Today's Garneau School opened in 1923

Notes from my book Old Strathcona Edmonton`s Southside Roots by Tom Monto

(available at Alhambra Books)

13 Schools in ’13

The Edmonton Public Schoolboard built 13 new schools in 1913, five of them on the southside. With all this construction, elementary students were moved out of the Strathcona Collegiate, and it was re-named the Strathcona High School.That year saw the construction of the first of the Garneau schools.

The Edmonton Public School Board put out to tender the construction of a four-room two-storey frame building for the Garneau area. J.W. Edinger put in the lowest bid, at $6815. This school, located at 84 Avenue and 111 Street, opened its doors in September that year to 126 students.

Within four years, the school’s population had grown so much the poorly-built basement had to be used as well as space rented from the Unitarian Church next door. (This church later became the Garneau United Church of Canada.)

Two portable classrooms were quickly added as well.

A brick Garneau School was built in 1923, but the old frame building was used as a school until the 1950s.

In 1938, the southside high schools were amalgamated. Scona High School was housed in the “Collegiate Institute” building, with the 87th Avenue Garneau School housing Strathcona High School Annex No. 1 and the woodframe 84 Avenue school building housing Annex No. 2.

With the outbreak of war, the high school program at Garneau School closed. In 1945, the Garneau High School program started again. George Conquest was principal, 1945–50, then Duncan Innes took on responsibility for this operation as part of his duties as principal of Strathcona Composite High.

Strathcona Composite High was a combination of Garneau School, Strathcona High School (in the Strathcona Collegiate Institute Building) and an occupational program.

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The EFCL and the Garneau Community League Founded

In the early 1920s, A.E. Ottewell, the director of the Department of Extension at the University of Alberta, provided educational services for the fledgling community movement. Representatives of many of the community leagues formed at the time met at his office in the Arts Building, University of Alberta, on January 21, 1921 to form the Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues. The purpose of this central body was to facilitate the sharing of information between the leagues, “to take united action in matters of common interest and in the interest of the city as a whole and to come to the support and assistance of individual leagues as deemed advisable.”

This same year, the Garneau Community League was founded. The neighbourhood was built on the old farm of Laurent Garneau, who coincidentally died that year at St. Paul. The local Parent-Teacher Association, led by Garneau School principal Harry Ainlay, called for the formation of a neighbourhood organization “to include everybody interested in the welfare of the Garneau community.” The first goal of the community league was the establishment of a skating rink. A space was found for it in a large hole in the area, the half-built basement of Bishop Emile Legal’s cancelled cathedral. Wooden steps took skaters and hockey-players down to the level of the ice, where a community volunteer ran a shack selling chocolate bars to the skaters.At first, community league meetings and events were held at the nearby Unitarian Church and in the Garneau schools.

In 1928, the league rented the block of land between 83 and 84 Avenue west of 109 Street. Community league volunteers had a “brushing bee,” to clear the brush off the unused land. They started work on a clubhouse and laid out a lawn bowling green. The Garneau Lawn Bowling Club was often victorious. In 1959, it represented Canada at the Empire Games, what we today call the Commonwealth Games.

The Garneau Tennis Club was formed also in the 1920s. It shared the community league’s facilities. The community league was still run on a shoestring budget in the 1950s. At this time, an old house was purchased and moved next to the skating rink to house the caretaker, “Old Tom,” who as a young man had been friends with Saskatchewan’s Tommy Douglas.

In 1980, the community league took advantage of city grants and a bank loan to build a modern two-storey community centre complete with a licensed lounge, a 150-seat rental hall, squash courts, and living quarters for “Old Tom” and his wife. Outside the hall, the lawn bowling greens were replaced by beach volleyball nets as a young generation succeeded an old. The Garneau Lawn Bowling Club was disbanded. By the 1990s, the community league found it could not keep up the facility. Now the City owns it and uses it for its Arts Centre.

The 70-year-old Garneau Tennis Club was said to be disbanded about this time as well. But it did survive to go on to approach its 100th anniversary (at time of writing this in 2024).

