by Doug Munro
as secretary of the Ladies’ Aid and treasurer of the Women’s Missionary
Society. It was the women who kept these small churches going, organising
church suppers, raising money for repairs to the manse, teaching Sunday
school, and hosting endless teas.23 In 1937, the church leadership thanked
the Ladies’ Aid ‘for their exceptionally good showing in raising over $400
for church purposes in a hard year’; a few years later, it acknowledged that
were it not for the Ladies’ Aid ‘it would be very difficult for us to carry on’.24
In 1940, Russell Cook graduated from St Andrew’s and, a few months
later, announced his intention to seek a new pastorate. Having come to
appreciate what it called his ‘conscientious and uncomplaining service’, the
church leadership urged him to stay and was even prepared to ‘guarantee’
a salary of $1,200, although it is unlikely that it could have.25 After all,
it had paid him occasionally in farm products – including bunches of
20 Minutes of the Raymore Union Congregation, 16 May 1936 and 8 September 1936, Saskatchewan Archives Board (SAB), Minutes of the Raymore Union Congregation, A381.XV.A.5777.
21 Author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014.
22 Sinclair Ross, As for Me and my House (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1957; first published in 1941), 9, 10, 6. Readers never learn Mrs Bentley’s first name.
23 See Marilyn Färdig Whitely, ‘“Doing all the Rest”: Church Women of the Ladies’ Aid Society’, in Sharon Anne Cook, Lorna McLean and Kathryn O’Rourque, eds, Framing Our Past: Constructing Canadian Women’s History in the Twentieth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).
24 Minutes of the Raymore Union Congregation, 24 January 1937 and 25 February 1940, SAB,
Minutes of the Raymore Union Congregation, A381.XV.A.5777.
25 Ibid., 24 January 1938.
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CLIo'S LIvES
rhubarb that he called Saskatchewan strawberries – and, as a result, he
had accumulated too many debts to too many local merchants. ‘We were
very poor’, Ramsay Cook now says. ‘But I didn’t know we were poor.
The whole town was poor.’26 Not far from Raymore was Wynyard, a larger
centre with a larger congregation. Located south of an enormous drainage
basin – named the Quill Lakes because of their location on the migratory
routes of waterfowl and shorebirds – and first settled by Icelanders in
1904, Wynyard had grown quickly, attracting immigrants from Norway,
Sweden, Great Britain, Poland, Germany and Ukraine. In 1941, it had
a population of 1,080, making it the largest town in the district. But it
too had trouble paying its minister, and Cook’s debts kept growing. It was
time to make another change.
Canada and Great Britain – his two great loves – were at war with Germany,
and this time Cook was determined to serve. Canada was a British country
and he was a British subject, making his loyalties complementary, not
contradictory. When the 1939 Royal Tour of King George VI and Queen
Elizabeth made its way through Saskatchewan, he took his family to catch
a glimpse of the first reigning monarch to visit North America. Ramsay
Cook recalls being shuttled to five or six different whistle-stops and
walkabouts on the royal route, including Melville, a small town north-
east of Saskatoon, its grain elevator proudly decorated to form, according
to the Regina Leader-Post, a ‘mighty welcome’.27 Somewhere in the crowd
of 60,000 people was a little boy on his dad’s shoulders. George VI was
not only the King of Great Britain, he was the King of Canada,28 and each
Christmas Russell and Lillie Cook gathered Vincent, Luella and Ramsay
around the radio to listen to their king’s annual broadcast.
To serve his two countries, Cook tried to join the air force but was told that
he was too old. He said that he could train young pilots on the Link Trainer,
even though he had never used a Link Trainer, much less flown a plane. The
air force wisely declined his kind offer. He then tried to join the army as
a chaplain, although it involved negotiating with a reluctant United Church
and the threat that if he was not permitted to join the Canadian army then
he would move to the United States and join the American army. In the
26 Author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014.
27 ‘Bold Welcome to King and Queen at Melville’, Regina Leader-Post, 5 June 1939. See also Mary Vipond, ‘The Royal Tour of 1939 as a Media Event’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 35:1
(2010), 149–72.
28 Although sometimes called the King of Canada, George VI was not technically the King
of Canada. Elizabeth II became the first monarch to be proclaimed Queen of Canada pursuant the Royal Style and Titles Act 1953.
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6 . CECI N’EST PAS RAMSAY CooK
end, the United Church relented. Stationed at Camp Shilo in Manitoba,
Cook moved his family to Brandon. Now that he was earning a modest but
reliable salary, he paid his debts and bought a small house.
