Chapel 1976

While rural areas are dotted with hulks of abandoned school houses, churches and farm buildings, the city usually dispenses with such remnants of Alberta’s frontier days with almost indecent haste. Surprisingly, then, one of the Anglican church’s original missions in this area lasted for 65 years in the north end of Edmonton before finally facing condemnation proceedings by the city’s engineering department.  And Edmonton’s Mission Chapel at 11725-93 St. may survive for another 65 years, if St. John’s School of Alberta can raise the $12,500 it needs to move the chapel 40 miles southwest of Edmonton to the school’s property on the North Saskatchewan River.

The chapel was originally built to serve English immigrants who settled just north of Edmonton during the immigration boom which followed the turn of the century. Thinly-populated areas of the new province could not support their own parishes, so the mission was staffed by 17 priests sent in 1910 by the Church of England. With the church here as headquarters, the priests served a wide area. Although all returned to Europe when World war I began, and 10 died in the trenches as army chaplains, the mission continued to serve the district in different capacities as the population and parish increased in size and wealth. Now, many other modern structures have replaced the little chapel, which stands empty on the ground the city wants to make into a “quiet area”. The Anglican diocese is also anxious that the church should quickly disappear since some of its outbuildings have been condemned as firetraps.

But an unlikely rescuer has appeared in the Anglican private boys’ school situated just west of the Genesee Bridge, half way between Warburg and Stony plain. The school since its construction in 1967 has been without a church of its own. Plans to build one of logs fell through only four years ago, when several logistical problems prove insurmountable. Then the school’s small library was remodeled to fill the role. “But it was never intended to be permanent,” says Bud Brooks, science teacher at St. John’s, the man charged with finding money for the moving project. “We’ve always had our eye open for an abandoned church, but all the previous possibilities fell through for one reason or another.” Mr. Brooks heard about the imminent destruction and persuaded the city to hold off until he could raise the money to move it.

A brief to the Devonian Foundation in Calgary proved initially abortive, but one of the foundation’s members referred the brief to an anonymous Calgary philanthropist. He has agreed to pay up to half the $25,000 needed to move and re-establish the church, matching whatever Mr. Brooks and St. John’s can raise by other means. Mr. Brooks hopes to raise the money soon, because the Anglican church has already sold the land to the city. As for the staff and students of St. John’s, Mr. Brooks says they would like it moved as soon as possible, too. But since they have been doing their morning and evening devotions in canoes, around campfires and in mountain passes for years, a few more months in a cramped library isn’t going to cause too much suffering.

Chapel

St. John’s School of Alberta urgently needs a chapel and has no money to buy one. A chapel was not included in the original construction of the school as it was expected that the boys could worship in classrooms or the library until a proper chapel could be built. This has proved a delusion. Attendance at religious services in the Manitoba school has quadrupled since an abandoned church was brought onto the site to serve as a chapel two years ago. Last summer, the Alberta chaplain, Rev. Stanley Isherwood, examined three abandoned churches in the school’s vicinity. Two were too small, one too expensive to move. With a clampdown on all capital spending a new one cannot now be erected and paid for.

For St. John’s Schools the past two years have been a time of escalating publicity, some bad, most good, but plentiful enough to send a story a about the schools into scores of Canadian and American newspapers, one national TV program and, most recently, towards the international edition of the Reader’s Digest.

What began the boom was the publication by St. John’s two years ago of a 40 page teacher recruiting booklet called “Men Wanted” that was sent to a dozen Canadian newspapers. Two of them, the Victoria times and the Ottawa Journal, did stories on the place.

The story in the Journal was spotted by Weekend Magazine which then sent a reporter and photographer west for a few days on a visit.

To the photographer, Britisher Bruce Moss, St. John’s brought on nostalgia, taking him back to his own school days in England. Nearly all the pictures he took showed lively, happy youngsters, all smiles, all intensely occupied, all warmly recommending St. John’s.

To reporter James Quigg, St. John’s was Buchenwald of the Prairies, a sinister reassertion of medieval authoritarianism, hidden in the remote reaches of the West and ruled by a cold, Squeers-type despot named Wiens who kept “a large brown dog” in his office.** It was apparently a reference to Ivor, the school’s pet mongrel.

Frank & Ivor

In Quigg’s concoction of innuendoes, half truths and no truths at all, presented to 2.25 million readers of Weekend Magazine and accompanied, bewilderingly, by Moss’s grinning photographs (as if all the inmates of Buchenwald were advertising Quest toothpaste), St. John’s concluded that it had met its doom. Not at all. The story set off such a demand for admissions as the school had never seen. More than 200 parents applied within 48 hours of the story’s appearance. When the professionally indignant masters of the nation’s hottest radio shows took hold of it and tried furthering the expose, the same backfiring occurred. For every person horrified by the place, ten tried to send sons to it. As the Quigg story moved through its circuit of American Sunday supplements, the same reaction spread southward. The Alberta finance campaign, recently launched, demonstrated an immediate lift in interest. Donations to the Selkirk school picked up.