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Brick Garneau School Opened

A new brick Garneau School was opened in 1923 to take the pressure off the old wood frame one on 83 Avenue. The new school located at 87 Avenue and 109 Street is still in use.The schoolboard’s discussion of a name for the new school was heated.

Dr. Frank Crang, in particular, had a strong opinion on the matter. The schoolboard meeting minutes tell the tale: “Trustee Dr. F.W. Crang stated that he cannot see why the name Garneau should be given to that school. Garneau was a Roman Catholic and a half-breed. He does not know what residents of the district think. He had two names that he would like to submit. One is Lord Renfrew and the other, Dr. Collip. He mentioned Dr. Collip, because he was the co-discoverer of insulin and has not been given credit as he should. The medical men think that a great deal should go to him for what he has done in that connection.”

At the meeting, all but Crang voted for the name Garneau.

In 1921, U of A Researcher Dr. James Bertram Collip had helped invent insulin. As the December 16, 1990 Edmonton Journal observed, “The country’s best scientist was ignored in his home town.”

Franks daughter Margaret assured me that Frank was not racist - that he treated many indigenous peole at little or no charge. (this was during the benighted days when doctors charged patients for service.)

She could not explain Frank`s stand against the Garneau name. But when we talked it was 70 years after the Garneau School naming controversy.

Even into the 1970s, boy and girl students at Garneau used separate entrances, the girls’ sign over the east door later being partially sanded off. Once inside the building, classes were co-ed, of course.

(A brick-clad addition, containing an auditorium/gymnasium, was added to the school in 1941 during WW II, when the normal school (teachers’ training) program was housed there.)

The Garneau School is a Designated Municipal Historic Resource.The old woodframe school was put into use again in 1927.

In the early 1920s, Harry Ainlay, later mayor of Edmonton, served as principal of the Garneau School.

It was during this time that Edmonton high school teachers went on strike to gain official recognition for their union, the Alberta Teachers’ Alliance. The ATA was led by Strathcona High teacher John Barnett and Victoria High teacher Mary Crawford. (Mary Crawford’s brother, H.H. Crawford, had been MLA for southside Edmonton. Mary later was on the executive of the Alberta CCF and was a CCF candidate in many elections in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.)

On April 11, 1921, the teachers walked out of southside schools, leaving classrooms unattended in Strathcona High and King Edward Junior High. The schoolboard, led by its authoritarian chairman, William Rea, tried to fill their shoes with “replacement teachers.” However, these teachers could not maintain discipline. Strathcona High students actually barricaded classroom doors with desks to prevent their new teachers coming in. Chaos reigned. But Chester Ronning (in charge of the elementary section of the H.A. Gray School) and other progressive-minded elementary school teachers refused to “interfere inside the classrooms of the scab teachers,” as Ronning phrased it.

Three schoolboard trustees, Dr. John A. McPherson, S.A.G. Barnes and Frank Scott, supported the strike. These three had been elected as Labour representatives. Barnes and Scott investigated conditions in the schools and found that many of the “scab” teachers had only marginal qualifications. Trustees Mrs. E. Thyrza Bishop and southsiders Dr. W.H. Alexander and H.W.B. Douglas seemed to be ambivalent about the justice of the strike.

Alexander finally broke the deadlock. He proposed that ATA representatives be allowed to attend all schoolboard meetings and to lay their concerns before the board or any of its committees. After this was accepted, the teachers went back to work on April 25, having, in their minds, forced the schoolboard to officially recognize their union. (In 1922, the chairmanship of the schoolboard was filled by Labour’s Frank Scott, the next year by Mrs. Bishop, then in 1924 by southsider W.H. Alexander.)

Harry Dean Ainlay (1887–1970)

Born in Ontario, Harry Dean Ainlay got his teaching certificate there. He moved to the Stavely area, in southern Alberta in 1907, where he married in 1911. The couple moved to Edmonton in 1912. After several years in the real estate business, he enrolled in the University of Alberta. In 1920, he graduated there and became principal of Garneau High School.

He was an active member of the CCF party. As a pro-labour representative, he served as city councillor for the city of Edmonton from 1932 to 1935.

