January/February 2004
Vol. 36, no. 1
ISSN 1492-4676

SAVOIR FAIRE

Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Ney:
Frederick James Ney’s Battle to Save the Empire

Martin Ruddy, Research and Information Services

Major Frederick James Ney was an extraordinary man who had grand ideas about Canadian nationhood. According to Amy Tector and Sandy Ramos, reference archivists from Library and Archives Canada, he was "born 100 years too late, and his ideas, although he pursued them doggedly, were rarely in step with the times." Tector and Ramos kept the large audience interested and amused during their September SAVOIR FAIRE presentation as they looked at a man whose fervent belief in the righteousness of British imperialism became a cause that he would promote for most of his life.

Ney was born in Sussex, England, in 1884, the second of nine children. He and his older sister were raised by their grandfather, who imbued them with his strict early-Victorian values and spoon-fed them with stories of British imperial glory from a very young age. Many of the ideas that were central to Ney’s understanding of Empire later in life hearken back to this early Victorian outlook.

Ney became a teacher and traveled to Cypress. At the age of 23, he was promoted to headmaster of the English College of Nicosia. In 1908, Frederick James Ney immigrated to Canada and became headmaster of Treherne High School, near Winnipeg. At this time, Winnipeg was growing rapidly – the population more than tripled between 1900 and 1910, increasing from 52,000 to 170,000. Most of this growth was the result of an immigrant recruitment scheme in Eastern and Central Europe. The clash between non-Anglo Saxon immigrants and the WASP Charter Group, or founding fathers, created tensions in the city. To quell anti-imperial sentiment, Ney, through his new friendship with Robert Fletcher, Deputy Minister of Education for Manitoba, proposed and carried out a scheme of teacher exchanges. Ney felt that exposing educators to the motherland’s verdant hills and cultural bounty would infuse them with a respect for their British heritage that would in turn be passed along to their students. The program, called Hands Across the Seas, became a great success and continued until the First World War put a stop to trans-Atlantic travel.

When war was declared, Ney joined the British army rather than the Canadian Expeditionary Force, demonstrating where his loyalties lay. The war years brought Ney many accolades, including the French Croix de Guerre with Palm, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, and the Military Cross. He was also mentioned in despatches three times. Ney paid a high price for these honours, however, as the wounds he sustained in the war caused him chronic headaches, dental problems, and stomach ailments that would debilitate him for the rest of his life.

After the war, Ney returned to Winnipeg, where his friendship with Robert Fletcher served him well. He became secretary of the newly founded National Council of Education, whose mandate was to unify Canadian education, emphasize Christian values and quash socialist tendencies. Ney also continued his work with Hands Across the Sea, joining forces with the Manitoba Department of Education and renaming the exchange program the Overseas Education League. Despite the future struggles Ney would have in furthering his imperialist agenda, the Overseas Education League was a continuing success. Over 10,000 students and teachers participated in its tours and exchanges by the 1930s.

Various youth movements such as Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and Boys Brigade had become popular by 1937, and Frederick Ney’s interest began shifting from teachers to those they taught. Unlike most other youth leaders, however, Ney, an unabashed elitist, was concerned with giving only the "right" type of adolescent the tools necessary for leadership roles in the Empire.

Ney and his colleagues dreamed of creating the Empire Youth Movement. The Empire’s elite would be sought out and groomed by means of a program of travel and social interaction. They imagined the Empire Youth Movement would, in time, combat the rising threats of Communism and Fascism.

To kick-start his movement, Ney successfully arranged and orchestrated an Empire Rally of Youth at Royal Albert Hall, on May 18, 1937. Held in the immediate aftermath of George VI’s coronation, the rally was followed by a special service at Westminster Abbey the next day. Eight thousand students, including 1500 from overseas, came to hear some of the most important men in the world talk to them about their role in the British Empire. Speakers included Sir Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister of Great Britain, poet Alfred Noyes and Sir Firoz Khan Noon, High Commissioner for India in England.

The rally and service turned out to be the high points of Ney’s career. Trying to convert the success of May 1937 into something of a more permanent nature presented a challenge due to the increasing international tensions prior to the Second World War, lack of specific goals for the Empire Youth Movement, and Ney’s own health problems. Although Ney had a number of ideas for giving the movement an identity, such as a youth magazine, scholarships, exchanges, recreational leagues and even the construction of a "Youth City" – a complex in London where visiting students could stay in the heart of the Empire and be immersed in imperial culture – most of them never materialized. Only Empire Youth Sunday, an annual event in which young people from across the Empire came together in their respective countries to celebrate their good fortune at living under the Union Jack, saw much success. Youth Sundays became a wartime rallying point. Based on the momentum created by the war, Youth Sundays continued until 1964.

Throughout the war, Ney busied himself with speaking tours, first in Canada, and then throughout Britain, as an employee of the Ministry of Information. Not surprisingly, during the speeches he extolled the many virtues of the British Empire and strove to arouse patriotism in the hearts of his listeners. He was frequently disappointed to encounter ignorance and apathy about the Empire; however, this only convinced him of the need to renew the efforts of the Empire Youth Movement once the war ended.

Despite the massive changes in the geopolitical organization of the world following the Second World War and the crumbling of the British Empire, Ney held fast to his imperialist beliefs. It is especially remarkable how out of step he was with the times in this latter part of his life, as there was reluctance to embrace his ideas even among the rarified circles in which he traveled. The Queen of England even let him down by dropping the term British Empire and sanctioning the more inclusive word Commonwealth.

As the Cold War era advanced, Ney feared that the "instrument of death," Communism, would spell the end of Western civilization if Britain were to fail to accept "the burden of leadership which so many in the world looked to her to assume."

"First unto God and then to the Queen" was the unambiguous motto chosen for the newly formed Commonwealth Youth Movement. Ney wanted his organization to be diametrically opposed to all facets of the Communist Youth Organization. It would be essentially a spiritual movement, since, for Ney, Communism was a religion and as such had to be combated on spiritual terms. As tenacious as he was, most of Ney’s dreams and schemes for his youth movement never saw the light of day. By the end of the 1950s, Ney’s imperialist message was becoming increasingly irrelevant, if not offensive, to young people in the Commonwealth.

Ney spent the last years of his life relatively quietly and certainly with little to show for all his hard work in defence of Empire. A few activities and scholarships for young people are the only remaining services of Ney’s grand, imperialist dream.

Information on up-coming Savoir-Faire presentations: www.nlc-bnc.ca/1/9/index-e.html