Bissell, ed., University College: A Portrait, 1853–1953 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953); Robert H. Blackburn, Evolution of the Heart: A History of the University of Toronto Library up to 1981 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); Adrian Brook and W.A.E. McBryde, Historical Distillates: Chemistry at the University of Toronto since 1843 (Toronto: Dundurn Group, 2007); Robert Craig Brown, Arts and Science at Toronto: A History, 1827–1990 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); Robin Harris and Ian Montagnes, eds., Cold Iron and Lady Godiva: Engineering Education at Toronto, 1920–1972 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973); T.A. Reed, ed., A History of the University of Trinity College, Toronto, 1852–1952 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952); and C.B. Sissons, A History of Victoria University (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952). 9 See James G. Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); and D.C. Masters, Henry John Cody: An Outstanding Life (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1995). 10 A.B. McKillop, Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 11 See Paul Axelrod and John G. Reid, eds., Youth, University and Canadian Society: Essays in the Social History of Higher Education (Montreal; Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989); Catherine Gidney, Tending the Student Body: Health, Youth and the Rise of the Modern University, 1900–1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); and Paul Stortz and E. Lisa Panayotidis, eds., Cultures, Communities, and Conflict: Histories of Canadian Universities and War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 12 J.L. Granatstein, Canada’s Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 13 Yves Tremblay, Instruire une armée: les officiers canadiens et la guerre moderne, 1919–1944. Outremont, QC: Éditions Athéna, 2008); Geoffrey Hayes, “The Development of the Canadian Army Officer Corps, 1939–1945” (PhD diss., University of Western Ontario, 1992), revised for publication as Crerar’s Lieutenants: Inventing the Canadian Junior Army Officer, 1939–1945 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017). 14 Bernd Horn and Stephen J. Harris, eds., Generalship and the Art of the Admiral: Perspectives on Canadian Senior Military Leadership (St Catharines, ON: Vanwell Publishing, 2001). 15 Peter Kasurak, A National Force: The Evolution of Canada’s Army, 1950–2000 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013); Andrew Godefroy, In Peace Prepared: Innovation and Adaptation in Canada’s Cold War Army (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014).



Notes to pages 18–22

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1. “Old K”: The University Rifle Company and Its Legacy, 1861–1914 1 On Wilson as his contemporaries remembered him, see H.R. Fairclough, “Sir Daniel Wilson,” University of Toronto Monthly 2 (1901–2): 118–21; and George M. Wrong, “Sir Daniel Wilson,” Arbor 3 (1911–12): 150–60. For a full portrait of Wilson as a scholar and administrator, see Harold Averill and Gerald Keith, “Daniel Wilson and the University of Toronto,” in Thinking with Both Hands: Sir Daniel Wilson in the Old World and the New, ed. Elizabeth Hulse, 139–210 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 2 Daniel Wilson, Address to the Convocation of the Faculties of the University of Toronto and University College, October 5th, 1891 (Toronto: Howser and Hutchison, 1891). 3 See “The Opening of Convocation Hall,” University of Toronto Monthly 7 (1906–7): 238–46; Varsity, 9 February 1921, 1. 4 On the revival of the Ridgeway commemoration and the observance of Decoration Day in 1890s Toronto, see Paul Maroney, “‘Lest We Forget’: War and Meaning in English Canada, 1885–1914,” Journal of Canadian Studies 32, no. 4 (1998): 108–24, esp. 114–16. 5 On Gibson’s services to the university, see University of Toronto Monthly 15 (1914–15): 121–2; and A1973–0026/117(07), University of Toronto Archives (hereafter cited as UTA). 6 George Hunter Robinson Diary, 8 March 1866, 9 March 1866, 13 March 1866, 16 March 1866, 2 April 1866, 3 June 1866, B1982–0003/003: 3, UTA. 7 On George Hare, who had worked as gatekeeper, janitor, and groundskeeper at University College since 1865, see Varsity, 12 February 1913, 4; see also “The White Thorn: Pages from Mr. Hare’s Reminiscences,” University of Toronto Monthly 23 (1922–3): 334–6, and the notice on Hare’s death in 1929 after sixtysix years of service at the university, Varsity, 30 September 1929, 1. 8 Globe (Toronto), 4 June 1866. 9 The third was John Henry Mewburn; see D.R. Richardson, A Not Unsightly Building: University College and Its History (Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 1990), 121, n164. 10 Globe (Toronto), 6 June 1866; Ernest J. Chambers, The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada: A History of a Splendid Regiment’s Origins, Development and Services (Toronto: E.L. Ruddy, 1901), 65–7. 11 The story of the first memorial window is drawn from the proceedings of the Toronto University Senate, 1866, in J. George Hodgins, Documentary History of Education in Upper Canada from the Passing of the Constitutional Act of 1791 to the Close of the Reverend Doctor Ryerson’s Administration of the Education Department in 1876, vol. 19, 1865–1867 (Toronto: L.K. Cameron, 1907), 239–43, and the accounts in the Globe (Toronto), 18 October 1866, and 17 November 1866, with McCaul’s speech reprinted in full.

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12 The sundial in the Hart House quadrangle rests on a stone shaft (mullion) removed from the frame of the memorial window after the fire by Professor Alfred Baker, who served as captain of K Company in the 1880s; see I.H. Cameron, “England’s War Memorials,” University of Toronto Monthly 24 (1923–4): 167–9. On the changes to the building after the fire of 1890, see George W. Stoddart, “Story in Stone,” University of Toronto Monthly 46 (1945–6): 104–5. 13 The armoury would have been located where Professor W.J. Alexander (head of English from 1889 to 1926) kept his office; see “Back in the Old Days,” Varsity, 6 February 1924, 2. It is tempting to identify this as the present Room 251 of University College (now the office for Gender Diversity Studies). The floor plans for the 1859 construction (B1965– 0028[049]-[051], UTA) show an anteroom on the upper floor of the east wing, in what was then the Senate tower; this room was immediately below the bedel’s apartments, which for many years were occupied by Robert McKim, K Company’s quartermaster. The anteroom became an office when the east wing was reconfigured after the fire in 1890 (B1965– 0028[164], UTA). The rebuilding plans do not specify any room set aside as a new armoury, but the architects allowed plenty of storage space in the basement of the east wing. 14 University of Toronto Monthly 7 (1906–7): 267–8 (written by John A. Paterson, graduate of 1866 and a veteran of Ridgeway). 15 The story of the second memorial window and the dedication ceremony is assembled from University of Toronto Monthly 1 (1900–1): 123; 7 (1906–7): 235, 263; 8 (1907–8): 179, 302–3, 313–14; 9 (1908–9): 57, 296–7, 335, 341; 10 (1909–10): 528–9, 536–44, 546–550; 11 (1910–11): 442; 12 (1911–12): 430–1; press clippings from Toronto newspapers, A1973–0051/242(04), UTA; Varsity, 28 February 1921, 1, and 3 November 1925, 1, 4; the program of the memorial service, B1983–1972, UTA; President Robert Falconer’s approval of the inscription and placement of the tablet, A1967–0007/014(137), UTA; and Richardson, Not Unsightly Building, 138. 16 Some of the correspondence and solicitation forms survive in the papers of Barlow Cumberland, who headed the memorial window committee; B1983–1207, UTA. Cumberland himself had been a member of the Trinity College Rifles before transferring to the 10th Royals in May 1866; he took part in the campaign but did not see action at Ridgeway. 17 On the fractious nature of the colleges making up the university in the years before the Great War, see McKillop, Matters of Mind, 236–41. 18 W. Stewart Wallace, A History of the University of Toronto, 1827–1927 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1927), 111. 19 The COTC inherited and safeguarded more than the memory of the University Rifles; see M.W. Wallace, “The Croft Silver,” University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–1): 196.



Notes to pages 27–8

259

20 On Canadian attitudes towards the United States in this period, see Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 153–76; and S.F. Wise, “Canadians View the United States: The Annexation Movement and Its Effect on Canadian Opinion, 1837–1867,” in God’s Peculiar Peoples: Essays on Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1993), 115–47. The ingredients of Upper Canadian patriotism are inventoried by Ian Radforth, Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 271–80. 21 For a good overview of the situation, see W.L. Morton, The Critical Years: The Union of British North America, 1857–1873 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964), 98–109. 22 C.P. Stacey, Canada and the British Army, 1846–1871: A Study in the Practice of Responsible Government, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 117–46; John R. Grodzinski, “A Modicum of Professionalism: The Canadian Militia in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Canadian Way of War: Serving the National Interest, ed. Bernd Horn, 99–136 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2006); and C.F. Hamilton, “The Canadian Militia,” Canadian Defence Quarterly 6 (1928–9): 46. For a first-hand account of militia service at this time, see Cameron Pulsifer, “Narrative of the Volunteer Camp at Niagara, June 1871, by a Full Private [Andrew Greenhill, 13th Battalion],” Canadian Military History 12, no. 4 (2003): 37–54. 23 W.J. Loudon, Sir William Mulock: A Short Biography (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1932), 31–55. An adulatory portrait that offers an interesting glimpse into student life at the time, Loudon claims that Mulock, then a first-year man, approached President McCaul about forming a university company. Mulock had the sense to outlive his peers: he died in 1944 at age 101, by which time his version of events was the one in circulation. For a more reliable account of the company’s origins, drawn from a manuscript chronicle written during Croft’s captaincy and kept in K Company’s armoury (until it perished in the fire of 1890), see “A Page of College History with a Hitherto Unpublished College Honor List,” Varsity, 20 November 1880, 50–1; and “The University Rifle Company, now K Co., Queen’s Own Rifles,” in The Year Book of the University of Toronto: First Year of Publication, 1886–87, ed. J.O. Miller and F.B. Hodgins (Toronto: Rowsell & Hutchison, 1887), 90–3. A brief history of the company’s creation is also given in Canadian Military Gazette, 15 December 1892, 376, and in the papers of Jabez Henry Elliott, B1983–1249, UTA. 24 John King, “Varsity Men You Know: Professor Croft,” Varsity, 11 December, 1880, 87–8, and 8 January 1881, 122–4. The author, the father of William Lyon Mackenzie King, later refashioned his article into a larger sketch in his McCaul: Croft: Forneri: Personalities of Early University Days

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Notes to pages 28–31

(Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1914), 105–8, esp. 139–48. See also William Hodgson Ellis, “Henry Holmes Croft, D.C.L.,” University of Toronto Monthly 2 (1901–2): 29–32; and the survey of Croft’s career in Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 29–49. The company’s first lieutenant, John Cherriman, was also the son of a soldier who had served under Wellington, as noted by John A. Paterson, “John Bradford Cherriman: An Appreciation,” University of Toronto Monthly 9 (1908–9), 77–83. 25 John A. Paterson, “Four Decades Ago,” University of Toronto Monthly 5 (1904–5): 165–71. 26 John A. Taylor, “The University Rifles,” in The University College Literary and Scientific Society’s Annual, 1869 (Toronto), 43, P78–0764, UTA. 27 The Second Battalion Volunteer Militia Rifles became The Queen’s Own Rifles of Toronto in 1863 and The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada in 1882; see History of the Second Battalion The “Queen’s Own Rifles” of Toronto (n.p., 1878), 10–12; Chambers, Queen’s Own Rifles, 39–54; and “History of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada: Its Formation, 1860-63,” Canadian Military Journal 21, no. 10 (1955): 43–7. 28 For reminiscences of a graduate who recalled his experiences and impressions at the university in the 1860s, see “Varsity in the Later Sixties,” Varsity, 18 March 1897, 233–6. 29 When funds were needed to furnish the armoury, K Company staged a concert to raise the money; see Varsity, 4 December 1886, 79, 11 December 1886, 91, and 12 February 1887, 158. 30 William Mulock, “Student Life Sixty Years Ago,” University of Toronto Monthly 11 (1920–1): 249–52; the same issue has the reminiscences of Sir John Gibson (297–8) and William van der Smissen (348–9). According to a Varsity article on the University Rifles, the Rosedale ravine marksmen fired east from a point between Jarvis and Church streets into butts near the Huntley Street Bridge; errant shots sometimes struck the few houses in the vicinity. See Varsity, 16 November 1925, 2, 4. 31 Varsity, 8 January 1881, 124. According to William Hodgson Ellis, who served under Croft, “the company was never more efficient or more popular than under his captaincy.” Stories of Croft’s entertaining K Company cadets after a day’s target practice circulated long afterwards; see Varsity, 19 January 1921, 1. 32 Taylor, “University Rifles,” 46. 33 William J. Loudon, Studies of Student Life, vol. 3 (Toronto: Macmillan and Company, 1923–48, 261; see also the recollections of student life in the 1870s and 1880s in University of Toronto Monthly 28 (1927–8), 174–9. On student conduct at the time, see McKillop, Matters of Mind, 89–94. Their predecessors of half a century earlier seemed imprisoned in the Dark



Notes to pages 31–4

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Ages to students living in the uncorseted world of the 1920s; see Varsity, 9 February 1923, 3, 4. 34 This comes across quite strongly in a retrospective penned by an 1887 graduate; see John S. MacLean, “UC’s Exhilarating 80’s,” Varsity Graduate 1, no. 2 (1948): 3–8; see also T.A. Reed, “The First Fifty Years of U.C.,” University of Toronto Bulletin (March–April 1954): 114–16. 35 Wallace, History of the University of Toronto, 106–11. A look at Varsity, 17 November 1883, 77–8, shows the University Company notice sandwiched between others referring to Association Football, the Modern Language Club, the Mathematical and Physical Society, the Literary and Scientific Society, the University College Temperance League, and the YMCA. The clubs and associations were drawing from a small pool: annual enrolment in the 1870s fluctuated between 197 and 257 students; not until 1886–87 did the number of students exceed 500 (530). 36 Standing Orders of the 2nd Battalion Active Militia, The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada (Toronto: Copp, Clark, 1883). 37 Son of Colonel George T. Denison, and brother of George Taylor Denison, founder of The Queen’s Own Rifles and author of Soldiering in Canada: Recollections and Experiences (Toronto: G.N. Morang, 1901). See David Gagan, The Denison Family of Toronto, 1792–1925 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973). 38 Robert E. Denison, A History of the Denison Family in Canada, 1792–1910 (Grimsby, ON, 1910), 18–20 and passim. 39 Hew Strachan, History of the Cambridge University Officers Training Corps (Tunbridge Wells, UK: Midas Press, 1976), 10–23. 40 S. Bruce Harman, “Trinity College Rifle Company,” Trinity University Review 12, no. 7 (1899): 87–9; reprinted in Trinity University Review 15, nos. 5–6 (1902): 125–7. Harman joined the Trinity College company at its inception, fought at Ridgeway, served in the Red River expedition of 1870, and rose through the ranks from private to company captain (1870–3). He gives a list of the forty-nine originals and the succession of officers, most of whom, like Harman, appear among the first volunteers. 41 For the history of the rifle company, see two pieces by former company members: David Ford Bogert, “Student Life at Trinity,” Trinity University Review 15, no. 12 (1902): 185–7; and Thomas Paterson, “Student Life at Trinity,” Trinity University Review 16, no. 1 (1903): 8–10. See also Patrick Cain and Jean Morley, eds., The Reminiscences of Arthur Jarvis and Other Documents from Trinity’s First Generation (Toronto: Trinity College Historical Society, 1992). 42 Between 1852 and 1925, Trinity College stood in what is now Trinity Bellwoods Park, on Queen Street West, close to the first Crystal Palace

262

Notes to pages 34–7

(located from 1858 to 1878 at King and Shaw) and the parts of Toronto where the Denison family held extensive properties. The Reverend Charles Kenrick’s Picturesque Trinity (Toronto: George N. Morang, 1903) contains good photographs of the college buildings and the neighbouring ravine, all long gone today. 43 Strachan and Egerton Ryerson, both central figures in the history of nineteenth-century education, were the first and most ardent voices behind the militia myth that exercised a powerful hold over the minds of Upper Canadians; see S.F. Wise, “The War of 1812 in Popular History,” in Wise, God’s Peculiar Peoples, 149–67, esp. 162–5. 44 Barlow Cumberland notes that forty-nine of the sixty-two were Trinity students, the rest being “kindred young men of the city families.” Of the forty-nine collegians, eighteen later entered the ministry and most of the others became laymen in Anglican synods and organizations; see “The Fenian Raid of 1866 and Events on the Frontier,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Third Series (1910) 4, section 2 (Ottawa, 1911): 85–108 (contained in Cumberland’s file, B1983–1207, UTA). 45 Reed, History of the University of Trinity College, 236–8; “Trinity’s Soldiers,” Trinity University Review 15, nos. 5–6 (1902): 127–8; “The Queen’s Own Rifles,” Trinity University Review 23, no. 1 (1910): 10; and “Trinity and the Queen’s Own Rifles,” Torontonensis 8 (1906): 128. The idea of reviving the Trinity College Company surfaced from time to time; see, for instance, Empire, 25 October 1892; and Trinity University Review 15, no. 10 (1902): 167. 46 J.A. MacDonald, Troublous Times in Canada: A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 (Toronto: W.S. Johnston, 1910). 47 Hereward Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991). 48 Accounts of the battle appeared within weeks of its occurrence; see George T. Denison, History of the Fenian Raid on Fort Erie with an Account of the Battle of Ridgeway (Toronto: Rollo and Adam, 1866). The most trenchant analysis is Brian A. Reid, “‘Prepare for Cavalry!’ The Battle of Ridgeway, 2 June 1866,” in Fighting for Canada: Seven Battles, 1758–1945, ed. Donald Graves, 137–88 (Toronto: Robin Brass Studio, 2000). For a well-documented study of the battle with a thorough list of sources, see Peter Vronsky, Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the Battle That Made Canada (Toronto: Allen Lane Canada, 2011). 49 William Hodgson Ellis, “The Adventures of a Prisoner of War,” Varsity, 20 March 1899, 249–52, reprinted in Canadian Magazine 13, no. 3 (1899) and in Canadian Defence Quarterly 3 (1925–6): 209–12; idem, “The University Rifles and the Fenian Raid,” Varsity War Supplement (1915), 42–4; David Junor, “Taken Prisoner by the Fenians,” Canadian Magazine (May 1911); Adam Wright, “The University Company and the Battle of Ridgeway,” University of Toronto Monthly 21 (1920–1): 392–6.



Notes to pages 37–41

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50 Fifty years after Ridgeway, at a jubilee reunion dinner in 1916 for the class of 1866, John Paterson recalled his fallen comrades and linked their names with Varsity men who had fallen in the Great War; see University of Toronto Monthly 17 (1916–17), 31–3. In 1923 the university invited Colonel Otter to the reception at Hart House after the annual COTC inspection, where he took his place alongside other Ridgeway veterans; two months later he shared his memories of the battle at the annual June commemoration. See Canadian Military Gazette, 24 April 1923, 8, and 13 June 1923, 5, 6. 51 Varsity, 20 November 1880, 50–1, and 4 December 1880, 73. 52 “Reminiscences of Ridgeway,” Varsity, 2 June 1883, 330, 331–5. 53 Varsity, 9 January 1929, 1. Something of his character and reputation may be gleaned from the affectionate valedictions upon his retirement in 1913; see University of Toronto Monthly 13 (1912–13): 347–52, 361, 380. He could at times exasperate his colleagues; Wilson memorably described him as “a Dutchman, perfectly content to move along like a fly through a glue-pot” (Daniel Wilson Diary, 19 December 1890, B1974–0033/1, UTA). The most interesting account of the university’s personalities and politics in this time is found in Blackburn, Evolution of the Heart, 46–93. 54 This raised a few eyebrows at the time; Croft and Cherriman joined the company the day after the battle and remained on duty at Stratford until the return to Toronto on 19 June; Varsity, 20 November 1880, 51. 55 Colonel Charles Gillmor testified that half of the volunteers had never fired a shot or been properly drilled; see MacDonald, Troublous Times, 223–4. 56 C.F. Hamilton, “The Canadian Militia,” Canadian Defence Quarterly 7 (1929– 30): 78–89. 57 On the conditions and attractions of militia service in this time, see Chambers, Queen’s Own Rifles, 111–18; Carman Miller, “The Montreal Militia as a Social Institution before World War I,” Urban History Review 19, no. 1 (1990): 57–64; Desmond Morton, The Canadian General: Sir William Otter (Toronto: Hakkert, 1974), 39–73; James Wood, “The Amateur Military Traditions of Victorian Canada,” in Citizen Soldiers and Empire: The Amateur Military Tradition in the British Empire, 1837-1902, ed. Ian F.W. Beckett, 79–100 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012); and idem, Militia Myths: Ideas of the Canadian Citizen Soldier, 1896–1921 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 28–38. The Queen’s Own’s status in late nineteenth-century Toronto is noted in C. Pelham Mulvany, Toronto: Past and Present, A Handbook of the City (Toronto: W.E. Caiger, 1884), 241–2. On the football match, see Varsity, 17 November 1883, 77. 58 Baker graduated in 1869, having served in K Company; he took the rank of lieutenant in 1875 when he joined the university staff, and became company captain in 1878. He went on to a long career as professor, dean of residence, and dean of the Faculty of Arts; see A1973–0026/016(07), UTA.

264

Notes to pages 41–3

59 K Company came under the gaze of Sir William Otter (1843–1929) during his years as commander of The Queen’s Own Rifles (1875–83) and deputy adjutant general of Military District No. 2 (Toronto and central Ontario) after 1884. On his career and insistence on the standards of organization and discipline in the Canadian militia, see Morton, Canadian General. 60 Varsity, 14 October 1881, 5–6, and 4 November 1881, 39. 61 Varsity, 11 November 1881, 49, 16 December 1881, 99, and 12 February 1887, 158. 62 Varsity, 10 March 1882, 187, and 17 March 1882, 198. 63 Varsity, 10 February 1882, 147–8. 64 Varsity, 10 November 1883, 67, and 6 December 1884, 84. 65 Varsity, 31 March 1883, 267. The White and Blue, 7 February 1879, 4, contains a good account of the annual dinner with its guests and program. Prize giving was another occasion dear to the volunteers, who took it ill if their achievements in competitions went unrecognized; see the complaints voiced in Varsity, 16 December 1881, 99, and Captain Baker’s explanation, Varsity, 13 January 1882, 110. The music on such evenings included the “Regimental Song of the Queen’s Own Rifles,” words by the Reverend John Campbell, a K Company original who commanded No. 6 company of The Queen’s Own at Ridgeway; see The University of Toronto Songbook (Toronto: Canadian-American Music, 1887), 68–9, and A1973– 0026/050(14), UTA. 66 Varsity, 3 February 1882, 138, and 17 February 1882, 158. 67 The affection for McKim among the students is evident in the song, “Our Irish Bedel,” which dwells on his exploits during the Crimean War; see University of Toronto Songbook, 26. Alfred Baker, who knew McKim for twenty-seven years, left a generous testimonial: “Bedel Robert McKim,” University of Toronto Monthly 28 (1922–3): 226–7. See also the reminiscence of a former student, in University of Toronto Monthly 28 (1922–3): 349; the notice of McKim’s death in Varsity, 12 October 1892, 6; and the note on McKim in Varsity, 17 March 1921, 1. 68 Notices of armoury inspections reflect well on McKim’s stewardship; see Varsity, 4 December 1880, 73, 27 January 1883, 150, 6 October 1883, 9, and 12 January 1892, 132. 69 W.J. Loudon refers to the good work of the company’s first colour sergeant, Sturgeon Stewart, who attended faithfully to “the drudgery of clerical work” between 1861 and 1866; Loudon, Sir William Mulock, 51–5. 70 Varsity, 15 December 1883, 125, citing Sir Daniel Wilson and Goldwin Smith. 71 Spring drill began sluggishly in 1883; see Varsity, 24 March 1883, 246, 7 April 1883, 271, and 28 April 1883, 307, charting the rise in attendance from a meagre sixteen to a more robust thirty-eight. Someone seems to have



Notes to pages 43–5

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reminded the sluggards of the “excellent recreation afforded from the hard grinding for examinations,” and that “a desire to sustain reputation of the company … should be inducements to every member to be present.” When honey failed, vinegar was used. A good turnout for fall drill in October 1887 was attributed to Lieutenant Gunther’s “having read the riot act” to the company; Varsity, 29 October 1887, 7. 72 J.H. Bowes, “Residence Life in the Eighties,” University of Toronto Monthly 24 (1923–4): 109–11. 73 Varsity, 28 October 1882, 18, 13 October 1883, 20, 3 November 1883, 53, and 17 November 1883, 77. 74 Varsity, 6 October 1883, 9, reports that a former private in K Company obtained a sergeant’s rank in the 19th Foot. Courses, promotions, and qualifications are noted in Varsity, 14 April 1882, 221, 13 February 1884, 211, 5 April 1884, 283, and 23 March 1889, 152. Former members qualifying for commissions in The Queen’s Own receive mention in Varsity, 17 March 1888, 195–6. 75 Mercer, of course, is remembered for his performance at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915 and as the highest-ranking Canadian soldier ever to be killed in battle, dying of wounds inflicted by shellfire near Sanctuary Wood on 3 June 1916. On his early connection with K Company, see A1973–0026/318(43), UTA. 76 Varsity, 28 October 1881, 25. Upon his retirement, the Canadian Military Gazette (23 November 1920, 3–4) noted: “like so many others who have since attained high rank, he began his career in ‘Old K’ Company, the University Company of the Queen’s Own Rifles, in which he donned a private’s uniform away back in 1879.” On Fotheringham’s career, see A1973–0026/107(05), UTA, and the brief biography in Varsity, 17 February 1915, 1, 4. 77 Varsity, 7 November 1885, 32, 21 November 1885, 55, and 10 March 1888, 195–6. One of the K Company officers of the 1881–82 year, Gunther served in the 1885 rebellion. While establishing a law practice in Toronto, he worked his way up to colonel of the regiment and co-authored an album of The Queen’s Own; see A1973–0026/131(69), UTA. 78 Varsity, 27 October 1883, 41, and 15 December 1883, 125. 79 Varsity, 27 March 1886, 229, and 21 November 1885, 55. 80 Varsity, 4 April 1885, 258; Desmond Morton, The Last War Drum: The North West Campaign of 1885 (Toronto: Hakkert, 1972), 23–35. 81 Varsity, 4 April 1885, 255, 259, where the reasoning behind the “Toronto University Scouts” is set out by a correspondent proposing to apply his experiences of Apache warfare in western Texas to the Canadian Northwest. The swift suppression of the rebellion put an end to the idea.

266

Notes to pages 45–8

82 Varsity, 28 March 1885, 243. The names of the university men who took part in the 1885 expedition soon took an honoured place alongside the paladins of 1866; see W.J. Loudon and W.F. MacLean, eds., University of Toronto, FASTI from 1850 to 1889 (Toronto: Williamson, 1887), 94–5. 83 W. Stewart Wallace, “Veteran of ’85,” Varsity Graduate 6, no. 4 (1958): 180–1. 84 George Henry Needler, “A Remarkable Young Man of 95,” Varsity Graduate 9, no. 2 (1961): 76–8. Needler also edited General Frederick Middleton’s account of the 1885 campaign, with an introduction by Professor Malcolm W. Wallace, former principal of University College and a founding father of the COTC; see idem, Suppression of the Rebellion in the North-West Territories of Canada, 1885 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948). It was also published in six instalments in Canadian Army Journal from December 1948 to June 1949. 85 George Henry Needler, The Battleford Column: Versified Memories of a Queen’s Own Corporal in the Northwest Rebellion 1885 (Montreal: Provincial Publishing, 1947). The stanzas quoted are on pp. 9, 47, and 21, respectively. See also his piece, “University of Toronto Men in the Northwest Rebellion of 1885,” Varsity War Supplement (1915), 45–7. On his career and publications, see A1973–0026/345(76), UTA. The hardships of the campaign were later recalled in lyrics sung to the tune of “Solomon Levi,” in “Pork, Beans and Hardtack; a Rebellion Song,” in University of Toronto Songbook, 78. 86 Varsity, 4 April 1885, 258–9, and 11 April 1885, 272. 87 The diary of Lieutenant Richard Cassels, a Queen’s Own officer and University of Toronto graduate who knew several of the university men in the expeditionary force, gives a first-hand account of the experiences of the volunteers; see R.C. Macleod, ed., Reminiscences of a Bungle by One of the Bunglers, and Two Other Northwest Rebellion Diaries (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1983), 103–240. The battle at Cut Knife Hill is best described by Morton, Canadian General, 175–222; and idem, Last War Drum, 95–110. 88 Dean Acheson’s memoir of his early life recalls his Canadian roots, and notes with some pride his father’s service with The Queen’s Own; see Dean Acheson, Morning and Noon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 1–27. 89 Varsity, 21 November 1885, 55. 90 One such was Lieutenant George Badgerow, who was unfortunately killed in an accident in 1891. The obituary records that he had qualified as a second lieutenant in K Company in 1888–89, attended the Infantry School in 1890, become an officer in The Queen’s Own, and intended to pursue a military career; Varsity, 24 February 1891, 199, and 3 March 1891, 216. Another was Lieutenant Robert Barker, who enlisted as a private in K Company while a student in the late 1880s and continued in The Queen’s Own, serving with distinction in South Africa and retiring with the rank of major; see Canadian Military Gazette, 9 August 1910, 9.



Notes to pages 48–51

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  91 The fire broke out on the evening of Valentine’s Day, just before the annual Conversazione began. The band of The Queen’s Own was to provide musical entertainment, and among the collections and exhibits on display was the K Company armoury. One of the assistants carrying a tray of lit oil lamps up to the second floor stumbled on the southeastern staircase and dropped one of the lamps. As the oil spilled from the other lamps, the fire took hold on the dry wooden floors and raced through the tower and corridors on the eastern side of the building, which within an hour was completely gutted: “of the Armoury not even a bayonet remained.” See Old Varsity in Ashes: The Great Fire of 1890 and Its Aftermath (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978).   92 Canadian Military Gazette, 27 February 1890, 69, 10 April 1890, 124, 24 April 1890, 131, 22 May 1890, 163, and 10 July 1890, 221.   93 Canadian Military Gazette, 16 October 1890, 342.   94 Varsity, 7 October 1890, 10, and 11 November 1890, 70.   95 Varsity, 13 October 1891, 17, 20 October 1891, 34, 3 November 1891, 58, 17 November 1891, 82, 12 January 1892, 132, and 16 February 1892, 192.   96 Empire, 1 November 1892, 8, and 4 November 1892, 7; Varsity, 9 November 1892, 53.   97 Empire, 10 November 1892, 8.   98 Canadian Military Gazette, 1 February 1893, 34; clipping from Mail (Toronto), 28 October 1899, in A1973–0051/241 (C.O.T.C. 1895–1939), UTA. K Company’s fate rested in the hands of the University Council and the Council of University College, parallel bodies that oversaw teaching, student discipline, residence life, and the various societies, clubs, or associations on campus. Scanty records of their proceedings exist (unlike the minutes of the University Senate and Board of Trustees), making it impossible to delve into the reasons for their unwillingness to preserve the company. Their indifference is all the more difficult to fathom since several professors (such as van der Smissen, Ellis, Baker, and Wright), the university vice-chancellor (Mulock), and President Loudon were all K Company veterans who surely would have voiced strong objections to its severance from the university.   99 Canadian Military Gazette, 15 January 1893, 18; “Last Roll Call,” Varsity, 1 February 1893, 131. 100 Varsity, 20 October 1911, 2. 101 Canadian Military Gazette, 1 December 1892, 357. 102 Canadian Military Gazette, 15 December 1892, 376, and 1 March 1893, 71. Reunions and talk of reviving a university company in the later 1890s are recorded in the clippings from Toronto newspapers; see A1973–0051/241 (C.O.T.C. 1895–1939), UTA. 103 Empire, 19 January 1893, 9; Canadian Military Gazette, 1 February 1893, 34. 104 Varsity, 15 February 1893, 150; Canadian Military Gazette, 1 April 1893, 99.

