Mary Coyne Rowell Jackman (1904-1994)

Mary’s father, Newton Rowell, was born in 1867. With a strict Methodist upbringing, Newton joined the Metropolitan Methodist Church in 1891 when he moved to Toronto, and was licensed as a local preacher in 1892. But he had educated himself further in law and became a prominent Ontario politician and lawyer.

Nellie Langford was seven years younger than Newton and had first met him when she was a pupil in his Sunday school class in London. At Victoria College, she succeeded his sister Mary as vice president of the College’s Missionary Society (and only woman on the society’s executive committee). In 1901, Nellie and Newton were married, and their wedding trip took them to the World Methodist Convention in London UK.

On their return to Toronto, they moved in to 87 Crescent Road in Rosedale where, in 1902, their first child was born and named William Langford (known as Langford or Lankie). Meanwhile, a new three-story house was being built for them at 134 Crescent Road, on a small offshoot of a Rosedale ravine. At this stage, Newton was often absent at missionary committee meetings and on business engagements in Ontario and New York. Nellie managed the succession of plumbers, painters, and so on, as well as shopping for furniture and interviewing potential cooks and maids. A few months before the move, in January 1904, Newton and Nellie’s second child was born and named Mary Coyne, after her aunt. In 1907, another baby was born and named Edward, but he lived only a few months. In 1916, the addition of baby Frederick Newton Alexander completed the family.

Mary Rowell grew up in the comfortable new house with its large library filled with books on law and history. After her birth, Newton began to take on fewer Sunday preaching engagements, preferring to put his energy into the Sunday school and spend more time at home. Although streetcar service was already established in Toronto, there were no cars in Mary’s early childhood, and the Rowell establishment featured a horse, carriage, and coachman. Summers were spent at the cottage on Lake Simcoe.

In 1906, Nellie had joined the Board of Management of Annesley Hall, the women’s residence of Victoria College; this board was responsible not only for the residence but also for “all the affairs pertaining to women at Victoria College.” She stayed on the board for a decade, becoming vice president (1913) and then treasurer (1914). In addition, she was a member of the YWCA national executive by 1910 and in 1913 she was elected president of the YWCA’s Dominion Council.

During World War I, Newton traveled round the province, speaking in support of the Union government and the war effort. He also visited the Canadian troops in Europe. Nellie, then president of the Women’s Liberal Association, also traveled, speaking in favour of the sale of victory bonds. In 1917 Newton was invited to join the Union government, and in 1921 he was sent as Canadian delegate to League of Nations.

At this time, the older children were at school. Langford went to St Andrew’s College, Aurora, and Mary to King’s Hall, Compton, Quebec where her parents had been assured the French teaching was excellent. The friendships Mary made at school were to last a lifetime.

In 1922, Mary went to Europe with Newton, Nellie, Newton’s sister Mary, and young Frederick. (Langford stayed in Toronto and summer camp in Temagami.) From the end of May, they spent six weeks in France, southern Germany, Belgium, and Holland. Nellie went to Austria with her sister-in-law for a YWCA World Committee meeting focused on immigrants and girls and women in industry. War memories were stirred in Verdun, Rheims, Amiens and the cemeteries in Vimy, Ypres, St Julien, Sanctuary Wood. In mid-July, they reached London, where Newton attended meetings of the Council of the League of Nations discussing mandates for Palestine and Syria and attended debates in House of Commons; then to the International Missionary Council in Canterbury.

In 1925, as a graduation gift, Mary accompanied her father on a three-month trip to all parts of the British Empire. Newton made official visits in Winnipeg and Vancouver, then they sailed on the RMS Niagara from Vancouver. Mary reported Newton now rested and jolly. They visited Honolulu, Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Nagasaki, and traveled across Japan visiting various missionary friends. Everywhere Mary and Newton visited points of interest and Newton met with government leaders, judges, lawyers, and so on.

After finishing school in Canada, Mary studied at LSE, the London School of Economics, in England. She then went on a YWCA leadership training course in Selly Oak, near Birmingham. In London began her continuing interest in psychology. She saw a psychiatrist, J A Hadfield, who specialized in dream work.

Mary’s commitment to the Student Christian Movement was strong. At that time the SCM was a strong leftwing movement in which many prominent and soon-to-be prominent figures were involved. In 1926, Mary represented the SCM at three conferences in Europe. From 1928 to 1929, she was employed fulltime by the SCM as the SCM women’s secretary at the University of Toronto.

