English-speaking Canadians. Sir George’s visit there with Lady Parkin, their children and grandchildren was a family reunion that provided photo opportunities for a book being prepared about his life. A camera always accompanied the family on their various excursions, and pictures were taken. Thus, Sir George had a picnic on the beach with his grandson George. They sat among the rocks and ate bacon sandwiches, oranges and bananas. It made a lovely photograph but one that George Grant grew to hate. “That picture of me on the beach – you know that story was told me a thousand times – how he had asked for one child to stay with him on the beach and I was the one who volunteered and Mother would tell me this was my destiny, to carry on his work for king, country and empire.”
Sir George Parkin’s notion of a new world federation had been deflected but not destroyed by the First World War. That war taught British imperialists that the United States was too powerful an ally to be left entirely out of the postwar equation. It also taught them that it wasn’t enough to have a well-educated ruling class. Peace and justice demanded dedicated, responsible political parties and a well-informed electorate. Sir George and Lady Parkin’s three daughters all married men who carried parts of his dream forward in different directions. Vincent Massey, George’s uncle who was to become Canada’s first native-born Governor General, was active in the Liberal Party. Another uncle, James Macdonnell, was the Canadian secretary of the Rhodes Scholarship Committee and an organizer for the Conservative Party. William Grant, George’s father, was the incumbent headmaster of Upper Canada College. He was also president of the Canadian branch of the League of Nations society and active on behalf of increased educational opportunities for adult Canadian workers.
George Grant was born on Wednesday, November 13, 1918, two days after the armistice ended the First World War. His mother gave birth at their home in the principal’s residence in the southeast wing of the main building of Upper Canada College (UCC). George was the fourth child but first son of William Grant, a wounded veteran of the war who had returned to Canada to take up the position of headmaster of UCC a year earlier. Maude Parkin Grant, George’s mother, first met her husband twenty years earlier when William was a history teacher at UCC and her own father was the principal and William’s boss. They named their son George Parkin Grant in his honour.
Born inside the walls of UCC and educated there until William’s death in 1935, George was deeply marked by the school. When he was in his sixties and apologizing for a longstanding quarrel he’d had with her, he told his sister Charity, “One difference between myself and yourself is that you did not attend school where your father was headmaster. Whether for good or ill, my life has been greatly a convalescence from that fact.”
Whatever advantage George gained from being a student at what some claimed was the best secondary school in Canada during his father’s term of office, it left him feeling trapped by his own adolescence all his life. Perhaps because of this, George Grant developed a remarkable empathy for young people. It was a most charming part of the complex personality that made him an extraordinary teacher in his own classrooms at Dalhousie and McMaster universities, on lecture platforms, in newspapers and books, and on CBC radio.
George never met his other grandfather. William’s father, George Monro Grant, died in 1902. Like George Parkin, George Monro Grant grew up on a farm in the Maritimes. His family was of Scots, not English, origin. His parents immigrated to Pictou county, Nova Scotia, in 1826. When George Monro was involved in a farming accident and could no longer do physical work because of a serious injury to his hand, his father sent him back to Scotland to study and train as a Presbyterian minister. Reverend George Monro Grant returned to Canada in 1863 as rector of Saint Matthews Presbyterian Church in Halifax. In addition to his church duties, Reverend Grant worked to revive and strengthen Dalhousie University, which had fallen on hard times. He had such success reorganizing its finances and upgrading its educational standards that he was then invited to rescue a small college in Kingston, Ontario from its troubles. As head of Queen’s for twenty-five years, Principal Grant transformed it from an unimportant college to a prominent educational institution modelled on the German ideal of the university as a research centre.
Reverend George Monro Grant has a second claim to fame. While still located in Halifax, he acted as secretary to Sandford Fleming, the chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway (and a parishioner at Saint Matthews) when Fleming made an exploratory journey to the Pacific in search of the best route for the rails to follow. George Monro Grant’s written record of the 1872 expedition that travelled from Halifax to Victoria by train, steamer, canoe, wagon, and horseback was published as Ocean to Ocean, one of Canada’s most famous and influential travel books. George Monro Grant wrote vividly and humorously of the hardships the expedition faced. He also wrote with great enthusiasm of the many new things he encountered. His purpose in writing the book was not just to inform and entertain: Ocean to Ocean defended the creation of the transcontinental railway as a key instrument of Canadian unity. Without it, the Americans would come in and take everything. He also saw the West as a great garden to feed Ontario while that province busied itself with industrial manufacturing. Although he had considerable sympathy for the Metis and First Nations cultures, he believed that they had to be controlled for the sake of “progress.”
As an adult, George Grant found much to criticize in the ideas of both his grandfathers – especially George Monro’s belief in progress – but through his parents, his grandfathers both left positive imprints on him. The Parkin side of the family taught him to prize peace and justice above all else, and the Grant side taught him to keep all of Canada in mind when he spoke of any part of it. Both sides taught him the importance of education for everyone and the duty of teachers to form not only students in the classroom but also public opinion.
“Not now, Georgie. Not now. Can’t you see I’m quite busy?”
“George wants kisses.”
“Not now, Georgie. Not now.”
Even as a child growing up inside the walls and grounds of an all-boys school, George’s early life was still dominated by women. The first and most powerful female force in his life was his mother Maude. She was thirty-eight years old when she gave birth to George. Unlike the vast majority of women of her generation, Maude Parkin had gone to college. At the urging of Sandford Fleming, she’d been among the first to enrol in McGill’s Royal Victoria College, an institution he’d funded in 1903. After graduation, she had gone to England and had become the assistant dean of women at the University of Manchester’s Ashburne Hall. She had a successful career of her own before she married William Grant when she was thirty-one and he was thirty-nine.
After their wedding, they settled in Kingston, Ontario, where William taught history at Queen’s. Despite his age and family status, William was posted overseas as an officer in the Canadian Army when the Great War (First World War) erupted. Maude moved back to England with Margaret and Charity, their two young daughters, in order to be near him. Early in 1916 she gave birth to their third daughter, Jessie Alison. In the middle of August that year, William was badly injured on the battlefront in France when his horse threw him and then rolled on top of him, inflicting severe head and chest wounds. Once William was fit enough to travel back to Canada, he took up the job of headmaster of UCC he’d been offered while recuperating from his injuries. Maude took charge of the family and got them all resettled in Toronto.
“Not now, Georgie. Not now. Can’t you see I’m really very busy?”
“Why can’t I have a hug?”
“Not now, Georgie. Not now.”
As the wife of the headmaster, Maude worked to make the school a success. William was hired to get the place back on its feet financially
