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I :E~ J.J >i A VICTORIA COLLEGE :) J By Jack Batten hings started to go wrong for Cobourg on the day in the late " 1850s when the railway line to Peterborough fell into Rice Lake. Until then, Cobourg had been a go-ahead town of 5,000 spunky citizens. It boasted wool mills and a distillery, and its dandy harbour could accommodate ocean-going vessels. The railroad be- tween it and Peterborough, an emerg- ing centre of inland commerce, was ex- Here's where it pected to consolidate Cobourg's stature started: the college as a bustling metropolis. building in But when the railway bridge col- Cobourg, where For the lapsed, not once but a couple of times, Victoria University the town's fortunes nose-dived. Busi- began its life in ness went into decline, the growth in 1836 as Upper Sesqui year, Canada Academy. population stalled, and an 1863 editor- a light and ial in the local Sentinel Star moaned . over a shadowy future: "Our fate is to be lively history forever the victims of accursed railway speculations. Our harbour has become the haunt of the wild duck and resounds with the crack of the sportsman's rifle instead of the busy song of the jolly tar. Cobourg, we fear, has seen the summit of her glory," Jack Batten graduated from Victoria College in 1954. He is the author of four- teen books, including Lawyers and In Court. Research by R. WAYNE KLEINSTEUBER and FRED FARR (Vie 4T9) It was no wonder, given this history of gloom, that Cobourg's politicians launched a lawsuit on May 2, 1889, to prevent Victoria College from desert- ing the town in favour of entry into fed- Would the univer- eration with the University of Toronto. sity's namesake, Victoria had been granted a Royal Char- Queen Victoria (below right), ter in 1836 as a Methodist secondary approve of co-ed school, Upper Canada Academy. In field hockey and 1841 it had become Victoria College student orienta- after the parliament of the United Can- tions of the 1980s? adas granted it post-secondary powers. It would be a cruel blow to lose the school when it was one of the town's few remaining glories. ~~ 1,,_ 'hoce We'" powedul "gu· ~ments on the side of the IfIIIII/I /l/II/!!II move; not the least was the bequest to Vic of $200,000 in the will of a benefactor named William Gooder- ham, the gift being conditional on the university's shift to Toronto. Cobourg's town fathers pressed on with the suit, but after an acrimonious trial, which Ryerson was a persuasive, intelli- stretched from November 1889 to Au- gent, and somewhat pessimistic man. gust 1890, a judgement was brought "How mysterious are rhe ways of Provi- down freeing the university to move. dence," he wrote in The Stor)' of !If)' And so on November 12, 1890, Victoria Life. "How dark, crooked and pen'erse departed poor slumping Cobourg to be are the ways of man," But he believed formally admitted to the University of profoundly thar a free and quality educa- Toronto. tion was rhe righr of e\'ery Canadian History isn't entirely clear on the young person. Thar convicrion put him identity of the man who suggested Co- in the vanguard of educarional progress, bourg as Vic's original site-Belleville, and he applied his precepts co VictOria Brockville, Colborne, and Kingston as irs early champion, irs most indebtig- were in the running-but there is no able fund-raiser, and its firsr principal mistaking the man who was the guiding when the college took the name of Vic- force behind Victoria's beginnings in toria in 1841. 1836: Egerton Ryerson. t t srudenrs, reacring againsr rhe adminis- By 1858, under his assured hand, enrol- ~I~ ~ nforrunarely, once Vie was in rration's draconian disciplinary raerics, menr had climbed ro eighry undergradu- ,& t-: operarion as an upsranding rook ro serring off home-made bombs ares. And wirh life around the collcge on ~/ Merhodisr college, Ryerson's in rhe school halls. rhe upswing, Vicroria's history during ralenrs were diverred ro wriring rexr Ir seemed rhe lasr srraw when Alex- rhe resr of irs Cobourg period was books, blazing rhe way for separare ander Macnab, rhe principal who suc- marked wirh significanr milestones. schools, and performing his duries as ceeded Ryerson, dropped rhe news in Female srudenrs began ro asscrt rhe firsr Superinrendenr of Educarion rhe fall of 1849 rhar, well, sorry, he was rhemselves. In 1883 Augusra Sro\\'c of for Canada Wesr. Wirh Ryerson away renouncing his Merhodisr orders for rhe Faculry of Medicine rook rhe firsr de- from rhe helm, norhing seemed ro go reordinarion in rhe Anglican minisrry. gree issued to a Vie woman Indeed. Vie smoorhly. A cholera epidemic rocked Reeling under rhis succession of blows, was rhe firsr universiry in Onrario ro rhe school. Irs financial srrucrure Vicroria plunged ro irs lowesr poinr in admir women ro leerures and full under- couldn'r find an even keel. Many of rhe 1850 wirh a sraff of only rhree profes- graduare sranding. TIle firsr bachelor of sors and a rreasurer (who had few funds science degree granred ro a woman in in rhe rill), and a srudenr body of a Onrario wenr ro Nellie Greenwood in lonely rwenry-five souls. 