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Colonel the Honourable Justice John Andrew Hope (1890-1954)

On September 10, 2026, a provincial plaque was unveiled at the Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital in Perth. The plaque was then permanently installed in front of the hospital following the ceremony.

The bilingual plaque reads as follows:

COLONEL THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE JOHN ANDREW HOPE (1890-1954)

John Andrew Hope served in the First World War and was wounded twice. After his return to Perth in 1919, he set his focus on honouring those who had made the “supreme sacrifice” and became local president of the Great War Veterans Association. Instead of building a monument to remember the fallen, Hope provided leadership and momentum by bringing together community groups and officials to fund a 20-bed memorial hospital, complete with operating theatre and maternity ward, in the former Victoria Hall. On March 8, 1923, as its first president, Hope opened the door to Perth’s Great War Memorial Hospital, which provided care to returning soldiers and the broader region. It filled a vital community need through a great act of remembrance. Hope went on to be appointed King’s Counsel in 1929, a judge of the High Court and later the Court of Appeal. In 1945, he became a governor of the University of Toronto and chair of Ontario’s Royal Commission on Education, which produced The Hope Report, a foundational step in modernizing education in Ontario. Hope was a proud veteran from Perth whose life and legacy reflect exceptional service to his community, province and country.

COLONEL ET HONORABLE JUGE JOHN ANDREW HOPE (1890-1954)

John Andrew Hope sert durant la Première Guerre mondiale, au cours de laquelle il est blessé à deux reprises. De retour à Perth en 1919, il se donne pour mission d’honorer ceux qui ont consenti le « sacrifice suprême » et devient le président local de la Great War Veterans Association. Au lieu d’ériger un monument à la mémoire des soldats tombés au combat, il fait preuve de vision et d’initiative en mobilisant les autorités et des groupes communautaires afin de financer l’aménagement d’un hôpital commémoratif de 20 lits doté d’une salle d’opération et d’une maternité dans l’ancien Victoria Hall. Le 8 mars 1923, en sa qualité de premier président de l’établissement, il inaugure l’Hôpital Great War Memorial de Perth, où des soins sont prodigués aux soldats de retour du front et à la population de la région. L’hôpital répond à un besoin communautaire vital tout en constituant un grand acte de mémoire. Le colonel Hope sera nommé conseiller du roi en 1929, puis juge à la Haute Cour et, plus tard, à la Cour d’appel. En 1945, il devient administrateur de l’Université de Toronto et président de la Commission royale d’enquête sur l’éducation en Ontario, laquelle établira le rapport Hope, étape fondamentale dans l’instauration de l’éducation universelle dans la province. Fier d’être un ancien combattant originaire de Perth, il incarne un dévouement exemplaire au service de sa collectivité, de sa province et de son pays.

Historical background

Overview

Honourable Mr. Justice John Andrew Hope, KC, DSO, MC, VD (1890-1954)

Loyalty, courage, endurance, discipline, unselfishness. These are the principles that guided John Andrew Hope throughout his life — as a soldier, a lawyer, a justice and a humanitarian.1

John Andrew Hope was born in Perth, Ontario in 1890, the fourth of five children to Peter Hope (1853-1929), a tinsmith and plumber,2 and Jane Lydia Holmes (1859-1919). He attended Perth Public School and Perth Collegiate Institute (PCI), after which he enrolled at the University of Toronto. He was admitted to Osgoode Hall before completing his bachelor’s degree, which was considered unusual at the time. “Although urged by his father to take a university degree before entering law, His Lordship frankly admits that his decision not to do so was because as one of a large family, he personally felt that he should stand on his own feet in life and earn his own living as speedily as possible.”3 In 1914, he was called to the bar, timing that coincided with the commencement of the First World War.

The First World War

Although Hope did not enlist with the Canadian Expeditionary Force for overseas service until 1916, he had already undergone military training. While attending PCI the previous decade, he was one of three original officers of the newly organized cadet corps. In 1910, he became an active reservist and gazetted lieutenant in the 42nd Brockville Battalion of Infantry, which eventually became the 42nd Field Artillery Regiment (Lanark and Renfrew Scottish), thus beginning his long association with both the regiment and the army reserve. In 1914, he was promoted to captain.

