Introduction

Halifax in the 1920s. Dalhousie's résumé since 1818.

In July 1924 Professor Boris Petrovich Babkin and his wife were on a transatlantic liner en route from England to New York. A student and disciple of Pavlov’s, Babkin was forty-seven years old and had been professor of physiology at the University of Odessa since 1915. During the upheavals after the Russian revolution he fled to England; but unable to find a suitable job, he was on his way to be an instructor in pharmacology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. It was the best he had been able to get. A steward came to him. “There is a cable for you, sir, in the wireless room.” Babkin was astonished - who would cable him? It was from Dalhousie University, a place he had hardly heard of; would he come to Halifax to consider the professorship of physiology? After consulting in New York about where and what Dalhousie was, Babkin took the train through early August heat, surprised at the wooden buildings in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and thus not surprised at Canadian ones. At McAdam Junction, New Brunswick, the first stop in Canada, everyone got out for breakfast. It was cool and quiet; they were among spruce, pines, and birches that reminded him of Russia. When he got to Halifax that night, 7 August, the city was just concluding celebration of its 175th anniversary. The next morning the weather broke, rain streamed down, and Halifax’s wooden buildings looked gloomy, even ugly. In the hotel lobby Babkin met President MacKenzie, “tall, dignified,” who drove him to the president’s office in the Macdonald Library. There they talked about the chair of physiology. Babkin liked MacKenzie at once; he liked still more the laboratory in the new Medical Sciences Building, where there would be five rooms and two assistants to go with them. This was followed by a Nova Scotian lunch at the Halifax Club: fish chowder (which he ate for the first time), fresh fish, and fresh blueberry pie. Asked if he knew that berry, he exclaimed, “Did I know blueberries!” He came from Novgorod in northwest Russia; Babkins for the past four centuries had eaten blueberry pies! During a break in the afternoon he walked up to Barrington Street, came to St. Paul’s cemetery and found himself in front of the Crimean War monument. It was startling; his grandfather, Colonel Ivan Babkin, and his uncle, Lieutenant Alexander Babkin, had fought in the Crimean War on the Russian side. He had been brought up on memories of “perfidious Albion.” These people’s descendants now wanted him as professor. When President MacKenzie came to the hotel that evening to talk it over, Babkin’s decision to come was already made.¹

The Halifax of 1924 that Babkin saw was not a prepossessing city, though Dalhousie old timers such as Professor Archibald MacMechan liked its smallness, its intimacy, its closeness to woods and water, its golf and tennis. Halifax had only 58,000 people in the 1921 census and it showed. Outside of the Citadel and the parks, its public amenities were not extensive. For example, there was no decent public library, save for a cramped roomful of books tucked away in City Hall. There were still theatres with real stages and real actors, but as the 1920s went on they were slowly giving way to movie theatres that showed silent films. They came with sound after 1930. Halifax was still under prohibition rules, as was the rest of Nova Scotia, until 1930 when the creation of the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission allowed liquor stores in the few places that wanted them, of which Halifax was certainly the principal one.

Halifax was starting to resemble distantly the modern city; the changes that had started in the mid-nineteenth century were working their way through society, the way it lived, did its business, developed its institutions and its mores. It was only fifty years since an old lady in Antigonish, in 1878, fainted at her first sight of a railway train. In that time Halifax and Canada had been transformed industrially and commercially. In the process the old dominance of the learned professions, the church, law, and medicine, had given way to a much more diversified educated class. There were whole new ranges of professions, in business, engineering, public health, dentistry, pharmacy. Women dominated school teaching during most of that time; in 1901 78 per cent of Canada’s school teachers were women and it was the same in 1931. In 1901 10 per cent of Canada’s librarians were women; by 1931 it was 30 per cent. Women doubled their numbers as clerical workers from 21 per cent in 1901 to 45 per cent in 1931. They doubled their numbers as doctors, too, but that was only from 1 to 2 per cent, and slightly from 5.5 to 8.1 per cent as professors or school principals.²

Many of these new skills required secondary school, and not a few put an increasing emphasis upon a university degree. Professional employment was responding to a much more complex market economy. As the professions expanded their knowledge and techniques, so did the necessity of guaranteeing to the public that anyone who chose to carry the name doctor, dentist, lawyer, accountant, should be conversant with modern techniques. No one wanted their appendix removed by an unqualified horse doctor. What determined “qualified” was, increasingly, a university degree. Professional associations gradually developed criteria for evaluating even university degrees. Hence the delight at Dalhousie when in 1925 its MD was given an A1 rating by the American Medical Association, and when its Dental School was accredited in 1922. The professional associations watched the universities’ training with close scrutiny. If the doctors, dentists, and engineers so accredited developed professional monopolies, that had the advantage of ensuring that certain standards had been attained. And new professions were gaining status. The creation of Dalhousie’s W.A. Black Chair of Commerce marked that in 1921, although it took President MacKenzie seven years to find someone suitably qualified.³

