The Great War and After, 1914-1922

The Canadian militia and Dalhousie. A Dalhousie soldier. Dalhousie’s Stationary Hospital No. 7. Moving onto the Studley campus. The Law School revised. The 1917 explosion. Mrs. Eddy and Shirreff Hall. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Christian Movement. Deaths of Eben Mackay and John Forrest. Changing Dalhousie traditions.

War in 1914 was still glorious. Haligonians remembered the sailing of Canadian contingents to South Africa just fifteen years before, and there was a bright flame of glory even about that war. There were few photographs of actual battlefield conditions; war was illustrated by splendid paintings that glorified the smoke, the fury, the wounding, and the dying. War was adventure; there were risks, as in all adventure, but risks were good for the maturing of young men. They toughened moral fibre, gave men the grit that society, increasingly civilized, was failing to give. Men, and women, needed some stress. Women got it naturally from child-bearing; men got it from fisticuffs and fighting – and war.

That hardships were good for you was the philosophy prevailing in the Canadian militia and there was no better publicist for it than Colonel Sir Sam Hughes, Robert Borden’s mercurial and headstrong minister of militia. Hughes extolled the virtues of the volunteer militia in whirlwind trips across Canada, often in colonel’s uniform. He promoted its moral character and discipline, the stern virtues, even in peacetime, of military training. The three main centres of Canadian morality were, in Hughes’s mind, the school, the church, and the militia. The militia was a panacea for the ills of modern society, instilling into young men, as Hughes put it, “the spirit of obedience, discipline, patriotism, veneration and love for principle.”^[1]

Hughes knew full well the art of managing newspapermen, having been one. He was able to establish the impression of himself as a dynamic man, with superabundant energy applied to original ideas. He succeeded in doubling the militia budget, and in 1912 and 1913 began building drill halls and local armouries. By 1914 some fifty had been established across Canada. (Halifax’s had been erected in 1899 at the time of the Boer War.) Dalhousie was looking for a combined drill hall and gymnasium before the 1914 war; Hughes had promised President MacKenzie as much. But he was hard to pin down, and his military estimates were by the spring of 1914 meeting more resistance from his colleagues.^[2]

The last major war, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, was effectively over in fifteen months, and there was uncertainty, not to say unease, that the War of 1914 might be over before young Canadians could have a fair crack at it. One French general assured the press that the war would not be over until 1917 and that the British need not refrain from joining up because of the mistaken belief that it would soon end.

The war had overwhelming popular support in English Canada and propaganda about bleeding Belgium and the demon Hun augmented it, and soon compromised civilized behaviour. Concerts began to avoid including works by Beethoven, Brahms, and especially Wagner. German teaching dried up. Berlin, Ontario, an essentially German-speaking community, decided to change its name to Kitchener.

The Dalhousie Gazette at first tried to present something of both sides. An article on 4 November 1914, “The Apathetic Man,” criticized the war. Suppose, said its author, Frank Graham, that France had crashed into Belgium on its way to attack Germany. Would we, the British and the Canadians, rush to help the Germans against the French? Not at all. “We wage a jealous war. We care not a jot for principle. Neutrality is a word. Expediency is our God… We saw a chance to smash [Germany] and we leapt at it. Accident made us appear to act with honour… In our day we have broken our national word of honour many times – we have been perfidious Albion. It happens to suit us to keep our word now.”

That fairly put the cat among the pigeons. And while Graham’s remarks were mainly directed against the formation of the Dalhousie Canadian Officer Training Corps (COTC), the local papers could not resist taking it up. The Acadian Recorder said that Graham’s “sophomoric but offensive effusion” could only be published under the aegis of the British freedom of expression. The Herald did not even accept that. It sternly recommended that Dalhousie, governors, Senate, and students alike, should repudiate the article. The Dalhousie Senate did not do that. It agreed in private that Graham’s was a “most unpatriotic” article, that it “had given rise to a strong feeling of indignation in the community,” but all it would say in public was that, as in most universities, Senate exercised no supervision over the student paper. It authorized President MacKenzie to write the Halifax newspapers to that effect. Nor did the Dalhousie Gazette have much sympathy for Frank Graham’s views. There was much correspondence about it, though the Gazette thought that the Herald was being needlessly critical. The Herald’s propaganda began in September 1914, and continued to the end of the war. A sample:

Why do they call, sonny, why do they call For men who are brave and strong? Is it naught to you if your country fall, And Right is smashed by Wrong? Is it football still and the picture show, The pub and the betting odds, When your brothers stand to the tyrant’s blow And the Empire’s call is God’s?^[3]

In fact, propaganda was not much needed. The Dalhousie COTC had a good deal of student support and it was a movement that preceded the outbreak of war. It had been devised by Sam Hughes and in 1912 the Department of Militia and Defence offered university students the opportunity to acquire elementary military training. The control of each unit was left to a local military committee composed of student representatives, a member of the Dalhousie staff, and a representative of the army. Drill was required: twenty-five parades of at least forty- five minutes each. In return students got the free issue of uniform and accoutrements from militia funds. By June 1914 some 59,000 men, in universities and outside, were undergoing military training. By November Dalhousie had eight companies in training, each afternoon and evening, company by company, in the South End Rink.^[4]

Within a year of the outbreak of war some 165 Dalhousie graduates and staff had enlisted and eighty-three undergraduates. By October 1916 President MacKenzie told the chief Halifax recruiting officer that while he would duly post up the recruiting notice just received, the fact was that in arts and science at Dalhousie there were only sixty-eight male students altogether, of whom only forty-five were over eighteen years of age. Of those forty-five, many were foreign, or lame, or had already been turned down on medical grounds. In the third and fourth years, the classes of 1918 and 1917 respectively, there were only ten male students altogether. “I fear,” said MacKenzie, “that there are not many recruitable men left…” By this time 60 per cent of Dalhousie arts and science students were women, a figure that rose to 63 per cent in 1917-18.^[5]

The career of one Dalhousie COTC student may illustrate something of the lives of the 567 Dalhousie graduates and undergraduates who enlisted. Larry MacKenzie was from Pictou County and Pictou Academy, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and the grandson of another. He would later become president of the University of New Brunswick from 1940 to 1944 and the president of the University of British Columbia from 1944 to 1962. He had come to Dalhousie in 1913, at the age of nineteen, having left home four years before to work with his brothers on a homestead in Saskatchewan. He did very well the first year, with firsts in mathematics and English. Into his second year, 1914-15, he joined the Dalhousie COTC but found prospects too slow and shifted in December 1914 to the 6th Canadian Mounted Rifles. He officially left Dalhousie on 10 February 1915 and would, like other students in similar circumstances, be given his year. He went overseas with his regiment at the end of July 1915 and duly arrived in Flanders.

