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Always in the Family’s Schools

Cleopatra, the legendary Queen of ancient Egypt, was short, dark, and large-nosed. At fourteen, George Grant is tall, blond, and delicate-featured. As Cleopatra in Upper Canada College’s 1934 production of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, he’s the star.

“What are you going to write about Grant’s performance?” one boy asks another.

“He’s a fine figure of a woman, as my father likes to say, isn’t he?” says the drama critic for the school paper. “I’ll say he was well cast and won much praise.”

A year later, George is Gloria Clandon in Shaw’s You Never Can Tell.

Charity, Margaret, George, and Alison Grant on the steps of the Principal’s Residence, Upper Canada College (UCC), 1932–1933. “I loved being hugged; I loved the wetness and the softness.”

George Grant at UCC, third row, extreme right. “One difference between myself and yourself is that you did not attend school where your father was headmaster. Whether for good or ill, my life has greatly been a convalescence from that fact.”

“Grant is excellent as a mature woman, isn’t he!” the drama critic tells his friend.

At an all boys’ school, George was definitely not “one of the boys.”

The casting of males in female roles – an ancient tradition in the theatre that was common practice in Shakespeare’s day and goes back to the Greeks, who invented drama as we know it – is just one of the things that now strike many people as odd about the private boys’ schools that were created in Canada on British models. The primary purpose of these schools was then and is now to turn boys into men who fit easily into the ruling class. The methods they used to favour were rigorous athletic training in aggressive team sports, severe physical punishments for undisciplined behaviour (measured against a whole book of rules), and military drills. Boys at UCC in George’s time, for instance, were required to join the school’s corps of army cadets so that they would learn how to submit, instantly and unthinkingly, to commands and get accustomed to obeying anyone and everyone of a higher rank. Most of the boys were being trained for life as future businessmen, and businesses such as banks were modelled on the military. In a great many instances, the same men who had served as military officers in the Great War became the senior executive officers of the banks and other Canadian businesses in peacetime. It took the protest movements of the 1960s to demilitarize the schools, relax the rules, and reduce the level of physically abusive punishments.

William Grant served as an officer in the Canadian army but he was also an educational reformer. The major change he introduced to the daily life of his school was the inclusion of music and art classes. He believed that the proper aim of education is the formation of character and that training in music not only developed individual talent and spirituality but also required the same team effort as organized sports. He hired the soon-to-be-famous Canadian composer/conductor Ernest MacMillan as music master to direct the school choir and improve its repertoire. The boys learned to sing oratorios by Bach and Handel and to stage the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Filled with the sons of Ontario’s industrial elite, UCC had a political tone that was deep blue Conservative. William Grant did not share that point of view. His brother-in-law, Vincent Massey, was president of the Liberal Party of Canada, and the past and future prime minister, Mackenzie King, was often among the guests welcomed at the Principal’s residence. George always thought Mackenzie King looked like a “sissy gangster.” And said so. His father was amused.

George’s father differed from the fathers of most UCC boys in other respects as well. William Grant was a specialist in Canadian history and was so sympathetic and enthusiastic a defender of French and French Canada that the Canadian history book he wrote for high schools was banned in British Columbia. But it was in his attitude to the Great War in which he’d served and been wounded that he was more radical than most: William Grant often spoke with disgust of the senselessness of that war. He believed that reason was our only defence against madness and greed. If rationality was pursued with intellectual integrity, he believed it would be guided by the Holy Spirit. His attitude encouraged some UCC teachers to do such radical things as select plays by the socialist George Bernard Shaw to be performed by the boys and to organize at the school discussion groups that studied world religions and issues of war and peace. William was pleased that George acted in the Shaw plays and joined these discussion groups. As headmaster, William Grant encouraged the boys of UCC, his son included, to follow Martin Luther’s advice, “Live in the large. Dare greatly, and if you must sin, sin nobly.”

One of the books that is chosen for George’s discussion group is Beverley Nichols’ Cry Havoc – a book that affects George deeply. Nichols argues on behalf of Christian ideals and the values of Gandhi against arms merchants and the wars that serve their bank accounts so very lucratively. Pondering Nichols’ arguments, swayed by their force, George becomes an avowed pacifist. He’s articulate and self-assured in espousing it. Pacifism gives him a sincere interest in the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels of the New Testament. Pacifism also develops his awareness of international issues, including Gandhi’s campaign on behalf of independence for India. His pacifism is shared by a few other boys and leads them to petition the headmaster for exemptions from the cadet corps. They argue their case successfully.

Out of the cadet corps, George is even more out of step with the majority of boys at the school. His inability to become just “one of the boys” is based not just on whose son he is and his politics and acting ability. He’s also clumsy and not good at team sports. His games are golf and tennis. He does have a few good friends, but his friendships are with the other UCC “outsiders,” boys who are interested in art, music, literature, and politics.

