Outwardly, Victoria High School’s amazing graduating class of 1955 might not seem different from any other in the iconic school’s century-plus of graduating classes.
But as time wore on, four of them gained Canadian and international prominence in the fields of science, sports journalism, Olympic rowing, federal politics and art.
While those are five fields of accomplishment, one man excelled in two of them — David Anderson.
Anderson, who turns 81 in August, was a member of Canada’s eights rowing team at the 1960 Olympic Summer Games in Rome, which won a silver medal, losing the gold to a German squad. In a heat leading up to the rowing final, the Canadian crew beat a United States team that had never lost in Olympic competition.
Anderson then turned his attention to politics in 1968, running as a rookie candidate for the federal Liberals and beating four-time Progressive Conservative incumbent George Chatterton.
Anderson resigned his seat in 1972 to become the B.C. Liberal leader, winning his riding but not the provincial election.
At the urging of Jean Chrétien, Anderson returned to the federal scene in 1993, and after he and the Liberals won, was appointed minister of national revenue.
He subsequently held cabinet posts in transport, fisheries and oceans and, finally, environment. For eight of his 10 years in the federal cabinet, Anderson was the senior federal minister responsible for British Columbia.
Anderson and four other graduates of Vic High will be honoured June 2 at a Black and Gold Dinner open to the public and hosted by the Victoria High School Alumni Association at the CFB Esquimalt Wardroom.
The internationally renowned particle physicist who graduated from Vic High in ’55 is Stew Smith, who, in his graduating year was awarded the Governor General’s medal, as the top high school student in B.C.
After obtaining his master’s degree at UBC, he earned his PhD in physics in 1966 from Princeton University in New Jersey, where he and his wife, Norma, still live. He stayed at Princeton, where he spent half a century on the faculty beginning in 1967.
He was Princeton’s founding dean of research (2006-2012), chaired the physics department from 1990 to 1998 and was vice-president of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
Smith and his American Physical Society team won the W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in experimental particle physics in 2011 for their multi-year search for an exceedingly rare form of decay of a particle called K meson (a 1-in-10-billion event), which they finally observed in 1997.
Smith was also a great athlete, playing lacrosse for the Victoria Junior Shamrocks for five seasons (going to the Minto Cup national championship twice) and the senior Rocks for a year. He later joined the 1961 Vancouver Carlings team, which won the Mann Cup that year.
Jim Taylor, one of Canada’s top sports journalists and humour columnists, was also in the Vic High Class of ’55.
Born in Nipawin, Sask., Taylor started his writing career while in Grade 11 and taking journalism teacher Stan Murphy’s classes. It was Murphy who saw the talent in Taylor’s writing and recommended him to the Daily Colonist’s sports editor, Jim Tang.
His favourite story from those early days concerns his decision to keep his paper route while working part-time in the sports department, just in case the writing thing didn’t work out.
After 10 years with the Colonist, a short stint with the Vancouver Times, Vancouver Sun (13 years), Province (17 years), six years as a nationally syndicated columnist with the Calgary Sun, about 7,500 columns on a mostly-five-a-week basis and working in radio in Vancouver, Taylor decided to call it a career.
He’s closing in on authoring 20 books, including one on hockey legend Wayne Gretzky and Rick Hansen’s wheelchair Man in Motion Tour.
Taylor has been inducted in three sports halls of fame: the Canadian Football League, British Columbia and Greater Victoria but is most proud of his Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jack Webster Foundation in 2010.
The artist from the Class of ’55 is world-renowned oil painter Fenwick Lansdowne, who is acclaimed for his depiction of birds and wildlife.
Lansdowne was self-taught in painting, starting at the age of 12. At 19, his work was exhibited in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
His work has been compared favourably to 19th-century artist John James Audubon, and one of Lansdowne’s last projects, a 32-print selection of rare birds of China, sold for $25,000 a set.
Lansdowne’s work is displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
He was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1974, the same year he was awarded the Order of British Columbia. He received the Order of Canada in 1976.
Prince Philip once wrote that Lansdowne “has the exceptional ability to capture such moments with a seemingly effortless assurance but which can only come from intimate knowledge, immense care and remarkable talent.”
Lansdowne died on July 26, 2008.