In 1916, Hope was sent overseas with the 59th Battalion, where he was soon promoted to brevet major. Later that year while in France, he was transferred to the 46th Battalion, Saskatchewan Regiment, as company commander, adjutant and finally as battalion commanding officer. In 1917, he was briefly attached to the 9th Infantry Brigade.

Major Hope was wounded at Passchendaele (1917) and Drocourt-Quéant (1918).

“In order to clear up a doubtful situation after an attack, Acting Major A.J. Hope made a daring and successful reconnaissance of the newly-captured line, during which he was attacked by the enemy, whom he killed,” says the official account of the occasion when he won the Military Cross. “He then arranged,” it continues, “for a bombing party to clear up a section held by the enemy, and it was due to his initiative and sound judgment that this operation was successfully carried out and a number of the enemy killed and captured.”4

For his valour, he was decorated with the Military Cross (MC), the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), and was mentioned in dispatches.

After being discharged in 1919, he returned to Canada and settled in Perth with his new wife, Hilda Southcombe (1893-1974) of Surrey, England. They had one child, a daughter Rosemary (m. Poynton, 1922-2023). Together, they set up residence at 53 Drummond Street West.5

Military service

Legal career

Hope began his legal career as a partner with the Perth firm of Stewart,6 Hope and O’Donnell,7 barristers and solicitors, established in 1918,8 with offices located at 65 Foster Street.9 He rose quickly in the profession, serving as Ottawa Crown Attorney (1923-33); in 1929, he was appointed King’s Counsel. In 1933, he was placed on the bench of the High Court of Ontario, and from 1945 until his death in 1954, he served as a justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal. His appointment to the bench coincided with the family’s relocation to Toronto, where they took up residence at “Glynwood” on Riverview Drive.

The Great War Memorial Hospital, Perth

During their years in Perth, John and Hilda Hope participated actively in their community. Hilda was a frequent soloist at local events;10 John chaired the Perth Board of Education and became founding president of the Great War Veterans’ Association (GWVA) of Perth.11 It was establishing a permanent hospital, however — a memorial to Perth’s war dead — where John Hope made the greatest impact on his hometown.

Canada suffered more than 60,000 military deaths during the First World War, out of a population of approximately eight million, making it one of its deadliest conflicts.12 As no one was untouched by this horrendous loss, communities large and small set about erecting memorials to the fallen. While many of these took the form of cenotaphs and plaques, Major Hope wanted to create a living memorial that would leave a lasting legacy.

In 1918, during the height of the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Perth Health Board established an emergency hospital in the Mill Street home of the late Honourable John Haggart (1836-1913), a prominent millowner and former local mayor and member of Parliament. In 1917, his sister, Isabella Haggart Millar (1846-1917), had willed the property to the Soldiers’ Aid Commission (SAC) for recovering veterans.13 Local chapters of the Red Cross Society and the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire (IODE) provided both practical and financial assistance.

Prior to this, all acute and chronic health care for the community was administered primarily in patients’ homes.

The IODE were actually the first to suggest around this time that a proper hospital would best serve as a memorial to Perth’s war dead, when they sponsored a two-day fundraising and veterans’ homecoming event on July 30 and 31, 1919. The Perth Peoples Popular Patriotic Peace Party, as it was named, raised $1,860 for a hospital.14 Addressing an assembly of several thousand, guest speaker Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Bethel Ware (1877-1951) observed:

“I feel it must be hard tonight for a great many who are here when they know that some of their friends and loved ones will not return, but the honor you should pay those men will not be just a stone tablet or bronze memorial, but I prefer that a hospital be built where the soldiers who have returned can be treated and also the citizens of Perth may receive excellent treatment. A stone memorial means so little, but the hospital will aid the sick and suffering and be a wonderful tribute to the memory of those who have gone before.”15

The next year saw much back and forth between the Town and various organizations as to whether Perth truly needed a dedicated hospital and how it would be financed and operated. By the summer of 1920, progress had stalled, so local chapters of the IODE, the Red Cross and the Women’s Institute (WI) convened a meeting to reconsider a more modest cottage hospital. A letter read aloud by Major Hope, however, as president of the GWVA, provided much-needed momentum. “Those present,” he wrote, “that it was their wish that they would be able to carry out plans for a Hospital as a memorial to the men who had made the supreme sacrifice in the late war.”16 The women’s organizations consequently passed a motion to throw their support behind Major Hope and the GWVA’s proposal.

