2 The Fighting Soul of Hockey in Ralph Connor’s Glengarry School Days

The Fighting Soul

Ralph Connor was the best-selling Canadian author of his time, beginning with his first novel, Black Rock, in 1898, and he remained one of Canada’s most well-known writers at the time of his death in 1937. “Ralph Connor” was the pseudonym of Rev. Dr. Charles William Gordon, a Presbyterian and United Church minister and eventual moderator of the Presbyterian Church, who served as Chaplain to the Canadian 3rd Division in France during the First World War (though he was in his mid-fifties at the time). Connor was also, as Keith Wilson writes in his biography, a keen sportsman throughout his life (1981, 42).

Glengarry School Days is the second Connor novel set in Glengarry County, Ontario, which sits at the far southeastern extreme of Ontario bordered by the St. Lawrence River and Québec. This is an area whose European settlers were primarily of Scottish descent. The first Glengarry novel, The Man from Glengarry, came out in 1901 and tells the story of Ranald MacDonald, an orphan from this Scottish-descended community, who overcomes adversity and achieves great success by way of physical prowess, hard work, and moral virtue—guided along the way by the local Presbyterian minister’s wife, Mrs. Murray, who becomes his surrogate mother. As Daniel Coleman has pointed out, by the end of The Man from Glengarry, the successful Ranald MacDonald has become the model for “the bold new Canada” that Connor hopes to see emerge (2006, 122).

Glengarry School Days takes as its protagonist Hughie Murray, the son of Mrs. Murray, who is introduced as a minor character in the earlier novel. Like its novelistic namesake, Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), Glengarry School Days is a coming-of-age tale featuring a boy’s boy. Hughie is energetic and athletic, and, although a decent student, not at all a future intellectual. He has a gift for reading and spelling—the competition of a spelling bee appeals to “his little fighting soul”—but he prefers physical challenges: “If he could only run, and climb, and swim, and dive, like the big boys, then he would indeed feel uplifted” (Connor 1902, 17).

Hughie, like Tom, has a series of experiences that help to shape his natural boyishness into what the novel defines as an ideal man. His first teacher, Archibald Munro, models industry, “self-mastery,” and a refusal to complain: “Archibald Munro had a steady purpose in life—to play the man, and to allow no pain of his … to spoil his work” (25). On examination day, the children dress up, but the boys are careful not to be “proud” of their appearances, since any boy convicted of “shoween off” was “condemned by his fellows” (48). At the end of his time with Hughie and his classmates, Munro summarizes what he has sought to impart as a teacher. “It is a good thing to have your minds trained …,” he explains, “but there are better things than that. To learn honor, truth, and right; to be manly and womanly; to be self-controlled and brave and gentle—these are better than all possible stores of learning” (74).

The middle part of the novel is mostly concerned with the rivalry between Hughie and Foxy, a sly, fat, red-haired boy who embodies the “unheroic” spirit of the school when it is turned over to what Hughie contemptuously calls “gurl” teachers (151). Foxy hates the old games and instead “managed to divert the energies of the boys to games less violent and dangerous,” until playtime is centred around a game of “store” with Foxy as storekeeper. Hughie, after resisting at first, is seduced by the promise of getting a real pistol from Foxy and, half from weakness and half from Foxy’s manipulation, ends up stealing fifty cents from his parents to pay for it. Immediately after, he becomes Foxy’s “slave” (173). With his conscience tormenting him, Hughie’s behaviour changes for the worse, and his mother senses something is wrong. She decides to allow him time off school to work on a farm with Thomas Finch, an older boy, and “the kindly, wholesome earth and honest hard work” help to cleanse his soul and “breathe virtue into him” (214). He confesses what he has done to the good Christian parents of Thomas, who send him home to his mother, where he admits to having sinned and vows to “restore fourfold” (223). Afterwards, he confronts Foxy in front of the other children. Foxy attacks him with his “big fists,” but Hughie, though the smaller of the two, fights back fiercely and wins, and Foxy’s reign comes to an end (277–78).

The Foxy chapters are followed by a standalone chapter in which Hughie, his boyish manhood restored, shoots and kills a bear. Afterwards, he refuses to boast about it: “He had done a man’s deed, and for the first time in his life he felt it unnecessary to glory in his deeds.” In this way, he enters “the borderland of manhood” (252). Hughie’s full crossing into manhood is narrated in the last third of the novel in the form of a challenge hockey match.

