UBC Clock Tower as seen from the Residential School History and Dialogue Centre. Photo by Amy Scott Metcalfe, 2021.
Last week, when I was asking myself, “Can I sense time here?” while I was in the UBC Library Garden, I decided to take a visual soundscape video: UBC Library Garden visual soundscape, May 2021
It happened that I was there near the top of the hour, so the chimes of the UBC Clocktower are audible in the segment. The Clocktower itself has a backstory, related to time (not surprisingly), as described in this article by Erwin Wodarczak, appearing in the November 2013 issue of the Trek (alumni) magazine, called “The Clock Tower and the Anarchists“. Intrigued? Please pause here and follow the link to read it. Reading the story helps to “cement” the concept of colonial time to this exact spot.
We learn from Wodarczak’s article that the clock tower could also be called the Ladner Tower: “The tower was a gift from Leon J. Ladner. He was the son of British Columbia pioneers, born and raised in the town that bears his family name. . . . A founding member of Convocation, it was Ladner who in May 1921 moved the resolution urging the establishment of a new campus at Point Grey.”
Ladner had “also hoped that the clock tower would serve as an inspiration to UBC students: When that clock tower is completed and the clock rings out the passing of each hour, I hope it will remind the young students that not only does time go fast, but that the hours at our university are very precious and the use of those hours will seriously affect the success, the happiness and the future of their lives.”
The year was 1967, and students were not satisfied with Ladner’s capitalistic sense of time, nor that his $150,000 donation was to be used for a symbolic clock tower and not the Library itself, noting that you could “buy 25,000 books” with the same money. Controversy and student unrest did not abate as the project neared completion in 1968, so much so that the university declined to hold a dedication ceremony out of concern that students might hold a demonstration. The article states, “Director of Ceremonies Malcolm McGregor was even more blunt – when asked by The Ubyssey when students could expect an official dedication, he answered, ‘I won’t be part of a ceremony that is for the benefit of anarchists.’”
The original carillon bells of the UBC Clock Tower were replaced with a digital recording in the late 1990s. The “Big Ben” tune counts the hours, marking (making) time as well as sounding out the British-ness of the University of British Columbia and the province of BC itself.
More about campus timekeeping in this University Affairs magazine article, “A Brief History of Clock Towers on Canadian University Campuses“, by Kerry Banks (September, 2020).