More awkward yet is that, while a new Canadiens team was established in 1910 (from the Haileybury franchise), the original entity went to, of all places, Toronto. In other words, the Canadiens were created by the Renfrew family, awarded first to Montreal and then sold to Toronto. It is easy to see why the Habs stick to a simple story—that they are the original Canadiens even if, strictly speaking, they really are not.
Conn Smythe built the Leafs into hockey’s most profitable enterprise—and helped erase any history that preceded him.
The more interesting question is why the Leafs pretend not to have the origins they really do.
Some of this relates to the mythology created by Conn Smythe himself. When Smythe purchased the NHL’s failing Toronto St. Patricks in 1927, he claimed to have given them a new birth, inspired by a patriotic vision. The Maple Leafs, he declared, were conceived from the insignia on the shoulder of his First World War uniform. The fact that the city already had a successful, long-running professional sports franchise by that name—the Toronto Maple Leaf baseball club—was apparently pure coincidence.
Smythe did, however, truly remake professional hockey in Toronto. Also, to be fair, the Maple Leafs have always recognized their legal link to the St. Patricks and the Arenas before them. What they have never acknowledged is their relationship to the club that bought the original Canadiens and won the city’s first Stanley Cup: the Toronto Blue Shirts.
This denial of history is imbedded in the legal manoeuvring that led to the end of the Blue Shirts and the old National Hockey Association. Since the Arenas and the National Hockey League effectively confiscated the Toronto club from E. J. Livingstone, it has long been official dogma to emphasize the legal break of 1917. Yet, in reality, the NHL’s “new” Toronto team used the same players, wore the same jersey and was commonly called by the same names (the “Torontos” and, initially, the “Blue Shirts”) as its NHA predecessor.
That the Blue Shirts have been thus orphaned by history is understandable. The Livingstone saga led to almost a decade of court battles that helped undermine the pre-Smythe franchise. That is to say, it is understandable, but it is sad nonetheless.
In truth, Toronto’s first Stanley Cup club has been largely forgotten. It remains to this day the only one of the city’s pro hockey champions not to have its banner hung in the Air Canada Centre.
Forgotten, and yet the players of the original Blue Shirts, collectively and individually, made a considerable mark in the sport.
No fewer than seven members of this championship team belong to the Hockey Hall of Fame. Indeed, most of the young Torontos had professional careers that extended through the 1920s and into the 1930s. Few of these, however, were spent in the Ontario capital.
The notable exception was Harry Cameron. He would be the only one to play on all three pre-Leaf Cup squads: the Blue Shirts of 1914, the Arenas of 1918 and the St. Patricks of 1922.
Although the Blue Shirts franchise faded after 1914, the group arguably did win one more Stanley Cup together. This occurred after Livingstone’s club was plundered to stock the PCHA’s new franchise, the Seattle Metropolitans, in 1915. Former Blue Shirts Frank Foyston, Hap Holmes, Jack Walker, Cully Wilson and Eddie Carpenter (the replacement for Jack Marshall) all shared in the Mets’ championship two years later. This club was also notable as the first U.S.-based team to hold the Cup.14 The phenomenon of the “Seattle Blue Shirts” (my term) would be replicated nearly eighty years later, when captain Mark Messier led a number of players from his former Edmonton championship team to a Stanley Cup with the Rangers—i.e., the so-called “New York Oilers.”
Seattle Metropolitans, 1916–17. Bruce Ridpath’s former Blue Shirts were the core of this team, the first U.S.-based Stanley Cup champions.
Speaking of Jack Marshall, old “Jawn” did not quite retire following the 1914 championship after all. He did some spot duty the next season, but knew enough to leave once the Livingstone era began. Returning to Montreal, Marshall played occasionally with the Wanderers until 1917, when he turned forty. He died there in 1965, shortly after his induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame. An obituary stated that Jack never knew about his honour, being by then eighty-eight and “lost in the mists of memory.”15
Allan Davidson was one of only two Blue Shirt champions who did not have a long hockey career. Scotty was killed in action in Belgium in 1915, reputedly after refusing to retreat during a battle. Despite his relatively brief shinny story, his exploits on and off the ice were recognized with induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1950.