Before I turn to the match itself, let me emphasize two points from the novel’s earlier chapters. First, as many critics have already pointed out, the ideal of manhood promoted by Glengarry School Days is a muscular Christian one. The allusion in the novel’s title to Tom Brown’s School Days—the most famous muscular Christian novel of all time—is not an accident; there may even be a homage to Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s School Days, in Connor’s choice of “Hughie” as the name of his protagonist. The term “muscular Christianity” was coined by T. C. Sanders in a review of Charles Kingsley’s 1857 novel Two Years Ago, in which Sanders asserts that Kingsley’s hero is “a man who fears God and can walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours—who … breathes God’s free air on God’s rich earth, and at the same time can hit a woodcock, doctor a horse, and twist a poker around his fingers” (quoted in Hall 1994, 7). Though Sanders intends the description to be mocking, Kingsley’s idea about the interrelationship between a man’s physical and spiritual strength proved enormously popular in Victorian England and later Canada.

From a twenty-first-century point of view, it is easy to criticize the muscular Christian ideal. As Donald Hall has pointed out, the popularity of muscular Christianity came from the perception by many Victorians of “a world growing ever more confusing and fragmented,” in which new “technological advances,” religious doubt, and urbanization threatened the traditional social order (1994, 9). To a significant extent, muscular Christianity was about trying to shore up a white, middle-class, and heteronormative patriarchal culture, where men were “manly” and women were “womanly,” and people generally acted with “self-restraint” and good manners. Yet it can also be said, as Hall does say, that novels like Tom Brown’s School Days represent “both the best and the worst aspects of Victorian society” (1994, 4). Kingsley was a genuine social reformer, a Christian socialist and critic of child labour and the Victorian treatment of the poor (as is shown by his other famous children’s book, The Water-Babies, which features a chimney sweep). Hughes, Connor and other writers in the mode held similar views. The idea that the ruthless tendencies of capitalism need to be tempered with a Christian sense of fairness is hard to argue against even today. In the same way, the portraits of teamwork, resilience, and hard-fought success against the odds that are so much a part of Tom Brown’s School Days and Glengarry School Days remain inspirational despite certain glaring omissions in the muscular Christian perspective of the books.

The second thing I would stress is that muscular Christianity had a particular appeal in Canada. Daniel Coleman explains it this way: “The figure of the muscular Christian, with his untiring and virile physical body balanced by his spiritually sensitive heart, made a perfect representation of the ideal Canadian who could carry out the hard physical work of territorial expansion, as well as the equally important social work of building a new civil society” (2006, 129). The figure of the muscular Christian fit well into this pattern of Canadian self-definition. The muscular Christian man had the strength and optimism of an American but the piety and morality of an Englishman; he overcame the over-sophistication of the English with his more simple, hardy nature, but avoided the exploitive excesses of American-style capitalism with his commitment to Christian charity. That the muscular Christian was often associated with the hardy Scot, who came from the rugged northern region of the British Isles, was a bonus: it fit into the narrative about how a uniquely Canadian character was produced by the cold northern climate of the country.

Glengarry School Days identifies Hughie’s nascent muscular Christianity with being Canadian. Although Hughie inherits his good heart from his parents, his physicality and courage come from the Canadian environment in which he has been raised. One of the most telling moments in the novel has to do with the episode in which Hughie craves the pistol. Hughie’s father, who is an old school Presbyterian minister, cannot understand why a child of Hughie’s age would want such a thing. This is because he doesn’t realize “that young Canada was a new type” and “that already Hughie, although only twelve, was an expert with a gun.” Hughie, the text goes on to explain, has already spent many a day out in the woods hunting (Connor 1902, 166)—probably pegging a few woodcocks and ministering a few horses along the way. There is a telling irony, though, in the fact that Hughie acquires his pistol from Foxy. If Hughie is a portrait of a young Canadian (or of the young Canadian nation), then Foxy, with his sly ways, crass materialism, and pasty physical appearance, is a stand in for the United States (the hint of Sam Slick in his character is not, I think, accidental). Perhaps there is a subtle warning in the pistol’s origin about how the more simple Canadian male, with his healthy manly desires, has to be careful not to be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous capitalists to the south.

