CIVIL ENGINEERS
Saluting the Fifth TECHNICAL TRAINING: Queen’s Engineering Professor Douglas Ellis (fifth from left) was one of the early officers in the Fifth. He went on to command the company in the 1920s and later served as Dean of Applied Science at Queen’s from 1943 to 1955. In this photo, about 1910, each man has a battery and telegraph key. They appear to be practicing Morse code
THE STAGING GROUND: When war was declared on August 4, 1914, Valcartier, Quebec was nothing more than a grassy field near a rail line. By September 8, more than 36,000 soldiers had gathered there from across Canada for training and staging. A month later, most of those men shipped to Europe with the First Canadian Expeditionary Force.
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n 1914, when war broke out in Europe, Canada’s population was just over seven million. More than half of them were younger than 25 and only about four in one hundred were older than 65. Home electrical and telephone service were fancy novelties and women had not yet won the right to vote. Kingston had a population then of about 15,000 and Queen’s was really coming into its own as an institution. The university was, after years of struggle and uncertainty, relatively financially stable and independent. It was on a facilities building streak— Grant, Nicol, Jackson, Kingston, and Gordon Halls were all new— and had a fine society of alumni, faculty, and students. The footprint was much smaller than it is today and the university was effectively bounded by University, Stuart, Barrie, and Union Streets. Campus was surrounded by a smattering of suburban homes and grassy pastureland. It marked the city’s outskirts.
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THE COMPLETE ENGINEER
Notions of military preparedness weren’t new among Queen’s students and faculty. Various civilian militias operated on campus from at least the 1880s. The demographics of the Queen’s
“ ” By April of 1910 the Fifth Field
Company Canadian Engineers was a legitimate,
state-sanctioned militia unit.
community were overwhelmingly Anglo, with many recent immigrants from Britain, including veterans of the Boer War, eager to serve and defend the British Empire. So, as clouds of war began to gather over Europe in the early years of the 20th Century, a Queen’s Engineering professor
became convinced that a corps of welltrained Queen’s engineers ought to be ready to serve king, country, and empire in the interests of national defence. Alexander “Sandy” MacPhail became a professor of civil engineering at Queen’s in 1904. It’s a role he held throughout his working life, and he even served as department head for more than 20 years. MacPhail advocated for military training for Queen’s volunteers as early as 1909. He guided the formation of a rifle association comprised of 75 students that spring, and by the end of the year had easily convinced the Engineering Society to sanction a company of Canadian engineers. The university proposed the plan to the Canadian government, and by April 1910 the Fifth Field Company Canadian Engineers was a legitimate, state-sanctioned militia unit. There were supplied rifles, ammunition, and equipment; given drill pay and provided rigorous, ongoing training by qualified military officers.
