St Johns Ravenscourt School - Eagle Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

Page 8 text:

HISTORICAL SKETCH St. John’s-Ravenscourt School is the second oldest school of its type in Canada, the oldest school of its type in Western Canada. The roots of St. John’s-Ravenscourt are to be found in the very first efforts to provide sound education at Red River Colony. The Hudson’s Bay Company was not long in making provision for the education of the children of factors and servants in Rupertsland. As early as 1808 three teachers were sent to provide at least the rudiments of learning. Lord Selkirk personally appointed Mr. K. McRae to the position of educational supervisor in 1813. That the earl’s agents shared his interest in education is demonstrated in the formation of a school for the children on board the ship which brought the fourth party of Scotch settlers to Red River. All these early efforts, though not of permanent duration, were based on the British Public School system and the leading school in the community was to grow from these small beginnings. On November 1, 1820, the first formal school for English-speaking children at Red River was opened. Rev. John West, who came to the Forks at the invitation of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and with the sup¬ port of the Church Missionary Society, was responsible for organizing the co-educational school. The Church Missionary Society had sent West to the Forks following representations by John Pritchard, a devoted member of the Anglican Church and for many years an approved teacher at Red River. A certain gentleman named George Halbridge taught some twenty children in a log cabin situated three miles below Fort Douglas. Provision was made in a residence for pupils from a distance. West had brought two Indian boys from York Factory as students for his prospective school on his way down to Red River. One of these was Henry Budd, “the first Indian convert and clergyman in Rupert’s Land”, who in 1840 opened a mission among the Crees around Le Pas. In 1821 a large tract of land was purchased two miles north of the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers and an attempt was made to erect school buildings before winter set in. During the winter, classes had to be conducted in buildings belonging to the North West Company. In 1822 the Upper Church site came into use and the school became an agricultural and domestic science school in a small way. The following year Rev. John West returned to England and the school was directed by the Rev. T. D. Jones for two years. It was Rev. T. D. Jones who founded the second English parish at Red River, St. Paul’s or Middlechurch as it was later called. Rev. W. Cochran replaced Jones as “minister, clerk, schoolmaster, peacemaker and agricultural director”, for a period of one year. When Jones returned Cochran moved down the river to St. Andrew’s where he established the Lower Church and a second school in 1827. Two other schools were opened, one down the river from St. Andrew’s and the other on the east bank of the Red River opposite the present site of the Kildonan Church. With these three tributary schools the parent establishment grew in importance. By 1833 the parent school had assumed the name Red River Academy and under the guidance of Rev. John McCallum, a graduate of the Uni¬ versity of Aberdeen, played a dominant role in the education of Red River youth. Red River Academy not only prospered and held a large place in community life, but it provided training of a more advanced type. When Dr- Mountain, Bishop of Montreal, visited the colony in 1844 he could report 485 students in the church schools. Six EAGLE

Page 7 text:

EDITORIAL ☆ The first year of the amalgamated school has been successful in manv ways. The following pages contain the record of such events as the Cadet Inspection, the Gym display and house competitions in all fields. The social life of the school was highlighted by the Father and Son banquet and the visit of St. Paul Academy. The boarders had their own special programme of activities. However, there is one thing which will not be recorded any¬ where as a separate event, but which is most important to us. This is the daily association with the masters and with one another. The masters who used to fill us with awe when we were little have become good friends in our graduating year. It is through our daily contact with them and with the other boys that we learn an attitude to life which is, after all, the real purpose of the school. One important feature of a good attitude to life is learning to be self- reliant. When we enter school we are almost wholly dependent on our teacher and do little on our own initiative. By our final year we have learned to be self-dependent and confident. The independence is gradually instilled in us by giving us more and more to do with little guidance or exact precedent. Another purpose of school life is to prepare us for a job. This is the most obvious and probably the least important objective, for it is felt that if a boy is healthy and has a good outlook on life he will succeed at whatever he chooses as his work. A more important purpose of school life ' is to make a sportsman out of the boy. By sportsman we mean a good sport rather than one who is good in sports. A good deal of emphasis is placed on sportsmanship at St. John’s-Ravenscourt; boys are told that the im¬ portant thing is not just to win, but to play as well as possible, to be good losers, and what is harder still, good winners. Perhaps the most important part of a good attitude to life is the ability to get along well with other people. This does not mean being well liked or having a lot of personality. The man who gets along well with others must be tolerant, considerate and friendly. In a school where the boys come from all parts of Canada and live together in close contact there is a good opportunity to learn co-operation and understanding. These are some of the things which we the graduates feel we have learned from our school life. It is going to be hard for us to realize that this June will not be the same as other Junes, when we knew that Septem¬ ber would bring us all together again in the same familiar places. This year school closing for us means school leaving. No one knows how far apart another year will find us. However, neither time nor distance will break the bond formed during these years spent together. To those boys who are climbing the ladder which we have now topped, and to the masters who teach them, we would offer our best wishes for the future. COLIN LAING. EAGLE Five