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Notes to pages 52–3

105 “Trinity and the Queen’s Own Rifles,” Torontonensis 8 (1906): 128; Canadian Military Gazette, 5 May 1903, 5; Telegram (Toronto), 20 December 1924, clipping in A1973–0051 (C.O.T.C. 1895–1939), UTA. Current and former university men in The Queen’s Own are listed among those who accompanied the regiment to England during its demi-centennial celebrations in 1910; see Varsity, 11 October 1910, 1. 106 Hamilton, “Canadian Militia,” Canadian Defence Quarterly 5 (1929–30), 383–9, esp. 386–7; and Carman Miller, “Sir Frederick William Borden and Military Reform, 1896–1911,” Canadian Historical Review 50 (1969): 265–84. 107 The university did not send a formal contingent to South Africa, but a number of Toronto students and graduates (some of them alumni of K Company) volunteered to serve there; see Varsity, 25 October 1899, 21, and 2 October 1946, 5. Among those who returned to a rapturous welcome in Toronto were Lieutenant John McCrae and Private Victor Odlum, both of whom would achieve greater fame in the First World War; see Varsity, 30 October 1900, 46–8, and 6 November 1900, 63–4. On the upsurge of patriotism and militarism in the years following the South African War, see Berger, Sense of Power, 233–9. 108 Candid but fair assessments of Loudon are given in Wallace, History of the University of Toronto, 148–66; and Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer, 105–12. His accomplishments were recognized at the time; see J. Squair, “President Loudon as University Reformer,” University of Toronto Monthly 6 (1905–6): 193–8. 109 Wallace, History of the University of Toronto, 212–16; Friedland, University of Toronto, 158–96, esp. 190–4; Richard White, The Skule Story: The University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, 1873–2000 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 39–86; and McKillop, Matters of Mind, 149–76. In sad contrast to his colleagues’ commemoration, Loudon’s name stands only on a wing of the Sir Daniel Wilson residence at University College. 110 William J. Loudon, Convocation Address, University of Toronto, October 14th, 1898 (Toronto: Rowsell and Hutchison, 1898), 5–6. Loudon’s correspondence for 1899 contains an exchange with the general officer commanding the Canadian Militia, Edward Hutton, in which the latter suggests the formation of a corps of engineers from the university’s engineering school; see Loudon to Hutton, 9 November 1899; Hutton to Loudon, 11 November 1899, B1972–0031/003(50), UTA. Hutton visited the university in December 1899 to discuss the matter with Loudon; see clippings in A1973–0051/241 (C.O.T.C. 1895–1939), UTA. The growing likelihood of an engineering company occasioned some discussion in the Varsity, 1 February 1893, 133, and 17 January 1900, 135. An exchange of letters with John Morison Gibson mentions Loudon’s meeting with



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the University Council to discuss the creation of a university company. See Loudon to Gibson, 4 December 1900; Gibson to Loudon, 7 December 1900, B1972–0031/011(13), UTA. 111 Loudon to Borden, 18 January 1901; Borden to Loudon, 24 January 1901, B1972–0031/012(01), UTA. 112 University of Toronto Monthly 1 (1900–1): 53–4; William R. Lang, D.Sc., F.C.S. Letter of Application and Testimonials, Toronto, 1899 (letter from Archibald Barr) in B1972–0031/011(13), UTA. Further details on Lang’s background and early career at Toronto are found in interviews with the Varsity, 20 January 1915, 1, 4, and 7 December 1917, 1, and in Sir Robert Falconer’s eulogy, University of Toronto Monthly 26 (1925–6), 130–1. 113 Friedland, University of Toronto, 157; and Brook and McBryde’s survey of Lang’s academic career in Historical Distillates, 65–82. 114 Carman Miller, A Knight in Politics: A Biography of Sir Frederick William Borden (Montreal; Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 206–13. 115 T.A. Reed, The Blue and White: A Record of Fifty Years of Athletic Endeavour at the University of Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1944), 17; and A1973–0026/515(44), UTA. 116 On the company’s first year, see Canadian Military Gazette, 16 April 1901, 4, 4 June 1901, 12, 6 August 1901, 6, 5 November 1901, 4, and 20 May 1902, 5; Varsity, 18 December 1901, 131; Torontonensis 4 (1902): 250–1; University of Toronto Monthly 2 (1901–2): 222. 117 The School of Practical Studies affiliated with the university in 1900, and became the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Engineering in 1906, although for years afterwards it was still referred to as the “SPS.” 118 Canadian Military Gazette, 5 May 1903, 5. 119 Varsity, 18 December 1901, 134. 120 Varsity, 4 October 1906, 5, and 15 October 1909, 1. The sappers were singled out for praise in the 1904 sham battle along the Humber River, whereas a mishap (not of the their making) in the 1906 exercise along the Credit River came in for some comic treatment. See Torontonensis 7 (1904– 5), 350; Varsity, 25 October 1906, 52. 121 The summary of the company’s history and activities is drawn from Torontonensis 6 (1904): 274; 7 (1905): 350; 10 (1908): 310–11; 11 (1909): 220– 1; and William Hodgson Ellis’s brief overview, “The Faculty of Applied Science and the War,” Varsity War Supplement (1917), 116–17. 122 R.C. Fetherstonhaugh, McGill University at War, 1914–1918, 1939–1945 (Montreal: McGill University, 1947), 2–4; Bindon, Queen’s Men, 10–11; A.J. Kerry and W.A. McDill, The History of the Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers, vol. 1, 1749–1939 (Ottawa: Military Engineers Association of Canada, 1962), 46–51.

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1 23 Canadian Military Gazette, 8 March 1904, 10–11. 124 Varsity, 24 February 1904, 279, and 9 March 1904, 315; Torontonensis 8 (1906): 261. See also Rifle Association, 1906–1939, A1973–0051/249, UTA. 125 Varsity, 6 October 1905, 9; Torontonensis 9 (1907): 319; 10 (1908): 361; and 11 (1909): 372. 126 Varsity, 29 September 1911, 3; see also Varsity, 2 October 1912, 2, and 4 October 1912, 3; and the University of Toronto Rifle Association application forms for 1908, UTARMS 0268, and 1910, A67–0007/011(66), UTA. 127 Varsity, 3 November 1904, 60, 21 November 1907, 105, 24 November 1908, 1, 5 November 1909, 4, 4 October 1910, 2, and 6 December 1910, 4. 128 William Beahen, “Filling Out the Skeleton: Paramilitary Support Groups, 1904–1914,” Canadian Defence Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1984): 34–9. 129 Varsity, 2 October 1912, 2. 130 For representative examples of contemporary views, see John T. Fotheringham, “The Duty of Imperial Defence,” Arbor 1–2 (1910–11): 304–6; J. MacDonnell, “National Service,” Arbor 4 (1912–13), 181–7; and clippings from Toronto newspapers, in Military Studies, 1911–1921, A1973–0051/228, UTA. See also Desmond Morton, “The Cadet Movement in the Moment of Canadian Militarism, 1909–1914,” Journal of Canadian Studies 13, no. 2 (1978): 56–68; K.B. Wamsley, “Cultural Signification and National Ideologies: Rifle-shooting in Late Nineteenth-century Canada,” Social History 20, no. 1 (1995): 63–72; Mike O’Brien, “Manhood and the Militia Myth: Masculinity, Class and Militarism in Ontario, 1902–1914,” Labour 42 (Fall 1998): 115–41; and Wood, Militia Myths, 150–72. 131 W.H. Tackaberry, “A Rifle Corps,” Varsity, 24 February 1904, 277; and the letter from Sedley Cudmore (the UTRA’s first secretary), Varsity, 9 March 1904, 314–15. 132 Varsity, 29 September 1911, 3. 133 The ideals and aims of military training are discussed by Mark Moss, Manliness and Militarism: Educating Young Boys in Ontario for War (Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada, 2001). 134 Varsity, 17 January 1912, 2, closely echoing the arguments canvassed by Berger, Sense of Power, 251–7; and A.B. McKillop, “Marching as to War: Elements of Ontario Undergraduate Culture, 1880–1914,” in Axelrod and Reid, Youth, University and Canadian Society, 75–93, esp. 82–5. 135 Varsity, 4 October 1911, 1, and 6 October 1911, 1. 136 Considerable effort went into preparing and publicizing this course. President Falconer obtained approval from the Militia Department (A1967–0007/021[25], UTA), and the Canadian Defence League put up money for prizes to be awarded for the best examination results at the course’s end. Despite this backing, it did not attract a great many



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students. Details on the syllabus and attendance woes are given in Varsity, 29 September 1911, 4, 11 October 1911, 1, 13 October 1911, 1, 20 October 1911, 1, 27 October 1911, 1, 10 November 1911, 4, 11 December 1911, 2–3, 19 January 1912, 1, 4, and 31 January 1912, 1. On the Canadian Defence League and its efforts to promote compulsory military service, see Wood, Militia Myths, 196–208. 137 John T. Fotheringham, “Military Knowledge as a Culture Subject,” The Arbor 3 (1911–12), 138–40. 138 Varsity, 20 October 1911, 2, 4 October 1912, 3, and 10 February 1913, 1. 139 For general background, see Byers, “Canadian Officers’ Training Corps,” 1–29. 140 Military service and Canada’s obligations to Britain were frequent topics for debate at the university; see the notices in Varsity, 3 November 1908, 1, 3 December 1909, 1, 21 February 1913, and 1, 23 February 1914, 3; and the acerbic exchange in Arbor 4 (1913–14): 181–7, 284–8. 141 See the Centennial Supplement to Varsity, 6 October 1927, 1, 4, for the role of the Rifle Association before and during the Great War. 142 Mickle to Falconer, 9 February 1909, Falconer to Mickle, 10 February 1909, and Falconer to Mickle, 10 March 1909, A1967–0007/007(10), UTA. 143 Otter to Falconer, 9 February 1909, A1967–0007/008(30); Falconer to Otter, 10 February 1909; Falconer to Otter, 12 February 1909, A1967– 0007/007(26), UTA. 144 Fotheringham to Falconer, 16 February 1909; Falconer to Fotheringham, 22 February 1909, A1967–0007/005(87), UTA. 145 “Report by Lt.-Col. J.T. Fotheringham to the President of the University of Toronto and the Heads of Colleges and to the Committee, in the matter of the establishing of another militia unit in the university” and “Petition to the Senate of the University of Toronto re the establishment of a University Battalion,” Office of the Registrar, Military, Establishment of Battalion/COTC, Courses in Military History and Tactics, 1911–1912, A1972–0017 (012), UTA. 146 Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer, 109–21; Friedland, University of Toronto, 200–15; Wallace, History of the University of Toronto, 168–75; Brown, Arts and Science at Toronto, 39–56. 147 Falconer’s early support of military training at the university is expressed in a letter to Rupert Kingsford, 7 September 1910, A1967–0007/014(14), UTA. 148 Falconer’s pre-1914 correspondence includes several letters to the Militia Department on behalf of the Rifle Association; see A1967–0007/001(20), /004(38); /007(22), /008(30), /011(42), UTA. 149 Falconer to Assistant Adjutant General, 2nd Military Division, 6 December 1912, A1967–0007/023(87); Falconer to Colonel Eugene Fiset, 8 May 1911, A1967–0007/013(23), UTA.

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150 For an early overview of the program, with excerpts from the Militia Department documents, see Antonio Le Sieur, “Relations de l’Association nationale des universités canadiennes avec le gouvernement fédéral au sujet de l’éducation militaire des officiers dans les universités canadiennes de 1911 à 1949” (MA thesis, University of Ottawa, 1958), 1–27. 151 On the Haldane reforms and the British OTC, see Edward M. Spiers, Haldane: An Army Reformer (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1980), 136–43; and Strachan, History of the Cambridge Officers Training Corps, 121–39. See also Andrew L. Brown, “Cutting Its Coat According to the Cloth: The Canadian Militia and Staff Training before the Great War,” War and Society 34, no. 4 (2015): 263–86. A course essay by Patrick Naughton, “The Development of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps: The Beginning,” briefly describes the first attempts to create a university-based training program in Canada; see A1983–0036/035 (C.O.T.C.), UTA. 152 “A University Battalion,” Arbor 1–2 (1910–11): 221–2. 153 Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer, 135–53; see also McKillop, Matters of Mind, 247–9, on the interplay of missionary zeal, athletics, and militarism in student life before the Great War. 154 Memorandum of the President’s Committee on Military Education, 12 March 1910, A1967–0007/016(65), UTA. 155 Fotheringham’s report (“Report by Lt.-Col. J.T. Fotheringham, A1972– 0017 (012), UTA) seems to have been the basis for the committee’s assumptions; he cited Borden’s response in Parliament to a question from Sam Hughes concerning the government’s willingness to fund local armouries; see also the clippings from Toronto papers in A1973–0051/241 (C.O.T.C. 1895–1939), UTA. 156 Falconer to Mickle, 30 March 1910, 1967–0007/010(33), UTA. 157 Minutes of the Board of Governors 1906–1911, 254 (10 November 1910), A1970–0024/013–014 (reel 8), UTA. 158 Falconer to Frederick Borden, 25 November 1910, A1967–0007/012(40), UTA. 159 Friedland, University of Toronto, 233–5; Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer, 163–9; “The Financial Crisis of the University,” University of Toronto Monthly 14 (1913–14): 337–40. 160 On the series of negotiations between 1910 and 1912, see Byers, “Canadian Officers’ Training Corps,” 30–45. 161 Falconer to William Peterson, 4 February1911, A1967–0007/015(30), UTA. 162 Borden to Falconer, 17 February 1911, A1967–0007/016(56), UTA. 163 Fiset to Falconer, 19 April 1911, “Revised Regulations,” A1967– 0007/016(65), UTA.



Notes to pages 66–8

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164 “Memorandum by Committee of alterations required in annexed memorandum to make it satisfactory to Committee,” A1967– 0007/016(65), UTA. 165 “Revision to Revised Regulations, Canadian University Regiment,” A1967–0007/016(65), UTA. 166 Falconer to Fiset, 8 May 1911, A1967–0007/013(23), UTA. A month later, at the National Conference of Canadian Universities and Colleges, Falconer introduced a motion accepted by his fellow presidents “that in consideration of the immense services that may be rendered by the Universities in training officers for the Military service of the country … the Federal Government should assume the entire responsibility for the expenditures required to carry out the scheme”; see National Conference of Canadian Universities, First Meeting (Montreal, 1911), 7–8; see also Gwendoline Pilkington, “A History of the National Conference of Canadian Universities, 1911–1961” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1974), 36–7. 167 R.G. Haycock, Sam Hughes: The Public Career of a Controversial Canadian (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986), 135–53; Wood, Militia Myths, 176–86. 168 Fiset to Falconer, 19 December 1911; “Reply to Deputy Minister of Militia and Defence in Re proposal of December 11, 1911,” Military, Establishment of Battalion/COTC, Courses in Military History and Tactics, 1911-1912, 1972–0017/012, UTA. 169 “Minute of the Board of Governors re Proposal of Militia Department of 19th December 1911”; “Senate Committee Report, October 30th, 1912,” Military, Establishment of Battalion/COTC, Courses in Military History and Tactics, 1911–1912, A1972–0017/012, UTA. See also Minutes of the Board of Governors, 1911–1917, 19–20 (11 January 1912), A1970–0024/015–016 (reel 9); and Senate Minutes, vol. 11, 381–2 (June 1912), and 437 (8 November 1912), A1970–0005/011, UTA. The “other reasons” mentioned in the Senate report had to do with the Senate’s decision to abide by the University Act, which made no reference to military training as part of the work of the university. Without such authorization, the Senate deemed the introduction of military training at the university a matter for the provincial legislature. See “Military Training,” editorial, University of Toronto Monthly 13 (1912–13): 50–1. 170 Morton, “McGill’s Contingent,” 37–40; see also Le Sieur, “Relations de l’Association nationale des universités canadiennes,” 28–36; and “Notes on Origin of COTC,” 8 March 1952, 495.003(D1), Directorate of History and Heritage, Ottawa (hereafter cited as DHH). 171 Varsity, 17 January 1913, 1.

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172 A letter from Falconer to Fotheringham (28 November 1912) mentions efforts to secure a classroom for military instruction, but refers to the impossibility of securing a place for drill on campus. His inquiries about finding space in the new armouries on University Avenue seem not to have led anywhere (A1967–0007/023(18), UTA). 173 Globe (Toronto), 12 December 1913, 1, 4; Byers, “Canadian Officers’ Training Corps,” 52–4. 174 Globe (Toronto), 13 December 1913, 3; the parlous state of the university’s finances was noted in Varsity, editorial, 17 November 1913. 175 No fewer than 104 dances had been announced in Varsity’s “Coming Events” calendar during the year. A good many more had gone unadvertised – the better to avoid the attention the authorities and press were beginning to pay to student festivities. Falconer spoke sternly about the “intoxication with the new dances,” and complained that “many students do not take into account the fact that they are here for serious work.” See Varsity, 23 January 1914, 1; McKillop, Matters of Mind, 249–52, and idem, “Marching as to War,” 87–9. A series of Varsity editorials criticized student attitudes and attempted to inject a more serious strain into the student body; see “Epicureanism and the University,” Varsity, 15 December 1913, 2; “Ease and Earnestness,” Varsity, 19 January 1914, 2; “Delights and Difficulties,” Varsity, 16 February 1914, 2; “The Purpose of Life,” Varsity, 4 March 1914, 2; and “A Retrospect and a Lesson,” Varsity, 11 March 1914, 2. 176 On Hutton’s standing at the university and his views, see Varsity, 17 October 1910, 2; S.E.D. Shortt, The Search for an Ideal: Six Canadian Intellectuals and Their Convictions in an Age of Transition, 1890–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 90–1; and Berger, Sense of Power, 255–7. The short-lived Canadian Defence League was founded in 1909 to encourage physical and military training in the country’s youth; see Berger, Sense of Power, 237–9; and Wood, Militia Myths, 204–9, who provides a good perspective on the mixed fortunes of the militarists just before the Great War. 177 Varsity, 17 January 1913, 3. 178 The course had an unfortunate side effect in that it embroiled Falconer in a dispute between the Senate and the Board of Governors over the academic authorization of the course; see Senate Minutes, vol. 11, 211 (13 October 1911), 242–7 (8 December 1911), 264–7 (12 January 1912), A1970–0005/011; and Senate Committee re: Establishment by Board of Governors of a Course in Military History and Tactics, 1911, A1973–0051/085, UTA. 179 Canadian Military Gazette, 3 March 1903, 1.



Notes to pages 70–2

275

2. Born and Raised in War: The University of Toronto Contingent, 1914–1919 1 Varsity, 30 September 1914, 1, 2. 2 Varsity, 30 September 1, 3; “The President’s Opening Address,” University of Toronto Monthly 15 (1914–15): 18–34. He would elaborate on these themes in The German Tragedy and Its Meaning for Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1915). On Falconer’s views of the conflict and his unstinting support for the war effort, see Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer, 213–27. 3 On the intellectual and spiritual reactions to the war, see R. Matthew Bray, “‘Fighting as an Ally’: The English-Canadian Patriotic Response to the Great War,” Canadian Historical Review 61, no. 2 (1980): 141–68; Paul Maroney, “‘The Great Adventure’: The Context and Ideology of Recruiting in Ontario, 1914–1917,” Canadian Historical Review 77, no. 1 (1996): 62–98; and Brock Millman, Polarity, Patriotism, and Dissent in Great War Canada, 1914-1919 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 82–108. 4 McKillop, Matters of Mind, 253–7, 264–92; see also Doug Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 80–106. On Canadian universities and the war, see Barry M. Moody, “Acadia and the Great War,” in Axelrod and Reid, Youth, University and Canadian Society, 143–60; idem, “Educating for War and Peace at Acadia University: The Great War Generation,” in Stortz and Panayotidis, Cultures, Communities, and Conflicts, 26–50; and James M. Pitsula, “Manly Heroes: The University of Saskatchewan and the First World War,” in Stortz and Panayotidis, Cultures, Communities, and Conflicts, 121–45. The attitudes among students and professors should also be set in the closer context of Toronto during the Great War, the subject of Ian Miller’s Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 15–33. 5 Surveys of the university at war are given in University of Toronto Roll of Service, 1914–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1921), xi–xlviii; Wallace, History of the University of Toronto, 185–7; G. Oswald Smith, “Canadian Educational Institutions in the Great War: VIII – University of Toronto,” Canadian Defence Quarterly 5 (1927–8): 227–9; Donald B. Smith, “Lost Youth,” University of Toronto Magazine 17, no. 1 (1989): 19–21; Friedland, University of Toronto, 253–68; Brown, Arts and Science at Toronto, 57–72; and Harold Averill, Marnee Gamble, and Loryl MacDonald, We Will Do Our Share: The University of Toronto and the Great War (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2014). The issues of Torontonensis, University of Toronto Monthly, the annual President’s Report, Varsity War Supplement, and Canadian Annual Review supply much useful material. A brief outline of

276

Notes to page 72

the Toronto Contingent’s history during the war is found in the COTC Historical Record (A1968–0003/005, UTA), which by and large presents the same information given in Varsity War Supplement. Copies of a typescript and handwritten notes outlining the history of the corps as far as March 1917 are found in A1968–0003/008, UTA, inserted in the second of two folders entitled “Draft Material for War Diary.” The records of the university historian include files on the COTC and the university during the war (A1983–0036/035, 036, UTA). 6 See, for example, the list of lectures given by various professors during 1914–15 in The Calendar of the University of Toronto for the year 1915–1916, appendix, 102–3; President’s Report, 1914–15, 11, 23. Also of interest are the clippings files, University Sunday Sermons 1905–15 and University Sunday Sermons 1915–22, A1973–0051/245, UTA. 7 “What is a university?” Globe (Toronto), 14 September 1914. This and other newspaper items cited in this chapter are found in the clippings files compiled by the Office of the Registrar, “Miscellaneous 1914–1918,” A1973–0051/219(04); “COTC, OTC and Flying Corps, etc., 1914–1918,” A1973–0051/219(05); “Lists, Enlisting, Promotions, Honours, 1914–1918,” A1973–0051/220(01); “Military Service, Recruiting, etc., 1914–1918,” A1973–0051/220(02), UTA. It is difficult to give precise references to these unpaginated clippings. Since they proceed in chronological order, reference will be made to the date(s) of the newspaper(s) cited. The COTC files contain a scrapbook, mainly clippings from Varsity, for the years 1915–18, in A1968–0003/014, UTA. 8 An album (compiled in 1940) tracing the graduating class of 1915 records that sixty-five men volunteered and nineteen died on active service: 1T5 Biographical Sketches, B1978–1334, UTA. 9 Robert A. Falconer, “The Canadian Universities and the War,” in Idealism in National Character: Essays and Addresses (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), 178; drafts of this paper, with the details Falconer gathered from other Canadian universities, are in A1967–0007/046a[20], UTA). See also the note in University of Toronto Monthly 16 (1915–16): 368. Correspondence with Principal William Peterson of McGill shows Falconer’s preference for the university to train officers: “to send the ordinary student as a private, when there are such multitudes to enlist as privates, would be rather a waste of good material,” Falconer to Peterson, 23 October 1914, A1967– 0007/035(107), UTA. 10 Register of Students, 1914–1915, in The Calendar of the University of Toronto for the year 1915-1916, appendix, 2–54. On the ethnic and religious composition of Toronto at the time, see Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief, 7–9, appendices A, B. 11 President’s Report, 1914–15, 48–9.



Notes to pages 72–3

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12 On the curriculum and the values it imparted before and during the war, see Susan Fisher, Boys and Girls in No Man’s Land: English-Canadian Children and the First World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 15–27, 51–103. 13 See, for instance, the reports on Falconer’s first sermon of the year (Varsity, 5 October 1914, 1, 4) and Archdeacon Henry John Cody’s sermon two weeks later (Varsity, 19 October 1914, 1). George M. Wrong, “Canada’s Part in the War,” Varsity War Supplement (1915), 37, typifies what students heard from their professors. 14 ”Look Facts in the Face,” Varsity, 28 October 1914, 2; “For They Know Not What They Do,” Varsity, 9 November, 2. 15 Invoking British ideals of fairness goes back some way in the university’s history, and was more than just flag waving. In 1885 Varsity ran an editorial decrying the injustices done to the Métis and native peoples, and while calling for the suppression of the rebellion laid the blame for its outbreak on the dishonourable conduct of the government (“The NorthWest Tragedy,” Varsity, 4 April 1885, 256–7). Twenty or so years earlier, during the US Civil War, a black candidate standing for admission to the University College Literary and Scientific Society was rejected by a group of students from the Confederate states (draft dodgers avant la lettre). President McCaul declared it “an infinite disgrace and injury” to the university if a student were denied entry to the society on account of race: “that sort of ostracism should not be tolerated in any British institution, and least of all in an educational institution.” The student was admitted. See King, McCaul: Croft: Forneri, 86–8. 16 See the strident editorials in Varsity, “We Demand Fair Play,” 2 December 1914, 2; “Canadian Reign of Terror,” 4 December 1914, 2; “Charges Unproven,” 7 December 1914, 2; and the final comments on the matter, 9 December 1914, 2, and 11 December 1914, 2. Letters from students show strong support for Varsity’s stand; see 9 December 1914, 2, 3, and 11 December 1914, 4. Falconer held out as long as he could against enormous pressure from the press and politicians demanding the dismissal of the three German professors on the grounds that they were “enemy aliens” whose sympathies lay with their homeland – unfounded, unjustified allegations that nevertheless led to their resignation. See Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer, 201–13; and McKillop, Matters of Mind, 259–62. 17 “The Call and the Answer,” Varsity, 11 November 1914, 2. 18 Keith Walden, “Hazes, Hustles, Scraps and Stunts: Initiations at the University of Toronto, 1880–1925,” in Axelrod and Reid, Youth, University and Canadian Society, 94–121. 19 Berger, Sense of Power, 235–6; Wood, Militia Myths, 210–12; Maurice Hutton, “To the Alumni Leaving for the Front,” University of Toronto Monthly 15

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Notes to pages 73–4

(1914–15): 270–2, captures the spirit of the times in an address full of great cause and high diction. 20 Gordon Shrum, a Victoria College student who joined the COTC in 1915 and fought at Vimy Ridge, left a stark picture of his childhood on a farm and his efforts to obtain an education; see Gordon Shrum, Gordon Shrum: An Autobiography (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1986), 1–18. He later became a central figure in the history of the COTC at the University of British Columbia and an important liaison between the university contingents and the Department of National Defence when the COTC was relaunched after the Second World War. 21 The applications filed by the Office of Admissions record the father’s profession and the career aspirations of students accepted into the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering (A1969–0008/003, 004, UTA), the Faculty of Arts (A1969–0008/055, 056, 057, 058, UTA), and the Faculty of Medicine (A1969–0008/178, UTA). The information briefly noted here comes from the years 1911 and 1912 – as of this writing the latest student records with unrestricted access. 22 The rising costs that students had to meet just before the war were laid out by T.N. Dean, “The Student’s Expenses Ten Years Ago and Today,” University of Toronto Monthly 12 (1911–12), 384–8. 23 Support for the German professors at the university aroused cries of sedition and lack of patriotism from certain elements in Toronto. Sensitivity to the “unjust and bitter taunt of disloyalty” and firm rebuttals are found in Varsity, 18 November 1914, 1, 11 January 1915, 2, and 8 March 1915, 2; and in Gregory Clark’s article in the Sunday Star (Toronto), 15 February 1915, A1973–0051/219(04), UTA; see also Canadian Annual Review 14 (1914): 264–9. 24 For accounts of the meeting, see Varsity, 23 October 1914, 1; University of Toronto Monthly 15 (1914–15): 100–1; and clippings from Toronto newspapers Globe, News, Star, and Telegram, 21–22 October 1914, A1973– 0051/219(05), UTA. 25 As at Victoria College and Wycliffe; see Varsity, 9 October 1914, 3, 23 October 1914, 4, and 26 October 1914, 1. 26 University of Toronto Roll of Service, xxxvi–xxxvii; clippings from Toronto newspapers Globe, News, Star, Star Weekly, Sunday World, and Telegram, 15–20 August 1914, A1973–0051/219(05), UTA; Trinity University Review 27, no. 1 (1914): 7–8; Canadian Annual Review 14 (1914): 269–70; Canadian Annual Review 15 (1915): 306–11. A number of Varsity men remained with The Queen’s Own, which continued to recruit among students for its B Company, also known as “the University Company”; see Varsity, 8 January 1915, 1, and 3 March 1915, 3.



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27 See Falconer’s meeting with the caput, 19 September 1914, Caput Minutes, vol. 1 (January 1907–November 1925), 71–2, A2003–0024/001, UTA. 28 Falconer to Hughes, 16 September 1914, A1967–0007/035(65); and clippings from the Globe (Toronto) and Telegram (Toronto), 16–19 September 1914, A1973–0051/219(05), UTA. 29 Varsity, 30 September 1914, 1, and 25 November 1914, 3. A vote of thanks to the Rifle Association for its help in forming the COTC is recorded in the minutes of the meeting of the President’s Military Advisory Committee, 21 November 1914, A1967–0007/035(63), UTA. 30 Varsity War Supplement (1915), 29–33; and clippings from the Globe (Toronto) and Telegram (Toronto), 16–25 September 1915 A1973– 0051/219(05), UTA. A list of successful candidates is given in Varsity, 9 October 1914, 1. 31 Lloyd Stevenson, Sir Frederick Banting (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1946), 32–6. 32 Varsity, 7 October 1914, 1. On the creation of COTC contingents at other universities, see Bindon, Queen’s Men, 17–47; Fetherstonhaugh, McGill University at War, 13–28; Morton, “McGill’s Contingent,” 40–2; and Thomas, UWO Contingent, COTC, 7–38. For an overall account of the COTC during the war, see Byers, “Canadian Officers’ Training Corps,” 64–92. 33 Varsity, 5 October 1914, 4; President’s Report, 1914–15, 17–18. 34 Varsity, 2 October 1914, 1, 7 October 1914, 1, 2, and 9 October 1914, 1, 2; Acta Victoriana 39 (1914–15): 294–5. 35 Varsity, 2 October 1914, 1. 36 Varsity, 7 October 1914, 1, 9 October 1914, 1, 14 October 1914, 3, and 21 October 1914, 1; President’s Report, 1914–15, 19. Ellis, a Ridgeway veteran and ardent supporter of the COTC, had become dean upon the death of John Galbraith in July 1914. See also White, Skule Story, 87–95. 37 Torontonensis 17 (1915): 12; see also C.R. Young, Early Engineering Education at Toronto 1851–1919 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), 140–3. 38 The lists of companies and enrolments are given in Varsity, 16 October 1914, 1. 39 Adjutant General to Falconer, 24 September 1914, A1967–0007/035(65), UTA. 40 Falconer to the Officer Commanding, 2nd Division, Toronto, two letters, 30 September 1914, A1967–0007/037(07), UTA. 41 Falconer to Prime Minister Robert Borden, 8 October 8, 1914, A1967– 0007/033(54); General Staff Officer, 2nd Division, Toronto, to Falconer, 12 October 1914, A1967–0007/037(07), UTA. 42 Hughes responded to a direct appeal from the University of Western Ontario with instructions to expedite the request for a COTC; Thomas, UWO Contingent, 8–12.