In the middle of his next-to-last year of high school, George loses his father. On February 3, 1935, William Grant dies of pneumonia complicated by the chest injuries he’d suffered in the war. He’s sixty-two. George is sixteen, a terrible age to lose the male model against which boys measure themselves. It’s a particularly hard blow for George: his father is dead, Upper Canada College will have to find a new principal, and his family has to leave its home at the end of the school year – three great losses all at once.

When his mother goes away to England to spend some time with her friends, George has to live in residence during his final year at UCC. George detests school life as a boarder, chafes under the restrictions imposed by the new headmaster, and feels abandoned by his family. After school ends in the summer of 1936, George sets about acquiring a good practical knowledge of the French language in Quebec by becoming the first student to take part in UCC’s Visites interprovinciales. He learns a great deal about language, customs, and the Roman Catholic religion of the Québécois by living with a wealthy and cultivated family on Rue St Urbain in Montreal. He has a very good time with the family he stays with, the Morins, who have daughters near his own age. He writes his mother,

I have never had such fun as I had on the last few days at the Morins. It was positive heaven. We went to two parties. I slept, painted and went on wonderful long walks. I had long talks with two of the girls who are definitely anti-Catholic, except as a religion to go to Church. One said, “If we only read that which we were allowed, we wouldn’t read very much.”

Living in a parish rectory with a Catholic priest at Saint-Basile-le-Grand isn’t as much fun. George does have an opportunity to discuss his father’s view of Quebec history with Monsieur le Curé, who finds William Grant’s knowledge accurate and point of view refreshingly free of English Canadian prejudices.

The events of George’s school days do not fade away. They remain fresh, often too fresh in his memory into middle age. They are emotionally damaging – too full of hurt – but the ability to speak the French of Quebec and the rarer ability to empathize with the people of Quebec never leaves him.

“Where in Heaven’s name did George come up with her?” Donald MacDonald asks. Even George’s best friend is surprised and disconcerted by the girl he brings as his date to the Arts Formal dance. She’s of mixed race, part African Canadian, very tall, stunning, exotic, and not a university girl. She can really dance and so can George. He’s one of the leading exponents on campus of the kind of Swing dancing called the Big Apple. Its one of the things at which he becomes an expert during his three years at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario – the college his grandfather George Monro Grant did so much to establish.

When he first arrives on campus, George is 1.88 metres or nearly six foot two inches tall, slim, and emotionally distressed. His father never pushed him to excel academically, but his mother is ambitious for him. For her, public success – including social success – is the measure of personal worth. Ambition is to be directed at the greater public good, the service of something bigger than oneself. She pushes George into the world of Queen’s as the grandson of its greatest Principal, the son of a former teacher, the nephew of James Macdonnell, who is chairman on the board of governors of Queen’s, and as Maude Grant’s boy.

Because Maude wrote her many friends in Kingston, a lot of doors opened to George. He was immediately a social success as a tennis and dance partner with the daughters of prominent families. This made it difficult for him to establish his own identity at Queen’s. He began to wonder if anyone could like him for himself. There were no men’s residences at Queen’s so George boarded in town. Although he found many of the students, especially his housemates, obsessed with girls and hockey, he did find them simpler and nicer than those he’d studied with at UCC. To create a world in which he could measure himself by his own standards, George set himself the academic challenge of doing the four-year Honours History program in three years.

In his first year at Queen’s, George suffered from loneliness and lack of money – the twin evils that beset most university students when they are first away from home and on their own. The loneliness was more acute in his case because his family and friends had all left UCC and there was no longer a home he could return to. His mother was once again visiting England and staying with friends. His sister Charity was in Europe studying German, his sister Alison was in London studying art, his eldest sister Margaret remained in Toronto, but she was on the verge of marrying one of the UCC teachers and establishing her own life. The Masseys, the uncle and aunt to whom he was closely attached, had left for London the previous year when Uncle Vincent was appointed Canada’s High Commissioner. It was his reward for helping bring the Liberals back to power in Ottawa under the leadership of Prime Minister Mackenzie King.

George’s best friends at UCC had scattered to different universities. It was the height of the Depression – a terrible period of mass unemployment, agricultural crop failures, and widespread poverty. When George’s father died, UCC granted his mother a pension of 30 per cent of what William’s salary had been. By the general standards of the time, George was well off as a university student but there was little money left over after he paid his fees, his board and lodging. He fought off loneliness by studying hard, joining drama and debating societies, taking an avid interest in international affairs – the abdication of the King, the Spanish Civil War – and by reading widely for pleasure. His relationship with his mother began to dominate his emotional life: he started writing lengthy letters to her every week.