The other man to have a brief presence in the sport was Roy McGiffin. Since his junior days, McGiffin had spent the offseasons in Dinuba, California, where he was in the fruit business. Leaving hockey after the 1914–15 season, he ended up in the American military during the First World War. In fact, Flight Lieutenant McGiffin was an instructor in aerobatics in the U.S. Army Air Service. A daredevil to the end, he went down near the end of the war while looping his aircraft outside Wichita Falls, Texas.
There is quite an irony in a player like McGiffin having a fate similar to the American hockey prodigy Hobey Baker. Baker was, it will be remembered, also killed in a 1918 plane accident while serving in the U.S. air force. One can imagine heaven’s hockey rink hosting two of the most radically different characters ever to lace up a pair of skates. We can picture the great Princeton star trying to lead the rush as Minnie hacks, harasses and hotly tests his legendary eternal patience.
Hobey Baker. Ironically, the American amateur hockey legend met with a demise almost identical to that of Canadian professional hockey “goon” Roy McGiffin.
And so the Stanley Cup champion Toronto Hockey Club has been largely left to the graces of heaven and history. Yet if it has been for the most part forgotten, its predecessor of the same name—erroneously christened the “Maple Leafs” many decades later16—has been utterly so. Even in the accounts of the 1914 playoffs, Toronto papers would sometimes note the previous Cup challenges of the Wellingtons and Marlboros, strangely omitting the (much more competitive) one of Alexander Miln’s Professionals.
Some of this may be attributable to Miln himself. The man who directed the original Torontos had renounced his professional past and returned to rabid amateurism not long before pro hockey took hold in the city for good. Pulled down as manager with the demolition of the old Mutual Street Rink, he became a minor figure in the local shinny scene.
Miln remained active in other sports, and by 1915 was a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor employed as Ontario representative of the British-American Bank Note Company. That is when, like so many members of Toronto’s elite, he eagerly signed on to fight for the British Empire in the Great War. Alex rose rapidly through the depleting ranks to become an army major. Younger brother Jack Miln also enlisted and attained the rank of lieutenant.
The tragic death of Major Miln on November 18, 1916, was prominently featured in all the city’s dailies. Yet only the Toronto Star remembered that the all-round amateur sportsman had once been “manager of the Torontos, champions of the Ontario Professional League.”17
Miln was not the only one associated with the original Torontos to serve and die in the First World War. The brief Professional and former Marlboro star Herb Birmingham left a clerical job at Toronto City Hall to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915. Lieutenant Birmingham died from battle wounds on August 10, 1918. He was survived by a wife and numerous family members, including brother Hilliard. The Birmingham family was prominent in politics, his brother and late father being leading Conservative political organizers in the city and the province.
Alexander Miln had long since left the world of pro hockey at the time of his death in the service of his country. His original “Leafs” were already fading from memory.
Eight other onetime Toronto Professionals traded hockey jerseys for the uniform of the Canadian Army: Harry Burgoyne, Charlie Ellis, Walter Mercer, Skene Ronan, Zina Runions, Donald Smith, Rolly Young and the man I
have called the “elusive” Bert Morrison. While all survived the conflict, Bert must nevertheless be classed as a casualty.
In the case of Morrison, the mystery to be solved was his disappearance early in the 1908–09 season. Vague reports as the campaign progressed had suggested that he was “ill.” In the code language of the time, this may have referred to a drinking problem. Unfortunately, a tracing of Bert’s military career gives credence to this theory—and more.
Attestation paper of Bertram Clifford Morrison. Bert Morrison might have been a troubled man before enlisting. He certainly was afterward.
Morrison’s war story is a sad one, indeed. The saga begins with his enrolment late in 1916. At that point, Bert was a sales representative for his father’s brass manufacturing company. Although deemed fit, he was almost thirty-seven years old.
