“Good morning, Father,” said Mr. Thompson, a little more playfully than usual as the school’s new chaplain sat down for breakfast.
“Would you like some toast? I’m afraid it’s a bit soggy this morning.”
Conversations within earshot froze mid-sentence. Had Mr. Thompson really said that word to Father Sargeant’s face? No one dared look round, let alone laugh for fear of arousing suspicion. Perhaps it was just a coincidence he had chosen to use that particular word. But probably not, knowing Mr. Thompson.
Dave Thompson was a 22-year-old high school teacher from Winnipeg with an M.A. in English. His master’s thesis had been on humor in Canadian literature and his fascination with puns and the like made his classes entertaining even though he did tend to go overboard.
So it wouldn’t have been at all surprising if he had deliberately chosen a double-entendre when addressing Father Sargeant. What was shocking was that Mr. Thompson seemed to have already caught on to Father Sargeant’s nickname. The name Sog was still new among most boys at the school. The suspense waiting for Father Sargeant’s reply was killing us.
“Oh well, never mind,” he replied in his still novel English accent with a high-pitched tone. “We’ll just have to heat it up, won’t we?”
You could almost feel the collective sigh of relief. He obviously hadn’t caught on. Otherwise, surely he would have made some attempt to express his displeasure at being made fun of in front of students. It meant we could now be even bolder about making Sog jokes. What made the game even more appealing as it seemed to have been sanctioned by the masters.
Most of the masters had nicknames, but Father Phillip Sargeant’s was the only one that ever came to enjoy semi-official approval. The staff adopted the name Sog almost as soon as students did.
Only rarely would you get spanked for saying it which was not the case with other masters. This was particularly so in the case of Mr. Thompson. He was known as the Goose and was subjected to some particularly vicious ridicule because of it.
Neither Mr. Wiens nor Mr. Byfield had nicknames apart from their first names Frank and Ted although at some point in the late ’60s if you said the General, everyone knew you were talking about Mr. Byfield.
The nickname came from his habit of military-like pacing and his tendency to overreact to just about everything. He would usually respond with the kind of fervour normally associated with a bad-tempered general trying to rally his troops. His outbursts came to be known as ‘having a ratch’.
For bringing a roomful of unruly teenagers to heel they were very effective. No other master could match the sweep and magnitude of a Ted ratch. Mostly they involved a lot of bellowing which might have been more intimidating had they not become so common-place. But the General usually got results.
Mr. Wiens also got results but with far fewer theatrics. In fact, the label “stern disciplinarian” could have been invented for him. I never saw him lose his cool and he hardly ever even raised his voice. I also remember him being as much fun to mimic as any of the others.
I’d set the scene by grabbing a handful of toilet paper or if outside, twigs and judiciously arrange them so they stuck out of the collar of my T-shirt in the same manner as Mr. Wiens’s ample growth of chest hair. Then I would proceed to give life and death importance to some minor infraction such as not standing up when I entered the room. The style and delivery were of course far more important than the substance of my lecture. My favorite stage was the front of the classroom during recess.
Mr. Bennett was called Yogi after the famous cartoon bear. The nickname had its origins in the part-time school when St. John’s occupied a three-story house at 66 St. Cross St. near the cathedral in Winnipeg. Mr. Bennett apparently made the mistake of choosing to lay down the law one day in 1960 at a moment when the dish crew was more interested in singing the hit tune by the Ivy Three called “Yogi” than drying dishes. Mr. Bennett’s demand for less noise and more work came just as they were belting out the refrain, “I’m a Yogi bear, bop, bop…”
Yogi’s reputation as a big-footed bully was immediately applied to Mr. Bennett for spoiling their fun and from then on those in the know got a big laugh out of singing the refrain whenever he was within earshot. The name continued to be used when the school went full-time although the origin, like the song, quickly faded into history. Most of us assumed it had something to do with his stocky build.
