United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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be unwise to dedicate it entirely to pictures of row on row of academic gowns, formats and gym clothes surmounted by rows of tediously similar heads; in the future, you will not be inspired by such an issue, unless it be to the desultory game of guessing the identity of the curious looking people. Memories of ideas will not fade, however, nor will those ideas change in fashion, if they are basic ones. Those who had read Woodsworth’s early work, or had accompanied Dr. Rose and Gerry Riddell on the first stages of their intel¬ lectual way, or had felt through Cottingham’s and Pickersgill’s writing a deepening sense of the relevance of life, must read their old issues of VOX with a new dimension of experience. And even if our hardy enemies, Time and Death, seem to have triumphed so soon over Cotting- ham and Pickersgill, we know from a few issues of VOX that they had already subdued those foes, by seeing in them intelligible form. And though their deaths are no less tragic, they are neither stifled nor mute. For Shoes That Combine V COMFORT V FIT V FASHION VISIT THE EXPERTS AT MacDONALD 492-4 MAIN ST. Just South of the City Hall For . . . BIRD bring big-job CLEAN COAL know-how to small-job Filtered Fuel Oil building! Consult us before you bulid. DELIVERED IN THE BIG WHITE TRUCK Phone 92-8161 • BIRD CONSTRUCTION CO. LIMITED Sargent at Erin St. WINNIPEG 8

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A Message from the Honorary Editor THE VOICE OF UNITED COLLEGE By PROF. R. M. STINGLE TN a letter to his family in 1939, David Cotting- ham (United ’42) wrote: VOX comes out next week. I have a couple of poems in it. Beattie’s story that won the Chancellor’s Prize will be in it, also a storv by John D. Hamilton. . . . There is also an article by J. S. Woodsworth, who was senior stick of the college in 1896. . . . Surely this casual note defines the function of the college magazine, which unites the genera¬ tions of the College in the timeless world of creative exDression. This antiphon of the genera¬ tions was heard again in 1940, when Cotting- ham’s story, The World Is Waiting , appeared in the same issue with Dr. W. J. Rose’s article on Poland, in which some of the world problems awaiting Cottingham were analysed. Now, in this issue, Dr. Rose is speaking again through VOX, both as a graduate (Wesley ’05) and as a member of the faculty. And interweavin? these are many others, such as Gerry Riddell and Frank Pickersgill. It is fitting that yet another graduate, Dr. E. P. Scarlett (Wesley T6). should be renresented in this issue by a study of the central core of the Humanities, a fiery core that must have been the beacon for the man who came to be called “The Conscience of Canada”, for the young poet who was killed at Ortona in 1943, and for the distinguished scholar who has returned with so many gifts for his Alma Mater. I know how much that light meant to Gerry Riddell, who was senior tutor at Victoria College, before going on to become, so appropriately, Canada’s Ambas¬ sador to the United Nations. And I have shared, with many others, a renewal of faith in the values of the Arts College in reading Frank Pickersgill’s letters. Dr. Scarlett identifies the light relating these men together with the “invisible sun” of Sir Thomas Browne, that sun which Solomon saw burning in the soul of every believer, and which Christ described as proper to his own nature. Though ultimately of the soul, this sun is fed by reason, and thinkers like Plato, who preceded Christ in time, though not in Creation, help build the City of the Sun. Students presumable are striving to create that city, a city set apart from, though not with¬ out influence upon, that other world waiting outsaide, a world too often one of “telegrams and anger”, of incompletion. For make no mis¬ take, the real world is here; the other world is a fumbling attempt to realize in time and space the perfection of religion, art, literature, and philosophy. Then, if the students are doing their duty, and if VOX is truly the voice of United, this magazine will be a source of building material for the City of the Sun. With the platitudes of the guest speakers at my own graduation still clanging in my ears, I cannot, with any sense of comfort or of gravity, urge you to keep the faith with Dear Old Ivy College. Strident assertions of values and stand¬ ards are perhaps the shortest way to destroying them, and though the times may indeed be por- tentious, they do not excuse our being so. I feel especially vulnerable, therefore, in striking the theatrical pose now recognized as the charac¬ teristic stance for members of the English De¬ partment when they discuss VOX. But I am willing to be caught in the rather graceless pos¬ ture of daring to be a Daniel if it means stating yet once more that this magazine should be more than a Year Book; it should be the voice of creative thought, speaking from the past to the future of this College through its present. Without doubt the chronicle of physical activity, on the dance floor as on the basketbali floor, has a value, and such activity plays an integral, though subordinate, role in college life. If we could return to producing monthly issues, or even to the later practice of issuing three issues per year, and pay for them from student fees, we could devote the final copy to such a chronicle. But with only one issue, we should 7

