Selwyn House School

Lucas School and Mackay Street (1908–1930)

Algernon Lucas (1879–1916), educated at Warminster Grammar School in Wiltshire, read theology at Selwyn College, Cambridge, graduating in 1903. After four years teaching at St Alban's School in Brockville, Ontario, he came to Montreal in 1908 and, with the backing of the financier Herbert Holt and other families of the Golden Square Mile who wanted a preparatory school closer to home than the existing Wickham House in Westmount or St John's School (the forerunner of Lower Canada College), opened Lucas School in a flat at the Saint Catherine Street end of Crescent Street with seven pupils, a partner named St George, and a curriculum of "the three R's", French, history and geography. The school's own history names the first boys as Robert Holt, Hubert Fairbanks, Stuart Bell, Paul Drummond, Arthur Evans, Gratz Joseph and John Pangman. Within a year it had moved to Mackay Street, just south of Sherbrooke Street: Lovell's Montreal Directory lists "Lucas A, private school" there from its 1909–10 edition, and from 1911 the school occupied a house at no. 452 (later renumbered 1538, and today no. 2130), which was adapted with classrooms on two floors, staff quarters above, a basement "gymnasium" and a carpentry workshop in the former stable. By 1910 it had fifty-five boys, none older than twelve, and a Scout troop, the 41st Montreal, whose black-and-yellow scarves supplied the school colours.

In September 1912 Lucas left teaching for insurance broking and transferred the school to Colin Campbell Macaulay (1875–1959), a graduate of Malvern College and Selwyn College who had matriculated with him in 1899 and had been teaching history at Lower Canada College. Macaulay renamed it Selwyn House after their college and adopted the badge, a lion that was at first depicted wearing a coronet, and the motto Veritas that the school still uses; the school's historians could find no connection between the badge and the college. Lucas married Gail Yuile of Montreal in November 1914 and, having been refused by the Canadian cavalry, obtained a commission in the 2nd King Edward's Horse in February 1915; wounded in France, he was convalescing in Dublin when the Easter Rising broke out, and on the night of 28–29 April 1916 he was shot dead while in charge of a guard at the Guinness malt-house on Robert Street by a Royal Dublin Fusiliers quartermaster-sergeant who took him and a brewery clerk for rebels. The sergeant was tried for murder by court-martial in June 1916 and acquitted. His widow endowed the Lucas Medal, designed by the sculptor Louis-Philippe Hébert and first awarded in 1917, which remains the school's highest prize for an all-round graduating pupil.

Macaulay ran the school for seventeen years. Staff were recruited almost entirely from Britain, among them Charles Anstey, who taught at the school from 1911 until his death in 1942, latterly setting its standard in mathematics, and whose name is borne by the inter-house academic trophy. As pupils began to come from Westmount and beyond, the school was divided in 1920 between a senior section on Mackay Street and a junior section in Macaulay's own house at 711 Sherbrooke Street; from 1926 the senior school was run by Geoffrey H. T. Wanstall, an Old Rugbeian who had joined the staff in 1921 after serving as an officer of the Dorsetshire Regiment in the First World War. The Jeffrey Russel Prize, named for the footballer Jeff Russel, who had attended Lucas School in 1908–10 and was electrocuted in 1926, was founded in 1927, and the school's annual School Magazine began publication in 1929, prompted by The School Times, a printed paper produced the previous year by a form that included Stephen Leacock, son of the humorist Stephen Leacock. Macaulay retired to England in 1929, selling the school to Wanstall; he died at Rugby on 6 March 1959.

Redpath Street and the Wanstall era (1930–1945)

Wanstall reunited the two sections in June 1930 by buying from a friend a stone mansion at 3458 Redpath Street, a cobbled cul-de-sac off Sherbrooke Street beside the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul. He lived in the building, beside which a small outdoor rink was built; a brief experiment with boarders in 1931 was abandoned, and the school has never again taken them. Wanstall, a bachelor and keen sportsman whose "ample supply of canes" was, the school's historians wrote, "a school legend", kept the curriculum centred on English, mathematics and French: science found no place in it, and "little or nothing of Canada or Canadian history came within its purview". A library was begun in 1936, a Selwyn House Ski Club opened at Sainte-Adèle in 1938, and in 1940 the poet Patrick Anderson, newly arrived in Canada, joined the staff; he taught at the school until 1946, the years in which he founded the literary magazine Preview, and his left-wing politics caused "acrimonious" common-room disputes with older colleagues. In 1937 former pupils won twenty-three of the forty-five prizes awarded at Bishop's College School and fourteen at Trinity College School, a measure of the school's reputation as a feeder of the boarding schools.