Commerce permeated the pages of the Halifax papers and the Dalhousie Gazette. By 1920 comic strips had appeared in the populist Halifax Herald; “Bringing up Father” and “Mutt and Jeff” were early favourites; by 1929 even the more staid Morning Chronicle had a whole page of them, every day. Except Sunday, of course. Comic strips helped sell newspapers, and newspaper circulation helped sell advertising; with the cheap pulp paper readily available since the turn of the century, newspapers could increasingly exploit their double face, news and advertising; mayhem and murders on the one hand, make-up and manicure on the other. Advertisements extolling Bayer’s Aspirin competed with tobacco offered in various forms, Old Chum, Macdonald’s Cut Brier, at 80 cents a pound; Wilson’s Bachelor cigars, “The National Smoke,” at 10 cents. A new Nash car cost $2,150, a Maxwell coupe $1,415. Chevrolet (its logo the same as in 1997) boasted that its 1923 car had sixty-seven improvements over its 1922 model. A column in the Chronicle by “Trouble Shooter” offered advice on “When the Engine will not Start.”

The changes in advertising were especially swift and dramatic between the end of the Great War and 1930. For example, in 1919 Listerine was soberly advertised as a safe antiseptic; by the early thirties, as advertised in the glossy magazines, its consistent use as a mouthwash could save young women from that awful fate, “Always a bridesmaid, but never a bride.” In the Halifax Chronicle Aunt Madge consoled her niece, in tears over some social failure, delicately suggesting the transformation to be effected by the use of Lifebuoy soap.⁴

In the 1920s the Chronicle began to list the radio programs of the new and powerful American radio station WGY in Schenectady, New York. Halifax got its first radio station in May 1926 with CHNS, which operated out of the Lord Nelson Hotel. By the end of the 1920s radio was becoming almost a necessity to Halifax households, and it became a listening post to the suggestions of the world. Radio brought commercialism into the life of every family that owned one. Between 1924 and 1935 Canada produced one radio for every seven people in the country. Foster Hewitt brought the Saturday night hockey games of the Toronto Maple Leafs while carrying rather distantly tributes to the superior qualities of Imperial Oil; by the mid-thirties Jack Benny, the radio comic, was doing the same thing with Jell-o. Commerce thus permeated the very air; it was in the radio waves that caught every aerial, and steadily filled homes and their inhabitants with values they may not have wanted, desires they may never have heard of.

Nova Scotia and Halifax could escape only some of it. Nova Scotians being on a huge wharf in the Atlantic, as one might say, experienced these influences slowed and cooled, made less strident, by several hundred miles of forest or sea. That did not prevent local stations pumping out programs made in Toronto, New York, or Hollywood, but it helped Nova Scotians to weigh, and resist, the febrile fashions that emanated from the world outside. Thus they had benefits from their isolation and their distances. But there were disadvantages of which many Nova Scotians were not fully aware; they were apt to underestimate their cultural and intellectual isolation. Neither radio nor newspapers could quite overcome that. It was felt particularly by professors; they knew something of the world at large and fought to keep in touch with it. John Willis, then a young professor out of Oxford and Harvard at Dalhousie Law School, wrote about it years later: “No one [now]... has any idea how isolated the teacher at Dalhousie was and felt he was - thirty hours at least by train, and with no money to get on the train... from his colleagues in the rest of Canada.”⁵

Plane travel was still very much an exciting novelty. Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in 1927 in his single-engine “Spirit of St. Louis,” but that was a feat of great daring. Commercial plane travel in Canada was still a decade away. Halifax City did take over in 1930 a stretch of fields north of Chebucto Road, between Mumford Road and Connaught Avenue, as Halifax’s airport, and laid down two short runways, but they were useful only for light planes. Anything bigger than a Tiger Moth was apt to have trouble.

