Fri, Sep 9, 2011
Looking back a lifetime ago
Original students at Queen Elizabeth High School pore over 1941 time capsule
By SELENA ROSS
Seventy years ago, Halifax teenagers starting the school year had to choose a head girl and head boy who were both virtuous and charming.
They had to buy their own textbooks and supplies. Some students worked paper routes and other odd jobs around the city.
Their little brothers and sisters would make enough money to go to the movies by collecting empty beer bottles left at Citadel Hill.
It was wartime, after all. One girl’s father teased her all summer that her first year in a brand-new high school would be called off because the school would be turned into a hospital.
But it wasn’t.
Queen Elizabeth High School welcomed its first class in 1942, and some of the members of that class showed up at Citadel High School on Thursday to watch the opening of a time capsule that was laid in the old school’s cornerstone in September 1941.
Inside? Two newspapers, some coins, some stamps and a school board commissioner’s report.
But even those scanty items were enough to spark a wealth of memories among the former classmates, now in their 80s, who still have great pride in their now-demolished school.
"We loved it, just loved it, loved it, loved it," said Jean Brown, 84, once the girl whose father had teased her.
Her class walked to the YWCA once a week for gym class, and her parents wouldn’t let her go to Kentville for the weekend to watch a hockey game. But kids accepted what they were told back then, she said.
It was considered a privilege to go to Queen Elizabeth, a school that brought together teens from across the city to mingle with others outside their social strata.
It was an exciting and lively place, she said — and the time capsule had been put together by grown-ups before the school was even built, which is why it was so boring.
"I’m sure that the creative kids from school would have had a lot to go in there," Brown said.
But some of the current students from Citadel High said they weren’t disappointed after watching the bronze box pried and cut open.
Yearbooks and social drama are always the same old thing, 16-year-old Sarah Ellis said. But you don’t get to look at crumbling newspapers from your city’s past every day.
"I love the photos," she said, looking over an old copy of the Halifax Chronicle. "And the Queen’s Honour Roll — I thought that was really awesome."
The Queen’s Honour Roll was a note in the newspaper thanking all the Londoners for standing up to the Germans as their city was bombed, explained Wallace Matthews, 82.
The front pages of the Chronicle and the Herald from Sept. 29, 1941, then two separate papers, were crammed with war news, including the deaths of 18 sailors in the sinking of a Corvette warship.
Matthews, who used to earn $10 a week delivering the papers, said he remembered the Corvette going down. Speaking at the ceremony, he recalled when history class was changed to defence class, which taught navigation and Morse code.
"Whenever a student lost a loved one, we all felt the pain," he said.
Later, poring over the paper, Matthews reminisced about a competing paperboy in the north end whose sister was "a real cutie."
A story about a labour slowdown in the Cape Breton mines reminded him of how wages were frozen then.
He remembered the time a merchant ship caught fire and was sunk by gunfire. He slept through it, he said.
"I was a much better sleeper in those days."
Nearby, a group of women in their 80s chatted and flipped through 1940s yearbooks that someone had brought. Even a former head girl was there — Frances Jubien, now Frances Williams. Someone found a picture of her at 18, smiling, with a bow in her hair.
"Frances’ abilities are not limited to academic ability, and indeed she is one of those people blessed with all the virtues in their right proportions," was printed below.
Younger women laughed. "That’s priceless!" said one.
The head girl just smiled and kept turning the pages.