“From Wartime Refuge to Peaceful Hippie Haven”: Chapter by Dr. Tarah Brookfield

From Wartime Refuge to Peaceful Hippie Haven: Generations of Youth on Grindstone Island

Tarah Brookfield

Grindstone Island, a twelve-acre private isle on Big Rideau Lake, has the unusual distinction of twice being used as a sanctuary from war, once by militarists and once by pacifists. Grindstone was first the summer home of Admiral Charles Kingsmill, director of the Naval Service of Canada. After his death, Kingsmill’s peace-minded daughter donated the island to the Quakers in 1963 for use as a peace education summer retreat. Attendees included activists, educators, university students, journalists, diplomats, and spiritual leaders. Children and youth were always an important part of Grindstone’s landscape and mission. During the Second World War, the island housed British children evacuated from the Blitz. In the 1960s and 1970s, the sons and daughters of Canadian and American peace activists spent their summer vacations exploring the island, and taking part in multi-generational activities, such as the 1965 Grindstone Experiment, an elaborately designed role-playing exercise that simulated a mock invasion of the island that was meant to test the principles of nonviolence. Between 1966 and 1971, an annual workshop for high school students to “Explore the Possibilities of a World Free from War” became a transformative experience for youth concerned about the state of the world.1

This chapter will interrogate how the island, as a natural and politicized space, was presented, experienced, and embodied as a refuge for a collective of youth endangered or alarmed by war, be it the Second World War, the Vietnam War, or the Cold War. Drawing on oral history and archival documents, the chapter com- pares youth’s experiences confronting real and imaginary experiences of war, while living away from home in the wild. The island’s geographic space, in conjunction with its owners’ cultural practices and ideological mission, stimulated young guests’ imaginations, allowing the anxieties of war and other forms of violence to seem both distant and present, and in some cases, possible to resist. This particular piece is part of a larger monograph project based on interviews with over forty Grindstone staff or participants, some of whom have asked to be referred to by a pseudonym. I also drew on the manuscript collections of the Grindstone Cooperative and the personal papers of associated activists and Quakers. This chapter focuses on the understudied role played by Grindstone youth as members (willingly and begrudgingly) of politicized families and as independent agents in peace education and activism.

The Kingsmill Era: A Retreat from War

Prior to it becoming a site of peace education, the island was a retreat from war under an entirely different guise. Sir Charles Edmund Kingsmill (1855–1935) served forty years as an officer in Britain’s Royal Navy before being chosen to found Canada’s naval services in 1908. In the prelude to the First World War, he oversaw the training of Canadian naval cadets and fought unsuccessfully to expand Canada’s fleet. When war was declared, he deployed two Canadian cruisers for the purposes of protecting the East and West coasts and refitted government and civilian ships to create an anti-submarine flotilla.2 It was during his wartime leadership that Kingsmill began to spend summers on Grindstone Island with his wife Lady Frances, and their three children.

Grindstone’s main cottage, dominated by a large veranda built to resemble a ship’s deck, was finished in 1916. Over the years, twelve smaller buildings were added to the property, including a servants’ quarters, guest cabins, a laundry, an icehouse, and a nursery, along with a boathouse, tennis court, and playhouse. Initially much of the acreage remained untamed, full of uncut grasses and bush, beaches and coves for swimming, trees to climb, and wildlife to watch. Electricity was brought over in the 1930s. Still, the island’s only form of telecommunication remained a radio until the 1980s. Grindstone was located approximately seventy kilometres from Ottawa and fifty kilometres from Kingston, and was initially accessible via train and ferry. This made Grindstone a conveniently located getaway; close enough to return to the capital when needed, but distant enough to temporarily escape the pressures of war. Historians have characterized spaces such as Grindstone as where modernity and anti-modernity meet. The phenomenon of wilderness tourism, popular in turn of the century Ontario, was rooted in the cultural values of Euro-Canadians, such as the Kingsmills, who had money, leisure time, and freedom of movement. They most likely vacationed, as Patricia Jasen argues, as a “reward for coping with the stressful world of business and social obligation.”3 Spurred by new transportation technologies that made it possible for a comfortable, extended trip to the wilderness, many Canadians believed a short-term stay immersed in nature would rejuvenate the industrialized and urban body.4