In 1929, the Alberta women decided to take the “persons case” to the UK Privy Council. In the early summer of that year, therefore, Newton went to England, and Mary, who was on her way to spend the summer at student conferences in Britain and on the continent, accompanied him.

Later that year, Nellie and Newton toured China, where Nellie visited branches of the YWCA, and Japan, where Newton was a Canadian delegate at a meeting of the IPR (Institute for Pacific Relations). It was in Japan that they heard, by cable, of the UK Privy Council decision that women in Canada were persons under the British North America Act. They returned from Kyoto just in time for Christmas and found family interest focused on Mary’s upcoming marriage to Henry (Harry) Rutherford Jackman, a Toronto lawyer and financier with strong Conservative affiliations.

Mary and Harry were married on April 26, 1930. As a wedding gift, Nellie gave her daughter $25,000, which she would later use to support artists, and a copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Nellie Rowell was social convener of the MUC Women’s Association, and Mary soon joined the Junior WA and became its convener of social service. Soon after, in 1937, Mary organized The Metropolitan Nursery School in Toronto for the children of women workers and families living on minimum incomes. It is still active today, on an independent basis, as the Bond Street Nursery School.

In 1933, Newton and Nellie had just returned from London and were most concerned about developments in Germany and, particularly, the plight of the Jews. Mary, Harry, and baby Hal, their first child, visited them in Muskoka where they were spending two months. Mary and Harry were to have four children: Henry Newton Rowell Jackman (Hal), born June 10, 1932; Eric, May 17, 1934; Edward, February 20, 1940; and Nancy, January 6, 1942. Newton, who had suffered a stroke and was paralyzed for five years, died in 1941. After his death, Nellie spent much time organizing his papers and arranging for his biography. Nellie lived to 1968, survived by only two of her four children, Mary and Frederick.

Harry became an MP in 1940, at which time Mary put considerable effort into supporting his campaign (a phone log from that year documents some of the many calls she made). Mackenzie King had called a March election and, with the support of Roland Michener (later Governor General, also a family friend), Harry set out to win the Rosedale riding from the incumbent H G Clarke. At a stormy meeting, he won the nomination and, with the full support of the Rosedale Conservatives, went on to win the election.

Mary had been raised with a strong interest in international affairs, and was active with the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) and with Women’s Missionary Society for many years. Her strong Methodist upbringing led her to feel responsible for advancing the common good and for being part of a global society. But when she desired to join the Canadian Institute for International Affairs, she found she could not. Meetings were held in Hart House, which still would not admit women. Mary’s undaunted response was to found a women’s branch of the CIIA. Eventually the CIIA had “mixed” study groups, which Mary also attended.

Harry was defeated in the election in 1948, and in 1949, he and Mary bought McCallum’s Island in Go Home Bay. A guestbook/log covers activities at the cottage there from 1949 to 1974. Mary had long had a romantic relationship with the cottage, which she had visited as a child, since she was a friend of Helen McCallum, daughter of the then owner. The area was a familiar one, full of pleasant memories. The Rowells had rented a cottage in the area.

The cottage bought by Mary and Harry featured a number of murals painted by members of the Group of Seven during the first world war, and one of these murals, “The Picnic,” a panel by Arthur Lismer, contains a figure which may well be a portrait of Mary.

Along with a crew of joiners, plumbers, and so on, Charles and Louise Comfort spent much time helping put the cottage in good order, and Charles painted an oilcloth tablecloth for picnics as well as views of the cottage and sketches of the panels. These last were sent to A Y (Alec) Jackson with a request for help in identification and he was most helpful in this. Jackson also provided supporting panels which were completed in July 1953 and installed with much celebration. Later he was a regular visitor.

Will Ogilvie (with his wife Sheelah) was also a frequent visitor, making watercolours and sketches of the island. Mary admired both Will and his paintings. Nellie Langford Rowell visited in 1950, writing in the log that she was “Enriched in mind and body amid these glorious isles.” In 1959, Eric’s wedding day was followed by his and Deone’s arrival at the cottage for a week’s honeymoon. In 1963, Mary found it a good place to recoup after a heart ailment. In 1964, Hal and Maruja Duncan stopped at the cottage after their marriage, before leaving for a honeymoon in Bermuda.

