Barry Gough, VHS class of '56
Interviewed by Meaghan Claughton
VHS Grade 11
(with additional comments from M.H., ed.)
VHS Grade 11
(with additional comments from M.H., ed.)
Barry & Meaghan, VHS Archives 2012
Meaghan Claughton (MC): I think we’ll start as far back in history as we can go. Where did your family immigrate from?
Barry Gough (BG): My mother was born in Edmonton, so she’s the Canadian side of the family. Her father was from Scotland, and her mother was from England. They lived very close to here, on Balmoral Road, so that was the family house. My mother and uncle were both born in Canada. My father, however, came from Leeds, Yorkshire. He came with his family, including great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers. If you look at it technically, I’m the fourth generation of my family to live in Victoria. The precursors are buried in Ross Bay Cemetery, so we’re a deep-seated family. My father, my mother, my sister and myself, my uncle and aunt are all Victoria High School grads. Unfortunately, my kids are not (laughs).
Mark Hellman (MH): Where did they go? Oak Bay?
BG: No, no. I was a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, so my kids are Ontario kids. That was an oversight. There you are, Meaghan: that’s it in a nutshell.
MC: And your mother, Dorothy Morton — she was part of a piano duo, right?
BG: At least, yes.
MC: And she went to McGill?
BG: No, she didn’t go to McGill but to Victoria College and to the Provincial Normal School. But everybody in Victoria at the high school in the teens and twenties had McGill connections, because McGill University was the sponsoring academic body for Victoria College. Of course, Victoria College was a spin-off of Victoria High School, and for years Victoria College and Victoria High School were one and the same. That’s how my father and my mother went to university. Victoria College then migrated to Craigdarroch Castle, which you already know about. And the Normal School was established about the same time.
Barry Gough (BG): My mother was born in Edmonton, so she’s the Canadian side of the family. Her father was from Scotland, and her mother was from England. They lived very close to here, on Balmoral Road, so that was the family house. My mother and uncle were both born in Canada. My father, however, came from Leeds, Yorkshire. He came with his family, including great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers. If you look at it technically, I’m the fourth generation of my family to live in Victoria. The precursors are buried in Ross Bay Cemetery, so we’re a deep-seated family. My father, my mother, my sister and myself, my uncle and aunt are all Victoria High School grads. Unfortunately, my kids are not (laughs).
Mark Hellman (MH): Where did they go? Oak Bay?
BG: No, no. I was a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, so my kids are Ontario kids. That was an oversight. There you are, Meaghan: that’s it in a nutshell.
MC: And your mother, Dorothy Morton — she was part of a piano duo, right?
BG: At least, yes.
MC: And she went to McGill?
BG: No, she didn’t go to McGill but to Victoria College and to the Provincial Normal School. But everybody in Victoria at the high school in the teens and twenties had McGill connections, because McGill University was the sponsoring academic body for Victoria College. Of course, Victoria College was a spin-off of Victoria High School, and for years Victoria College and Victoria High School were one and the same. That’s how my father and my mother went to university. Victoria College then migrated to Craigdarroch Castle, which you already know about. And the Normal School was established about the same time.
MH: It’s only in the past five to ten years…. Studies are now showing that students who study music in school do better in math than those who do not study music.
BG: Absolutely. And isn’t it so often that people say, “Oh, we’ve got to make cuts,” and they go to the arts as being the first thing they’re going to cut? Which is ridiculous, because there are also economic spinoffs from the arts that are very important. Look, 10-15 percent of local economies are generated by bands, groups, performances, CDs…. It’s quite prominent in the small business sector. Certainly in terms of self-employment, it’s very important. On the other hand, I grew up in a family in which these things were a given. My father was a musician, my mother was a musician, my sister was a musician, my uncle was, and so am I. It was just understood. But we’re unusual in that sense, you know?
MH: Definitely. I would say so (laughs.) Your dad played. What did he play?
BG: He was a jack of all trades. He was a flautist and a piccolo player in the Shrine band for years, but when he was at school here he was a cornetist and bugler in the cadet corps. I have a photograph of him somewhere as a bugler in the Victoria High cadet corps, so that takes us back some time. I think one of the reasons he fell in love with Dorothy Morton was that she was such a great musician as well as a beautiful woman.
MC: We have your dad’s yearbook photo.
MH: I think he’s — there (indicating No. 117). Very dashing young man.
BG: No, that’s not him. Why, yes, it is. Excuse me. It’s just that his hair is slightly different there. This is how he translates in later years, but you can see that the mouth is very much the same....
BG: Absolutely. And isn’t it so often that people say, “Oh, we’ve got to make cuts,” and they go to the arts as being the first thing they’re going to cut? Which is ridiculous, because there are also economic spinoffs from the arts that are very important. Look, 10-15 percent of local economies are generated by bands, groups, performances, CDs…. It’s quite prominent in the small business sector. Certainly in terms of self-employment, it’s very important. On the other hand, I grew up in a family in which these things were a given. My father was a musician, my mother was a musician, my sister was a musician, my uncle was, and so am I. It was just understood. But we’re unusual in that sense, you know?
MH: Definitely. I would say so (laughs.) Your dad played. What did he play?
BG: He was a jack of all trades. He was a flautist and a piccolo player in the Shrine band for years, but when he was at school here he was a cornetist and bugler in the cadet corps. I have a photograph of him somewhere as a bugler in the Victoria High cadet corps, so that takes us back some time. I think one of the reasons he fell in love with Dorothy Morton was that she was such a great musician as well as a beautiful woman.