In 1936, he ran unsuccessfully for the mayor’s job, as a candidate for the United People’s League, an amalgam of Communist, CCF, unemployed and labour groups. Its platform included a cancellation of all property tax arrears up to and including 1934, and a lowering of property tax on the first $1500 worth of assessed home property.

Ainlay also served as a city councillor from 1942 to 1945.

In 1945, he was elected mayor. He was re-elected in 1946 and 1947 (when the mayor’s term in office was changed to a two-year term). During Ainlay’s terms as mayor, the city passed a by-law that allowed the city to revoke the licence of any business that refused to provide service to “people of any race, colour or creed.”

In 1946, a city plebiscite on Daylight Saving Time was held. City voters voted in favour. In 1947, a province-wide referendum rejected Daylight Saving Time, although a majority in Edmonton supported it. So, Ainlay’s city council established Daylight Saving Time in Edmonton, alone in the province. Edmonton had its own time zone until the Social Credit government made DST illegal at the next sitting of the Legislature. The same election that defeated the Social Credit Government (on August 30, 1971) saw Albertans vote in a plebiscite in favour of DST.

In 1950, he retired to BC, where he ran as a CCF candidate in a provincial election unsuccessfully. His wife passed away in 1959. He later re-married.

Ainlay passed away on March 12, 1970.

Harry Ainlay High School is named after him.

Harry Ainlay and family resided at an ordinary bungalow at 11014 81st Avenue for many years.

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Thanks for reading this admittedly chopped-up piece. Hope it was interesting and useful.

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100th Anniversary of Garneau School 2023/2024

On June 2I, 2023, I attended an event held at the Metro Cinema. This is the historic Garneau Theatre across the street from the Garneau School. The event was held to celebrate the school's 100th anniversary.

There were many informative presentations but here I will speak about just one.

A fellow there read this old (1907) newspaper account written by Charles Lewis Shaw, at one time said to be one of Canada's foremost "literary workers."

I figure it may be of interest to some who were not at the event.

[Charles Lewis Shaw recounted spending an evening with Laurent Garneau: Few of us even in these days of social communism ever really understood the complex character of the half-breed. The lights and shades of his variable nature were not clearly enough defined to admit of clear comprehension and certainly not of definition to anyone accustomed only to the clear-cut racial distinctiveness of world-old peoples, for the point of view of the half-breed is to be sometimes felt but never described. Once only it was given to me and then by the master hand of one of the race through the magic music of his violin, for few men, I have been told, could play the violin as could Larry Garneau, the finest example of the French half-breed it has ever been my fortune to meet. The long summer day of the Saskatchewan had closed and we sat in the coolness of the evening looking out over the river where high above the feeble flickering lights of the little settlement on the northern bank, shone the bright glimmering stars of the universe and the words of the intellectual man at my side were in harmony with the scene. He talked ethically of the rights of man, the duties of government, personal freedom, etc. And the desultory conversation gradually drifted from wonderings at the purpose of creation, the law of the powerful, the injuries of the weak, and the abstract theories as to man's relations with the Infinite, until as the shadows deepened the soft, deep voice of Larry Garneau spoke directly of the rights and wrongs of his people. Unconsciously I must have assumed the mental attitude that a legal training and the teachings of my race would once beget. With keen intuition my companion understood. Sympathy and feeling, human qualities as necessary in the judgement of worldly things as they are in religion, should be brought to bear on the question of half-breed rights and wrongs,” said he, quietly reaching for his violin. “Let me tell you the story of the half-breed.” And with the stars glimmering down upon us, with no sound to break the quietness of the night but the soft swishing flow of the mighty Saskatchewan, the notes of the violin, now vibrating with the swirl of the buffalo hunt and the mad merriment of the dance, then softening to some old French love song brought over seas and prairies from Brittany, now murmuring the quaint, sweet lullabies of childhood, then breaking into the fierce chants of war and revenge at last died away in the wailing sadness of a requiem that told of a dying race. Only the other day I heard a great military band of world-wide repute tell the awful story of Bonaparte's most disastrous campaign, with blare of trumpet, the shriek of shells and the groans of the wounded, and some at least learned something of the horrors of war. [likely reference to Taikchovsky's 1812 Overture]

From the throbbing notes of the singing, sobbing violin pressed under the strong chin of Larry Garneau, from his deep chested words of rapid explanation uttered now and then during the recital, from his softened or flashing eyes, and the mobile features of his expressive face in the clear northern starlight, I learned the tragic story of the Half-Breed.”    (Strathcona Evening Chronicle, May 6, 1907) Hope you enjoyed it.

