OVER A CENTURY OF SERVICE
Women’s club still going strong
From socks for soldiers to scholarships for students, the Ottawa Women’s Canadian Club has been helping and hosting for over 100 years.
Guest speakers at the Ottawa Women’s Canadian Club meetings and luncheons have ranged from princesses to prime ministers, explorers and astronauts.
“We’re part of Canada’s history,” said Loreen O’Blenis, current president of the club.
“I felt it was a good meeting place for women of like interests, to meet new people and exchange ideas,” said O’Blenis, who joined the club six years ago. “It gives us an opportunity to discuss things important to Canada and to our communities. We get so much information from television, it’s refreshing to have a live person with new information and to whom we can ask questions.”
Many of the group’s younger members are professionals with children, and love to come, she said. “We also invite two high school students, chosen by their schools, every second month and they come with wonderful biographies. We introduce them to the members and learn about what they’re doing.”
Rowena Cooper, club archivist, joined the club in 2005, when she moved from Caledon, Ont. to Kemptville. “My sister-in-law told me there was no question, I was going to come.” She stayed because she “liked the people, I liked the speakers and it was nice to go out once a month.”
Formerly a professional archivist for the Regional Municipality of Peel, she wrote the history of the club, Ottawa Women’s Canadian Club 1910-2010, and is currently updating the book.
As she was doing her research, she was “blown away by what they’d accomplished during the First World War. They had leaped right into fundraising for refugees, and by the end of the war they’d raised about $279,000. They took over the Ottawa Free Press for a day in 1916 to prove that they could.”
Cooper likes a foreword written by Lady Foster: “We are only women. We have no votes for Parliamentary Candidates and are not eligible for election to the House of Commons, nor for appointment to the Senate, though we remember to have heard the latter spoken of as a delightful resort for ‘old women’. Yet in becoming responsible for the sentiments expressed on this editorial page our motto for the day is: with malice towards none and charity for all.”
Funds raised from the sale of advertising and the sale of newspapers from that one edition enabled the club to underwrite the cost of a free buffet for soldiers and sailors in Victoria Station, London, one day per month, feeding about 12,000 men and women daily, wrote Cooper.
According to the club history on the website, a group of 30 women met at the home of Mrs. Archibald Parker on Jan. 17, 1910 to discuss the formation of a women’s Canadian Club. (A men’s Canadian Club of Ottawa had been formed in 1903.) Mrs. R. G. McConnell moved a motion that a club be formed and the motion was seconded by Mrs. Clifford Sifton. The motion passed unanimously with Mrs. Adam Shortt being appointed to the chair. An interim constitution was presented by Mrs. McConnell.
A membership fee of $1 per year was set, and the first public meeting of the club took place on Dec. 3, 1910 in the Assembly Hall of the Collegiate Institute. Speaker Sir George W. Ross spoke about “What every Canadian should know.”
The Château Laurier Hotel opened in 1912; the OWCC had its first meeting there on Oct. 19, 1912, and has been meeting at the historic hotel ever since.
Men are welcome to join the Ottawa Women’s Canadian Club.
Retired RCMP Staff Sgt. Garth Hampson has been singing O Canada at the end of the meetings for 32 years.
There were 91 members at the first annual general meeting in January 1911. By the beginning of the First World War the membership stood at about 500. According to the history, at the outset of war, Mrs. Herridge wrote to Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden offering the services of the club in war work. Membership climbed to just over 1,600 members as the OWCC threw itself into war work.
“Over 61,000 letters were written to soldiers on the front line,” said the history. “Fund raising events were held for Belgian and Serbian relief. Thousands of pairs of socks were knitted, thousands of comfort parcels were sent to wounded servicemen. Funds were raised for three motor ambulances and to pay the wages of a nurse for one year. In all, well over $300,000 was raised to fund charities such as Belgian and Serbian Relief during the course of the war.”
The club incorporated under the War Charities Act in 1918, and as a lasting legacy after the First World War, a “sum of $4,000 raised by entertainments, sale of service flags and special donations was devoted to the foundation of a scholarship at Queen’s University for Prisoners of War enlisted from, or resident in Oct. 12: Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, who will talk about “Stanley’s Dream: the Canadian Medical Expedition to Easter Island”
Nov. 16: Mark O’Neill, president and CEO of the federal crown corporation that operates the Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum
Dec. 14: A presentation of Christmas classics by St. Joseph’s Catholic Secondary School Choir
Jan. 18: Dr. Peg Herbert, founder of Help Lesotho, will speak on “Changing 12,000 Lives isn’t for Wimps”
Military District #3 and their descendants, or failing these, veterans of the Great War and their descendants.”
Today, the Ottawa Women’s Canadian Club is still awarding scholarships, and the program has been expanded to award scholarships at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, as well as at Queen’s. “The first scholarship at Queen’s was for ex-servicemen and their relatives, but now we leave it up to the university to decide who receives it. It is given to men or women, and we like to give it to people doing Canadian studies,” said Cooper.
During the years between the wars, event organizers became very imaginative, she wrote. “One year, they wrote to every premier in Canada as well as the prime minister, inviting them to speak to the club. Several of the premiers accepted the invitation.”
At the onset of the Second World War, the club once again went into high gear, registering under the War Charities Act to enable them to raise necessary funds. At the beginning of the First World War, Sir George Perley came to the aid of the club, supplying them with a house at 270 Cooper St. in which to carry out most of the day-to-day war work. In 1939, the estate of Sir George Perley came to the rescue of the club giving offices at 55 Metcalfe St. for the club to carry out necessary work.
In 1946 the club’s annual membership fee was raised from $1 to $2, the first time in their history that the fee had been raised.
Today, new members are welcome, and new memberships may be purchased for an annual fee of $67 by completing the form on the club’s website.
Luncheon tickets are available monthly, or as a prepaid package. For more information, please view www.owcc.ca.