MC: We have your dad’s yearbook photo.
MH: I think he’s — there (indicating No. 117). Very dashing young man.
BG: No, that’s not him. Why, yes, it is. Excuse me. It’s just that his hair is slightly different there. This is how he translates in later years, but you can see that the mouth is very much the same....
BG: ...A very interesting thing…. Maybe we can divert from the questions for a short period of time. My father was a municipal inspector for Saanich after he had taught at the Normal School in 1931 and been a teacher at Victoria High School from about 1924 to 1931, so he had a good run at teaching here. But he became Mr. Schools in Victoria from about 1950, when he became superintendent for District 61, until he retired in 1966. This is a wonderful illustration that was done of him by Mr. Mortimer, who was doing these. Every week there would be somebody featured. That’s the original. Anyway, this story of my dad at the school — I don’t want to wander away too much on this….
MC: What did he teach?
BG: He taught English and History here, and when he went to the Normal School he taught Social Studies methods. From that, he went into textbook writing. He wrote Old World Horizons and New World Horizons, which were elementary school textbooks, and A Children’s History of British Columbia. I didn’t bring copies of those, though I could have. He was a bit different from most superintendents because not only was he evaluating teachers but he was also doing curriculum stuff. One of the things he did was make sure First Nations content came into the elementary school curriculum. And he drove that agenda, that initial stump in the 1940s.
MH: Interesting to see how things have had to change and develop, very slowly, in that relationship of the whole first nations community, in the wider context of the community.
BG: Yes. We’re still working to get them on the inside, but this school has been doing that.
MH: There were schools back in those days that were really trying to initiate these things and that understood it had to be dealt with before we could really move on.
BG: Exactly. We still have to deal with it. It’s not ahead on the agenda. We still have to keep moving on that. One of the things I did was press forward when I was teaching at my university. In history I introduced a course on First Nations stuff — two semesters back to back: one on Eastern Woodlands and the Canadian North and the other one on Plains and Pacific West. That was one of the first university history courses taught on “Indian History.”
MC: It’s good that our school has more programs than some others too. There are two — First Nations English, History. But they’re electives. They’re separate. I think they should be a bigger part of the curriculum.
BG: Yes, isn’t that fascinating? How do you deal administratively with these things? Do you put them in a “separate area” or do you try to integrate it, or both? Well, you know, in the case of Victoria, it was built…. The first people who were the labourers here and the suppliers of timber for the forts and the stockade and so forth, they were Native persons. They were all brought into the process, into that economy. I know the Scotts brought their engines and their picks and axes and the English came with their managerial skills, but it was based upon Native trade and Native strength.
MC: So back to the band…? Right now, the band is obviously very different than in 1953. There is no concert band, really. It’s almost all R&B under our current teacher. What was it like back then?
BG: It was a very major force. There were more students in the band than there were in the orchestra, and the orchestra was very strong. It relates to the interest of the two faculty staff members who were dealing with it. Roland Grant was former British army. He had been in the First World War in the military band. He migrated to Canada and became a teacher. In those days the teacher of band would have maybe two schools. Roland Grant’s main headquarters were at Central Junior High School, where the band room was. Those who didn’t have private musical instruction would take a course in band with Roland Grant. He would go to the cupboard and bring out the euphoniums or the trumpets or the baritone horns or tubas and drums. As I said, you could get credit for band in those days.
The Central Junior High School band and the Victoria High School band were integrated. There was a separate band at Central and a separate band here. The best players, and the ones who had private instruction, were asked right from grade seven to be part of the high school band. I was one of those. Anyway, we were back and forth. Central is pretty close to here. There was another kind of connection, for instance, between Mount Douglas High School and S.J. Willis. Roland Grant was the big gun here. Because he had been trained properly at the college for musical instruction for British bands — I think it’s called Knellar Hall — and because he knew the repertoire of concert music as well as march music, he was really excellent at the choreography of a good concert. The band would do two public concerts in Victoria, one for the fall, usually about four or five weeks before Christmas, and another one as a spring concert.
A typical concert the Victoria High School band would lay on would be, say, a Sousa march or an Alford march to start with. Then we would do perhaps a tone poem or something to get everybody settled down. The third sort of thing would be Teddy Bears’ Picnic or something else on the lighthearted side, or it might be Leroy Anderson’s typewriter thing. Then we would probably do another march. Kenneth Alford, the British guy, was Roland Grant’s favourite. Then we would do a couple of other pieces.
We’d always feature a soloist if we could. We had two really good clarinet players who stood ahead of me. One was Russell Gurney. The other was Earl…. Hawkins, I think his last name was. They would always get featured to do something like a movement from a Mozart clarinet concerto. And that was the way it would work. Donna Eastman was another very fine clarinetist, and Dennis Tupman, who I mentioned earlier. These people get featured. We had a prized baritone horn player who would get featured: Duck Stewart, who later became a Member of Parliament. We had these kinds of people. A good band instructor would talent-spot these people to lead them forth and choose the music that would feature them.
We’d come finally to the grand finale, which was usually a concert piece we would play in the big festivals. It could be Offenbach’s great Parisian thing, or it could be Zamba or the William Tell Overture. Those things would then become the festival pieces.
