C.W. Lonsdale, Lost and Found

Posted 2/2/2019

CW Lonsdale was born on the 1st of February, 1886, and died in 1952 – long before any of us had the opportunity to meet him.

Thanks to Mr. Jay Connolly's address this week, we all have a much clearer picture of who Lonsdale was and what he can still mean to our school.

I have asked that his reflections be republished here, with permission.

A few weeks ago, the Rev and the Headmaster asked if I would talk today about C.W. Lonsdale, the Founder of this school, because he was born February 1st, and they thought this might be a fitting occasion to tell his story. You have all seen his statue, of course, but you won’t know much about the person. Statue people often look boring, at least to me, but Lonsdale still has lessons to teach.

Because of his work on this campus, the Founder earned the admiration of people up and down the west coast of North America. His was a towering personality, and when he was Head Master, parents did not talk of enrolling their children in Shawnigan Lake School so much as they bragged about sending their sons to Lonsdale. When he was your age, however, Lonsdale was a troubled underachiever. For this reason, his life may be more instructive to those of you who feel confused and uncertain than to those who bound from success to success. Today I want to talk to the rebels – to the free spirits and the contrarians and the dreamers among you – and tell you how a couple of lost boys found themselves, here.

Years ago, when I first researched the history of Shawnigan, I read Lonsdale’s private and professional papers and spoke to dozens of people who had known him. One evening when I was sitting at my desk and writing about Lonsdale’s later years, a feeling swept through me – a sense that I had come to know this man, dead 40 years by that point, better than I knew some of my friends. It was late at night, and I was tired, and I had the almost mystical experience of feeling deeply connected to a person I had never met. Partly I had come to appreciate the complexity of the man, and partly I had come to identify with some of his struggles . . . because the school that saved him saved me.

I do not, however, wish to provide you with the equivalent in words of a statue. I want to tell you something deeper about the Founder and share a lesson I have learned from his life. Here’s the first thing you should know: C. W. Lonsdale was an alienated young man who was banished to Canada by his family and who battled a long time to find his place in the world.

As I was writing this talk, I stumbled across a news story that kept drifting into my head as I thought about Lonsdale. Late in 2017, scientists detected an interstellar space object they named Oumuamua, which is the Hawaiian word for “scout” or “messenger.” The chair of Harvard’s astronomy department said the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization.” Other articles described this theory as far-fetched—but I have some sympathy with the practice of watching the perimeter for aliens.

When I came to Shawnigan as a January entry in grade 9, I certainly occupied the fringe for a while. Some of you will know exactly what that feels like. When he was just a little older than the current grade 12s, C. W. Lonsdale was a lot like that interstellar space object, drifting along the edge of an unknown world.

Lonsdale was born in England on February 1st, 1886. His father was a respected minister in the Church of England, and Lonsdale’s two older brothers followed their dad into the Church. Christopher Lonsdale was expected to do the same, but that expectation was a terrible weight on him. It was certainly part of the reason he stumbled through his classes at Westminster School in London and failed to qualify for university. To the teenaged Lonsdale, heading for a career as a minister was like a slow walk into a life-sentence.

Here’s his math teacher’s comment on Lonsdale’s final report card in 1902: “Very bad. Has made no effort.” And from his science teacher: “Extremely poor.”

That report card rewrote Lonsdale’s future. His sister later reported that in the time after he left Westminster, C. W. Lonsdale caused the family both expense and embarrassment. He spent a year as a soldier in northern England, and then his parents shipped him to Canada. He was a remittance man, which means that his family paid him to go away. We don’t know the exact nature of the trouble he caused, but we do know he rejected his family’s plan for his future. In some circles 100 years ago, that was enough to earn a one-way ticket to a different world.

When he arrived in Canada, Lonsdale had no idea what the future would hold. The Palestinian writer Edward Said called exile an “unhealable rift forced between . . . the self and its true home” and said it caused an “essential sadness [that could] never be surmounted.” There was certainly a degree to which Lonsdale carried with him an insurmountable sadness. He was broad-shouldered and handsome and he had the devil in his eye – and at 20 years old, he was a lost boy.

I imagine him, 113 years ago, alienated from his family, landing on the shores of Nova Scotia, then making his way, at about this time of year, to the moonscape of a farm in the middle of Saskatchewan, which was where he first settled. He must have felt, as Margaret Atwood wrote in one of her poems, like “a word / in a foreign language.” He must have wondered where in the 10 million square kilometres of Canada he would eventually find himself – and if he would find himself.