Transport on the ground was by trains, trams, horses, and increasingly by cars. Jim Bennet ('53) writes of the 1930s:

... When patient, plodding horses hauled the bread and milk and ice And postmen came six days a week, not once a day, but twice. When Boutilier’s little ferry boat across the Arm would ply By oar in February and by motor in July... When Adams Transport lowbed wagons rumbled through the streets And honeymoons and hardhats were the penny-candy treats. The Black Ball on the Citadel told harbour ships the time, And kids could see Gene Autry at the Empire for a dime. Those tinker-toys of tramcars round the Belt Line used to buzz Past Hec MacLeod - the smartest traffic cop there ever was; When boys in capes and gaiters biked the telegrams around And Sis took in the tea-dance to the Gerry Naugler sound. The railway locomotives and road-rollers ran by steam And so did half the laundries in the city, it would seem...⁶

Jim Bennet grew up on South Street, just across from Dalhousie. His father, C.L. Bennet, a New Zealand veteran of the First World War, had come in the 1920s to help Professor Archibald MacMechan with the work of English 1. That Dalhousie of the 1920s was already a century old more or less. It had a strange history, told in volume 1, but a brief retrospect is offered here as background.

Lord Dalhousie’s College, 1818-1925: A Résumé George Ramsay, the ninth earl of Dalhousie (1770-1838) was born near Edinburgh, attending its high school and university. But when his father died in 1787, he abruptly took up a military career. After the Battle of Waterloo and peace in Europe in 1815, he looked for a colonial position and in 1816 received the lieutenant-governorship of Nova Scotia. He and his wife and youngest son came out on a British navy frigate that brought them into Halifax harbour on 24 October 1816.

Halifax with its substantial army garrisons and naval base was rough and boisterous. Alexander Croke, vice-admiralty judge, from his estate at Studley above the North-West Arm, noted that military and upper-class parties were anything but decorous;

Great Harlots into honest Women made, And some who still profess that thriving Trade...

There was one college for the whole province, King’s, founded in 1789 at Windsor, there out of reach of Halifax’s wickedness. King’s College was however for Anglicans; students on graduation had to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. King’s in 1817 had only fourteen students, not a high proportion of the estimated sixteen thousand Anglicans who were 20 per cent of Nova Scotia’s population of eighty thousand.

Lord Dalhousie learned from his predecessor, Sir John Sherbrooke, that in the imperial treasury in Halifax there was a fund of some £11,596 (Halifax currency) called the Castine Fund.⁷ It had been acquired by the British army during the occupation of eastern Maine in the War of 1812 from customs duties at Castine. What to do with that £12,000? Nova Scotia had no standing debt to pay off. Lord Dalhousie’s Council had several suggestions: road and bridges, an almshouse, the Shubenacadie Canal. R.J. Uniacke, the attorney general, mentioned a college. Lord Dalhousie decided that a non-denomi- national college in Halifax, open to all comers in the way Edinburgh University was, would be much the best use of the money. His Council approved, and early in 1818 so did Lord Bathurst, the colonial secretary. So the Dalhousie building was started, right in the middle of Halifax, on the Grand Parade where City Hall now is. On 22 May 1820 Lord Dalhousie laid the cornerstone. Then almost at once he left for Quebec to take up his new position as governor general of British North America.

The difficulties now started. Lord Dalhousie’s enthusiasm and foresight was shared by very few others; his Council, despite their initial approval, were sceptical and the Legislative Assembly almost recalcitrant. The truth was that in an age of strong religious attachments and rivalries, a non-denominational college seemed an idea altogether utopian. In London, England, unlike Edinburgh, there was no non-denominational college until 1828. The Dalhousie College building was finished in 1824, but it was a building without college life; there were no professors and no students. Instead the Dalhousie board rented out the premises to secular realities such as a brewery and a bakeshop.

Dalhousie College was brought into being in 1838 under Thomas McCulloch, its first president, but inept management by its board, outside rivalries, and the death of McCulloch in 1843, put Dalhousie into twenty years of limbo as a Halifax high school. In 1863, however, Joseph Howe and Charles Tupper, rivals in politics and so much else, cooperated to put Dalhousie College on its feet with a new charter and six professors. Dalhousie kept its non-denominational character in its board but the spirit and energy driving it was Presbyterian and Presbyterian passion for education. Dalhousie was given a tremendous lift in the 1880s by George Munro’s endowment of several new chairs and by 1912 it had over four hundred students and three professional faculties, Law (1883), Medicine (1912), and Dentistry (1912). All were crowded within the brick building on Robie Street that had become by 1887 Dalhousie College. The city had taken over Dalhousie’s space on the Grand Parade.

Mercifully, the Dalhousie Board of Governors of 1911 rose to the new challenges and bought the whole forty-three-acre block of the Studley campus. As the First World War came, the first new buildings began to appear, first the Science Building and then the Macdonald Memorial Library, both looking a little stiff and very isolated amid the stretches of grass, the willows along the creek, and the white pines that crowned the hill above the Arm. Space there was!