To jump forward to 1955, we took the CPR ferry to Vancouver. We were headquartered at the YMCA. It was riotous (laughs). We practiced on the way over. The band went through Active Pass against the tides, and we did our practice there. The B.C. Musical Festival was always in Vancouver. That was the great gathering place. The choirs would go from this school as well, and some of us would also be singing in the choirs. Norma Douglas was the choir teacher here, and we swept away all the mixed choir and boys choir championships. Never any trouble with that! The orchestra might be with us or not. They would also go over, but their leader, Dorothy Evans — who I wanted to mention — was perhaps less ambitious to win B.C. championships than was Roland Grant. This was our finest hour, and in 1955 we won the big championship. That’s the story.
MC: What did he teach?
BG: He taught English and History here, and when he went to the Normal School he taught Social Studies methods. From that, he went into textbook writing. He wrote Old World Horizons and New World Horizons, which were elementary school textbooks, and A Children’s History of British Columbia. I didn’t bring copies of those, though I could have. He was a bit different from most superintendents because not only was he evaluating teachers but he was also doing curriculum stuff. One of the things he did was make sure First Nations content came into the elementary school curriculum. And he drove that agenda, that initial stump in the 1940s.
MH: Interesting to see how things have had to change and develop, very slowly, in that relationship of the whole first nations community, in the wider context of the community.
BG: Yes. We’re still working to get them on the inside, but this school has been doing that.
MH: There were schools back in those days that were really trying to initiate these things and that understood it had to be dealt with before we could really move on.
BG: Exactly. We still have to deal with it. It’s not ahead on the agenda. We still have to keep moving on that. One of the things I did was press forward when I was teaching at my university. In history I introduced a course on First Nations stuff — two semesters back to back: one on Eastern Woodlands and the Canadian North and the other one on Plains and Pacific West. That was one of the first university history courses taught on “Indian History.”
MC: It’s good that our school has more programs than some others too. There are two — First Nations English, History. But they’re electives. They’re separate. I think they should be a bigger part of the curriculum.
BG: Yes, isn’t that fascinating? How do you deal administratively with these things? Do you put them in a “separate area” or do you try to integrate it, or both? Well, you know, in the case of Victoria, it was built…. The first people who were the labourers here and the suppliers of timber for the forts and the stockade and so forth, they were Native persons. They were all brought into the process, into that economy. I know the Scotts brought their engines and their picks and axes and the English came with their managerial skills, but it was based upon Native trade and Native strength.
MC: So back to the band…? Right now, the band is obviously very different than in 1953. There is no concert band, really. It’s almost all R&B under our current teacher. What was it like back then?
BG: It was a very major force. There were more students in the band than there were in the orchestra, and the orchestra was very strong. It relates to the interest of the two faculty staff members who were dealing with it. Roland Grant was former British army. He had been in the First World War in the military band. He migrated to Canada and became a teacher. In those days the teacher of band would have maybe two schools. Roland Grant’s main headquarters were at Central Junior High School, where the band room was. Those who didn’t have private musical instruction would take a course in band with Roland Grant. He would go to the cupboard and bring out the euphoniums or the trumpets or the baritone horns or tubas and drums. As I said, you could get credit for band in those days.
The Central Junior High School band and the Victoria High School band were integrated. There was a separate band at Central and a separate band here. The best players, and the ones who had private instruction, were asked right from grade seven to be part of the high school band. I was one of those. Anyway, we were back and forth. Central is pretty close to here. There was another kind of connection, for instance, between Mount Douglas High School and S.J. Willis. Roland Grant was the big gun here. Because he had been trained properly at the college for musical instruction for British bands — I think it’s called Knellar Hall — and because he knew the repertoire of concert music as well as march music, he was really excellent at the choreography of a good concert. The band would do two public concerts in Victoria, one for the fall, usually about four or five weeks before Christmas, and another one as a spring concert.
A typical concert the Victoria High School band would lay on would be, say, a Sousa march or an Alford march to start with. Then we would do perhaps a tone poem or something to get everybody settled down. The third sort of thing would be Teddy Bears’ Picnic or something else on the lighthearted side, or it might be Leroy Anderson’s typewriter thing. Then we would probably do another march. Kenneth Alford, the British guy, was Roland Grant’s favourite. Then we would do a couple of other pieces.
We’d always feature a soloist if we could. We had two really good clarinet players who stood ahead of me. One was Russell Gurney. The other was Earl…. Hawkins, I think his last name was. They would always get featured to do something like a movement from a Mozart clarinet concerto. And that was the way it would work. Donna Eastman was another very fine clarinetist, and Dennis Tupman, who I mentioned earlier. These people get featured. We had a prized baritone horn player who would get featured: Duck Stewart, who later became a Member of Parliament. We had these kinds of people. A good band instructor would talent-spot these people to lead them forth and choose the music that would feature them.
We’d come finally to the grand finale, which was usually a concert piece we would play in the big festivals. It could be Offenbach’s great Parisian thing, or it could be Zamba or the William Tell Overture. Those things would then become the festival pieces.
To jump forward to 1955, we took the CPR ferry to Vancouver. We were headquartered at the YMCA. It was riotous (laughs). We practiced on the way over. The band went through Active Pass against the tides, and we did our practice there. The B.C. Musical Festival was always in Vancouver. That was the great gathering place. The choirs would go from this school as well, and some of us would also be singing in the choirs. Norma Douglas was the choir teacher here, and we swept away all the mixed choir and boys choir championships. Never any trouble with that! The orchestra might be with us or not. They would also go over, but their leader, Dorothy Evans — who I wanted to mention — was perhaps less ambitious to win B.C. championships than was Roland Grant. This was our finest hour, and in 1955 we won the big championship. That’s the story.
