The High School of Montreal was an English-language high school founded in 1843, serving Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in the area eventually known as the Golden Square Mile. It was less formally known as Montreal High School and from 1853 to 1870 was called the High School of McGill College, or the High School Division.
Founded as a school for boys only, girls were first admitted in 1875, although to a separate division called the High School for Girls, and a new building shared by both was opened in 1878. In its last century, the school took children from the first to the twelfth grades. In 1915, after occupying several different sites, the school moved into a new neoclassical building on University Street, near the campus of McGill University. Girls and boys were taught in separate wings of the building and were also apart for school sports, but came together for some activities. The two divisions were united into a single school in 1965.
The school closed in June 1979, largely as the result of a decline in the English-speaking population. Soon after, the mostly French-speaking F.A.C.E. School moved into its empty premises.F.A.C.E. School at memorablemontreal.com, accessed 29 December 2017
Origins
The school was founded in 1843 by a group of Montreal professionals and merchants who saw the need for a Protestant secondary school which respected 19th-century ideas of education. It was modelled on the Royal High School, Edinburgh. Several of the founders, led by James Ferrier, with William Lunn, William Collis Meredith, David Torrance, and the Rev. Henry Esson, were of Presbyterian Scottish origins, and one of their purposes in establishing the school was to provide a solution to the growing influence of Anglicanism in education at the time. In short, they saw a need for a means of access to McGill College not controlled by supporters of the Church of England.
In August 1843, The Gentleman's Magazine reported, under 'Civil Preferments', "Rev. G. F. Simpson to be Rector of the Public College of Canada, about to be established at Montreal", suggesting that the name of the school still remained to be decided.Gentleman's Magazine dated August 1843, vol. 55 (1843), p. 198
The school was first organized as a private institution, under a board of directors.Report by Montreal Protestant Board of School Commissioners, 1910, p. 12
History The school's first Principal, the Rev. George Foster Simpson, M.A., was a young Englishman, a graduate and former scholar of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, born in 1811.John Archibald Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses 1752–1900, vol. V (1953), p. 515 He opened the school in November 1843 at Bingham House, which had been leased by the directors of the school, and within a few months 167 boys had been enrolled. The end-of-year ceremony in the summer of 1844, presided over by Peter McGill, with Lord Metcalfe to present the prizes, was held in the large hall that had been the ballroom of Bingham House.Edgar Allen Collard, Donegana's and the Charity Ball in Montreal Gazette(1972), accessed 1 January 2018 The boys at the school in its early days included Thomas White, George Holt Henshaw, George Washington Stephens, Andrew Gault, later called the Cotton King of Canada, and Charles Hamilton, first Archbishop of Ottawa.
In 1846 the school moved into a new purpose-built building on La Gauchetière Street. The same year, on the death of the elderly Alexander Skakel, Master of the Royal Grammar School of Montreal, for many years the city's leading secondary school (founded in 1801 by the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning or RIAL), the high school's board petitioned successfully for Skakel's salary to be transferred to it, and thus absorbed the Royal Grammar SchoolGuide to the Archives, vol. 2 at archives.mcgill.ca, accessed 28 December 2017(and so the Principal of the new school was titled "Rector and Master of the Royal Grammar School" for over a century). Newton Bosworth, describing the school in a guide to Montreal of 1846, reported that it had accommodation for between three and four hundred pupils, that the Rector had several able assistants, and that the fees were £10 a year "in the higher branches" and £6 a year in "the preparatory branches". On 28 July 1847 a Provincial Statute was enacted which allocated the revenues from the Estates of the Late Order of Jesuits to educational institutions around Quebec, and the first item listed in the schedule was "For the Salary and Allowance for House Rent, heretofore paid to the Master of the Grammar School at Montreal, to be allowed to the Directors of the High School at Montreal, in consideration of their educating twenty free scholars of the poorer classes ... £282-4s-6d".The Provincial Statutes of Canada: anno undecimo et duodecimo Victoriae Reginae (Montreal: Stewart Derbishire and George Desbarats, 1848), pp. 1483, 1484 Shortly afterwards the directors received £98-3s-6d as the balance of the grant for the year 1846, and also £141-2s-3d for the six months ended 30 June 1847.Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Quebec, Volume 8, Issue 1 (Legislative Assembly, 1849), Appendix A, No. 29
In 1850, Foster resigned as Rector and returned to England, where he became headmaster of Lincoln Grammar School, but died suddenly in 1857. In 1853 control of the school was given to McGill College, and it was renamed as the High School of McGill College (governed by the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning). A McGill prospectus for 1863 states that "The High School Department offers a thorough English education, with the French and German languages, and the Classical and Mathematical training necessary for entering the College course."Annual Announcement of the Faculty of Medicine of the McGill University, Montreal, for the 31st Session, 1863–64 (Montreal: J. C. Becket, 1863), p. 9