Bert was shipped overseas, but by 1917 had begun forfeiting pay due to various ailments. The following year, he vanished for three weeks, and, when finally discovered, was clearly suffering from a serious breakdown. He was hospitalized for some nine months. His medical records indicate severe mental illness—what we would today label as schizophrenia. Previous alcohol and drug abuse are also suspected in the doctors’ reports.
Morrison was released from the military in April 1919. He then spent the better part of the next decade in a London, Ontario, mental institution. Discharged in 1929 to the care of family members, he was subsequently certified as mentally incompetent.
Bert was never able to work again and lived in virtual anonymity in Toronto. Yet the reclusive bachelor remained in generally good physical health. He outlived all his kin, passing away four decades later at the age of eighty-nine.
Walter Mercer’s war story is not sad, but it is perplexing. After apparently finishing his hockey career in Brantford in 1910, the right winger of the Professionals’ Cup challenge team headed to British Columbia. Yet Mercer still claimed to be a “professional lacrosse and hockey”18 player when he enlisted there in 1915. Even more oddly, he appears to have falsified his birthdate on his attestation papers, declaring himself to be a full five years younger—twenty-five rather than thirty years of age.
Mercer had a good service record before heading back to B.C. at the end of the conflict. Yet files indicate he maintained the revised longevity for the rest of his life. Thus, when he passed away at Sunnybrook Hospital in 1961, he was said to be in “his 71st year.”19
Chuck Tyner played with Mercer in Brantford during the 1909–10 campaign, where he was the manager. Like Wally, Chuck exited the game at the end of the season. He also fought in the First World War, though, in getting there, he took a very different path than his teammates did.
For reasons unknown, Tyner left Canada shortly after his days as a professional goalkeeper ended, apparently simultaneously forgoing his ambition to become a medical doctor. He went first to Vermont. By May 1914, Tyner, who was Anglican, had become a graduate of Seabury Theological Seminary in Minnesota. He then headed to Nebraska, where two brothers were also Episcopal ministers, and where his future wife, Mary Sprague, had been born.
Tyner had settled into his theological career for only a few years when, approaching forty and apparently still restless, he took a sabbatical. It was a stint in the U.S. Army after the Americans finally entered the war. Tyner was not a chaplain; he was a full-fledged combatant. Reverend Charles fought hard and became something of a correspondent for his hometown paper in Lincoln, Nebraska.20
Reverend Charles R. Tyner (1924). This photograph shows Tyner shortly after he took up his mission in Kansas City, Missouri, where he would spend the rest of his life.
Tyner returned to the active priesthood in Nebraska after the armistice in 1918. In 1923, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, to take over St. George’s Episcopal Church and stayed there for the remainder of his career, becoming emeritus in 1952.
Canon Tyner passed away in 1967, just before his eighty-eighth birthday. Mary lived until 1980. St. George’s went on to become part of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in 1986.
Not surprisingly, Charles Tyner was active in his community. His pastimes included an interest in hockey and skating. He served as timekeeper at local games and was honorary president of the Kansas City Figure Skating Club. His obituary declared that, as a hockey player long ago, he had been “with the Toronto team that won a Stanley Cup.”21 The story, it seems, had improved over the years.
Unlike Tyner, by the time Rolly Young headed to Europe, he had achieved his dream of becoming a physician. After being cut from the Berlin Dutchmen in 1908–09, Young made one brief and final return to the OPHL, with his hometown Waterloo Colts the following season. After that, Young dedicated himself solely to his studies.
Rolly had graduated from McMaster University (then located in Toronto) in 1907. As has been noted, he then studied medicine at the University of Toronto. He finally finished up in 1911.
Dr. Roland W. Young signed up with the British Royal Army Medical Corps in 1914. He served in Malta, Egypt and Macedonia before returning to Canada and joining the Canadian Army Medical Corps. After being demobilized in 1919, he practised medicine in Waterloo, London, Toronto and Bronte, Ontario.
At the age of forty, Young married one Elizabeth Ross Greene, a nurse. Like most of the key Toronto Professionals, he left no descendants.22 Rolly passed away in 1961 and is buried in the family plot at Waterloo.
