Open Collections

Porebska-Smith, Maya

University of British Columbia

Professor Harry Tremaine Logan is a significant figure in the University of British Columbia’s history. Logan was a classicist trained at McGill and Oxford and later became principal of the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School on Vancouver Island. This school participated in child migration schemes, taking 329 British children from their parents or orphanages between 1934 and 1951. Survivors remember this school as a place where they suffered emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. In this thesis, I consider how Logan became an agent of empire by looking at his education and the relationship between classics, colonialism, and empire, and by analyzing the words of survivors from the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School. To do so, I consider how Logan understood empire, how he formed this understanding through his training in classics, the relationship between classics and empire, and demonstrate how Logan participated in imperialism at Fairbridge. I use archival evidence from the UBC archives (especially letters and exams taken and given by Logan), survivor testimonies, and investigatory findings on child migration, to contextualize how Logan came to hold the power he did and how he understood his role in contemporary imperialism in B.C. Logan was celebrated by UBC until recently but created an unsafe environment for children at Fairbridge. He was imagined for years as a benevolent philanthropist, but peeling back the layers of his work, the harm he caused was exposed. He studied Classics, understanding this work as setting the foundations for understanding imperialism in his day. The Fairbridge Farm School system provided the means through which Logan could enact imperialism and realize the ideals of ancient world Logan had studied. As a classical scholar who engaged with questions of power, domination, and colonization, the work he did at Fairbridge fit well within this scheme. He looked to ancient Greece and Rome to legitimize the work he undertook. Logan’s troubling legacy at UBC and his interpretation and application of Classics should inspire contemporary classicists to change the field.

Text

2023-01-05

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/83574

Ancient Culture, Religion and Ethnicity

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/