The Second World War touched the school more closely than the first: two masters joined the navy, one of whom was lost in a submarine; evacuee boys from England were enrolled; and the school's roll of honour, read at the school each Remembrance Day, came to name fifty Old Boys who were killed in action or died on active service, nearly all of them in that war. Wanstall himself fell ill in February 1945 and died in hospital in May, as the war in Europe ended.

Selwyn House Association and the Speirs era (1945–1971)

Wanstall had owned the school outright and died intestate, with his heirs in England and Vichy France; enrolment had fallen to 125, and closure seemed imminent. Three parents, Walter Molson, Philip Mackenzie and Winthrop Brainerd, and Constance Howis, who had kept the school's accounts, pressed for the year to be completed; the lawyer G. Miller Hyde, a former pupil, assembled a committee of Old Boys that offered the estate $25,000 for the school "as a going concern", raised the money through an issue of twenty-year 3% mortgage bonds taken up by parents and friends, and on 19 June 1945 obtained Quebec letters patent for the Selwyn House Association, a non-profit corporation under Part III of the Quebec Companies Act, with Hyde as its first chairman. The committee recruited as headmaster Robert Alan Speirs, a Scot educated at the universities of Edinburgh and Columbia who was head of English and assistant headmaster at Lower Canada College; his appointment was announced at the school's sports day on 13 June 1945.

Speirs introduced weekly tests, prefects, assemblies with visiting speakers (among them Jesse Owens, Robert Watson-Watt and Peter Fleming), a public-speaking society, a Christmas entertainment and a school hymn of his own composition, and the Association's board, which kept the school's first written records, added a gymnasium (1947), the Wanstall Memorial Library (1949), a laboratory in which practical science was taught for the first time (1950), a dining hall designed by the Old Boy architect Francis (Frank) Nobbs (1956) and a further wing (1960). A house system, with houses named Lucas, Macaulay, Wanstall and Speirs after the four headmasters, was adopted in 1951, the Old Boys' Association was founded at a reunion dinner in December 1953, and a staff pension plan followed in 1958. Enrolment grew from 148 in 1945 to 265 in 1960, with a waiting list. Although non-denominational, the school had a Protestant ethos: a quarter-hour of religious instruction opened each morning from the late 1930s, and Speirs, a Presbyterian, wrote its hymn. Edgar Bronfman Sr., who with his brother Charles was sent there in the 1930s and 1940s by their Anglophile father, Samuel Bronfman, recalled it as "a place that enrolled few Jewish boys", where the brothers' friends were "the Protestants at Selwyn House"; Charles Bronfman later said that he "was in [his] twenties before [he] knew French was spoken in the city".

The school remained a preparatory school, most boys leaving at fourteen or fifteen for boarding school, and the board had considered restricting it to junior forms; by 1960, however, placing older boys elsewhere had become difficult and the governors resolved to teach to matriculation. In April 1961 the Westmount Protestant School Board put up for sale the senior Westmount High School building at 95 Côte-Saint-Antoine Road, opposite city hall, as the high school consolidated on a new site on Sainte-Catherine Street. Within three weeks the Association, chaired by the contractor John G. Bourne, had agreed to buy it, financing the purchase by selling the Redpath Street property to McGill University, which also provided a 7% mortgage. The school took possession on 1 July 1961 and the building was formally opened on 14 September 1961 by the mayor of Westmount, J. C. Cushing, who planted a maple tree on the east lawn with Lucas's widow. The old science rooms were converted into a dining hall, Coristine Hall, given by the parents of Christopher Coristine, a former pupil who had died at seventeen helping a younger boy escape when the training ship Albatross foundered in the Gulf of Mexico on 2 May 1961. McGill used the Redpath Street house for offices until 1974, when it was demolished.