By that time, the western front was at a stalemate from the English Channel to the borders of Switzerland. It was the reverse of a war of movement; the technology had become heavily defensive, with men living for months in trenches guarded by heavy machine guns and barbed wire. Indeed, you could smell the front lines before you ever got to them – the stench of mud, decay, and death. Horses were needed to haul even machine guns. At the Battle of Sanctuary Wood on 2 June 1916, Larry MacKenzie was lucky: he was hauling supplies. Of Larry’s battalion 90 per cent were wounded or killed. During the Battle of the Somme, a couple of months later, the horse he was riding was killed by shrapnel. Invalided to England with pneumonia, his papers got lost and by the end of 1917 he was with the 85th Battalion, Nova Scotia Highlanders. He won the Military Medal at Amiens in August 1918, and had a bar added to it a few weeks later, when the Canadian Corps became the main striking force of the British army’s final offensive.^[6]
That he survived all of that without a scratch was blind luck. Larry would send reports back to the Dalhousie Gazette; one, in September 1918, tells his story well enough:

Have just come through another “over the top” stunt without a scratch, though how I did it I don’t know, for they [my fellow soldiers] were falling all around me. Of course we got what we were after, but we certainly paid for it. Personally I don’t think the whole of France is worth the boys I helped to carry out, but then it isn’t land we are fighting for but liberty… The more I think over this miserable business the worse I feel about it, I think of thousands of fine young chaps like him [John O. MacLeod, on his first foray] going under.

That was what Larry and many other Dalhousie soldiers could never quite get over. It was not so much the Germans – though it took Larry a long time before he could view them with equanimity – it was the slaughter of his pals, as he called them. For them he would always be, as he told Archie MacMechan later, “boiling over.” The camaraderie of his old soldiers was for Larry something profound, and to the end of his life he never forgot his pals of the 85th. “Lest we forget” for Larry meant the living as well as the dead.^[7]

One major Dalhousie contribution was the creation of a stationary hospital, using the Medical School professors, senior students, and nurses as staff. In the British army (and Canadian hospitals were under its administration) a stationary hospital was the stage between a field hospital and one back in Britain or in Canada. A wounded soldier was taken by stretcher-bearers to battalion headquarters, looked at, then sent via field hospital and clearing station to a stationary hospital. The stationary hospital was what it said it was – a building adapted as far as possible to being like a civilian hospital where the full range of operations and surgery was performed.

Over the winter of 1914-15 similar units were being organized at Toronto, Queen’s, and McGill. The idea was that graduating medical students would receive degrees before sailing from Canada and would be given commissions as captains in the army. Nurses would receive commissions as lieutenants. The British government was by no means ready to accept these Canadian offers. It was only in September 1915 that the War Office cabled that they would be glad to accept Dalhousie’s offer of doctors, nurses, orderlies, to staff a four-hundred-bed hospital. The equipment would be provided by the Canadian government. Dalhousie’s Stationary Hospital No. 7 was finally mobilized on 9 November 1915, in the old Halifax Medical College building. It sailed from Saint John, New Brunswick, on 31 December in the Metagama. The Dalhousie unit included 162 staff: twelve doctors, one dentist, twenty-seven nursing sisters, two administrative officers, and the rest orderlies, typists, and cooks. Most were Dalhousie professors or students, but there were also men from Acadia and Mount Allison.

They arrived in Plymouth after an uneventful passage, and ended up in Shorncliffe Hospital, just west of Folkestone on the Channel in Kent. They dealt mainly with Canadian wounded, who would arrive in groups of ten to forty on hospital ships from France. As Dr. John Stewart, head of the hospital, described it to President MacKenzie, “Our surgical cases are chiefly bone and joint injuries, operations for the removal of dead bone, pieces of shrapnel & various deformities… some, poor fellows, armless or legless or minus an eye or with heart or lungs damaged, but almost invariably cheerful, are discharged to go home to Canada.”

The Dalhousie hospital unit was anxious to go to France, and to their great relief were embarked from Southampton, on 18 June 1916. They took over a British stationary hospital in Le Havre, in an old hotel. Sanitary arrangements were primitive. After the Battle of the Somme started on 1 July 1916, there was a flood of wounded – twelve to sixteen train-loads every twenty-four hours – with three or four hospital ships constantly being used to transfer cases to England. The scene at the railway station in Le Havre is described by Dr. Stewart: “The stretcher cases lay in hundreds on the railway platforms so close together that there was barely room for the orderlies to pass among them with tea and other refreshments or to arrange bandages and dressings. Some lay quietly, too ill, or suffering too much to talk or to move.”

Eventually, in June 1917, Stationary Hospital No. 7 was moved to an old chateau close enough to the front lines for the staff to see and hear the artillery at night. They were near Armentières; after the Battle of Messines nearby, 7 to 11 June 1917, they found themselves treating not only Canadian wounded, but Germans as well. The German prisoners were both surprised and grateful for the treatment they received.^[8]

Moving to the Studley Campus
Dalhousie was now fairly established on its new campus. The new Macdonald Memorial Library was finished in the autumn of 1915, and Dalhousie began to move into it that summer. They moved at the same time into the Science Building. It cost $144,000, of which $40,000 was met by the Carnegie Foundation. The library cost $90,000, without the five-storey book stack at the back, added in 1921. The library was placed in between the big Science Building to the east and the Murray homestead to the west; the narrow space allotted for it was rather a measure of the function of a university library in 1912. Darling, and even more Cobb, were ingenious in devising a handsome building in the space restricted as much by money as design. Moreover, it was clear by 1913 that the Macdonald Library would have to be not only a library building but would also house a couple of arts classrooms thrown in for good measure.

In the big red brick building on the Carleton campus, renamed the Forrest Building by the board in 1919, books had suffered from want of space, from dust, and from the omnipresent threat of fire and water. When the dentists moved into the Forrest Building in September 1908, one of the rooms they took over had been used for storing uncatalogued books. Some five thousand books had to be reshelved, some in the faculty room (a small room on the north side), the others in the attic.

The move to the Macdonald Memorial Library took place while the carpenters were still working. The books were placed in the handsome main reading room. Even so there was not enough space. Chemistry, physics, and geology got departmental libraries, while other books judged less needful were put in the new attic. The best part of the transfer was that the new librarian, Frances Jean Lindsay, persuaded MacMechan, the university librarian, and MacKenzie, to adopt the new Library of Congress system for cataloguing the books. No other university library in Canada, except the embryonic one at University of British Columbia, used it.^[9]

The move to Studley had one effect not altogether anticipated: it split the campus. True, the split was only half a kilometre, four city blocks wide, but there it was. It was true also that even in the Forrest Building, arts, medicine, dentistry, and law did not mix very much, having little in common but the Dalhousie name and government. Nevertheless, the separation that began in 1915-16 made the two campuses seem like separate worlds. The remedy suggested by the Dalhousie Gazette was to form a student union, and still better, to get rid of the Forrest campus altogether. The first was a dream for the future, the latter an illusion in the present. The capacious thirty-year-old Forrest Building could not be given up; the land on which it stood was essentially without value, for the city possessed the reversion to it.