1884, and rhe firsr art degree ro LK Egerton Ryerson lenr rhe presrige of Willoughby in 1886. his name ro a rescue operarion, bur ir Vicroria College rook a major leap was rhe new principal, Samuel Sobi- forward in 1884 when ir became Viero- eski Nelles, who spearheaded rhe ria Universiry, afrer a complicared recovery. merger wirh Albert College, an insriru- rion rhar possessed universiry powers. And perhaps mosr crucially, ir was dur- Vic girls in 1920 on side steps of Annsley Hall (top right) and in 1949 u'ith ice- sculpture:Lester Pearson's winnillg team, 1923 (Pearson is second from left, back mu), ing these years that Nathanael Burwash THEN came on the scene. He graduated from Vic in 1859, and after hieing off to Yale AND for a year's srudy, rerurned to his alma NOW mater and climbed the ladder from lec- rurer to dean of the Faculty of Theology to principal of the University, a post he held from November 18, 1887, for twenty-six thriving years. Margaret Atwood Vie 6TI ~'I I• urwash supervised the move 1 ., westward down the highway to ••I Toronto, a city that in 1890 could claim about seventy churches and at least as many saloons, a busy commer- cial life presided over by business men of Scottish descent, the splendidly stocked new emporium of Mr. Timothy Eaton, and a mood of hard-driving and optimistic nationalism. Victoria found a snug place in this new home. By Oc- tober 1892 it opened for classes in quar- Robert Bateman ters on the Toronto campus (cost of the Vie 5T4 building, furnishings, and landscaping: $212,000). By 1898 its enrolment had passed the three-hundred mark. Within the University of Toronto, Victoria gradually took on a distinctive personality. Part of it was a matter of physical presence: in 1910 the hand- some Birge-Carnegie Library opened with spacious reading rooms and much- needed research facilities. Part of it was social: in 1901 the Eta Pi Society (which took its name from one of the Society's favourite pastimes) came into exist- ence, an outfit given over to "discussion Fraser Kelly and tOmfoolery". Vie 5T6 And part of Vic's special personality grew out of the character of the college's leading figures, as the Affair of the lect- ern demonstrated in the early 1900s. It seemed that twO eminent Victoria lec- rurers, Pelham Edgar in French and A.]. Bell in classics, shared the same second- floor classroom. Edgar liked to work from a lectern on the classroom's plat- form. Bell preferred an uncluttered plat- form, and whenever he found Edgar's lectern in place, he'd summon the care- taker to remove it. One day, perhaps in a rancorous mood, Bell didn't bother Peter C. Newman with the caretaker. Instead, assisted by a Vie 5TO couple of able-bodied students, he heaved the distasteful object through an open window and sent it crashing to the lawn below. Of Edgar's response, his- tory records only that it was not temperate. 1903, and from the beginning, Miss Ad- Annesley Hall, the women's resi- wrote her in 1911 in deep shock,"rhat dison, an 1898 Vic grad, had her inge- dence, and Miss Margaret Addison, its srudents have gone to dances (he charac- nuity and sense of discipline put to the first dean, became key ingredients in ter and conduer of which \ve know noth- test. "I am told," Nathanael Burwash the Vic personality. Annesley opened in , '/ ing. These are matters which, if mooted late 1940s? So \ :t abroad, would destroy the value of our crowded that in "I residence in the eyes of our Methodist 1947 the annual people." Miss Addison rode out the college show, the storm over her girls' suspect dancing Bob, had to move habits and remained at Annesley's con- to Massey Hall to trols for decades, a figure of rectitude accommodate its and firm character. audience. Perhaps in re- action to the grim ~~ ~ ~ 1940s, the decade ~ ~ ive hundred and thirty Victoria of the fifties had a ~ men served in World War 1. more light-hearted , The government of the day didn't feel. Tobesure,se- --- encourage university students to enlist, rious matters were dealt with: the new The first Wymilwood.
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