After surviving a dumping and a spanking in my first couple of weeks at the school I allowed myself to believe my initiation to St. John’s was over. It turned out such thoughts were slightly premature.
Those introductory experiences constituted what might be regarded as my “official” welcome to the school. Some of the old boys, however, considered them insufficient. They felt new boys should be exposed to as many unpleasant aspects of the school as possible to ensure “you were right for St. John’s and St. John’s was right for you.”
Most of the time these unofficial rites of passage took the form of practical jokes. While upsetting, they were relatively harmless and soon forgotten. Someone would “french” your bed, or put a piece of chalk in your milk, or pour water on you while you were sitting on the john. Only if you made a scene did you find yourself the victim of more such pranks.
I soon discovered that there was one particular prank reserved for new members of the kitchen crew — that of being “accidentally” locked in the storeroom.
I had been assigned to the kitchen crew on the first day of term. Some of the time I peeled potatoes – a chore that took place in the pot room which was next door to the storeroom. My confinement in the storeroom came the day I was accused of “goofing off” because I had taken too long to drag a heavy sack of potatoes from the staff house at the other end of the school.
The coterie of conspirators pounced just as I reached the entrance to the storeroom. I knew my fate was sealed. Swiftly they shoved me into the storeroom and slammed the door shut.
“Don’t worry, you won’t starve,” hooted one of them as he locked the door.
“Here’s a potato in case you can’t open any of the cans,” laughed another as he hurled a potato through the peephole in the door then slid its wooden shutter shut.
I knew I was in for at least a 15-minute stay — unless discovered by the cook or a master. What seemed to give the perpetrators the biggest laugh was not the fact I might get caught but rather that I was being detained in a real cell.
A few moments alone in the school’s storeroom was all it took to bring me face to face with another chapter in the history of the school buildings. The walls, what I could see between the cans of peaches, creamed corn, and peanut butter, were covered with grim reminders that the buildings had previously housed the Manitoba Home for Girls and that I was locked in Thinking Room No. 1.
In that tiny, five by ten-foot chamber with iron bars on the window I could still see the angry markings of women who once spent long hours within its confines. Sometimes it was just a record of the number of hours or days. Sometimes it was a word of hatred carved letter by letter.
But most chilling were the marks left by those who appeared to have made a desperate attempt to claw their way out. It was a chapter in the history of the property that seemed so out of character with its peaceful, country-estate setting.
The school was situated in that part of Manitoba that once lay beneath a glacial inland sea known as Lake Agassiz. In general, the countryside is unnervingly flat, windswept. Those views not blocked by stands of trees stretch forever, dissolving finally into a watery haze of earth and sky.
The region is not blessed with an abundance of ideal sites for settlement. Only in the wooded areas that line the banks of rivers were the early settlers able to discover protected spots for their homes.
William Cockran discovered one such spot where Cook’s Creek joins the Red River just downstream from Selkirk. In 1825 he was sent from England to Red River by the Anglican Church Missionary Society.
A man of great physical strength and determination, Cockran spent his first five years ministering to the colony of mostly Scottish settlers at what was to become Winnipeg. He was then appointed priest at St. Andrew’s, a settlement 15 miles downstream and not far from Lower Fort Garry, the Hudson Bay Company’s fortified base of operations in Western Canada. Further downstream near Cook’s Creek lay an Indigenous settlement led by the famous Chief Peguis.
Cockran used to regular visits to Peguis’s camp, talking to them about his Christian faith and encouraging them to become farmers. Peguis was himself a newcomer to Red River, having led a band of 200 Saulteau (Ojibwa) to there from Sault Ste Marie in the 1790s. His band also included Swampy Cree from Manitoba’s interlake district. Peguis was known to be hospitable towards Europeans and it wasn’t long before he agreed to help Cockran with his plan for a church and farming venture at Cook’s Creek.
Initially, the Peguis band resisted Cockran’s efforts to convert them to Christianity, but that changed when Peguis agreed to be baptised. His baptism led the way to many others stepping forward in the years to come.
In 1839, when John Smithurst took over as minister, Cockran’s settlement included a wood frame church called St. Peter’s, a mission house, a school, and about a dozen Indigenous homes.
In 1851, when Cockran returned for a second stint, the congregation had grown to nearly 500, prompting him to ask his backers in England for money to build a larger church. They agreed and Cockran set to work building a stone church similar to the one he’d built at St. Andrew’s in 1845. The task of completing the limestone structure, however, fell to Cockran’s successor, Abraham Cowley, who took over in 1854.
Cowley was born in Fairford, Gloucestershire, and educated at the Fairford Free School. As a student, he was greatly influenced by one of his teachers, the Reverend Canon F. Rice, and this grew into a lifelong friendship. Canon Rice eventually became the Baron of Dynevor, a title associated with Dynevor Castle in Wales.
In his early 20s, Cowley attended the Church Missionary Society College in London before being sent to Canada in 1841. He arrived at Red River in September with his wife Arabella having sailed to Hudson’s Bay then traveling inland from York Factory by York boat.
He spent his first 13 years establishing a mission at Fairford on Lake Manitoba. When he was transferred to Cook’s Creek in 1854 he brought with him his wife and four young children.
As tempted as he might have been to abandon work on the stone church in favor of replacing the dilapidated wooden rectory it was a project that would have to wait another seven years. Work proceeded on the church, mainly using Indigenous labor, and by the end of Cowley’s second summer, St. Peter’s was ready for occupancy.
For the next few years, he turned his attentions to the spiritual and physical needs of the Indigenous at St. Peter’s. He was particularly concerned about caring for the sick. His home became a makeshift field hospital.
Not until 1860 was he able to start thinking about improving his own comfort. His letter on February 15 that year to the CMS acknowledging receipt of 100 pounds sterling marked the beginning of another great building project at St. Peter’s.