The wilderness as a transformative space was an enduring myth, one just as appealing to Grindstone’s mid- to late twentieth-century visitors. Some guests went so far as to characterize the island in utopic terms. “From the moment the launch motor dies and the craft eases up against the wharf, there is an irrepressible feeling that this is a very different island in the sun,” wrote Ottawa Citizen reporter Andrew Cohen in 1978. “Weeping willows, maples and pines stencil jagged figures against an ice blue sky. A molten sun sears the landscape. The vision of El Dorado, Shangri-La or any other lost horizon comes to mind.”5 Similarly, oral history participants who visited Grindstone in their youth used terms such as “beautiful,” “paradise,” “magical,” “heavenly,” and “amazing” to describe the island. It is quite possible these adjectives are filtered through their adult nostalgia and vocabulary; but certainly, islands have held a special place of enchantment in children’s culture and literature, symbolizing discovery and adventure in the case of Treasure Island or the danger and uncertainty of Lord of the Flies or the sanctuary and romance of Anne of Green Gables. Pauline Dewan, a specialist in the art of place in children’s literature, classifies islands as representing “for many children their first place of autonomy, spaces free of parental control.”6 She also notes how islands tend to stand apart from the ordinary world, thus allowing not only for a “wondrous ad- venture” but sometimes “a revaluation of society’s values” and “a place of resolution and reconciliation.”7

In the case of Grindstone, the island was only accessible in summer, a time for school-aged children that symbolized freedom from a certain set of responsibilities. Typical summer days were filled with hours of exploration. Most of Grind- stone’s visitors, from the elites of the Kingsmill era, and later, the middle-class peace program participants, called cities and suburbs their home, so their exposure to a wilderness landscape would seem somewhat exotic. It was also an opportunity to pretend Grindstone was its own little world where you could practise the principles in which you believed. This might be particularly appealing to youth. “Children, who control little else in their lives,” argues Sue Misheff, “have always been drawn to the concept of a place of their own where they can be lords and ladies of their own kingdoms.”8 In the case of Grindstone, the island’s natural beauty was seen to be particularly conducive for personal reflection and building relationships. The simple act of leaving home, leaving one’s family, and leaving the mainland could allow one to be open to new possibilities.

Admiral Kingsmill retired in 1920, not long after King George V knighted him for his service defending the British Empire. The Kingsmills summered at Grind- stone in the interwar years where they hosted many friends and dignitaries, including Prime Minister Robert Borden, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and actor David Niven. In reference to the leisurely days of water sports and nights filled with formal dinners, one grandson described summers on the island containing “a sort of Great Gatsby atmosphere.”9 After the admiral’s death in 1935, Lady Kingsmill continued to make Grindstone her summer home. During the Second World War, at Lady Kingsmill’s invitation, the island became a welcome retreat for government officials weary of the bureaucratic treadmill in Ottawa, along with members of the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service and convalescing soldiers.10

Seven young family acquaintances, evacuated from Britain to Ottawa during the Second World War, joined the Kingsmill grandchildren on Grindstone in the summer months. As Claire Halstead’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, the goal of state-sponsored and private evacuation schemes was intended to shelter children from the physical risks of the war. Unlike unaccompanied children, the Grindstone evacuees came with their mothers or nannies and were not housed with strangers. They also benefited from staying with a privileged family whose resources allowed them to circumvent most wartime shortages and rationing. Keeping with Grindstone’s retreat mentality, there was a deliberate effort to leave the war behind, at least in front of the children. The only real tangible reminder was their missing fathers, most of whom were serving overseas or employed in other war service; however, fathers were never a familiar presence in peacetime anyway, since employment usually kept them away until the weekends. “They did not tell us about the awful parts,” recalls one granddaughter, Diana Kingsmill- Flynn, in reference to the adults, particularly in regards to her uncle’s wartime service in the North Atlantic.11 Upon reflection, she seemed embarrassed to re- member that she spent the war “perfectly happy,” a not surprising experience given the children’s young ages, the family’s socioeconomic status, and their isolated locale.

British children evacuated to Canada likely felt war anxiety and the separation from home and their fathers far more strongly than the Kingsmill’s own children and grandchildren. Kingsmill-Flynn has a strong memory of one small British boy who used to perpetually stand at the shore on a big rock and look out to sea, pretending to be an admiral on a ship. It is unclear if this daily game was specifically related to the war or because he was staying in the home of a deceased admiral. Nevertheless, it does call attention to the ways in which a child’s imagination could be stimulated by the natural environment.

