demoralized. Maude had wonderful social skills and a flair for bringing people together over the dinner table. With her powerful personality and strong will motivating and assisting him, William was able to persuade the board of governors to raise salaries so that he could recruit enthusiastic and inspiring teachers to implement the changes he envisioned for the school. Working alongside her husband to recruit students and improve conditions at UCC left her with little time to devote to her four children. Mrs. Don Leo, the family nursemaid, was responsible for their daily welfare. Leo, as they called her, tended to pamper the children – George especially – since her own two children had both died in early childhood.
“Whatever has happened to George’s beautiful golden curls?”
“His father insisted on taking him for a haircut. Leo really has been spoiling him.”
George’s sisters were very much like their mother and didn’t fuss over their little brother either. After Sir George died, Lady Parkin lived for part of each year with Maude’s family at UCC and the rest of the year at the grander home of Alice Massey, her far wealthier daughter. “The person I loved best was Grandmother Parkin,” George confessed to his uncle Raleigh Parkin forty years later. “I liked a lot of kissing. I loved being hugged; I loved the wetness and the softness.”
In England, there was another woman keeping her eye on George. Marian Buck, a wealthy widow and a devoted admirer of Sir George and his dream of a new world order, exerted considerable pressure on William and Maude to mould George to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, a pressure that continued until her death in 1947.
UCC provided the Grant family with a high standard of living and many privileges. In addition to the nursemaid, the family had two servants – a parlourmaid and a cook. The school was almost in the countryside. It had large open fields behind it and the most affluent part of Toronto outside its front gate. Many of its neighbours in Forest Hill continued to raise and ride horses for pleasure. UCC was a place of many charms, and the family had a place of their own at Otter Lake in cottage country, where they could spend summers swimming and fishing and entertaining friends and relatives.
Always in the Family’s Schools
Cleopatra, the legendary Queen of ancient Egypt, was short, dark, and large-nosed. At fourteen, George Grant is tall, blond, and delicate-featured. As Cleopatra in Upper Canada College’s 1934 production of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, he’s the star.
“What are you going to write about Grant’s performance?” one boy asks another.
“He’s a fine figure of a woman, as my father likes to say, isn’t he?” says the drama critic for the school paper. “I’ll say he was well cast and won much praise.”
A year later, George is Gloria Clandon in Shaw’s You Never Can Tell.
Charity, Margaret, George, and Alison Grant on the steps of the Principal’s Residence, Upper Canada College (UCC), 1932–1933. “I loved being hugged; I loved the wetness and the softness.”
George Grant at UCC, third row, extreme right. “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 greatly been a convalescence from that fact.”
“Grant is excellent as a mature woman, isn’t he!” the drama critic tells his friend.
At an all boys’ school, George was definitely not “one of the boys.”
The casting of males in female roles – an ancient tradition in the theatre that was common practice in Shakespeare’s day and goes back to the Greeks, who invented drama as we know it – is just one of the things that now strike many people as odd about the private boys’ schools that were created in Canada on British models. The primary purpose of these schools was then and is now to turn boys into men who fit easily into the ruling class. The methods they used to favour were rigorous athletic training in aggressive team sports, severe physical punishments for undisciplined behaviour (measured against a whole book of rules), and military drills. Boys at UCC in George’s time, for instance, were required to join the school’s corps of army cadets so that they would learn how to submit, instantly and unthinkingly, to commands and get accustomed to obeying anyone and everyone of a higher rank. Most of the boys were being trained for life as future businessmen, and businesses such as banks were modelled on the military. In a great many instances, the same men who had served as military officers in the Great War became the senior executive officers of the banks and other Canadian businesses in peacetime. It took the protest movements of the 1960s to demilitarize the schools, relax the rules, and reduce the level of physically abusive punishments.
William Grant served as an officer in the Canadian army but he was also an educational reformer. The major change he introduced to the daily life of his school was the inclusion of music and art classes. He believed that the proper aim of education is the formation of character and that training in music not only developed individual talent and spirituality but also required the same team effort as organized sports. He hired the soon-to-be-famous Canadian composer/conductor Ernest MacMillan as music master to direct the school choir and improve its repertoire. The boys learned to sing oratorios by Bach and Handel and to stage the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Filled with the sons of Ontario’s industrial elite, UCC had a political tone that was deep blue Conservative. William Grant did not share that point of view. His brother-in-law, Vincent Massey, was president of the Liberal Party of Canada, and the past and future prime minister, Mackenzie King, was often among the guests welcomed at the Principal’s residence. George always thought Mackenzie King looked like a “sissy gangster.” And said so. His father was amused.
George’s father differed from the fathers of most UCC boys in other respects as well. William Grant was a specialist in Canadian history and was so sympathetic and enthusiastic a defender of French and French Canada that the Canadian history book he wrote for high schools was banned in British Columbia. But it was in his attitude to the Great War in which he’d served and been wounded that he was more radical than most: William Grant often spoke with disgust of the senselessness of that war. He believed that reason was our only defence against madness and greed. If rationality was pursued with intellectual integrity, he believed it would be guided by the Holy Spirit. His attitude encouraged some UCC teachers to do such radical things as select plays by the socialist George Bernard Shaw to be performed by the boys and to organize at the school discussion groups that studied world religions and issues of war and peace. William was pleased that George acted in the Shaw plays and joined these discussion groups. As headmaster, William Grant encouraged the boys of UCC, his son included, to follow Martin Luther’s advice, “Live in the large. Dare greatly, and if you must sin, sin nobly.”
One of the books that is chosen for George’s discussion group is Beverley Nichols’ Cry Havoc – a book that affects George deeply. Nichols argues on behalf of Christian ideals and the values of Gandhi against arms merchants and the wars that serve their bank accounts so very lucratively. Pondering Nichols’ arguments, swayed by their force, George becomes an avowed pacifist. He’s articulate and self-assured in espousing it. Pacifism gives him
