Memory on Ice: Making the 1936 Canadian Olympic Hockey Team. by Thomas Rorke, B.A., B.A.(Hons.) A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of History Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario September 20,2009 ©copyright 2009 Thomas Rorke Library and Archives Biblioth&que et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de l'6dition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-64441-6 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-64441-6 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by partelecommunication o u par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non- support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. 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M Canada Abstract The 1936 Olympic Ice Hockey Tournament caused a re-thinking of Canadian attitudes towards their own national game. After handily winning gold in every previous Olympics, the Canadians in 1936 experienced their first ever loss, in a match with Britain. At the time, the event was passed off as an anomaly - Britain in the 1930's was experiencing a brief fad for New World sports, and was able to assemble a team that included many British-born but Canadian-trained players. The event has since been repressed in the Canadian popular imagination. This thesis seeks to re-examine Canada's failure at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, arguing that the failure to win must be seen in terms of unique tensions, particularly the struggle to free hockey from the grip on nineteenth- century notions of amateurism and the uniquely Canadian insistence on linking community representation with the international sport. Using archival sources and the contemporary press, the thesis concludes that the 1936 defeat played a key role in the development of Canadian conceptions of national representation and international sport. ii Acknowledgments This thesis was possible only with the support and encouragement, and often, forbearance, of my friends and colleagues who put up with all sorts of excited conversations about a wide range of topics as I thought through the issues. Thanks go out to everyone who read, discussed, and engaged my ideas, and in particular to Lorna Chisholm, Ward Minnis, and Sheila Rorke for their willingness to read and comment on chapters and fragments that regularly seemed to dart off on unexplained tangents. The financial, intellectual, and moral support of the Carleton History Department was significant and much valued. This project would never have started without the encouragement of Bruce Elliott and Matthew Bellamy, whose friendly encouragement greatly eased my return to the University. Nor could this project have been completed with a supervisor any less patient than Duncan McDowall, who put up with a steady stream of shanked topics and theoretical lurches that I'm sure must have dismayed him at times. This project could simply not have continued without the kind and sensible hand of Joan White guiding me through the sometimes complex world of graduate regulations and forms. Thanks, Joan. Callista Kelly managed to obtain more obscure inter-library loans that I imagined possible. Marilyn Barber and Michael Robidoux are also due thanks for their forbearance during my free-handed use of their seminars for the opportunity to explore this and other perhaps only tangentially related topics. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iii Table of Contents iv List of Illustrations v Introduction; Memory on Ice 1 Chapter 2: Taking A Wise Approach to Canadian Sport History 18 Chaipter 3: Making the National Sport: Hockey's Rise in the Canadian National Imagination, 1875-1936 60 Chapter 4: Representing the Nation 109 Chapter 5: The Most Perplexing Problem 137 Chapter 6: The Games Begin 169 Conclusion: Making the Canadian Team 199 Bibliography 207 iv List of Illustrations National Symbolism 67 'Ye Gude Olde Days' 74 Community Hockey Teams 89 'Why won't They Come' 93 The Wolverines Expelled 129 Royalty Watching Ice Hockey 153 Modernity and Hockey in Britain 156 Being British and Becoming Canadian 160 'C'mon You Canucks' 168 The Garmisch Games 170 Hockey at Garmisch 175 'Spoiling A Beautiful Picture' 177 The British Team 180 'The Battle of Garmisch-Partenkirchen' 186 'Too True' 198 v Introduction On February 11, 1936, an arresting headline blared across the banner of the Toronto Globe: 'ENGLAND DEFEATS CANADA IN OLYMPIC HOCKEY'. The news was nearly as surprising then as it would be today. In the other front page stories, Mussolini's legions were continuing their assault on Abyssinia, Hitler was up to no good in Germany, and the citizens of Barrie were digging themselves out after a blizzard. But England beating Canada at Canada's national game took top billing. It was unprecedented. In fact, anybody beating Canada in Olympic hockey was unprecedented. Canadians barely knew what to think. The event is remembered today as an odd blip in the 'Golden Age' of Canadian hockey that lasted from the first Olympic tournament in 1920 to the rise of the Soviet challenge in the 1950's. Some have even ingeniously cast the defeat as an 'extra' Canadian medal. Since many of the victorious British players had lived and been trained in Canada, some pundits argued that the team was 'really' Canadian, and thus that teams of Canadians had 'really' won both the gold and silver medals at the 1936 Winter Olympics. Others detected a post-colonial irony in the affair: the mother country had defeated the colonials at their own home-grown game. Canadian sport historian and Olympic official Henry Roxborough wrote "that many on the British team had been developed in Canada and that this was an instance of the pupils defeating the teachers." 1 1 Roxborough, Canada at the Olympics, 101. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson [1975]. 1 As a result of the loss, the 1936 Olympic Ice Hockey tournament has not been used as a 'heritage minute' site for commemorating Canadian identity. We have tended to suppress its memory, but there are a number of reasons why it is worth studying. The narrative is more complicated than that of the easy, big, wins of the earlier Canadian Olympic hockey teams. While it is less useful for fostering national sentiment or marketing sporting nostalgia, understanding the events of the 1936 Olympic Ice Hockey tournament, held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany (near Munich in the Bavarian Alps), can lead to a better understanding of the place of hockey in Canadian life in the 1930's and the role of sport in Canada's changing cultural relationship with Britain. While this research will provide a chronicle of the events of the tournament, it will also have a bigger story to tell. One, perhaps superficial, way to explain this story is simply to say that a great goaltender - Glasgow-born and Winnipeg-raised Jimmy Foster led an underdog team to a big upset. This is a valid observation, but as an explanation it barely scratches the surface. There are more important themes than goaltending in this story. The 1936 Olympics marked a transformative point in history. The place of sport society, and in the public imagination, had been contested for some time. Nineteenth century sport had been seen as a site for healthful exercise, and as a tool for inculcating disciplined and polite behaviour. But the Olympics of 1936 signaled to the world great changes in the meaning of sport. The pursuit of national prestige through inter-national 3 sport had been intensifying throughout the twentieth century.2 The Berlin Olympics, famously documented in Leni Reifenstahl's (propaganda) film Olympia, were of unprecedented scale, and marked the full transformation of the Olympic Games from "a small public novelty of the Belle Epoque" into a "crucible of symbolic force into which the world poured its energies, and a stage upon which it played out its hopes and terrors."3 The Thirties was a transformative period for sports and modern society. The emergence of radio broadcasts of sport and the construction of a new generation of big arenas and stadiums enlarged audiences and changed the way spectators experienced sport. The immense scale of the 1936 Olympic Games, as much as the Nazis' transparent use of sport to promote racial politics, forever changed international sport.