Grade 10 was added in 1962 and Grade 11 in 1963; the first matriculation class, of fewer than a dozen boys, sat the McGill junior matriculation examinations in 1964, Canadian football was introduced in 1963, and a bursary fund and a French summer school were begun. Now a full secondary school, Selwyn House was admitted to the Canadian Headmasters' Association and joined the newly formed Quebec Association of Independent Schools, created as the province's new Ministry of Education extended its authority over private schools. Enrolment reached 450 in 1966, after which 425 to 435 was fixed as the optimum; a 1968 extension doubled the gymnasium and added laboratories, a library and classrooms. In 1969 the Association's by-laws were changed to make every paid-up member of the Old Boys' Association a member of the Association, and in 1974 at least eight of the fifteen elected directors were required to be Old Boys. Speirs, who received an honorary LL.D. from Sir George Williams University in 1968, retired in June 1971 with the title of headmaster emeritus and continued to teach linguistics at the school until shortly before his death in March 1981.

Expansion in Westmount (1971–2008)

Speirs's successor, Alexis S. Troubetzkoy (1934–2017), a Paris-born member of the Russian princely Trubetskoy family who had taught at Stanstead College and Bishop's College School and been registrar of Appleby College, was the first headmaster not from Britain. He replaced the English form names with grade numbers, introduced a cycle timetable with periods for clubs, a Cum Laude Society for graduates with averages of 80% or more and French immersion in Grade 6, and sought a more "democratic" school; his first year ended with the departure of fourteen teachers, including the last of Wanstall's staff. In November 1973 the school began accepting Quebec government grants for its secondary grades, and a charitable Lucas Foundation was created to hold capital and scholarship funds. Troubetzkoy convened staff "mini-Pugwash" conferences on the school's future in 1974 and 1976, and in May 1975 the school hosted "Canada Day", a conference on Canadian writing attended by 1,250 pupils from fifty schools and thirty-two writers, among them Hugh MacLennan, Mordecai Richler and F. R. Scott; a bilingual sequel, "Contact '76", whose participants included Irving Layton and Louis Dudek, followed in 1976. A 1976–77 reconstruction moved the junior school into a new east wing linked by a glazed bridge to the former caretaker's house on Argyle Avenue, and gave the senior school a library three and a half times the size of the old one. The first Founder's Day was held in 1978, the school's seventieth year, with the launch of Veritas, the history of the school by its former senior master Edgar C. Moodey and Speirs. Troubetzkoy left in 1981 to become headmaster of Appleby College and later of the Toronto French School.

Robert Manion, previously of Royal St. George's College in Toronto, was headmaster from 1981 to 1984; during his tenure the Speirs Medal, awarded annually to a teacher, governor or friend of the school, was instituted (1982), and the school's seventy-fifth anniversary was celebrated in 1983, when its endowment fund reached $1 million. William Mitchell, who had taught at Trinity College School and Lower Canada College, became the seventh headmaster in January 1985 and served until December 2008, the longest tenure after Speirs's. With about 485 pupils crowded into one building, the Association in 1985 bought the former St. Andrew's United Church across the street, registered in August 1985 at $1,000,000, after a public consultation on the necessary rezoning at which no objections were raised; the converted church, with a gymnasium in the former sanctuary, opened in November 1986 as the Macaulay Building, and the original school was named the Lucas Building. The school's invitational varsity hockey tournament was first held in December 1985, a kindergarten class was added in 1992, and French was progressively extended through the elementary curriculum. A "Making Room for the Future" capital campaign chaired by the Old Boy André Desmarais raised more than $15 million for a two-phase, $12.5-million construction project: the Speirs Building, a $10.8-million structure designed by the architect Andrea Wolff on the school's former parking lot and rink, was inaugurated on 10 November 2003, and renovations of the Lucas Building followed over four summers, ending in 2006 with the conversion of its 1935 gymnasium into a dining hall and auditorium, the new Coristine Hall. The school's centennial in 2007–08 was marked by a gala that raised about $1.45 million for the endowment and local charities and by a published history, Selwyn House School: Celebrating 100 Years.