Maude Grant comes back to Canada to take up the kind of job she’d done before her marriage. McGill’s Royal Victoria College in Montreal has appointed her dean of women. George joins his mother for a holiday in rural Quebec before taking up a summer job of his own as a reader for Professor McDougall, a University of Toronto historian, who was blinded in the Great War. The experience deepens his pacifism and increases his self-awareness. He writes to his mother,

I hope that I am passing through the supremely selfish stage which has been enveloping me and that this job which entails doing exactly as I am told very cheerfully will do me good.

During the second year at Queen’s, George is joined by one of his close friends from UCC school days. His circle of new friends grows, he begins to excel in the study of history. One of his great pleasures in the middle of much hard work is to listen to Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He also learns that freedom of speech and political action can not be taken for granted in Canada, especially when they conflict with the aims of Canadian industrialists. As political opinions become radicalized by the growing power of fascism in Spain and the increased military power of Germany under Hitler and of Italy under Mussolini, the Principal of Queen’s refuses to allow a student debate on Chamberlain’s peace policy and forbids leftist political clubs on campus. Through the social contacts he has due to Maude’s influence, George is disheartened to discover just how powerful a role business and government actually play in the running of Canadian universities. After the president of the Canadian Pacific Railway visits the campus, George writes to his mother,

The unity of Rig Business certainly degraded Grant Hall as it has never been degraded before. It was abysmal. Cleverly covered up, the subject really was: “We have the money and if you university professors don’t do and say what we want, out you get.”

On a cold winter day in February 1938, Principal Wallace calls George into his office at Queen’s and says, “I’m putting your name forward for a Rhodes Scholarship. I think you have a good chance of being awarded one next year.”

George doesn’t know what to say.

“You do know that it won’t be given to you just because you’re George Parkin Grant. There are other strong candidates in the class of ’39. You’ll have to work to win it.”

George sets to work with great discipline. When he writes his mother to tell her about it, he says,

An excellent system of work has been devised… Getting up at seven in the morning & eating my breakfast till eight then working till nine then lectures. I go to bed strictly at eleven o’clock. The trouble is that when one goes to bed one is so tired that one drops exhausted to the pillow only to get up the next day and do exactly the same thing.

The hard work and discipline pay off almost immediately. He wins two scholarships for his final year at Queen’s which allow him to take the summer off and travel in England and Europe. He works his way to England on a cattle boat then stays with Mrs. Buck at her country estate. He visits with the Masseys in London and then spends some time cycling in England with a friend. With his sister Alison and his cousin Hart Massey, he visits Italy by automobile. In Milan, George writes home:

I have been slow writing, but there has been so much to do and it has all been perfect. I have never seen such wonderful things and, above all, you must not miss Chartres. Paris, however wonderful, must be given up for a bit to see Chartres, as it is the most wonderful man-made thing I have ever seen, even after Geneva (marvellous), Switzerland & the mountains, the lakes and Milan. I think I loved Chartres best. Even rushing through France I realised that it was far in a way not a foreign country but home.

From Milan they go to Padua, Venice, Verona, and Florence then to Assisi, Capri, Naples, Pompeii, Rome.

Back in Kingston for his third year, George works hard for the Rhodes Scholarship. In letters of support from his teachers, he’s praised for his ‘quick active mind and powers of penetration and comprehension above the average’ by Professor Trotter. Professor Corry singles out ‘the important quality of intellectual daring.’ Nicholas Ignatieff, who had taught him history at UCC, writes that George gives ‘every indication of possessing a first class mind – fearless, original and prodding’ and exhibits ‘a strong but sensitive character very much concerned with justice and right.’ All comment on his emotional immaturity. After he wins the Rhodes scholarship, there are those who think he got it through family connections because he’s neither as well-rounded nor as competitive an athlete as Rhodes Scholars are expected to be in order to better become great leaders.

Toward the end of his final year, war looks more and more inevitable. It’s on everybody’s mind. George wonders how he should respond if it breaks out. Is his pacifism deeply enough rooted to withstand the frenzy of the warmongers? It’s something he talks about with his friends and thinks about late at night.

George paces his room unable to apply himself to his studies. His mind races this way and that. He remembers what his friends have said to him. And what he has said to them. It’s a jumble of competing voices. When he can no longer hear himself think clearly because there’s been too much talk all day, too much to sort out, he starts a letter to his mother. He writes some words about the dominance of evil in the world, gets up, paces some more, sits back down, writes what is closest to his heart,

If one is a Christian one must be forced back without doubt that one can never fight. Force cannot vie with force. Christ could have called on the angels to tear the temporal power of Jerusalem into ten billion fragments but he didn’t because he realized by passive resistance he won in the long run because he realized that if he let tyranny, stupidity & foolishness be destroyed they would crop up again. But as he made the permanent protest of nonresistance in the end he would create a far greater victory in his example; of course the world has not accepted the example but it still stands unflinching. Therefore if one is a Christian one cannot fight. Of course if one isn’t there is no reason in the world why one shouldn’t fight.

The question no one can answer for him is how much of a Christian is he, really?