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The school was built in 2023, but it was in April 24, 1924 that pupils and staff made a grand march from the old Garneau school near 112th Street to the new school along 109th Street.

This event was recreated on April 24, 2024 by today's pupils at the school.

That same day an evening of celebration, speeches and song was held to mark the 100 years, principally in the gym but also in all the rooms of the school.

Here are some notes from the event:

Garneau School doing good - 350 pupils.

part is rented out to daycare program i think.

but the school is producing intelligent "deep thinkers" according to reports.

one mother was saying her lad started at Garneau in grade 4 and started crying one day on way home bemoaning that he was not a "deep thinker," like the others who had been there since Kindergarten.

maybe like Tempo in old days..

it started in the gym for speeches.

not packed, some empty chairs but good turnout.

kids did land acknowlegement

much on Laurent Garneau

Garneau said to be former patriot of 1870 rebellion, true

and also as  "chief of Papaschase nation" 

- certainly his kids intermarried with Papaschase band  members, and no real divide between Treaty Indans and Metis (like Garneau), but he was not really a chief.

I liked how one pupil described him - "a strong man with political convictions"

a former Riel patriot of 1870 Winnipeg, he indeed had political convictions.

and his arrest in the 1885 rebellion for his beliefs is well known 

(this in addition to being a much-sought-after fiddler for community events.)

being a farmer and pioneer of 1970s Edmonton and living a very physical life, he was indeed strong.

There's lot of truth there. (It reminded me of what my daughter wrote as a child -- "the big, hot fire was nice and warm.")

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Mention made a couple times of how a school board trustee objected to the naming - that was Frank Crang,

but Margaret, his daughter (city councillor 1933-1935, now deceased) assured me he was not a racist, but wanted scientist Collip honoured by school name. (He was Labour Party school board trustee not known to be racists, being political ancestors of the NDP of today.)

then audience participation --

they asked who was there from 2010s,

down by deczde to the 1950s  about 3 or 5 were there from 1950s.

and staff from the diff periods, oldest one worked there maybe in 1980s. I think

 and present staff based on how long had worked there - one has been there since the year 2000 or so!

former pupils

several hands went up from 1970s like me but when i got over there at the end of speeches,, they had left or were unrecognizable, being mixed in with the crowd.

that was when we went into the school proper, the main school, the 1924 part, as opposed to the gym which was built in 1941.

both parts looking much smaller than I remember it.

kids had made displays of time periods, old class photos. presented in the hallways.

one was particularly interesting ot me as an historian -- people of 1920s -- Wop May, Emily Murphy, etc. I don't recall all the names presented...

"beaded timelines" a new term for me they looked like regular timelines to me.

also neat photo   [meme?]

the 350 pupils at Garneau had gone out in sport field and formed themselves in the numbers 100

someone took photo of them from high window of school.

old yearbooks in the library (which is in classroom where I took French, I think)

some interesting ones from 1960s

including special centennial yearbook of 1967..

got talking to J.L. -- pupil at Garneau in 1960s -- of Windsor Park, 

she lived just a half block from where Cross Cancer now - 

J. said she had fought in 1960s to wear blue jeans in school.

by my time (1973) Simon Hemmingway was famous for big white bowtie, 

i wore funky U.S.-hippy pants 

and we got away with it.

J. and i saw photos of some kids with plaid pants but i think that might have been old-time Maritime fashion, not hippy thing. Many Maritime (Newfoundland) workers came west to Alberta in 1960s and 1970s.

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unveiling of fence art later by artist

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strolled over to Upper Crust for old-style bread and tasty pot pies.

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(on way to school, I happened to pass by "white goliath" building at 107th and 85th or so. Margaret Atwood once lived there.

It has had fire and will be torn down apparently.

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