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Notes to pages 78–85

43 Colonel Septimus Denison, Acting Adjutant General, Canadian Militia to Falconer, 17 October 1914; Falconer to Denison, 19 October 1914, A1967– 0007/037(07), UTA. 44 John Alvin Surerus, a student at Victoria and a COTC original (University of Toronto Roll of Service, 485), recalled these early days in an oral history interview conducted on 31 May 1973; transcript in B1974–0023, UTA. 45 Sissons, History of Victoria University, 271–6; Raymond Massey, When I Was Young (London: Robson, 1977), 100–8; Lester B. Pearson, Mike: The Memoirs of the Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972–75), 1:16–18; Varsity, 23 October 1914, 4, and 16 November 1914, 1. 46 Torontonensis 17 (1915): 260. 47 Varsity, 11 January 1915, 4; President’s Report, 1914–15, 18. 48 Falconer to the Minister of Militia, 31 December 1914; Surgeon-General, Deputy Minister to Falconer, 15 January 1915; Falconer to Deputy Minister of Militia and Defence, 18 January 1915, A1967–0007/035(65), UTA. 49 Varsity, 4 December 1914, 1, 11 December 1914, 1, and 6 January 1915, 1. 50 Varsity, 25 November 1914, 3; A.F. Coventry to Falconer, 10 November 1914; approval of the statement by the President’s Military Advisory Committee, A1967–0007/033(123), UTA. 51 Varsity, 14 December 1914, 2. The shooting range reached completion about the same time that the contingent’s rifles finally arrived; see Varsity, 3 February 1915, 1, and 22 February 1915, 4. 52 Varsity, 30 November 1914, 1; for other reports on field exercises, see Varsity, 23 October 1914, 4, 30 October 1914, 1, 4 November 1914, 1, and 16 November 1914, 1. 53 Varsity, 14 December 1914, 1; clippings from the Globe (Toronto) and Telegram (Toronto), 14 December 1914, A1973–0051/219(05), UTA. 54 Varsity, 28 October 1914, 1, 30 October 1914, 1, 2, 4 November 1914, 1, 2, 27 November 1914, 2, and 4 December 1914, 4; University of Toronto Monthly 15 (1914–15): 156, 374. 55 Professors of the University of Toronto, The Canadian Soldier’s Manual for French and German (Toronto: Camp Chaplain’s Office, Concentration Camp, 1915); see also The Soldier’s Word and Phrase Book, Compiled by a Committee of Well-Known Teachers from Actual Experience of Soldiers’ Needs. English: French: German. With Pronunciation (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild and Stewart, 1915). 56 The papers of Professor Clarence Richard Young contain the nominal roll and attendance at drill, photos, and certificates from the first days of the engineer companies, B1978–0001/008, UTA. 57 Clippings on Wallace, university librarian, author of the centenary history of the university (1927), and holder of a proud military record in the Great



Notes to pages 85–8

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War, are found in A1976–0026/493(028), UTA; see also Blackburn, Evolution of the Heart, 131–50. 58 On McMaster in the Great War, see Charles M. Johnston, McMaster University, vol. 1, The Toronto Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 128–49. On its place in the COTC, see McMaster University Monthly 24 (1914–15), 61–2, 99–100, 136–7, 170–2, 209–10, 249. 59 University of Toronto Monthly 15 (1914–15): 5; Torontonensis 17 (1915): 262. 60 Clipping from Telegram (Toronto), 2 December 1914, A1973–0051/219(05); Falconer to C. Lesslie Wilson, President of the University Club, 3 March 1915, A1967–0007/037(07), UTA. 61 Profiles of the officers commanding the COTC that appeared in the Varsity emphasized this bond; see Varsity, 20 January 1915, 1, 4 (Lang), 12 February 1915, 1 (McVicar), 17 February 1915, 1, 4 (Fotheringham), 19 February 1915, 1 (Le Pan), and 5 March 5 1915, 1 (Bramfitt). 62 The companies and officers are listed in Varsity War Supplement (1915), 31–2; and University of Toronto Roll of Service, xxxviii–xxxix. The officers who passed the qualifying examinations were noted in Varsity, 7 October 1914, 1, and 9 October 1914, 1. The formal requests to appoint Lang and his staff are found in Falconer’s correspondence, Falconer to General Officer Commanding 2nd Division, 21 November 1914, Falconer to same, 9 December 1914, A1967–0007/037(07), UTA. 63 On Christie’s career, see Varsity, 28 January 1914, 3, 11 March 1914, 3, 19 February 1915, 4, and 10 January 1923, 3, 4, A1973–0026/058(19), UTA. 64 Varsity, 7 December 1914, 3. 65 Varsity, 20 January 1915, 1, and 22 January 1915, 1. 66 Varsity, 25 January 1915, 1, 2, 4; McMaster University Monthly 24 (1914–15): 170–2; Trinity University Review 28, no. 3 (1915): 60–1; and clippings from Toronto newspapers Globe, Mail, Star, and World, 23–26 January 1915, A1973–0051/219(05), UTA. 67 G.C. Creelman, President of the Ontario Agricultural College, to Falconer, 15 February 1915; Falconer to Creelman, 16 February 1915, A1967– 0007/033(127), UTA. On the Agricultural College during the Great War, see Alexander Ross, The College on the Hill: A History of the Ontario Agricultural College, 1874–1974 (Vancouver: Copp Clark, 1974), 86–9; and Alexander Ross and Terry Crowley, The College on the Hill: A New History of the Ontario Agricultural College, 1874–1999 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1999), 87–8. 68 Varsity, 15 January 1915, 1. Discussions with Hughes had begun a few days before: see Falconer to Minister of Militia, 11 January 1915; Hughes to Falconer, 13 January 1915, 1967–0007/035(65), UTA. 69 “The Officers’ Training Corps,” Trinity University Review 27, no. 3 (1914): 58–9; Varsity, 3 February 1915, 1.

282

Notes to pages 88–93

70 “The Officers’ Training Corps,” University of Toronto Monthly 15 (1914–15): 2–5; Varsity, 9 October 1914, 1, 11 November 1914, 3, and 11 December 1914, 1, 2; and “The Canadian Officers’ Training Corps of the University of Toronto,” Torontonensis 17 (1915): 260–1. 71 Varsity, 3 February 1915, 1. 72 The objectives and standards of the COTC were spelled out in the Regulations for the Canadian Officers Training Corps, 1916, issued by the Militia Department under the authority of General Order No. 31, copies in A1967–0007/069(01), UTA. 73 Otter’s The Guide became the Old Testament when Lang added a New Testament as Part II: The Organization, Administration and Equipment of His Majesty’s Land Forces in Peace and War, with a note on the COTC, 39–41. 74 The requirements and syllabus for certificate “A” were published in Varsity, 11 November 1914, 3, and 27 November 1914, 3; see also Varsity, 6 January 1915, 3. The condensed lecture schedule was published in Varsity, 15 January 1915, 3; and the weekly orders in Varsity, 29 January 1915, 4, 5 February 1915, 4, and 12 February 1915, 4. 75 Varsity, 30 October 1914, 1, 27 January 1915, 1 (McGill), 11 January 1915, 4 (Acadia), 15 February 1915, 1 (Queen’s), and 3 March 1915, 3 (Manitoba). 76 Varsity, 15 February 1915, 1. 77 Varsity, 8 March 1915, 2. 78 Varsity, 10 February 1915, 4; President’s Report, 1914–15, 13–19 passim. 79 Varsity, 2 November 1914, 1, 6 January 1915, 3, 13 January 1915, 1, 18 January 1915, 1, 22 January 1915, 1, 29 January 1915, 1, and 19 February 1915, 4. 80 Falconer to the Minister of Militia, 19 October 1915, and 19 January 1916; Falconer to General W. Gwatkin, 19 January 1916; Gwatkin to Falconer, 20 January 1916; Hughes to Falconer, 12 February 1916, A1967–0007/38b(011), UTA. 81 Varsity, 10 February 1915, 1, 19 February 1915, 4, and 22 February 22 1915, 4. 82 Clippings from Toronto newspapers, March–April, 1915, A1973–0051/ 219(05), UTA. 83 Varsity, 24 February 1915, 1; News (Toronto), 22 February 1915, A1973–0051/ 219(05), UTA. 84 Falconer to Hughes, 13 April 1915; Hughes’s telegram, 26 April 1915; Falconer’s letter of thanks, 26 April 1915, A1967–0007/035(65); Falconer to Borden, 21 April 1915; Falconer to Borden, 27 April 1915, A1967–0007/ 033(54), UTA. 85 The Niagara camp received daily coverage in the Toronto papers; see the press clippings, 4–15 May 1915, A1973–0051/219(05), UTA. The passage quoted is from Globe (Toronto), 4 May 1915. To envision the scenes at the



Notes to pages 93–5

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Niagara camp, see Richard D. Merritt, On Common Ground: The Ongoing Story of the Commons in Niagara-on-the-Lake (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2012), 125–43; and idem, Training for Armageddon: Niagara Camp in the Great War 1914-1919 (Victoria, BC: Friesen Press, 2015), 33–42. 86 Edward Frederick Church, “A University under Canvas,” Acta Victoriana 39 (1914–15), 413–23; see also Varsity War Supplement (1915), 33–5; University of Toronto Roll of Service, xxxix; and University of Toronto Monthly 15 (1914–15): 413–15. For the jarring effects of Second Ypres on Toronto, see Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief, 38–49, 69–70, 108–11. 87 See the Camp Order Book detailing each day’s schedule, A1968–0003/ 10(01), UTA. 88 Torontonensis 19 (1917): 89. 89 Varsity, 20 October 1919, 1. 90 On the university companies that made up reinforcing drafts for the PPCLI, see Ralph Hodder-Williams, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry 1914–1919 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923), 1:80–3. One Niagara camp participant who immediately joined the Second Universities Overseas Company was Lieutenant Daniel Galer Hagarty, the first undergraduate offered a commission in the Toronto Contingent in 1914 and Toronto’s first COTC graduate to be offered a commission in an overseas battalion. True to the pre-COTC traditions of the university, he was a member of the Rifle Association and served with The Queen’s Own. He was killed at Sanctuary Wood in June 1916. See the tribute penned by his broken-hearted father in University of Toronto Monthly 17 (1916–17): 342–4. 91 Appeals to Varsity men to join specialized units, such as the Cycle Corps, Corps of Guides, a machine-gun section, and the Eatonia Armoured Car Corps, peppered the Varsity in February 1915, just as the Second Contingent was preparing to leave for England; see, for instance, Varsity, 8 February 1915, 2, 12 February 1915, 1, and 17 February 1915, 3. 92 See the critical report in the Star (Toronto), 12 August 1915 (clippings file, A1973–0051/219(05), UTA); and “The COTC and the Student,” editorial, Varsity, 13 December 1915, 2. 93 A letter supporting recruiting for the 20th Battalion in Varsity, 26 February 1915, 2, points out that most men qualifying for certificate “A” would go into the ranks and rise from there; the military examinations should not therefore delay anyone wishing to join an active service unit. 94 The names of the successful candidates were published in University of Toronto Monthly 16 (1915–16): 84–5; their careers are recorded in University of Toronto Roll of Service. See also the lists recording the names of the men commissioned from each of the university contingents, 2007/1–000.8 (D44) 5–8; (D33) 4–4, DHH.

284

Notes to pages 95–8

95 Cockburn left a rich trove of literary and photographic material describing his experiences in France and Palestine, assembled in B1965–0005/007–008, UTA. 96 The careers of these and other officers would make an interesting subject of study analogous to the one done by Christopher Moore-Bick, Playing the Game: The British Junior Infantry Officer on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Solihull, UK: Helion, 2011), a remarkable analysis of the men who served at this crucial level of leadership. It would also be useful to compare junior officer training in the COTC with that given at the Royal Military College in Kingston, ON; the basis for such a study has been laid by Andrew Godefroy, “The Royal Military College of Canada and the Education of Officers for the Great War,” Canadian Military History 18, no. 4 (2009): 17–31. 97 On the meaning and effect of this commitment, see Wood, Militia Myths, 227–31. 98 Varsity, 5 January 1916, 1, 2. McMurrich was one of the professors appointed by President Falconer to a military committee charged with keeping the issues of the war before the students. His was one of many short, signed articles from the faculty that appeared in the Varsity that year. 99 President’s Report, 1915–16, 13; University of Toronto Roll of Service, xxxix–xl. On the contingent’s activities during the 1915–16 year, see Torontonensis 18 (1916): 19–22; Varsity War Supplement (1916), 114; and University of Toronto Monthly 16 (1915–16): 316–17. 100 Falconer at the Engineers’ Dinner, quoted in Varsity, 7 February 1916, 1. 101 The effects of the war on the university are well summarized in “The University’s War Service – II,” University of Toronto Monthly 19 (1918–19): 55–8. 102 Varsity, 5 January 1916, 2. The “Dope Fiend” supplied genuinely witty comic relief at a time badly in need of it, but he tended to get on people’s nerves and his column did not survive the year. 103 Varsity, 3 March 1916, 2. 104 A separate file of COTC orders and clippings from the 1915–16 session is contained in A1968–0003/015(01), UTA. 105 “The Officers’ Training Corps,” Varsity, 15 October 1915, 2; see also University of Toronto Monthly 16 (1915–16): 10–11; and Torontonensis 19 (1917): 210–12. 106 Varsity, 29 September 1915, 1, 1 October 1915, 1, 6 October 1915, 3, and 8 October 1915, 1. 107 According to Varsity (25 October 1915, 2), which had also noted McGill’s efforts to reduce the burden on students doing the COTC course (20 October 1915, 2).



Notes to pages 98–9

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108 Varsity, 22 October 1915, 1; University of Toronto Monthly 16 (1915–16): 145–7. 109 Varsity, 15 November 1915, 1; part of Hutton’s address was published in University of Toronto Monthly 16 (1915–16): 107–12. 110 Quoting clippings from the News (Toronto) and Star (Toronto), 4–5 November 1915, A1973–0051/219(05), UTA. All in all, Toronto sent twelve drafts between 1915 and 1918, for a total of 351 candidates seeking commissions in the British Army; noted in “Unit Questionnaire, University of Toronto Contingent COTC 1914/46,” 495.019 (D4), DHH. 111 Varsity, 13 October 1915, 1, 22 October 1915, 1, 27 October 1915, 1, 10 November 1915, 1, 22 November 1915, 1, 10 December 1915, 1, 3 December 1915, 1, and 10 January 1916, 1; University of Toronto Monthly 16 (1915–16): 147–9; University of Toronto Monthly 17 (1916–17): 39. 112 Professor William H. Piersol, Department of Biology, to Falconer, 24 November 1915; Falconer’s thanks, 2 December 1915, A1967– 0007/040(62), UTA. Piersol conversed with one hundred students (mainly medical students, the rest in arts) on four topics: enrolment in the COTC, previous military training, overseas service, and opinions on COTC – criticisms and suggestions. His findings, though limited to a small cohort, present a most interesting view of the corps from the perspective of the students. 113 Varsity, 5 November 1915, 1, 12 November 1915, 1, 17 November 1915, 1, 10 December 1915, 1, and 14 January 1916, 1; University of Toronto Monthly 16 (1915–16): 148, 207. Falconer, Lang, and the officer commanding Military District No. 2 submitted recommendations that were confirmed by personal interviews with General Willoughby Gwatkin of the Department of Militia and Defence, Ottawa. It was an honour highly sought – Falconer’s files for 1915–16 contain many letters requesting recommendations or letters of reference. 114 All thirty-one members sent to England in January 1916 took commissions after six weeks of further training. From their records in the University of Toronto Roll of Service, they fully warranted their selection. Six were decorated (Captain Alexander Douglas Hume, son of the head of the Philosophy Department, won the Military Cross and bar with the Royal Fusiliers before his twentieth birthday), five were Mentioned in Despatches, twelve were wounded, and four killed – the latter including the McMaster student and war poet Bernard Freeman Trotter; see Joel Baetz, Canadian Poetry from World War I: An Anthology (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2009), 141–8. 115 Varsity, 22 October 1915, 1, and 13 December 1915, 2. 116 University of Toronto Monthly 16 (1915–16): 340–1.

286

Notes to pages 99–101

117 “Facts and Figures,” Varsity, 19 January 1916, 1; Henderson’s retraction, Varsity, 7 February 1916, 2. See also “The University and the Army,” editorial, Varsity, 5 January 1916, 2. 118 Telegram (Toronto), 9 March 1916, A1973–0051/219(05), UTA. 119 Varsity, 21 January 1916, 2; Star (Toronto), 26 January 1916, A1973– 0051/219(04), UTA. 120 Varsity, 10 January 1916, 1; see also Trinity University Review 28, no. 7 (1916): 163. 121 Toronto newspapers, January–February 1916, A1973–0051(02), UTA. 122 Varsity, 24 January 1916, 1, 2; see also “The Canadian Universities and the War,” Varsity War Supplement (1918), 90–1. 123 Varsity, 17 January 1916, 1, 2, 19 January 1916, 1, 2, 21 January 1916, 1, 28 January 1916, 1, 2 February 1916, 1, 14 February 1916, 1, 7 February 1916, 1, 2, and 14 February 1916, 1; Bindon, Queen’s Men, 33–5. 124 Varsity, 14 February 1916, 1, 16 February 1916, 1, 2. 125 C.C. Grant, General Secretary of the Students’ Administrative Council, to Falconer, 16 February 1916, A1967–0007/040b(08), UTA. 126 Falconer was very protective of the university’s reputation and quick to respond to criticisms of its commitment to the war effort. He spent the autumn of 1916 fending off accusations of slackerism and proGerman attitudes at the university, and traded barbs with LieutenantColonel Herbert Lennox, who called for the university to be closed; see Toronto newspapers Globe, Star, and Telegram, 6 November 1916, A1973–0051/219(04), UTA. Aspersions from fellow universities raised his ire. Falconer sent a letter to General Gwatkin complaining of “a slur upon us at the University of Toronto” in a publication that gave full credit to McGill’s efforts over and above those at Toronto (although Falconer did not implicate the authorities at McGill). Gwatkin is asked to help remedy this grievance in Falconer to Gwatkin, 3 April 1916, and a sympathetic reply, Gwatkin to Falconer, 5 April 1916, A1967–0007/038b(11), UTA. 127 Falconer to General Gwatkin, Chief of the General Staff, 21 February 1916, repeating the text of a telegram sent to the minister of militia the same day; Falconer to Gwatkin, 10 March 1916, A1967–0007/038b(11), UTA. 128 University of Toronto Roll of Service, xl. Approximately half of those writing the examination passed; many candidates voiced complaints that the examiners had focused too narrowly on tactics, to the exclusion of the other subjects studied in the proficiency course; Telegram (Toronto), 29 March 1916, A1973–0051/219(05), UTA. 129 The effects of the war at Trinity, where 70 per cent of the men had enlisted, and the “spirit of unrest” palpable throughout the college are described by a contemporary student in Trinity University Review 29, no. 4 (1917): 91–2.



Notes to pages 101–4

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130 The organization of the contingent in 1916–17 is detailed in Lang’s correspondence to the officer commanding the Toronto Contingent, 28 September 1916, A1967–0007/043(04) and in a memorandum of 18 October 1916, A1967–0007/045a(29); the year’s work is summarized in the Annual Administrative Report, March 1917, 1967–0007/045a(41), UTA. There is an interesting exchange between Falconer and Joseph Banigan, president of the University of Toronto Engineering Society, in which the rules and purpose of the COTC are outlined in response to a set of questions put forward by the engineering students in October 1916; A1967–0007/041(15), UTA. See also Varsity War Supplement (1917), 63; President’s Report, 1916–17, 15; and Varsity, 11 October 1916, 1. 131 Hundreds of letters applying for admission to the OSTC remain on file; A1965–0002/031(01)-(09), UTA. A good number of applications are from students at US universities hoping to gain commissions in the Canadian Army. Americans could enlist in the CEF simply by swearing allegiance to the king, but since the OSTC prepared men for commissions in the Imperial forces, only British subjects (as Canadians then were) were permitted to join this unit. 132 Accounts of the Overseas Training Company’s origins are given in University of Toronto Roll of Service, xli–xliii; University of Toronto Monthly 17 (1916): 38–9; President’s Report, 1915–16, 13; Varsity War Supplement (1916), 27; Toronto newspaper clippings, April–June 1916, 1973– 0051/219(05) and 220(02), UTA. The conditions of acceptance and service are outlined in “Overseas Training Company,” 1967–0007/050(09), UTA. 133 Of the men that entered the ranks of the OSTC, 334 took commissions in the British Army, 76 in the Royal Flying Corps (after January 1918 the Royal Air Force), 36 in the Royal Naval Air Service, and 73 in the CEF; see Varsity War Supplement (1918), 132. The Princess Patricias refilled their ranks from the OSTC, taking men who failed to qualify for commissions but who satisfied the requirements of NCOs. 134 On the ill-judged Siberian intervention, see G.W.L. Nicholson, Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War: Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1962), 517–23; James Eayrs, In Defence of Canada, vol. 1, From the Great War to the Great Depression (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 27–40; and the useful but ideologically tilted study by Benjamin Isitt, From Victoria to Vladivostok: Canada’s Siberian Expedition, 1917–19 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). For the experience of a former COTC man, see Massey, When I Was Young, 198–222. 135 Varsity, 4 January 1918, 1, 18 February 1918, 3. 136 Varsity War Supplement (1916), 27. 137 Varsity, 20 October 1916, 1, 27 November 1916, 1, and 4 February 1918, 1.

288

Notes to pages 104–7

138 Varsity, 31 January 1917, 1; University of Toronto Monthly 17 (1916–17): 131–2. 139 The OSTC suspended recruiting in the summer of 1918 owing to the surfeit of applications; Globe (Toronto), 3 June 1918, A1973–0051/219(05), UTA. 140 John Marteinson and Michael McNorgan, The Royal Canadian Armoured Corps: An Illustrated History (Toronto: Robin Brass Studio, 2000), 53–6; see also the issues of the First Tank Battalion’s “newspaper” published while the unit was in England: The Tank Tatler (London: Polsue, 1918–19), esp. the “Going-Home” edition of May 1919, 3–6, 26–8. 141 For correspondence regarding the formation of the Toronto company of the University Tank Battalion, see: telegram from General W. Gwatkin, Chief of General Staff, to Falconer, 27 March 1918; letter, Gwatkin to Falconer, 3 April 1918; Falconer to Militia Council, 9 April 1918; and Falconer to Gwatkin re the appointment of officers, 2 May 1918, A1967–0007/050(14), UTA. The success of the offensives in August 1918 had shown the value of tanks and inspired a call for a second Toronto company; see the appeal in Varsity, 4 October 1918, 1. On the Canadian Tank Battalion, see Report of the Ministry: Overseas Military Forces of Canada 1918 (London: Ministry, Overseas Forces of Canada, n.d.), 377. On the company raised by McGill, see Fetherstonhaugh, McGill University at War, 28; see also Thomas, UWO Contingent, 36–7. 142 Toronto newspapers, April–May 1918, A1973–0051/219(05) and 220(02), UTA. 143 Lieutenant-Colonel R.L. Denison, Officer Commanding 1st Tank Battalion, to Falconer, 7 May 1918, A1967–0007/050(19), UTA. 144 Major Mavor to Falconer, 5 July 1918, A1967–0007/056(20), UTA. 145 Varsity, 30 November 1917, 6. 146 Bindon, Queen’s Men, 17–18. 147 The Secretary, War Office, London, to Falconer, 28 February 1919, A1967– 0007/056(09), UTA. 148 Varsity, 8 November 1918, 3, noting the high standing in the School of Artillery examinations achieved by Toronto men and listing the ten medals won by former members of the OSTC; see also “The Passing of the O.T.C.,” Varsity, 2 December 1918, 2. 149 Varsity, 3 October 1917, 1. 150 For example, the memorable “Pot-pourri” concert, reported in Varsity, 9 November 1917, 1. 151 The four issues of the Kit-Bag of the O.T.C. are found in P78–0639 (01)-(04), UTA. 152 The 25th and 26th Batteries were formed in March 1915 with sections recruited from the University of Toronto; the 43rd Battery, raised later



Notes to pages 108–10

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that year, trained at Guelph and arrived in the Ypres Salient in the fall of 1915. A humorous chronicle of the battery’s characters and experiences was begun by Hugh Reid Kay, a COTC trainee from Knox College, who was killed at Passchendaele; a continuator, George Magee, was killed at Bourlon Wood, leaving Finlay Angus MacLennan, another COTC volunteer from Knox, to complete and publish Battery Action! The Story of the 43rd Battery – C.F.A. (Toronto: Warwick Brothers and Rutter, n.d.). 153 “67th Varsity Depot Battery,” Varsity, 8 December 1916, 1; Varsity War Supplement (1916), 107; Varsity War Supplement (1917), 67; University of Toronto Monthly 17 (1916–17): 131–2; University of Toronto Roll of Service, xliii–xlv. For correspondence regarding the 67th Battery’s creation and purpose, see Falconer to Gwatkin, 21 February 1916; Falconer to Gwatkin, 10 March 1916; Falconer to Gwatkin, 24 June 1916; Gwatkin to Falconer, 29 June 1916, A1967–0007/038b(11), UTA. See also the clippings file, March–June 1916, A1973–0051/220(02), UTA. 154 Falconer addressing the unit during an inspection, reported in the Globe (Toronto), 5 May 1917, A1973–0051/220(01), UTA. 155 Varsity, 27 November 1916, 2, 8 December 1916, 1, and 13 December 1916, 1. 156 Varsity, 11 December 1916, 1. 157 University of Toronto Monthly 18 (1917–18): 17–20. 158 On Hughes’s dismissal, see Haycock, Sam Hughes, 288–310; Robert Craig Brown, Robert Laird Borden: A Biography (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1975, 1980), 2:54–9. 159 Lang to Falconer, 21 July 1916; Falconer to Lang, 26 July 1916; Lang to Falconer, 26 July 1916, and Falconer’s reply, A1967–0007/044(04); Needler to Falconer, 2 August 1916, A1967–0007/045a(29), UTA. 160 Lang had no high opinion of Johnston, who in his estimation gave new meaning to the “fresh” in freshman. He passed along to Falconer the correspondence that Johnston had sent to Wright. Johnston comes across as a rather self-important young man who intended to bring in new officers and methods to a unit that was already functioning perfectly well; see Lang to Falconer, 31 July 1916; Captain E.P. Johnston to Lieutenant W.J.T. Wright, 29 July 1916, A1967–0007/044(04), UTA. 161 Falconer to F.B. McCurdy, Assistant Minister of Militia, 27 July 1916; McCurdy to Falconer, 4 August 1916; Falconer to McCurdy, 11 August 1916; McCurdy to Falconer, 15 August 1916, A1967–0007/045b(03). See also Falconer to Major-General W.E. Hodgins, Adjutant General, Militia Department, 27 July1916; Hodgins to Falconer, 28 July 1916; Gwatkin to Falconer, 15 August 1916, 1967–0007/045b(02), UTA. 162 Colonel R.J. Gwynne to Falconer, 18 August 1916, A1967–0007/045b(02), UTA.

290

Notes to pages 110–13

163 Lang to Falconer, 5 September 1916, forwarding a copy of the agreement; Falconer to Lang, 9 September 1916, announcing his intention to take up the matter of appointments personally with the Militia Department, A1967–0007/044(04), UTA. 164 For example, Hodgins to Falconer, 9 October 1916, re appointment of Lieutenant H.B Kennedy, A1967–0007/045b(02), or the extensive correspondence concerning Wright’s successor, Captain Reginald Orde, A1967–0007/045a(41), UTA. Misunderstandings about the eligibility of Orde’s successor, Lieutenant H.E. Cawley, a former student of the University of Toronto, who did not take a degree but who proved to be a highly capable officer on active service, occupied Falconer and the Militia Department in the summer and fall of 1917. The department made overseas service a prerequisite for commanders of training batteries and so Cawley, although technically not a graduate, was appointed; A1967– 0007/046a(01)/048a(22)/050(34), UTA. 165 Mrs E.S. Johnston to Falconer, 21 October 1916; Falconer to Johnston (including a handwritten draft), 24 October 1916, A1967–0007/042(66), UTA. 166 For a plentiful source of material for researchers interested in the experiences of the 67th’s trainees who saw action in 1917–18 and in the role of ex-servicemen’s clubs in the years following the Great War, see B1984–0010, UTA. 167 Varsity, 11 October 1916, 1. 168 Torontonensis 19 (1917): 212; Varsity War Supplement (1917), 63; President’s Report, 1916–17, 15; Varsity, 26 September 1917, 3. 169 Byers, “Canadian Officers’ Training Corps,” 83–8; the views of the Militia Department concerning the COTC were spelled out in a letter from the minister, General A.E. Kemp, to Prime Minister Borden, which Borden passed on to Falconer; see Borden to Falconer, 3 October 1917, A1967– 0007/046a(51), UTA. 170 Interestingly, Major C.R. Young of the COTC applied for employment as a military instructor in the United States in the hope that he might be allowed to go overseas with the American Expeditionary Force. It is evident from his letter that instructional staff were routinely denied permission to proceed overseas, even though they were fit and qualified for active service. By May 1917 his frustration was compounded “by the stigma that is sure to attach to young and physically fit officers, who continue to remain at home”; letter, 7 May 1917, B1978–0001/008, UTA. 171 On the role of Canadian officers, most from the University of Toronto, in training American students, see Varsity War Supplement (1917), 56–7; Raymond Massey describes his own experiences at Yale in When I Was Young, 191–7.



Notes to pages 113–14

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172 Varsity War Supplement (1917), 63. Falconer’s correspondence with the prime minister records his offers of assistance and Borden’s caution in promoting conscription; see Falconer to Borden, 27 November 1916; Borden to Falconer, 30 November 1916; Falconer to Borden, 2 December 1916 (with the passage quoted), A1967–0007/041(29), UTA. See also Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer, 222–7; and University of Toronto Roll of Service, xxv–xxvi. 173 For the resolutions of the caput (20 December 1916) and Senate (12 January 1917), see Falconer’s files, A1967–0007/045a(27); for the Resolution re Compulsory Military Training in University of Toronto passed by Board of Governors and the Senate, 10 May 1917, see A1967– 0007/044(38) and the Senate minutes from 1917–21, A1968–0012, roll 7 (vol. 13, 35–6), UTA. See also Varsity, 26 September 1917, 3. For the background on Borden’s decision to introduce the Military Service Act, see Brown, Robert Laird Borden, vol. 2, 60–9, 83–98, 99–110; and Wood, Militia Myths, 231–40. 174 University of Toronto Calendar 1917–1918, 35. The experiences of a young Jewish medical student, David Eisen, recounted in his diary for 1917–18, are worth mentioning here. Eisen was required to present himself for a medical evaluation and was at first assigned for military training; however, since he was born in Galicia and was not naturalized as a British subject before 1902, as the regulations required, he was deemed ineligible to wear the king’s uniform and, much to his chagrin, was compelled to take physical exercise instead. See David Eisen, Diary of a Medical Student (Toronto: Canadian Jewish Congress, 1974), 5–38. 175 Varsity, 5 December 1917, 2, and 27 February 1918, 1. 176 On the rules pertaining to medical and dental students, see the correspondence in A1967–0007/054(47), UTA. 177 Toronto newspapers, 15–16 March 1918, A1973–0051/220(02), UTA. The Board of Governors and the Senate discussed (the many) cases of students failing to attend drill and the warnings or sanctions to be applied; see, for example, the meeting of 11 January 1918 in the minutes of the Senate, 1917–21, vol. 13, 125–7, A1968–0012, roll 7, UTA. 178 See Falconer to Colonel H.C. Osborne, Military Secretary, Department of Militia and Defence, 2 May 1918, requesting partial reimbursement for the expense of hiring military instructors, A1967–0007/050(28), UTA. 179 For the correspondence concerning the appointment, see Falconer to Lang, 20 June 1917; Lang to Falconer, 26 June 1917; Falconer to Lang, with the confirmation of the appointment by the Board of Governors, 29 June 1917, A1967–0007/043(04), UTA. 180 Memorandum for COTC officers, 25 September 1917; Memorandum for President Falconer, 25 October 1917, A1967–0007/048a(22), UTA.

292

Notes to pages 115–17

181 Varsity, 17 October 1917, 1. The final figures given in the President’s Report, 1917–18, 11, state that 154 of the 960 students examined were placed in Category A; 51 of these were medical students who were exempt from call-up. 182 Varsity, 28 September 1917, 1, 15 October 1917, 2, and 21 January 1918, 3, noting the dismissal of a private from the Dental company for speaking back to an officer; the young man was then expelled from the College of Dental Surgeons. 183 A1967–0007/056(11), UTA. This revealing, Janus-like document appears to have been prepared in the autumn of 1918, looking back over the 1917–18 year and ahead to 1918–19. The Varsity (18 December 1918, 2) has an interesting letter from a COTC member recounting an embarrassing situation caused by the resemblance of his uniform to that worn by CEF personnel. 184 Echoed in a letter to the Varsity, 13 December 1918, 2. 185 Varsity War Supplement (1918), 130; Varsity, 25 November 1918, 2; President’s Report, 1917–18, 32–3. 186 See, for instance, a letter in the Varsity, 11 December 1918, 2, stating that “the feeling of the student body is overwhelmingly against drill, and for athletics.” 187 Complaints about the language and behaviour of one drill officer in particular appear in an article and letter in the Varsity, 20 January 1919, 1, 2. 188 NCCU, Fourth Meeting (Ottawa, 1917), 109–25; Pilkington, “History of the National Conference of Canadian Universities,” 64–75; Byers, “Canadian Officers’ Training Corps,” 84–6. 189 The effects of the influenza epidemic on the Overseas Training Company are evident in its War Diary entries for October 1918, A1965–0013/073(01), UTA. 190 Some idea of what the university faced is sketched out in the President’s Report, 1918–19, 12–13. 191 Reminders in the Varsity that drill was still compulsory were drowned out by the increasing cries for its abolition. Compare the editorials of 25 November 1918, 2, and 20 January 1919, 2, with the reports and letters showing student attitudes: 10 January 1919, 2, 15 January 1919, 1, 2, 17 January 1919, 1, 2, and 20 January 1919, 1. 192 Varsity, 22 January 1919, 1; University of Toronto Monthly 19 (1918–19): 109; Falconer to the Board of Governors, 23 January 1919, recommending suspension of military drill, A1967–0007/051a(52), UTA. In a letter to Colonel R.W. Leonard, a member of the Board of Governors, Falconer noted the reasons for terminating drill: lack of facilities, the unsuitability of the drill instructors who had alienated the students, and the problem



Notes to pages 117–22

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of the COTC uniform, which embroiled the students wearing it in difficulties with the military police: Falconer to Leonard, 22 January 1919, A1967–0007/053a(29). 193 Robert A. Falconer, “To Commemorate the University’s Work in the War,” University of Toronto Monthly 19 (December 1918): 6–8. 194 In March 1919, in response to a request for information from the assistant adjutant general, Military District No. 2, Lang stated that the Toronto Contingent sent 86 of its officers and 1,248 other ranks into the CEF or Imperial forces; of the latter figure, 470 served as officers, 778 in the ranks. He emphasized that this total did not include the 1,138 sent by the Overseas Training Company (not all of whom, of course, were University of Toronto men). See Assistant Adjutant General, Military District No. 2, to Lang, 10 March 1919, and Lang’s reply (based on figures supplied by the COTC paymaster, T.A. Reed), 14 March 1919, A1968–0003/012(05), UTA. 195 “A Retrospect,” Varsity War Supplement (1918), 11. 196 The figures are taken from University of Toronto Roll of Service, 529, and from the slightly revised totals given by G. Oswald Smith in Canadian Defence Quarterly 5 (1927–28): 227–9. 3. Soldiering on in Peacetime: The University of Toronto Contingent, 1919–1939 1 Accounts of the first service at the Soldiers’ Tower are found in Varsity, 12 November 1924, 1, 4; and University of Toronto Monthly 25 (1924–25): 103–4. On the construction and dedication of the memorial, see Friedland, University of Toronto, 269–71, and the clippings file in Memorial Tower, A1973–0051/242, UTA. Shortly after the cornerstone was dedicated, the Varsity (5 December 1919, 1) published a sketch of the proposed monument with an explanation of its intended symbolism. 2 Varsity, 24 October 1924, 4, 5 November 1924, 2, 6 November 1924, 1, 7 November 1924, 2, 4, and 11 November 1924, 1. 3 Authority to wear the cap bands had been granted in February 1921. 4 “The Lesson of Yesterday,” Varsity, 12 November 1924, 2. See also the summaries of the debate on the war’s consequences as seen six years later, Varsity, 12 November 1924, 1, 4; and University of Toronto Monthly 25 (1924–25): 114–16. Another impassioned exchange of views was occasioned by the 1926 Armistice Day sermon at Trinity College; see Trinity University Review 29, no. 2 (1926): 12–13, and no. 6 (1927): 11–14. 5 On the evolution of Remembrance Day ceremonies in the inter-war period, see Jonathan F. Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 211–25. 6 Varsity, 20 January 1925, 1.