Brandon was not Alameda, Raymore or Wynyard; it was a city and, for the
first time in his life, Ramsay Cook did not have to cut across the yard to an
outhouse. He remembers listening to the speeches of Winston Churchill,
singing patriotic songs at school and watching Canada Carries On,
a series of short propaganda films on the war effort.29 More importantly,
he understood that ‘there was a larger world outside and that something
quite terrible was taking place’.30 Because both his father and his brother
– who had left college to join the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps
in 1940 – were doing their bit, Ramsay would do his. In Wynyard, he
had collected old bones from the surrounding fields to be used in the
production of industrial glues.31 Now he followed the news coming out of
Ottawa and London on a couple of old maps and an atlas; he cheered the
exploits of Buzz Beurling, the ‘Falcon of Malta’, Canada’s most successful
fighter pilot; he wore a sweatshirt bearing the Union Jack and the title
of Vera Lynn’s popular song, ‘There’ll Always Be An England’, and once
punched a kid who begged to differ; he knitted woollen squares that were
sewn together to make blankets for the Red Cross; he counted his nickels
and dimes to buy War Savings Certificates; and he collected scrap metal,
tin cans and glass bottles.
But Cook also experienced that moment in every child’s life when he
learned that the ‘larger world outside’ was not what it said it was. Reading
anti-Japanese propaganda in the form of comic books took him back to
the summer of 1940 when he and his parents visited his brother, then
stationed in Victoria, British Columbia, and spent a month in a rented
cottage.32 One day a boy about Ramsay’s age showed up and, although he
was Japanese Canadian, Russell and Lillie Cook were delighted that their
son had a summer playmate. For the next couple of weeks, the boys were
inseparable, for the most part spending their days fishing off a small dock.
29 On the National Film Board and Canada Carries On, see Pierre Véronneau, ‘La Propagande du Geurre de l’État Canadien: Le Cas de l’Office National du Film de 1940 à 1945’, Bulletin d’Histoire Politique, 16:2 (2
008), 151–62.
30 ‘American Society During World War II: An Interview with Prof. George Ramsay Cook’, Center for American Studies, University of Tokyo, Oral History Series, 7 (1982), 1.
31 On the collection of bones and fat for military uses, see Ian Mosby, Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014).
32 On anti-Japanese propaganda in American comic books see Paul Hirsch, ‘This Is Our Enemy: The Writer’s War Board and Representations of Race in Comic Books, 1942–1945’, Pacific Historical Review, 83:3 (2014), 448–86, doi.org/10.1525/phr.2014.83.3.448.
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A young Ramsay Cook, left, fishing with his Japanese Canadian friend
near Victoria, British Columbia, 1940
Source: York university Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Ramsay
Cook fons, ASC25757 . With permission of Eleanor Cook .
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6 . CECI N’EST PAS RAMSAY CooK
The comic books depicting Emperor Hirohito as ‘a fire breathing dragon’
and Japanese soldiers as subhuman and ‘essentially more cruel’ than
German soldiers did not make any sense. His friend, who had taught him
how to bait a hook, cast a line and wait for the tug, was not cruel and he
certainly did not breathe fire. He was ‘human’, Cook said, and he ‘made
me think differently’. Although ‘I still probably thought that Emperor
Hirohito breathed fire, I knew that there was at least one Japanese who
didn’t’.33
III
Because that settlement and that land were my first and for many years
my only real knowledge of the planet, in some profound way they
remain my world, my way of viewing. My eyes were formed there.
— Margaret Laurence
Demobilised in 1946, Russell Cook received a pastorate in Morden, about
200 kilometres south-east of Brandon in the Pembina Valley. Like Raymore
and Wynyard, Morden was a small town servicing a large farming district,
principally wheat but also corn and apples. A run of stores and businesses
with names like Turner’s Bakery, Dack’s Pharmacy, Goode’s Confectionary
and Atkins’ Hardware lined Stephen Street. There was a restaurant or two,
a hotel, a bowling alley, a pool hall and a grocery store run by a man named
Mark Ki who had emigrated from China in 1902. There were several
churches, at least 12 according to one count, each denomination having
enough adherents in what was an ethnically, linguistically and religiously
diverse region, a microcosm really of the prairies that emerged at the turn
of the century when Clifford Sifton, as Canada’s minister of the interior,
opened the west to immigrants from Scandinavia and eastern and central
Europe. The large Mennonite farming population alone supported three
separate churches. Meanwhile, the Morden Times covered Morden as well
as Winkler, Darlingford, Rosebank and Plum Coulee.
33 ‘American Society During World War II: An Interview with Prof. George Ramsay Cook’, 6.
See also Ramsay Cook, ‘JACS and my Discovery of Japan’, Japanese Association of Canadian Studies Newsletter, 100:4 (2015), 3–4.
