Maxwell Bates at Central Collegiate

Here we are at Central Collegiate, the current headquarters of the Calgary Board of Education. This beautiful sandstone building was built in 1908, and when it opened it was considered to be the city's academic high school. Now, its literary connection.

Today I would like to talk to you about Maxwell Bates, the Calgary boy who would become Canada's foremost expressionist painter in the mid-20th century. Max Bates went to high school here and was a graduate of the class of 1924. Maxwell Bates became known to the world as a painter, but in Calgary he is also remembered as the architect who designed the new St. Mary's Cathedral in Mission in the 1960s.

Bates was also a writer. In mid-life he also wrote essays for Canadian art magazines. He had a lot of opinions about society and art. He also wrote poetry. He started writing poems as a teenager, around the time he was a student at Central Collegiate. He continued to write poems throughout his life. A couple of his adolescent poems feature the urban landscape of his hometown.

I'd like to talk just for a minute about Maxwell Bates' literary education in Calgary. He grew up across the street from the Lougheed house, just west of the Ranchmen's Club. I'm going to talk more about his childhood home when we get to the Ranchmen's Club stop. According to Bates' biographer Kathleen Snow, Bates' real education was gained at the public library. Early on, the library had played a really important part of the young Maxwell Bates' life. The Calgary Public Library opened in January 1912, around the time Bates was going to elementary school at Haultain School. Haultain School is kitty-corner to Central Memorial Park Library. There was a larger building that is no longer there, but the little bungalow is still there. As Max Bates walked home from school, he would often stop off at the library and hang out in the children's section. Now the children's section of the library was a really important initiative of Alexander Calhoun, the city's first chief librarian, and this is what he said:

"If the children of Calgary do not have access to good literature, and are not guided in its choice, we shall have in future a population that does not read good literature."

And in 1912, when Max Bates was stopping in at the library to spend time in the children's section, Calgary and Toronto were the only Canadian cities offering children's library services. Very foresightful on Alexander Calhoun's part, and an important part of Maxwell Bates' education. When Bates was in high school here at Central Collegiate, he continued to visit the library several times a week, and he continued to do this well into his early 20s. He read all the libraries books on art, he read literary criticism, he read psychology, philosophy, poetry, and the Russian novelists, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. So, the Calgary Public Library was a mecca for Maxwell Bates, much as it would be for his family friend, poet P.K. Page.

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