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Martin Kavanagh arrives in Brandon.

Article Excerpt
Growing up in Brandon I knew of Mr. Kavanagh and being a history buff I had copies of his books. I remember speaking to him once on the telephone, when I called to ask him for help with a paper I was writing. He was courteous and patient with me and did what he could to help me. My older brother had him as Geography teacher at Brandon Collegiate and he remembers a tall, thin, rather austere figure in a schoolmaster's gown. He never had any trouble with discipline because he commanded respect with his rather aloof and distant manner.

In the first chapter of his unpublished and unedited memoir, Kavanagh describes favorite teachers from his own school years and there is no doubt that he chose to emulate some of these men and their techniques. He was also from another age and another country where relations between teachers and students were less democratic than they were becoming in the 1960s.

The memoir shows Mr. Kavanagh in a warmer light, as he tells his personal stories (referring to himself in third person) with dry humor. He is remembered as a good teacher because he could make subjects interesting. He also had a certain cache for students as the man who not only taught history but had actually found the site of a fur trade post and the wreckage of an old river steamer.

Born in Ireland in 1895, Martin Kavanagh was educated in Wexford, Dublin and London. He was driven to immigrate, like so many at the time, by the terrible unemployment after World War I. He chose to come to Canada in 1923, and taught in rural schools. In 1929 he joined the staff of Brandon Collegiate Institute where he taught Latin and Geography until 1963.

The Brandon that Martin Kavanagh came to in 1929 was a prosperous market town, enjoying the benefits of the improved wheat crops of the late 1920s. The expanding use of the automobile during the 1920s meant that people from farther and farther away had become customers for the city's stores and services. Farmers, with money in their pockets for the first time in years, were buying.

Brandon lay in the heart of country settled largely by Protestants from Ontario and in 1929 the population was still quite homogenous. As a Roman Catholic, Kavanagh must have felt as though he had landed in a place more like Ulster than his home in Southern Ireland.

The prosperity of the late 1920s was short lived and soon enough the Stock Market crash, poor crops and low prices, and the terrible drought of the early 1930s left Brandon in a desperate situation. The city, obliged to support large numbers of citizens on relief, was almost bankrupt in the mid 1930s and her affairs were put under the control of an administrator. As the Depression ground on and on, the young teacher must have wondered at times why he had left Ireland. But he and Brandon persevered and eventually enjoyed the prosperity of the post war years.

He left us two books, The Assiniboine Basin: A Study of Discovery, Exploration and Settlement (1946) and La Verendrye--His Life and Times, in 1967. Both books are well researched and carefully written, as one would expect of a man like Martin Kavanagh, and they continue to be useful sources. His point of view was very much that of a man of his generation and he was criticized for, among other things, portraying La Verendrye as a "great man" bringing civilization to the wilderness.

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Kavanagh established a scholarship at St. Paul's College at the University of Manitoba, to encourage the study of La Verendrye, and he was given a special Margaret McWilliams Medal by the Manitoba Historical Society for his contribution to the understanding of Western Canadian history and geography. He died in 1987.

Taking Up the Load--Odds and Ends Excerpted from the unpublished and unedited memoir of Martin Kavanagh

When Kavanagh arrived in Brandon for all practical purposes he knew no one so he parked his car near the City Hall and commenced a search for a hotel. He examined the Prince Edward Hotel, the Brandon Hotel, and the Beaubier Hotel. All had price pretensions so he rejected them in favour of a room at the YMCA. It was clean. It had a bath and a Cafeteria and it cost under $2.00 a night. (At the time Kavanagh was dictating these notes a Brandon Resident had flown home from a trip to Vancouver. She mentioned that her hotel there charged $92.00 for room and bath, but, because she was one of a number of delegates to a convention, the hotel charge was reduced...

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