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Notes to pages 123–4

7 Varsity, 25 October 1935, 1, 2, 4. The Student Christian Movement had called for the COTC to be excluded from the ceremony, and went ahead with its own service when the demand was refused; this parting of the ways took place amid a slanging match between pacifists and COTC supporters; see Varsity, 11 October 1935, 1, 4, 14 October 1935, 1, 2, 23 October 1935, 1, 6 November 1935, 1, 8 November 1935, 1, 2, 12 November 1935, 1, 4, and 19 November 1935, 1, 4. 8 For a record of certificates achieved by Toronto graduates between 1921 and 1938, see General Correspondence, 1925–43, A1968–0003/013, UTA. Of the 1,000 “A” and “B” certificates, 654 were in Infantry, 126 in Signals, 82 in Medical, 64 in Artillery, and 51 in Engineers (most engineering students, it seems, opted for infantry training). On the larger total and the registration with the Department of National Defence, see Globe and Mail (Toronto), 29 March 1939, in C.O.T.C. 1939–40, A1973–0051/241, UTA. 9 Varsity, 25 November 1918, 1. 10 Varsity, 29 November 1918, 2, and 4 December 1918, 1, 2. The readjustment of one department is described by Mark Kuhlberg, “An Acute Yet Brief Bout of ‘Returned-soldier-itis’: The University of Toronto’s Faculty of Forestry after the First World War,” in Stortz and Panayotidis, Cultures, Communities, and Conflicts, 51–70. 11 General Correspondence, 1919–22, A1968–0003/012, UTA, holds many letters from next of kin and the various agencies directed to T.A. Reed, the contingent’s paymaster and acting adjutant from 1915 to 1943, who answered all queries concerning the records of former members. 12 For the history of the university between the wars, see Friedland, University of Toronto, 269–337; and Brown, Arts and Science at Toronto, 73–93. For wider discussion of contemporary university life, see McKillop, Matters of Mind, 295–520; Robin Harris, A History of Higher Education in Canada, 1663–1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 205–336; and for the 1930s, Paul Axelrod, Making a Middle Class: Student Life in English Canada during the Thirties (Montreal; Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990). 13 Useful information on the Toronto Contingent between the wars is found in a brochure published in 1937 under the authority of the university’s Military Committee; see Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, University of Toronto Contingent (copies in A1968–0003/015[02]) and in the clippings file, C.O.T.C. 1895–1939, A1973–0051/241, UTA. For background and related experiences, see Byers, “Canadian Officers’ Training Corps,” 106–58; Bindon, Queen’s Men, 49–69; and Thomas, UWO Contingent, 39–136. For the comparative story of a British OTC, see Strachan, History of the Cambridge University Officers Training Corps, 148–75.



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14 Falconer to Leonard, 22 January 1919, A1967–0007/053a(029), UTA. In a letter to the assistant adjutant general, Military District No. 2, 14 March 1919, Lang likewise wrote off military training for the rest of the 1918–19 session, but noted: “It is intended, however, that a complete resumption of activities along the lines which the corps was organized will take place in the autumn”; General Correspondence, 1919–22, A1968–0003/012, UTA. 15 Senate Minutes, vol. 13, March 1917–September 1921, 244 (10 January 1919); and 260–2 (14 March 1919), A1968–0012/013. Minutes of the Board of Governors, vol. 5, June 1917–December 1919, 230–1 (9 January 1919); and 270–1 (27 March 1919), A1970–0024 (reel 10), UTA. 16 See McKillop on “the culture of utility” in Matters of Mind, 323–46; and Harris, History of Higher Education in Canada, 259–306. 17 James W. Barton, Physical Director, to Falconer, 17 February 1919, A1967–0007/056(011), UTA. On the introduction of mandatory physical education, see Reed, Blue and White, 45–51; President’s Report, 1918–19, 26; and President’s Report, 1919–20, 27–29. For a larger study of compulsory physical education programs in Canadian universities, see Gidney, Tending the Student Body. 18 See Frank Cosentino and Maxwell Howell, A History of Physical Education in Canada (Toronto: General Publishing, 1971), 41–6; Harris, History of Higher Education in Canada, 418–20. After the Great War it had become painfully clear that 30–40 per cent of young Canadian men were unfit for service, a fact that also contributed to the development of health education in the universities; see NCCU, “Student Health Education,” in Eleventh Meeting (London, ON, University of Western Ontario, 1927), 108–14. 19 Varsity, 10 October 1919, 1, 2, 20 October 1919, 1, and 31 October 1919, 1. 20 Lists of men attested from 1919–20 to 1924–25 are found in A1968– 0003/016, UTA. 21 Lang, Annual Administrative Report to General Officer Commanding, Military District No. 2 (copy for President’s file), 29 March 1920, A1967–0007/059a(014), UTA. A letter in the COTC files from the officer commanding the Queen’s University Contingent asks for Toronto’s advice on the proposed revival of the COTC at Queen’s; the reply from the acting adjutant of the Toronto Contingent points to the heart of the problem: “I beg to say that our experience in re-organising the COTC during the past session has not been very encouraging. We think this is due to the natural re-action after years of war and that within a short time things may come back”; see Lt-Col. T.G.C. Campbell, Queen’s Contingent, COTC, to The Adjutant, COTC, University of Toronto, 29 June 1920; Acting Adjutant to Campbell, 15 July 1920, General Correspondence, 1919–22, A1968– 0003/012, UTA.

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Notes to pages 126–8

22 Lang to Falconer, 11 April 1919, and 14 April 1919, General Correspondence, 1919–22, A1967–0007/061(084) and A1968–0003/012, UTA. 23 Report of the Board of Governors for the Year Ending 30th June, 1921, 10–13, 16–18, A1967–0007/057a(43), UTA, contains one of several reports from the Board of Governors during the 1919–20 session concerning the demands for space and new buildings; see the files on Buildings, A1967– 0007/061(81)-(84), UTA. 24 Brook and McBryde, Historical Distillates, 79–81, review the none-toograceful redefinition of Lang’s position and his shocked but stoic reaction. For Falconer’s correspondence with Lang on the matter dated 29 March 1920, 14 May 1920, and 17 May 1920, see A1967–0007/059a(014), UTA. See also Falconer’s letter of 22 April 1920 to the Board of Governors requesting that Lang be appointed director of military studies and be paid by that department, and that he no longer be head of chemistry, but still deliver lectures to students in first-year medicine: A1967–0007/057a(43); confirmed in the Minutes of the Board of Governors, vol. 6, January 1920– April 1921, 64 (22 April 1920); 73–4 (18 May 1920), A1970–0024 (reel 10), UTA. Later, owing to the workload in military studies, Lang asked to be relieved of his teaching in chemistry; see Lang to Falconer, 30 September 1924, Lang Correspondence, September 1924–March 1925, A1967– 0007/088, UTA. 25 Lang was offered a senior position with the educational staff of the Imperial War Office in the autumn of 1920. He rejected it because it would have taken him to India, where he could not reside for reasons of health; see Canadian Military Gazette, 14 December 1920, 1; and Toronto Star, 18 December 1920, Military Studies, 1911–21, A1973–0051/228, UTA. 26 W.R. Lang, “Military Studies and the O.T.C.,” University of Toronto Monthly 23 (1922–23): 166–7; reprinted in Canadian Military Gazette, 22 April 1924, 3. 27 Lang to Falconer, 11 April 1919, General Correspondence, 1919–22, A1968– 0003/012, UTA. 28 Minutes of the Board of Governors, vol. 5 (June 1917–December 1919), 303 (meeting, 19 June 1919); 329 (meeting, 10 July 1919), A1970–0024 (reel 10), UTA. 29 Lang to Falconer, 20 February 1920, A1967–0007/061(083); Falconer to Lang, 1 March 1920, and 19 May 1920, Lang Correspondence, June 1919–May 1920, A1967–0007/059a; Lang to Falconer, 27 May 1920, Lang Correspondence, May 1920–June 1921, A1967–0007/065, UTA. 30 Minutes of the Board of Governors, vol. 6 (January 1920–April 1921), 94 (meeting, 24 June 1920); 154 (meeting, 28 October 1920), A1970–0024 (reel 10), UTA.



Notes to pages 128–31

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31 A brief record of repairs is found in A1975–0027/002(069), UTA; the Property Committee report no. 132 (27 April 1921), A1973–0005/151, UTA, allowed the Department of Militia and Defence to spend $105 to install windows and secure the doors in the contingent’s armoury. 32 See Lang to Falconer, 4 May 1920, requesting letters of thanks (written on a half-sheet of paper, another cost-cutting measure), Lang Correspondence, June 1919–May 1920, A1967–0007/059a), UTA. For the loans and donations, see President’s Report, 1920–21, 53; President’s Report, 1921–22, 71–2. 33 Falconer received various requests from Lang in April 1924, including “accommodation in the University … when new buildings are being planned.” The reply dashed that hope: “[P]ressure for other buildings which have had right of way for some time and have not been provided for as yet is, as you perhaps realise, very severe.” See Falconer to Lang, 17 April 1924, Lang Correspondence, September 1923–April 1924, A1967– 0007/084, UTA. 34 Lang, “Military Studies and the O.T.C.,” 166–7; Canadian Military Gazette, 24 April 1923, 8; see also “Officers Training Corps Popular,” University of Toronto Monthly 25 (1924–25): 123–4; Canadian Military Gazette, 22 April 1924, 2; and clippings from Toronto newspapers, Military Studies, 1911–21, A1973–0051/228, UTA. 35 McNaughton finished the war as commander of the Canadian Corps Heavy Artillery; he became deputy chief of the general staff in 1922 and chief of the general staff in 1929. 36 NCCU, Fifth Meeting (Ottawa, 1918), 18; Pilkington, “History of the National Conference of Canadian Universities,” 75–86. 37 See Magee to Lang, 6 May 1920, and the advance copy in Officers Training Corps, A1967–0007/069. 38 For McNaughton’s circular of 17 March 1920 (HQ 586–35–1), Lang’s comments, and copies of the COTC regulations from 1916, see Officers Training Corps, A1967–0007/069, UTA. Lang’s remarks were addressed to Major General J.H. Elmsley, Military District No. 2, with a copy to Falconer; see Lang to Elmsley, 6 May 1920, and Lang to Falconer, 8 May 1920, in the same file. 39 The COTC regulations issued in 1916 contained a provision whereby the government and the university would each pay half the cost of a drill hall, with the government’s assuming the maintenance costs once the building was completed. No university ever acted on the offer, and the paragraph was struck from the regulations in 1922. 40 One of the unsung figures in Canadian military history, overshadowed by the tempestuous Sam Hughes, Willoughby Gwatkin oversaw the

298

Notes to pages 131–3

recruitment, training, and repatriation of the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the Great War and laid out the plans for the post-war army; see Stephen J. Harris, Canadian Brass: The Making of a Professional Army, 1860–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 141–8. 41 NCCU, Seventh Meeting (Quebec City, Université Laval, 1920), 17–20, 27–31; Pilkington, “History of the National Conference of Canadian Universities,” 99–109. 42 Granatstein, Canada’s Army, 147–74; Eayrs, In Defence of Canada, 1:224–36, 302–19; Harris, Canadian Brass, 141–66; idem, “A Canadian Way of War, 1919–1939,” in Horn, Perspectives on the Canadian Way of War, 195–211; and Britton W. MacDonald, “The Policy of Neglect: The Canadian Militia in the Interwar Years” (PhD diss., Temple University, 2008). 43 Quoted in Le Sieur, “Relations de l’Association nationale des universités canadiennes,” 48; his discussion on 42–51, and that of Byers, “Canadian Officers’ Training Corps,” 111–14, form the basis for this section on funding. 44 The general estimate is based on the annual reports submitted by the Finance Committee of the COTC, contained in the Minutes of the Military Committee, 1921–44, A1968–0003/009, UTA. 45 University of Toronto Calendar for 1924–25, 159–60. 46 Canadian Military Gazette, 12 May 1925, 2; Varsity, 23 November 1925, 1. 47 Varsity, 14 November 1934, 1, 4. Cockburn had earlier repeated the assurances from National Defence Headquarters that the COTC would be supported no matter the cuts to the militia; see Varsity, 1 March 1933, 1, 4. 48 On the training and education of officers between the wars, see Harris, Canadian Brass, 192–209; and J.L. Granatstein, The Generals: The Canadian Army’s Senior Commanders in the Second World War (Toronto: Stoddart, 1993), 3–27. On the state of regular force and militia training, see the trenchant but just assessments of Tremblay, Instruire une armée, 21–60, esp. 41–55; and Thomas, UWO Contingent, 105–11. The growing reliance on the COTC in the 1930s is noted by Hayes, “Development of the Canadian Army Officer Corps,” 13–36, esp. 31–3. 49 Varsity, 16 December 1920, 2. 50 The establishment of the contingent was fixed in 1925 at a headquarters and three companies totalling 25 officers and 245 other ranks, with some leeway allowed to permit enrolment to go as high as 325. See Minutes of Officers’ Meetings 1921–46, 28 September 1925, and Minutes of the Military Committee, 1921–44, 22 October 1925, A1968–0003/009, UTA. 51 The revival of the COTC was noted with approval in an editorial published in Acta Victoriana 45, no. 4 (1920–21): 273–4; see also Victor A.S. Williams, General Officer Commanding Military District No. 2, to Lang, 10 April 1922, congratulating Lang and his staff for the successful



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reorganization of the Toronto Contingent, General Correspondence, 1919– 22, A1968–0003/012, UTA. 52 Varsity, 22 October 1920, 1, and 25 October 1920, 1. 53 Notices in the Varsity listing the arrangements for military studies and COTC drill: 28 September 1921, 1, 5 October 1912, 1, 29 September 1922, 1, 9 October 1922, 4, 26 September 1923, 4, and 4 October 1923, 3. 54 President’s Report, 1923–24, 66; President’s Report, 1924–25, 63. Five years later, 107 out of 177 were enrolled in special courses; President’s Report, 1929–30, 75. 55 Lang’s manner and reputation played a large part in one student’s decision to enlist. Ernest Moogk joined the COTC in 1924 “out of curiosity” and out of regard for Lang. It was for Moogk “an interesting and useful experience which provided an introduction to military service during W.W. 2,” by which time he had risen to quartermaster of the Toronto Contingent and was later posted to the Royal Canadian Engineers school at Petawawa (B1983–0005/001(12), UTA). 56 On his long life and career, see the clippings file, A1973–0026/53(056), UTA; President Cody’s letter of appreciation upon his resignation in April 1937, A1968–0006/026(05), UTA; and Anne McDermaid, “A Servant of Empire: Brig. Gen. George Strachan Cartwright, 1885–1920,” Archivaria 22 (Summer 1986): 129–35. 57 Varsity, 21 November 1921, 1. Lang insisted on obtaining Cartwright’s services when certain university staff defaulted on promises to deliver lectures at the department. Falconer acquiesced, but warned against paying Cartwright out of university funds lest the Board of Governors complain about “the outlay we are making on Military Training.” See Falconer to Lang, 28 March 1922, Lang Correspondence, June 1921–May 1922, A1967–0007/075, UTA. 58 Varsity, 21 January 1916, 1. 59 Varsity, 3 October 1924, 4, 15 January 1925, 1, and 1 October 1926, 1. Musical training under Slatter was among the incentives to join the band; Varsity, 4 October 1929, 1, 4. 60 Varsity, 22 October 1920, 1, 12 November 1920, 1, and 17 November 1920, 1. 61 Minutes of Officers’ Meetings 1921–46, 1 October 1923, A1968–0003/009, UTA. 62 Varsity, 3 October 1929, 1, 4. 63 Varsity, 29 September 1926, 1, and 7 October 1926, 1; Torontonensis 29 (1927): 293. 64 The band almost ceased to exist after 1930 but revived thanks to Slatter, the Students’ Administrative Council, and the support of President Cody; Varsity, 21 October 1932, 2, and 25 October 1932, 1, 2. See also E.A. MacDonald, General Secretary-Treasurer of the Students’ Administrative

300

Notes to pages 136–8

Council to Cody, 7 November 1932, A1968–0006/018(08), UTA. Each volume of Torontonensis between 1932 and 1939 (vols. 34–41) contains a report on the Student Band or Varsity Band (as the Blue and White was often called); see also the clippings in Varsity Band, 1926–40, A1973–0051/238, UTA, which sketch out the history of the university-cum-COTC band. 65 Varsity, 29 November 1937, 2. 66 The requirements for COTC members in the band are reviewed in Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, University of Toronto Contingent, 22, A1968–0003/015(02), UTA. 67 Varsity, 26 September 1923, 4, 28 September 1923, 3, 3 October 1923, 3, 4 October 1923, 3, and 15 October 1923, 4. 68 Varsity, 8 November 1922, 4. 69 Varsity, 7 February 1921, 2; the end of year issue of 17 March 1926 contained set of spoof orders for the COTC among the other jests at campus organizations – yet another sign of acceptance. 70 “What C.O.T.C. Means to Students,” Varsity, 9 October 1922, 4. 71 “The O.T.C. Parades for Inspection,” University of Toronto Monthly 23 (1922–23): 388–9. 72 The requirements were defined in 1925 and published in Varsity, 20 January 1926, 4, and 26 January 1926, 4. 73 For an outline of training for students in the various companies of the COTC, prepared by Colonel J.R. Cockburn in 1932, see General Correspondence, 1925–43, A1968–0003/013, UTA. 74 Summarized from the annual calendars of the Faculty of Arts, 1922–39; see also the booklets outlining the courses and examination procedures for the COTC published in 1929 and 1936, 495.056 (D1), DHH. 75 Canadian Military Gazette, 12 May 1925, 2; just how much work this entailed for Lang and his staff in arranging the supplementary classes and obtaining classrooms and indoor drill space is evident from the COTC announcement printed in the Varsity, 7 January 1925, 4. Further evidence of the pains taken to ensure success is found in another COTC notice calling for all candidates to submit the practice tests done in advance to gauge their chances on the certificate “A” and “B” examinations; Varsity, 17 January 1927, 4. 76 University of Toronto Monthly 25 (1924–25): 123–4; Falconer to Lang, 27 November 1922, Lang Correspondence, May 1922–June 1923, A1967– 0007/078, UTA. The problem was not confined to COTC members, as can be seen from “Matters Orthographical,” editorial, Varsity, 21 January 1927, 2; and “The Power of Self-expression,” editorial, Varsity, 11 March 1927, 2. Nor was it confined to Toronto; see “Weakness in English among Undergraduates and Graduates in Canadian Universities,” in NCCU, Eleventh Meeting, 79–97.



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7 7 Varsity, 22 January 1925, 4, and 23 January 1925, 4. 78 Falconer’s files contain a heartfelt letter from Lang thanking the president for his remarks and noting with rueful humour that, “having received no distinction for 1914–19 has made my old friends at home feel disappointed at my not having come up to their expectations!”; Lang to Falconer, 25 March 1925, Lang Correspondence, September 1924–March 1925, A1967– 0007/088, UTA. 79 Varsity, 23 November 1925, 1, 2, and 24 November 1925, 1, 4; Canadian Military Gazette, 24 November 1925, 1. Falconer’s eulogy delivered at the funeral was printed in University of Toronto Monthly 26 (1925–26): 130–1; see also “The Late W.R. Lang,” included in the addresses and convocations collected in the Office of the President, A1966–0003/002, UTA. 80 Varsity, 24 November 1925, 1, 4. Press clippings describing Lang’s funeral are found in A1973–0026/217(14), UTA; the excerpt quoted is from the Telegram (Toronto), 24 November 1925. It says something about the esteem in which Lang’s colleagues held him that General Cartwright offered to work without pay for the rest of the term so that Lang’s salary might go to his widow and family at a difficult time. Falconer, deeply touched by this generous offer, wrote to Cartwright to assure him that the Board of Governors and the Carnegie Foundation had seen to Mrs Lang’s welfare. See G.S. Cartwright to Falconer, 27 November 1925, and Falconer’s reply the following day, Cartwright Correspondence, November 1925, A1967– 0007/092, UTA. 81 Varsity, 4 October 1926, 1, 4; President’s Report, 1926–27, 70–1. 82 Varsity, 30 September 1927, 1; Minutes of Officers’ Meetings 1921–46, 18 October 1927, A1968–0003/009; Loudon to Falconer, 5 May 1927; Falconer to Loudon, 7 May 1927, A1967–0007/101(100), UTA. 83 The preparations and conduct of the dedication ceremony are described in Varsity, 17 February 1927, 2, 2 March 1927, 1, 3 March 1927, 2, 3 October 1927, 4, 5 October 1927, 2, 4, 6 October 1927, 1, and 7 October 1927, 1, 4; and University of Toronto Monthly 28 (1927–28): 64–7, with a panoramic photograph showing the COTC arrayed below the Soldiers’ Tower). See also A Record of the Proceedings of the Centenary of the University of Toronto, 1927 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1929), 20. 84 C.P. Stacey, A Date with History: Memoirs of a Canadian Historian (Ottawa: Deneau Publishers, 1983), 10–11, 13–28, esp. 22–4, on his military career while at university. His papers contain his training booklets in signals and his two certificates, the certificate “B” awarded in June 1928 not coming into his possession until forty years later; Education, B1990–0020/ 007, UTA. 85 Varsity, 6 October 1926, 2. 86 Varsity, 12 November 1926, 1.

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Notes to pages 142–3

87 The story is pieced together from three articles, unsigned but undoubtedly written by Stacey: Varsity, 9 November 1926, 1, 11 November 1926, 1, and 12 November 1926, 1; see also University of Toronto Monthly 27 (1926–27): 55–6, 108–9 (the latter being the description of the service, reproduced from the Varsity and attributed to Stacey). 88 The letter, dated 18 September 1918, would wring tears from a stone. It is found in Harold Goodman’s file, A1973–0026/121(036), UTA; the next file, his father’s (037), contains obituaries noting Mr Goodman’s rapid decline upon receiving the news of his son’s death. 89 Varsity, 6 October 1926, 2: “what could be more fitting than that, on this occasion, this year and all the years to come, these calls should be sounded on the Goodman bugle.” 90 Ibid., 1. The article notes that Goodman’s parents donated the bugle in 1920, but this must have happened earlier, since Mr Goodman died in September 1919. Upon its reception the bugle was hung “in the trophy case on the southwest stairway of Hart House, among the evidences of the University’s prowess in the field of sport,” most likely by T.A. Reed, long-time secretary of the Athletic Association, adjutant of the COTC, and devoted custodian of university memorabilia. We hear of its being played at subsequent services (see, for example, Varsity, 10 November 1933, 1), which suggests that it was brought out regularly once a year. The bugle was supposed to be put on display in the Soldiers’ Tower after the 1926 service, but it was still “an oddity among the awards and memorabilia of field and arena heroes of the past” when F. Michah Rynor published “The Sound of Silence,” University of Toronto Magazine 30, no. 1 (2002): 58, with a good photograph showing the inscription. The bugle remained in the possession of the Athletic Association until 2009, when it was put on permanent loan in its rightful home in the Soldiers’ Tower. 91 See his Armistice Day editorial in Varsity, 11 November 1926, 2. 92 Varsity, 22 October 1926, 2, 26 October 1926, 2, 15 November 1926, 2, and 22 November 1926, 2, chastising student antics at the Soldiers’ Tower after a football game and people parking their cars beside the memorial; and Varsity, 2 December 1926, 2, arguing for the preservation of Fort Henry. 93 Varsity, 21 October 1926, 2, with reference to a current exhibition of war art in Toronto, during which a special showing was arranged for the COTC; see Varsity, 12 October 1926, 1. 94 Varsity, 15 October 1926, 2, 7 December 1926, 1, 2; 8 December 1926, 2, and 9 December, 2. 95 Varsity, 3 February 1927, 2. 96 Varsity, 17 February 1927, 2, 2 March 1927, 1, and 3 March 1927, 2. The question of contingent colours had first been raised by the COTC’s officers: Minutes of Officers’ Meetings, 1921–46, 26 October 1926, A1968–003/009, UTA.



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97 Stacey, Date with History, 24. 98 Memorandum of the Committee to consider the proposal to abolish the University Reserves, 27 March 1967, University of Toronto Joint Service Training Committee, 1964, B1990–0020/046, UTA. The same file contains lecture notes on the COTC and the 67th (Varsity) Battery. 99 Loudon’s papers, including records of his service with the COTC, are in B1976–0003/001–011; his clippings file is in A1973–0026/241(90), UTA. In fragmentary notes, some handwritten, some in typescript, apparently composed as the basis of an autobiography, he wrote down his memories of the hectic early days of the COTC; see B1976–0003/001(15), UTA. 100 Loudon’s account of his return to the COTC in 1919 is in a handwritten draft, B1976–0003/001(10), 96–8, UTA. On his contribution to university athletics (especially rowing) and his popularity among the students, see Reed, Blue and White, 51–3, 75, and passim; and A.M. Reid, “The Twenties,” in Harris and Montagnes, Cold Iron and Lady Godiva, 55. 101 Loudon’s views on promoting peace are given in “What Are We Doing?” Trinity University Review 47, no. 1 (1934), 16–17. The role of the FASE in developing the country is described by Philip A. Lapp, “The Nation Builders,” in Harris and Montagnes, Cold Iron and Lady Godiva, 109–46. 102 Friedland, University of Toronto, 262–3; White, Skule Story, 92–3. 103 J.H. Parkin, “The Toronto Aerodynamic Laboratory,” University of Toronto Monthly 24 (1923–24): 25–6; clippings file, Applied Science and Associated Buildings, 1909–26, A1973–0051/246, UTA; White, Skule Story, 121–2. For the larger context of flight in Canada during the inter-war period, see Jonathan F. Vance, High Flight: Aviation and the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2002), esp. 107–32; and Jonathan Scotland and Edward Soye, Aviators and the Academy: Early Aeronautics in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, 2015). 104 W.A.B. Douglas, The Creation of a National Air Force: The Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in cooperation with the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Government Publishing Centre, Supply and Services Canada, 1986), 91–3; L. Milberry, Canada’s Air Force at War and Peace, vol. 1 (Toronto: CANAV Books, 2000), 95–8; Allan D. English, The Cream of the Crop: Canadian Aircrew 1939–1945 (Montreal; Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 48–9. The initial discussions regarding university candidates for air force training are noted in clippings from Toronto newspapers, June–July 1921, C.O.T.C. 1895–1939, A1973–0051/241, UTA. Brief notices explaining the program to the students are found in Varsity, 13 February 1930, 1, 4, and 1 December 1931, 1. 105 This total is compiled from the figures given in the annual summaries of the Department of Military Studies found in the President’s Reports covering the 1924–25 to 1930–31 sessions.

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Notes to pages 144–6

106 President’s Report, 1927–28, 73–4; Lapp, “Nation Builders,” 120–4; John Talbot Dyment clippings file, A1975–0026/001(34), UTA. 107 Varsity, 14 October 1928, 3, and 27 November 1928, 4; Calendar of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering 1928–1929, and 1929–1930, 117–18; Minutes of the Military Committee, 1921–44, 31 October 1928, and 16 May 1929, A1968–0003/009, UTA; University of Toronto Monthly 28 (1927–28): 319; University of Toronto Monthly 29 (1928–29): 108; Telegram (Toronto), 1 November 1928, in T.R. Loudon file, A1973–0026/241(90), UTA. The RCAF at this time concentrated on civil rather than military duties; see Douglas, Creation of a National Air Force, 90–108; and William J. McAndrew, “Canadian Defence Planning between the Wars: The Royal Canadian Air Force Comes of Age,” Canadian Military History 22, no. 1 (2013): 57–70. 108 Varsity, 14 October 1928, 3, and 27 November 19128, 4; clippings from Toronto newspapers, November–December 1928, C.O.T.C. 1895–1939, A1973–0051/241, UTA. 109 Telegram (Toronto), 23 September 1936, A1973–0026/241(90); Minutes of Officers’ Meetings, 1921–46, 12 November 1929, and Minutes of the Military Committee, 1921–44, 9 October 1929, A1968–0003/009, UTA. 110 Announced in Colonel C.H. Hill to Falconer, 29 February 1932, A1967– 0007/131b(19), UTA; President’s Report, 1931–32, 79. 111 Hill to Falconer, 8 May 1929, and the response from the COTC, 10 May 1929, Cartwright, G., Dept. of Military Studies, May 1929, A1967– 0007/113, UTA; President’s Report, 1928–29, 69. Two students got their wings and nine were in training the following year; President’s Report, 1929–30, 75. The same lack of coordination hindered efforts to attract Toronto graduates into air training when the RCAF began expanding in 1938. See Colonel M. Barry Watson, Director of Military Studies, to Cody, 4 October 1938, noting the inability of the RCAF to see the error of its ways in sending acceptance letters in the summer when the graduating students had already dispersed, A1968–0006/039(05); and Cody’s letter making the same point to the deputy minister, Department of National Defence, 6 October 1938, A1968–0006/038(03), UTA. 112 McNaughton to Loudon, 24 September 1935; Croil’s memorandum, and Loudon’s letter to Major-General Ashton, 18 November 1936, are contained in Loudon’s papers, B1976–0003/006(15), UTA. 113 See William J. Loudon, “Aeronautic Training,” University of Toronto Monthly 38 (1937–38): 209–11; White, Skule Story, 132–4. 114 Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, University of Toronto Contingent, 23; Minutes of the Military Committee, 1921–44, 2 June 1937; Varsity, 4 February 1938, 1, and 17 February 1938, 1; clippings, Flying Club, 1937– 38, A1973–0051/249, UTA.



