Tom Symons: A Canadian Life

Chapter 18: Tom Symons and Peterborough

Tom Symons and Peterborough SYLVIA SUTHERLAND I n the autumn of 2005, as my penultimate year as Mayor of Peterborough was ending, I received a call from Tom Symons. “Sylvia, as you know, I’ve been working on a lot of national and international projects. Well, I think I now would like to do something for my city.” My initial, unspoken, reaction was that the establishment of Trent University four decades ago would surely qualify as “doing something” for his city. My spoken response was to suggest a spot on the Peterborough Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee. Tom hesitated. He had not long before stepped down after several years as chairman of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada and wanted a bit of a change of pace. A spot would be opening up on the Peterborough Lakefield Police Services Board. In fact, the board would soon be in need of a chairman. How about that? “Yes, that might be good. I have always been interested in social justice issues.” I was then in my fourteenth year on the Police Services Board, and I didn’t want to disillusion Tom regarding the exact nature of the board and its rather peripheral involvement in social justice issues. I did know, having served with Tom on the board of Broadview Press, that he had the business acumen the Police Services Board needed and the experience and personal skills to make a superb contribution C H A P T E R 1 8 360 TOM SYMONS: A CAnAdiAn Life to the board. That he has done. But his experience there was not without incident, and there may have been times when he wished he had opted for the Architectural Advisory Committee instead. Trent University changed Peterborough forever, and for the better. The chief architect of that change was Tom Symons, and his influence to the cultural, civic, and institutional life of the city is to be felt in Peterborough to this day—well beyond the parameters of the university. Robertson Davies, who did not much care for Peterborough, would have undoubtedly been happier there had he followed rather than preceded Tom and Trent to town. It would be highly unfair to Peterborough to declare it devoid of cultural or intellectual pursuits before the coming of Trent University. Indeed, as Tom well recognized and frequently acknowledge, the city had a rich literary and artistic heritage dating back to the Strickland sisters scribbling away in the woods of Upper Canada just north of Peterborough. And it was, after all, the initiative of the community leadership itself that brought the university to the city. The Davies— Robertson and his wife, Brenda—had enhanced and improved an already active community theatre group, and an enormous engineering talent, with its own particular inventiveness and creativity, was to be found at Canadian General Electric. The Community Concert series had a high subscription rate in Peterborough, and several of the local churches had remarkably talented choirs. What the city lacked was a postsecondary educational institution, along with all the enhancements to the local community that such an institution could bring if its leadership acknowledged the importance of the interrelationship between the community and the university, and appreciated the community in which the university found itself. This Tom most assuredly did. He was the perfect founding president for a university located in Peterborough. Tom will tell you that he loves Peterborough now, and did when he came here in the spring of 1961 as the thirty-two-year-old presidentdesignate of Trent University and member of its founding board. It was the city’s physical setting and its built environment that attracted him—the buildings and their expression of old Ontario that was, in his words, “neither souped-up nor spoiled.” TOM SYMONS AND PETERBOROUGH 361 “I had no commitment to accept the Trent position when I first came,” Tom recalls. He had been offered a similar position in Oshawa, which was also seeking to establish a university. Which community would get the university depended to a large extent upon which invitation Tom decided to accept. It was Peterborough that won him and, through him, the university. Speaking at Trent’s opening ceremonies on Saturday 17 October 1964, Tom explained to those assembled the special relationship the university had to the community—to Peterborough, to the Valley of the Trent, and to Eastern Ontario. “No new university,” he said...