The surviving Kingsmill children inherited the island after their mother’s death in 1956. There was talk of selling the property, but the politically active daughter Diana Kingsmill-Wright “hoped the tranquility of their island can be extended a little into the world.”12 Sent off to boarding school in England and finishing school in Switzerland, Kingsmill-Wright returned to Ottawa to be presented as a debutante in 1929. Her early adulthood involved marriage to the son of a British lord and politician, Victor Gordon-Lennox, international travel, and competing as part of Canada’s Olympic ski team. In 1945, she eschewed her life of privilege when she married her second husband, Jim Wright, a prairie socialist, and moved to rural Saskatchewan. Out west, Kingsmill-Wright became active in cooperative, environmental, and peace movements. She worked as the editor of the Union Farmer newspaper and campaigned for the Canadian Commonwealth Federation party.13 As Saskatchewan’s provincial representative for the disarmament organization Voice of Women/Voix des Femmes (VOW), ending the threat of nuclear annihilation became Kingsmill-Wright’s most critical political cause in the 1960s. At the same time, her son George Gordon-Lennox, a journalist with the Ottawa Journal, was also interested in international affairs. When he heard Grindstone might be sold, he suggested the family retain the island but lease it to a university or not-for-profit association interested in “international understanding” and working with young people.14 The solution came via Murray Thompson, Diana’s old friend and the peace education secretary for the Canadian Friends Service Committee (CFSC), the social justice wing of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Kingsmill-Wright leased the island to the CFSC in 1963 for a dollar per year so that they could build a peace retreat there. She explained her decision as such: “While the island has served as a refuge for casualties of war … the present means of destruction [means] there can no longer be war but annihilation. Thus, we feel there is only one course to follow – to do what is in our power to help build the peace.”15 Kingsmill-Wright felt her father would have approved, explaining that in the last years of his life, Admiral Kingsmill began to question the use of military solutions to resolve conflicts. He felt it was tragic that air warfare put civilians at such great risk.16

Building a Peaceful Community

Since the seventeenth century, Quakers have been committed to actively opposing war and committing to peace. They have traditionally worked toward this goal through conscientious objection, civil disobedience, peace education, and assistance to refugees. The CFSC’s educational work at Grindstone was both a product of and departure from the broader Canadian peace movement. While the public spectacle of protests, marches, and letter-writing campaigns organized by groups like the vow or the Canadian Committee for Nuclear Disarmament (CCND) targeted government action and broad civic engagement, Grindstone under the CFSC focused more on social change through education. The CFSC transformed the Kingsmill summer home into a camp that could accommodate approximately fifty overnight guests. Quakers Nancy and John Pocock, who supervised the camp, scheduled fourteen workshops for the first summer on topics as varied as “Creative Alternatives to the Arms Race,” “National Interest and International Responsibility,” and “Towards a Relevant Christian Peace Testimony.”17 While children, including the Pococks’ teenage daughter Judy, accompanied parents to some of the above-mentioned events, the first summer also held one specific multigenerational event. vow rented out the facilities to host a conference designed to encourage cross-cultural understanding between families from English and French Canada. The conference involves structured meetings, language lessons, cultural exhibitions, and group recreational activities.18

By the end of the first summer, Jack Pocock concluded, “Grindstone has already become a concrete and visible symbol of the peace effort in Canada.”19 He attributed this to the centre’s ability to attract 377 registered participants in the first summer of operation, followed by 424 visitors in 1964 and 496 in 1965.20 Most adult guests were members of existing Canadian and American peace, civil rights, and internationalist groups. Grindstone’s youngest participants were usually their offspring or teens interested in politics and/or seeking an awakening. The latter was the case of Peter, a high school workshop participant, who recalled: “I’d never been to anything like that [Grindstone]. It ended up being significant to me be- cause I’d grown up in a fairly sheltered, naïve environment … [I] certainly was not exposed to things politically. At Grindstone I first clued in to Bob Dylan. That was the month Sergeant Pepper Came out, and we had that there. It was a real eye opener … It certainly affected my life. It was one of the first times I experienced thoughts about social agitation and actually doing political work to make things change.”21 With few exceptions, Grindstone’s guests were left leaning and came from white, middle-class households in and around Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Unsurprisingly, Quakers made up a large cohort. There were also a number of Jewish participants and members from Christian denominations, but approximately one-third of participants described themselves as having no religious affiliation.22 While the gender ratio varied depending on the specific topic of each seminar, high support from vow meant that women made up approximately 60 per cent of the participants each summer in the 1960s. Between 1963 and 1968 there were a number of international visitors; 12 per cent of the participants were American and 10 per cent came from other countries, including university students on exchange from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Some of the Americans were young men of draft age and used their visit to make connections with Canadians who could advise them about immigrating to Canada.23 Among the Canadians, one 1967 survey reports that 67 per cent of Grindstone guests had voted for the New Democratic Party.24 For some guests, their radicalism extended to lifestyle or fashion choices associated with the counterculture. “Going to Grindstone Island and you could always pick out on the ferry who was hippies and who were the cottagers right?” quipped David Josephy, who visited the island with his parents and brother in the 1960s and later returned to attend the high school workshops.25