Notes to pages 146–8

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115 “Depression and Revolution,” Varsity, 6 January 1933, 2. 116 Axelrod, Making a Middle Class, 19. The COTC’s penny pinching was shown in 1933, when Bandmaster Slatter made the unauthorized purchase of a baton. This prompted a flurry of discussion and paperwork to ensure that henceforth all purchases, however small, were approved beforehand; Minutes of the Military Committee, 1921–44, meeting, 13 January 1933, A1968–0003/009, UTA. 117 Figures tabulated by T.A. Reed upon Hunt’s retirement in 1939 and forwarded to President Cody for special mention in the thanks tendered to Hunt for his services to the COTC since 1914. See Reed to Cody, 3 October 1939; Cody to Hunt, 4 October 1939, A1968–0006/042(03), UTA. 118 Colonel Cockburn requested that for administrative purposes the number of platoons be reduced from thirteen to ten in 1933–34; Cockburn to Cody, 26 October 1933, A1968–0006/008(05), UTA. 119 Minutes of Officers’ Meetings, 1921–44, 2 October 1933, and 28 October 1937, A1968–0003/009, UTA. The general correspondence for 1925–43 includes a memorandum spelling out the dos and don’ts of Mess dinners – Emily Post would have been hard put to prescribe finer etiquette; A1968–0003/013, UTA. 120 President’s Report, 1935–36, 101. The next year, 76 per cent of Toronto candidates passed; President’s Report, 1937–38, 17, 113; Colonel H.H. Madill’s report to Cody, 19 February 1936, A1968–0006/023(01), UTA. Toronto’s rate was exceeded only by that of the University of Alberta. What bears noting about the Canadian rates of success is that the COTC received comparatively less support than the British OTCs, or so it seemed to one COTC graduate who attended the University of London’s OTC summer training exercises in 1930. The instruction he observed there was more thorough and more practical, and the university made more effort to accommodate its officer cadets, especially at examination time. See G.B. Riddehough, “Impressions of an English O.T.C.,” Canadian Defence Quarterly 8 (1930–31): 237–9. 121 In view of the worsening situation in Europe and the resurgence of student interest in military affairs, the Department of Military Studies was formally integrated into the Faculty of Arts at the beginning of the 1938–39 session and the director (Major M. Barry Watson, Cartwright’s successor) given the rank of assistant professor; see Varsity, 31 October 1938, 1; President’s Report, 1938–39, 11. 122 President’s Report, 1936–37, 99–100; President’s Report, 1936–37, 113. 123 Axelrod, Making a Middle Class, 128–48; idem, “The Student Movement of the 1930s,” in Axelrod and Reid, Youth, University and Canadian Society, 216–46; and McKillop, Matters of Mind, 437–52. On the pacifist reaction during the inter-war period, see Vance, Death So Noble, 29–34; and

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Notes to pages 149–51

Thomas P. Socknat, Witness against War: Pacifism in Canada, 1900–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 60–191. 124 These misgivings conform with the broader trend; see, for instance, editorials and articles in the Varsity, 3 October 1928, 2, 9 November 1928, 2, 28 November 1929, 1, 4, 7 February 1930, 2, 21 February 1930, 2, 6 October 1931, 2, and 28 October 1, 4. None goes so far as the strident “Away with Armistice Day,” Trinity University Review 45, no. 10 (1932), 39–41 (with an equally heartfelt rejoinder in the following month’s issue, 71–2). 125 The Varsity echoes the gloomy diagnoses of the time; see 25 January 1930, 2, 21 February 1930, 2, and 11 November 1930, 2. 126 A selection from the Varsity records the criticisms levelled against the COTC and the responses: 27 January 1928, 2, 3 October 1928, 2, 2 November 1928, 2, 28 January 1930, 1, 3, 7 February 1930, 2, 19 February 1930, 1, 20 February 1930, 1, 27 November 1930, 1, 9 January 1931, 2, 5, 18 February 1931, 1, 23 February 1931, 1, 5, 25 January 1933, 2, 7 February 1933, 2, and 24 November 1933, 1, 4. 127 Varsity, 29 October 1931, 1, 4, 30 October 30 1931, 1, 2, 2 November 1931, 1, 2, and 3 November 1931, 1, 2. These reports and impassioned editorials came after a meeting at the university in which Agnes Macphail spoke in favour of disarmament. Not all were swayed: “Agnes Macphail doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” one student was quoted as saying. “There is no sense in disarmament under present conditions, any more than there is in disbanding the police force of the city.” 128 Thus the founders of the Anti-War Society in October 1933: Varsity, 27 October 1933, 1, and 30 October 1933, 1, 4. On the society, which later recast itself as the Student Peace Movement, see the clippings files Anti-War Society, A1973–0051/249, and Student Peace Movement, A1973–0051/250, UTA. 129 Varsity, 10 November 1932, 2, 11 November 1932, 2, and 14 November 1932, 1, 3. 130 Taken from President’s Report, 1934–35, 22–5; his thoughts on the role of the university and the values it upheld often form the introduction or conclusion to his annual reports. His interest in the welfare of the COTC is evident in his correspondence with Major-General E.C. Ashton, then commander of Military District No. 2, in December 1932; see COTC 1932–39, A1983–0036/035, UTA. 131 On Cody’s life and career, see Masters, Henry John Cody, esp. 177–82, 199–203, and 218–20, on the controversies over political views and free expression during the 1930s. Here I must take issue with McKillop’s indispensable Matters of Mind, 387–93, where he notes Cody’s sympathy with Mussolini’s Italy and the “darker resonances” in his



Notes to pages 151–2

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public addresses opposing radical political dissent – that is, socialist or communist agitation. In stating that “such phrases bring a chill to the bone,” knowing as we do that “the road to fascism led to Auschwitz,” McKillop, in my mind, unfairly associates Cody with evils that no one foresaw in the early 1930s. It is also part of the record that Cody returned the decoration given him by the Italian government and repudiated Fascism once its true colours became clear to him. Moreover, the road to Auschwitz led not through fascist Italy (loathsome as it was) but through Nazi Germany, a place that Cody abominated from its inception. Few were more forthright than Cody in warning against the threat posed by Hitler or in arguing for the admission of Jewish refugees to Canada, a principled, humane stance that does Cody great honour. And if he is to be tarred with the brush of fascism, what of those who sympathized with a Soviet regime more murderous even than Hitler’s? Did the road to Kolyma, Solovki, Magadan, the entire Gulag Archipelago (in operation long before and long after anyone heard of Auschwitz) not lead through Stalin’s Russia? Why are the communist and socialist advocates of the time never held to account for their political beliefs, which many never repudiated even after the truth about Stalin’s crimes was known? Does it not strike historians who write so glowingly of left-wing professors and fellow travellers – useful idiots who never went to live in the communist utopia they worshipped from afar – as worth a mention that at the same time Stalin was sending millions to their deaths, not one of the people with whom Cody disagreed, Frank Underhill chief among them, so much as lost his job, largely because Cody took no action against them? 132 “Report of the Committee on Armistice Day Service, 1932–33,” A1968–0006/ 006(07), UTA. 133 See Harriet Christie, Secretary of the Committee on the Armistice Day service, to Cody, 1 November 1935, declaring that the Alumni Association will invite the COTC to participate, and Cody’s supportive reply, 4 November 1935, A1968–0006/026(05), UTA. The call for the exclusion of the COTC from the Remembrance Day service printed in Trinity University Review 47, no. 3 (1934): 84–5, typifies the pacifist point of view. 134 Varsity, 10 October 1935, 1, 4, and 30 January 1936, 4; clipping from Telegram (Toronto), 4 December 1935, C.O.T.C. 1895–1939, A1973–0051/ 241, UTA. 135 Varsity, 5 February 1934, 2. A similarly hostile editorial inspired by the COTC Ball had appeared the previous year: Varsity, 2 February 1933, 1, 4, and 7 February 1933, 2. On the revival of the Ball, see Varsity, 29 January 1931, 1, 2 February 2, 1931, 2; and University of Toronto Monthly 31 (1930–31): 223. 136 In the fall of 1934 the International Student Service circulated a questionnaire on attitudes to war in Canadian universities. Although the

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Notes to page 153

questionnaire received considerable attention in the Varsity, only two hundred out of six thousand Toronto students answered it. The responses showed general antipathy to war, to no one’s surprise, but as one article noted, this testified only to the current drift of opinion, and gave no real indication of what students would do in real rather than hypothetical circumstances. See Varsity, 13 November 1934, 1, 4, 15 November 1934, 1, 16 November 1934, 1, 4, 20 November 1934, 1, 4, 23 November 1934, 1, 27 November 1934, 1, 4, 29 November 1934, 2, 30 November 1934, 4, and 4 December 1934, 2; Axelrod, “The Student Movement in the 1930s,” 226–9. 137 Varsity, 8 February 1933, 1, and 21 February 1933, 1, 4. Interestingly, many of the women canvassed admitted they had never even heard of the COTC. 138 As when the Varsity wryly announced that neither Agnes Macphail nor J.S. Woodsworth would attend the COTC Ball as patrons, since “the realisation that the C.O.T.C. was about to do anything which did not directly inculcate a longing to slaughter and to slay would be too great a shock to their frequently orated convictions”; Varsity, 21 January 1932, 1. In 1934 forty or fifty members of the COTC showed up at a meeting of the Anti-War Society not to disrupt but to listen and to insist that their wish to serve their country was as sincere as that of the pacifists – this is one of many cases where a feverish headline (“Meeting Invaded by Militarists”) gives a very misleading impression of events; see Varsity, 8 November 1934, 1, 3. The COTC officers attended another debate a week later; see Varsity, 15 November 1934, 1, 4. The Student Christian Movement graciously invited members of the COTC to the alternative Remembrance Day service in 1937. Madill and the officers attended on behalf of the contingent; see Varsity, 22 October 1937, 2, and 11 November 1937, 1. 139 In 1942 the director of university extension, W.J. Dunlop, indexed the occupations of the fathers of the applicants to first year in all faculties, schools, and departments in 1919, 1930, and 1938. Farmers led the list in 1919, but had slipped noticeably by 1938; the 1930 and 1938 lists show a much more urban, trade, and professional background (merchants, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, manufacturers, salesmen, engineers). Clergymen, teachers, provincial and municipal officials, and insurance men also stand out. See A1968–0006/049(05), UTA. 140 The high-flown rhetoric and lofty sentiments of certain peace advocates came in for some balloon pricking; see Varsity, 14 February 1933, 1, 2, 4 December 1934, 2, 16 January 1935, 4, and 21 January 1935, 2. 141 Of the 309 enrolled in the COTC in 1937–38, 94 came from the FASE and 75 from medicine and dentistry; 45 came from University College, and 70 from the other arts colleges (Trinity, Victoria, St Michael’s), the rest being headquarters staff or men attached from other units. The next year’s



Notes to pages 153–5

309

figures present 101 from the FASE, 66 from medicine and dentistry, 54 from University College, and 70 from the others, in a combined enrolment of 327. See President’s Report, 1937–38, 149–50; President’s Report, 1938–39, 138–40. 142 Claude Bissell, a student at University College from 1932 to 1936 and afterwards president of the university (1958–71), described “the great good place” in his memoir, Halfway Up Parnassus: A Personal Account of the University of Toronto, 1932–1971 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 3–16. For an appreciation of the honours course and the academic standards of the time, see Bissell, University College, 51–83. 143 From Cody’s preface to Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, University of Toronto Contingent, A1968–0003/015(02), UTA. The COTC occasionally put its case directly to the students through the Varsity; see Varsity, 2 December 1936, 2, 4, in which the public good and the personal development of officer training are given as reasons to join, and letter to the editor, Varsity, 4 December 1936. 144 Copies of the brochure are found in A1968–0003/015(02), UTA; the creation of the brochure and the favourable impression it made are noted in the Minutes of the Military Committee, 1921–44, 2 June 1937, and Minutes of Officers’ Meetings, 1921–46, 28 October 1937, A1968– 0003/009, UTA. 145 University of Toronto Monthly 39 (1938–39): 13. 146 President’s Report, 1935–36, 100; President’s Report, 1936–37, 99–100. 147 Varsity, 29 September 1938, 1. 148 The Varsity took a much harder line against appeasement after Munich; see, for example, 30 September 1938, 2, 3 October 1938, 2, 19 October 1938, 2, and 25 October 1938, 1, 4. This was in step with the general shift in Canadian opinion noted by C.P. Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict: A History of Canadian External Policies, vol. 2, 1921–1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 231–6. 149 Sympathy for the plight of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany is evident among Toronto students as early as 1933; see Varsity, 6 October 1933, 1, 4, 14 November 1933, 1, 5 December 1933, 1, and 16 February 1934, 2. For reactions to Kristallnacht, see Varsity, 16 November 1938, 2, 18 November 1938, 2, 22 November 1938, 1, 24 November 1938, 1, 4, 25 November 1938, 1, and 6 January 1939, 4. One of the most forthright appeals to the Canadian government to take in Jewish and other refugees was made by President Cody in a radio broadcast of 3 February 1939. The text of the address was published in University of Toronto Monthly 39 (1938–39): 139–41, and deserves to be reproduced in every Canadian high school history textbook. Perhaps Canadians of the time should be judged more by the humane example of Cody (and Falconer, among others) than by

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Notes to pages 155–7

the pusillanimous politicians and bureaucrats who, in restricting entry to refugees, proved themselves unworthy of the country they governed. 150 The aforementioned Kenneth Woodsworth was one of them: “I think it is time for every able-bodied young man to take his place in the armed forces. There is no place for pacifism in this time of extreme crisis”; undated clipping, A1973–0026/525(66), UTA. This in contrast to his uncle, who averted his eyes from reality all the way to the end. Charles Levi, “Student Opinion in Depression and War: The Case of Paul McGillicuddy (1918–42),” Ontario History 87, no. 4 (1995): 345–67, considers another Toronto student’s engagement with the issues of his time. McGillicuddy belonged to the peace movement and the COTC during the late 1930s. After struggling to find his way in 1939–40, he enlisted in the RCAF early in 1940–41. Sadly, he was fated to die of wounds sustained over Dieppe on 21 August 1942. 151 Details of his life and career are drawn mainly from his clippings file, A1975– 0026/003(09), UTA, from the transcript of a 1977 interview (B1978–1302, B1983–0028/001[02], UTA), and correspondence on his career with the COTC between his successor, Colonel W.S. Wilson, and Mr John L. Skinner in February and March 1946, Correspondence, B1993–0045/001, UTA. 152 “Report on Accommodation, May, 1937,” and correspondence on possible purchases, Reports on COTC and Histories, ca. 1937–44, A1968– 0003/006(02), UTA. 153 Madill to Cody, 7 January 1939, A1968–0006/038(02), UTA. 154 He came by it naturally as the son of the newspaper publisher, parliamentarian, and civic benefactor John Ross Robertson; on his life and career, see the clippings files in A1973–0026/381(84), UTA. 155 Madill to A.D. LePan, 7 January 1939 (appended to Madill to Cody, 7 January 1939), A1968–0006/038(02); see also Minutes of Officers’ Meetings, 1921–44, 10 January 1939, A1968–0003/009, UTA. The same terms had been proposed in the earlier purchase offers; see, for example, Reed to Cody, 18 March 1938, re 112 St George, General Correspondence, 1925–43, A1968–0003/013, UTA. 156 Reports of the Property Committee, August 1926–June 1947, no. 209 (10 January 1939) and no. 210 (18 January 1939), A1973–0005/152; Minutes of the Board of Governors, Minute Book no. 15 (October 1937–May 1939), 290 (12 January 1939), A1973–0024/015, UTA. See also the brief account in University of Toronto Monthly 40 (1939–40): 163–5. The money to purchase the property came out of the generous bequest left to the university by E.C. Whitney, which funded a number of university buildings. 157 For the contracts and agreements, see Correspondence re Drill Hall, 1939–41, A1968–0003/013; the discussions are summarized in Minutes of Officers’ Meetings, 1921–44, 2 June 1939 and 22 July 1939, A1968–0003/009, UTA.



Notes to pages 157–9

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158 Minutes of Officers’ Meetings, 1921–44, 17 March 1939, A1968–0003/009, UTA. Approval for the expenditure of $15,000 from the contingent’s funds to pay for the drill hall and the authorization by Craig and Madill to provide the plans were granted at this meeting. 159 “The University and the War,” Torontonensis 43 (1941): 211; Torontonensis 44 (1942): 215. 160 Varsity, 9 November 1938, 1, 4. 161 Varsity, 30 November 1938, 4. 162 Varsity, 31 January 1939, 3, 17 March 1939, 1, and 29 September 1939, 1, 6. See also the sixtieth anniversary issue, Varsity, 14 March 1941, 19; University of Toronto Monthly 39 (1938–39): 219–21; and President’s Report, 1938–39, 115, 139, recording that 18 officers and 115 other ranks presented themselves for duty long after the term had ended. The visit by the king and queen was the subject of an album containing the report on the itinerary and preparations by the warden of Hart House, newspaper clippings, and photographs, A1982–0016/001, UTA. On the purpose and effect of the Royal Visit, see Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, vol. 2, 1921–1948, 243–8. 4. “The Child of the Last War”: The University of Toronto Contingent, 1939–1945 1 On the university during the Second World War, see Brown, Arts and Science at Toronto, 94–115; Friedland, University of Toronto, 338–60; Masters, Henry John Cody, 233–48, 269–86; and White, Skule Story, 147–57. For the history of the Toronto Contingent, see clippings from the Torontonensis, University of Toronto Monthly, Varsity, and Toronto newspapers, War Diary 1940–45 (two files, including a typewritten draft of 36 pp.), A1968–0003/008; a typescript of a unit history with brief biographies of contingent officers, lists of awards, officers, and so on, History, 1939–45, 1968–0003/006; the untidy dossiers in War Effort, 1940–42 and War Effort 1943–45, A1973–0051/248; and a small file on the COTC in 1939–40, A1973–0051/241, UTA. The bulk of the material is dispersed throughout Cody’s papers, A1968–0006; the COTC files, A1968–0003, and the longneglected files of the Office of the Registrar, A1973–0051/115 and 147–63, UTA. The material amassed by Robin Harris (A1991–0020/001[11]), is helpful, as are his files in A1983–0036, UTA. For background, see Granatstein, Canada’s Army, 175–95. The parallel experiences of the COTC contingents at Queen’s and Western (including subunits at Assumption College and Waterloo College) are covered in Bindon, Queen’s Men, 71–122; Thomas, UWO Contingent, 130–397; and Theobald, “Western’s War,” 52–67. Brief descriptions of other COTC contingents are found in Canadian Army Journal 1, no. l (1947): 24–7 (Queen’s, UBC); and Canadian Army

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Notes to pages 159–61

Journal 1, no. 2 (1947): 28–32 (Western Ontario, Université de Montréal, University of Ottawa). For a handwritten account of the COTC at Mount Allison University, see 495.009 (D4), DHH; documents relating to national policy towards the COTC during the war are found in 112.3M3009 (D65), (D84), (D144); and 325.009 (D176), (D444), DHH. See also the summary of the contribution made by the Ontario Agricultural College, Guelph, in University of Toronto Monthly 45 (1944–45): 100–1. 2 The muted reaction in 1939 should not obscure the patriotic resolve shown in Toronto and the genuine commitment to Canada’s cause; see Ian Miller, “Toronto’s Reaction to the Outbreak of War, 1939,” Canadian Military History 11, no. 1 (2002): 5–23. 3 “The University’s Part in the War,” University of Toronto Monthly 40 (1939– 40): 64. 4 President’s Report, 1939–40, 1–2, 16; Varsity, 28 September 1939, 1, 2. Cody was transmitting the recommendations in the letter sent by General McNaughton to him on 16 September 1939, A1968–0006/043(03), and to all university presidents three days later, A1968–0006/043(05), UTA. On the collaboration between the universities and the federal government during the Second World War, see Paul Axelrod and Charles Levi, “Universities, Students, and the Conduct of War in Canada and Britain: A Comparative Perspective,” in Stortz and Panayotidis, Cultures, Communities, and Conflict, 253–71; Bindon, Queen’s Men, 71–5; McKillop, Matters of Mind, 521–47; and Pilkington, “History of the National Conference of Canadian Universities,” 305–84. On the scientific contribution, see Donald Avery, “Canadian University Scientists and Military Technology: The Challenge of Total War, 1939–1945,” in Stortz and Panayotidis, Cultures, Communities, and Conflict, 175–201. 5 C.P. Stacey, Arms, Men and Governments: The War Policies of Canada, 1939– 1945 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1970), 6–17. 6 A circular dated 2 September 1939, sent to all district officers commanding, Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, defined the place of the COTC with respect to the militia and the Canadian Active Service Force; text reprinted in Thomas, UWO Contingent, 131–2. The circular and its implications for the Toronto Contingent were discussed by the university’s War Service Advisory Board on 22 September 1939; see the minutes of this meeting in A1968–0006/044(04), UTA. On the policies governing officer selection in the early stages of the war, see Hayes, “Development of the Canadian Army Officer Corps,” 46–59. 7 Varsity, 28 September 1939, 1. The five originals were A.F. Coventry, T.R. Loudon, M. Wallace, W.S. Wallace, and C.R. Young; a sixth member was Major M. Barry Watson, head of the Department of Military Studies. Watson had suggested the idea of such a committee, and its members,



Notes to pages 161–3

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to Cody two days after Canada declared war; see Watson to Cody, 12 September 1939, A1968–0006/042(02), UTA. 8 Varsity, 28 September 1939, 1, 5; University of Toronto Monthly 40 (1939–40): 3–4, 163–4; Minutes of Meetings of the Military Committee, 29 September 1939 and 20 October 1939, A1968–0003/009; correspondence between Officer Commanding, Military District No. 2 and Cody, re establishment of University of Toronto Contingent, COTC, 20–21 October 1939, A1968–0006/043(05), UTA. See also Madill’s review of the contingent’s organization and activities in President’s Report, 1939–40, 136–40. 9 President’s Report, 1939–40, 104–5; see also “The Undergraduate and the War,” Trinity University Review 52, no. 4 (1940): 39–40. 10 Margaret Hyndman (1901–91) was only the second woman in the British Commonwealth to be appointed KC (in 1938); her distinguished career in law and public service earned her the Order of Canada in 1973. 11 Cody’s files contain several letters dealing with the proposal to train women in the COTC; see Margaret P. Hyndman to Cody, 29 May 1939 and 31 May 1939, with Cody’s reply of 10 June 1939, A1968–0006/037(03), UTA; the same file contains a letter dated 1 June 1939 from Major M.B. Watson to Cody, expressing support for the idea of a women’s corps in Canada akin to the British Voluntary Aid Detachments or Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. 12 Hyndman to Cody, 4 August 1939, A1968–0006/042(03), UTA. Training women in the COTC also met with support from other university presidents. Sidney Smith at Manitoba took Hyndman’s proposal seriously; Cody himself, though generally in favour, stated that he was “at a loss to know how the C.O.T.C. could be related to the women”; Smith to Cody, 19 September 1939 and Cody’s response, 25 September 1939, A1968– 0006/044(02), UTA. 13 Torontonensis 43 (1941): 213; University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 37, 185–7; Varsity, 10 October 1940, 2. See also Nancy Kiefer and Ruth Roach Pierson, “The War Effort and Women Students at the University of Toronto, 1939–45,” in Axelrod and Reid, Youth, University, and Canadian Society, 161–83, esp. 163–5; and Ruth Roach Pierson, “They’re Still Women After All”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986), 95–128. A file titled “Women’s National Service Training 1942–43” should be added to the dossier of material on this subject, A1973–0051/156, UTA. 14 President’s Report, 1939–40, 105–7; cf. President’s Report, 1937–38, 113–15, and the reports from the 1930s. 15 The university was as parochial as it had been twenty-five years before. Of the 7,811 students enrolled in 1939–40, 6,947 (90 per cent) came from Toronto or elsewhere in Ontario, 571 from the other provinces, and 293

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Notes to pages 163–5

from the United States or elsewhere. The list of names shows the same predominantly British background. See President’s Report, 1939–40, 2, 173–4; and University of Toronto Directory: Staff and Students of the University and the Federated Colleges 1939–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1939). The physical standards and outlook of the university men invite comparison with the general sketch of Canadian soldiers given by Terry Copp, Fields of Fire: The Canadians in Normandy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 15–17. 16 Cody received several such offers addressed to him personally; see his files, A1968–0006/042(02), and 043(05), UTA, containing letters from veterans offering their services. 17 John Clarry, interview by author, 25 August 2011. 18 Quoted from Charles Hill, interview by Charles and Louise Comfort, 3 October 1973, 126, available online at http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/ cybermuse/servlet/imageserver?src=DO99-1000&ext=x.pdf. He was not the only one to note the irony “of teaching a humane subject to those who must presently go to war”; see, for example, Reed, History of the University of Trinity College, 168–9. Comfort was called up for overseas service in February 1943 (his request for leave of absence is in A1968–0006/059[01], UTA). Before leaving he wrote to Cody in August 1943 to say that he would be wearing his University of Toronto badges – the first time these badges were worn in a theatre of active operations; A1968–0006/059(04), UTA. His war experiences are described in University of Toronto Monthly 44 (1943–44): 194; Varsity, 12 January 1945, 1, and 23 January 1945, 1; and his classic memoir, Artist at War (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1956). 19 Varsity, 16 November 1939, 1; President’s Report, 1939–40, 137–8, 141. 20 See Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, University of Toronto Contingent, Elementary Drill Manual, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1941); idem, Lecture Notes for First Paper: Part I Examination, 2nd Lieutenant to Lieutenant, N.P.A.M. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1940); and C.R. Young, Elementary Military Law for Canadian Officers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1939). All these can be found in UTA. 21 Much of the material used in the course for the engineer company during the 1939–40 year is preserved in the papers of Captain Ernest G. Moogk, C.O.T.C., B1982–0031/001, UTA. 22 Madill noted that 606 of the men doing the one-year course wrote the First Paper in December, of whom 462 went on to write the Second Paper in March. Of the 635 candidates who wrote the First Paper in March, 496 are identified as junior students enrolled in the two-year course, suggesting that the rest were senior students trying the examination again. 23 Resolution of the Senate, 9 February1940, cited in President’s Report, 1939–40, 138; Varsity, 23 February1940, 1. Supplements of up to 10 per cent



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in each course, calculated against students’ attendance and results in the COTC, were awarded to 229 of 338 students in the FASE; President’s Report, 1939–40, 25. 24 Varsity, 29 February 1940, 1, 4. 25 Hayes, “Development of the Canadian Army Officer Corps,” 56–7, notes that in 1939–40 the Canadian Active Service Force was authorized to take half its officers from the COTC. 26 Varsity, 12 March 1940, 2, and 15 March 1940, 1, 8. Elizabeth Waterston’s memoir, Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs: College Life in Wartime, 1939–1942 (Montreal; Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), tells a similar story of the 1939–40 session. 27 Varsity, 30 November 1939, 1, 4; 2; University of Toronto Monthly 40 (1939– 40): 63. Maher had risen to lieutenant in the FASE company of the Toronto contingent and held Certificates “A” and “B” in engineers and artillery. 28 A survey conducted by Professor J.D. Ketchum of the Psychology Department traces the change in outlook. In April 1940, before the Blitzkrieg, nearly half (49 per cent) of the students polled declared themselves not quite or not at all convinced that Canada should put everything into defeating Germany, no matter the cost; by December 1940, after the fall of France and the Battle of Britain, 65 per cent said they were fully or pretty well convinced that Canada should do so. By November 1941 the percentage of fully or pretty well convinced had risen to 88 per cent. Cody, upon seeing Ketchum’s chart, could not believe that 10 per cent of respondents still questioned the necessity of Canada’s full commitment. Note, however, that Ketchum’s sample was made up of 180 arts students, seven in ten of them women. See correspondence between Ketchum and Cody, 17–20 November 1941, A1968–0006/050(04), UTA. 29 A film of the 1940 camp, preserved in UTA A1968–0003/001M, can be viewed online at http://heritage.utoronto.ca/category/corporate-name/ officers-training-battalion. On the use of the Niagara Commons as a training centre during the Second World War, see Merritt, On Common Ground, 151–62. 30 Torontonensis 43 (1940–41): 211. 31 The contribution of the universities is not discussed in any of the standard works on conscription in the Second World War; see Daniel Byers, “Mobilising Canada: The National Resources Mobilization Act, the Department of National Defence and Compulsory Military Service in Canada, 1940–1945,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 7, no. 1 (1996): 175–203, esp. 175–81; idem, “The National Resources Mobilization Act, the Department of National Defence, and Compulsory Military Service in Canada” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2000), 28–99; C.P. Stacey, Arms, Men and Governments, 31–4, 397–9; idem, Official History of the

316

Notes to pages 166–7

Canadian Army in the Second World War, vol. 1, Six Years of War: The Army in Canada, Britain and the Pacific (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1955), 110–24; and Tremblay, Instruire une armée, 122–37 (with a list of basic training centres in appendix 1, 357–60, but compare with the list in Stacey, Six Years of War, 528–30). On the role of the universities, see McKillop, Matters of Mind, 522– 5; and Michael D. Stevenson, Canada’s Greatest Wartime Muddle: National Selective Service and the Mobilization of Human Resources during World War II (Montreal; Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 18–26, 51–65. 32 Cody’s communications with the government and his fellow university heads are contained in A1968–0006/047(04) and A1968–0006/048(15), UTA. 33 President’s Report, 1940–41, 7–8, 84, citing 3,500 undergraduates and 425 graduates; and Varsity, 9 October 1940, 2. See also Varsity, 26 September 1940, “Special Military Supplement,” 5–6, copy in A1973–0051/248(34), and the clippings file for 1940–41, A1968–0003/014(02), UTA. A list compiled in March 1941 showing the authorized strength of all university contingents adds up to 12,191 students in training during the 1940–41 year; 112.3M3009 (D84), DHH. Since this lists only the COTC, as opposed to the Auxiliary Training Battalions, the total number will have been even higher. 34 Cody’s files contain a revealing exchange with Sherwood Fox, president of the University of Western Ontario, 13–14 June 1940, A1968–0006/042(01), UTA. Fox deplored the effect of the government’s pronouncement in September 1939 that students should complete their degree, since even now, in perilous times, students at Western “are not offering themselves in satisfactory numbers either for C.O.T.C. work or, after securing their certificates, for active service.” As this was likely the case elsewhere, Fox asked Cody to confer with other presidents and ask the government to make a new statement that would “add to the power of University officers in urging enlistment.” Cody’s reply suggested that it was not lack of willingness, but that “young men … do not know where to go and or what to do … [U]ntil the Government adopts a policy of compulsory service the matter of enlistment depends upon the individual.” See also K.P.R. Neville, secretary of the NCCU, to Fox, 15 March 1940, A1968–0006/043(06), UTA. 35 Documents pertaining to Cody’s discussions with the Department of National Defence are in A1968–0006/048(15) and A1968–0007/010(01), UTA; see also the correspondence with the presidents of Queen’s, Manitoba, and Dalhousie, A1968–000/044(04) and A1968–0006/047(04), UTA. 36 National War Services Regulations, 1940: Recruits (Ottawa: J.O. Patenaude, 1940), section 16, “University and College Students”; Cody’s copy is in A1968–0006/048(15), UTA.



Notes to pages 167–8

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37 Globe and Mail (Toronto), 11 September 1940, A1973–0051/248(34), UTA; University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 6. 38 Minutes of the Board of Governors, 25 May 1939–26 September 1940, 282 (meeting, 12 September 1940), A1970–0024/027; and correspondence in Military Training Committee and Court of Discipline 1940–41, A1973– 0051/153, UTA. The text of the resolution was published in Varsity, 1 November 1940, 1. Cody’s role in shaping government policy towards the universities has been forgotten, but his fellow presidents and principals well knew what he had accomplished on their behalf. In the words of the testimonial presented at the NCCU in 1951, shortly after Cody’s death, “as a leading spokesman for all Canadian universities, he took an important part in the negotiations with the Dominion Government, during and after World War II, with respect to the military training and service and subsequent rehabilitation of students, and influenced the adoption of those enlightened policies by which the error of indiscriminate and premature enlistment was avoided, and university men and women were equipped to realise their full potential of leadership and responsibility when they put on His Majesty’s uniform”; NCCU, Twenty-seventh Meeting (Montreal, McGill University, 1951), 57. 39 Varsity, 26 September 1940, 6–7; separate copy in A1973–0051/248(34), UTA; see also President’s Report, 1940–41, 84–7; University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 64. 40 For the registers compiled for the National War Service Board, see A1973– 0051/046(01), UTA; for a list of students exempted listed, with the reasons, see A1973–0051/049(06), UTA. 41 Varsity, 15 October 1940, 3; President’s Report, 1940–41, 86–7. 42 President’s Report, 1940–41, 76–7. In the end, 889 students completed the course of training; Varsity, 14 March 1941, 11. 43 The curriculum is mirrored in M. Barry Watson, Lecture Notes for First Paper, 2nd Lieutenant Canadian Army (Reserve) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1941). 44 A detailed record of the Training Battalion’s first year, including photographs, clippings, and lists of personnel and activities, is found in two folders in University of Toronto, Training Centre Battalion War Diary 1940–41, A1968–0003/006; Minutes of the meetings of the Military Training Committee and the Court of Discipline for 1940–41 are in A1973–0051/153; the attendance records and the June camp are found in Military Training, Attendance and Marks, 1940–41 COTC, A1973–0051/155, UTA. 45 This was not lost on contemporaries; see editorials in Varsity, 9 October 1940, 2, and 2 December 1940, 2; and Torontonensis 43 (1940–41): 212. 46 President’s Report, 1940–41, 68; see also Ian Montagnes, An Uncommon Fellowship: The Story of Hart House (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 142–52.

