Brigadoon (Page 2)

Brigadoon

	Walter Hitschfeld

How Heckscher had managed to establish the school was described by Walter Hitschfeld, PhD'50 (a former pupil in the camp school), when, as Vice-Principal of Research at McGill, he presented Heckscher at the 1981 convocation where he received his honorary doctorate:

"[Heckscher] convinced the military guardians to tolerate, eventually to aid, what he was up to; got generous help from the YMCA, and through the intervention of that towering figure in Canadian education, Henry Marshall Tory, he made the case to McGill University that his pupils be allowed to write its extramural matriculation examination.... Through a toughness of spirit, allied with soft-spoken good humour, through consummate tact and devotion, but above all through his patent love of learning, he led and inspired his boys, and in the space of seven months, we wrote the exams...which helped loosen the rigours of internment for everybody.... But Heckscher shrugs off all praise, recalling merely that during the first war, his grandfather had taught French prisoners of war in Germany!"

How the school acquired the official curriculum and became an extramural matriculation exam centre of McGill University was downright theatrical, although I knew nothing of it at the time. As in the musical Brigadoon, it began with a fog over our camp area. Bill Heckscher described that November event:

"One night I was fast asleep. To my horror one of the guards came into my hut, tapped me on the shoulder, and said the commandant wanted to see me. When I came out of the hut, the fog was so thick I could hardly see the guard walking ahead of me.

In the commandant's office sat an old man.... He turned to me to ask me whether I knew why he was there. I said no. It was because of the fog, he explained. 'I am Dr. Tory,' he said, 'and I have a taxi full of books waiting outside. I am on my way to the military camp....' Dr. Tory went on to ask me about our school, whether we had pencils and writing gear. I said, 'Well, we make do, but it could be better. The real trouble is that we don't know what to prepare for. We need to know about university admissions, examinations, and so on.' Well, Dr. Tory was marvelous [about that]. The fog had turned out be a highly profitable fog. He had been sent by heaven."

[From Deemed Suspect: A Wartime Blunder, by Eric Koch]

	H.M. Tory

The misty weather could have brought no better visitor. During the First World War, Tory had presided over formation of the Khaki University, an enterprise which saw some 50,000 Canadian troops enroll in various academic or job-training courses at military camps and hospitals in Britain (and which would be revived at the end of WWII). One of McGill's earliest science PhDs, Tory went on to help found the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta, where he served as president for 20 years. He finished his career as head of Canada's National Research Council, although in his "retirement" he worked to establish Carleton University, and volunteered as president and lecturer there until his death in 1947. In 1940, this extraordinary 76-year-old man was still personally distributing books to army camps, and so it was that he arrived in our Brigadoon.

At a reunion of the camp school on the occasion of Bill Heckscher's honorary McGill degree, Eric Kippen told us that he and Dr. Tory had talked about education after Kippen mentioned the school in his camp. Thereupon he had had the sleepy Heckscher brought to his office to meet Tory and, as a result of that night's visit, Kippen had gone to see T. H. Matthews, the McGill Registrar, and enlisted his help to make the camp school "official." This wonderful action was unknown to Heckscher and us students until this conversation 40 years later!