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Because Cook understood that for any church to achieve what a St Andrew’s
classmate had called ‘vitality’,34 he turned St Paul’s United Church into a
centre for both worship and fellowship by making its presence felt every
day of the week, not just one day. In its 1940 Statement of Faith, the United
Church of Canada had declared that ‘God has appointed a Ministry in
His Church for the preaching of the Word, the administration of the
Sacraments, and the pastoral care of the people’.35 As a minister, Cook
preached God’s word and administered His two sacraments, but ‘he
most enjoyed spending time with everyday people in common places
like the coffee shop, the curling rink, [and] kids’ hockey games’.36 Within
days of arriving in Morden in December 1946, he organised a special
children’s service and a Christmas cantata; in January, he planned a service
to celebrate Canada’s new Citizenship Act; and in February, March and
April, he held events and led services to mark Valentine’s Day, Shrove
Tuesday, St Patrick’s Day, Easter and the Battle of Vimy Ridge. On any
given Sunday, he could lead services at three and sometimes four different
churches that did not have their own ministers. He was also the chaplain
to the Morden Branch of the Canadian Legion, eventually serving as its
president. ‘They are my boys,’ he always said.37
Meanwhile, Lillie Cook threw herself into her obligations as a minister’s
wife, joining the Women’s Association and the Women’s Missionary
Society, opening the manse to the congregation and the community,
assisting in the Food for Britain drive, and helping with the Valentine’s Tea,
the St Patrick’s Day dinner and the annual Lilac Tea held each June. The
Women’s Association did not get much rest because the church hall had
to be either ‘gaily decorated’ with red hearts, ‘handsomely decorated’ with
green shamrocks or filled with bouquets of violet lilacs.38 Within seven
months of their arrival, Russell and Lillie had increased the membership
of the congregation by welcoming the old, the young and the in-between.
To keep teenagers interested in the life of the church – a problem now
four decades old in Protestant churches across the country – they created
youth groups, although that initiative did not take root, especially among
34 ‘Theologs Hold Banquet’, The Sheaf, 21 February 1939, USA.
35 United Church of Canada, ‘Statement of Faith’, (1940), www.united-church.ca/beliefs/
statements/1940 (accessed 25 May 2015).
36 ‘Spiritual Leadership: Rev. George Cook’, mordenmb.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/11-
Spiritual-WebLg.pdf (accessed 25 May 2015).
37 Author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014.
38 ‘Around the Town’, Morden Times, 19 February 1947; ‘Around the Town’, Morden Times, 19 March 1947.
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teenage boys. However, Lillie Cook revitalised the Canadian Girls in
Training, even leading the senior group.39 In fact, she included the girls
– dressed in what W.O. Mitchell described as their smart uniforms of
‘white middies, blue skirts, and blue ties’ – in meetings of the Women’s
Missionary Society.40
Religiously driven and civic-minded, Russell and Lillie Cook lived their
values on a daily basis, emanating hard work, delayed gratification, service
to others and education, an example not lost on their children. Vincent
had gone to St Andrew’s College, but joined the army and, after the war,
made it his career. After high school, Luella studied nursing in Brandon,
winning the Bronze Medal and the General Proficiency Prize in 1947.
Two years later, she received a scholarship to do postgraduate work in
nursing at the University of Western Ontario.41 Ramsay was still in high
school, of course, but it was expected that he would go to university.
Reflecting on his childhood and adolescence, Cook remembers something
else about his parents: their tolerance and their commitment
to equality.
His mother’s family was a bit Orange – his grandmother once refused
to take a particular medicine because it had alcohol in it, making it, she
said, ‘Catholic’ – but his mother was not, not in the slightest. His father,
meanwhile, was ‘a man with no prejudices’: yes, he sometimes grumbled
about Germans during the war, and he was not pleased when the barber
in Raymore, a German man named Mr Schindelka, cut Ramsay’s hair
‘the way Hitler wore his hair’, but on balance he lived his faith, believing
that everyone was equal in the eyes of God. One of the few times Ramsay
Cook ever saw his father angry was also in Raymore when the Native
people would haul wood into town. Their price was already low, they
were asking ‘almost nothing’, but still people ‘pushed the price down’,
and ‘I remember how angry he was that people would cheat the Indians,
as we called them in those days’. ‘I admired my father greatly’; ‘he was
a wonderful man.’42
39 On the CGIT, see Margaret Prang, ‘“The Girl God Would Have Me Be”: The Canadian Girls in Training’, Canadian Historical Review, 66:2 (1985), 154–84, doi.org/10.3138/CHR-066-02-02; and
Patricia Dirks, ‘Shaping Canada’s Women: Canadian Girls in Training versus Girl Guides’, in Cook, McLean and O’Rourque, Framing Our Past.
40 ‘Around the Town’, Morden Times, 30 March 1949; Mitchell, Who, 47.
41 ‘Around the Town’, Morden Times, 28 May 1947; ‘Around the Town’, Morden Times, 31 August 1949.
42 Author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014.
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Russell and Lillie Cook’s tolerance and commitment to equality came
naturally to them – it was who they were – and it came from the second
great commandment – ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy self’
(Matthew 22:39). But it was also born on the prairies: ‘if there is a word’
that captures prairie political culture ‘it is equality’.43 Of course, racism,
nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment found plenty of expression on the
prairies in the first decades of the twentieth century. In his 1909 book,
Strangers Within Our Gates, J.S. Woodsworth worried about the ‘mixed
multitude’ of people from eastern and central Europe ‘being dumped into