Page 9 text:

In,the fall of 1849, the Right Rev. David Anderson, first Bishop of Rupert’s Land, arrived at the settlement and took charge of the school when MacCallum died. He placed the school under the care of Thomas Cochran and George Pridham, and himself took a share in the teaching. In 1855 Bishop Anderson instituted a new plan for its management and nominated a Collegiate Board giving it the name “St. John’s College”. Unfortunately, the demands on the Bishop by his extensive Diocese pre¬ vented this scheme from coming to fruition and he reluctantly consented to the closing of the school. Nevertheless, this school could not die! A tributary school had been founded a few years before in the parish of St. Paul. The St. Paul school was conducted by Rev. S. Pritchard, a son of Mr. John Pritchard. St. John’s College found lineal succession in this school until 1865. Bishop Anderson’s successor, the Right Rev. Robert Machray, shortly after reaching his new diocese, determined that the school was the key to the future of the settlement. Therefore, he brought out Rev. John McLean, an old college friend from England, to revive St. John’s. On November 1, 1866 a new school was opened and Mr. Pritchard’s school was amal¬ gamated with it, the new institution being called St. John’s College School. Three students registered in the college and nineteen in the high school. The teachers were Bishop Machray himself, Archdeacon McLean and Mr. Pritchard. This was the first amalgamation. The school had not only survived the period of uncertainty and hard¬ ships of a frontier community under Company rule, it had also been as Bishop Machray said, “a backbone to our whole system”. It provided the only sound spiritual, moral and practical teaching to the English-speaking youth of Red River before 1851. Indeed, all the English-language schools of Red River before 1870 were organized along the lines of the British Public Schools. From 1866 to 1950 St. John’s College School showed signs of continu¬ ous progress. Re-organized on the lines of Westminster School, the School largely owed its spirit and its success to the inspiration and foster¬ ing care of Archbishop Machray. In this school Winnipeg possessed a foundation much older than the commercial developments made possible first by wheat of the prairies and later by successful, development of mining and petroleum engineering. By 1885 quarters on the banks of the Red River were outgrown and a new building was erected on Main Street near St. John’s Cathedral. This building stood until the second amalgama¬ tion in 1950. Ravenscourt School for Boys was founded in September, 1929, by the late Captain Norman A. T. Young, a graduate of Oxford and a pioneer of the University of Achimota in the Gold Coast, and a group of public- spirited citizens to provide Winnipeg with a non-denominational school founded on the best traditions of scholarship. Ravenscourt soon acquired its founder’s wider outlook, a horizon stretching beyond the prairies and even beyond the North American continent. Starting with less than thirty boys in the old Bannatyne castle in the Armstrong’s Point district of Winnipeg, the school quickly grew to over seventy boys. This number proved to be too large for existing facilities, and the school was handi¬ capped by the lack of proper games fields. So in 1934 Ravenscourt was moved to the Thompson estate on South Drive in suburban Fort Garry. At the same time the school was in¬ corporated as a non-profit institution under the direction of a Board of Governors. The new site consisted of twenty acres of well-treed land on EAGLE Seven