Only once was the school at all threatened. A lady faculty member from the University of Toronto wrote to Archbishop H.H Clark demanding the place be closed. The “academic community” was disturbed, she said. The school offered to pay her way west to see the school for herself and thereby provide the academic community with information more unimpeachable than that of a rotogravure supplement. She said she was too busy. That ended that.

Meanwhile the Ugly Canadian himself was flown to New York by the CBS to appear on a show called, To Tell the Truth, and let a panel of experts decide whether it was he or one of two other men that was the real Frank Wiens. They picked the wrong man, choosing instead one of the alternates, a New York cab driver, and Mr. Wiens’s $500 went to the school’s capital fund.

Then too, the Quigg story had not gone unobserved by the CTV network and its Private Eye show. It was faced as usual, with the task of finding seven or eight scandals to expose as Sunday entertainment for Canadians. In an otherwise disturbingly barren week, St. John’s appeared as manna from the heavens. This, however, the school refused to buy. As a provender for the national appetite for righteous indignation St. John’s had done its share.

Meanwhile, at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation the thought occurred that the Quigg expose might not only be exaggerated but might even have concealed a genuinely positive contribution to Canadian education. The producers of the show, This Land of Ours, made further inquiries, and sent a research man, Pat Patterson, who lived at St. John’s for a week, spent hours talking to the boys, and came to like the place. Several weeks later the entire This Land of Ours crew arrived and John Lackie and John Foster produced a half hour documentary on St. John’s. Their show, which depicted much more of St. John’s than had Weekend, has been on the network four times, and brought much support for the school.

All these developments had been watched carefully by Dave MacDonald, Canadian correspondent for the international edition of Reader’s Digest, who then spent a week a St. John’s last fall. His story is scheduled to appear quite soon.

Withal, Selkirk’s cold despot remains wary of newspapermen. “Whenever one of them shows up,” says Frank Wiens, “I tell Ivor to get out of my office and go sleep somewhere else.”

** Reminiscent of Roosevelt’s famous defense of Falla, Wiens later commented: “I didn’t care so much what he said about me, and the school, and the parents, and the boys. But when he started in on Ivor, who has few teeth left and has never so much as snared at anybody, that was going too far.” However, Ivor, it is true has an unfortunate smile in which he bares his teeth and wags his tail. He doesn’t mean any harm by this. He’s only trying to be hospitable. Quigg reacted badly to Ivor.

Battle of Maldon the Year 991

We have had many requests for copies of the Green Literature Book. Plans are in the works for a limited reproduction – but here is one of the favourite poems from the book.

Battle of Maldon001.pdf – Google Docs.

(article from the 1970-1971 Annual Report for Saint John’s School of Alberta)

Honey Production in 1971

Apris Mellifera in its uncounted thousands has provided the base for a program at St. John’s of Alberta which enabled students to gain some special knowledge and experience and also returned a cash profit to the school.

For those who wonder, that means bees. They produced 52,000 pounds of honey which students processed, packaged, promoted and sold door-to-door at a net profit of about $5,000 last year.

The boys started the year with 100 hives, but the process of extracting the honey from the combs proved both time-consuming and wasteful. Therefore the honey is now bought in bulk from neighbouring farmer Don Scheideman and others filtered, bottled and labeled by the boys. Mr. Scheideman bought the school’s hives and extracting equipment.

In the first part of the 1970-71 year, sales were made by small groups of students in Edmonton each day, and by Christmas had reached 20,000 pound for $10,000. After the holiday the program of one-day sales blitzes in Edmonton, Calgary, Re Deer and Saskatoon sold 32,000 pounds for $16,000.

All students took part in these and for some reason the Grade 8 classes regularly outsold the higher grades. Salesman of the year was Robert Fogg, 14, of Winnipeg, far outstripping everyone else. He romped ahead with a record $144.50 in sales in a single day.

Recruiting Pamphet

In 1956, as a result of a frustration with the way society was moving toward more secular attitudes, Ted Byfield and Frank Wiens began a Sunday school program for boys who sang in the choir at St. John’s Cathedral church in Winnipeg. The Sunday school program did not work – irregular attendance, amateurs teaching a subject that would tax professionals, teachers constantly changing, facilities bad – but beneath all this was what they felt was the true reason for the failure – children were not being taught to think. The habit of reasoning from premise to conclusion had played little part in their education. Also, the new generation lacked some old instincts; to Christians, life is a pilgrimage, an adventure, a voyage into distant lands with great dangers, arduous difficulties and indescribable rewards. But their students had been somehow trained to believe that the good life consisted of social security, physical comfort and physio-psychological thrill.