A Victory Worth a Leg

The identification of muscular Christianity and Canada is most explicit in the hockey match. This match takes up about the last third of the novel. In the lead up to it, the Twentieth school gets a new master named John Craven (the trustees having seen the error of having “gurl” teachers). Craven seems rather indifferent and lazy at first, until the cold weather comes, the mill-pond freezes, and he puts on a pair of skates. Then his indifference vanishes and “it turned out that he was an enthusiastic skater … a whirlwind on ice” (Connor 1902, 272). Before the arrival of Craven, the children had played only a disorganized game of shinny, which included matches against a team from another school called the Front. Craven now institutes “a more scientific style … to make the contest a game on ice, and to limit the number of the team to eleven” (273). The result is that in the first match, Hughie and his mates dominate, despite being the smaller team. Hughie is the star and captain, and he manages to infuse “his own fierce and furious temper” into his teammates (286). Afterwards, the players return home “bearing with them victory and some broken shins, equally proud of both” (287). Tellingly, from the moment the Twentieth boys train seriously as a hockey team, the text refers to them as “men.”

Before the rematch, word comes that the Front has responded to defeat by bringing in a scientific coach of their own and by stacking their team with older boys—fully grown young men—known for rough play. This leads to a debate between Hughie and his mother over whether or not it would be permissible to fight such players. Mrs. Murray says no. “Fighting,” she points out, “is not shinny.” But what about “when a fellow doesn’t play fair,” Hughie asks, “when he trips you up or clubs you on the shins when you’re not near the ball.” “[That’s] the very time to show self-control,” Mrs. Murray replies (300). John Craven reinforces the lesson. He acknowledges that it’s hard to show self-control when another fellow “clubs you,” but self-control is better than “being a cad.” The best revenge against a team that gets to “slugging,” Craven says, is to play on and win (301). Hughie agrees to this logic, but the reluctance he shows hints that there might yet be a time and place for fighting.

The reinforced Front prove to be as formidable as predicted. Led by their new player coach, Dan Munro, they jump out to a 3–1 lead. Hughie shows his leadership by staying positive. He emphasizes to his teammates that, despite the prowess of Munro, they have the advantage of better team play (312). By this point, Hughie is focused not on scoring himself but on shadowing Munro, since the Front “had learned to depend unduly upon him” (309), and in the second half, this helps to turn the tide. The Front send one of their new ringer-goons to bully Hughie away from Dan: “when Hughie followed up his plan of sticking closely to Dan Munro, he found Jimmie Ben upon him, swiping furiously with his club at his shins, with evident intention of intimidating him” (317). Hughie is neither intimidated nor goaded into retaliation. The Twentieth tie the score, 3–3; then Hughie channels his fury into a brilliant defensive play that turns into what looks like it could be the deciding rush. Just as Hughie is about to score, however, Jimmie Ben “reached him and struck a hard, swinging blow upon his ankle. There was a sharp crack and Hughie fell to the ice” (327). Hughie’s ankle is broken. He insists on playing on, however, and trades places with the Twentieth’s goalie. The Twentieth are inspired to one last rush and score the winning goal just as the umpire calls time (329).

In the aftermath of the victory, three important events occur. First, John Craven drops the gloves with Jimmy Ben. “You cowardly blackguard,” he calls out, “you weren’t afraid to hit a boy, now stand up to a man, if you dare” (329). Ben steps forward to fight but Craven strikes him “fair in the face” and then, with a second blow, lays him out flat on the ice, “where he lay with his toes quivering” (330). Secondly, people rush to help the injured Hughie. Mrs. Murray tells him she is proud of him, but then, with “sudden tears,” she says, “I fear the game cost too much.” Hughie, now a real man as well as a real hockey player, replies, “Oh, pshaw, mother, … it’s only one leg bone, and I tell you that final round was worth a leg” (330). And, finally, the boys of the Twentieth experience a spiritual uplift. So profound is this uplift that ten of the newly minted “Glengarry men” head off “for the ministry” (333).