Recent history (2009–present)

Hal Hannaford, for twelve years headmaster of Royal St. George's College and himself a Lower Canada College graduate, succeeded Mitchell in January 2009, in the final months of the class action described below. In 2010 the school, which rented ice in Westmount's municipal arena and described itself as its "best tenant", campaigned among parents for the city's $37-million arena and pool project. Hannaford retired in June 2020 and was succeeded by Michael Downey, a science teacher and coach who had worked at the school for thirty years and was its assistant headmaster and head of senior school; the board chairman, Jonathan Goldbloom, said that after searching "the world" the board had found "the best candidate ... right here in our own backyard".

From the 1970s the school had received Quebec grants for its secondary grades, about $1.0–1.6 million a year in the 2000s and 2010s, on condition that those pupils held certificates of eligibility for English-language instruction under the Charter of the French Language; the elementary school, which was unsubsidized, was open to all, but each year eight to twelve Grade 6 boys without certificates had to leave. Following The Study (2016) and ahead of Lower Canada College (2024), Selwyn House gave up its grant of roughly $5,000 per pupil in 2021 and became fully private, which allowed it to admit pupils from French-language elementary schools; Downey said applications subsequently "went through the roof", with "a big contingent out of the francophone sector", while the office of Quebec's education minister, Bernard Drainville, said it deplored the decision of such schools. In November 2022 the school announced a Grade 12 "pre-university" year, the first in Westmount, as an alternative to CEGEP; the first cohort of about twenty boys began in September 2023, following a curriculum based on New Brunswick's Grade 12 and leading to that province's diploma. To house the programme the school entered negotiations in 2023 to buy the neighbouring St. Matthias' Anglican Church while preserving its sanctuary for the congregation, and in December 2024 it bought a building at 4120 Vendôme Avenue, on the edge of the Villa Maria campus, from the Congregation of Notre Dame for $5 million; in May 2026 Downey said the Vendôme building was "on hold" pending the St. Matthias talks and the Grade 12 pupils remained in the Speirs Building.

Lucas Building

The main building, at 95 Côte-Saint-Antoine Road, was built in 1935 by the Westmount Protestant School Board as Westmount Junior High School, on the site of the Côte-Saint-Antoine Academy of 1895 (later Westmount Academy and, from 1914, Argyle School), which had been demolished in 1934 because of foundation problems. The new school cost about $250,000 including the land, became Westmount's senior high school in 1940 and was sold to the Selwyn House Association in 1961. Designed by the architect Charles Reginald Tetley and built by the Bremner-Norris Company in greystone, to harmonize with the city hall opposite, it was altered for the school by Francis J. Nobbs between 1961 and 1968. The city's 1991 heritage inventory, Westmount: A Heritage to Preserve, lists it as a "very significant" building and counts it, with Victoria Hall (1924) and the Church of the Ascension of Our Lord, among the neo-Gothic buildings of the interwar years that reinforced the prestige of the district. It houses the elementary and middle schools and Coristine Hall, the dining hall and auditorium created in 2006 from the original gymnasium and named, like its 1961 predecessor, in memory of Christopher Coristine.

Macaulay Building

The Macaulay Building, at 101–103 Côte-Saint-Antoine Road on the north side of the street, is the former St. Andrew's United Church. The congregation, formed in 1900 after a split in the Melville Presbyterian Church over temperance, built a red-brick Romanesque church designed by Alexander Cowper Hutchison in 1908–09; it later joined the United Church of Canada, was gutted by fire in 1965, and was rebuilt in concrete, brick and oak in 1966–67 to designs from the office of Harold Lea Fetherstonhaugh. When the congregation merged with Dominion-Douglas Church in 1985 the building was sold to the school, which converted it, under the architect Bruce Anderson, into classrooms, offices and a second gymnasium.