Part-time School 1961

What was required to remedy this was a new kind of school, a residential school, a school that in the present environment would appear as a very strange place. Boys would not so much attend it, as live it. They must begin with the feeling of belonging to it, and they must end with the feeling that it belongs to them.

It must restore the traditional values – the value of truth, the value of work, the value of individual freedom, the value of laughter and the value of sacrifice. To do this it must not only have rules and back them up. It must also have a sense of proportion too. It must teach men to think – not the canned, pre-digested “answers that get the marks”, but the genuine premise-to-conclusion reasoning that secures conviction and nerves decision.

They believed that to accomplish this they must resume the task of teaching history, the students must once more know the rigours and the poetry of life outdoors, and they must begin the long journey towards knowing God. All these things they must take with them when they leave the school.

St. John's Cathedral Choir

They began a part-time school and eventually moved to a full time residential school (1962). All this required money – using the model of church run schools they quickly realized that while in church schools the priests and nuns were paid only living costs, these men had families, so this set up would not work. Or would it? The five original staff members agreed that perhaps it could work – why couldn’t married and single people, laymen and clergy, form a partnership, something like a religious order, provide homes for families and pay one another only essential living expenses and an income of $1 a day for spending money? Thus was formed the “Dynevor Society” – later re-named the Company of the Cross.

The Company was originally formed to address a financial problem, how could the group run a Christian school, teach boys the values they saw missing in society and share in a life together in community? The Company of the Cross addressed these problems.

SJSA Early Years003.pdf – Google Docs.

“Men wanted for hazardous journey, Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success”. – Sir Ernest Shackleton

When the British Antarctic explorer ran his famous advertisement in the London dailies of 1906, the results astonished him. Thousands of men came forward. Three years later those selected enabled Shackleton to locate the south magnetic pole and press within 150 miles of the south pole itself. Sixty-four years later the same ad did one thing more. It enabled St. John’s Schools of the Prairies to solve the central problem of their existence – how to find top notch men at a salary of $1 a day plus living essentials.

For the Company of the Cross, 1970 was a year when the recruiting of competent men had become crucial. Its two schools were built and well on the way to being paid for. Traditions were established. The schools were nationally publicized. Fees were low enough for a wide income group and new bursary funds were making it wider. The time had come to direct full attention to the academic program. But this meant finding men and women, educated enough to have something to teach, imaginative enough to put heart and soul into it, of intelligence and humility enough to learn what had to be learned – all for $1 a day plus necessities. Such people, Shackleton discovered, can be found best by honest advertising.

The Company knew only one live and bona fide advertising man. He looked nothing like Madison Avenue, but was shy, almost timid, absent minded, unfashionably dressed, unaggressive in conversation, drank almost not at all, and never, simply never, slapped backs and passed around cigars. All this was, of course, deception. In fact, he was one of the sharpest copy writers in the business, possessed a satirical and happy wit, had single handedly conceived, organized, publicized, directed and propagated the national Help-a-Stranger campaign, had been written up in The Star Weekly, and was, to those who knew him, one of the few great letter writers that the mid-century had produced. His name is Tam Deachman (pronounced Dakeman) of the Gordon Roundtree firm in Vancouver, a booster of St. John’s since he heard about the movement five years ago. When it decided to advertise, the Company thought instantly of Deachman and Deachman thought instantly of Shackleton.

“The success of the Shackleton ad,” said Mr. Deachman, “lay in its honest appeal to those instincts for meaning and adventure which lie deep and unfilled in all good men. I knew if I could duplicate that Shackleton approach, we’d find that such men still existed.”

Copy of the original ad

The resulting advertisement, pictured on this page, was carried by the daily papers at Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal and the university papers of B.C., Ontario and the Montreal district. The response was as startling in its way as that which had greeted Shackleton’s appeal. Over 150 men replied, many with full degrees or successful careers in business and industry. Why did they want to join the Company? The explanations were always the same – meaning, purpose, adventure and genuine service.

Company members crossed the country, reduced 150 to 22 and invited these to visit the Selkirk school, Company and candidates sharing the cost.

At Selkirk, they were required to teach one class, snowshoe up to 18 miles, and discuss with Company members their reasons for joining and what they thought they could contribute. Married couples, of course, visited the school together. So impressive were the people who came that the Company decided to add 14 men instead of the eight originally planned.

Does the Company owe it all to Shackleton? More probably it owes it to Deachman, the man who remembered the Shackleton experience. On behalf of an industry, so frequently accused of deception and ruthless exploitation of human gullibility, the Deachman effort offered some distinct evidence to the contrary. The fact is that the Company could not have fulfilled it purpose this year without it.

1970's Recruiting Pamphet

Page 1 of '70's Pamphlet

Alberta Report 1987 SJCBS article.pdf – Powered by Google Docs.