Old friends they were. They had met at Girl Guide camp in 1933, when Hope, now a glowing sixty-six, was fourteen, and Margaret, then sixteen, had been hired as the nature counsellor. Margaret's luggage included nature books packed in a soap box on which she had altered the words "LUX" to read "BUX', which Hope thought witty of her. "I decided then and there that this was someone I was going to like very much," Hope wrote to me after Margaret's death.
"After four weeks of camp with her, during which she taught me the excitement of learning to identify trees and flowers and birds and stars, I think I loved her. Her own love for all the things of nature seemed to be passed on to me by some magical form of osmosis, and it's something I've never lost."
Margaret went to McMaster University, paying her tuition in part by teaching canoeing at summer camps and by winning two scholarships. She graduated in 1938 with an Honours B.A. in English and history…On graduation she obtained teacher's certificates in English, history, music, and guidance at the College of Education in Toronto.
In 1946 she was one of the first staff hired by Bloor Collegiate in Toronto. She started as an English teacher and a member of the guidance department, but in her first year rounded up enough students to start a school orchestra, which she led.
Margaret promised to consider the possibility of volunteering at Nellie's, and she certainly followed through. Two summers later, in 1977, she played a significant role in keeping the hostel open. That was a year after she took an early retirement from teaching at the age of fifty-eight.
She plunged into two circles of activity, one focused on Nellie's that led her into a maze of committees dealing with housing and feminist issues, and the other centred on Holy Trinity, the Anglican church whose singular congregation was then battling for its life against two Goliaths, Eatons of Canada, which wanted to usurp its space for the proposed Eaton Centre, and the Anglican Church of Canada, which looked askance at Holy Trinity's unconventional approach to Christianity. Both activities were on the leading edge of social change, where she proved to be a spunky, resourceful, determined, and a confident David.
The Supportive Housing Coalition divided off a regional sub-committee, the East Area Mental Health Coalition…Margaret Frazer and Alison moved into this new group as well, along with others from Nellie's.
Alison pursued her research with such credible results that the paper she prepared, "The Role of Nellie's in Providing Post-Psychiatric Care", became a valued document. It caught the attention of Larry Grossman, then Minister of Health. Grossman met with Alison and her arguments influenced his subsequent decision to provide funds for a cluster of houses in Toronto to shelter homeless ex-psychiatric patients.
Nellie's was assured of funding for one of these residences in an ideal site, a huge abandoned house only a few steps away from Nellie's itself. … At one of the early planning meetings, deciding the name was on the agenda. Alison said, "we should call it Margaret's, after Margaret Frazer. She's the one who has always been there for Nellie's. The committee met for years when it didn't look as if anything would happen, but Margaret kept plugging along. She has stuck with us through the whole long process."
Her life came in two parts. One half encompassed her childhood and thirty years as a high-school teacher; the other half spanned the last ten years of her life, when she turned her retirement into a monument of good works.
What happened at 47 Deloraine in the spring of 1985 was therefore unusual, but the lessons have universal application. It will be enough, it will be more than enough, if Margaret Frazer's legacy is only that people realize they can help one another through a terrible time.
Over the years, many people have asked us who is Margaret Frazer? Our organization was named in her honour. We have a framed photograph of her in the main hallway of the house but nothing else that describes who she was and what her passions were. The following excerpts are from June Callwood's book, Twelve Weeks in Spring, an account of a team of sixty people who came together to provide comfort and support to Margaret in the last 3 months of her life. The excerpts are used with permission by the author. We hope they will give you a glimmer of understanding into who Margaret was.