Practising Peace and Non-Violence as a Family

The Josephys fit the profile of typical Grindstone family: a married couple with young children, active and committed in peace work. Walter and Goldie had im- migrated to Canada from England in 1956. Walter was a teacher with the Eastern Ontario Institute of Technology and Goldie focused on raising their two sons, Michael and David, born in the 1950s. The family was Jewish, though non-practising for the most part, and Goldie later converted to Anglicanism. Walter’s family fled Nazi persecution in Germany in the 1930s, while Goldie grew up during the London Blitz; both knew firsthand the terror and destruction of war. They became quite active in Cold War–driven peace movements in Ottawa, including branches of the Committee for Control of Radiation Hazards and the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and they started the Committee for Peace and Liberation. Goldie was also a member of vow, who on her own, or with her children in tow, participated in anti-war marches and organized the Ottawa visits of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Linus Pauling. As an entire family, the Josephys marched against the installation of BOMARC missiles at the Royal Canadian Air Force base in La Macaza, Quebec, in 1964. The family also opened their Ottawa home to American draft resisters seeking temporary refuge. When asked why she was so active, Goldie replied, “I protest for my children’s sake, and for their children. I want the human race to survive. Willfully adding to the peril of the world – nuclear explosions, pollution and the rest – is demonic. We must fight against it.”26

The Josephys visited Grindstone numerous times together in the 1960s. While Walter and Goldie attended seminars, the sons spent the days hiking, fishing, canoeing, swimming, and reading. Once the high school workshops began, their youngest son, David, visited Grindstone without his parents for two summers. While Grindstone acted as a temporary sanctuary for many families, the participants or island should not be idealized. Like many active families, the Josephys were typical in how the struggle to balance paid responsibilities at work, at home, and in their activism could be insurmountable. The couple divorced in 1975, a decision their sons attribute to their mother’s intense commitment to her activism.27

The Josephys and other participants who visited as a family attended Grind- stone for practical and ideological reasons. The island’s setting made it attractive to families looking to combine learning with an affordable summer holiday. It was also a more appealing location than a mainland conference centre.28 Work- shops were usually scheduled during the day, with breaks for shared meals, meditation, and outdoor activities. Children and non-participating spouses were free to spend their entire time on leisure activities. Grindstone also became a family- friendly space for parents wanting to immerse themselves and their offspring in an environment that supported their intertwined political beliefs and parenting goals. Many of these parents believed that being active in the peace movement was part of being a good parent, a sentiment expressed by renowned pediatrician and anti-war activist Dr Spock in 1963: “It simply isn’t enough today for parents to give birth to a child to feed, clothe and toilet train him and send him to school. They must do their part to see that the world is not annihilated before the child can inherit it. And they must bring him up unwarped by Cold War anxieties. What can we tell our children when they are anxious? We can tell them what we are doing personally in working for peace.”29 While the majority of Grindstone pro- grams approached Spock’s advice by attempting to solve global security threats and local inequities, Grindstone also ran a specific workshop for parents and teachers called “Raising Children for a Better World.” It orchestrated discussions on how to practise peaceful childrearing in regards to discipline, developing morals, cooperative play, and non-violent toys. More generally, it addressed “concerns for caregivers in a nuclear age.”30

The Grindstone Experiment

Occasionally, the practicalities of parenting collided with the practices of non-violence and a peaceful ideology. This can be most dramatically seen during the Training Institutes in Non-Violence, which “took discussion about peace issues such as non-violent resistance a giant leap forward by realistically stimulating an actual conflict situation, with participants split into aggressors and defenders.”31 Much like the civil defence training exercises analyzed by Andrew Burtch in this volume, these exercises involved significant role play, a form of experimental learning popular in the 1960s and 1970s in which participants immersed themselves in fictional scenarios to practice decision-making and self-reflection. The goal was to prepare activists and educators engaging in real non-violence activities to most effectively confront resistance to their causes, whether it be police action breaking up a peaceful protest or opening dialogues with those committed to violent action as a means of change or social control. Unlike the infamous role play in the Stan- ford Prison Experiment or Milgram Experiment, there was no deception involved in Grindstone’s role play; however, much like those social psychological experiments, participants in the Training Institutes for Non-Violence deeply immersed themselves in their roles and confessed to having strong emotional reactions to the intense situations they experienced. Unique to Grindstone’s role play was the presence of children and youth whose participation added a layer of realism to the fictional scenario, forcing the adults to consider the implications of experimental learning and the ideology they were practising.

Grindstone’s most heightened non-violence simulation was the infamous 1965 experiment where fifty-one participants engaged in a mock invasion of the island. Divided into umpires, defenders, and invaders, the simulation was meant to test how well the participants assigned as defenders were able to apply the principles of non-violence resistance in an oppressive scenario. A third of the defenders were young people between the ages of two and fifteen, dependents of the adult participants. These included the four Christiansen family siblings, all but one of whom were high school students from Connecticut. They were on the island with their mother Mary and their father Gordon, a chemistry professor, who was active in the War Resisters League and chairperson of the American Committee for Non- Violent Action. On the younger side were the three Olson siblings from Newborough, New York, who accompanied their mother Lydia and their father Theodore, a Presbyterian minister and creator of the Upland Institute, a professional school of social action training in Pennsylvania. Both fathers would later co-author Thirty-One Hours: The Grindstone Experiment, a transcript and analysis of the planning, experiment, and debrief of the role play exercise that they had de- signed.32 For the Christiansen and Olson families, particularly the mothers, parenting had to continue during the experiment and consequently, decisions had to be made regarding the extent of the children’s engagement in the role play. In other cases, the young people’s genuine interest or lack thereof in the adults’ make believe influenced the experiment’s outcomes.