318

Notes to pages 169–70

47 Varsity, 2 October 1940, 1, 3 October 1940, 4, 4 October 1940, 1, 6, 7 October 1940, 1, 4, and 8 October 1940, 3; Torontonensis 43 (1941): 214–15; President’s Report, 1940–41, 85–6. 48 Varsity, 28 November 1940, 1; University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 65. Numbers in the TCB dropped from 1,453 to 1,318 as more fell by the wayside; interestingly, 76 left to go on active service; see Varsity, 14 March 1941, 9, 11; President’s Report, 1940–41, 87. 49 University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 37. Wilson’s papers contain a summary of the Training Battalion’s history, undated but written probably in 1945; Correspondence, B1993–0045/001, UTA. 50 University of Toronto Roll of Service, 520; University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 36; Varsity, 12 November 1940, 1; and Wilson’s clippings file, A1973–0026/520(57), UTA. 51 Cody to Brigadier R.O. Alexander, Military District No. 2, 10 September 1940, requesting the extension of Madill’s appointment, since Major Wilson had heavy duties in the Engineering Faculty and Auxiliary Battalion “and could not give to the Corps the time required”; A1968–0006/041(01), UTA. 52 University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 36–7, 93–4; Varsity, 30 October 1940, 2. The information on the company commanders comes from Joseph Evans, a 1929 graduate who joined the COTC in 1939 and attended the Niagara Camp in June 1940. He was commissioned and attached to the Training Battalion in September 1940, remaining on strength until the end of the war. He stayed on as secretary to the Joint University Service Training Committee that oversaw military training after the war, and succeeded A.B. Fennell as university registrar in 1949. In January 1978 he composed a handwritten account of his experience with the wartime COTC; see Miscellaneous COTC 1939–45, A1983–0036/035, UTA. 53 Smythe left the university in 1915 to join the CEF. He earned a Military Cross while serving with the artillery and became an air observer with the Royal Flying Corps. Shot down in 1917, he spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in Germany. He completed his degree in 1920 and set out on his career in business and sports. In 1939 he joined the 7th Toronto Regiment, and in 1941, at age forty-six, recruited his own unit, the “Sportsman’s Battery,” so that he could go on active service again. He suffered severe wounds in Normandy and made quite a stir on his return to Canada with his criticisms of the government’s reinforcement policy. His service with the COTC is noted in University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 258; President’s Report, 1940–41, 85, and in his clippings file, A1975–0026/003(14), UTA. 54 Cartwright received an honorarium of $500 a year, Wilson $600. Watson requested that his own salary be reduced by $1,000 once he went on the payroll of the Canadian Active Service Force; see Minutes of the Board



Notes to pages 171–2

319

of Governors, 10 October 1940 to 11 December 1941, 51 (meeting, 12 December 1940), A1970–0024/027; Minutes of the Military Committee 1921–44, meeting, 30 April 1941, A1968–0003/009, UTA. 55 Varsity, 29 November 1940, 2. 56 Wilson to Cody, 4 November 1940; Madill to Cody, 22 November 1940, both emphasizing the savings to the government resulting from the university training scheme, A1968–0006/048(06), UTA. The same file contains Cody’s requests for uniforms and the discouraging replies from Military District No. 2 Headquarters. The Women’s War Service Committee and other organizations knit mittens, scarves, and socks for needy members of the Training Battalion; see University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 94. 57 Correspondence in A1973–0051/049(06), UTA; eventually it was left to each faculty to determine the award and proportion of an academic bonus. 58 University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 156; Varsity, 21 February 1941, 1, and 7 March 1941, 1, noting that 150 Auxbattmen were using the last weeks of term to complete the full 110 hours of training. Similar discretion was shown to the members of the OTB at examination time; see University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 94. 59 The resolution appears in the Minutes of the Board of Governors, 10 October 1940 to 11 December 1941, 19 (meeting, 24 October 1940), A1970– 0024/027, UTA; and Varsity, 1 November 1940, 1, and 4 November 1940, 4. The lone delinquent, who did just 31 of the 110 hours, was compelled by the Court of Discipline to complete his training the following year; Minutes of the Board of Governors, 137 (meeting, 12 April 1941). 60 Joseph Evans manuscript, Miscellaneous COTC 1939–45, A1983–0036/ 035, UTA. 61 B.E. Tolton and W.A. Bryce, Army Work Book: Guidance in Qualification of Officer and Other Ranks for Promotion – Infantry (Rifle) and Related Arms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1941). On its reception, see Varsity, 20 January 1941, 1; University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 122; and a clipping from Telegram (Toronto), 22 January 1941, in War Effort, 1940–42, A1973–0051/248, UTA. The authors commanded E Company of the OTB; Tolton taught at Humberside Collegiate, Bryce at North Toronto. A copy of the Army Work Book sits in the basement of the Gerstein Science Information Centre, shelved with a call number so ancient that it took an experienced librarian nearly an hour to find it. Another copy, heavily annotated, may be found in the papers of John Henry Milnes, a Trinity student who joined the COTC in 1940–41, and went on to train for the Army Service Corps at Camp Borden; his textbooks and notes are in B2010–0002/001, UTA.

320

Notes to pages 172–4

62 Torontonensis 43 (1940–41): 212; University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 94, 122; Varsity, 15 January 1941, 1, and 21 January 1941, 4. 63 University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 37, 94, 156, 218; University of Toronto Monthly 42 (1941–42): 221–2; Torontonensis 43 (1941): 212, 216; Varsity, 13 February 1941, 1, 4; President’s Report, 1940–41, 88. 64 Varsity, 18 October 1940, 1, 21 October 1940, 1, 2, 4, and 18 November 1940, 1; University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 35, 64; Torontonensis 43 (1940–41): 216. 65 Varsity, 8 November 1940, 1, and 11 November 1940, 1, 2. 66 Madill to District HQ, Military District No. 2, 20 November 1940, A1968–0006/048(06), UTA. 67 Minutes of the Board of Governors, 10 October 1940 to 11 December 1941, 114 (meeting, 13 March 1941), A1970–0024/027, UTA; University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 156; Varsity, 19 February 1941, 1, 24 February 1941, 1, 4, and 26 February 1941, 1, 4. The relevant documents are in National War Service Board Regulations 1940–41, A1973–0051/155, UTA, with copies of Canada Gazette 74, no. 94 (18 March 1941), and “Minutes of meeting of representatives of the National Conference of Canadian Universities,” chaired by President Cody and attended by the ministers of national defence and national war services, Ottawa, 24 February 1941. Two of Cody’s files, A1968–0006/048(15) and A1968–0006/052(09), UTA, contain the revised section 19 of the National War Services Regulations, 1940 (Recruits) (Consolidation 1941), and a circular sent by Colonel J.K. Lawson to all District Officers Commanding, All Military Districts, 10 September 1941, stating “the intention of this Section is to allow postponement [of call-up] until the end of the complete course, viz., until the student leaves the university.” 68 A survey of FASE students showed that most earned their tuition during the long break; 59 per cent stated they could not continue if they had to spend all summer in military training. See Varsity, 29 November 1940, 2; Lieutenant E.A. MacDonald to A.B. Fennell, 21 February 1941, A1968– 0006/045(06), UTA; copies of the survey are in National War Service Board Regulations, 1940–41, A1973-0051/155, UTA. 69 Colonel A.A. Magee, Department of National Defence, to Cody, 19 March 1941, National War Service Board Regulations 1940–41, A1973–0051/155, UTA. 70 The figures cited in President’s Report, 1940–41, 87, are 855 in the OTB and 601 in the TCB. On the preparations for the 1941 camp and the training routines, see University of Toronto Monthly 41 (1940–41): 187, 218; University of Toronto Monthly 42 (1941–42), 3–5; Torontonensis 44 (1942): 216–17, from which the quotations are drawn.



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71 Again, not lost on contemporaries; see Varsity, 9 January 1941, 2, and 7 March 7 1941, 1, 4. More than forty years later, the editor of the 1940–41 Varsity looked back at the year and its remarkable events; see Varsity, 24 September 1982, 5. 72 President’s Report, 1940–41, 85, 87, recording 909 as having passed the First Paper, 806 the Second. 73 John William Griffin, “The University and the War,” Torontonensis 44 (1942): 215; University of Toronto, Superintendent’s Office, Report re: Contribution of the University of Toronto to the War Effort, 12 June 1941, A1968–0006/050(04), UTA. 74 Birney, age thirty-six in 1940 and a recognized poet on the teaching staff at University College, had been rejected by the navy because of his age. In his Spreading Time: Remarks on Canadian Writing and Writers, 1904–1949 (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1980), 46–68, he cites both anti-fascism and a desire to protect his Jewish wife, then pregnant with what would be his Jewish child, as his reasons for joining the army. Elspeth Cameron viewed his decision as more tactical in nature; see Earle Birney: A Life (Toronto: Viking, 1994), 180–242, esp. 184. Whatever his motives, Birney spent his second year in the COTC as a drill sergeant, juggling his duties between four undergraduate and two graduate classes, and then went to Brockville for officer qualification. A broken ankle threatened but did not end his hopes of going overseas; see his correspondence with Cody, 29 June 1942, A1968–0006/049(02) and the letter from Principal Malcolm Wallace to Cody re Birney’s injury, A1968–0006/052(03), UTA. Birney did get to England, where he expanded his circle of female acquaintances while serving as a personnel selection officer. Out of this experience came his novel Turvey: A Military Picaresque (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1949). 75 Moore recounts his war years in Reinventing Myself: Memoirs (Toronto: Stoddart, 1994), 54–105; he trained and instructed with the COTC before applying for active service in 1943. After spells at Brockville, RMC, and Camp Borden, he was sent to London in 1944 to work in psychological warfare. 76 McNaught was an avowed pacifist whose thinking changed as the war and its implications widened. He volunteered for overseas service, but since there was hardly enough of him to cast a shadow he remained, to his lasting chagrin, in Canada with the Ordnance Corps. See his Conscience and History: A Memoir (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 22–36. 77 Bissell refers briefly to his military service and time in the COTC in Halfway Up Parnassus, 17–18, 75–7. Ernest Sirluck’s memoir holds a mirror to the university between 1940 and 1942, and describes his experience in 1944–45 as intelligence officer with the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division

322

Notes to pages 177–9

in northwest Europe in First Generation: An Autobiography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 67–144. 78 The files for Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster contain brief but useful snippets on their COTC days at Toronto, their work as trainers at Camp Borden, and their subsequent careers with the Canadian Army Show; see A1973–0026/416(02) and 500(39), UTA. 79 Sirluck, First Generation, 68–70, 80–1; his disdain for the 1941 camp, at odds with the upbeat university reports, reflects an opinion widely held. McNaught thought it a waste of time, as did others: “The number of clear-thinking young university men who came away with the feeling that most of the time spent was wasted on inconsequentials – the feeling that they had received almost no preparation for fighting such an army as that of modern Nazi Germany, was large”; Varsity, 6 October 1941, 2. 80 Varsity, 29 September 1941, 1, 6 October 1941, 1, 23 October 1941, 4, 5 November 1941, 1, 4, 12 December 1941, 1, and 6 March 1942, 1, 4; Torontonensis 44 (1942): 218–20; University of Toronto Monthly 42 (1941–42): 37–8, 102, 133, 227–8. 81 See University of Toronto Monthly 42 (1941–42): 263–4; Torontonensis 45 (1942–43): 233–4; President’s Report, 1941–42, 72; and Paul Fox, “With the Training Centre Battalion at Camp Niagara,” Acta Victoriana 67, no. 1 (1942): 29–32. It helped that the numbers were not as unwieldy (300 OTB, 500 TCB), and two active service units (the Governor General’s Foot Guards and the Ontario Regiment) were also training at Niagara. 82 Sirluck, First Generation, 90–2, 96, 98. 83 R.A. Kennedy, “Trainee Triumphs,” Trinity University Review 52, no. 1 (1940): 14–15. Similarly wry accounts from members of the Women’s Service Training Detachment appear in the issues of December 1940, 31–2, and January 1941, 20–1. The poem quoted at the beginning of this section is from D.G. Watson, “Reflections,” Trinity University Review 52, no. 1 (1940): 30–1. 84 Frankly acknowledged by the university registrar to the divisional registrar of the National War Services Board, 17 March 1942, Military Training Miscellaneous 1941–42, COTC, A1973–0051/156, UTA. In the spring of 1941 the universities reviewed their military training programs and identified a number of concerns (the syllabus, uniforms and boots, training of students in specialized fields useful to the war effort) on which to seek clarification from the government; see “Memorandum regarding questions on which the Special Committee of the Canadian Universities Conference would like to receive replies from the Ministers involved,” copy in Military Training Committee and Court of Discipline 1940–41, A1973–0051/153, UTA. 85 Varsity, 21 October 1941, 2, 27 October 1941, 1, 10 November 1941, 2, 12 December 1941, 1, 10 February 1942, 1, 4, 18 February 1942, 1, and



Notes to pages 179–80

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26 February 1942, 1, 3. Changes in the regulations at Toronto and other universities can be seen in the file on 1941–42 training, A1973–0051/156, UTA. 86 Varsity, 21 September 1942, 1. Correspondence showing the steps taken in one of these cases, a third-year medical student, is found in A1968– 0006/056(03), UTA. Other cases are on record in “Court of Discipline,” A1973–0051/152, UTA, with most documents dating from the 1941–42 session. 87 Outlined in President’s Report, 1941–42, 20–5, 31–2; see also Varsity, 25 September 1941, 1, 7, and 20 October 1941, 1, 2, 4. Cody expended no small effort on these arrangements; see A1968–0006/050(03), UTA. 88 Young had warned of the effect of too much training on engineering students at Toronto; see Young to Cody, 9 July 1941, A1968–0006/052(04), UTA. See also the correspondence between Cody and Principal Cyril James of McGill, February 1942, A1968–0006/050(03), UTA; and “Confidential opinion of Faculties of Engineering on C.O.T.C. and other military training from the standpoint of engineering and science students,” attached to a letter from L.E. Westman, Director of National Selective Service, to Cody, 4 June 1942, A1968–0006/062(02), UTA. It is clear from internal evidence that “University B” is Toronto. The same file contains correspondence outlining the first steps taken by the Wartime Bureau of Technical Personnel and the National Selective Service to apportion science and engineering students among the armed forces and industry. The measures taken by the FASE to combine military training with the engineering curriculum are reviewed in President’s Report, 1940–41, 29–32; and President’s Report, 1941–42, 25–7. 89 The correspondence on exemptions from the 1942 camp is found in Communications from Department of National Defence, Military Districts, etc., A1973–0051/155, UTA. 90 The problem was not restricted to Toronto. Cody’s correspondence with Sidney Smith contains a report from the commander of the University of Manitoba Contingent noting the difficulties in securing suitable administrative and training staff. Qualified officers in the Active Service Force could not be appointed to the COTC, which was part of the Reserve Army; even when the restriction was lifted, few would seek or accept postings to the COTC because of reductions in pay, status, and advancement possibilities. The argument for distinguishing the COTC from the reserves in the eyes of the public and emphasizing its unique role anticipates the discussion along the same lines at Toronto in 1944. See Smith to Cody, 31 December 1941 (with memorandum attached), and Smith to Cody, 17 February 1942, A1968–0006/051(05), UTA. See also Cody’s exchanges with Cyril James at McGill in January 1942, A1968– 0006/050(03), UTA. 91 Varsity, 25 February 1942, 1, 4, and 4 March 1942, 1, 4.

324

Notes to pages 180–1

92 Varsity, 16 January 1942, 1, 19 January 1942, 1, 4, 28 January 1942, 1, 30 January 1942, 1, 4, 10 February 1942, 1, 4, 25 February 1942, 2, 6 March 1942, 1, 4, and 13 March 1942, 1, 4. It was also noted that American students were not exempt from the draft, as were their Canadian counterparts; see Varsity, 12 January 1942, 2. The constitution of the “Victory Club,” founded at the beginning of the 1941–42 session, expressed its members’ desire for realistic training in modern methods of war; A1968–0006/058(05), UTA. 93 A problem at other universities as well; see Minutes of Conference of Officers Commanding and Representatives of Contingents of the C.O.T.C., Toronto, 10 June 1942, Miscellaneous 1942–43, A1973–0051/156, UTA. A year later, a Varsity editorial insisted that complaints and suggestions about the COTC “reflected the serious place of military training in the students’ minds”; Varsity, 8 February 1943, 2. 94 Varsity, 30 January 1942, 2. 95 It would be very interesting to count the number of Varsity articles dealing with the war as opposed to the post-war world; by an admittedly impressionistic reckoning, it would seem that for every piece on the war there are two or three on the management of the post-war world. The real concern was not to repeat the mistakes of the years after 1918. 96 John Alvin Surerus, a student at Victoria College in 1914–15 and professor of German during the Second World War, commented on the contrast in a 1973 oral history interview; transcript in B1974–0023, UTA. 97 There is much material on conscientious objectors. See the minutes of the meetings of the Military Training Committee and Court of Discipline 1940– 41, A1973–0051/153; the three files in A1973–0051/155; and the Minutes of the President’s Committee on Military Training, 1940–44, A1973–0051/115, UTA. The Board of Governors sought to bar conscientious objectors by passing a resolution that no student be admitted to the university unless he agreed to abide by the regulations on military training; see Minutes of the Board of Governors, 10 October 1940 to 11 December 1941, 137, 211 (meetings, 12 April and 26 June 1941), A1970–0024/027, UTA. The resolution was later withdrawn; see Fennell to Cody, 14 May 1942; C.E. Higginbottom to Fennell, 15 May 1942, Military Training Miscellaneous, 1941–42, A1973–0051/156, UTA. Those objecting on religious grounds were required to identify themselves before registering and to do first aid training with a university division of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade or in the Red Cross; see, for example, the correspondence between Fennell and Professor C.D. Rouillard during the spring of 1942, Military Training Miscellaneous 1941–42, A1973–0051/156, or the letters in Military Training, General Correspondence 1940–41, 1941–42 (Students) and Correspondence (Students) 1942–43, A1973–0051/157, UTA.



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98 Varsity, 15 December 1941, with editorials explaining the purpose of the issue; see also Varsity, editorial, 22 January 1942, 2. 99 Varsity, 13 March 1942, 1, 4, and 6 March 1942, 1; President’s Report, 1941–42, 6. 100 Madill’s report is in A1968–0006/054(03), UTA; it formed the basis for the military supplement published in the Varsity, 21 September 1942. 101 The sources for the COTC in 1942–43 are Torontonensis 45 (1942–43): 223–34; University of Toronto Monthly 43 (1942–43): 3–4, and passim; and President’s Report, 1942–43, 67–71. 102 It also coincided with the reinvigoration of infantry training that began in the spring of 1942 with the introduction of more realistic methods of preparing NCOs and other ranks; see R. Daniel Pellerin, “Battle Drill Comes to Canada, 1942–1945,” Canadian Army Journal 16, no. 1 (2015): 48–69. 103 Madill explained the process to the students in Varsity, 26 September 1941, 1, 4, and 8 October 1941, 4. Hayes, “Development of the Canadian Army Officer Corps,” 99–124; and Tremblay, Instruire une armée, 139–82, discuss the approaches to officer training, with emphasis on the crucial period between April 1941 and July 1943. See also Stacey, Six Years of War, 127–32, 138–41. 104 Hayes, “Development of the Canadian Army Officer Corps,” 115–16, cites the impressive total of 7,441 COTC candidates chosen for officer training in 1942 as proof of the army’s reliance on the universities. 105 “Minutes of C.O.T.C. Commanding Officers, 10 June 1942,” Miscellaneous 1942–43, A1973–0051/156, UTA; and 325.009 (D176), DHH; see also “Memorandum, Military Training University of Toronto,” 25 February 1943, 112.3M3009 (D84), DHH. 106 Exactly which tests were used is not specified, but we know from the Varsity (9 February 1943, 1, and 4 March 1943, 1, 4) that the members of the 1st Battalion were given the notorious “M” test, which supposedly measured the subject’s mental capacity. On the types of observations, interviews, and tests that formed the psychological approach to officer assessment, see Hayes, “Development of the Canadian Army Officer Corps,” 130–7; and idem, “Science and the ‘Magic Eye’: Innovations in the Selection of Canadian Army Officers, 1939–1945,” Armed Forces and Society 22, no. 2 (1995/1996): 275–95. A reminder that this “science” was very much in its infancy is found in a Varsity report on a speech given by Brigadier Brock Chisholm, head of army personnel selection. Among the pearls of wisdom he dispensed, he noted that the army had rejected many men unable to make the adjustment to military life. Too many boys, he claimed, were being raised by overly protective mothers, which made them unwilling to face up to the necessity of killing in battle; Varsity, 14 February 1944, 1, 3.

326

Notes to pages 186–8

1 07 Varsity, 21 September 1942, 3, and 24 September 1942, 6. 108 Torontonensis 45 (1942–43): 223. 109 Tremblay, Instruire une armée, 158–60, criticizes the COTC for lacking seriousness (“le manque de sérieux du CEOC”), and exposes its flaws, especially as a refuge for the sons of well-to-do families (Pierre Trudeau being the prime example of an able-bodied young man using the corps to escape military service). Not all COTCs were the same, however, and we should be wary of assumptions about the socio-economic status of university students. It must also be recognized that the University of Toronto made every effort to have its young men do serious military training and enlist upon graduation. 110 See the candid assessment given by one student in Acta Victoriana 67, no. 4 (1943): 4. 111 “Trends of Officer Training as noted at O.T.C. Brockville, Sept. 42,” from Major G.R. Lane, Chief Instructor, 2nd Bn. to Officers of 2nd Bn. U. of T. Cont. C.O.T.C., A1968–0003/010(02), UTA. The arrangements for this visit and the program laid out by Colonel Gregg are filed in 325.009 (D176), DHH. 112 See the description laid out in “Officer Training at the Brockville O.T.C.” by Captain J. Matheson, 369.033(D1), DHH. It is interesting to note from this document that not until 1942–43 did the methods and objectives of officer training at the Brockville OTC become firmly established. 113 Major C.R. Sanderson’s lecture notes are in A1968–0003/010(03) and (04), UTA; see also “University of Toronto Contingent, Canadian Officers Training Corps,” which details the methods and objectives of the Niagara Camp training period in June 1943, Reports on COTC and Histories, ca. 1937–44, A1968–0003/006(02), UTA. 114 Varsity, 5 October 1942, 2, and 10 March 1943, 2. 115 The University Air Training Corps and the University Naval Training Division operated alongside the COTC; the air force training unit on campus was disbanded in early 1945 and its members reassigned to the COTC. 116 Varsity, 29 September 1942, 1, 4. 117 Varsity, 1 October 1942, 1, 2 October 1942, 1, 5 October 1942, 1, 2, and 6 October 1942, 2; University of Toronto Monthly 43 (1942–43): 40. 118 A useful overview, “Military Training at University of Toronto, April ’43,” remarks on the “decided change in the attitude of the undergraduates as a whole towards enlistment.” The figures cited in this document, indicating the willingness of 2nd Battalion members to go on active service upon graduation, show that 1,640 COTC men had received appointments on active service by the end of the 1942–43 session; Reports on COTC and Histories, ca. 1937–44, A1968–0003/006(02), UTA. See also



Notes to pages 188–9

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Varsity, 10 March 1943, 3; Torontonensis 45 (1942–43): 224; University of Toronto Monthly 43 (1942–43): 229, listing the numbers that went into the artillery, engineers, signals, armoured corps, and infantry. 119 The draft of the report prepared by the Canadian Social Science Research Council (revised and initialled by Harold Innis) during the annual meeting, 30 October–1 November 1942, is in A1968–0006/054(03), UTA. The correspondence of C.R. Young, dean of the FASE, reveals the pressures on the department; A1968–0006/057(03), UTA. See also President’s Report, 1942–43, 4–5, 7–8, 23–5, 26–8. 120 Varsity, 24 September 1942, 1, and the editorials, 2. 121 Varsity, 21 September 1942, 1; Globe (Toronto), editorial, 24 December 1942, A1973–0051/154, UTA. A letter of 11 May 1942 sent to Cody by W.B. Scott, criticized the abuse of the regulations by students exempt from active service by virtue of membership in the COTC. Cody referred the matter to Madill, who reiterated the condition applying at Toronto that all were to enlist in the Active Service Force upon graduation. Whether this rule was in force elsewhere is not clear; A1968–0006/051(05), UTA. Other university heads raised the issue with Cody; see Smith to Cody, 2 September 1941, A1968–0006/052(01); Cody to F.C. James, 22 September 1941, A1968–0006/050(03); and Cody to R.C. Wallace, 23 March 1942 and 27 March 1942, A1968–0006/052(03), UTA. A letter from Professor E.F. Burton (written during the 1942–43 session) brought Cody’s attention to the “exceptionally large number of applicants” to the schools of medicine, dentistry, and engineering. Many were weak students who, in Burton’s view, were trying to enter the university to avoid military service; A1968– 0006/054(02), UTA. Ways to review applications and fend off hostile press reports about slackers are recorded in the files of the registrar, A1968–0006/054(06), UTA. 122 Stacey, Arms, Men and Governments, 403–12; Stevenson, Canada’s Greatest Wartime Muddle, 3–11, 51–65; Daniel Byers, “J.L. Ralston as Minister of National Defence during the Second World War: A Reassessment,” Canadian Army Journal 16, no. 1 (2015): 71–95. Deliberations on the looming shortage of engineers and scientists were already under way in the spring of 1942. The steps to be taken to increase the number of engineering students and arrange their COTC training are laid out in Conference of Representatives of the Arts Departments of Mathematics and Science, and of Departments in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering (Canadian Universities), A1973–0051/155, UTA; the agreements between the National Selective Service and the universities on the status of arts and science students are appended to NCCU, Twentieth Meeting (Hamilton, ON, McMaster University, 1944), 64–76.

328

Notes to pages 189–90

123 Varsity, 11 November 1942, 3, mentions the first cull at Queen’s; a flurry of notices tallies up those who stumbled at the hurdle of the first-term examinations; see Varsity, 8 January 1943, 1 (Queen’s and Manitoba), 20 January 1943, 1 (Ottawa), 21 January 1943, 1 (McGill), and 25 January 1943, 1 (Western). A table of the “plucked” published on the front page of the 27 January issue shows Toronto (100) in second place after UBC (152), followed by Queen’s (90), Manitoba (89), Alberta (76), McGill (66), Western (55), McMaster (22), Ottawa (20), Ontario Agricultural College (11), and Dalhousie (11). No figures are cited from francophone universities. By February, 827 students had been asked to leave their respective universities across the country, a total that increased to just over a thousand by the end of the session; Varsity, 9 February 1943, 1; University of Toronto Monthly 43 (1942–43): 170, also noting that 56 Varsity men had lost their deferments. Toronto took a forgiving approach and allowed these students to complete their year. Subsequently all students finishing in the lower half of their class were reported to the local Selective Service Board, but were allowed to complete their year: see Cody to Monsignor Cyrille Gagnon, 18 January 1944, A1968– 0006/060(02), UTA. Lists of students enrolled in the COTC in 1942–43 and their academic standing are in A1973–0051/158, UTA. 124 “Minutes of the special meeting of the NCCU held in Ottawa on January 9th, 1943,” Minutes of former meetings etc. Orders in Council etc., A1973–0051/154, UTA. The policies concerning the eligibility of students applying to university and the regulations governing the continuation of their deferments were thrashed out at a meeting of the NCCU in August 1943. It generated a great deal of paperwork, filed in A1973–0051/154, UTA. 125 Varsity, 11 January 1943, 4, on regulations stating that science students were not to enlist in the armed forces unless approved by the Department of Labour; see also “Circular re University Science Students, December 30, 1942,” A1973–0051/154, UTA. 126 The reports of a speech given by the assistant director of the National Selective Service calling for the curtailment (a much favoured word in the department’s vocabulary) of the university curriculum aroused immediate and strong reactions; see Varsity, 19 October 1942, 1, 20 October 1942, 2, and 26 October 1942, 1, 2. The debates concerning the humanities and the key part played by Innis are reviewed by McKillop, Matters of Mind, 529–47; and Harris, History of Higher Education in Canada, 496–502. Cody’s arguments are taken from his reflections on the curriculum in President’s Report, 1941–42, 1–2, 15–18; President’s Report, 1942–43, 1, 19–20; and his address to the NCCU, 9–11 June 1942, Toronto, in Proceedings of the Nineteenth NCCU, 74–6.



Notes to pages 191–2

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127 A point made in the exchange of correspondence with Professor Watson Kirkconnell of McMaster University during December 1942, A1968– 0006/055(04), UTA, which includes the “Memorial on studies in the humanities in Canada” signed by more than forty professors across the country. 128 Quoting Cody’s draft of Toronto’s position at the NCCU conference in January 1943; text in A1968–0006/059(30), UTA, and “December 1942– January 1943: Meeting of representatives of the University of Toronto to the Nat. Conf. of Can. Universities,” A1973–0051/155, UTA. 129 For a wise discussion of Canadian approaches to officer selection in the Second World War, see Bill McAndrew, “Canadian Officership: An Overview,” in Horn and Harris, Generalship and the Art of the Admiral, 37–68. Captain Cyril Falls’s reflections are still worth reading; see his “Training an Army in Peacetime,” Canadian Army Journal 1, no. 5 (1947): 1–3. The ways in which the officer selection and training process prepared men for the realities of battle – or not – are described on the basis of one man’s service record (beginning with his COTC training at Bishop’s University) by Geoffrey Hayes, “A History of Lieutenant Jones,” in Canada and the Second World War: Essays in Honour of Terry Copp, ed. G. Hayes, M. Bechthold, and M. Symes (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 413–29; reading this, we do well to remember what the country was asking of citizens scarcely out of their boyhood. 130 “Minutes of the Conference of O.C.’s Contingents held in Woods Building, Ottawa, Sunday, 10th January, 1943,” A1973–0051/152, UTA. Stuart’s name is wrongly given as “Stewart” in this record. The emphasis on character in officers has been explored by Geoffrey Hayes and Kirk Goodlet, “Exploring Masculinity in the Canadian Army Officer Corps, 1939–45,” Journal of Canadian Studies 48, no. 2 (2014): 40–69. 131 Captain H.S.M. Carver, Army Examiner, Officer Selection and Appraisal Board, Brockville OTC, to Cody, 1 March 1944, with report attached (addressed to the director of personnel selection, 25 February 1944), A1968–0006/062(04), UTA. Carver, whose memories of the Training Battalion are quoted on the last pages of this book, taught in the School of Architecture from 1938 to 1941 and inherited some of Madill’s courses when the war broke out. He joined the Canadian Army in 1942, served as a personnel selection officer, and returned to the university as a lecturer in the School of Social Work; see Varsity, 16 October 1947, 1; Varsity Graduate 1, no. 3 (1948): 9–11. His perceptive, often poignant, account of his wartime duties reveals the very human perspective he brought to his career as a landscape and urban architect. See his autobiography, Compassionate Landscape (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 61–76.