The recruiting of almost a cricket-team’s worth of Presbyterian ministers aside, the hockey match in Glengarry School Days illustrates how well-trained hockey players can become muscular Christian men and vice versa, and how muscular Christianity and hockey both contain the elements of ideal Canadian manhood from Connor’s point of view. Overall, the novel suggests that the ideal Canadian man is intelligent but not an intellectual, is physically strong, and is someone who thrives in the outdoors—especially the cold snowy outdoors of winter. Such a man is not afraid of violence and will deploy it if necessary to defend himself or to right a wrong against someone weaker than him. In deploying violence, however, he will maintain an appropriate self-restraint. This ideal Canadian man will also be willing to sacrifice his own ego—and to experience pain or violence himself—for the betterment of his community (or team). And, finally, his personal manner will be governed by something like Christian humility: he will neither complain about his suffering nor boast about his achievements.

Glengarry School Days connects hockey and Canada in more subtle ways as well. The rules of the hockey match are an interesting blend of old world and new. John Craven’s decision to limit the sides to eleven players is reminiscent of the old-world English games of football and cricket, likewise played eleven-a-side. There is even a resonance between the climactic hockey game in Glengarry School Days and the climactic cricket match in Tom Brown’s School Days. Indeed, the master’s lesson to Tom Brown about cricket could easily have come from John Craven about hockey: “ ‘The discipline and reliance on one another which it teaches is so valuable, I think,’ went on the master, ‘it ought to be such an unselfish game. It merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn’t play that he may win, but that his side may win’ ” (Hughes 1895, 343).

The actual play of the Glengarry School Days match is akin to rugby and the fact that the players use “clubs” to hit a ball is out of field hockey—more old-world elements. That Craven uses his knowledge of lacrosse to develop strategy, however, introduces something new. Lacrosse was an adaptation of the First Nations game baggataway (Robidoux 2001, 39). Craven’s use of a “scientific” method, intended to “banish any remaining relics of the ancient style of play” and to get rid of such “foolishness” as the old “off-side” rule (presumably as inherited from rugby), is also of the new world (Connor 1902, 296, 304). The overall mix of old and new elements positions hockey as a more modern contest in keeping with the emerging character of Canada, a game that resists the old imperial ways of doing things even as it incorporates the best elements from the old ways within it.

It’s hard to say how conscious Connor was of the symbolic quality of Craven’s reshaping of the game. Conscious or not, however, the reshaping reflects the nationalist agenda that hockey served in early twentieth-century Canada. John Craven’s more “scientific” game is a good example of how “the development of sport in Canada has been shaped largely by the desire to resist the imperial influence that continued to define Canada, and the need to formulate an identity of its own” (Robidoux 2001, 32).

A Game Becoming “The Game”

Stephen Hardy and Andrew Holman describe the 1877 to 1920 period of hockey history as the one in which “A Game Becomes The Game” (2009, 23). During this period there was a gradual consolidation of the rules of play, with the Montreal Rules as a benchmark, but, just as importantly, the beliefs today associated with the hockey myth began to take hold. What began the period as only a game evolved by the 1920s into what has become known in Canada as “the game.”

Glengarry School Days offers a fictional glimpse at a moment in this evolution. Did Connor recognize an opportunity to promote his muscular Christian beliefs by co-opting the new craze for hockey? Or did he see already in the game the kinds of values he wanted to promote? Probably a combination of the two. Whether Glengarry School Days reflects a hockey reality already present or brings a new reality into being (whether it “reveals” or “creates” that reality, in J. Hillis Miller’s [1990] terms), Connor’s combining of hockey, muscular Christian values, and Canadian identity reflects a strand of the hockey myth that persists into the present.

It should be stressed, however, that just as “the innocent game” projected by “The Hockey Song” was created as much by what was left out of the song as by what was put into it, the joining of hockey and Canadian identity in Glengarry School Days contains some important omissions. Let me end by pointing out three of these.

The first has to do with gender. As you might expect in a novel published by a man in 1902, the roles of women in Glengarry School Days are very limited. Mrs. Murray is a classic Victorian angel of the house. In the world of the novel, girls and women might be fans of hockey and moral cheerleaders, but they cannot be players. Hughie’s disdain for “gurl” teachers is not entirely ironic: the overall trajectory of the narrative reinforces the idea that schoolteachers need to be good male role models, since the most important work of schools is to prepare young men to go on to university (and, in the best-case scenario, to the ministry). The devaluation of the feminine is accompanied by a narrow definition of the masculine. What makes Foxy a villain is not only his American-style materialism but his lack of interest in the “violent and dangerous games” beloved by the other (real) boys. The novel does not go so far as to suggest that Foxy is gay (the horror of this would probably be too much for Connor to contemplate), but it does hint that there is something not quite right about his sexuality: Hughie, the novel says, “sympathized with Betsy Dan in her creepy feeling whenever [Foxy] approached” (Connor 1902, 158–59).

