Table Of ContentSt. John's College
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St. John's College
Faith and Education
in Western Canada
J.M. Bumsted
University of Manitoba Press
© 2006 J.M. Bumsted
University of Manitoba Press
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2M5 Canada
www.umanitoba.ca/uofmpress
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the University of Manitoba Press, or, in the case of photocopying or any other
reprographic copying, a licence from ACCESS COPYRIGHT (Canadian Copyright Licenc-
ing Agency) 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 901, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6,
www.accesscopyright.ca.
Cover and text design: Doowah Design
Cover photograph: St. John's College Theological Group 1927-1928 (detail)
Title page: A.B. Adamson (captain, St. John's College football team 1907-1908)
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bumsted, J. M., 1938-
St. John's College : faith and education in Western Canada / Jack M. Bumsted.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-88755-692-2
1. St. John's College (Winnipeg, Man.)—History. I. Title.
LE3.S56272B84 2006 378.7127`43 C2006-905051-1
The University of Manitoba Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its
publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba
Arts Council, and the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage, and Tourism.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface vii
The Precursors, 1820-1866 1
A Theological College, 1866-1876 11
Adding Liberal Arts, 1877-1892 27
A Coeducational College, 1892-1910 45
Learning to Live with the University, 1910-1922 75
An All-Male College and a Return to Coeducation, 1923-1932 93
More Financial Trouble, 1932-1945 Ill
On Broadway, 1945-1958 135
On Campus, 1958-1970 155
Seeking a New Identity, 1970-1980 181
Epilogue, 1980-2005 203
A Note on Sources 210
Photograph credits 210
Photographs appear between pages 74 and 75 and pages 154 and 155.
To the Johnians in my family.
Preface
ONE OF THE MANY THINGS I LEARNED WHILE DOING THE RESEARCH for
The University of Manitoba: An Illustrated History was just how rich were
the archives of St. John's College. I relied on them extensively for the early
chapters of the university's history, and I was therefore quite amenable to
taking on a historical project for St. John's College. Kathryn Young asked me
to assume responsibility for a work that had begun life earlier as a collection
of anecdotal memoirs by those associated with it, paralleling a similar
book recently published by St. Paul's College. I was not much interested
in centring a book around anecdotes, but I offered instead to use them as
illustrative documents for a new history of the college. I had in mind neither
a celebratory romp through the past nor a huge tome with several hundred
pages of footnotes. I had several examples of the latter sitting on my shelves.
At the outset, I knew just enough about the background of the history of the
college to know that the archival material would sustain a complex story,
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St. John's College
and I hoped that, if presented without superscripts and the usual scholarly
trappings, an audience of old Johnians and other readers interested in
the lives of small institutions of higher learning might find the account
interesting and instructive. A biography of the college, therefore, was what I
intended from the beginning, and what has come out in the end.
As I did the research and writing for this book, I became increasingly
aware that none of the usual models for a church-related liberal arts college
in the historical literature of higher education quite fit the St. John's College
situation. Indeed, a major problem was that there was never a single model
for a church-related liberal arts college in Britain, the United States, or
Canada. St. John's College was structurally and administratively based, not
on a generic Oxford College, but on Christ Church College, Oxford, with its
intimate connection between college and cathedral chapter. On the other
hand, St. John's College in its teaching replicated neither the tutorial system
nor the tripos, but followed instead the Canadian pattern of lectures and
course examinations. Furthermore, St. John's College at a very early stage
of its development became a founding college within a university structure
which, while mainly a virtual one before 1900, nevertheless altered the
dynamic substantially. Bishop Machray wanted to situate St. John's within a
university structure, but he was unable to control what this would mean. In
any event, finding a standard model that could be understood and replicated
was no easy matter for the early founders.
If St. John's College was in some respects sui generis, in other respects its
history was quite representative of the problems of church-related higher
education in Canada and especially in the prairie region of western Canada.
The history of St. John's continually intersects with the development of
Manitoba and prairie Canada over the 150 years since its founding. When
Louis Riel led his Metis in righteous indignation against the government
of Canada, Bishop Robert Machray was there, counselling moderation
amongst the Protestant mixed bloods of the Red River Settlement. When
Winnipeggers celebrated Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1897, St.
John's held a special ceremony. When Canada went to war in 1914, St. John's
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Preface
College's students, alumni, and staff were in the front row of volunteers.
When a major financial scandal in 1932 — the defalcation, as it is known
— brought down the old boys' network in Winnipeg, the culprit held, among
many other responsibilities, the office of bursar of St. John's College. The
college's changing fortunes also paralleled those of the Anglican Church
itself, particularly in Manitoba but by extension right across the West.
Beginning as a missionary institution in the early nineteenth century, the
college quickly became part of the WASP establishment of Winnipeg. It
declined with that establishment after 1932 and then again in the 1960s with
the triumph of secularism. But the college has not simply been an Anglican
institution, but an educational one connected since the 1870s with the liberal
arts in complex ways. Its history as a liberal arts college tells us much about
the changing place of the arts disciplines in Manitoba and the Canadian West
since the middle of the nineteenth century. Arts was initially subordinated
to theology, then held an equal place with it, struggling to find local and
external funding until ultimately both arts and theology declined in the face
of occupationalism and instrumentalism in Canadian higher education.
As well as because of its central place in the history of Canadian
education, the St. John's College story needs to be told for other reasons. In
the first place, the archives are exceptionally rich, documenting in detail the
development of the college from its earliest beginning 150 years ago. Few
educational institutions in Canada, much less in western Canada, have the
continuous record that St. John's College possesses, or one of such duration.
St. John's was one of the first educational institutions in modern Canada
founded west of southern Ontario, and it has been fortunate enough to have
been able to preserve its records free from fire and other ravages of time. In
the second place, the early history of St. John's College — like that of the
other founding colleges of the University of Manitoba — forms an important
and integral part of the history of the university. Before the establishment of
the faculty of science at the University of Manitoba in 1904, institutions like
St. John's College did the teaching at the university and were responsible for
its extracurricular activities as well. Third, the history of St. John's College,
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