Father Millward had the nickname Pappy, not because he had a back-slapping, one of the boys’ nature, but because it seemed to be a persona we could never imagine him having, on or off-duty. Its appeal was that it was totally out of character. It was a name you could have said to his face, as some did, and all he would have done was smile.
Mr. Thompson had two attributes that pretty well guaranteed that any nickname he received would be less than complimentary. His portly shape caused him to sway from side to side as he walked, and his nasal, staccato laugh sounded distinctly like a cross between a honk and a cackle. As a result, he became the Goose not long after arriving at the school in 1963. Aspiring cartoonists in the student body had a field day. And so did the poets. Glasses propped up on a beak, briefcase stuffed under one wing with an empty coffee cup dangling from the other no other master was more vividly illustrated than the Goose.
Mr. Thompson’s irrepressible sweet tooth soon put him at odds with the cook, Charlie Race. Chuck’s not well-disguised hostility towards the Goose on baking days was celebrated in a poem entitled The Chase by Rick Wiens, Mr. Wiens’ second son, in which the Goose a la Sam Magee in the “Cremation of…” definitely comes out on the losing end.
Mr. Thompson’s proclivity for big words and bad puns also took a beating in the mostly unrecorded folklore which grew up around his feathery persona. It was invariably unkind, and for the most part, I thought, unrepresentative of the feelings of most boys towards him. He certainly had the best sense of humor of all the masters.
A variety of other nicknames came to be used including Bear for Dave Neelands, Squeak for Stanley Isherwood, Dude or Turtle for Frank Doolan, and Kentucky for American Doug Teuting but none were ever as popular as Sog.
The origin of Father Sargeant’s nickname is as obvious as it is little known. I didn’t find it out until I interviewed Mr. Wiens’s oldest son Robin for this book. Rather than attend St. John’s Wiens spent the first month of his Grade 12 year at a public high school in North Winnipeg. It was his final act of rebellion for losing any real home life to the school.
In his class, there was a student by the name of Bob Sargeant whom everyone called Sog. The nickname is apparently used in the British Army for someone of that rank. When Wiens returned to the school to finish Grade 12 he immediately dubbed Father Sargeant Sog. And the nickname stuck.
The name was even used openly by masters when talking among themselves. It once appeared on a CBC television production schedule during the filming of a documentary on the school. When an assistant saw the nickname and realized it referred to Father Sargeant she told him she guessed it was because he was a Servant of God.
Father Sargeant did more to advance the Sog persona than anything dreamed up by students. Unmarried and 46, he displayed many of the eccentricities associated with advanced bachelorhood.
He was a longtime miniature railroad buff and one of his first projects was to mount a set of tracks on plywood and suspend it on pulleys in one of the classrooms. It could be lowered onto tables whenever the model railroad club met.
It was obvious from the disheveled, sometimes stained state of his black cassock that cigarettes received more of his $1-a-day salary than dry cleaning did. He also wore a clerical bib that hung over his shoulders and gave his six-foot frame a scarecrow-like appearance. He tended to walk quickly and on flat feet. His customary salutation was cuffing the air wildly just above your head then instantly clamping his hand on the back of your neck as he playfully chided you about some long-forgotten transgression.
There was much speculation, often distasteful, as to the cause of the disfigurement on his hands, face, and balding head. Where the skin wasn’t discolored it was peeling like a sunburn, sometimes breaking into open sores. The standard explanation was that it was the result of a World War II wound.
While talking with him prior to writing this book he admitted he allowed people to think the skin problem was from the war. In fact, he said, it was the result of a burn he received when he was very young. He preferred to say no more than that.
Not long after soggy toast appeared at the breakfast table, soggy pepper made its debut. And then it was soggy salt. Father Sargeant still hadn’t caught on but the jokes eventually came to an end.
Boys stopped beating around the bush with references to things soggy and started saying just Sog. One day during the return of lost clothing one of the junior boys got carried away with his persistent “Has anyone seen Sog?” Father Sargeant had become the keeper of lost clothing and it was his job to return it to the rightful owner along with one swat per item.