Why Cowley chose to locate his new rectory on the opposite side of the river has never really been explained. There are a number of possible reasons. To begin with, the stand of oak and elm trees on the point opposite was very attractive. What’s more, it was on that side of the river along which the dirt track ran connecting the settlements of Red River. Also, a much larger Indigenous settlement had taken hold on the west bank.
By 1860, lots along the west bank had been assigned for a distance of seven miles while on the east bank the land was mostly unoccupied. Cowley was spending more of his time there. Indeed, it was on the wooded point that Cowley now tethered his horse Chelsea during the summer. It was there that he chose to build a new home for his family.
‘The new house is of stone and may D.V. serve many years. I am very thankful God has spared me till it is habitable. May he graciously accept the labour and cost bestowed upon it,’ Cowley wrote in his journal on Aug. 10, 1865.
The three-story building had an Edwardian-style interior with the ground floor consisting of three rooms divided by a central hallway. The second floor was similarly divided into three rooms for bedrooms while the third floor consisted of just two rooms. A two-story wood annex at the rear housed the kitchen, storage rooms, and servants’ quarters.
Though the stone walls were nearly two feet thick the wood-burning furnace in the basement would barely keep the ground floor liveable in winter. During temperatures below 0 degrees F (-13 C) the windows would frost over. There was no plumbing or electricity for many years.
Cowley continued to live in the rectory after becoming the Archdeacon of Cumberland (northern Manitoba) in 1866 but his stepping down very much marked the end of an era at St. Peter’s. Chief Peguis had died two years before. Then on October 6, 1865, Cockran died.
In 1871, with the signing of Treaty 1 (the first in Western Canada) by Peguis’s son Henry Prince, the settlement was formally divided with the Saulteau taking the northern half and the Cree the southern half. The name chosen for the Cree settlement, undoubtedly suggested by Cowley, was Dynevor in honor of his English patron.
Cowley’s continuing concern for the medical needs of the Indigenous families ensured there was a steady stream of visitors to his home right up to his death in 1887 at age 71. In his will he asked that his home be turned into an Indigenous hospital.
It was not until 1896 that his request was honoured with the opening of the Dynevor Indian Hospital. It included 16 beds plus an out-patients treatment centre. Among the founding patrons were Canada’s Governor-General, the Earl of Aberdeen, and J.C. Peterson, Manitoba’s Lieutenant Governor.
In 1908 the Women’s Auxiliary of the Diocese of Rupertsland (southern Manitoba) took over from the founding committee. A three-story wood-frame residence was added for the nurses, electricity was installed and the first telephone was hooked up.
In 1915, with the promise of increased funding from the federal government, the Dynevor Indian Hospital embarked on a major expansion. A two-story tuberculosis wing was built on the east side of the stone building. It wasn’t long before all 20 beds were full with Indigenous TB patients from communities all over Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. A registry for the years 1909 to 1934 indicates 2,370 patients were admitted during that period.
A barn was built in the mid-1920s and by the 1930s the grounds in front had taken on the appearance they would retain to the present — a semi-circular driveway bordered by a white rail fence.
In 1939 the federal government bought the hospital and turned it over to the Sanitorium Board of Manitoba to operate as a TB hospital. Dr. Murray Campbell was appointed medical superintendent and he was succeeded by Dr. Denton Booth in 1947.
Dr. Booth was also the father of two boys who attended St. John’s during the mid-1960s, one of whom, Don Booth, was a classmate of mine. During an interview for this book, Dr. Booth remembered being involved in a farm operation as much as running a hospital.
“We were pretty well self-sufficient so far as food was concerned,” said Dr. Booth. “I’ve always been interested in cattle so I got the fence repaired out to the two-mile road and we ran about 50 head. For a while, we had a pig operation in the barn.”
The Dynevor TB Hospital was a 50-bed facility run by a staff of 20 including a matron, two nurses, nine practical nurses, two orderlies, two cooks, one groundskeeper, a night watchman and a teacher for the Indigenous children.
Booth believed the rooms in the stone building have changed very little since the days when it was a church rectory. The room in the southwest corner had been divided into an inner and outer office, one for himself and one for the matron. When St. John’s took up residence Mr. Wiens occupied the inner office while the outer area served as the staff office.
The small back room served as an X-ray and treatment room. At St. John’s it was first the library, then a classroom, and finally Mr. Wiens’ office. The large room across the hall was a classroom during the TB hospital days and a chapel for the school.
On the second floor, the hall landing had been walled in to create a private ward for the terminally ill. In my day the school cook occupied that little room. The other rooms on the second floor were wards while the two rooms on the third floor served as the night nurses’ quarters.
For the school, two of the three second-floor rooms were initially dorms before being turned into classrooms while the room on the east side was always a classroom. The third-floor rooms were always classrooms.
The TB wing during Dr. Booth’s days consisted of two open wards, one on each floor. The school divided the second floor of the TB wing into a number of four-bed dormitories in the early years before opening it up as a library while the ground floor was always the kitchen and dining room. Elaborate wooden staircases, landings, and slides were added outside as fire escapes when the federal government took over the facility.
In 1957 the Sanitorium Board closed the hospital and, following a stem to stern renovation to make the premises secure, the facility re-opened as the Manitoba Home for Girls.
My detention in the storeroom was one of the few rooms unchanged since the girls’ home days. Iron bars were still on the window and the door still had a peephole. I was spared a long detention by one of my fellow potato-peelers. He didn’t see why I should be sitting there doing nothing when there were potatoes to be peeled.
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.
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I’ve taken classes in that building. The floors were warped beyond anything I had ever seen since I had yet been to Europe. The smell was other than “musty.” Makes you wonder if the walls talked . . .