As has been noted, Young’s defence partner, Con Corbeau, was the first of the original Torontos to play again professionally for the Queen City. He was also the first former Professional to drink from the Stanley Cup while wearing a Toronto uniform. The veteran’s on-ice career ended the following season with Glace Bay of the dying Maritime pro league.
Corbeau was later a fairly successful coach in the senior amateur game. However, Con died in 1920 at just thirty-eight from heart and kidney disease. Interestingly, his younger brother Bert Corbeau was a prominent NHL defenceman who played his pro hockey in Toronto from 1923 to 1928.
Con Corbeau was one of four Toronto Professionals to play hockey for the Queen City later in their careers. Harold McNamara and Skene Ronan returned in 1915 to join Livingstone’s Toronto Shamrocks. Jack Marks would also come back and, like Corbeau, would help bring the Stanley Cup to Toronto.
Marks was the ringer who had substituted in the second half of the 1908 showdown with the Wanderers. He had later accompanied the club on its disastrous postseason road trip. Jack’s career was prominently eulogized after the train wreck of 1909, which had presumably ended his playing days. However, not only was he back with Brantford before the end of the season, but he went on to a long and successful pro career. Although it was spent mostly in Quebec City, Marks would serve as a spare forward on the 1917–18 champion Toronto Arenas.
A couple of other erstwhile Toronto Professionals—the Mallen brothers—have Stanley Cup history that is worth mentioning. Of these, Ken was the biggest star and played until 1917. Acknowledged as the fastest skater of his era, he helped the Ottawa Senators hold the Stanley Cup in 1910. He won Lord Stanley’s mug a second time with Cyclone Taylor and the Vancouver Millionaires in 1915. However, it remains a mystery why Kenny’s name was never engraved on the jug.
Ken had three hockey-playing siblings, including fellow Toronto Pro Jimmy Mallen. Jim had less success in the game, but he does have one notable achievement to his name. In January 1910, Jimmy and Kenny lined up for Galt and Ottawa respectively—the first brothers to ever play against one another in a Stanley Cup final.
Although most of Alex Miln’s squad had some presence in the sport after the team folded, one notable who did not was Hugh Lambe. Lambe never played in another professional match, but he did periodically surface in the local news. The club’s perennial spare defenceman—and the only man with the team for the entirety of their existence—he was actually one of their most popular players. This fan following really came from lacrosse. Hughie was regarded as one of the best defenders of all time for the Toronto Lacrosse C
lub.
A 1912 report noted Lambe’s marriage to Eleanor Rubidge Barron. Miss Barron was the daughter of Stratford judge John Augustus Barron. Barron, it may be recalled, was captain of the old Rideau Rebels and chaired the founding meeting of the OHA. We know that the marriage, which eventually ended in separation, was troubled due to Hugh’s drinking.23
Lambe died tragically in 1941 from a fall down the stairs while running to catch a taxi to the railway station. Interestingly, he was then apparently travelling the world as a tea examiner with the Department of National Revenue. Why such an occupation was necessary is not self-evident, but the Toronto Star reported that “the position is one which requires years of special training—training possessed by not more than a handful of experts in the whole country.”24
The most significant member of the Toronto Professionals, Bruce Ridpath, also never played another game of hockey. In retrospect, the trajectory of Ridpath’s shinny career was already apparent when the modern hockey rivalry between Toronto and Montreal began on Christmas night 1912. The man chosen to be the franchise player of the new Queen City team was behind the bench in street clothes. Bruce was still very much in the early stages of a long convalescence from his near-fatal automobile accident.
Ridpath did, however, eventually return successfully to canoeing, his original claim to fame in sporting circles. It also appears he was able to regain much of his former expertise. In the summer of 1919 an advertisement appeared in the Toronto World, stating, “On the lagoon in Jubilee Park the expert canoeist, Mr. Bruce Ridpath, will demonstrate the correct method of steering a canoe, the proper positions for paddling, either with single or double paddle, and safety-first rules.”25
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