Figure 6.1
Adult and child participants in the Training Institute in Non-Violence known as 31 Hours, 1965. Nancy Pocock Fonds, Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York University.

Sometimes the children’s impact was a consequence of their schedules, supervisory needs, and attention spans. For example, a late meeting for the defender liaisons was cancelled because a fifteen-year-old liaison had already gone to bed.33 The experiment’s transcript also records a snippet of conversation between the Olson sisters in which they discovered their brother Ernst was somewhere he should not have been, to which Margrit Ann replied, “No! Oh, no,” followed by Johanna saying, “He can’t go without a mother!” There is no context to this discussion, but it suggests little Ernst was breaking some set of rules, whether out of confusion, apathy, or because the adults were otherwise distracted. During the exercise, there was a meeting for worship, held silently per Quaker principles, in which teenage Scott Christiansen played a practical joke by blasting the Doors song “People are Strange” on the record player in the main lodge. The presence and participation of youth affected the role play’s direction in subtle ways, while also demonstrating children’s agency to play along or resist the adults’ plans.

In more significant ways, Ted Olson believes that “people probably changed how they’d behave because of the presence of the children.”34 Most notably, the well-being of and uses for child defenders were taken into consideration during the planning stages of the exercise. Since people could be “killed” in the game, foster parents were selected in case there was a “loss” of biological parents. Hiding spaces like cubby holes were prepared in advance. Most significantly, meeting minutes show that one idea floated was that “Children may be used spontaneously to break down barriers or in highly defined situations with their parents’ con- sent.”35 In regards to the latter, the use of children in political protest was not a new concept. vow and its American equivalent, Women Strike for Peace, had long used the voices and bodies of real children in their marches and protests as an effective means to reinforce the respectability of their maternal activism and convey the “children are our future” message. For some parents, bringing children along was also due to a lack of other childcare options.36 Acting on their own or on their parents’ initiatives, African American children and teens were on the frontlines of civil rights demonstrations in the American South in the 1950s and 1960s. Michael Sznajderman’s study of the youth marches against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, demonstrates the important presence of young Black activists in the civil rights movement. Not only did it signal a united Black community, but images of Black school children taking to the streets, where they were harassed and arrested by police and brutalized by police dogs and fire hoses, were credited with awakening national public sympathy. Concurrently, civil rights activist parents were criticized for placing their children at risk. In response, these parents argued there were more important, long-term improvements to their children’s welfare that only desegregation and equity could bring.37 No further details were provided in the Grindstone records to illuminate the specific uses of children imagined in the experiment. Given the Quaker mentality, it is unlikely the children were to be used as human shields. Rather, the children may have been expected to consciously or subconsciously charm or trick the invaders with their childish innocence. Alternatively, the presence of children could help the defenders appeal to the emotional nature of the invaders.

In reality, the children made the adult defenders, particularly the mothers, feel more vulnerable than expected, particularly when it came to the main form of non-violent resistance chosen to demonstrate opposition to the invasion, a hunger strike.38 Most defenders stated they would respect if the mothers and children sat out the hunger strike, though at least one defender thought the cooperation of everyone was necessary since the image of hungry children would give the invaders “a black mark with their superiors and possibly with the world at large, thus bringing pressure for release of the defenders.”39 On the first evening of the hunger strike, Mary Christiansen escorted all the children to the dining hall to eat dinner, though she did not eat herself. Meanwhile in solidarity, her eldest child Steve fasted along with her. He remembers rationalizing his choice: “I wanted to be part of the fasting group. I didn’t want to be treated like a kid … I think maybe I was kind of halfway between the life of a child and the life of an adult.”40 Steve’s siblings, Scott, Roger, and Cori, confessed by morning they were happy to skip the “lousy” oatmeal breakfast served at Grindstone, and pretended they were participating in a hunger strike too, something Scott remembers the adults praising him for.41 Meanwhile Lydia Olson, who had experienced real hunger as a child in the Philip- pines during the Second World War, had “mixed emotions” at including a hunger strike in the role play.42 Ultimately, the issues of food became moot as the exercise ended after thirty-one hours, several days earlier than planned, due to the emotional distress caused by the “death” of thirteen participants who were “shot” by the invaders for refusing to obey an order to desist their non-violent protests.

