By Nancy Miller Chenier
The crumbling ruins of the former Our Lady’s School stand forlornly at the corner of Murray and Cumberland streets. Described as a poster child for “heritage demolition by neglect”, the school building sat empty after being sold by the Ottawa Catholic School Board in the mid-1970s. In sharp contrast, a little further along Murray, the former Guigues School, built in the same year, stands proudly, adapted in 1997 for use as a community centre for Francophone seniors. Outside is a plaque that reminds us of the school’s role in the important battle for Francophone language rights in Ontario’s educational system.
Our Lady’s, a school for English-speaking girls, could not avoid being absorbed into the lengthy conflict over language in Ottawa’s Roman Catholic separate schools, albeit from a different perspective than the Guigues School. Our Lady’s and the English Grey Nuns of the Cross who taught here no doubt experienced the turmoil that was evident both in the educational and the religious spheres even before the two schools were built in 1904.
Disputes between the English and French trustees on the Ottawa Separate School Board (OSSB) had a long history of competition for school funds and for qualified teachers. The rift between the French and Irish branches of Ontario’s Roman Catholic Church was growing when the provincial Regulation 17 brought the conflict between Anglophone and Francophone Catholics into the public realm in 1912.
By 1915, when the Ontario government replaced the OSSB with a government-appointed commission, the bitterness and acrimony among separate-school board members and within the local priesthood boiled over. Samuel Genest, chair of the OSSB at the time, ordered all the schools closed,French as well as English. The Ottawa Citizen reported that 210 girls arrrived at Our Lady’s one day to see a typewritten notice stating that it would not be re-opened until a date decided by the Board.
By the mid-1920s, some of the English Grey Nuns who had taught at Our Lady’s left Ottawa to form a new order called Grey Nuns of the Immaculate Conception. In 1926, Genest, still chair of the OSSB, convinced his French trustees to deny these nuns access to their former teaching jobs in Our Lady’s School. Once again, the Ottawa Citizen reported that 200 students, along with their parents, gathered outside and refused to enter until their old teachers were re-hired.
Although the English-minority members of the OSSB appealed to the French majority and to the Catholic religious authorities, Genest stood firm and insisted that only Grey Nuns of the Cross located in Ottawa could be employed by the OSSB. When Our Lady’s opened in the fall, there were several newly employed lay teachers.
The story of Our Lady’s School is not yet fully documented, but even these glimpses of its place during the Regulation 17 period suggest that the remaining walls deserve respect. Two Roman Catholic separate schools along Murray Street were affected by Regulation 17, but two different battles were waged. One school, Guigues, associated with the long and significant public fight to ensure French-language instruction in elementary schools, stands proudly. The other, Our Lady’s, with a record of admirable secular and religious education of young English girls is slowly disintegrating. Something more than a plaque is needed here!