The second has to do with class. Class issues are resolved somewhat by the social environment of Glengarry County: everybody, the novel suggests, shares equally in the economic challenges of the settler community, except perhaps Foxy’s father and the stock underclass character, Alan Gorrach, who has a “gypsy” face and kills dogs for a living (28). Yet, as I mentioned above, muscular Christianity does project an identity that is elevated in class terms. John Craven is a gentleman, and the ideal hockey player/Canadian man he helps to train has a gentlemanly quality to him. When Craven warns about being a “cad” or a “blackguard,” he is using language that marks not only bad behaviour but behaviour unbecoming of a gentleman. Though the novel implies that this ideal of behaviour is available to everybody within the community, the definition of a gentleman is always, to some degree, exclusionary.

Which leads me to the third omission. In both The Man from Glengarry and Glengarry School Days, First Nations individuals are notable by their absence. The absence is particularly ironic given that Glengarry County is described as resting on “a strip of country … known as the Indian lands—once an Indian reservation” (Connor 1901, 14). Could an Indigenous person assume the role of hockey player/muscular Christian/ideal Canadian man posited by Glengarry School Days? The absence of First Nations characters is a strong answer in itself. The relationship of Indigenous people to Connor’s imagined modern Canada, as well as to the hockey game that embodies the values of this Canada, is hinted at by the novel’s references to lacrosse. Remember that John Craven uses his knowledge of lacrosse to develop a strategy for the Twentieth hockey team. His knowledge is a result of his having “captained the champion lacrosse team of the province of Quebec” (285).

In the Canada of 1902, references to lacrosse would be heavy with ideological significance. Lacrosse, as Robidoux and others have pointed out, was not only very popular in Canada at the time of hockey’s arrival, but until the end of the nineteenth century, it was widely touted “as Canada’s national game” (Robidoux 2001, 40). Promoters of lacrosse saw it as “the perfect metaphor for the tenuous existence of living in Canada’s hinterland” (40). That the game was appropriated from the First Nations made it only more useful ideologically: the appropriation meant that lacrosse represented something distinctive from England (it supplanted cricket in the 1860s as the Canadian elite’s game of choice) but also that it symbolized the claims of the settler community to the land. As George Beers put it in the Montreal Gazette in 1867: “Just as we [Canadian colonists] claim as Canadian the rivers and lakes and land once owned exclusively by Indians, so we now claim their field game as the national field game of our dominion” (quoted in Robidoux 2001, 41).

The process of adaptation of lacrosse from baggataway bears uncanny resemblance to the adaptation of hockey from shinny. Both began as wide-open games played outdoors and were adapted to be played on smaller, more controlled surfaces, with rules designed to make play more “respectable.” Control of both adapted games was claimed by elite organizations who used the ideology of amateurism to exclude players who were deemed undesirable. Don Morrow cites the definition of amateur from the Montreal Pedestrian Club as an example: “[An amateur is someone] who has never competed in any open competition or for public money, or for admission money, or with professionals for a prize, public money or admission money, nor has ever, at any period of his life taught or assisted in the pursuit of Athletic exercises as a means of livelihood, or is a laborer or Indian” (1989, 203). First Nations players were barred from lacrosse and other sports with the baldly racist claim that an “Indian” could not, by definition, be a “gentleman.” There was also, as Colin Howell points out, a fear that Indigenous players, because of their culture and history, might be “too good.” To allow First Nations players into these competitions, then, might force the white gentlemen players out of the game (Howell 2001, 39).

The blind spots in Glengarry School Days anticipate areas of focus for later, more critical, representations of hockey. Before these critical responses occur, however, there is a period of decades in which the hockey myth, with its conservative language about the game and Canadian identity, is refined and consolidated. A glimpse of this consolidation is offered by the text that is the focus of the next chapter.

Works Cited