1969-1970: Our first year in Ottawa

As the days drew in and cold weather descended on Edinburgh in late autumn of 1969, I flew to Canada ahead of the rest of the family. My passport and landed immigrant card give the date, November 9, 1969. That was late enough in the year to miss all the fall colours in Ottawa, and for the first hard frost, the first dusting of snow. I observed my first wind-chill factor watching faces pinched against the bitter cold as people bent into the wind walking down O’Connor Street outside the windows of the Bytown Inn, while I sat warm inside eating my breakfast. The sight was daunting enough to reinforce my misgivings about our decision to leave Edinburgh where we were so happy, and start all over again in this bitter cold foreign land.  I went back to Edinburgh to collect the family, and all of us came over together a week before Christmas, incubating the season’s epidemic influenza. We all got it just in time for Christmas, which we spent cheerlessly in our pleasant rented house at 331 Island Park Drive, pleasant but lacking furniture, which hadn’t arrived because of labour disputes on the docks in Britain. So our arrival and early days were inauspicious and unhappy.  The move bewildered our children, shattered their happy friendship networks, obliterated all familiar landmarks in their lives. Perhaps worst of all, Rebecca had somehow become separated from her teddy bear between Montreal and Ottawa. We never did recover her teddy bear, and it took a long time for Rebecca to get over the loss. That loss was unhappier for all of us than the acute influenza we’d all been incubating as our plane left Heathrow, and which struck us down on our second day in Ottawa.  It was a miserable start to our new lives. Wendy and I boosted our morale by looking upon this beginning as the next episode in our journey home to New Zealand or Australia where there were no academic openings on the horizon, but, we felt convinced, there soon would be. We regarded our stay in Ottawa as an interlude, Canada as a stepping-stone in the oceans separating Scotland from our Antipodean homelands. It took many years for that subconscious feeling to dissipate.

The winter of 1969-70 lasted a long time, and we were without beds and other comforts for what felt like months. Friends of my father, David and Margaret McNicholl, the Australian high commissioner and his wife, lent us mattresses so we would not have to sleep on the floor. When our furniture finally arrived we began to feel a little more a sense of belonging, more quickly than we had in Vermont or in Edinburgh. One of the good things about Canada was the way we so soon felt at home. Canada is a nation of immigrants, and its social, cultural and demographic philosophy of the “mosaic” helps to give all who come here a sense of belonging right from the outset. The children settled rapidly into schools, made friends at once, and soon got over their homesickness for Edinburgh and the friends they had left behind. Rebecca, a good mimic, acquired the local accent almost at once. David, who had won a prize for reciting a Robbie Burns poem with the best Scottish accent in the class, clung tenaciously to his Edinburgh accent for years, maybe still has a trace of it. Wendy was soon absorbed into the neighbourhood, making good friends, some of whom she continued to see more than 40 years later. David also remains in touch with classmates from his first year in Ottawa, as well as with his Edinburgh friend John McTernan (who was one of Tony Blair’s staff in the 10 Downing Street years).

The spring brought good cheer. We saw our first display of the tulips which transform Ottawa every May. In those days a lovely avenue of elms lined both sides of Island Park Drive, and our garden was blessed with several more of these stately tall trees. Alas, all died a few years later of the Dutch elm disease. But in that first year they shaded us in the summer and their branches were the setting for high-altitude acrobatics by hordes of black squirrels. Wendy and I watched these acrobatics with fascinated interest, and briefly adopted a juvenile squirrel that was abandoned by its parents after it fell from a high branch.

My first few months were unsettling. I had been recruited by an old man about to retire, with the understanding that I would succeed him as department chairman. He acted strangely (soon after he retired, he became demented, ending his life sadly in a nursing-home for demented elderly people). His behaviour was reminiscent of the man for whom I had worked in Angaston in 1951: suspicious, secretive and very unfriendly; he gave me no help, indeed actively hindered me in getting acquainted with the way to run his little department, and in establishing networks with colleagues throughout the medical school and elsewhere across Canada. He managed to create such an uneasy situation by the time he retired, that the succession of the chairmanship to me was far from automatic. For several months it wasn’t clear whether I would become the chairman at all. Perhaps I might even be out of a job, a harsh and frightening possibility that I managed to keep from Wendy until the situation had been happily and successfully resolved.

Another disconcerting truth that he hadn’t bothered to mention was that the little house on the main campus that had been the department’s offices, was condemned, soon to be demolished to make way for new university buildings. My first quite urgent task was to find somewhere else for us. To a newcomer in town this was daunting. Fortunately I had some allies, and rather quickly I was able to secure splendid accommodation in the Lady Grey Building at the old Royal Ottawa Hospital, with abundant space for expansion as I built up the department. My speed and efficiency in completing the negotiations for this space impressed the dean, Jean-Jacques Lussier, and, I discovered years later, disconcerted another department chairman who was furious that I had been able to move in and secure this space before he even knew it was available.  About six years later I learnt that I had been used in the power struggle between two department heads, one of whom had made sure I would get this prime space before his personal enemy, head of another department, knew it existed. This later had unfortunate consequences; the loser viewed me as an enemy too, and not only never gave me any help but went out of his way to frustrate my plans, blocking or trying to block my attempts to recruit highly qualified staff. I was blissfully ignorant of these machinations in 1970, and set about moving the department into the Lady Grey Building with a song in my heart and ambitious plans to build a team in Ottawa that would be the equal of any in other parts of Canada.

Department of Epidemiology & Community Medicine

staff on veranda of cottage on the downtown campus of University of Ottawa, summer 1970, about the time we got our eviction notice. The splendid Unicentre now occupies the site where this cottage formerly stood.