Numbering the Thirteen Club(s)… part 3

Much to my surprise, there was a second Thirteen Club in Toronto. As mentioned in part 2 of this series, the 1911 Blue Book linked the Toronto Thirteen Club to the University of Toronto, simply by calling it “The Thirteen Club of Toronto University”. The Blue Book blew it.

As far as I can determine, the two clubs were entirely separate with perhaps about half a dozen members in common: John Harvey Douglas, Howard Kilbourne Harris, Melville M. Hart, Richmond Wylie Hart, Angus Compston Heighington, and Alexander Crosby Snively. (There are still gaps in the records of both clubs, so I can’t be entirely sure.) Despite a strong connection between founder Walter Earl Willmott and the University—Walter, an undergrad at the time, and his father dean of the Dental College—the original Thirteen Club may have had more to do with friends from Metropolitan Methodist Church.[1]

The University of Toronto’s Thirteen Club was founded in 1902, some 18 years later than the Toronto Thirteen Club. Henry Darling was the founder and first president.[2] He was well connected with Toronto society, but we can’t know whether the Thirteen Club was on his radar. There were Thirteen Clubs at some American universities. I found them in the yearbooks of Purdue (West Lafayette, Indiana), Tulane (New Orleans, Louisiana), and the University of Dubuque, Iowa.[3]

The American university clubs seemed to be more like fraternities. Yearbook listings included alumni. The Toronto club listed only their 13 members in the University of Toronto yearbooks Torontonensis—and most members appeared on the list for just a single year. Unfortunately, the university club, like the original Thirteen Club, has not left us any minutes or correspondence, so we’re left to glean what we can from the club listings in the annual Torontonensis. The Club appears in editions from 1903 to 1915.

The 1906 edition of Torontonensis is the only one with any description. It states that “The purpose is to promote social intercourse among the members and bring them in contact with prominent men.” Well, I’m not sure what that means, but the Club is usually listed with literary and debating clubs. There is definitely an air of exclusivity (only a select 13 members) and it is described as a “senior society”. When included in a grad’s biography, that student is usually involved in lots of other activities from sports to music, to political science. Lots of them seem to be working towards a law degree.

The Search:

All of the names in the table below are taken from the University of Toronto yearbooks Torontonensis, which have been digitized and made searchable with OCR by The Internet Archive.[4] Editions from 1905 to 1915 each include a list of the Club members, mostly with just surname and initials. There is no list in the 1903 edition, but a search for “thirteen” found biographies for first president Henry Maurice Darling and first secretary William Francis Kingston. The 1904 edition also lacked a list, but the “thirteen” search found John Jennings Creelman, Archibald Foulds, Thomas Baker McQuesten, Percival John Montague, Harry Claude Moore, and William Hugh Vance. A second search for “13” found Club president Alexander Crosby Snively.

In an attempt to attach forenames instead of just initials, I searched each surname in the appropriate edition of Torontonensis. In most cases, I found a short grad biography of each—some tongue in cheek—but with shreds of useful information. (You’ll find those references in the table’s third column.) For a few other members, I have added additional information, mostly military service.

This project has given me some useful insight into searching publications in The Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive aka archive.org is a wonderful forward-thinking organization and a terrific resource for historians and genealogists. Most items that have been digitized are also made searchable with OCR (optical character recognition). We know that OCR has its limits—but The Internet Archive lets us see just how those limits affect a particular publication.

Scroll down below the image of the publication, and you’ll see the “full text” file produced by OCR. Open it to see how well the computer handled the font, paper, ink colour, page angle, etc. Can you adapt your search to work around them?

Some editions of Torontonensis used decorative initials at the beginning of sections. The Internet Archive’s OCR tried really hard to figure out what these fancy letters were—but sometimes came up with very creative but incorrect answers. If the capital T was transmogrified, searching “hirteen” in the text file might work. In some editions of Torontonensis, the Club was identified with Roman numerals. I found that XIII was frequently interpreted as XM or XIN or the final letter was dropped. Searching for XI was useful.

I also used these workarounds discovered by looking The Internet Archive’s full text files when I searched digitized newspapers.

The Thirteen Club project also took me to the University of Toronto Archives for the first time. The Archives is located in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library that in turn is within the Robarts Library, the spectacular Brutalist fortress on St. George Street. Actually, it is a very friendly fortress.

The Archives has files on University organizations. The file on the Thirteen Club was decidedly slim, and I recognized most of the items as belonging to the other “non-University” Thirteen Club. (I managed to resist looking at the Seventeen Club file in the same box!)

The Archives is behind the digitization of Torontonensis (and many other University publications) with The Internet Archive.[5] But beyond Torontonensis and the file mentioned above, we found no other references to the Thirteen Club in the collections database. However, there were some excellent resources to research the Thirteen Club members.

I only scratched the surface. A card catalogue in the reading room opens the door to a series of thousands of newspaper clipping files about students and their families. These files don’t exist for every student but were plentiful for the time period of the Thirteen Club, and for the echelon of society to which many members belonged. (They made the papers.) The clipping files are a terrific find if there is one for your subject. The years of work involved in collecting all these little mentions that may follow a student through marriages, children, careers, and even the next generation is awe inspiring.

While I did not explore them for this project, I understand the Archives also has a card file listing all graduates, and, of course, holds many collections of personal and family papers of students and faculty.

This is the third and final post about the Thirteen Clubs. I found delving through Torontonensis for the first two decades of the 20th century absolutely fascinating. It introduced me to a society—and its concerns—that changed with each edition. Women were surprisingly prominent throughout the time period, stepping forward even more as men went off to military service. I’m grateful that the Thirteen Club took me there.

[1] “Wrecking Looking-Glasses and Walking Under Ladders Delight of Thirteen Club”. The Globe, 10 Dec 1923, page 13.

[2] Biography of Henry Maurice Darling in Torontonensis, 1903. https://archive.org/details/torontonensis05univuoft/page/34. The 1906 Torontonensis (page 76) says the Club was founded in 1900, but I have found no other evidence of this earlier date.

[3] The yearbooks for these three schools (and many others) have been digitized by The Internet Archive.

[4] Torontonensis Collection: https://archive.org/details/torontonensis

[5] The digitized collections are listed here: https://utarms.library.utoronto.ca/archives/online/digitized-publications