In 1864, during the American Civil War, on hearing of the St Albans Raid from Montreal into the US by Confederate soldiers, the school organized a company called the Montreal High School Cadet Rifles. This continued to operate for some twenty years and was disappointed not to be mobilized at the time of the Fenian raids between 1866 and 1871.Montreal’s First Organized High School Militia Cadet Corps In 1864 dated August 18, 2015, at canadaatwarblog, accessed 5 January 2018Ernest J. Chambers, The Montreal Highland Cadets : being a record of the organization and development of a useful and interesting corps, with some notes on the cadet movements in Britain and Canada (Montreal: Desbarats & Co., 1901)
In September 1870, control of the school was transferred again, this time to the Protestant Board of School Commissioners. Soon after that, J. W. Dawson, principal of McGill, began to press the Protestant Board to create a high school for girls, and in 1875 this came into being as a separate division, with its own "lady principal" and four other teachers, all trained at the McGill Normal School.Stanley Brice Frost, McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning, Volume I, 1801–1895, p. 256 This was made possible by a local school tax and was the spur for the planning of a new building, opened in 1878.Karen Stanworth, Visibly Canadian: Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 (McGill-Queen's Press – MQUP, 2014), p. 289 To begin with, the girls' classes had been taught in private houses.Report by Montreal Protestant Board of School Commissioners, 1910, p. 54 The separate girls' school continued to exist in shared buildings until 1965, when for the first time the divisions for boys and girls were united under one principal.James Collins Miller, National Government and Education in Federated Democracies, Dominion of Canada (1940), p. 44 The boys' High School provided elementary as well as secondary education, with a junior division called the Preparatory High School. The girls' school did not at first include elementary classes, which came a few years later in the new building, and in 1878 the school population was 241 boys and 226 girls.
There was a bitter dispute in the 1880s when the Protestant School Board decided to stop the teaching of Latin in the first two forms and to limit Greek, Algebra, and Geometry to the final two forms. This was opposed by the elderly Rector, Dr Henry Aspinwall Howe, but supported by some parents and staff. On 28 November 1890 the dispute between those who believed in a classical education, including Latin and Greek, and those supporting a greater focus on sciences, culminated in the burning down of the school's building on Peel Street.J. I. Little, Jean Barman, “An educator of modern views” The (Auto)biography of Margaret Ross, 1862–1943 at queens.scholarsportal.info, accessed 28 December 2017 No cause was ever identified for the fire. Dr Howe, a fierce opponent of a move away from classical languages, quickly tendered his resignation, to take effect from the end of the school year. The successful applicant to replace him, Elson I. Rexford, was English Secretary of the Department of Public Instruction. A new school building was built on the site of the lost one and opened in the fall of 1892.Flower (1949), pp. 80–81
The school has been described as "the secondary school for the city's Protestant elite", but as reported by Margaret W. Westley, "By 1906, the Protestant Board of School Commissioners was operating fifteen publicly financed elementary schools and three secondary schools, some of which were located conveniently close to residents of the Square Mile. Most renowned was the High School of Montreal. One of the comments made most frequently by graduates about the High School of Montreal is that there one met and knew people from all walks of life and all backgrounds, something not true of the private schools."Margaret W. Westley, Remembrance of Grandeur: The Anglo-Protestant Elite of Montreal, 1900–1950 (Editions Libre Expression, 1990), p. 64
However, in 1906, the Rector and Master, Wellington Dixon, who had succeeded Rexford in 1903, reported "The High School is not free. It is supported by fees paid by the pupils, a Government grant of $2,000, and by grants from the rate. In return for the Government grant of $2,000, thirty free tuitions are ordered by the Lieutenant-Governor, not on the results of examinations, but on certain conditions of good conduct, etc... The High School (Protestant) does not confine itself to advanced pupils. As before said, the Elementary Schools are free, but the High School takes young children in the Kindergarten and Elementary Departments if the parents are willing to pay the fees. The High School, except in the case of the scholarships already mentioned, is a school for the children of parents who are willing to pay fees. Out of the 1,200 pupils in attendance, 550 are in the High School proper, and 650 in the Kindergarten and Elementary Departments, all of the latter paying fees.Minutes and Votes and Proceedings of the Parliament, with Papers Presented to Both Houses, volume 1 (1906), p. 99
In 1906, the school had three separate courses of instruction for pupils, the first two being Classical and Scientific, which ran in parallel, and the other Commercial. The aim of the Classical and Scientific course was to prepare children for higher education and the professions. Believing in the principle of mens sana in corpore sano, the school aimed to develop both body and mind, and at its site in University Street had its own swimming pool, two gymnasiums, a shooting gallery, and games rooms, as well as a library, auditorium, and planetarium.