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WHAT THE CLASSROOM HAS MEANT TO ME By DR. WILLIAM J. ROSE W r HEN the Editors of VOX honoured me with an invitation (or command) to contribute something for the 1954 issue, I at once asked to see some of the recent numbers so that I could learn what sort of a creation this ancient journal has become. I knew the lady well enough fifty years ago, and my name can be found on some of her pages, but tempora matantur: would I recognize her after so long a time? Could I fit myself into the new pattern of things? Well, the Old Grey Mare is not what she used to be—that I can say at once. (Of course the truth is, she never was!) But I must admit that in some ways you young folk have us oldsters beaten a mile. Many of the things I have read— verse and prose, sense and nonsense, would have been quite beyond our reach. Some of the “con¬ ceits”, in the proper sense of that term, startle me; some of your ways of saying things rather offend me: but I have to hand you an “Oscar” (is that the term, or is it the Nobel Prize?) for originality. So far, so good. Only what am I to do about it? As a co-factor of the newest VOX, what am I to say? Most old men tend to become gar¬ rulous, and garrulity is dull; almost invariably they swing into reminiscence, and that can be very boring. All the same, I shall take the risk and set down something about what college and university have meant to me during a long space of years. The privilege of returning and spend¬ ing a session where I sat as a green under¬ graduate at the beginning of the century means that for me the wheel has gone full circle. Put another way, the stone has done a lot of rolling: has it gathered any moss? The list of academic halls where I have sat under the great and the near-great is rather for¬ midable, and I should be a learned man—per¬ haps even a wise one. Oxford, Leipzig, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, Dartmouth College, London, U.B.C.—rather a mixed bag, and involv¬ ing work in two languages besides my own. Plenty of variety; no lack of opportunity. It should be admitted that in three of them I had only a few months each, and that in Prague I attended the German and not the Czech classes. It was a lot easier to get a Rhodes Scholarship in 1905 than it is in 1954. When I set out for Oxford I had a high opinion of myself: was, in short, a very conceited young man, whose only saving grace was that he really did want to learn. It took only a few weeks of meeting up with the real thing to disillusion me. Thinking I knew a lot, I discovered that I knew nothing. I can still hear, across the ages, the voice of my distinguished tutor telling the Head of the col¬ lege and his col leagues: “Of course, Mr. Rose is no scholar”! That was a tough blow, and I’ve been trying to recover from it ever since. The fault, if it was one, lay in part with my teachers at Wesley and ’Toba: they coddled me when they should have used the rod; they let me dawdle along when I should have been ex¬ tending myself. I was to discover how harmful this can be when I came back three years later, and started to teach. I had some gifts as a teacher, but I didn’t know my stuff. Something had to be done about this, so in 1912, accom¬ panied by a lovely and brave young bride (like myself, Manitoba born), I set out afresh with some savings we had accumulated for what was then thought of as the home of learning—the universities of Germany. Here we had first to master German as the medium of instruction; not just enough to let us get about, but to the point where we could think in it and dream in it. Then it was that I discovered something im¬ portant: I could learn languages by ear, but not from books! Why was that method not used in good part with the Latin and the Greek? Two years later the war of 1914-18 caught us, and I turned right about to devote myself to modern studies. By the end of the war I had become fairly proficient in Polish, and I was drafted as a Relief Worker in what was then called European Student Relief. With this went service under the Red Triangle, and I settled down in Warsaw, but still more in the ancient university of Cracow, to use my spart time in reading. Five years of intermittent study, with scanty attendance at lectures, enabled me to bluff my way to a Ph.D. in the History of Educa¬ tion. My thesis was written in a burst of energy in the summer of 1925. Two years later I was 9