edwardseulogy

To those of you who knew him it may seem odd to be remembering Reg Edwards in a religious setting. But towards the end he did say that if anyone wanted to make a fuss after he was gone, it could be in Birk's Chapel. Thank you for being here with us and helping to make that bit of a fuss.

Others have spoken this afternoon of his life and work in Canada. We thought that we could add something of his earlier family context.

Although he was born and grew up in Lancashire, his father's family were small potters from Staffordshire. James and Thomas Edwards made serviceable earthenware for the North American market, shipping across the Atlantic brown and white wares decorated with scenes of Boston, Quebec City, or the new Cunard steamships. But by the 1870s the business had been sold and Thomas, my great grandfather, had become involved in the new trade union movement, serving for many years as the head of the Staffordshire Trades and Labour Council. He was also an alderman and later the mayor of Burslem, one of the five towns that now make up Stoke on Trent.

Reg's father Sam Edwards was, in his way, a dreamer with many schemes. He moved to Oldham in Lancashire to build houses for the expanding workforce in the cotton industry at the turn of the century. For most of his life he was a jobbing painter and decorator but he also bred terrier dogs and he kept chickens on a piece of scrap land on which he squatted. He loved to gamble on horses and greyhounds and went bankrupt after the First World War and was unable to get credit ever again. He played soccer into his 60s, until my grandmother burned his boots and stubbornly climbed his painting ladder into his 70s until she publicly threatened to find out where he was working and do the same with the ladder.

Edith, Reg's mother, was an orphan, raised in the family of an aunt. She sang in the choir of a Methodist chapel and lived by a strict moral code. She was the antithesis of my grandfather in many ways. They had been brought together in the manner of the nineteenth century by a chance meeting in a railway carriage. Theirs was an odd relationship by today's standards and there were many times when they would only communicate with each other through Reg or his sister Jessie. She loved music hall and later Hollywood spectaculars such as the Ziegfeld Follies. She subscribed to Hollywood magazines, as well as to various horoscope publications, believed not only in Methodism but in phrenology, taking Reg at an early age into Manchester to have his skull bumps analysed. Indeed it was her idea to call him Reg, an exotic name she noticed on a gravestone as they entered the church for the baptism. (In the Edwards family all the boys were called Tom, James, Harry or Sam leading to a lot of references to Tom's Sam, and Sam's Harry, so Reg was a little unusual for both the family and that community).

Reg's education began at the neighbourhood Millgate Methodist School from which he claimed to have been expelled for truancy. In spite of this he was lucky enough to win a scholarship at 10 to a private school, Holme Grammar School for Boys. Yet apart from sports he appears to have a chequered school career until the age of 15 when by what he always considered a stroke of luck the government increased the years of compulsory schooling across England leading to a corresponding need for a greatly increased number of teachers. His school decided, as was the case for poor children, that he should stay on and try for a place at a teacher training college. At Bangor Normal College in North Wales, in what he would have called another stroke of fortune, he met Nancy and gained a teaching a certificate.

He returned to Oldham during the depression where his wages not only had to repay his education loan from Oldham authorities but also to support his parents who were without work. His father's long daily treks to the dole office, and the hunger marches across England, made a lasting impression on him as they did for so many of his generation. The Left Book Club, the Labour Party, and the struggles in Spain became an important part of his broader education.

As did, surprisingly, baseball, brought to Oldham by Mormon missionaries. For several years he played on an Oldham baseball team, the Dons, and although baseball never occupied the same part in his life as rugby, which he also played, it did give him a lifelong interest in America and much pleasure later in the Montreal Expos. That Ben, his great grandson, bears the name Felipe both amused and pleased him.

The second World War saw him conscripted into the Royal Corps of Signals. He had married Nancy just before being posted to Singapore but, in what was probably the most important fluke of fortune, the army in its wisdom decided he was inadequately trained, removed him from the convoy and someone else took his place on a ship which arrived in Singapore at the same time as the Japanese.

The army, as it did for so many, provided a direction for his later professional life. Service at the War Office Selection Board initiated a lifelong interest in intelligence, and in testing and measurement. And again, Reg, like so many, both officers and men, at the end of a long war, wanted to see a different kind of Britain. As Captain Edwards he was selected by the Labour Party to stand for the wealthy Manchester constituency of Withington, one of the few northern constituencies which didn't return a Labour member in that 45 election. It was, of course, a moral victory, as the Labour Party used to say.

After demobilisation in 1947 he returned to Oldham to teach and to later be an educational administrator in neighbouring Rochdale and, still later, a University lecturer in Sheffield. Oldham and Lancashire remained central to his view of his place in the world. He was very proud to be a Lancastrian and all the family at one time or another had to imbibe the battle cry of the Lancashire Fusiliers, and were told the story of the six Lancastrians who had won six Victoria Crosses before breakfast on one auspicious morning of the First War.