The Law School Revised
Richard Weldon, dean of law since 1883, retired in 1914. He had created almost singlehandedly the Dalhousie Law School over the past thirty years. He and Benjamin Russell, the half-time professor, were the law school. The rest were downtown lecturers; some were good, but they were an uncertain lot, not always arriving to give their scheduled lectures, and when they did, sometimes ill-prepared. By 1914 student criticism of the Law School was mainly directed at three things. There were too few lectures compared to other law schools, only six to seven hours a week. The standard of admission was too low; in other words, there was no standard, other than ordinary matriculation into the university, and no arts classes were required. The students’ main complaint, however, was that the curriculum was not sufficiently practical. They wanted to have international law struck out, constitutional history shortened, and more mundane subjects, such as procedure and agency, chosen. Weldon and Russell resisted, for it struck at the public law curriculum that made the Dalhousie Law School so distinctive. Nevertheless the poem in the Gazette in January 1914, had relevance:

…A BA and an LL.B. – both from Dalhousie College, He seemed to have strangle-hold on all the useful knowledge; He knew it all from Alpha to Omega, but the fact is, The things he’d learned at law school didn’t cover all his practice…

He’d achieved a signal victory in appeals in two Moot Courts For he’d won a case in shipping and another one in torts; The Dean had listened to his plea with one eye almost open, As he waltzed through his citations like a melody from Chopin…

In his office, newly painted, where he’d sat a week or more, With his shingle swinging gaily to the breeze outside the door, And his LL.B. diploma in a brand new varnished frame, These sombre meditations to the young attorney came: –

“I’m familiar with the judgements of all the higher courts, From the Fourteenth Century Year-Books to Dominion Law Reports; In general jurisprudence I can give full satisfaction, But – I don’t know what is proper for the conduct of an action.”^[10]

In the two or three years prior to 1914 Dean Weldon had been obviously failing. Russell rather than Weldon seemed to be in charge, and he was only half-time. President MacKenzie happened to be in Weldon’s office one day early in September 1913, supervising the cleaners – one of the president’s multifarious duties? – and found on Weldon’s desk a large number of unopened letters, many of which had been lying there for eight or nine weeks. MacKenzie’s letter about this to Weldon is instructive, for he was gentle with the old dean, the criticism more implied that stated. “I am afraid some people will feel badly neglected, as the post mark on some of the letters is as early as June… I presume the janitor must have thought you were coming over [from Dartmouth], once in a while to look over your mail.”^[11]

MacKenzie had already acted to remedy one of the Law School’s most notorious deficiencies, its teaching period of only twenty-one weeks. This anomaly he swept away and by 1912-13 the school’s year was the same as the rest of Dalhousie’s. As to admission standards, pressure came from the council of the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society; they decided that at least one year should be added to the law student’s education before he went into law. The Law Faculty fell into line and went one better: the student now had to spend at least one year in an arts program, pass five classes, of which four had to be Latin, mathematics, French or German, and English. The meeting that decided this, on 5 April 1914, was the last faculty meeting that Weldon attended.

The Barristers’ council did more than that. They were concerned about other inadequacies in the preparation of Nova Scotia lawyers. There emerged from their disquiet in 1914 a modus vivendi, between Dalhousie’s right to say what, and how, law should be taught, and the Barristers’ Society’s duty to see that poorly trained lawyers were not let loose on the Nova Scotian public. This consisted of joint examinations. The Barristers’ Society did not really exercise any great control but joint examinations offered a common ground between lawyers too busy to teach and teachers too busy, or out of touch, with legal practice.^[12]

President MacKenzie wanted a new law dean whose whole energy would be given to the Law School, not an aging one whose work was being dissipated in a retreat in Dartmouth. He wanted to put, as he said, “life and energy and snap and go into it which it does not now possess.” Finding such a dean was not easy. First-class lawyers at the top of their profession were not to be hired at $3,000 – Weldon’s salary after twenty-one years of teaching. What MacKenzie was looking for and, surprisingly, got was an educated, mature, and civilized lawyer who had a yen to teach. He got Donald Alexander MacRae.^[13]

MacRae, though a junior lawyer in a Toronto firm, was forty-two years old. He was born in Prince Edward Island, worked in a clothing store for seven years, then came to Dalhousie at the age of twenty-two with an entrance scholarship. He swept the board in classics, taking the University Medal in 1898. MacRae spent six years at Cornell getting a PH.D. and instructing in Greek, ending up at Princeton as an assistant professor of classics. He may have found teaching Greek a harder road than learning it; at the age of thirty-seven he turned suddenly to law, at Osgoode Hall, Toronto. He was low man on the roster at a Toronto law firm when MacKenzie found him.

MacRae liked Dalhousie and had no particular brief for big universities as such. His view in 1900 was that the size and facilities of a university did not make all that much difference. What mattered was the capacity of the student. Having more courses to choose from, as at Cornell, was a mixed blessing. University life was what the student made it.

Nevertheless, MacRae produced a decidedly revised curriculum over the session of 1914-15, implemented in 1915, and it came to be a model for other common-law law schools in Canada. It was designed to fill the gap in practical classes without quite giving up Dalhousie’s old allegiance to cultural ones. But definitely the old slant was shifted. International law was in abeyance for a decade after 1915, and in that time constitutional history would disappear. Something of the old character still held. A later dean, Sidney Smith (LL.B. ’20), put it in 1933 to a new professor, “Sink a shaft and sink it deep, don’t bother over much about coverage.”

As Dalhousie stiffened its law curriculum in 1915, there were new pressures that sought to expand the reach of its arts and science. Mount St. Vincent Academy was a Roman Catholic boarding school for girls, run by the Sisters of Charity who had come to Halifax in 1849. They bought a handsome property at Rockingham on Bedford Basin, and had fought off control by the Archbishop of Halifax. As it developed, the Mount acquired ambitions to educate its Roman Catholic girls beyond matriculation. They wanted a charter as a college, but the government, perhaps prompted by a disapproving frown from the archbishop or perhaps conscious of the existence already of five degree-granting institutions in the province, refused. The sisters then appealed to Dalhousie, saying that since Dalhousie was virtually a provincial university, Dalhousie should find some way to accommodate their wish to have their first-year college classes recognized. The stumbling block was Dalhousie’s uncertainty over the quality of that first-year work, and particularly of the sisters teaching such classes. The Mount was willing to send two or three of its best to the United States to be trained, so that it could, with a PH.D. or two, eventually take on even second-year work. The sister’s idea was that Dalhousie professors could teach the third and fourth years at the Mount, and they would pay Dalhousie a proportion of the professors’ salaries. The same examinations would apply to third and fourth year classes at both the Mount and Dalhousie. Transportation was a problem, though the proposal itself was made viable by the existence of automobiles.

Senate approved the scheme, in principle, on 9 April 1914. The war set Dalhousie’s own plans awry, the Board of Governors being unwilling, as MacKenzie put it to the sisters, to “undertake any new matter of policy or to enter on any new avenues of college activity.” Another difficulty for Dalhousie was the very small number of students – less than five – that would benefit from the arrangement. The only reason Dalhousie was willing to discuss it was because “we have felt it our duty to meet what seems a real need and hardship.” By September 1916 the board were willing to put it into operation on a year-by-year basis. Mount St. Vincent gave ten classes of the first two years, given by sisters who had a PH.D., examinations to be set and marked by Dalhousie. The Mount would pay Dalhousie $2,500 a year for giving the ten classes of the final two years. This agreement held until 1925, when it came abruptly to an end with the sudden, and to Dalhousie inexplicable, incorporation of Mount St. Vincent as a college.^[14]

St. Mary’s too had ambitions. In October 1916 it asked if its first year could be accepted for admission to Dalhousie Law School. It submitted examination papers to indicate its standards. These were duly reported on to the Senate by Dalhousie professors. Some reports were favourable, but in the key subjects of mathematics and English, they were not. For the time being St. Mary’s request was refused. Meetings were held to help bring their work into line with Dalhousie, and by 1916 MacMechan was ready to accept St. Mary’s first-year work in English. But the issue then lapsed, revived in 1919 and again in 1921, the main problem being whether St. Mary’s could satisfy the Senate’s conditions.^[15]

St. Mary’s wanted its students educated under a curriculum that it could control – one that was Catholic in moral and intellectual emphasis – and it did not feel Dalhousie should deny it access to Dalhousie’s professional schools merely because St. Mary’s intellectual purposes were different. The Dalhousie Senate felt, and would continue to do so for a long time, that what St. Mary’s was asking for was, in effect, an end run around Dalhousie standards. Dalhousie students had to meet certain criteria for admission to the Law School, and it seemed reasonable to the Senate that an outside institution should at least meet those standards. The Mount was willing to meet Dalhousie’s criteria and St. Mary’s seemed to be able to find reasons to avoid doing so. So the issue remained in limbo for some time yet.