In the aftermath of the experiment, many participants classified the role play as a failure for non-violence, while others thought it was valuable in thinking realistically of how one could organize peacefully when confronted with violence. While it had not been a deliberate intent, making the experiment a multigenerational activity with children present impacted the dynamics of the game and forced participants to consider (and in some cases reconsider) the application and style of non-violence resistance. Furthermore, seeing children take on adult-like roles and responsibilities or suffer deprivation likely forced some participants to reflect on the transience of childhood in violent circumstances. Although none of the youth were included in the formal debrief recorded in Thirty-One Hours, looking back thirty years later, many mentioned how surprised they were at the adults’ intense reaction to a game, and critiqued its value as a learning exercise. Even as a child, Scott Christiansen believed he knew at the time how phony the exercise was, adding, “that’s not to say that you couldn’t gain some kind of perspective on nonviolence,” but that if it had “truly been an occupation of Nazi-type people, it would have been a little more brutal and serious … I think the fact that we all knew that it wasn’t real, that it was a lot easier to … be a resistor simply because it wasn’t real.”43 While some of the youth had harsh words for the experimental learning they witnessed in 1965, many were keen to move from the peripheries of Grindstone programming. In 1966, the development of the high school workshop allowed teenagers to take centre stage at Grindstone for a week each summer.

High School Workshops

Youth visiting Grindstone were part of an exodus of Canadian children trekking far from home each summer to soak in sunshine, fresh air, and the values associated with simple living. While the most extreme expression of this tradition would be hitchhiking, a popular escapade for young men and women coming of age during the counterculture, summer camps remained popular spaces bridging autonomy and collective experiences.44 In The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Anti- modernism, and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920–55, Sharon Wall explains how under the guise of outdoor recreation, camps were designed to imbue a progressive form of education critical to child development. As participants in transformative experiences, campers were expected to graduate with an appreciation and the skills required for becoming productive and well-rounded citizens. Across North America, discerning parents could choose from a variety of camp options emphasizing certain skills, or what particular brand of citizenship would be emphasized. The fact that almost every religious sect and political affiliation hosted a summer camp spoke to the perceived value of camps as important spaces to further inaugurate youth in their parents’ belief system. Since the 1930s, Quaker youth had spent summers at Camp Neekaunis on Georgian Bay in youth-only or family camps that combined worship, recreation, and education. Not unlike Grindstone, Neekaunis mixed outdoor education with Quaker principles, including their commitment to peace and non-violence, which meant that campers could spend an afternoon participating in an Underground Railway role play or drive across the US border to bring cash donations to organizations supporting draft dodgers.45

Because Neekaunis already served youth, Grindstone did not initially include separate programming for adolescents. “We had no intention of having teenagers,” explained Nancy Pocock, “except the odd one who wanted to come. It reached the stage where teenagers were getting too difficult for them to cope with at Camp Neekaunis. It was when kids were first starting to get into drugs and sex. They said: ‘Let’s send them to Grindstone!’”46 The psychedelic youth culture emerging within the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, some of which ran counter to Quaker principles of abstaining from alcohol and drugs, can partly explain the demand for something less traditional than Neekaunis. More broadly, the new programming at Grindstone addressed adult anxiety about what Mischa Honeck and Gabriel Rosenberg have dubbed the “Atomic Generation,” the cohort of baby boomers who grew up in the shadows of Hiroshima and the Cuban Missile Crisis. This generation were by no means the first to reflect on their vulnerability, but the dangers specific to that period prompted an urgency for the development of political programming “accessible to youth, directed toward youth, and expressed by youth.”47 As high school workshop participant Mary Newberry recalled, “I don’t remember a time that we weren’t afraid of nuclear war … My generation all remembers the day Kennedy died and, and I remember the tension around the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War.”48 The Pococks’ own daughter Judy experienced this restlessness. Raised as a Quaker, by the time her parents were wardens on Grindstone, she had begun to drift away from Quakerism and was “moving towards Marxism, moving towards Communism,” where she wrestled with the principles of pacifism alongside the possibility that a revolution might be needed to bring about social and political change. “We fought a lot,” Judy recalls, over her new influences. At Grindstone, she bunked with the kitchen staff and experienced more independence as she mingled with the other guests. “So the nice thing about Grindstone was … although I was with them [her parents] … I had some independence and people related to me independently of them.”49