MH: How many of you would have been going over to Vancouver?
BG: Well, about sixty in the band proper, and there were…. If you look in the school history, you’ll see a photograph of the boys choir — twenty-five to thirty of us in the boys choir. It was kind of fun because it was not very popular. It was not exactly the thing to do to be in a boys choir.
MH: Still isn’t much of a thing. It’s hard to get boys to join the choir.
BG: Well, about sixty in the band proper, and there were…. If you look in the school history, you’ll see a photograph of the boys choir — twenty-five to thirty of us in the boys choir. It was kind of fun because it was not very popular. It was not exactly the thing to do to be in a boys choir.
MH: Still isn’t much of a thing. It’s hard to get boys to join the choir.
BG: Norma Douglas got us all out there. A few leaders of us wanted to sing, and we brought the others in. That’s the way it works. Then in the girls choir, in the mixed choirs, there would be another twenty or thirty. I’d think that going over on the CPR boat like that, on the day boat, there would be 150 of us.
MC: Practicing music, too?
BG: Sure. Always.....
MH: And I think now, when the band goes on tour, of course the R&B band just came from Nashville, and Ottawa, right?
MC: Yeah, Ottawa in February [*correction: March*], Nashville just a week ago.
MH: And they’ve got about twenty of you?
MC: Yes, twenty or so. And at this show there is another twenty so there’s going to be about forty of us playing. Not at the same time.
MH: Such a great experience, that traveling experience.
BG: Oh, bonding. For lots of kids from Victoria it was their first time being in Vancouver.
MC: It wouldn’t have been as common to go over there as it is now.
BG: Not at all, not at all. People didn’t have the disposable cash they do now, Meaghan, nor did they have their own individual jobs. Or if they did have jobs, the money would go into a family conference. Cutting grass for 35 cents on a Saturday afternoon is not a lot of money. I’m getting off the track, but it’s a sociological fact.
MH: It takes us into some of the things about life in Victoria in general, Barry. That’s as much our interest in this project — to look at what it was like to grow up in Victoria.
BG: We were very self-contained here, so to do things in theatre and music and sports — great rugby teams, for instance — these things were sources of great pride. You’ve got to remember that the school in those days…. Esquimalt High School didn’t come along until about 1916, and Oak Bay High School was not built until 1929. When you look at the programs of my mother, they were at the high school. This place was it. Now, we share that glory with all the others on the periphery, but this was the gathering place of all the towns.
I want to mention another thing too. This city has had a longstanding history of private school students — Saint Michaels, or Glenlyon, and if they didn’t go there, they’d go to Brentwood or Shawnigan Lake. It was the English kids, old school. The old school money would drag them off to Saint Michaels University School or Glenlyon. It still goes on now under the assumption that if you can buy education, it’s going to be better for you. But that was not the case in Victoria High School because this was the premier place, I’m sure of it. This was the Canadian school.
MC: Especially for music. Still, now.
BG: And for developing Canada. Not just for music, and for science and mathematics, but for building the idea of who we are in Canada. If you go through issues of The Camosun for the Great War, 1914 through 1918 and even after, you see this concept of the emerging Canadian identity and the importance of this school in it.
MC: A bit more about the band, particularly jazz? I’d like to hear more about the jazz club.
BG: We had a jazz club, yes. It was the brains of a buddy of Ian McDougall’s called John Fraser, who was a great chum of mine. And Joe Fraxon, who was one of our cheerleaders, and Bryant Wood, and Joe Moore, who was a year ahead of us. All of us musicians were jazz singers. We got together and decided that the new long plays that were being produced, coming out on 33 1/3 from Columbia Record Club, were worth listening to. Paul Desmond and Brubeck were just coming along. Louis Armstrong was in his high days. He produced a record, playing W.C. Handy, the blues. I happened to join the record club, so I got this sort of stuff, but others would bring records as well. We had a room over in the old Fairey Tech building for jazz listening, so that’s what would happen. We had J.J. Johnson, and Kai Winding, the trombone guys. W.C. Handy and Fats Waller were in their heyday. Gerry Mulligan and those kinds of new groups were coming along. And Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, of course, and a few bright sparks on that side.
That’s what we do, you know, as just part of jazz education, but jazz didn’t exist in the high school curriculum except when we’d have an assembly. I mentioned Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson, the two famous trombone players. McDougall and Fraser were both trombone players, and I remember them doing a replication of one of the Winding and Johnson productions for part of a musical. This was the kind of thing that was a spinoff of the jazz club.
MH: So you tended to listen and then do some playing?
BG: And analyze. A guy called John Gittins, a graduate of this school, started to do some arranging for us. He was a couple of years older than I was. Four of us turned into a jazz musical vocal quartet — John Fraser, myself, Joe Fraxon, Bryant Wood. Gittins was up at Victoria College in those days, and he’d write stuff for us along the lines of the Four Lads or the Four Freshmen. Know what I mean? None of that survives, except in memory. It was another spinoff that came out of the jazz club. We always thought we’d get more dates with the girls, but I don’t think…. I think we were so distracted with our own music it never went anywhere (laughs).
MH: What about the rest of the city? Were there places to go listen to jazz in Victoria?
BG: You’d have to ask McDougall.