330

Notes to pages 192–6

132 On No. 1 Canadian Army Course, see University of Toronto Monthly 43 (1942–43): 227–8; Varsity, 25 September 1942, 1, 4. The discussions that gave rise to the course are found in “Report of proceedings of a Meeting of Representatives of Teaching Departments in the FASE and science departments in the Faculty of Arts, held Saturday, June 6, 1942,” Conference of Representatives of the Arts Departments of Mathematics and Science, and of Departments in the FASE (Canadian Universities), A1973–0051/155, UTA; see also the correspondence in Cody’s files, A1968–0006/057(06), UTA. The terms of the agreement with the university are recorded the Minutes of the Meeting of the Treasury Board, 21 October 1942 and in other documents filed in 112.3M3009 (D84), DHH. A second course was given at twelve Canadian universities in 1943–44. 133 A note in the Varsity, 1 October 1946, 7, announces a reunion of the estimated fifty to seventy-five members of Army Course No. 1 now enrolled at the university in arts, sciences, and dentistry. 134 W. Stewart Wallace, Notes on Military Writing for English-Canadian Soldiers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1943), designed for use in both the COTC and CAUC. On physical training and sports in the COTC, see President’s Report, 1942–43, 63–5; President’s Report, 1943–44, 66–9. 135 Cody to J.L. Ralston, Minister of National Defence, 6 May1942, A1968– 0006/051(04), UTA. 136 Varsity, 25 February 1942, 1, 4. 137 Sirluck, First Generation, 99–105. 138 Cody to Ralston, 29 March 1943; Ralston to Cody, 16 April 1943, A1968– 0006/051(04), UTA. 139 Madill to Cody, re “Engineer Candidates for Commission,” 5 May 1943, in UTA A1968–0006/055(05), with copies in A1968–0006/051(04), UTA. Cody had voiced similar concerns to the minister in a letter of 2 April 1943, A1968–0006/056(04), UTA. 140 Lieutenant-Colonel F.S. Milligan, DEO, RCE, Military District No. 2, to Major H.W. Tate, 26 April 1943, A1968–0006/055(05), UTA; emphasis his. 141 Ralston to Cody, 22 May 1943, A1968–0006/055(05), UTA. 142 “Memorandum. C.O.T.C. Training,” from the Department of National Defence to the Director of Military Training, 21 December 1943, 112.3M3009 (D144), DHH. 143 The preference for men toughened by service in the ranks and unburdened by too much book learning comes through very strongly in the National Film Board’s 1943 Up From the Ranks, which portrays the rigours and content of officer training courses. It does not flatter the COTC, to say the least. The film can be seen online at https://www.nfb. ca/film/up_from_the_ranks/. The debate goes on even today; see, for instance, Danic Parenteau, “General Culture as School of Command:



Notes to pages 196–8

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Training Our Young Officers,” Canadian Military Journal 15, no. 1 (2014): 59–63. 144 For the memorandum, “Commissions Active Army, C.O.T.C. Personnel,” 29 March 1943, detailing this change of policy, see 112.3M3009 (D144), DHH. 145 Varsity, 4 March 1943, 1, 4; University of Toronto Monthly 43 (1942–43): 170; University of Toronto Monthly 44 (1943–44): 167. Signals was described as the “toughest course.” Candidates were to have mastered basic codes and signals by the time they graduated; they had to have passed algebra, geometry, and physics, to have taken the army’s “M” test, and then to have been interviewed by a panel of officers from the Corps of Signals. Three months at Brockville, followed by eighteen months of specialized training at Kingston, would earn them a lieutenant’s commission. The final month was spent learning how to handle men under their command. 146 Hayes, “Development of the Canadian Army Officer Corps,” 125–54, 164–6. 147 University of Toronto Monthly 43 (1942–43): 255; University of Toronto Monthly 44 (1943–44): 3; Torontonensis 46 (1943–44): 272; President’s Report, 1942–43, 69. 148 The documents outlining the changes in COTC training are in 112.3M3009 (D144), DHH. 149 J.D. Wray, “The University and the War,” Torontonensis 46 (1943–44): 265; President’s Report, 1943–44, 72–5. 150 Varsity, 10 December 1943, 1, and 13 December 1943, 1. 151 Varsity, 15 October 1943, 2, 13 December 1943, 2, 13 January 1944, 2 (used here), and 17 March 1944, 2. 152 Varsity, 15 December 1943, 2, 3. This followed a long campaign on the part of Major C.R. Young to reduce the number of training hours for science students at all universities. See “Analysis of replies to questionnaire relating to Military Training in the Engineering Faculties and Colleges in Canada,” and his correspondence with Cody during the summer and fall of 1943, A1968–0006/062(02) and Senate Executive Committee – Military Training, 1943, A1965–0013/099, UTA. 153 “Historical sketch of the COTC by Mrs Sorby, February 1963, with particular reference to the University of Toronto,” 530.009 (D1), DHH. 154 “Summary of Appointments and Enlistments in Canadian Army (Active and Reserve) (so far as known) received by members of the University of Toronto C.O.T.C. (to June 30th, 1944),” Reports on COTC and Histories, ca. 1937–44), A1968–0003/006(02); W.S. Wallace (quoting Madill) to Cody, 24 March 1944, A1968–0006/062(01); and C.R. Young to Cody, 29 November 1943, A1968–0006/062(02), citing a total of 455 science

332

Notes to pages 199–200

graduates collectively representing over 90 per cent of their classes. See also the figures given by Cody to Major-General A.E. Potts, Military District No. 2, 8 January 1945, A1968–0006/063(03), UTA. 155 “An unofficial report of the U. of T. Mess Committee for presentation as new business at the Annual Meeting of Officers May 22nd [emended to March] 1944,” Minutes – Officers Meetings, 1921–46, A1968–0003/009, UTA. 156 “Minutes of the Conference of O.C.’s Contingents held in Woods Building, Ottawa, Sunday, 10th January, 1943,” A1973–0051/152, UTA. 157 The plight of the smaller institutions is described in the representation made to the government by an advisory committee in the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland. See the copy sent by Norman A.M. MacKenzie, President, University of New Brunswick, to Cody, 27 November 1941, A1968–0006/051(02); see also President Carleton Stanley of Dalhousie to Cody, 11 April 1942, A1968–0006/052(01), UTA. The NCCU, Nineteenth Meeting (Toronto, 1942), 52–3, records the pleas from the smaller institutions that the armed services cease recruiting in the universities; that the COTC become a rather small, select body consisting only of prospective officer material; that Auxiliary Battalion training not be compulsory for all male students for more than two years, since in many cases (medicine, dentistry, engineering, honours science) the war effort might be furthered more effectively by students in senior years giving their full time to professional training. The widely different training given to medical students in various contingents was the subject of considerable discussion in 1942–43; see 112.3M3009 (D84), DHH. 158 The rector of the Université de Montréal, Monseigneur Olivier Maurault, felt that the small minority of francophone universities was at the mercy of the NCCU and all federal organizations when it came to policies concerning the status of students. His remarks to the press in the fall of 1943 about the nature and outcome of the discussions with the National Selective Service prompted strong replies from Sidney Smith of Manitoba and A.H. McGreer of Bishop’s; A1973–0051/154, UTA. 159 See the documents pertaining to the NCCU meeting and the question of the uniformity of the COTC, University Advisory Board, 6 January 1944 to 25 February 1944, A1973–0051, UTA; and NCCU, Twentieth Meeting, item VII, 23–5; the minutes also record the intention to continue officer training in the post-war era. 160 “Report of the Special Committee appointed by the Commanding Officer following the Annual Meeting of the U. of T. Contingent, C.O.T.C. Mar 22, 1944,” appended to Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of Officers of the University of Toronto Contingent COTC held at Contingent Headquarters, on Friday 6 April 1945, Minutes of Officers Meetings,



Notes to pages 200–6

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1921–46, A1968–0003/009, UTA. Note that the meeting in which it was decided to launch the publicity campaign was held on 6 September 1944. 161 Copies are filed in A1968–0003/008; the drafts are in A1968–0003/006(02), UTA. 162 All now in A1968–0003/008, UTA. The files of the Office of the Registrar contain the raw material for an intended Roll of Service, beginning with a form letter sent to all veterans asking for the particulars of their service careers and a typescript (dated 25 February 1949) listing the university’s fallen (which will have been the list used for the panels in the archway beneath the Soldiers’ Tower); A1965–0002/001, UTA; thirty boxes of the forms returned to the registrar have been sitting in the archives since the late 1940s (A1965–0002/002–030, UTA). The task of compiling and publishing this mass of material recording the service of 11,094 “sons and daughters of the university” proved too daunting; see Marcus Long, “Varsity’s Roll of Honour,” Varsity Graduate 2, no. 3 (1949): 41–3. Not until fifty years after the war did a register of the university’s 557 fallen appear. For the final tabulation, see President’s Report, 1945–46, 1; and Harold E. Brown, University of Toronto Memorial Book: Second World War 1939-1945 (Toronto: Soldiers’ Tower Committee, University of Toronto, 1994). Note that 186 served in the Canadian Army, 301 in the RCAF, 33 in the RCN, and the rest in British, US, Dutch, Australian, and Indian forces. 163 The draft of the War Diary has a table (on p. 36) of the known enlistments for active service in the Canadian, British, and US forces. Although an incomplete reckoning, the figures are of interest: 280 in the artillery, 213 in the infantry (rifle), 151 in the Armoured Corps. The Royal Canadian Engineers took in 164 men, the Corps of Signals 89, the Ordnance Corps 133, and the Army Service Corps 38. A total of 726 men enlisted in the Active Army but their units were not known. Note, too, that 251 joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, and 202 the Canadian Dental Corps. The RCN accepted 293 men, the RCAF 451, showing the results of the naval and air training units operating in conjunction with the COTC after 1942. 164 University of Toronto Monthly 45 (1944–45): 5. 165 See “Court of Discipline 1944–45,” A1973–0051/152, UTA. 166 Varsity, 10 October 1944, 1. 167 Varsity, 23 September 1944, 3. The COTC’s activities are reviewed in Torontonensis 47 (1944–45): 236–43; and President’s Report, 1944–45, 83–6. 168 Cody to Madill, 6 March 1945, A1968–0006/064(05), UTA. 169 Some of Cody’s contemporaries found him a bit long-winded and ambitious, but even a cursory inspection of his correspondence reveals his fairness and kindness to anyone who sought his help. The moral clarity with which he saw the war enhances the university’s proud record of service in 1939–45.

334

Notes to pages 207–10

170 Cody’s position is laid out in his “Statement concerning the admission of certain refugees to the University of Toronto in the fall term of 1942,” filed in the large dossier in Refugee Students, A1968–0006/057(09), UTA, where most of the documentation is concentrated; it includes a touching appeal to Cody from one of the applicants, Edmund Klein. Further regulations on refugee students and training are found in A1968–0006/062(10), UTA. See also Madill to Military District No. 2, undated, “re Refugee Students -Enrolment in C.O.T.C.,” Committee on Military Training 1943, A1973–0051/152; the circular from the Department of National Defence on enlistment of aliens and citizens in the Canadian Army, Military Training Com. Nov. 1943, A1973–0051/152; and correspondence between the COTC and the registrar, November– December of 1943, Meeting Military Training Committee, 1944, A1973– 0051/152, and Military Training Committee Miscellaneous, 1942–43, A1973–0051/156, UTA. The two students were Klaus Goldschlag and H.K. Rothfels, whose correspondence is found in Cody’s files, A1968– 0006/062(10) and A1968–0006/064(04), UTA. 5. A Vital Link: The University of Toronto Contingent, 1945–1968 1 Torontonensis 47 (1944–45): 242; President’s Report, 1944–45, 83–6; typescript of the unit history in History, 1939–45, A1968–0003/006, UTA. 2 “Petawawa Diary, prepared by Captain I.A. Blackstone and Sergeant H. Shanfield,” 24–5, A1968–0003/006, UTA. 3 On the plans for Canadian participation in the Pacific war, see Stacey, Arms, Men and Governments, 54–62, 482–4. 4 University of Toronto Monthly 45 (1944–45): 195. 5 University of Toronto Monthly 46 (1945–46): 13. 6 NCCU, Twenty-first Meeting (Quebec City, Université Laval, 1945), 31. 7 Sidney Smith (1897–1959) was president of the University of Toronto from 1945 to 1957, having served as dean of the Law School at Dalhousie (1929– 34) and president of the University of Manitoba (1934–44); see Varsity, 28 September 1944, 1, 4; University of Toronto Monthly 44 (1943–44): 255–6; Friedland, University of Toronto, 363–72; and the brief biography by Edward A. Corbett, Sidney Earle Smith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961), esp. 37–57. 8 The Joint Services University Training Committee replaced the President’s Committee on Military Training in the fall of 1944 and held its first meeting on 7 December of that year. Its purpose was to coordinate army, navy, and air force training and to administer recruiting policies in the interests of the services, the university, and the students. See the minutes of the meeting of 18 September 1944, and successive meetings, Joint Services University



Notes to pages 210–12

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Training Committee – 1944–45 and Joint Services University Training Committee from December 1944 to 1958, A1973–0051/115, UTA. 9 Norman DePoe, “The End and the Beginning,” Varsity Graduate 1, no. 4 (1948): 1–4. Warren Stevens, the university’s athletic director, was in charge of the medical reconditioning program for the RCAF and en route to the Pacific when Hiroshima and Nagasaki hit the headlines. His haste to get back and resume his duties makes one story that speaks for many; see University of Toronto Monthly 46 (1945–46): 8. See also Smith’s tour d’horizon in President’s Report, 1945–46, 1–25. On the challenges facing the university at the dawn of the post-war era, see Brown, Arts and Science at Toronto, 111– 21; Friedland, University of Toronto, 372–81; and White, Skule Story, 157–71. 10 Smith to James, McGill University, and to Chancellor G.P. Gilmour, McMaster University, 16 August 1945, A1968–007/162(04), UTA; the president made the same argument to the chairman of the University’s Board of Governors, Colonel W.E. Phillips, in a letter of 30 August 1945, A1968–0007/010(02), UTA. 11 Third Meeting of the JSUTC, 7 September 1945, Joint Services University Training Committee from December 1944 to 1958, A1973–0051/115, UTA. 12 Varsity, 24 September 1945, 1. 13 Thomas, UWO Contingent, 301–2. It was not just military training but also improved fitness that the proponents of mandatory COTC participation were calling for, since 40 per cent of Canadian youth had been judged physically unfit for active service; see Canadian Military Journal 13, no. 7 (1945): 5; Canadian Military Journal 13, no. 8 (1945): 5; Canadian Military Journal 13, no. 11 (1946): 4–6, 12–13. For the agreement between the universities to make military training voluntary, see Joint Services University Training Committee – 1944–45, A1973–0051/115, UTA. 14 In September 1945 the members included Colonels J.R. Cockburn, A.D. Lepan, and W.S. Wilson (Madill’s successor as officer commanding); the assessors included Colonel Madill, Dean C.R. Young, Major M.B. Watson, Major W.S. Wallace, Major T.A. Reed, and Wing Commander T.R. Loudon. 15 Fifth Meeting of the JSUTC, 11 February 1946, Joint Services University Training Committee from December 1944 to 1958, A1973–0051/115, UTA. Totals of delinquents by faculty and the letters sent to them are in COTC 1946, A1973–0051/115, UTA. The exasperation of the contingent officers is evident in the notices published in the Varsity, 26 November 1945, 1, and 4 January 1946, 4. It does credit to Wilson and his staff, however, to note that the uniforms and equipment issued to thousands of trainees were collected and sent back to Ottawa “with minimal loss”; see the confidential report submitted to President Smith by Major H.W.F. Appleton, 10 March 1947, A1968–0007/027(07), UTA. 16 President’s Report, 1945–46, 81.

336

Notes to pages 212–15

17 Peter Neary, “Canadian Universities and Canadian Veterans of World War II,” in The Veterans Charter and Post-World War II Canada, ed. Peter Neary and J.L. Granatstein (Montreal; Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 110–48. 18 The reports from the various faculties and departments in the President’s Report, 1945–46, 26–40, show the preponderance of veterans in applied sciences and engineering. On the FASE after the war and the creation of the satellite campus at Ajax, see White, Skule Story, 157–71. 19 President’s Report, 1945–46, 15. 20 Victoria Reports 2, no. 1 (March 1952): 8. The impact of the veterans and the warm afterglow of their presence make the years just after the war one of the most remarkable periods in the university’s history; see Brown, Arts and Science at Toronto, 113–15; Friedland, University of Toronto, 372–81; Alan Heisey, “The Ajax Years,” in Harris and Montagnes, Cold Iron and Lady Godiva, 73–83; and Reed, History of the University of Trinity College, 169–70. Morley Callaghan, “Men in a Hurry,” Varsity Graduate 1, no. 3 (1948): 12–16, offers a collective portrait of the student veterans at Toronto. Smith paid them this tribute on the first page of the President’s Report for 1949–50: “We are not discounting the character and competence of the younger generation when we remark that the University never had such a student body with such maturity, with such capacity to work hard, and with such aspiration as in the years from 1945 to 1950.” It all goes to show that one gets a very different brand of student when the notion of a “safe space” is a slit trench in Normandy. 21 Gidney, Tending the Student Body, 164–82, traces these changes of profound importance for the universities and the COTC in the years after the Second World War. As she rightly notes, the shift in emphasis from “character” to “personality” involved far more than semantics. 22 In this connection it is worth noting that the dean of Forestry conducted an informal poll of the veterans enrolled in that faculty that showed that “all … seemed interested in the financial and security aspects of the careers being opened to them” by the COTC or the Directorate of Defence Research; cited in the memorandum of a meeting held between representatives of the Toronto Contingent and those from National Defence Headquarters, 20 November 1946, COTC 1946, A1973–0051/115, UTA. 23 Varsity, 23 September 1946, 2, and 8 October 1946, 3. 24 Varsity, 25 October 1945, 1, 9 November 1945, 1, and 12 November 1945, 1. A good overview of Canadian attitudes and policies after 1945 is given by J.L. Granatstein, “Gouzenko to Gorbachev: Canada’s Cold War,” Canadian Military Journal 12, no. 1 (2011): 41–53. 25 Ronald G. Haycock and Michael Hennessy, “The Road from Innocence: Canada and the Cold War, 1945 to 1963,” in Horn, Perspectives on the



Notes to pages 215–19

337

Canadian Way of War, 235–63, and Howard Coombs, “Supporting the Pax Americana: Canada’s Military and the Cold War,” with Richard Goette, in Horn, Perspectives on the Canadian Way of War, 265–96. 26 Varsity, 22 January 1948, 5. 27 The story of the Toronto Contingent should be read in parallel with Bindon, Queen’s Men, 123–49. 28 See Paul Axelrod’s summary in Scholars and Dollars: Politics, Economics, and the Universities of Ontario, 1945–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 7–33. 29 Claxton’s life and career have been well covered by David Bercuson, True Patriot: The Life of Brooke Claxton, 1898–1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). The chapters on his tenure as minister of defence include discussion of officer training and the development of the tri-service colleges; see 180–3. 30 On the politicians and soldiers who shaped post-war military policy, see James Eayrs, In Defence of Canada, vol. 3, Peacemaking and Deterrence, 4–74, esp. 60–6; and Granatstein, Canada’s Army, 310–58. The efforts to create a technically competent, professional officer corps are discussed in Godefroy, In Peace Prepared, 47–74; Hayes, “Development of the Canadian Army Officer Corps,” 228–34, 244–52; and Peter Kasurak, “Concepts of Professionalism in the Canadian Army, 1946–2000: Regimentalism, Reaction, and Reform,” Armed Forces and Society 37, no. 1 (2011): 95–118. 31 On Foulkes’s career, see Douglas Delaney, Corps Commanders: Five British and Canadian Generals at War, 1939–45 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 255–95; and Granatstein, Generals, 173–7. Assessments of his tenure as chief of the general staff (1945–51) and chairman of the chiefs of staff (1951–60) credit his influence as a policy maker; see Kasurak, National Force, 10–52, esp. 12–13, 48–9, where he notes Foulkes’s efforts to improve the educational standards of Canadian officers; and Sean Maloney, “General Charles Foulkes: A Primer on How to Be CDS,” in Warrior Chiefs: Perspectives on Canadian Military Leaders, ed. Bernd Horn and Stephen J. Harris, 219–32 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2001). 32 The proceedings of the Chesley Committee and its successor, the Lett Committee, are reviewed in detail by Richard Preston, Canada’s RMC: A History of the Royal Military College (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 305–31. 33 “Minutes of the Meeting of the Joint Services University Training Board held in D[eparment of] M[ilitary] T[raining] Office NDHQ, Ottawa, 13th Nov 1945 at 1700 hrs,” Joint Services University Training Committee – 1944–45, A1973–0051/115, UTA. Thomson’s memorandum is attached as appendix A. 34 The minister of national defence, Douglas Abbott, invited Smith to serve as an alternate member on this committee, which included representatives

338

Notes to pages 219–22

from the NCCU, the federal government, the military, and RMC; see Abbott to Smith, 9 May 1946, and Smith’s acceptance, A1968–0007/010(02), UTA. 35 “Report of the Committee on Provision of Officers for the Canadian Post War Army,” 113.3M3.009 (D7), DHH. 36 NCCU, Twenty-second Meeting (Toronto, 1946), 33–4, and 96–100, appendix L, “Military Training in Universities Outlines of Proposed Plan.” See also the circular sent out by A.B. Fennell, secretary-treasurer of the NCCU, on 12 June 1946, COTC 1946, A1973–0051/115, copy in A1968–0007/027(07), UTA. The final version, “The Programme of the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps,” issued in April 1947, emphasizes the army’s intention to develop a “sound syllabus of training and the selection of highly qualified personnel to conduct the training” and “the elimination of all administrative matters that were previously a burden on the university.” Another circular, sent on 25–26 June 1946 invites the heads of universities and colleges to attend a meeting with Colonel E.F. Schmidlin, director of military training at DND to review the proposed course of military training; COTC 1946, A1973–0051/115, UTA. 37 Torontonensis 49 (1947): 338. 38 Varsity, 23 September 1946, 1, 2, 4, and 8 October 1946, 3. A copy of the Canadian Army Training Manual, no. 67 (October 1946) is in COTC 1946, A1973–0051/115; another copy, with the accompanying pamphlets, is in A1968–0007/027(07), UTA. 39 On the creation of the Defence Research Board and its growth under Omond Solandt (director from 1946 to 1957, and later chancellor of the University of Toronto, 1965–71), see Gordon W. Watson, “Defence Research Board: Policies, Concepts, and Organization,” in Perspectives in Science and Technology: The Legacy of Omond Solandt, ed. C.E. Law, G.R. Lindsey, and D.M. Grenville (Kingston, ON: Queen’s Quarterly, 1994), 61–75. 40 See Solandt, Foulkes, and the chiefs of the naval and air staffs to Smith, 8 November 1946, and further correspondence, memoranda, minutes of meetings, COTC 1946, A1973–0051/115 and A1968–0007/027(07), UTA. Reports on the visit appear in the Varsity, 21 November 1946, 1, and 22 November 1946, 1. 41 The career path is laid out in “Professional Advancement,” Canadian Army Journal 1, no. 8 (1947): 1–2. 42 Meeting of the JSUTC, 10 July 1946, and Seventh Meeting of the JSUTC, 21 October 1946, Joint Services University Training Committee from December 1944 to 1958, with copies in COTC 1946, A1973–0051/115; Foulkes to Smith, 2 October 1946, COTC 1946, A1973–0051/115, UTA. On Appleton’s career, see the biographical outline in A1968–0007/027(07); Appleton to Smith, 10 March 1947; Smith to Foulkes, 26 March 1947; Watson to Smith, 2 July 1947, praising Appleton’s work in 1946–47; and



Notes to pages 222–3

339

Smith to Foulkes, 19 October 1949, expressing the university’s appreciation of his qualities and achievements; A1968–0007/070(07), UTA. See also Appleton’s clippings file, A1973–0026/010(05), UTA; President’s Report, 1946–47, 82–3; President’s Report, 1949–50, 96; Varsity, 17 October 1946, 1. 43 “Annual Meeting of the Officers of the University of Toronto Contingent of the Canadian Officers Training Corps,” 10 January 1947, Minutes, Officers Meetings, 1947–57, A1968–0003/009, UTA. 44 “Report concerning the University of Toronto Contingent, Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, made to Dr. Sidney Smith, President of the University, by Major H.W.F. Appleton, Resident Staff Officer, 10 March 1947,” A1968–0007/027(07), UTA. The list of new officers is given in President’s Report, 1947–48, 85. 45 Eighth Meeting of the JSUTC, 30 April 1947, Joint Services University Training Committee, 1944–45), A1973–0051/115; “Notes for use by Maj HWF Appleton at the Conference of Resident Staff Officers to be held at Room 3411 ‘A’ Building, Army Headquarters, Ottawa 25 Aug 47,” Historical Record, 1946–58), A1968–0003/007, UTA. The curriculum is A1968–0007/027(07); see also Canadian Army Routine Order, No. 6771 (Ottawa, 26 September 1947), A1968–0007/027(07), UTA. 46 Smith agreed with the suggestion put forward by Watson and Appleton that students entering the COTC without previous military experience should hold the rank of “cadet” during their first summer training so that they could mature “under the unforgiving eye of the inevitable sergeant major”; see Watson to Smith, 22 February 1947, and Smith to Watson, A1968–0007/027(07), UTA. 47 “Recommendation for Quotas – 1947 Intake (First Year),” Historical Record, 1946–58, A1968–0003/007), UTA. The Varsity, 15 January 1948, 4–5, noted that 70 per cent of the 1947–48 unit were ex-servicemen. 48 NCCU, Twenty-third Meeting (Montreal, McGill University, 1947), 47–53, 62–3. Toronto’s quota had been raised to 360; the Université de Montréal had 264 enrolled, Laval 168 (the same number as McGill). 49 Foulkes himself toured the corps schools that summer to gauge the cadets’ performance. In a letter to Smith, 18 June 1947, he noted that he was “most favourably impressed with the showing of these young officers at all the Schools I have visited to date”; A1968–0007/027(07), UTA. The 1947 summer training received extensive coverage in the Canadian Army Journal and Canadian Military Journal; see “COTC and Reserve Force Training,” Canadian Army Journal 1, no. 6 (1947): esp. 2–10, where the training in Central Command (Ontario) is described in detail; and “Commissions in the Canadian Army,” Canadian Military Journal 15, no. 5 (1947): 14–15, outlining the scheme and its aims. On the numbers of Varsity men sent to the various corps schools, see President’s Report, 1947–48, 84–5.

340

Notes to pages 223–6

50 In April 1946 Canada was divided for military purposes into five Command areas (Eastern, Quebec, Central, Prairie, Western); the COTC contingents from Toronto, Western, and Queen’s came under the jurisdiction of Central Command, although cadets from university contingents might attend corps schools not within their Command area. 51 Ninth Meeting of the JSUTC, 6 October 1947, Joint Services University Training Committee from December 1944 to 1958, A1973–0051/115, UTA. 52 Canadian Army Journal 1, no. 6 (1947): 1, 23; Canadian Military Journal 15, no. 8 (1947): 23. 53 Varsity, 7 October 1947, 1; Claxton had taken time to address the university’s Joint Services Committee the day before. He had enrolled in the COTC in 1915 before going overseas as an artilleryman, and retained strong memories of the high sense of duty and comradeship he had found in his fellow cadets; see Bercuson, True Patriot, 15, 20. 54 Varsity, 25 September 1947, 1, and 29 September 1947, 5; and Sagar’s clippings file, A1973–0026/395(18), UTA. 55 Varsity, 29 September 1947, 8, and 30 September 1947, 2. 56 For Appleton’s plans for the 1947–48 curriculum, the allocation of staff and classrooms, and other matters, see Appleton to Fennell, 22 August 1947, A1968–0007/043(02), and in COTC Historical Record, 1946–58 (unpaginated and filed in reverse chronological order), A1968–0003/ 007, UTA. 57 President’s Report, 1948–49, 88; President’s Report, 1949–50, 96; see also the annual historical report, Session 1949–50, in COTC Historical Record, 1946–58, A1968–0003/007, UTA. 58 On the creation of the tri-service colleges at RMC and Royal Roads in 1948 and the francophone college at St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, in 1952, see Preston, To Serve Canada, 22–9. 59 For a University Naval Training Division cadet’s account of summer training at sea, see T.W.M. Grier, “Summer Cruise,” Varsity Graduate 4, no. 4 (1956): 174–5, 180. 60 The re-establishment of these units at Toronto can be traced in President’s Report, 1947–48, 84; President’s Report, 1948–49, 87–8; President’s Report, 1949–50, 95, 96–7; and President’s Report, 1950–51, 103, 104. Both Colonel Sagar and Major Appleton were behind the recommendation to the Department of National Defence “that steps be taken to promote the greatest possible co-ordination in the training programme being offered by the Service Units at Canadian Universities”; see Tenth Meeting of the JSUTC, 4 February 1948, Joint Services University Training Committee from December 1944 to 1958, A1973–0051/115, UTA. 61 “The COTC: The Two-Phase Training Programme,” Canadian Army Journal 3, no. 4 (1949): 12–14.



Notes to pages 226–8

341

62 See “Instructions for Command Contingents of the COTC 1949,” 369 (D1), DHH. Suggestions on matching the standards between university and Command COTCs were made by Major Appleton in correspondence with Central Command Headquarters, 7 December 1948, COTC Historical Record, 1946–58, A1968–0003/007, UTA. 63 NCCU, Twenty-fourth Meeting (Vancouver, University of British Columbia, 1948), 18–19; idem, Twenty-fifth Meeting (Halifax, Dalhousie University, 1949), 44; and idem, Twenty-sixth Meeting (Kingston, ON, Royal Military College, 1950), 71. 64 Much of what follows comes from President’s Report, 1947–48, 84–5; Colonel Sagar’s report to the JSUTC, 29 January 1948, COTC 1947–48, A1973–0051/115; “Report on Theoretical Training, Session 1948–49, April 30, 1949,” COTC 1949–51, A1973–0051/115; and “Report on Theoretical Training, Session 1950–51, April 30, 1951,” COTC Historical Record, 1946–58, A1968–0003/007, UTA. It is interesting that the 1951 report notes the use of “M” tests but points out that candidates with low scores were taken anyway since more often than not they turned out to be the best cadets. 65 The idea of a Slavonic Studies Department was greeted with interest by Foulkes in a letter to Smith, 10 February 1948, A1968–0007/043(02), UTA. Upon its creation, Foulkes informed Claxton, as both the minister and External Affairs were anxious that Canada have such a centre. On the establishment of Russian and Slavic Studies at Toronto, see Friedland, University of Toronto, 490–2, B1988–0007/002(42)-(44); and Shore’s clippings file, A1973–0026/414(78), UTA. 66 President’s Report, 1948–49, 88. Tayyeb continued to lecture to the COTC into the 1960s. 67 Torontonensis 50 (1947–48): 304; Varsity, 23 January 1948, 1, and 29 January 1948, 1. 68 The Somalia affair revealed the deficiencies of officer training in the armed forces, particularly the lack of educational and ethical standards evident up and down the chain of command. A great deal of ink was spilled in attempts to explain what had gone so badly wrong and to suggest the steps necessary to repair the damage; see, for example, David J. Bercuson, “Up from the Ashes: The Re-professionalization of the Canadian Forces after the Somalia Affair,” Canadian Military Journal 9, no. 3 (2009): 31–9; Ronald G. Haycock, “The Labours of Athena and the Muses: Historical and Contemporary Aspects of Canadian Military Education,” Canadian Military Journal 2, no. 2 (2001): 5–22; Bernd Horn, “Soldier/Scholar: An Irreconcilable Divide?” Army Doctrine and Training Bulletin 4, no. 4 (2001– 2): 3–8; and Bernd Horn and Bill Bentley, “The Road to Transformation: Ascending from the Decade of Darkness,” Canadian Military History 16, no.

342

Notes to pages 229–30

4 (2007): 33–44, further developed in idem, Forced to Change: Change and Crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2015). 69 NCCU, Twenty-seventh Meeting (Montreal, McGill University, 1951), 14–15, 30–1. 70 These meetings took place twice a year after 1953–54. The minutes of all meetings between the Military Studies Committee and the Personnel Members Committee from 1951 to 1964 are in RG 24, Box 7753, vols. 1–7, Library and Archives Canada (hereafter cited as LAC). 71 And yet by Canadian standards in peacetime, the overall numbers are rather impressive. Exactly 1,877 students attended summer training in 1953, 409 of them in the Third Phase; see Major-General Howard D. Graham to Smith, 18 May 1953, A1968–0007/105(13), UTA. 72 See A1967–0007/116(14), UTA, 1 October 1953. Files in COTC 1952–56, A1973–0051/115, UTA, also contain enrolments lists. The totals are reproduced here; the effects of veteran enrolment in the university and the COTC are noticeable. Enrolment Academic Year

University of Toronto

COTC

1946–47

12,977

244

0

1947–48

13,500

354

474

1948–49

12,571

415

620

1949–50

11,065

369

589

1950–51

9,518

298

543

8,522

187

402

82

251

1951–52 1952–53

not available

COTC including naval and air training units

73 On Simonds’s personality and career, see Delaney, Corps Commanders, 189–254; and Dominick Graham, The Price of Command: A Biography of General Guy Simonds (Toronto: Stoddart, 1993), esp. 240–55 on his time as chief of the general staff (1951–5). 74 Meeting of the JSUTC, 1 May 1951, Joint Services University Training Committee from December 1944 to 1958, A1973–0051/115, UTA, with Simonds’s correspondence attached as appendix A. 75 NCCU, Twenty-eighth Meeting (Quebec City, Université Laval, 1952), 16–17; see also the minutes of the Second Meeting of the Military Studies Committee and the Personnel Members Committee, 7 June 1952, RG 24, Box 7753, vol. 1, LAC.



Notes to pages 230–4

343

76 Warnings that officers were starting too high and not becoming familiar with the experience of other ranks were being sounded at this time; see F.E. Anderson, “The Good Officer,” Canadian Army Journal 4, no. 2 (1950): 13–23. 77 “Report on Theoretical Training 1951–52, 30 April 1952,” COTC 1952–56, A1973–0051/115, UTA; attached is a copy of a letter from President A.E. Kerr of Dalhousie to Simonds, 22 August 1951, complaining likewise of “a breach of faith” and warning of the damaging effect of this sudden change. See also Simonds to Smith, 5 April 1951, A1968–0007/083(06); and contingent commander Lieutenant-Colonel L.S. Lauchland to Smith, 14 April 1951, expressing concerns about the “possible drastic repercussions insofar as COTC enrolment is concerned,” A1968–0007/083(06), UTA. 78 “Report of the Committee on Military Studies,” NCCU, Twenty-eighth Meeting, 54–5; Fourth Meeting of the Military Studies Committee and the Personnel Members Committee, 14 December 1953, RG 24, Box 7753, vol. 2, LAC. 79 Lauchland to Smith, 5 February 1952, A1968–0007/095(14), UTA; see also Torontonensis 54 (1952): 263. 80 The shift in generational outlook is best described in Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 81 Scrawled in Evans’s handwriting on the minutes of the Fourth Meeting of the Military Studies Committee and the Personnel Members Committee, 14 December 1953, RG 24, Box 7753, vol. 2, LAC. The career enhancement aspect of COTC training was played up in Torontonensis 56 (1953–54): 252–3. 82 Both Chamberlain’s report, dated 12 April 1954, and the analysis of recruiting prepared for the McGill COTC by the John Price Jones Company (Canada) and Brakeley and Roberts Ltd., are in COTC 1952–56, A1973– 0051/115, UTA. The lengthy discussion of recruitment is noted in the minutes of the meetings of the JSUTC, 1 October 1953 and 15 April 1954, Joint Services University Training Committee from December 1944 to 1958, A1973–0051/115, and the contingent officers’ meeting, 28 September 1954, Minutes, Officers Meetings, 1947–57, A1968–0003/009, UTA. 83 Copies of the material sent out to incoming students are found in A1968– 0007/127(08), UTA; see also the articles on the national cadet program and the COTC outreach to high school students in Canadian Military Journal 21, no. 7 (1955): 18–21; and Canadian Military Journal 21, no. 8 (1955): 12–14, 55–7. 84 Stacey himself began to give lectures in military history to the contingent during the 1959–60 year, and stayed involved with the COTC until its termination; see President’s Report, 1959–60, 134–5; and Stacey’s lecture notes, B1990–0020/028 and 045, UTA.