The murals were later donated to the nation. In June 1967, the National Gallery photographed the murals in situ, then removed them to be installed in the National Gallery.

In the 1950s, though Mary (then in her late 40s) still had on her hands two teenaged children, Ed and Nancy, she began volunteer work at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry and also went back to school, to study art history at the U of T, because of her love of painting. She was active for many years on the women’s committee of the Art Gallery of Ontario. She participated in the restoration of the Grange (where a chest of drawers belonging to Nellie is now to be seen), took children to art classes at the AGO, helped develop the art rental service and a policy for art purchases. When the Eric Jackman room on aboriginal art opened there in the 1980s, Mary was invited to give an inaugural speech.

Mary has always taken her Christmas card list seriously and maintained it with care. It provided an opportunity to mesh her Christianity, her gift for friendship, and her passion for art – often she would commission an artist, such as Ann MacIntosh Duff, Rody Kenny Courtice, or Will Ogilvie, to design a card.

Coming out of the more leftwing SCM, Mary’s politics continued to develop. In one mayoral election, in the 40s or 50s, she voted for Tim Buck, leader of the Communist Party of Canada – her vote was the only one he received in the poll.

Mary’s tastes in art also encompassed the radical as well as the traditional. On a trip to New York, she insisted Harry buy an Alexander Calder mobile. In Paris, in the 1950s, she bought a Pigeon painting, an abstract of a black figure and a white figure linked together – both the presentation and the racial message implicit were thought, by Harry and others, to be ahead of their time. In fact, she was both perceptive and astute. The murals from the cottage, despite Harry’s initial skepticism, proved to be worth $475,000. In New York, she bought a Ben Nicholson line drawing for $200, which so outraged Harry that he rushed off to Nellie, brandishing it. The picture was later worth thousands. When these works were eventually donated to the province or the nation, Harry received large tax benefits and had to eat his words.

Travel remained one of Mary’s pleasures: she made a round-the-world trip in 1954, traveled with Charles and Louise Comfort to Europe in 1956 (to “New York City, London, Holland, Venice, Florence, Rome, etc.” says the travel log), and in 1965, aged 61, went to New Delhi for the Commonwealth Conference, visiting Nancy in Indonesia on the way home. Her passports for 1972-82 show that she visited China and Hong Kong, Fiji, Australia, England, Denmark, Greece in 1974/5 and 76, and France.

Mary’s continuing interest in Virginia Woolf grew steadily after the first considerable impact made on her by her mother’s wedding gift. Her interest expanded to include work by others of the Bloomsbury Group and the Hogarth Press.

Realizing the books should be made available to students, Mary donated them to the Women’s Residence Library at Victoria University in honour of her mother and her aunt. The whole collection then moved to the E J Pratt Library so as to be accessible to students outside Victoria College and now has more than 1,500 items. From December 1993 to the end of January 1994, an exhibition, “The Work of Virginia Woolf,” was held in the Pratt Library, featuring books by Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group, and the Hogarth Press. Mary wrote for the catalogue an introduction, “How the Woolf Collection Came To Be.”

With her daughter Nancy Ruth, Mary supported and promoted women’s and feminist causes and supported groups such as LEAF (the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund) and the Canadian Women’s Foundation, for which Mary provided the initial endowment funding ($500,000 each). The women’s studies library at York University, the Nellie Langford Rowell Library, was also established with funding provided through Mary from the Jackman Foundation.

Mary was a Dame Commander of the Order of St Lazarus. In the 1980s she received an honorary degree of sacred letters from Victoria University. In 1990 she was nominated for a Persons Award and received a special award with Nancy Ruth as a mother-daughter team. In June 1992, she received an honorary LLD from the University of Toronto. In 1993 she was nominated for the Order of Canada.

Up to the end of the 80s, Mary preserved an active life, visiting the Metropolitan Church, the farm, Stratford, and other cultural events, traveling to England, and seeing friends. Reading the Manchester Guardian each week, she still took a strong interest in politics and the world around her, a world she had helped to shape and which benefited from her presence.

Mary Rowell Coyne Jackman died in 1994 and is greatly missed by her family, her friends, and those she helped, including the Nellie Langford Rowell library, named after her mother, for which she was a continuing benefactor.