The high school workshop began in 1966 and ran for five years. Students in their last three years of study were eligible and the cost was $15 or $20 for one week. Often, the young participants had already been to Grindstone with their families before or heard about the program through friends or faculty in alter- native schools in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and New York. Unlike Neekaunis, the high school workshops were non-denominational, had a significant portion of time led by the youth themselves, and prioritized a semi-structured curriculum based on non-violence, civil rights, and disarmament over traditional camp activities. “I was aware that Grindstone Island wasn’t a camp,” recalls Eve Schmitz- Hertzberg, “it wasn’t a place where you just went and had fun, that you were expecting that you would be doing some work, intellectual work, thinking.”50 The day began at 7:00 a.m. with a swim, followed by meditation, and a time set side aside for a creative activity. In the afternoon and evening there were three time slots for work groups and community meetings, plus another swim break and free time. Questions addressed in the work groups included “Can we honestly respond to social problems and still make a living, please our parents and live in suburbia – do we want to?” and “How are social issues confronted today by non- violence confrontation, flower-power politics, dropping out, working groups for change, and traditional politics?” Facilitators, referred to as “resource people” to avoid an authoritarian perception, were typically under twenty-four years of age. They included David DePoe, de facto leader of Toronto’s Yorkville community of hippies, diggers, and other counterculture youth, or “young thinking” adults like the Pococks.51 While there were rules against underage drinking, oral history recollections from youth and staff suggest some resource people turned a blind eye when some kids engaged in pot smoking or alcohol consumption during free time.

As with most camps, the friendships, romances, rivalries and pranks, and sense of place stand out the most thirty years later. As Mary Newberry recalls, “my memories are really around developing my own personality and not so much about developing political ideas or social justice ideas even though that was the stuff at the background.”52 For others the trip to Grindstone was indeed life changing. Such was the case for Ted Hill, an African American young man from New Jersey who in a letter to the Pococks asked if he could come back because “I had never enjoyed myself so much in such a complete way as I did last year on Grindstone, and I had a lump in my throat the size of an apple the morning I left.” According to his letter, his time at Grindstone and meeting the Pococks inspired him to im- migrate to Canada where he would be safe from the draft.

In other cases, youth left Grindstone disappointed, feeling the program was too tame. “I’m stifled in school and in a similar way here,” expressed one participant in anonymous evaluation of the 1967 workshop. Harsher criticism came from another youth who called the program “bureaucratic” claiming the organizers tended to manipulate consensus in meetings.53 Other feedback included complaints about the presence of cliques, accusations that the girls were not being serious enough or the boys were too hostile. In 1969, there were recurring tensions between American and Canadian youth that played out on the volleyball court. The escalating aggression resulted in the triumphant American volleyball team replacing Grindstone’s United Nations flag with their own handmade USA flag. In response a group of Canadian boys torn it down and burnt it, an event that caused multiple attempts at reconciliations by facilitators with lacklustre results.54

Figure 6.2
Players on Grindstone volleyball court, 1976. Canadian Yearly Meeting Archives and Library, Pickering College.

While internal discord could make for powerful teaching moments, it could also spark pessimism at humanity’s capacity for conflict and violence. “I still don’t understand people,” one youth reflected at the end. “I mean the hatred, killing, stupidities and goddamn blindness. I find myself hating mankind and wishing I was dead and other times trembling at the thought of the A-bomb and wishing all the hate in the world were changed into love.”55 As with the adult programming, often the sessions at Grindstone exposed individual and group imperfections, prejudice, and biases which participants acknowledged were barriers toward building a culture of peace not only in the wider world, but also on the island.

In the early 1970s, participation in all of Grindstone’s adult and youth programs declined, a change attributed to less public engagement in the peace movement, as well as CFSC’s attention and resources being split between Grindstone and Neekaunis. Paired with a financial crisis that meant Diana Kingsmill-Wright had to sell the island, the early to mid-1970s represented a period of disillusionment. The 1974–75 shift from CFSC leadership to a cooperative model, with former participants buying shares and managing governance, saved Grindstone from financial ruin and revived its programming. It lasted for another decade and half, during which time youth once again became critical players, as participants in an alter- native children’s camp, as well as taking on roles as staff and co-op board members.

Conclusion

While there was no universal experience of children and youth at Grindstone, the young people drawn to the island commonly viewed it as a sanctuary. Whether it literally offered protection from war, as in the case of the British children escaping the Blitz, or acted as a safe space for the Canadian and American hippie youth to grapple with the causes of and solutions to war in the 1960s and 1970s, the island represented possibility. This is best summed up by David Josephy: “Growing up in suburban Ottawa, I very much felt in the late 1960s that a revolution was going on and I was missing it. Because all these incredible things were happening, but they were happening somewhere else … and then suddenly you went into this place where you just felt like you were part of this revolution of change in the world.” Grindstone might have been miles away from Woodstock or Birmingham in terms of geography and urgency, but for the young people who spent time on the island, it was a transformative space that allowed them to feel they were somewhere safe, somewhere special. Not only were their futures valued, they were considered valuable members of their families, communities, and nations.