344

Notes to pages 234–7

85 Clippings commending Officer Cadet Joel Wagman and a handwritten account of the Army Service Corps camp in the summer of 1955 are found in the photos file, A1968–0003/002.0149, UTA. A photograph of Officer Cadet Eric Reynolds appears in Canadian Military Journal 23, no. 2 (1956), 4, showing his award of the Sword of Honour as the outstanding cadet at the Royal Canadian Ordnance Corps school. 86 Canadian Military Journal 23, no. 2 (1956): 48–9. 87 “Minutes of the Officers’ Meetings, 1947–57, 12 September 1952,” A1968– 0003/009, UTA. 88 The creation and implementation of the ROTP at the country’s service colleges, and its subsequent history, are covered by Preston, To Serve Canada, 29–74. 89 Bill Heath, interview by author, 31 August 2011; Strachan Heighington, interview by author, 29 August 2011; and John Lowndes, interview by author, 23 August 2011, all members of the Toronto Contingent from 1946 to 1949. I have also used the interview with Peter Williamson (COTC 1949– 52) recorded and transcribed by his sister Mary Williamson on 7 October 2011 to round out the description of COTC training in the late 1940s. A word on the use of these records: those interviewed wished to speak about the COTC, not about themselves, and requested that their remarks be used in a general way; accordingly I have not referred to them directly. 90 First encounters with francophone cadets figure prominently in the recollections of nearly all ex-COTC men interviewed. It was the first time they had met the denizens of the other Canada, and the plight of young men training in a language not their own alerted them to the unfairness of a unilingual army. None of the men interviewed expressed any opposition to the use of French – quite the opposite, as all expressed support for the steps taken to promote bilingualism in the armed forces. 91 W.E. Hunt, “The Canadian Reserve Army: To Be – or Not to Be?” Canadian Military Journal 20, no. 10 (1954): 48–52. 92 First Meeting of the Military Studies Committee and the Personnel Members Committee, 15 December 1951, RG 24, Box 7753, vol. 1, LAC; these complaints were taken seriously and revisited at the Fourth Meeting of the two committees, 14 December 1953,” RG 24, Box 7753, vol. 2, LAC. A letter from Colonel Shrum attached to the minutes of this meeting stated that upon investigation the recent complaints did not square with the overall reports of cadets and observers. He wondered if the problems lay with the complainers, and warned that unsubstantiated complaining “has created considerable hard feelings against the COTC in some Corps Schools, to no advantage.” By this time the problems seem to have been ironed out; Canadian Military Journal 20, no. 4 (1953): 27–30.



Notes to pages 237–40

345

93 COTC cadets and officers from the 1950s and 1960s whose interviews are used here: Tony Ahrens (Waterloo Lutheran, 1962–64), interview by author, 1 September 2011; Peter Cameron (McGill, 1950–53), telephone interview by author, 27 August 2011; John Larke (Toronto Contingent officer, 1952–68), interview by author, 6 October 2011; Bill MacFarlane (York-Toronto, 1966–68), interview by author, 29 August 2011; Bruce Matthews (Acadia, 1959–62), e-mail communication with author, 16 June 2011; Tony Partington (Queen’s, 1965–68), interview by author, 23 August 2011; Bob Robertson (Toronto, 1955–57), interview by author, 24 August 2011); Robert Spencer (instructor in the Toronto Contingent, 1955–62, and commanding officer, 1962–66), interviews by author, 11 February 2011 and 22–23 May 2015. Again, these accounts are used in a general way in accordance with the wishes of those interviewed. 94 Changes in the selection process are charted in the Reports on Theoretical Training and the Annual Historical Reports from 1950–51 to 1953–54, COTC 1949–51 / COTC 1952–56), A1973–0051/115 and A1968–0003/007, UTA. 95 According to one cadet trained in the 1960s, the failure rate in the first year was 40 per cent, dropping to 10 per cent or less in the second and third years. 96 The rationale and aims of training in this corps during the 1950s are explained in “Training of the Armoured Corps Soldier,” Canadian Army Journal 7, no. 3 (1953): 98–103; also of interest is the article on service corps training, “The Royal Canadian Army Service Corps School,” Canadian Army Journal 8, no. 3 (1954): 121–8. 97 The rotation of units began with 27th Canadian Infantry Brigade (CIB) (1951), 1st CIB (1953), 2nd CIB (1955), and 4th CIB (1957). On Canada’s NATO commitments, see Isabel Campbell, Unlikely Diplomats: The Canadian Brigade in Germany, 1951–1964 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013); and Sean Maloney, War Without Battles: Canada’s NATO Brigade in Germany, 1951–1993 (Whitby, ON: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1997). 98 “COTC Men in Germany 1952,” Canadian Military Journal 19, no. 6 (1952): 26–7; see also “The 27th Canadian Infantry Brigade Group, 1951–1953,” Canadian Army Journal 8, no. 2 (1954): 2–14; President’s Report, 1951-52, 107–8. 99 See Appleton to Bissell, 30 March 1952, passed on to Smith, describing his duties and noting the good work done by former Varsity COTC men with the newly operational Canadian brigade; A1968–0007/095(14), UTA. 100 Campbell, Unlikely Diplomats, 95–103. 101 Quoting Major H.F. Hoskin, 27th Canadian Infantry Brigade, correspondence re attachment of COTC men to the brigade, 4 August 1952, 410B27.009 (38), DHH. Note that the English and German spellings

346

Notes to pages 240–5

of Han(n)over are used interchangeably in the documentary record. The complaints and responses are summarized in Third Meeting of the Military Studies Committee and the Personnel Members Committee, 10 December 1952, RG 24, Box 7753, vol. 1, LAC. 102 The numbers fell after the COTC was reduced in scale after 1957–58; thirty-five to forty was then the usual average. 103 “Officers of the Future Train in Germany,” Canadian Army Journal 8, no. 4 (1954): 30–5; see also W. Remple, “Training in Germany: 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade Group,” Canadian Army Journal 12, no. 1 (1958): 4–22. 104 R.R. Jeffels, “School for Subalterns,” Canadian Army Journal 9, no. 1 (1955): 90–5. 105 Seventh Meeting of the Military Studies Committee and the Personnel Members Committee, 10 December 1956, RG 24, Box 7753, vols. 4 and 5, LAC; NCCU, Thirty-second Meeting (Montreal, Université de Montréal, 1956), 97–8; NCCU, Thirty-third Meeting (Ottawa, University of Ottawa, 1957), 68–9. 106 The retention rate is drawn from the figures from the years 1953–57 compiled by Brigadier R.M. Bishop, director general of military training, in May 1959 as part of a memorandum weighing the pros and cons of restricting or cancelling the university training programs. Of 3,820 graduates of the COTC in these years, 279 joined the regular army, 721 the militia, 1,489 the supplementary reserves, and the rest did not continue. He also worked out the per capita expenses for 1954, noting that it cost $1,414 to train each man in the COTC, but $7,000 for each officer. See 113.003 (D3), DHH. 107 The summer camps and the COTC training done there received renewed attention in the mid 1950s; see “University Men Concentrate,” Canadian Military Journal 22, no. 8 (1956): 44; “A Review on Militia Camp Training,” Canadian Army Journal 10, no. 1 (1956): 45–6 (with tables showing growth of the reserves); “Summer Training – 1956,” Canadian Army Journal 10, no. 4 (1956): 24–69; “Summer Training at Corps Schools,” Canadian Army Journal 11, no. 4 (1957): 40–71. 108 Torontonensis 58 (1955–56): 94–5; President’s Report, 1955–56, 119–20; President’s Report, 1956–57, 116–17; and “Annual Historical Report, 1956–57,” 27 May 1957, A1968–0003/007, UTA. See also Ralph Campney, Minister of National Defence, to Smith, 3 July 1956, discussing the integration of the ROTP program within the universities, especially in the fields of engineering and science, COTC 1952–56, A1973–0051/115, UTA; and the note on ROTP-COTC cooperation in Canadian Military Journal 23, no. 2 (1956): 48–9. 109 President’s Report, 1957–58, 104–5; “Annual Historical Report, 29 May 1958,” A1968–0003/007, UTA.



Notes to pages 246–7

347

110 Canadian Military Journal 24 no. 1 (1957): 19; and Canadian Military Journal 24, no. 7 (1957): 29–30. See also M.E. Clarke, “The Army’s Role in National Survival,” Canadian Army Journal 14, no. 2 (1960): 13–16; Mark Davidson, “Preparing for the Bomb. The Development of Civil Defence Policy in Canada, 1948–1963,” Canadian Military History 16, no. 3 (2007): 29–42; and A.E. Wrinch, “The Army’s Responsibilities – New Civil Defence Role,” Canadian Army Journal 13, no. 4 (1959): 5–9. 111 The emphasis on ROTP training and the relegation of the COTC to secondary status are evident in the address given to the now-renamed National Conference of Canadian Universities and Colleges (NCCUC) by Air Vice-Marshal J.G. Kerr; see NCCUC, Thirty-fifth Meeting (Saskatoon, University of Saskatchewan, 1959), 18–23. See also F.E. Cochran, “Who Will Take Your Place? The Young Officer Programme,” Canadian Army Journal 13, no. 2 (1959): 74–8; and “Commissioning and Qualifying Officers,” Canadian Military Journal 25, no. 7 (1959): 8. 112 The DND and university positions are summarized in NCCUC, Thirtyfourth Meeting (Edmonton, University of Alberta, 1958), 26–30, 75, 78–9, 91–2. The memoranda and documents are filed with the minutes of the Seventh and Eighth Meetings of the Military Studies Committee and the Personnel Members Committee in 1957–58, RG 24, Box 7753, vols. 5 and 6, LAC. See also Branch of the Adjutant General, Canadian Army Manual for the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps. vol. 1, University Contingents, 1 July 1957, 495.045 (D1), DHH; and the D[epartment of] M[ilitary] T[raining] Instructions re Establishment of Armed Forces Offices, 21 August 1958, on the withdrawal of RSOs and the assumption of their duties by university contingent officers, to take effect on 1 September 1958, 495.006 (D1), DHH. 113 NCCUC, Thirty-eighth Meeting (Hamilton, ON, McMaster University, 1962), 122–3; NCCUC, Thirty-ninth Meeting (Quebec City, Université Laval, 1963), 23–4; Thirteenth Joint Meeting of the Military Studies Committee and the Personnel Members Committee, 14 January 1963, RG 24, Box 7753, vol. 7, LAC. 114 Figures for the Toronto Contingent between 1958 and 1964 (when quotas were sharply reduced) show that the contingent took in 117 cadets, of whom 61 qualified as second lieutenants (the rest were still in the pipeline); 17 had entered the regular army, 16 the reserves, and 28 the supplementary reserves, all directly from the COTC. ROTP enrolment had risen from 39 to 50 during the same span. See “Meeting of the JSUTC, 18 March 1964,” Joint Services University Training Committee, Minutes, 18 March 1964–23 October 1964, A1973–0051/115, copy in Annual Historical Report, 1964, A1968–0003/009, UTA. 115 Canadian Military Journal 27, nos. 5–6 (1961): 3. The idea of training women in the COTC had come up in the early 1950s, to general

348

Notes to pages 247–9

acceptance; see Fifth Meeting of the Military Studies Committee and the Personnel Members Committee, 13 December 1954, RG 24, Box 7753, vol. 2, LAC. Women had already been accepted for university air force training in 1952: see Wing Commander D.G. Allen, University of Toronto Squadron, to Miss Nancy Carr, 29 January 1954, COTC 1952–56, A1973–0051/115, UTA, noting that twenty-five women were enrolled; the same file contains clippings from the Varsity advertising for women in the RCAF and remarks from the COTC RSO to the effect that creating a women’s branch of the COTC “would be a wonderful idea,” although there were no plans to do so yet. 116 The Varsity editorial of 11 November 1959 provoked a torrent of replies; see Varsity, 16 November 1959, 6–7, and 20 November 1959, 4–5. The call for the elimination of the COTC in the 11 November 1963 edition of the Varsity accompanied an editorial so preposterous that it drew replies from Charles Stacey and Emil Fackenheim; see Varsity, 15 November 1963, 4, 13. It must be said that the Varsity loses much of its value and interest as a source after the late 1950s as it slowly turned into a broadsheet for the morally autistic; by the late 1960s it is just one tantrum after another. 117 Strangers to irony, humour, informed perspectives, common sense, and other points of view, the peace groups squabbling before and after Remembrance Day 1965 typify much of what went wrong during that benighted decade; see Varsity, 5 November 1965, 1, 10 November 1965, 1, 4, and 12 November 1965, 1, 5. 118 Madill and Colonel A.C.M. Ross, Board of Trustees, University of Toronto Contingent Fund, “Report on the Acquisition and Development of the Property, 119 St George Street,” 10 March 1960, with further correspondence in B2010–0024/009(02), UTA. 119 Minutes of the 15th Joint Meeting of the Personnel Members Committee with the Military Studies Committee, 15 June 1964, RG 24, Box 7753, vol. 7, LAC. 120 “Commanding Officer’s Report, 9 June 1964,” Annual Historical Report, 1964, A1968–0003/006, UTA; and President’s Report, 1963–64, 177–8. 121 Meeting of the JSUTC, 18 March 1964, appendix A and B, Joint Services University Training Committee, Minutes, 18 March 1964–23 October 1964), A1973–0051/115, copies in Annual Historical Report, 1964, A1968– 0003/009, and in Stacey’s papers, B1990–0020/026, UTA. 122 NCCUC, Fortieth Meeting (Ottawa, 1964), 26, 29. 123 The correspondence and memoranda outlining the interim plan are found in B1990–2010/026, UTA; the Toronto Contingent discussed the plan at the meeting of the JSUTC on 20 October 1964, Joint Services University Training Committee, Minutes, 18 March 1964–23 October 1964, A1973– 0051/115, UTA.



Notes to pages 249–54

349

124 Kasurak, National Force, 102–5, discusses the effects of the Suttie Report on the militia. For copies of “A Paper on University Reserves for discussion with representatives of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada,” 18 January 1967, see 495.009(D5), DHH, and Stacey’s papers, B1990–0020/026, UTA, along with correspondence from Toronto Contingent officers. 125 “University Reserves,” produced by a committee that met on 27 March 1967, “to discuss the proposal to abolish the University Reserves,” University of Toronto Joint Services Training Committee, 1964, B1990– 0020/026, UTA. 126 This is evident in the correspondence between Davidson Dunton, president of Carleton University, and Minister of Defence Leo Cadieux, in September and October 1967, in which Dunton points out that 125 students in the Ottawa area had indicated their interest in the COTC but could get no confirmation of places. Dunton’s annoyance at the delays in decision making and instructions from DND is quite obvious; see 495.009 (D5), DHH. 127 A copy of the notice sent to all universities by Major-General J.-V. Allard, chief of the general staff, is in 112.3Pl.009(D87), DHH; see also “New Training for Reserve Officers,” Canadian Military Journal 33 (Fall 1967), 28. 128 President’s Report, 1967–68, 159–60. 129 R.M. Withers, “A Matter of Education,” Forum: Journal of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute 5, no. 1 (1990): 18–19. 130 B2010–0024/008, UTA; see also the first notices in the Varsity inviting descendants of COTC members to apply for COTC Trust Memorial Awards – for example, 18 December 1968, 15, and 13 January 1969, 5. 131 President’s Report, 1964–65, 207–8. The file in A1968–0003/006(01), UTA, contains the plans, invitations, and program for the Mess Dinner, as well as copies of Colonel Spencer’s article, “A Parade of Proud Memories,” Varsity Graduate 11, no. 5 (1965): 2–8, 123–8. 132 Carver, Compassionate Landscape, 60–1.

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Index

Acheson, Dean, 48 Acheson, Private Edward Campion, 48 Acheson, Lieutenant George, 44 Alumni Association, 24, 26, 119, 122, 128, 151 Appleton, Major Harry, 222–3, 225, 235, 239 Applied Science and Engineering, Faculty of (FASE), 179, 198; source of recruits, 53, 56, 77, 82, 95–6, 153, 179; aeronautics, 143–6 Armistice Day: see Remembrance Day Baker, Professor Alfred, 41, 42, 43, 44–5, 58 Baldwin, Frederick Walker “Casey,” 58, 144 Ballard, Lieutenant Norman, 203 Banting, Frederick, 76 Barton, Dr. James, 125 Biggs, Major Percy, 58 Birney, Earle, 176, 177, 254 Bissell, President Claude, 176, 177, 178, 254 Borden, Frederick, 52, 53, 54, 59, 64, 65–6 Borden, Prime Minister Robert, 77, 93, 96, 102, 113

Bourinot, Arthur, 95 Bramfitt, Lieutenant George, 75, 87, 99 Brockville (Officer Training Centre), 185, 187, 195, 196, 198 Brown, Professor Walter, 189 Bryce, Captain Walter, 171–2, 254 Buckland, George, 28 Burwash, Reverend Nathanael, 25 Cameron, Peter, 242–3 Canadian Army University Course (CAUC), 188, 192–3 Canadian Defence League, 61, 68 Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), 58, 70, 78, 101, 106, 107, 112, 115 Canadian Officers’ Training Corps (COTC), 27, 61, 69, 71; origins, 62–3; initially rejected for cost, 64–8; First World War: created at Toronto, 74–8; growing pains, 78–82; organization, 82–5; need to learn French, 82; terms of enrolment, 88–9; burden on university, 90–1; academic credit granted to trainees, 89–90, 98; first review, 87–8; Niagara Camp, 91–3; devolution, 99–101, 112; mandatory training imposed, 113–16; record, 95–6, 98–9, 117–18; inter-war

368 Index period: effects of war weariness, 123–6; revival, 120, 130–7, 140–1; economy, 128–9, 131–2, 147; obtains headquarters and drill hall, 126, 127–9, 155–8; band formed, 134–6, 172; training and activities, 137–9; relations with peace groups, 122–3, 149–53; annual Ball, 152–3; rise in recruitment, 153–5; role in Royal Visit, 158; record, 123, 147–8; Second World War: expansion, 160–1; possibility of women enrolling, 161–2; standards of recruits, 162–3; instruction, 163–5; Niagara Camp, 165–6, 167, 168, 174–5, 178, 187, 197, 204, 208, 209, 210, 254; academic credit granted to trainees, 164–5, 171; restructured to conform with NRMA, 165–74; experience and perspectives of trainees, 176–83, 193–4, 253–4; training regime intensified, 184–8; debate over preferred qualities in officer candidates, 191–3, 194–7; training regime scaled back, 197–8, 204; uncertain identity and purpose, 198–200; publicity campaign, 200–2; accommodates Jewish refugee students, 206–7; wartime training regulations suspended, 208–12; record, 164–5, 176, 198, 202–4; post-war period: preference for university-educated officers, 215–19; revamped training program, 217–18, 219–20; instituted at Toronto, 220–3; successful beginning, 223–7; naval and air training units, 226, 230; instruction, 219, 222–3, 227, 233–4, 245, 246; annual Ball revived, 228; problems foreseen, 227–9; lack of consultation on part of DND, 230–1, 245–7, 248–50; recruiting

difficulties and remedies, 230–4; integrates ROTP, 234; experience of trainees, 235–44; with NATO brigade in West Germany, 238–42; benefits of COTC experience, 242–4; effects of changed defence policy, 244–7, 248–50; women enrolled, 247; university units discontinued, 250–1; record, 223, 225–6, 234, 244; legacy, 251–4 Cartwright, General George Strachan, 134, 145, 155, 170 Carver, Humphrey Stephen Mumford, 192–3, 253 Chamberlain, Major W.S., 232–3 Cherriman, Professor John Bradford, 19, 20, 37 Chesley Committee, 216–17 Christie, Sergeant James F., 87 Clarry, John, 163 Claxton, Brooke, 216, 225 Cockburn, Lieutenant James Roy, 95, 132–3, 134, 222 Cody, Canon Henry John, 161, 162, 166, 168, 198, 210; support for COTC, 151, 157, 206; political views, 155, 306 (n. 131); advises calm approach to war effort, 159–60; negotiates terms of NRMA for universities, 166–8, 174; states value of arts curriculum, 190–1, 193; defends COTC’s record, 189, 194–5; works with COTC to assist Jewish refugee students, 206–7, 334 (n. 170) Comfort, Charles, 163, 254 Conacher, Professor James, 233 Conn, Lieutenant Kenneth, 134 conscientious objectors, 114, 167, 181, 324 (n. 97) conscription, 112, 113, 160, 166, 181, 211 Cosbie, Major Waring, 134

Index 369 Croft, Professor Henry Holmes, 19, 22, 30, 31, 37, 74; first captain of K Company, 28–9 Croil, Air Commodore George Mitchell, 146 Crooks, Adam, 19, 22 Dalhousie University, 58, 59 De Lury, Alfred, 75 Denison, Colonel George T., 32 Denison, George Taylor, 32 Denison, Colonel Richard, 105 Denison, Major Robert Brittain, 32, 34 Department of National Defence (DND), 123, 132, 145, 155, 176, 184, 195, 196, 200, 215, 220, 222, 226, 228, 229, 231, 234, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, 250 Dieppe raid, 188 drill hall: desideratum, 48, 65–6, 155–6; prohibitive cost of, 67–8; built, 157–8 Dyment, John Talbot, 144 Ellis, Professor William Hodgson, 19, 67, 74, 90 engineers: see Applied Science and Engineering, Faculty of; Toronto Field Company of Engineers Evans, Joseph, 232 Falconer, Sir Robert Alexander, 79, 82, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 97, 98, 100, 105, 106, 113, 120, 122, 126, 127, 131, 134, 138, 139, 145, 151, 204, 251; supports officer training, 62–3; first attempt to create COTC at Toronto, 64–7; on meaning of Great War, 70–1; support for war effort, 71–2; institutes COTC, 74–8; encourages formation of university battery, 107–8; combats political meddling 109–11; imposes compulsory training, 113–16;

suspends compulsory training, 117, 124; reflects on Great War, 117–18; revives COTC, 124–5, 130, 133 Fenians, 19, 31, 45, 140, 202, 204; raid of 1866, 20–2, 24, 25, 34, 35–8 Field, Colonel G.W., 250 fire of 1890, 18, 24, 48 First Canadian Universities Tank Battalion, 104–5 flight training, 143–6 Fotheringham, Colonel John Taylor, 44, 62–3, 66, 74, 77 Foulkes, General Charles, 216–17, 219, 230 Gibson, John Morison, 19–20, 26 Goodman, Lieutenant Ambrose Harold, 141–2 Goodman, Lieutenant Frederick, 203 Gregg, Brigadier Milton, 187, 217 Gunther, Lieutenant Ernest, 44 Gwatkin, General Willoughby, 110, 131, 297 (n. 40) Haldane, Richard, 64 Haldenby, Colonel Eric, 95, 172 Hart House, 125, 142, 168, 181, 182 Hellyer, Paul, 248 Henderson, Professor Velyien Ewart, 76, 77, 87, 99 Hughes, Sir Sam, 67, 68, 75, 77, 91, 93, 109, 110, 111 Hunt, Sergeant-Major William, 147 Hutton, Professor Maurice, 68, 77, 98 Hyndman, Margaret, 161–2 Innis, Professor Harold, 190 James, Principal Cyril, 198 Johnston, Captain Edward P., 110–11 Joint Services University Training Committee (JSUTC), 210, 211, 217, 222, 232, 233, 249, 334 (n. 8)

370 Index K Company, 19, 43, 53, 251; created, 27–9; activities and training, 29–31, 39–45, 48–9; affiliation with The Queen’s Own Rifles, 29–30, 39–41, 45, 50–1; as No. 9 Company at Ridgeway, 20–2, 35–9; sends volunteers to Northwest Campaign, 45–8; armoury destroyed by fire, 48; severed from University College, 24, 49–52; reputation and legacy, 25–7, 51–2, 56. See also Trinity College Rifle Company King, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie, 131, 162, 211, 212 Kylie, Professor Edward, 75 Lane, Major G. Ritchie, 187 Lang, Colonel William Robert, 53–4, 58, 66, 67, 76, 81, 82, 88, 89, 99, 100, 102, 109–10, 120, 124, 206; commands Toronto Field Company of Engineers, 54–6; commands University of Toronto Contingent, 85–7; appointed director of Department of Military Studies, 114–15, 126–7; obtains headquarters for contingent, 127–9; revives COTC, 130–1, 133–4; death and funeral, 139–40 Lauchland, Colonel L.S., 231 Laval University, 67, 223 LePan, Major Arthur D’Orr, 87, 99, 157 Lett Committee, 219 Lloyd, George Exton, 47 Logan, Major G. McLean, 225 Loudon, President James, 19, 52–3, 54, 58, 63, 143; support for engineering company, 54–5 Loudon, Professor Thomas Richardson “Tommy,” 134, 143,

153, 222; promotion of aeronautics and aviation, 143–6 Loudon, Professor William J., 143 MacBrien, General James, 132 Macklin, General W.H.S., 228–9 Macphail, Agnes, 149 Madill, Colonel Henry Harrison, 75, 87, 134, 153, 161, 170, 174, 197, 198, 206, 222, 248; obtains headquarters and drill hall for COTC, 156–8; revamps training regime, 184–7; defends Toronto Contingent’s record, 195–6; clarifies role and results of COTC, 198–202; assists Jewish refugee students, 207 Magee, Colonel Allan, 130 Maher, Pilot Officer Gregory, 165 Massey, Raymond, 78, 287 (n. 134), 290 (n. 171) Massey, Vincent, 78, 87, 99 Mastronardi, Lieutenant Edward John, 231 McCaul, Reverend John, 22, 277 (n. 15) McCurdy, Douglas, 58, 144 McEachern, Colour Sergeant Peter, 44 McGill University, 57, 59, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 76, 104, 135, 198, 210; COTC, 67, 88, 91, 98, 225, 230, 233 McKim, Robert, 43, 87 McMaster University, 85, 210 McMurrich, Professor James, 96 McNaught, Professor Kenneth, 176, 177 McNaughton, General Andrew, 130, 146 memorial window: see Ridgeway, commemoration Mercer, Malcolm Smith, 44 Mickle, Henry W., 62 Military Service Act, 113 Military Studies, Department of, 114–15, 120, 124–7, 128, 133, 138, 141, 147, 156, 157, 161, 170, 176

Index 371 Military Studies Committee, 229, 237 militia, Canadian, 27–8, 34, 35–6, 38–9, 40, 41, 48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68. See also Reserves Moore, Mavor, 176, 177 Mulock, Sir William, 42, 204, 259 (n. 23) Mulock, Lieutenant William P., 110 National Conference of Canadian Universities (NCCU), 116, 130, 166, 167, 191, 199, 200, 209, 210, 218, 219, 220, 223, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 244, 245, 249 National Defence, Department of (DND), 123, 132–3, 145, 155, 176, 184, 195, 196, 200, 207, 215, 220, 222, 226, 228, 229, 231, 234, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, 250 National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA), 160, 166–7, 168, 171, 174, 184, 189, 198, 199, 207, 210 National Selective Service, 184, 189, 191, 210 Needler, Captain George Henry, 46, 75, 87, 110; commands Overseas Training Company, 101–2, 105; verse account of Northwest Rebellion campaign, 46–7 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 229, 237, 245 Northwest Rebellion (1885), 45–8 Officers Training Battalion (OTB), 167–8, 170, 172, 174–6, 184 Ontario Agricultural College (Guelph), 87, 100 Otter, Colonel William Dillon, 41, 42, 43, 46, 49, 54, 56, 62, 89 Overseas Training Company (OSTC), 101–7, 108, 110, 112, 123

pacifists and peace groups, 122–3, 148–55, 215, 247–8 Parkin, Professor John H., 144, 145 Pearkes, General George Randolph, 245 Pearson, Lester Bowles, 78, 213 Pellatt, Sir Henry, 26, 44, 54 Personnel Members Committee, 229, 237, 245, 249 Peterson, Principal William, 65 physical training, 114–15, 162–3; made compulsory, 125 Queen’s University, 58, 59, 76, 100, 135, 210 Ralston, James Layton, 194–6 Reed, Captain Thomas Arthur, 206, 222 Regular Officer Training Plan (ROTP), 234, 241, 244–5, 246, 247, 250 Remembrance Day, 119–20, 141–2, 172–4, 213–15, 231–2; controversies over, 122–3, 150–1 Reserves, 216, 219, 226, 233, 234, 244, 245, 246, 249. See also militia, Canadian Ridgeway, battle of, 29, 34, 35–9, 40, 45, 46, 204; commemoration, 18–20, 22–7 Riel Rebellion: see Northwest Rebellion Rifle Association: see University of Toronto Rifle Association Robinson, George Hunter, 20 Ross, Colonel A.C.M., 250 Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), 144, 145–6, 226, 227, 230, 250 Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), 226, 230 Royal Military College (RMC), 99, 216–17, 218–19, 225, 230, 238, 241 Royal Visit (1939), 158

372 Index Sagar, Colonel William Lister, 225, 228 St Michael’s College, 82 Saywell, Professor John, 233 School of Practical Science: see Applied Science and Engineering, Faculty of Shore, Professor B.E., 227 Shrum, Colonel Gordon, 223 Simonds, General Guy Granville, 230–1 Sirluck, Professor Ernest, 176, 177, 178, 194 67th (Varsity) Battery, 100, 101, 107–12, 117, 118 Slatter, Captain John, 134–5, 136, 172 Smissen, Professor William Henry van der, 19, 58; at battle of Ridgeway, 37–9 Smith, President Sidney Earle, 209–11, 213, 217, 220, 230, 232 Smythe, Conn, 170 Soldiers’ Tower, 23, 119, 122, 142 South African War (1899–1902), 52, 53, 64, 268 (n. 107) Spencer, Professor Robert, 233 Stacey, Colonel Charles, 141–3, 234, 249 Strachan, Bishop John, 34 Stuart, Major-General Kenneth, 191, 193 student life and attitudes, 31, 34, 68–9, 72–3, 115–16, 148–55, 178–9, 180–3, 212–15, 231–2, 247–8 Students’ Administrative Council, 100, 108, 117, 136, 164 Swayze, Major James, 203 Tayyeb, Professor Ali, 227 The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, 20, 24–5, 26, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 74, 78, 170. See also K

Company; Trinity College Rifle Company Tolton, Major Bertram, 171–2, 254 Toronto Field Company of Engineers, 53–8, 59, 77 Training Centre Battalion (TCB), 167–8, 170, 172, 174–6, 178–9, 180–1, 182–3, 184 Trent Affair, 28, 29 Trinity College, 25, 32, 34, 35, 52, 77, 82, 88, 203 Trinity College Rifle Company, 25, 32–5, 37, 105; at Ridgeway, 35–6 27th Canadian Infantry Brigade, 238–9 University College, 18, 23, 25, 34, 37, 43, 51, 77, 82, 101, 153 University College Rifle Company: see K Company University Naval Training Division, 226 University of Toronto Contingent: see Canadian Officers’ Training Corps University of Toronto Rifle Association (UTRA), 58–62, 63, 68, 75, 76, 79, 141; opposition to, 60, 62 University of Toronto Squadron, 226 Victoria College, 25, 77, 78, 82, 102, 105 Wainwright, Captain J., 237–8 Wallace, Captain Malcolm, 75, 101 Wallace, Major William Stewart, 85, 170, 193, 200, 206, 222 Watson, Major McClelland Barry, 162, 165, 187, 222 Wayne and Shuster (Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster), 176, 177, 254 Williams, Sergeant Alfred, 54–6 Wilson, Sir Daniel, 18–19, 22, 26, 28, 43, 49, 52

Index 373 Wilson, Colonel William Stewart, 170, 171, 211 women and COTC, 136, 161–2, 247 Woodsworth, James Shaver, 149 Woodsworth, Kenneth, 149, 310 (n. 150) Wright, Lieutenant Charles, 128

Wright, Lieutenant William J.T., 109–10, 134, 170 Wrong, Professor Hume, 95 Wycliffe College, 77 Young, Professor Clarence Richard, 164, 179, 290 (n. 170)