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1918: A “Most Trying” Year
Relief and thanksgiving at the end to the war could not wholly
overshadow a year Walter Murray described as the University’s “most
trying.” An enormous human cost had
been paid: 342 faculty and students had gone overseas; and while 33 had
received honours for their service, over 100 were seriously wounded and 67 had been
killed.
Neither was the University immune to the worldwide influenza epidemic
which hit the province in October. The
University promptly imposed a quarantine, having first released anyone who
wanted to go home. With its farm,
facilities and residences, the University was uniquely self-sufficient; all but
one of the 120 faculty and staff remaining on campus was protected from the
disease. Emmanuel College was used as
an emergency hospital for the city, and those 20 individuals who volunteered to
serve as nurses were billeted at the President’s residence. One volunteer contracted the flu and died:
student William Hamilton, a widower with three small children. Just how successful the University had been,
however, was evident when in the new year “without quarantine observance, over
150 cases developed within three weeks, and 2 students and 4 employees died.”
The year that had begun with “a startling absence of men of military
age and fitness” ended with an enormous influx of returned soldiers following
the armistice. As Murray wrote, it had
been “a session begun with foreboding, broken by the scourge of disease, thrown
into disorder by the constant coming and going of students, crowded with
feverish attempts to accomplish in three months the work of six or seven,”
leaving Murray with “memories of work badly done and a sense of
incompleteness.”1
| Related Collections |  |
J.A. Sharrard fonds, MG 90
| Images | |
1918a: Funeral for William Hamilton. Photograph Collection, A-5709.
1918b: Cartoon from the Sheaf, December 1918, vol. 7, no. 1, p. 46.
| Sources | |
Annual Report, 1917-1918.
Annual Report, 1918-1919.
1. All quotes from Annual Report, 1918-1919.
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