After about the fifth time it became obvious who the boy was referring to. Not wanting things to get any further out of hand Father Sargeant, as he later recalled, gave the boy a few swats to remind him to be a bit more respectful of his elders.
His health gave out on him more than with other masters, especially in his first year. For a while his laryngitis was so bad he had a whistle hanging from his neck in case it became necessary to restore order. He was the only master while I was at the school who didn’t go on a canoe trip and he only snowshoed on a few occasions.
His lively, sometimes mischievous sense of humor was as much responsible for moments of disorder in his classes as anything his students did. He teased his Latin students mercilessly, especially the younger ones.
“And what would your mummy say, MccccGrrrregorrr?” he would exclaim with a long, theatrical roll of the rr’s, relishing the opportunity to remind the boy of his Scottish heritage.
All McGregor, or whoever his victim was that day, had done to provoke the playful outburst was ask if he could be excused from one of Father Sargeant’s famous after class Latin ‘tea parties’. His question to McGregor was of course rhetorical.
“I think she’d say her little Billy needs another big helping of strawberry shortcake because he still hasn’t learned the difference between the accusative and the dative, now has he? Never mind, we’ll have another tea party tomorrow. Off you go.”
As a boy, Father Sargeant had attended the same boarding school as Rudyard Kipling – United Services College. Kipling’s book Stalky & Co about the mischievous antics of three schoolboys was based on his experiences as a student at the college and was of course required reading for anyone who ever attended the school.
Father Sargeant came away with great affection for all the characters in the book and delighted in reading excerpts from the book during Grade 9 English classes. We always suspected he liked the book primarily because it showed that Latin was not in fact a dead language and that someone other than himself had actually spoken it during the last hundred years.
Mr. King, the Latin teacher in Stalky & Co, may not have been a role model exactly, but Father Sargeant certainly borrowed some of his quirks. His open endorsement of the book was regarded by many boys as an open invitation to engage in Stalky-like mischief.
On one memorable occasion, the unmistakable splat of an egg after it had been winged through the peep-hole in the classroom door merely provided Father Sargeant with an opportunity to introduce a new Latin word.
“Ah, yes!” he responded when the offending mess landed inches from the bottom of his cassock.
“Ovus, ovus, ovum, ovi, ovo, ovo.”
And then he carried on as if nothing had happened, no doubt knowing full well it was too late to catch the culprit.
But of course, if he’d made a few inquiries his first hunch would have proven to be correct. Because new boys in our class were only learning French they had a spare during Latin. That meant they had minimally supervised study time in the library. Father Sargeant need only consider which boy was not in the room and had given him more trouble than any other.
In the library sat Donald Glen Forfar, grinning like a Cheshire cat. Once again he had gotten away with some mischief.
Richard de Candole has been working in British Columbia and Alberta as a reporter and editor for over 40 years. Toughest School in North America is about his five years as a student at St. John’s Cathedral Boys’ School in Selkirk, Manitoba from 1962 to 1968. Richard lives with his wife Wendy in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia.
bedard.com is serializing Toughest School in North America for your reading pleasure. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. If you’d like to preorder a copy of the book, leave a reply below. All replies are moderated.
Love reminiscing about the sixties in Selkirk through all these stories. One small point regarding nicknames- The General was Ted’s father who spent a few years at the school.
Thanks, Lee. We will fix it shortly. That was just there to make sure someone was reading :).
Not sure how deep your editing goes. He introduced and enjoyed leading a learn-to-be-attentive game, “The priest in the parish has lost his hat, some say this and some say that,” as well as read Don Camillo stories. The model train set up must have been moved- I saw it set up around the walls of his apartment, on the 2nd floor of the Old Stone Bldg. And was he the owner of a dog names Ivor?
I don’t remember the Don Camillo stories. I’m thinking the train set was always on the 2nd floor of the Stone building and after it was no longer a classrom and became his apt. he remounted it around the walls.