The Effects of the War on Dalhousie
The war made none of this any easier, with student numbers down, half the medical faculty overseas, and other staff depleted. Research in the sciences almost stopped, so much had the energies of the remaining staff been dissipated by war work of various kinds. The worst of it was that Dalhousie was thrown backward financially. The university was kept running, but each year saw the deficit on current account getting worse. By the end of 1916 arts and law were only 40 per cent of prewar enrolment, and fees were the main source of Dalhousie’s income. Medicine and dentistry were the only faculties that were near normal; there the demand was so great that the government asked Dalhousie to keep running continuously even in summer. Students by this time were as much concerned with casualty lists as with pass lists. Then in December 1916 the Military Hospitals Commission in Ottawa under Sir James Lougheed urgently asked the Dalhousie board to give up the Forrest Building for use as a military hospital. Dalhousie had the only building in Halifax, so they said, suitable for use as a convalescent hospital. The board replied that to give up the Forrest Building would completely disrupt medicine, law, dentistry, and pharmacy, but if the matter were very urgent, someone should be sent down at once to discuss it. Eleven days later Captain W.L. Symons, military architect, arrived and with other officers met with the board. It was more than urgent: it was desperate. The consequences of the Somme offensive were now, literally, coming home. Canadians had moved into the Somme line in September 1916, and were in a series of battles until the heavy rains of November stopped the offensive. Their casualties were over twenty-four thousand. The Military Hospitals men pleaded with the board, as MacKenzie remarked, “almost with tears in their eyes and begged us to let them have that building as otherwise they could not be ready.” The pressure they put on Dalhousie was so great that simply for the sake of humanity, as MacKenzie put it, Dalhousie agreed to offer the Forrest Building rent-free. There was only one condition: that Military Hospitals agree to fix up and substantially extend the old Halifax Medical College building at Carleton and College, so Dalhousie could use that.

Captain Symons had adapted Grant Hall at Queen’s for hospital use. Although college buildings looked as if they were well suited to hospital needs, they required substantial and costly changes in structure and in plumbing. That Dalhousie dithered, as one historian suggested, is improbable, that being unlike either George Campbell or President MacKenzie; what probably happened was a decision based upon costs and time. The Hospitals Commission started its own hospital, Camp Hill, in the spring of 1917 and had it finished by the autumn, a light, two-storey affair but a triumph of new, quick-construction techniques. Camp Hill became the inspiration for analogous hospitals at Montreal, Whitby, and Vancouver, all of them with the same character: ugly, functional, and inexpensive. In Halifax, Camp Hill Hospital was just in time, and for reasons of rather grim physics.^[16]

Dalhousie and the Halifax Explosion
Dalhousie’s George Munro professor of physics was Howard Bronson. He had come in 1910, replacing A.S. MacKenzie, who had departed for New York and New Jersey. Bronson was an American who had gone to McGill and worked with Ernest Rutherford, perhaps the greatest physicist of his day. Rutherford exemplified research, not teaching. When Yale wanted Rutherford to head their physics department, Rutherford said to Bronson, impatiently, “Why should I go there? They act as though the university was made for the students.” There spoke the research man. Bronson was much influenced by Rutherford, but at thirty-two years of age he had published much of his output in physics. He seems to have chosen Dalhousie deliberately, knowing its weakness in equipment, but knowing also its students were good. Bronson was now turning towards teaching. His research would slowly die, like Rutherford’s and MacKenzie’s alpha rays.

On Thursday morning, 6 December 1917, Bronson was at work in his physics laboratory on the second floor at the east end of the new Science Building. Suddenly, at 9:05 AM, the whole building shook, as if there had been a heavy blast in the new railway cutting, half a mile distant, though it seemed to come from directly underneath the building. Bronson thought the boiler might have blown up and started towards the door. He hadn’t gone thirty feet across the laboratory when the full air compression of explosion hit. It destroyed the windows on three sides of the Science Building and much more, including nearly all of north-end Halifax beyond North Street. It was the Mont Blanc blowing up.

She was a small French freighter of 3,100 tons with a valuable and dangerous cargo, 2,500 tons of picric acid and TNT plus thirty-five tons of monochlorobenzine stowed in steel drums on the open deck. Mont Blanc had come up the harbour that morning and near the narrows collided with a larger Norwegian vessel, the Imo, on her way out to sea and going too fast. That occurred at 8:45 AM. On board Mont Blanc the monochlorobenzine caught fire almost at once. The crew fled to the Dartmouth shore and headed for the woods as fast as possible. Twenty minutes later the Mont Blanc exploded. The total energy was 10^11 x 8.7 kg.-metres, as Bronson later calculated. All buildings within three thousand feet were destroyed, and those within a mile and a quarter rendered largely uninhabitable. All sections of Halifax beyond that radius had serious damage to windows, doors, and plaster. There was damage at Sackville, nine miles away, and at Truro, sixty-two miles distant, the shock was heavy enough to jar buildings and knock things off shelves.^[17]

The disaster was so universal in Halifax that no one section could think of the other; all thought they were in exactly the same kind of trouble. As President MacKenzie remarked, “If we at the south end had known that north-enders were buried under their houses and being burned to death,” more might have been done, though it is difficult to imagine what that might have been.

The toll on Halifax’s people was frightful; sixteen hundred people were killed outright and another six hundred died later of injuries. Several thousand were scarred or maimed for life. The worst was the glass: every window instantly became shrapnel; windows shot shards of glass across rooms with a force that buried them in plaster or in people. The effect on faces and eyes was horrifying. Hundreds of people lost an eye, at least fifty were completely blinded, and the fear then was that the latter figure would double. A call for volunteers went out. Dalhousie medical students of all levels went to the Victoria General or to the new veterans’ hospital, Camp Hill. Many of the young medical students worked without sleep for thirty hours or more. Dalhousie’s women students, wrote K.A. Baird in the Gazette, were angels of mercy, going quietly to work, helping in dressing wounds, comforting patients, “amid scenes of agony and death to which they were absolutely unaccustomed and which are known to have shocked the nerves of even those accustomed to surgical work.” Those scenes beggared description. Sometimes one could not distinguish the living from the dead. Volunteers were needed sometimes to help hold down patients being operated on without anaesthetic, for by the end of that awful Thursday the hospitals had run out of anaesthetic and, later, sutures. Mercifully, help for these shortages was not far away, nor long in coming.^[18]

