George Grant. T.F. Rigelhof

      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.

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