Ashbury Days

ou could possibly blame my going to, and enjoying, my four years at Ashbury College, Rockcliffe Park, on Rudyard Kipling. My father’s introduction to me of that great imperialist writer in the form of a small red-leather and gold-trimmed edition of Stalky and Co. opened up for me a whole new world of boys’ schools and overseas adventures. The latter 1870s world of Kipling’s schooldays at Westward Ho! near Bideford, on the North Devon coast, sounded like fun to my 15-year-old self, with grown-up adventures to come.

In Kipling’s time, the cliff-edge United Services College he attended from 1878 to 1882 was a harsh and distant drop-off site for the sons of expatriate British army and navy officers. These sons would then go on to pass the exam for Sandhurst or Woolwich and graduate to sail off to directly, or indirectly, rule vast swaths of India or Africa as soldiers or members of the prestigious Indian Civil Service.

As the son of Scottish parents this kind of unthinking romanticized imperialism was all part of my growing up, with a railway-building ancestor in the Siege of Mafeking, another with “the Mutiny sword” apparently hanging in his bar, and highland Scotland all around.

Naturally, I did not know at the time that I would write a doctoral thesis on those indirect rulers of British India’s princely states and frontier tribes. Life is odd like that.

Belatedly getting to the point here, I was lucky enough to have been able to attend Ashbury College as a “Day Boy” back in 1950-54, aged 15 to 19. I had a great time on the whole and I have no bad memories, only fun ones, for grades 11 to 13 - the last twice because I decided to head to RMC. In the end, while accepted, I did not go there after graduation, remaining a sort of un militaire manque thereafter, instead joining the COTC at Carleton.

Before Ashbury, I had been attending downtown Ottawa’s gray stone Lisgar Collegiate which was not in one of its better periods, at least for me, for grades 9 and 10. There were no sports, aside from gym unless you were on a team and I was no great athlete. There was nothing but a gravel lot across the street, we ate our brown-bagged lunches in tolerant nearby restaurants on Bank Street, and we Rockcliffers were a long car ride or a streetcar trip from home.

Ashbury on Mariposa, on the other hand, was virtually within distant eyeshot from our home on Buena Vista Road. The other motives for leaving Lisgar were that my Rockcliffe Park Public Schoolmate Hugh MacNeil, the future vice-admiral, was already there. Also, and, I am somewhat embarrassed to say, another school friend from RPPS and Lisgar, the somewhat dangerously advanced and popular David Hanson, was also going to attend Ashbury.

At any rate, I loved Ashbury’s green lawns and playing fields, where everyone got to play on a football team or a soccer team, where we skied down the roads to ski at the park at the bottom of Mariposa or Buena Vista after lunch in winter, or played hockey if that was your choice, and tennis or cricket in the spring. I proved that the day of the dumb lineman was not over in football, and learned to ski and play tennis. I even made a gesture at cricket, which was the domain of the most solid pillar of the school – Arthur D. Brain, or Dr. Brain.

In spring, Dr. Brain left us with our Latin or French lesson work and descended to a small room in the basement where clad in shorts and a singlet and puffing his pipe he could be seen – if one descended to ask a question or go to the bathroom - beating on a cricket bat with some kind of African club. This was presumably to acquaint it with cricket-ball impacts or to take out his aggression. I drew a full-page cartoon of him in my latter years there, seen as usual from the back, in his sporting get-up, bat and beater in hand, and labelled it “French in the spring.”

In those last two years at Ashbury I had been appointed to a rather meaningless role of Captain of the Day Boys and also as a prefect, which had more responsibility and prestige. One of the perks of being a prefect was that one got to frequent the one-room attic apartment on the third floor of the annex which the science teacher, Mr. Leonard Sibley, inhabited.

There, after one’s prefectorial duties in the evenings a bunch of us could have tea and cookies or whatever and chat on a one-on-one basis with this smiling and kindly “Sib” and a few other staff and older boys. It was fun to be able to hang out with the grown-ups, and so one night I took him my cartoon of “French in the spring,” and later learned that “Buggy” had seen and enjoyed it, to my great relief.

But as I mentioned earlier, I made a brief gesture towards cricket, attending Buggy’s meeting of all the potential players. I nervously raised my hand to ask whether this meant that there would be Saturday afternoon games. At that time I was much taken in love and lust with one of the girls from the neighbouring girls’ school, Elmwood, and was anxious not to have anything stand between me and taking this girl to the movies down at the bottom of Springfield hill, or whatever.

Brain was irritated at my unexplained resistance to playing cricket and said he didn’t care if I ever played, and that I would be the probably apocryphal “Captain of the Cradle.” This was a wooden curved affair for randomly bouncing cricket balls at players on the other side to prepare for the real thing, a role which I duly skipped in favour of weekday tennis and whatever Saturday afternoons might bring. Ah youth...

However, I must add here that in one of those latter years I was somehow in tears about the loss of one of those girls and Brain directed me to his adjoining office to await the end of class. He then came in, sat down at his desk, chatted with me and was kindness itself. He then sent me off feeling much better, not the kind of behaviour one would have expected from this otherwise loud and bullying man. I cannot remember more, but there it is, the other side of the coin.