MH: I guess. Someone who had been referring me to Ian mentioned that he was out gigging when he was nineteen….
BG: Twelve or thirteen.
MH: …with some of the clubs. But that wasn’t something you managed to get out to?
BG: No. I was not in his league at all.
MH: I thought you just might have been able to sneak in the back door and see him.
BG: He used to play at a club that was on View, or Johnson. I can’t remember which. Have you seen that piece I did on him in the alumni bulletin about three years ago?
MH: We could look it up.
BG: It’s a front-page story in the VHS alumni newsletter. It was done about 2005 or 2006. He’s Order of Canada, you know. He’s one of the very few graduates of this place who was awarded the Order of Canada.
MC: I have a couple of questions about the war, actually. You were very young during World War II, but I was wondering what it was like in Victoria, particularly.
BG: We were under curfew: lights out at nine. One thing I can remember about wartime was a gas mask in my desk at Oaklands School. And blackout curtains in our house at 3000 Dean Avenue. Ration cards, tight food controls, and everybody growing things. All the gardens had rabbit hutches. We had chickens. We were producing vegetables in the garden. This is long before landscape gardening became fashionable, so we were all doing our share with all of that.
There was a near impression of danger with regard to Japan, but by and large, most of us went about our own work for another generation. I know, later on, even during the Cold War, when there was a fear of nuclear fallout…. When I was in high school, a lot of the kids went into the navy or the army. They dropped out, grade ten, because they could get into the service right away, or they went to work for Dockyard and became apprentices there. In Victoria, we lived very easily with the services, the navy and the army, and that was a very natural thing.
From a childhood point of view, the war was a distant thing. I think we were kept free of the worry of it by our parents. I think they didn’t want us to be concerned by the war, which they were taking care of in their own ways. Do you know Bruce Hutchison, the name? Bruce Hutchison was one of the most famous journalists in Canada, and he was a graduate of this high school, 1917 or 1918, and editor of The Camosun. He wrote a memoir called The Far Side of the Street. And he says in there — he’s got two pages related to the high school during the 1914-18 war…. He said it was a very important war, and all sorts of our students went in to join our teachers.
Many of our teachers and fellow students joined up. And as you know, the Roll of Honour speaks to the great number of nursing sisters, and teachers, and boys who went from our school. He said you’ve got to remember that life is going on. We had to go on. We got ourselves involved in other things — dramatic societies, academic pursuits, the discourse of the town. In fact, he says, we had to carry on with life. The war was far away. Everything that was coming in was censored. We weren’t getting stories direct from the front, so we had to go on with life. He talks about this for two pages in the book. It’s rather a fascinating thing, and I suspect that was the case in the Second World War too, Meaghan. You know, that war was going on from 1939 to 1945, not four but six years this time, and life in Victoria went on.
MC: So it was more in the background. Very interesting.
BG: I think so, I think so. No, I think it was a distant field, or far distant fields. There was a consciousness, naturally. If you go through The Camosun for 1914-1918, you’ll see that there are stories coming home — that somebody has heard from somebody in the Western Front, that somebody’s brother has died, or that the local Portia Society, which is one of the girls groups of the high school, was keeping active the memory of those they knew who were overseas or who had died. Then we come to April of 1917, when the memorial trees are dedicated — not for Vimy but for the second battle of Ypres, when so many of them were killed.
War memories were already starting to happen before the war was over. They didn’t wait until after the war. Bruce Hutchison would have been here at the time. In his memoir, he doesn’t talk about the consciousness of the school and the war, but if you read The Camosun, which he was editing at the time, you see he did. There’s a conflict there. When he writes his memoir later on, it goes under the heading “old men forget.” Because they do. They tend to think in different points of view as to what it was like when they were there at the time. Anyway, we’re onto this Great War memory project at the school, which is fantastic.
MH: Which is a great thing for us. I want to get a little more information from you about what your plans are for 2014.
BG: It got my attention when the trees were cut down. I felt really badly because after Peter Smith died…. He had written it up in “Come Give a Cheer” — you know, the two pages that deal with the memorial trees. I’d thought we should have memorial plaques put up about the trees. Well, lo and behold, they were cut down. I felt really badly after that, so in consequence, I rummaged around in the history and discovered that not only did we have the school trees here on the Vining Street or Fernwood approaches to the school, we also have this famous Kitchener Oak. With the advice of Fred Packford, class of ’49…. You’ve talked to him. He and I got together and we badgered people and got the two memorial plaques. One has been mounted over here, above the stone. Have you seen the bronze plaque?
MH: I’d like to grab a picture of the two of you beside the plaque.
BG: And there’s another bronze plaque that’s being mounted by the school district beside the Kitchen Memorial Oak, which was also planted in April 1917. That’s one of the famous trees of Victoria, but few people know about it. It’s the big one over on Grant Street….
MH: Right by the sidewalk.
BG: Exactly. I mean, there are many heritage trees in Victoria, but unless you put up a sign, nobody knows.
MC: There was one cut down recently over there. Was that another memorial tree?
BG: That I don’t know, but the story of the Kitchener Memorial Oak is on the Victoria High School Alumni website. In fact, the story of the two clusters of trees has been integrated into a story on the website.
MH: We’ll make sure that when we start compiling our materials into a website…
BG: Yes. How are you going to do that, Mark?