Dalhousie casualties were comparatively light. One student lost an eye, and another was badly wounded in face and hands. Several occupants of the law library got cut. Edith Clarke, the assistant registrar, by one of those miracles not uncommon, was sitting beside a window when it blew in. She was not even scratched. But the new Science Building and library suffered badly. MacMechan hurried over to Dalhousie and found the tall Palladian windows of the library blown in, glass everywhere. The big globes for reading light had fallen and smashed. He and others set to work with brooms and dustpans, sweeping up the broken glass and in three hours had it cleaned up. The books were moved from under the gaping, empty window spaces to far corners where rain and snow couldn’t reach them. Windows would be covered in somehow by boards. He walked down to President Mackenzie’s house on Hollis Street to find out what was to be done next. At an emergency meeting at Mackenzie’s house that afternoon, the Senate decided that in view of the damage to university buildings, all classes would have to be stopped until after the Christmas holidays.^[19]

As the Senate was breaking up that Thursday evening, the east wind had already started, presaging one of the worst gales to hit Halifax in years. By morning a savage south-easter had set in, with blowing wet snow, that lasted into the Friday night. By Saturday it had abated and a few flickers of sunshine came through. On Sunday a thaw set in, turning the sixteen inches of snow into slush. It was only a brief pause: the next day another snowstorm came on, this time followed by a pattern every Dalhousian would recognize – a biting north-west wind, with everything frozen bone hard, slush and all. Dalhousie, its windows and woodwork heavily damaged, with the help of professors, staff, and janitors, managed to stop up the gaping holes that once were windows, and most of all, to keep the furnaces going. Thus the basic interior functioning of the buildings survived. Had the heating, and thus the plumbing, gone, Dalhousie would have had to close, not just for the Christmas holidays but for all of 1918. As it was, Dalhousie reopened at the usual time, if not in quite the usual form, in January 1918.

Five days after the explosion MacKenzie telegraphed the Carnegie Corporation asking if they would consider helping out with repairs to the new Science Building, for there was extensive damage to windows, doors, roofs. The Carnegie replied that they would “consider it a privilege to pay for repairing the damage to [all] Dalhousie University buildings by the explosion.” MacKenzie estimated $4,000 for the Science Building alone, $10,000 for all of them. But the repairs came to double that, as on closer inspection the damage was much greater than first thought, and the costs of material and labour had risen steeply. Carnegie still paid.

Return from Overseas
MacKenzie pushed hard to get his Medical Faculty back home after the armistice on 11 November 1918. He and George Campbell were joined by Hector Mclnnes, a well-established Halifax lawyer, who had been on the board since 1892. The three went to Ottawa in December 1918 to press for the return of the staff of Stationary Hospital No. 7. There were five on the Dalhousie medical staff and three of those carried heavy teaching responsibilities. Sir Robert Borden was sympathetic, but the military had their own ways of doing things and resented personal appeals to politicians to jump the huge queue for transport back to Canada. Most of the staff had returned by May 1919 and Colonel Dr. John Stewart arrived on the Mauretania on 6 June; by that autumn he had become Dalhousie’s dean of medicine, and would so remain until 1932.^[20]

he soldiers returned too. They were given what was called a War Service Gratuity, announced in December 1918. Three years or more overseas service entitled a soldier to six months’ pay, at $70 a month for a single man, $100 for married men. Wounded soldiers received free hospital treatment, much of it of a high standard, with pensions depending on the severity of the wound. The universities, Dalhousie included, pressed for a more generous settlement in education. The Repatriation Committee of the Borden government asked the universities to meet in Ottawa in January 1919. The universities had agreed – Acadia apparently excepted – to urge the government to pay tuition of all men whose college program, current or prospective, “was broken into by their enlistment.” The government agreed to do it for wounded soldiers; the universities wanted it for all. Although MacKenzie was sanguine, they did not get it. Borden said the credit of the country would not stand it. Dalhousie gave students in arts who had been delayed by anything more than a year the relief of one year’s work. In law it applied only to the year of arts preliminary to law. Nothing was taken off in medicine.^[21]

In the fall of 1919 Dalhousie had 622 students, the largest so far in its history, and double that of 1918-19. In 1920-1 it was still larger at 677, and in 1922-3 was 753. Of those 23 per cent were women.

After the war the most critical question facing the Board of Governors was housing for its women students. They were 31 per cent of the student body of 1918-19, and housing in Halifax was expensive and scarce. The board resolved to proceed with a women’s residence on the Studley campus. Dalhousie then rented 121 South Park Street, a substantial brick house housing about twenty girls, and eventually bought it for $15,000. It was called Marlborough House, was administered by a committee of alumnae, and would remain a women’s residence until 1924. In the meantime President MacKenzie set about visiting Canadian and American colleges to find out what were the basic requirements for a campus women’s residence. Feeling was unanimous, he discovered, that each girl have her own room; prevailing views favoured ample public space, large enough for dancing, with lounge areas broken up into alcoves where young women could meet their callers. Dining rooms should not be barrack-like but should be broken up into semi-private sections. All of this MacKenzie duly reported to Frank Darling, the architect in Toronto.

From the beginning Darling took a distinct interest in Dalhousie’s women’s residence. He drafted floor plans and MacKenzie liked them. The problem was that what Darling proposed would cost $200,000, double what Dalhousie could afford. Moreover, MacKenzie wanted to build in stone, not brick, and problems were surfacing with the nearest and cheapest available stone, Halifax ironstone. It was a metamorphosed slate with iron in it, and in the building of the new Anglican cathedral in Halifax some problems were revealed, where the mortar would not bond properly with the stone. That rang alarms with MacKenzie and Dalhousie’s professor of engineering, J.N. Finlayson. They inspected Dalhousie’s ironstone on the Science Building and the Macdonald Library and found early evidence of similar problems. MacKenzie was reluctant to use ironstone at all until more extensive tests had found a proper mortar. Then in the summer of 1919 they found a new stone, a handsome pink quartzite from New Minas that had been successfully used at Acadia.^[22]

As soon as the frost was out of the ground in early April 1919, MacKenzie went over the south-west corner of Studley with Finlayson. They wanted to preserve as many of the white pines as possible, so the site was moved to within thirty feet of Oxford Street. Tests with a three-foot crowbar showed rock at only one point in the main part of the building site, though the kitchen would have to sit squarely on an outcrop.

The cornerstone was laid by the Prince of Wales at the beginning of his tour of Canada in August 1919. It was now an open secret that Dalhousie was looking for a donor; whoever that was would get their name attached to what might well be a handsome residence. One Dalhousie alumnus well aware of this need was R.B. Bennett. Dalhousie offered Bennett an LL.D. in 1919, at the celebration of Dalhousie’s 1918 centennial. That had been put off until 1919 owing to the war. Bennett couldn’t come because of his presidency of the Alberta Red Cross, but there were talks. Bennett said he knew a lady who might be interested in putting up the money for Dalhousie’s women’s residence and would discuss it with her. He was, as usual, as good as his word. The lady was Jennie Shirreff Eddy.^[23]

Bennett had known her when he worked as apprentice lawyer in Chatham, New Brunswick. She was born there in 1864, trained in Boston as a nurse, and in 1894 married E.B. Eddy, in Halifax. He died in 1906 leaving her with control of Eddy’s, holding 51 per cent of the stock. She was thus very wealthy indeed, with a current income of about $250,000 per annum (roughly $2.5 million in 1992 terms). She was Presbyterian, and lived in excessive modesty at the Russell House, Ottawa, a long-established watering hole of parliamentarians which in 1919 had distinctly seen better days. Bennett knew her well, having helped her in the manifold problems of running Eddy’s. He told her she should take the Dalhousie residence idea in hand and give it her family name, Shirreff Hall. He strongly suggested to MacKenzie that he go to Ottawa to see her. MacKenzie had had private opinions that Mrs. Eddy was eccentric and difficult and when he was teased about the prospects of meeting her, he protested that Dalhousie would be “perfectly safe to allow me to go up and see her without fear of any entangling alliances.”^[24]