NOTES

1  This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

2  Sarty, “Admiral Kingsmill and the Early Years of the Royal Canadian Navy,” 75–7.

3  Jasen, Wild Things, 20.

4  Stevens, “Cars and Cottages,” 26–56; Wall, The Nurture of Nature.

5  Cohen, “Sticking to the Grindstone for Peace,” Ottawa Citizen, 16 August 1978.

6  Dewan, The Art of Place in Literature for Children and Young Adults, 99.

7  Ibid., 102–3.

8  Quoted in ibid., 99.

9  George Gordon-Lennox, quoted in MacAdam, Making Waves: The Grindstone Story, 9.

10  MacAdam, 11.

11  Diana Kingsmill-Flynn, interview by author, 9 May 2013.

12  Barrie Zwicker, “Quakers Lease Island for Peace Conference,” Globe and Mail, 3 July 1963, 10.

13  Carroll Allen, “Making a Little Go a Long Way,” Homemaker’s Magazine 9, no. 5 (September 1974): 85–7.

14  Quoted in MacAdam, Making Waves: The Grindstone Story, 16.

15  Archives of Ontario (AO), Grindstone Cooperative Fonds (GCF), Minutes of the Advisory Council for Grindstone Island Peace Centre, 2 June 1963

16  MacAdam, Making Waves: The Grindstone Story, 7.

17  Zwicker, “Quakers Lease Island for Peace Conference,” 10.

18  Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Voice of Women Fonds, MG 28, I 218, Vol. 7, File 17.

19  MacAdam, Making Waves: The Grindstone Story, 19.

20  Ibid., 18–22.

21  Quoted in MacAdam, Making Waves: The Grindstone Story, 22.

22  AO, GFC, “1967 Quaker-UNESCO Seminar, Written by Dr Hanna Newcombe and Dr William Eckhardt, F4326-2 Archives 1967.

23  Clara Thomas Archives, Nancy Pocock Fonds, 1998-041 1017 (26), Letter from Ted Hill III to Nancy and John, 7 April 1968.

24  Ibid.

25  David Josephy, interview by author, 17 June 2013.

26  Bruce Ward, “‘I Am a Bit of a Fossil,’ Says City’s Habitual Protester,” Ottawa Citizen, 12 June 1974.

27  Author interviews with Michael Josephy and David Josephy, 7 June 2005.

28  Workshops ranged from weekend to weeklong events, costing $6 per day per adult, $5 per day per couple, and $3 per day for children under twelve and students. It was slightly cheaper in the non-peak months of June and September. AO, GCF, “1965 brochure,” F4326-2 Archives 1965.

29  LAC, VOW Fonds, “What, How, Why?” Pamphlet, NA, MG 28, I 218, Vol. 7, File 17.

30  AO, GCF, F4326-6-0-4, Raising Children for a Better World Part III Poster, no date.

31  MacAdam, Making Waves: The Grindstone Story, 23.

32  Olson and Christiansen, Thirty-One Hours: The Grindstone Experiment.

33  Ibid., 7.

34  Ted and Lydia Olson, interviews by author, 21 October 2014.

35  Olson and Christiansen, Thirty-One Hours: The Grindstone Experiment, 8.

36  Brookfield, Cold War Comforts, 14.

37  Sznajderman, “A Dangerous Business,” 27.

38  Olson and Christiansen, Thirty-One Hours: The Grindstone Experiment, 90. It should be noted that at points in the text people are not identified by name, though sometimes they are described as a “mother” or “child” narrowing down the list of potential people belonging to the Olsen or Christiansen family.

39  Ibid., 13.

40  Steve Christiansen, interview by author, 18 September 2014.

41  Scott Christiansen, interview by author, 22 September 2014.

42  Ted and Lydia Olson, interview by author, 21 October 2014.

43  Scott Christiansen, interview by author, 22 September 2014.

44  Mahood, Thumbing a Ride.

45  Author interviews with Nora Newcombe, 15 October 2014 and Eve Schmitz- Hertzberg, 25 April 2015.

46  Quoted in MacAdam, Making Waves: The Grindstone Story, 22.

47  Honeck and Rosenberg, “Transnational Generations,” 237.

48  Mary Newberry, interview by author, 13 July 2013.

49  Judy Pocock, interview by author, 23 September 2014.

50  Schmitz-Hertzberg, interview by author, 25 April 2015.

51  AO, GCF, F4326-3-0-14, Grindstone Reports, High School Workshop “Theme: Man as a Creative Force?” July 2–8 1967, 1–3.

52  Mary Newberry, interview by author, 13 July 2013.

53  AO, GCF, F4326-3-0-14, Grindstone Reports, High School Workshop 1967, 4–5.

54  AO, GCF, F4326-3-0-14, Grindstone Reports, High School Workshop “Theme: No Man Is an Island,” 2–8 July 1969.

55  AO, GCF, F4326-3-0-14, Grindstone Reports, High School Workshop 1967, 5.