More fundamental perhaps were the Lancastrian characteristics, self defined that combination of northern truculence and independence tied to a spirit of generosity which held together the close knit industrial communities that readiness to share what you had, that sense that no one should have to beg when he had workmates or neighbours that tradition of passing the hat (the whip round it was called) in the pub or the mill summarised in an Oldham pub song with the refrain:

Pull tha chair up to table
Stay as long as tha art able
There's allus room for thee lad at our place.

For Reg and our family my aunt, uncle, and cousin much of this sense of northern solidarity was expressed through a passion for rugby league (the 13-a-side professional game). Each weekend we travelled by charabanc with hundreds of other supporters of Oldham, to various windswept rugby grounds around the mine and mill towns of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Cumbria. From the time I was about four or five our Saturday ritual would begin with oatcakes or potato pie at the open market if the match was at home at Watersheddings, the Oldham ground (for a long time my dad insisted his ambition was to live at 49 Watersheddings St, as close to the holy ground as one could be) or, if an away game, we would board the chara near the Co-op amidst much joking and mocking of the team selection, the manager and players. There'd be a stop at a pub on the moors, a bit of communal singing along the way on the bus, and a post-game analysis that relived the tries and goals or focused on the refereeing and how we was robbed. At the end of the day we'd return for tea to my grandparents where grandad would pour scorn on the oval ball and we'd have tripe and chips, plates of bread and butter, tinned plums, custard and parkin, a kind of Lancastrian ginger bread.

We came to Montreal as Jean Lesage came to power. The Quiet Revolution brought fundamental shifts in the position of church and state and in particular meant significant changes in the role and place of education. For Reg it was to offer an interesting and fulfilling career, new colleagues, a new language and a kind of home.

Reg saw himself as fortunate to have been offered a position at McGill. During the Depression he had taught in a classroom with a CPR poster on the wall advertising Banff Springs Hotel and Canada and North America had always held an attraction. The Suez crisis and Britain's last efforts to act as an Imperial power so disgusted him that he actively began to seek alternatives, first in Michigan as a Fulbright Scholar and later at McGill.

He and Nancy thought they were fortunate to live first at Macdonald College where they made long lasting friendships with several young families. After a decade they moved to Kirkland to a new house, always a dream of Nancy's and one unlikely to have been realised in England. Kirkland was a new suburb and both took a pioneer's pride in contributing to the building of the Library and the Lakeshore Hospital. They enjoyed Kirkland's civic gardening and its attractive town hall. Beacon Circle offered a sustaining community with its small park and its neighbourliness. They enjoyed watching the many children grow up, especially Anne Beaudoin, who adopted them as her own grandparents.

Reg saw it again as great good fortune that both his grandsons chose to come to McGill. With Alexander the regular cookie deliveries to Douglas Hall were replaced by the savouring of Alex's dean of Ephemera columns in the Trib, and the bemused following of his political triumphs in the renaming of the student building, as Vice President of McGill Student Society, and as commentator for Radio McGill. Regular lunches with Sandy at the William Tell or Tulip Noire offered the opportunity for long discourses (lectures some might say) by grandad on the real causes of the First or Second World War, a mathematical problem or and always the state of Quebec.

This was a story tradition which continued with Joe designated by Joe the Van Houtte Lecture Series, even appearing as such in a footnote in a University essay. During the Ice Storm the lectures took on mythic proportions as for several days he joined Joe and his roommates as they escaped burning buildings and camped with ghetto friends in whatever place had heat. Throughout this he kept a transistor radio clapped to one ear updating everyone in a loud voice with the latest bulletins, and comparisons to the Blitz. It was 1941 all over again!

In retirement he knew he was lucky to enjoy good health. But he also worked at it with a fierce determination and a strong will. He did daily crosswords, courses in advanced calculus, took up bridge again, became adept at the use of the computer, learned to cook, became an expert on drugs and their functions, set himself tasks of complicated mental arithmetic and travelled in Britain, Europe, and America while he was able.

The mutual support of both the Wise Walkers and the Dunworkin Club was helpful in his determination to remain independent. He became a frequent visitor to the McGill Library and Archives, a McGill backpack full of papers at his side. Research into the selection of Principal Peterson led to intense and detailed interest in Montreal's family histories a research trail which led him down many paths and to libraries and stately homes in England, Scotland and Wales.

He lived nearly 88 years and had friends, students, colleagues and family in many parts of the world. He was especially delighted that Joe would be a student in residence at London University, an ambition that had been unimaginable for himself. His own good health, both physical and mental was, he knew, a blessing that enabled him to face the very difficult duty of looking after Nancy in her last two years and of enduring the lonely years that followed.