So MacKenzie travelled to Ottawa in March 1920. Because she was incapacitated with the ’flu, MacKenzie explained what he had in mind in letters back and forth between the Russell House and the Chateau Laurier, and doubtless by telephone. On 20 May 1920 Mrs. Eddy offered Dalhousie $300,000 for its women’s residence. There were certain terms: the residence would be called Shirreff Hall; it would be non-denominational; she would want to approve the architect’s plans. Construction should be started as soon as practicable and payment would be made $100,000 annually, beginning by 1 July 1921. MacKenzie and Dalhousie accepted with enthusiasm the largest single gift Dalhousie had ever received and the largest in Canada ever given by a woman. They used the gift as their launch for Dalhousie’s Million Dollar Campaign on 1 June 1920.^[25]

Jennie Shirreff Eddy was anything but a retiring widow who just paid the bills. She had certain standards for Dalhousie’s young women that she wanted reflected in the residence. She wanted the dining room and servants’ quarters built at once. She was dissatisfied with Darling’s design for the library. She wanted fireplaces, “having regard for the climatic conditions of Halifax,” which she knew well. Excavations were even halted while this impasse, in August 1920, was negotiated by MacKenzie going to Ottawa and discussing plans with Mrs. Eddy and R.B. Bennett. She got her way; the library was made bigger and brighter. She suggested that there should be study rooms on the first and second floors, something quite overlooked by the men. She came to Halifax in October 1920, met the women students at MacKenzie’s house, and went from there to throw a hugely successful theatre party for the students at the Majestic. She was formally thanked by the president of the Dalhousie student council between acts two and three of a production of The Cave Girl. She gave a speech. Canada needed educated women, she said. How they were to be educated was for Dalhousie and other universities to say. She wanted to provide a residence with some semblance to the life the girls might have had at home, not spartan but comfortable, spacious, and civilized, to round out the training the university offered. It all gave her tremendous satisfaction. Owing to illness of Halifax relatives, she was kept in Halifax several weeks longer than Dalhousie found altogether convenient; nevertheless, said MacKenzie, “I found she had very good ideas about most things and found her reasonable in all things.”^[26]

Supporting the Faculty of Medicine
As Shirreff Hall was going forward, MacKenzie had on his plate a more difficult problem to resolve: the proper support and development of the Faculty of Medicine. As MacKenzie pointed out to the Carnegie Foundation, Abraham Flexner had done medical education in the Maritime provinces a great service in 1910, by exposing the considerable deficiencies of the old Halifax Medical College. But the effect was to throw a tremendous burden on Dalhousie that it was ill equipped, financially, to bear. It would have been difficult at any time to bring the Medical School up to standard; the war made it impossible, and for two reasons that pulled in opposite directions. Dalhousie’s income had shrunk owing to a fall in enrolment; at the same time there were great improvements in medical techniques and practice. Dalhousie had three chairs in medicine, only one of which was endowed, and that recently, by Dr. D.G. Campbell, in anatomy. It needed two additional ones, in hygiene and pharmacology, and, if possible, to get endowed the two chairs yet unfunded in physiology and pathology. The clinical facilities in Halifax were good, MacKenzie said, except in obstetrics where a maternity hospital was badly needed.^[27]

Dalhousie stood in high regard at the Carnegie Foundation. They liked MacKenzie and the men they had seen of the Dalhousie board. The Scottish ambience sat well in New York. There was a disposition to believe that Dalhousie might become the Johns Hopkins of Eastern Canada, closely knit, modest in claims, good in substance. Halifax had a good nucleus, and if a medical school was needed for Canada’s eastern provinces, then Halifax and Dalhousie was where it ought to be. MacKenzie went to New York in March 1918, and with Dr. D.G. MacDougall again in May 1919, seeking money for the medical school. Dr. H.S. Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation, said he would lay the Dalhousie proposal before his own board; but there would be conditions. Dalhousie should have sufficient control over hospitals so that there would be proper access for students, and there would have to be out-patient arrangements. These did not yet exist in Halifax. Pritchett would arrange a visitation to see matters on the spot. It looked hopeful, so much so that MacDougall could scarcely contain himself until the two were outside the building. MacKenzie was more cautious and rightly so. The Carnegie trustees took no immediate action, and while there was decided sympathy, they evinced a disposition to find out if there were the elements of support for the Dalhousie Medical School in the Nova Scotia government, the Victoria General Hospital, and even among the people of Halifax.

The hospital arrangements between Dalhousie and the Victoria General had long been loose and informal. Dalhousie needed control over appointments to hospital medical staff. And then there were the students. The superintendent of the Victoria General was Wallace W. Kenney, an able layman who was a good administrator but who was averse to having medical students in his hospital. Medical students were worse than a nuisance; they were against the best interests of the hospital. In short, the Dalhousie Medical School had concessions in the Victoria General rather than rights.

Armed with this information, and with a letter from the Carnegie Foundation of 2 June 1919, MacKenzie went to Premier George Murray and laid the whole question in front of him. He listened, and gave it over to the Board of Hospital Commissioners with the intimation that he would approve whatever they would recommend. The result was a reorganization of the appointment of Dalhousie’s clinical staff, passed unanimously by the Board of Hospital Commissioners on 18 October 1919: all clinical appointments would be made on the recommendation of a Dalhousie committee, consisting of the chairman of the board, the president, and the dean of medicine. Although the appointments themselves would be made by the hospital board, that was really window-dressing. In effect Dalhousie got the power it wanted over clinical appointments, and it got its medical students accepted. There would be periodic tiffs in the future, as when Dalhousie recommended a brilliant young gynaecologist, H.B. Atlee, in 1922, or when the medical students stole parts of a hospital skeleton in 1923. Dalhousie stood its ground on the first and gave way with an apology and offer to pay on the second.^[28]

At Christmas 1919 the Rockefeller Foundation of New York announced it had $50 million for the improvement of medical education, Canada included. In January 1920 Campbell and MacKenzie called at New York. Two months later two Rockefeller senior officials, Dr. Richard Pearce and Dr. George Vincent, visited Halifax for two days to review the whole medical scene. MacKenzie wined and dined them at the Halifax Club with thirty-nine selected guests. In a day and a half they talked to the legislature, dined at Government House, gave a public lecture at a packed Strand Theatre on public health, then departed. President MacKenzie was a wreck.

Pearce and Vincent were the most reticent pair he had ever met. They offered no plans of their own; they brought forward nothing. MacKenzie, brilliantly, devised the right stance: he never mentioned money. The word “dollars” never passed his lips. He took the view that they wanted to see what Dalhousie and Halifax could do for medical education. Taciturn as the visitors were, Dr. Vincent’s speech on public health was brilliant. MacKenzie said he had never heard a witty and amusing speech on such a subject freighting so much information, and making the time seem like five minutes. The Rockefeller doctors left without the slightest intimation of what they might do.^[29] They were, of course, experienced and knowledgeable in the ways of state governments and medical groups in the United States. They had some idea of what to expect. What they were looking for was confirmation on the ground of conclusions already tentatively reached.

