Prime Minister R.B. Bennett was just back from Kingston and his delivering his inaugural address as the Rector of Queen’s on this date in 1935. Part of his calendar was taken up with a private meeting he held with Leader of the Opposition (and former PM) Mackenzie King. While they were meeting to discuss the upcoming Silver Jubilee of King George V, they chatted first informally about Queen’s.
King recorded their exchange in his famous personal diary.
“He (Bennett) spoke of the students of Queen’s University being a body that came from homes where they had to struggle for their education and whose parents probably believed in prayer,” King wrote. “I said to him that they felt the preciousness of knowledge and that on the whole the university turns out more men of real value to the country than any other college in proportion to its size. He said that Dalhousie University some years ago was much the same in that regard – a small college where men eager for learning got a training that was thorough.”
You can read King’s entire diary entry for that day at this link.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.