I connect with Lonsdale and Oumuamua because I was a confused and angry adolescent who underperformed in school, who courted trouble of various kinds, and who often felt like an outsider even when I was in the mixed-up middle of things. When I was 13, I was collecting the road hockey net from our cul de sac one afternoon when I fell into a tense conversation with an adult neighbour. He had come down his driveway to fetch his garbage can, and he paused, with a little scowl on his face, to ask me what I imagined for my future. I had no idea about the future, so I turned the question back to him and asked what he thought I would be. He was one of the most successful independent business people in the city. I thought he might tell me I’d one day be a king of industry. He looked at me for a second, and then he said, “I think you’ll be in jail by the time you’re 19.” And he meant it.

I’ve thought about that moment many, many times over the years. That’s all he could see – a lost boy on a path to deeper trouble. I’ve always remembered that incident, and in the past, I sometimes used it as motivation, because even at 13, I knew he wasn’t looking hard enough.

My father drove me onto the Shawnigan campus six months later, to join the school on the Sunday return day in January. It was still early when my dad left, so I waited in my room for several hours, listening as the other boys arrived from their holiday. I felt nervous and uncertain because I was the stranger on the edge of a world where everyone else knew one another and had already settled the important business of fitting in. I was left to wonder: Who are these people? Are they like me? Will they like me? You’ve all asked the same questions, of course, because the search for authentic connection is fundamental to our human sense of well-being.

That’s what Lonsdale was searching for when he arrived in Canada. He didn’t find connection on that remote Saskatchewan farm, though, so he headed west to work on a cattle ranch in the BC interior. A year later, he was swinging an axe here on Vancouver Island to clear a path for the railroad. After that, he went back to the mainland and bounced from job to job for a few years. In 1912, he married a woman named Lucy French and bought a small dairy farm on the north side of Duncan. He was no farmer. Finally, he moved to Shawnigan Lake to manage a hotel. He was still a little lost.

Ten years later, C.W. Lonsdale could silence a room by walking into it, make a tough kid tremble by meeting his eye, and fill adult hearts with gratitude by his willingness to educate their sons.

I am fascinated by this kind of revolutionary change in people. How did Lonsdale transform from alien exile to pillar of the very social class and community that had rejected him back home?

Here’s what happened: Canada did not see Lonsdale through the lens of family expectations, or measure him against his classmates at Westminster School. With the clear eyes of a young nation, people saw the man’s potential, not his past. First in Duncan and later in Shawnigan Lake, he tutored a few boys, and those kids responded to him. Lonsdale impressed the parents not only by his effect on the understanding of their children, but also by his influence on them – by the way he drew from them the best parts of their ability and determination. By that point, no one cared how C. W. Lonsdale had managed on his science tests and his math quizzes. Canadians looked deeper and saw the power in the person.

I love that the teachers who changed his life were children. I love that it was in their eyes he saw his future.

The process did not happen overnight, of course, and I’m not suggesting that people were naive about Lonsdale’s past. In fact, that’s the point. Immigrants came to Canada for a variety of reasons. A hundred years ago, if a young man with a refined British accent and no clear purpose in life found himself on the ragged-green edge of the Canadian west, there was a good chance he had some secrets. The people who met him simply applied what F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, described as “an irresistible prejudice in [his] favor.” He found his believers.

When I came to Shawnigan as a confused 14-year-old with a history of bad choices, I consistently encountered people who saw the best in me. Instead of scowling at my capacity for back-talk and my ability to hatch misguided schemes, people here took these traits as evidence of spirit and imagination. When I showed them my worst, they subjected me to the full force of the School’s discipline system – and then they let my crimes dissolve into the past. They saw my whole self, good and bad, and they favoured the good.

Lonsdale was a piece of work: He could be moody, dismissive, remote, needy, and paranoid. The students knew that. At his best, though, he taught them, worked alongside them to carve this campus from the forest, laughed with them, and stood by them through failure and triumph. “If a boy’s worth educating,” he famously said, “then I’m going to educate him.” He was an example to his students of what it meant to be a complex person willing to show faith in other, equally complex people. The complexity of our experience is a big part of boarding school. In her recent memoir, Michelle Obama puts it this way: “There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others.”

This is Lonsdale’s real legacy. It’s the sacred equation for Shawnigan Lake School. We all labour under the confusing, conflicted burden of our humanity. We all need believers. May each of you find yours.

– Jay Connolly, Feb. 2, 2019

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