Their report to the Rockefeller Foundation on 6 April 1920 was based upon what was practicable in Halifax. The Rockefeller doctors understood well enough that there was no use hoping for a Nova Scotia government grant to Dalhousie Medical School; the other colleges would oppose it unless they received something commensurate. The government could not even build an out-patient department; the country MLAs would say it was purely for Halifax’s benefit and Halifax got too much from the government as it was. Based on this report, the final overall arrangements were complex but sensible and had been worked out, doubtless with suggestions from Dalhousie, between the two foundations in New York. Carnegie would give $500,000 as endowment to support chairs in Dalhousie’s Faculty of Medicine, conditional on Rockefeller giving the same amount. The Rockefeller half million would be for buildings: the Public Health Centre, $200,000; Medical Sciences Building, $150,000; equipment and remodelling, $50,000; an endowment for maintenance, $100,000. Both the Carnegie and Rockefeller grants were built upon an agreement with the Nova Scotia government that it would make extensions to the Victoria General and the Pathology Building totalling $675,000.^[30]

That was not the end of medical improvements. The most critical need in medical teaching in Halifax, to say nothing of the well-being of the province, was a maternity hospital. Dalhousie stepped in there as well. Learning that the Salvation Army was interested in building one, President MacKenzie and George Campbell went to New York in the spring of 1920 to ask Carnegie and Rockefeller to contribute. Neither foundation could make a contribution to the Salvation Army directly – that precedent was impossible – but both promised help indirectly through the Dalhousie Medical School. They each offered $50,000 to Dalhousie, on condition that at least $100,000 would be found by the Salvation Army. Medical students were to be allowed in the hospital on maternity cases and in the care of newborn children. Dalhousie deeded the Salvation Army a piece of land along Morris Street west from Summer Street (in effect half of the city lot given in 1909) between Morris and College streets.

As the building of the Grace Maternity Hospital began the contractors ran into underground water and costs rose rapidly from that and other causes; before the building was half finished the Salvation Army used up all the money and had to borrow. The two foundations’ money was not paid over until there was clear evidence the building was finished and furnished. That done, the money was duly paid and the Grace opened early in 1922.^[31]

Premier Murray laid the cornerstone of the Public Health Clinic on 9 November 1922. The existing hospitals in Halifax had one major shortcoming: none had out-patient departments. These contributed much to the training of students in illnesses and injuries that did not need hospital treatment. President MacKenzie’s speech that day reminded everyone, the premier included, how Dalhousie had been compelled to take on, and pay for, the Medical School out of its own money, hoping that eventually private help and, even more important, the government would relieve Dalhousie of the burden. That was not in sight yet. Dalhousie was still a private institution, privately endowed, beholden to no government for its funds, and rather wishing it were. It had to find its own money. Dalhousie had greatly improved the Medical School after taking it over from the old Halifax Medical College but, MacKenzie admitted, Dalhousie did all this “at the expense of the Arts and Science Faculty from the funds of which came the money to make up the relatively large annual deficit of the Medical School.”^[32]

Dalhousie needed a men’s residence as well as a women’s. Many Dalhousie students boarded at Pine Hill, which had space and not enough divinity students, but the growth of students in 1919 and 1920 forced the board’s hand. The same time as the Million Dollar Campaign was launched in 1920, the board bought the Birchdale Hotel for $160,000. It was a handsome old property; the hotel itself was no longer much patronized but it was right on the North-West Arm at the foot of Coburg Road. It had 6.83 acres with a frontage along the Arm itself, and it would accommodate about forty-five students.

Dalhousie’s other immediate need was for an arts building. None of the arts staff had even a room of their own, where they could work or consult with students. All they had in the Forrest Building was one small common room. The administrative offices, such as they were, had become awkward and crowded. By 1919 academic needs had become as important as dormitory needs. The decision was made at the end of 1919 to construct a building for arts that would in due course revert to law, when arts got its own building sometime in the future. Hence the peculiar title, the Arts (Temporary) Building. It was anything but temporary in appearance. It was placed opposite the Macdonald Library, designed in Darling’s and Cobb’s best colonial style, to cost about $100,000. The cornerstone was laid by G.S. Campbell in April 1921, a well-deserved honour. And it would, many years later, become the Law School. It is now Dalhousie’s University Club.

Postwar Dalhousie and the Student Christian Movement
The Law Faculty added two full-time professors, John Read (’09 and Rhodes scholar) in 1920, and Sidney Smith (’20) in 1921. In history J.E. Todd had gone overseas in 1916, ending up in India, and there were temporary replacements, one of them an Oregon Rhodes scholar. MacKenzie assumed Todd was returning, and so did Todd. He was finally demobilized after recovering from malaria in June 1919. He hoped there would be an increase in salary, for he and his family were poor, the result of two transatlantic moves. MacKenzie offered the maximum $2,500, plus 10 per cent and $500 in travel expenses, and a further vote of $1,000 to get Todd’s housekeeping started again in Halifax. That was generous. Then a chair of history at Belfast opened, with more money and no perennial worry about the children’s education in North America. But, Todd added, even if he did go to Belfast, “I want you to know that I shall never again enjoy such freedom & independence in my Department, such good fellowship with my colleagues, and such generous appreciation both from students & from a wider public as were mine when I lectured at Dalhousie.” A month and half later Todd cabled that he had been appointed to Belfast.^[33]

The board would have liked to appoint D.C. Harvey (’10 and Rhodes scholar) but Harvey was now at Wesley College, Winnipeg, and unavailable. Dalhousie were now a bit desperate, the measure of their desperation being a telegram to Harvard on 16 September 1919, the day the cable arrived from Todd. Harvard recommended George E. Wilson. He was on a Harvard fellowship, and it took an appeal to Dean Haskins and the offer of $2,500 to bring Wilson, reluctantly, off his fellowship. He walked up to Dalhousie on a fine morning at the end of September 1919; he was to stay for half a century.^[34]

The Dalhousie Wilson came to was replete with war veterans, many of whom had returned from overseas with very different ideas than when they had started. Some simply wanted to get on with their lives and careers; but there were others among the veterans who now abhorred war and everything connected with war, who believed in international law and arbitration of disputes. Some had also developed some ideas about what Canadian society should be, and put emphasis on what can be called Christian socialism – the belief that Christianity, shorn of arid theological disputes, had a great message for postwar mankind: the principles of the Sermon on the Mount. Wealth represented wickedness. To be a true Christian one probably had to be a socialist. These views came to be incorporated in a group called the Student Christian Movement. It was born in 1920, out of the war and much else, and its ideas were articulated and developed by Dr. Henry B. Sharman as a comprehensive, dutiful, even exacting Christianity. It was based on two questions, “Who is Jesus?” and “What is he saying?” The answers shaped one’s moral code.^[35]

The contrast between this new form of Christianity and the old Presbyterian one could be illustrated by old Dr. Forrest at the funeral of Professor Eben Mackay, the greatly loved professor of chemistry, who died in January 1920. Much of Dalhousie crowded into St. Matthew’s Church for that funeral. Forrest in his eulogy pointed to Mackay’s coffin and cried out, “And what is the message to you, young men, that comes from him now in that coffin? It is a clear and unmistakable one. Be ye also ready; be faithful in whatever is entrusted to you, if need be, like he was, faithful unto death.” It was characteristic of the cohesion and sentiment of Dalhousie board and Senate that at the funeral the wife of the chairman of the board, Mrs. George Campbell, sang a Gaelic lament.