Dalhousie had a difficult time during the First World War; although the Halifax explosion of 6 December 1917 did some damage, the real loss was income from student fees, for Dalhousie’s enrolment in two years of war shrank by 35 per cent, with shoals of its male students joining the Canadian army. By 1919 they were coming back and Dalhousie’s enrolment in 1920-1 was double what it was in 1916-17.

Then came the university federation movement in 1921, so far-reaching and so involving Dalhousie and its campus that it seemed to absorb all its energies for the next three years. King’s College, Windsor, had a devastating fire on 5 February 1920. There was talk of rebuilding in Windsor, talk of an appeal to the Carnegie Foundation of New York to fund it. That great philanthropic institution had been supporting aspects of Maritime college education for some years, but it now decided it needed an inquiry into the state of higher education in the Maritime provinces. K.C.M. Sills, president of Bowdoin College, Maine, and Dr. W.S. Learned of the Foundation conducted it in October and November 1921, and their report was published in 1922. It was not very cheerful. Dalhousie generally got high marks, but not for its library; Acadia’s was better. But all the colleges, Dalhousie included, were underfunded, undermanned, under-equipped, carrying on somehow with old staff sustained by old loyalties. The Nova Scotian colleges were the worst off, for they had no funding at all from the Nova Scotian government; that government had bailed out of it completely in 1881.

The solution that Learned and Sills recommended was federation of all the colleges, especially Nova Scotian ones, using Carnegie funds to move Acadia, King’s, St. Francis Xavier, Mount Allison to the Dalhousie campus. There they would become constituent colleges in a federated university. Dalhousie supported the idea, at least its board, president, scientists, and doctors did; they assumed that such a new federated university would at last be able to get the Nova Scotian government to fund badly needed laboratories and equipment; Dalhousie’s Arts professors were much less happy with what to them seemed an expensive and wrenching experiment. Archibald MacMechan, professor of literature since 1889, grumbled that Dalhousie was being invited to commit hara-kiri all in the name of a dubious standard of higher education. He and some others thought Dalhousie would be better off by itself.⁸

In the end it came to that. After extensive negotiations through the last six months of 1922, the Acadia Board of Governors declared on 16 February 1923 that it did not want to enter such a federation. Acadia’s withdrawal took the life out of the project. Mount Allison was doubtful. St. Francis Xavier had been doubtful from the start. The only college that now had any interest was King’s and that was because of necessity. Carnegie offered money for King’s to rebuild provided it did so on the Dalhousie campus. That was agreed to between King’s and Dalhousie on 1 September 1923. But by 1925 the rest of the university federation was virtually dead, and it would not be revived soon. Dalhousie would now go on with its own life, on its own campus, with King’s College buildings going up on the northwest corner, the only reminder of the three years of work Dalhousie had put into university federation.

Notes to Introduction

¹. Boris Petrovich Babkin (1877-1950) left Dalhousie in 1928 to become McGill’s research professor of physiology. His essay “How I came to Dalhousie” was written in 1934 and comes from the McGill University Archives. It was brought to my attention by Professor David Sutherland of Dalhousie, for whose perspicacity I am grateful. ↩

². The railway train story is reported in the Halifax Morning Herald, 2 Dec. 1878. The statistics are from M.C. Urquhart and K.A.H. Buckley, Historical Statistics of Canada (Toronto 1965) and from Paul Axelrod, Making a Middle Class: Student Life in English Canada during the Thirties (Montreal and Kingston 1990), pp. 8-9. ↩

³. The argument is developed in Paul Axelrod, Making a Middle Class: Student Life in English Canada during the Thirties (Montreal and Kingston 1990), pp. 10-11. ↩

⁴. A vivacious history of the changes is Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (New York 1931). The issues of the Halifax Chronicle and Herald of the 1920s and 1930s are deliciously instructive. The Chronicle in June 1931 has the Lifebuoy advertisements. ↩

⁵. For Dalhousie’s isolation, see John Willis, A History of Dalhousie Law School (Toronto 1979), p. 103. ↩

⁶. See James L. Bennet, Jim Bennet’s Verse (Halifax 1979), “I remember - Sometimes,” reprinted here with the kind permission of Jim Bennet. ↩

⁷. Halifax currency had become by 1820 a working standard and it gradually spread to the other British North American colonies. £1 Halifax currency equaled $4 American. Thus a shilling (£1=20 shillings) was the same as 20 cents. The Newfoundland 20-cent piece, still prevalent in 1949, is a remnant of this old system. The pound sterling was worth $4.86. ↩

⁸. MacMechan’s Private Journals, 28 Mar. 1922; 6 Apr. 1922, Archibald MacMechan Fonds, Dalhousie University Archives. ↩