There were other teachers, of course, including the English teacher Mr. Belcher, in slippers, I think, since he had a room there somewhere, looking somewhat unshaven and smelling of cigarettes. Belcher is the particular favourite of my class-mate and life-long friend Peter Carver who perhaps got a lot more out of his classes than I did. But certainly I liked Belcher’s English classes.

Then, inspired by my American Civil war interests and perhaps desperation I aced – an A – the grade 13 English composition exam by taking the bland “describe a scene in a train or bus station” question. I picked up this loose ball and ran all the way with it, describing a Confederate railway station which is overrun by Gen. Sherman’s forces, burned down and the rails melted and hopelessly bent over a pile of burning ties. Nothing but smoking ruins and destruction are left as the army rolls on, probably singing “Marching through Georgia.” And the rest is history.

My favourite teacher was David Polk, an American who had been in the merchant marine, I believe, and he taught us history. I had always really liked the subject, one of my later careers, and was free to draw whether on projects or in my books. All those Zulus, Civil War soldiers, and gorgeous girls from my daily out-of-school studies and imaginings filled the margins.

Whenever “Polky” would mention the neighbouring United States with a sweep of his duster-clad arm “that great republic to the south” we all yelled “MEXICO!” He was fun, and indeed long after I left school I collaborated with him by drawing little pictures for his proposed but never-published attempt at a children’s fantasy book. He was a nice, kind, man, and another antidote to Brain. The maths teacher was humorously nicknamed “Curly” Powell, a smart man.

I should add that I won the class prize, for overall marks, I suppose, for two of my four years at Ashbury, which I guess suggested I might go into academia and writing. At any rate, indeed after a terrible first year in commerce at Carleton – wrongly suggested by my accountant father - I slipped into a BA in English in second year and I did increasingly well.

In reviewing these remarks I see I have forgotten the army cadet corps in which we were all enrolled, no conscientious objectors allowed. I didn’t have any great rank, a corporal perhaps, but I do recall one of my Ashburian cartoons of a cadet trying to “look straight ahead” with a fly on his nose. That one and a couple of others of mine even appeared in Tony German’s excellent A Char- acter of its Own: Ashbury College 1891-1991, with my initials, M.H.

We also once had art classes for those interested given by A.J. Casson, of the famous Group of Seven. If I am allowed to brag he said to me on one occasion that there was nothing more he could teach me and that I should just go ahead with my art, but I didn’t follow that road.

Like arts classes by Casson, the amazing thing about being at Ashbury, the nation’s capital, just after the Second World War, was that all sorts of to me unknown but great generals at hand and probably also neighbouring governors-general came to review our parades and officiate at other events. For me it was just all part of life and school. I didn’t appreciate at the time the type of elite society I was benefitting from in Rockcliffe Park where the foreign ambassadors were just neighbours. I even married the Indian High Commissioner’s wonderful daughter who lived just blocks away and with whom I went to Carleton. Boy marries local girl, right?

However, keeping the best for the last, I made a number of lifelong friends at Ashbury. One, the above-mentioned Peter Carver, still a lifelong friend, was sadly trapped there against his will by his widowed father, but at school we had fun and it still goes on. He became a room captain and I remember him in the joint theatricals with the Elmwood girls.

Hugh MacNeil, the future vice-admiral, and still a dear friend I regularly call in Nova Scotia, lived a few blocks from us so I saw him all the time. We both still laugh at the time he managed to get some bit of Latin right for Buggy, and relieved from being balled out by him Hugh ducked down behind the boy ahead and made his trademark naval salute. Unfortunately, Brain spotted him and blared: “You needn’t salute ME, MacNeil!” which added to poor Hugh’s discomfort.

A third schoolmate was Graham Jackson, or “Jake,” a short and solid boxer and athlete nicknamed after Jake Lamotta, a boxer of those years. His parents were in Venezuela with Shell Oil and so poor Jake spent all but the summer months at Ashbury. He would often visit our home on weekends and holidays. In later years, Jake used to recall hearing my father read aloud hilarious and accented sea stories about Scottish tramp steamer engineer Colin Glencannon, by Guy Gilpatric.

Jake was also a great soccer player, and rose to become school captain or head boy. We went on together once in universities in the COTC out in Shilo, Manitoba, as fledgling gunner officers. He also went on to teach for a while at the school after graduating from Bishop’s College and then moved to Quebec City. I was in frequent telephone contact with him in these last decades before he died in 2022, heartbreakingly almost speechless, in a Montreal nursing home. His wife Suzanne is there still.

Jake – in the centre - and the rest of us would line up once a year for the school photo, all blazered and combed and seated or standing.

Ashbury’s history and evolution hold many milestones, and this year’s 40th anniversary of co-education is certainly one to celebrate. As an independent and international school in the nation’s capital, ensuring an inclusive school community is central to the school experience and to our mission and values. Looking back at our School history, A Character of its Own, the move to co-education was seen as a major change from the all-boys school that had endured for 91 years yet “a positive and welcome step with a new tone, an essential civility, an upbeat attitude, a feeling of openness and a pride in school and achievement.” Enrollment to start 1982-83 was 421 boys and 13 girls, with the