MH: …in particular, your relationship to the War Project…. It has been interesting just talking to students in a variety of classes here within this context. There is an awareness of Vic High’s relationship to the Great War and World War II — a really active curiosity. I think you’ll find that as you get into your 2014 project, it’ll be interesting to see how to involve some of the students in the school. How are you doing with your list of questions, Meaghan?
MC: Seems that’s about it. But actually, I have a yearbook with….
BG: Oh, that was a great class. This class of ’56 was a particularly wonderful bunch of people.
MC: There’s a marking I noticed: that you were called “George.”
BG: My mother called me George. I don’t know why. Thought it was kingly, I suppose. I don’t know. I can’t understand that.
MH: It wasn’t something that rubbed off on you in school, that you remember?
BG: I don’t know why…. This is John Fraser (pointing in the yearbook), Ian McDougall’s dear friend. These are the guys who did the Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson trombone duo. Now, McDougall is famous as a trombone player, but he was a brilliant rugby player. And this fellow is greatly lamented: Bob McKee. His father was the Chief Forester of the province of British Columbia. He was a very good student in science and engineering, but he died in the surf in Japan when the tsunami caught him, about 1965.
MC: And here’s the jazz club, right here.
BG: There you go. That’s John Fraser. I’m not in this photo. Let’s see…. Oh, this is Pat Lacroix, who was one of the people in the jazz quartet. He’s a photographer in Toronto. It was a lot of fun, a lot of fun. Excellent theatre bunch in those days too.
MH: We’re getting pretty close to winding things up here. Anything you would remark on as a last comment about Victoria itself? As a city in relationship to where it was in the 1950s, and where it sits in the first decade of a new millennium? Or offer up any reflections on changes in the city — or how, as they say, sometimes the more things change the more they stay the same?
BG: When I was young, there were a lot of English and Scots here. When I came back in 2004 after having been away for a long time, I discovered there were still a lot of English and Scots, and I was happy to see that. I think the strength of it continues that way. In the 1950s, Victoria was less multicultural than it is now, but we had Chinese students here, we had Sikh kids, and Indian kids from up the hill. So we always regarded the high school as being a melting pot. Then we had the immigrants. We had Dutch kids and German kids and so forth. This was very important. In my travels, people say, “Oh, you’re from Victoria — tea and crumpets and a bit of Olde England.” And I say, “Yes, yes, that’s true, but we also had a chance to mix with people from other places, other societies and other religions. We weren’t totally English and Scots.”
MH: Being a port city, it would be impossible, wouldn’t it? A port city would automatically connect to the global village in a very different way.
BG: Yes. History in some degree has passed Victoria by with the power of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, but still I think this is an extraordinarily creative place. The power of government has somehow gone to Vancouver rather than being vested here. The influence of the school in the running of government was very important, because we had a commercial department here that was very important. It was run by Mr. Heywood and a couple of others. They would be able to place any of their graduates from the school into the buildings, meaning the Department of Education, the Department of Mines and Forests…. We were a feeder school for the secretarial pool that would go there, and the same is true about the students going into either the Normal School to teach or to the Royal Jubilee Hospital or Victoria General Hospital. Everybody who came out of here was well skilled and well equipped to get into their professions. I don’t know whether that’s the case now, but the school was looked upon in the 1950s as being a bonafide entry to the professions.
MC: Practicing music, too?
BG: Sure. Always.....
MH: And I think now, when the band goes on tour, of course the R&B band just came from Nashville, and Ottawa, right?
MC: Yeah, Ottawa in February [*correction: March*], Nashville just a week ago.
MH: And they’ve got about twenty of you?
MC: Yes, twenty or so. And at this show there is another twenty so there’s going to be about forty of us playing. Not at the same time.
MH: Such a great experience, that traveling experience.
BG: Oh, bonding. For lots of kids from Victoria it was their first time being in Vancouver.
MC: It wouldn’t have been as common to go over there as it is now.
BG: Not at all, not at all. People didn’t have the disposable cash they do now, Meaghan, nor did they have their own individual jobs. Or if they did have jobs, the money would go into a family conference. Cutting grass for 35 cents on a Saturday afternoon is not a lot of money. I’m getting off the track, but it’s a sociological fact.
MH: It takes us into some of the things about life in Victoria in general, Barry. That’s as much our interest in this project — to look at what it was like to grow up in Victoria.
BG: We were very self-contained here, so to do things in theatre and music and sports — great rugby teams, for instance — these things were sources of great pride. You’ve got to remember that the school in those days…. Esquimalt High School didn’t come along until about 1916, and Oak Bay High School was not built until 1929. When you look at the programs of my mother, they were at the high school. This place was it. Now, we share that glory with all the others on the periphery, but this was the gathering place of all the towns.
I want to mention another thing too. This city has had a longstanding history of private school students — Saint Michaels, or Glenlyon, and if they didn’t go there, they’d go to Brentwood or Shawnigan Lake. It was the English kids, old school. The old school money would drag them off to Saint Michaels University School or Glenlyon. It still goes on now under the assumption that if you can buy education, it’s going to be better for you. But that was not the case in Victoria High School because this was the premier place, I’m sure of it. This was the Canadian school.
MC: Especially for music. Still, now.
BG: And for developing Canada. Not just for music, and for science and mathematics, but for building the idea of who we are in Canada. If you go through issues of The Camosun for the Great War, 1914 through 1918 and even after, you see this concept of the emerging Canadian identity and the importance of this school in it.
MC: A bit more about the band, particularly jazz? I’d like to hear more about the jazz club.