Out of Pictou County, Mackay had taken the gold medal in chemistry at Dalhousie in 1886 and came back with a PH.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1896 as George Munro professor. He was a first-class teacher; he gave so much time to his teaching that it could be said his own work was subsumed in that of his students. And his own money as well. When Dalhousie could not afford the journals in chemistry he thought essential, such as Zeitschrift fur physikalische Chentie, he bought them and had them bound at his own expense so that they would be available to students. “Oh well, we had to have them,” is all he would say. He read his subject, and he imbued students with the sheer excitement of research. Mackay’s was a sunny and cheerful nature; he seemed not to know envy and jealousy. He was like malleable iron, mild and strong: no one ever saw him angry. MacKenzie’s private tribute was to reflect

how much of his thought he gave to the problems of the University in general, and how valuable was his counsel and judgment in all matters. I never felt that I had seen and thought of all sides of a question until I had asked Eben what he thought of it… His was always a thought-out judgement and he was never carried away by incipient enthusiasms or chilled by difficulties and doubts.^[36]

Three months after Eben Mackay’s death, John Forrest himself died at the age of seventy-eight. Forrest was a man of transparent sincerity and kindliness. But he was also, as the Scots say, “a bonnie fechter,” a ready and hardy fighter, but of the sort who left few antagonisms. As MacKenzie said, one never fought Forrest personally, only on ideas. He took risks. It required moral courage of a high order to throw in his lot, as he did in 1878, with Dalhousie when it seemed to be sinking. He saw the need for money and found it. Forrest chose staff briliantly. He saw the need for law and engineering, and one may add, the need for union with King’s and other colleges. When he came Dalhousie was “a neglected starveling and [he] left it a university, a source of pride to the citizens.” So said MacKenzie.^[37]

MacKenzie had had a strenuous several years. At one point in March 1920, he had on his plate the visit of Drs. Vincent and Pearce from Rockefeller about the Medical School Buildings, having newly returned from negotiations with Mrs. Eddy about Shirreff Hall; the new Arts (Temporary) Building; the need for a men’s residence, and, as if that were not enough, the fallout after the King’s College fire at Windsor on 3 February 1920. As he wrote to George Campbell, “Things have followed each other in such rapid succession… that I have almost lost track of the time…” At the end of 1920 he came down with severe influenza and tired out after three years filled with problems, he could not shake the illness off. The doctors ordererd a complete rest, and in January 1921 shipped him off to Florida for a month.^[38]

In the autumn of 1921 Dalhousie’s enrolment stood at 712 in all faculties. The big increases that began in 1919 were in fact permanent. The little college of MacMechan’s youth had doubled, and as with all such large increases, carried with it larger consequences. Dalhousie’s charm and cohesiveness of staff still survived, but new strains and new staff would make the old ways difficult to hold. There was an interesting illustration in 1916. Dr. D. Fraser Harris, professor of physiology, had come in 1911 from England with fine recommendations. He was an excellent lecturer and it showed. “Physiology,” he used to say, “was romance, glorious romance.” But he could be a difficult colleague. In 1916 the professor of clinical medicine, Dr. K.A. MacKenzie, was taken ill and Harris had to do his lectures for him. Harris asked to be paid for these extra lectures. President MacKenzie wrote back, politely enough, reading Harris a lesson in Dalhousie traditions:

It has been the permanent policy of the University so long as I have known anything about it [i.e. 35 years] to consider that the salary of a full-time member of the University covered the pay for any duty he might assume… so that if a member of the staff undertook new work on account of stress of circumstances, like the sickness of a colleague, etc., or stayed in the city during the summer to do some special service for the University, it has always been considered that he did it to serve the University and the question of remuneration has never arisen.Indeed, perhaps the success of this little University is in no small measure due to the spirit of that kind which has animated its staff from the very beginning of things in 1863. If we did not have this general principle I think that there would be eternal trouble and envyings and jealousies… a thing which we have never had to contend with in my knowledge of the whole place… Next year, as part of what I consider my war duty, I have promised Professor Bronson to take some of the work of his assistant, whom we cannot afford to pay next year.

It says much about MacKenzie’s style, and charm, that notwithstanding all of that, he asked that Harris be paid the extra honorarium for the work he had done.^[39]

The deaths of Forrest and Mackay marked the passing of part of an older Dalhousie. There was in both of them a surrender of ego, an ascetic contentment in work as a pleasure in itself, that was part of the old Presbyterian tradition of Dalhousie. It still retained the belief that the university’s duty was to produce an aristocracy of learning, refinement, and sensibility, that a student should graduate with mind and manners civilized. Ovid was quoted from time to time, “fideliter artes emollit mores et nec sinit esse feros” (A faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and prevents it from being savage). In other words, Dalhousie aimed to create an intellectual elite, and it should if possible be a moral elite as well.

But less austere modes of thought and conduct were creeping in. A student from western Nova Scotia recounted in the Gazette how in his town anyone that went to university, went to Acadia. Dalhousie was a place for doctors, dentists, lawyers, and Presbyterians. Moreover, people said, it was “a d—ed hard place to get through,” a man might have to sacrifice sport to study, unless he were really good. But Dalhousie itself could not avoid such student attitudes. One writer in the Gazette complained in 1921, that “where a competitive examination is the basis of judging students it is always a case of the survival of the fittest. But where is this getting us? Every year we lose some of our best athletes. We know a college is not an athletic institution, but other colleges give attendance for varsity games.” A student asked to try out for the debating team said there was not enough in it for him at Dalhousie, that in this respect St. Francis Xavier or some other college was more generous. The Dalhousie Gazette observed, a little archly, in February 1923, that “following lines of least resistance makes rivers and men [run] crooked.^[40]

Sports at Dalhousie had developed on sufferance. Dalhousie was a city university and in sports it showed. Neither the Parade campus nor the Forrest one, academically or physically, had much space for sports. In both there was a sort of basement room, ill-equipped, that might euphemistically be called a gymnasium. There was no university playing field at all. A form of rugby practice could be managed in space along College Street, fifty yards or so wide; but a rugby field is 75 yards wide and 110 yards long, with another 25 yards at each end. That was some 3.3 acres, equal to three-quarters of the whole area of the Forrest campus. In the 1880s and after, the Dalhousie Athletic Club rented time at the Wanderers grounds. Rugby was the game that mainly interested Dalhousie students until after the turn of the century. Hockey started in the 1890s, Dalhousie sending its seven-man team (seven until 1911) to Mount Allison in 1897, where it won, seven to four. Basketball was invented in 1891 by Dr James Naismith, a Canadian, and became popular after the turn of the century. Hockey and basketball teams at Dalhousie scrounged whatever facilities they could.^[41]

Even after Studley was acquired, it took another decade, what with war and finances, to get a playing field available. There was no proper gymnasium until the late 1920s. A proposal to build a War Memorial Gymnasium was announced at the Alumni reunion of August, 1924, and it would take another few years before it was built and functioning.

Probably MacKenzie realized that the development of Studley would bring changes in its train; good administrator that he was, he anticipated some of them. Others came from forces outside Dalhousie that stirred hopes and ambitions within. The most far-reaching was the movement for university federation, by 1922 well under way.