Trinity During World War I

Recently, after binge-watching Downton Abbey, I realised that if I had been born in 1895 instead of 1995, I would be turning 19 at the outbreak of World War I.

Worries about political science papers, college drama, and less-than-desirable Saints dates would mean nothing in lieu of a country and college preparing for war. My male friends might already be serving overseas. Perhaps my 16 year-old brother would try to enlist, as so many others his age did. I might even be considering volunteering overseas in a support role.

This imagined experience was a reality to students returning to Trinity in the fall term of 1914.

At the end of the summer one hundred years ago, Trinity students were, then as always, up to their usual debauchery. A favorite pastime of early Trinitrons was hurling glass bottles into a ravine in the Old Trinity Bellwoods park. The 1914 "bottle roll" was particularly spectacular, as some students had found the unlocked basement of the closed Trinity Medical School containing "hundreds, if not thousands of glass bottles, test tubes, retorts, and what not."

Another event of the year was the infamous bonfire of 1914. To celebrate a victorious debate against Wycliffe College, Trinity and St. Hilda's scholars secretly stockpiled firewood, fallen branches, lecture room chairs, topping the pile with barrels of tar. The eighty foot flare created from these efforts would put any Guy Fawkes bonfire to shame.

The first classes of 1T7, 1T6 and 1T5 were expecting dramatic changes for the fall, but none so great as the World War. When Trinity College federated with the University of Toronto in 1904, it was predicted that the College would move to Queen’s park in the near future. A tentative date was set for 1914.

The outbreak of war would postpone these plans, and decreased revenue from student enrollment meant that Trinity had to sell their land in Bellwoods Park to the City of Toronto, leasing it back until the downtown project would be completed in 1925. As we covered in an earlier issue of the Salterrae (see Emma Smith’s article in the March 2014 issue), the schedule for the transition and the scope for the plans were greatly impacted by the First World War.

War was declared in August 1914. "Most of us were at our family's summer cottages when the news of war came," remembers one St. Hildian. "When we got back to the college, some men had already gone off. The numbers of students and younger dons thinned out steadily. One single man graduated with [the class of] 1917."

At first, men left in small groups, but eventually the only ones who remained were those waiting for enlistment, or those who were granted special permission to continue their studies. Another St. Hilda's resident commented, "It is a sad sight - nay a dismal skeptical - to see deserted tables in the dining hall, the vacant seats in chapel, and a solitary few in the lecture rooms."

Even the class of 1T8 was keen to follow the lead of the upper years, which resulted in the closure of the infamous Trinity house, lovingly known as "Jag House," by its first-year residents. Jag House would no longer be home to brutal initiations ceremonies and first-year worms alike. A year later, the west wing of the Trinity building would also close. In the final year of the war, there were only 26 men left in residence, most under military age.

Although devoid of students, the Trinity buildings were put to good use. Trinity College provided accommodation, training space, and medical care facilities for the officers of the twenty-eighth Battalion, also called the Northern Fusiliers. Convocation Hall was used as a space for officers’ classes, the gymnasium for musketry drills, the playing field became a parade ground, the west wing became a residence for officers, and Jag House became a home for convalescent soldiers.

For the Saint Hilda's women who stayed in residence, the atmosphere had changed substantially. Lectures had dwindled to tutorial sized classes, as money was tight and needed for the war. The Women of College also served overseas and on the home front. Many went to England and France as ambulance drivers, clerks, physicians and support personnel overseas. Others worked in chemical laboratories with munitions, or provided help on farms. W.A Kirkwood and A. D Young's comprehensive War Memorial Volume, published in 1922, includes detailed lists of every member of college's war contributions, including those of Trinity's female students.

Everyone in the college celebrated the Armistice exuberantly. Some lucky St. Hilda's students were able to join a truck that was brought in to greet the soldiers, proudly waving the flags of the Empire, Trinity, and St. Hilda's. Soon after the war, there was a military reunion dance which they held in the great hall. A student remembers, "the dust was gone, and the moonlight illumined the figures of a man and a girl leaning against a wall. Trinity was young again."

Trinity was young, but changed. In total, 543 men of college fought in the First World War, and 73 of those were current undergraduates. 149 honours were bestowed on the Trinity students who served overseas, in places such as Belgium, France, Italy, Serbia, Gallipoli, Palestine, Egypt, India, China, and Germany. Of those men, there were 197 wounded, and 56 casualties. Under Soldiers’ Tower, in 1927 a Carillion was installed inscribed with Met'Agona Stephanos in memory of the members of college who fell during the First World War.

While researching this article, I came across a photograph of the victorious basketball team of 1914, looking uncannily similar to a Trinwear-clad Trinity College Athletic Association team of 2014. I cross checked the names of the team with the list of the fallen in the first world war. The captain, J. Hately and G. M Matheson, who graduated in the class of 1914, were both killed in service. Hately was killed in action on August 21st in 1917, and Matheson was killed in action less than three months before armistice.

As I flipped through names and descriptions of Trinity students who fought, I came across people — though separated by a century — were eerily familiar to me. This included Howard Manzer, who came to Trinity College from my hometown of Nanaimo BC, only to serve until 1918 before being discharged as medically unfit. I also found Andrew Kent Griffin, Trinity's first Rhodes Scholar, a name I recognised from moments of procrastination in the Graham Library quiet rooms. He was discharged from Russia in 1919 on sick leave.

The many International Relations and History students at Trinity College may have studied World War I by discussing the decline of the Ottoman Empire, Austrian Archdukes, and nationalist Serbia, or at the very least, by pretending to have read Paris 1919. It is easy to forget that those who debated at the Lit, called their Frosh "worms", and danced at Conversat had their lives and dreams uprooted by a global war. The same students who commented at the turn of the twentieth century, as we still do now, that "Beer was to Trinity students as Nectar was to the Gods," may have sacrificed their lives shortly after.

This November, as we remember the sacrifices made in the First World War, we should not remember our soldiers as playing pieces on the risk-board of geopolitics or as unfamiliar names carved in Soldiers Tower. We should remember them as members of College.