BG: We had a jazz club, yes. It was the brains of a buddy of Ian McDougall’s called John Fraser, who was a great chum of mine. And Joe Fraxon, who was one of our cheerleaders, and Bryant Wood, and Joe Moore, who was a year ahead of us. All of us musicians were jazz singers. We got together and decided that the new long plays that were being produced, coming out on 33 1/3 from Columbia Record Club, were worth listening to. Paul Desmond and Brubeck were just coming along. Louis Armstrong was in his high days. He produced a record, playing W.C. Handy, the blues. I happened to join the record club, so I got this sort of stuff, but others would bring records as well. We had a room over in the old Fairey Tech building for jazz listening, so that’s what would happen. We had J.J. Johnson, and Kai Winding, the trombone guys. W.C. Handy and Fats Waller were in their heyday. Gerry Mulligan and those kinds of new groups were coming along. And Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, of course, and a few bright sparks on that side.
That’s what we do, you know, as just part of jazz education, but jazz didn’t exist in the high school curriculum except when we’d have an assembly. I mentioned Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson, the two famous trombone players. McDougall and Fraser were both trombone players, and I remember them doing a replication of one of the Winding and Johnson productions for part of a musical. This was the kind of thing that was a spinoff of the jazz club.
MH: So you tended to listen and then do some playing?
BG: And analyze. A guy called John Gittins, a graduate of this school, started to do some arranging for us. He was a couple of years older than I was. Four of us turned into a jazz musical vocal quartet — John Fraser, myself, Joe Fraxon, Bryant Wood. Gittins was up at Victoria College in those days, and he’d write stuff for us along the lines of the Four Lads or the Four Freshmen. Know what I mean? None of that survives, except in memory. It was another spinoff that came out of the jazz club. We always thought we’d get more dates with the girls, but I don’t think…. I think we were so distracted with our own music it never went anywhere (laughs).
MH: What about the rest of the city? Were there places to go listen to jazz in Victoria?
BG: You’d have to ask McDougall.
MH: I guess. Someone who had been referring me to Ian mentioned that he was out gigging when he was nineteen….
BG: Twelve or thirteen.
MH: …with some of the clubs. But that wasn’t something you managed to get out to?
BG: No. I was not in his league at all.
MH: I thought you just might have been able to sneak in the back door and see him.
BG: He used to play at a club that was on View, or Johnson. I can’t remember which. Have you seen that piece I did on him in the alumni bulletin about three years ago?
MH: We could look it up.
BG: It’s a front-page story in the VHS alumni newsletter. It was done about 2005 or 2006. He’s Order of Canada, you know. He’s one of the very few graduates of this place who was awarded the Order of Canada.
MC: I have a couple of questions about the war, actually. You were very young during World War II, but I was wondering what it was like in Victoria, particularly.
BG: We were under curfew: lights out at nine. One thing I can remember about wartime was a gas mask in my desk at Oaklands School. And blackout curtains in our house at 3000 Dean Avenue. Ration cards, tight food controls, and everybody growing things. All the gardens had rabbit hutches. We had chickens. We were producing vegetables in the garden. This is long before landscape gardening became fashionable, so we were all doing our share with all of that.
There was a near impression of danger with regard to Japan, but by and large, most of us went about our own work for another generation. I know, later on, even during the Cold War, when there was a fear of nuclear fallout…. When I was in high school, a lot of the kids went into the navy or the army. They dropped out, grade ten, because they could get into the service right away, or they went to work for Dockyard and became apprentices there. In Victoria, we lived very easily with the services, the navy and the army, and that was a very natural thing.
From a childhood point of view, the war was a distant thing. I think we were kept free of the worry of it by our parents. I think they didn’t want us to be concerned by the war, which they were taking care of in their own ways. Do you know Bruce Hutchison, the name? Bruce Hutchison was one of the most famous journalists in Canada, and he was a graduate of this high school, 1917 or 1918, and editor of The Camosun. He wrote a memoir called The Far Side of the Street. And he says in there — he’s got two pages related to the high school during the 1914-18 war…. He said it was a very important war, and all sorts of our students went in to join our teachers.
Many of our teachers and fellow students joined up. And as you know, the Roll of Honour speaks to the great number of nursing sisters, and teachers, and boys who went from our school. He said you’ve got to remember that life is going on. We had to go on. We got ourselves involved in other things — dramatic societies, academic pursuits, the discourse of the town. In fact, he says, we had to carry on with life. The war was far away. Everything that was coming in was censored. We weren’t getting stories direct from the front, so we had to go on with life. He talks about this for two pages in the book. It’s rather a fascinating thing, and I suspect that was the case in the Second World War too, Meaghan. You know, that war was going on from 1939 to 1945, not four but six years this time, and life in Victoria went on.
MC: So it was more in the background. Very interesting.
BG: I think so, I think so. No, I think it was a distant field, or far distant fields. There was a consciousness, naturally. If you go through The Camosun for 1914-1918, you’ll see that there are stories coming home — that somebody has heard from somebody in the Western Front, that somebody’s brother has died, or that the local Portia Society, which is one of the girls groups of the high school, was keeping active the memory of those they knew who were overseas or who had died. Then we come to April of 1917, when the memorial trees are dedicated — not for Vimy but for the second battle of Ypres, when so many of them were killed.
