Gord Wetherall, Sc’49, didn’t get a room of his own until he was 22. Just back from convoy duty in the North Atlantic and about to begin his classes at Queen’s, he moved into a room at the back of the second floor of 391 Brock Street, a student boarding house since the early ’30s.
“I felt pretty important,” says Mr. Wetherall, who turned 100 this year.
Though the move was significant, it wasn’t very far. For nine years before the war, he had spent his nights on a pull-out couch in the living room of 391 Brock. The redoubtable woman who ran the boarding house with miraculous efficiency over three decades was referred to by most of the students living in her home as Mrs. Wetherall. To Gord Wetherall, she was Mom.
Mr. Wetherall never really got to know the other students in the boarding house during his years at Queen’s.
“I was too busy during noon hours to really have any contact with them,” he says. “I remember grabbing a plate of food in the kitchen between washing dishes and setting tables and so on. I was part of the workforce.”
He had been “part of the workforce” since the family moved to 391 Brock St. in 1934 from a smaller house on Nelson Street, where they had also taken in student boarders. Mr. Wetherall’s mother, Lulu, needed all hands on deck to make the massive undertaking at 391 Brock work.
Until male residences were built in the 1950s, most Queen’s students lived in boarding houses like Mrs. Wetherall’s, according to Testing Tradition, the third volume in the official university history by Duncan McDowall, Arts’72, MA’74.
The home at 391 Brock had five bedrooms available for students, two of them doubles, so room for seven young men altogether. The family slept downstairs. A bedroom had been carved out of the home’s big living room, and Lulu Wetherall, her husband, Frank – a guard at the Collins Bay penitentiary – and Gord Wetherall’s younger sister, June, slept there. That left Gord on the living room sofa until he became a Queen’s student himself.
Mrs. Wetherall offered both room and board to her students – three full meals a day – and linen service, all for about $30 a month. “I even remember her making the beds,” says Mr. Wetherall. But her responsibilities didn’t end there.
She also provided meals to other students in rooming houses that didn’t offer board – a lot of other students. Twelve young men sat around the big dining room table for each meal. Then Gord Wetherall and his sister quickly cleared and reset the table for another 12 waiting in the foyer. Twenty-four meals. Three times a day.
“It sure was a lot of cooking, and she was all alone,” says Mr. Wetherall. For supper, he recalls, “she would usually have a soup, a meat-and-potato-type dish, and a dessert, which would usually be pie. It was a substantial meal.”
Mr. Wetherall’s daughter, Jacquie Arbuckle, Arts’71, Ed’72, says her grandmother’s years feeding famished scholars left her wondrously fast in the kitchen. “When I was a youngster,” she remembers, “and we would go and visit, it was always at Christmas and Easter when the roomers were gone. I remember she could peel a potato in a second. And make pies? She just made hundreds of pies and she was so fast at it.”
Gord Wetherall doesn’t remember missing anything growing up in the busy household, except maybe a quiet place to study. Living with seven virtual strangers and having 17 more troop in three times a day was just “normal life,” he says. “It was what I was used to.”
Tell us about the University District house you lived in and the memories you made.