Speirs Building and other properties

The Speirs Building, opened in 2003 on the school's former parking lot and rink on Stanton Street, adjoins the Lucas Building and is connected to the Macaulay Building by a tunnel beneath the street; it contains the Wanstall Library and learning centre, computer laboratories, classrooms, administrative offices, an agora for assemblies and a full-size underground gymnasium with a climbing wall; its stone exterior was designed to harmonize with the Lucas Building. The school acquired the former caretaker's house on Argyle Avenue with the building in 1961 and two neighbouring houses in 1968; part of the former was linked to the Lucas Building by a glazed bridge in 1977. In 2024 it bought a building on Vendôme Avenue for future expansion. The school has never had playing fields of its own: field sports are played in Westmount's parks, and hockey at McGill's McConnell Arena, the Westmount Recreation Centre and other city rinks.

Houses, prefects and awards

Pupils are divided into four houses named after the first four headmasters, Lucas, Macaulay, Wanstall and Speirs, which have competed since 1951–52 for the Governors' Shield in sport, academic work and other activities; the junior school has had its own competition, for the Afra Snead Shield, since 1967. A prefect system dates from 1945. The principal prizes are the Lucas Medal (1917), chosen by secret ballot of the staff and graduating class and announced only at the prize-giving, the Jeffrey Russel Prize (1927) and the Brainerd Prize for effort and public spirit (1958); the Speirs Medal (1982), presented each Founder's Day, honours an adult who has made a significant contribution to the school. The school's Scout troop, once its chief extracurricular activity, lapsed on the move to Westmount in 1961.

Athletics

The school's early sports were rugby, soccer, hockey, cricket, skiing and gymnastics; cricket died out around 1960 for lack of pitches and opponents, Canadian football was adopted in 1963, and rugby union, introduced by a Welsh games master around 1960, produced the school's first championship team in 1974. Selwyn House joined the Greater Montreal Inter-Scholastic Athletic Association (now the Greater Montreal Athletic Association of the Réseau du sport étudiant du Québec, in which it still competes) in 1967, and by 1978 fielded eighteen teams, thirteen of them in league play. Its teams, known as the Gryphons, have traditional rivalries with Lower Canada College and Loyola High School; the varsity hockey team won the provincial championship in 1991–92 and the school has hosted an invitational varsity hockey tournament, which by 1992 drew teams from Toronto, Halifax, Lennoxville and the former Czechoslovakia, every December since 1985. An under-17 hockey team joined the Canadian Sport School Hockey League's eastern division for the 2024–25 season. Teams have toured abroad since the mid-1980s, beginning with a bantam hockey trip to a world tournament in Helsinki, with a side visit to Leningrad, over the Christmas holidays of 1984–85, followed by a rugby "Tour de France".

Publications and traditions

The School Magazine, an annual record of the school's year, was published from 1929; under Troubetzkoy it became a conventional yearbook, and the name Veritas now belongs to the school's annual magazine for parents and alumni. Pupils' newspapers have included The School Times (1928), The Veritas (1939–40), The Black and the Gold (1954), The Selwyn House Chronicle and The Redpath Herald (1956–57), The S.H.S. Examiner (1968–77) and The Moon (1977), and from 1973 the annual anthology The Fourth Dimension collected the best creative writing in the school. The school hymn, written by Speirs to the Welsh hymn tune "St Denio", has been sung at prize-givings since the mid-1940s, and a French verse was added for the centenary. Founder's Day has been observed each autumn since 1978, and the Old Boys' Association, whose president sits ex officio on the school's board, organizes reunions, an annual golf tournament and an alumni hockey tournament. The school has held co-educational events with neighbouring girls' schools since a winter carnival shared with one of them in 1968–69. It has also digitized its yearbooks, magazines and programmes from 1929 onward and made them freely available through the Internet Archive.

Citations

Sources

• Moodey, Edgar C.; Speirs, Robert A. (1978). Veritas: A History of Selwyn House School, Montreal 1908–1978. Westmount, Quebec: Selwyn House Association. ISBN 0-9690882-0-5 – via Internet Archive.
• Selwyn House School (2007). Selwyn House School: Celebrating 100 Years. Westmount, Quebec: Selwyn House School – via Internet Archive.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)