War memories were already starting to happen before the war was over. They didn’t wait until after the war. Bruce Hutchison would have been here at the time. In his memoir, he doesn’t talk about the consciousness of the school and the war, but if you read The Camosun, which he was editing at the time, you see he did. There’s a conflict there. When he writes his memoir later on, it goes under the heading “old men forget.” Because they do. They tend to think in different points of view as to what it was like when they were there at the time. Anyway, we’re onto this Great War memory project at the school, which is fantastic.
MH: Which is a great thing for us. I want to get a little more information from you about what your plans are for 2014.
BG: It got my attention when the trees were cut down. I felt really badly because after Peter Smith died…. He had written it up in “Come Give a Cheer” — you know, the two pages that deal with the memorial trees. I’d thought we should have memorial plaques put up about the trees. Well, lo and behold, they were cut down. I felt really badly after that, so in consequence, I rummaged around in the history and discovered that not only did we have the school trees here on the Vining Street or Fernwood approaches to the school, we also have this famous Kitchener Oak. With the advice of Fred Packford, class of ’49…. You’ve talked to him. He and I got together and we badgered people and got the two memorial plaques. One has been mounted over here, above the stone. Have you seen the bronze plaque?
MH: I’d like to grab a picture of the two of you beside the plaque.
BG: And there’s another bronze plaque that’s being mounted by the school district beside the Kitchen Memorial Oak, which was also planted in April 1917. That’s one of the famous trees of Victoria, but few people know about it. It’s the big one over on Grant Street….
MH: Right by the sidewalk.
BG: Exactly. I mean, there are many heritage trees in Victoria, but unless you put up a sign, nobody knows.
MC: There was one cut down recently over there. Was that another memorial tree?
BG: That I don’t know, but the story of the Kitchener Memorial Oak is on the Victoria High School Alumni website. In fact, the story of the two clusters of trees has been integrated into a story on the website.
MH: We’ll make sure that when we start compiling our materials into a website…
BG: Yes. How are you going to do that, Mark?
MH: …in particular, your relationship to the War Project…. It has been interesting just talking to students in a variety of classes here within this context. There is an awareness of Vic High’s relationship to the Great War and World War II — a really active curiosity. I think you’ll find that as you get into your 2014 project, it’ll be interesting to see how to involve some of the students in the school. How are you doing with your list of questions, Meaghan?
MC: Seems that’s about it. But actually, I have a yearbook with….
BG: Oh, that was a great class. This class of ’56 was a particularly wonderful bunch of people.
MC: There’s a marking I noticed: that you were called “George.”
BG: My mother called me George. I don’t know why. Thought it was kingly, I suppose. I don’t know. I can’t understand that.
MH: It wasn’t something that rubbed off on you in school, that you remember?
BG: I don’t know why…. This is John Fraser (pointing in the yearbook), Ian McDougall’s dear friend. These are the guys who did the Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson trombone duo. Now, McDougall is famous as a trombone player, but he was a brilliant rugby player. And this fellow is greatly lamented: Bob McKee. His father was the Chief Forester of the province of British Columbia. He was a very good student in science and engineering, but he died in the surf in Japan when the tsunami caught him, about 1965.
MC: And here’s the jazz club, right here.
BG: There you go. That’s John Fraser. I’m not in this photo. Let’s see…. Oh, this is Pat Lacroix, who was one of the people in the jazz quartet. He’s a photographer in Toronto. It was a lot of fun, a lot of fun. Excellent theatre bunch in those days too.
MH: We’re getting pretty close to winding things up here. Anything you would remark on as a last comment about Victoria itself? As a city in relationship to where it was in the 1950s, and where it sits in the first decade of a new millennium? Or offer up any reflections on changes in the city — or how, as they say, sometimes the more things change the more they stay the same?
BG: When I was young, there were a lot of English and Scots here. When I came back in 2004 after having been away for a long time, I discovered there were still a lot of English and Scots, and I was happy to see that. I think the strength of it continues that way. In the 1950s, Victoria was less multicultural than it is now, but we had Chinese students here, we had Sikh kids, and Indian kids from up the hill. So we always regarded the high school as being a melting pot. Then we had the immigrants. We had Dutch kids and German kids and so forth. This was very important. In my travels, people say, “Oh, you’re from Victoria — tea and crumpets and a bit of Olde England.” And I say, “Yes, yes, that’s true, but we also had a chance to mix with people from other places, other societies and other religions. We weren’t totally English and Scots.”
MH: Being a port city, it would be impossible, wouldn’t it? A port city would automatically connect to the global village in a very different way.
BG: Yes. History in some degree has passed Victoria by with the power of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, but still I think this is an extraordinarily creative place. The power of government has somehow gone to Vancouver rather than being vested here. The influence of the school in the running of government was very important, because we had a commercial department here that was very important. It was run by Mr. Heywood and a couple of others. They would be able to place any of their graduates from the school into the buildings, meaning the Department of Education, the Department of Mines and Forests…. We were a feeder school for the secretarial pool that would go there, and the same is true about the students going into either the Normal School to teach or to the Royal Jubilee Hospital or Victoria General Hospital. Everybody who came out of here was well skilled and well equipped to get into their professions. I don’t know whether that’s the case now, but the school was looked upon in the 1950s as being a bonafide entry to the professions.
Barry Gough graduated in 1956 , and is still very involved with Victoria High School. It was a pleasure to speak with him and I’m sure we’ll hear more from Barry with his Great War Project 2014.
Meaghan Claughton 2012 Go Back to Home Page |