At its November 20 meeting, Perth Town Council received a delegation of 14 prominent Perth citizens led by Major Hope requesting that the Town submit a new debenture bylaw to ratepayers to grant the sum of $25,000 for establishing and equipping the Memorial Hospital. Major Hope argued that:

“The proposal is receiving the whole-hearted support of town and country. In the townships of Bathurst, Drummond, and North Burgess the matter has been received most favorably. It is also expected the townships of Elmsley, North Sherbrooke, Dalhousie, South Sherbrooke, and Lanark will give assistance.”17

The motion received first and second readings that night and was ultimately passed at the January 1921 meeting.

Initially, plans focused on purchasing Haggart House from the SAC and converting it into a 22-bed permanent hospital with private, semi-private and public wards, an operating theatre and a maternity ward. Numerous fundraising activities took place, including a masquerade ball sponsored by the Victorian Order of Nurses, IODE tag days and dances, amateur theatre productions and concerts, skating parties and benefit hockey games.

While the Great War Memorial (GWM) Hospital was legally incorporated in July 1920, building start-dates were repeatedly postponed as tenders, due to postwar inflation and supply issues, kept coming in above budget estimates. The fact that much of the Haggart House property is solid bedrock also provided expensive construction challenges. These realities finally forced the hospital committee to pivot. The SAC agreed to cancel the Haggart House sale, and the GWM turned its attention to Victoria Hall at 33 Drummond Street West.

Constructed 70 years earlier on a 10-hectare (25-acre) town lot by the Honourable John Glass Malloch (1806-73), Lanark County court judge, this 17-room mansion had been considered one of the finest homes in Eastern Ontario in its day. Since the judge’s death a half-century before, however, it had been occupied only a few weeks each year by distant relatives and by this time, it was owned by Sophia McLaren (1845-1923), widow of the late Senator Peter McLaren (1831-1919), a prominent Ottawa Valley lumber baron. She had bought it as a wedding gift for either of her sons, but they had both refused. Rumours of it being haunted made it undesirable as a residence. Consequently, Mrs. McLaren was happy to sell it to the Memorial Hospital. Things then moved quickly.

On March 8, 1923, 10 months after purchasing the property from Mrs. McLaren, the GWM Hospital was officially opened. Despite the pouring rain, nearly 2,000 people stood outside to hear board member Judge James Scott make some brief remarks, before asking Major Hope to admit the public. “The latter turned the key in the door and declared the Hospital officially open.”18

GWM facilities and donors

Over the next couple of days, 1,600 visitors toured the 20-bed hospital and neighbouring nurses’ residence, the former carriage house.

On Saturday, March 10, the GWM Hospital admitted its first patients; over the next 10 months, a total of 287 patients received treatment, 28 births and ten deaths were recorded and 53 major and 99 minor surgeries were performed. Major Hope was one of these patients when he underwent an appendectomy on May 18, an event considered significant enough to be reported in the local paper.19

The community continued to raise money for their new hospital, with events ranging from bazaars to a shooting tournament. In addition to clubs and organizations, individuals and companies also donated goods and services — a couple of the more noteworthy ones being a fire escape (James Bros. Foundry) and an elevator (Mrs. Jessie Stewart, J. A. Stewart’s widow).20

Major Hope’s wish that the GWM Hospital would be a lasting legacy to those who made the ultimate sacrifice was officially recognized on November 11, 1924, during an Armistice Day ceremony on the hospital grounds. Major Hope made the following remarks, after which a bronze tablet mounted inside was unveiled by Major-General Henri Panet (1869-1951), Adjutant General. The hospital was officially dedicated to those who fell during the Great War of 1914-18:

“We are here today by the grace of an Almighty Providence and the sacrifices of the immortal dead whom we hold in solemn reverence on this Sixth Anniversary of Peace. To us has been handed the great responsibility of upholding in honor and justice this fair country for which those brave men laid down their lives unflinchingly on the field of battle. Let our earnest vow be that the trust shall never be broken.”21

Among the large crowd attending the ceremony were veterans from the Fenian Raids of 1866 and the South African (Boer) War of 1899-1902, as well as the 42nd Regimental Band.

Two weeks later, Governor General Lord Byng and Lady Byng came to Perth by special train to attend a reception in their honour at the Balderson Theatre. Unable to participate in the Armistice Day ceremony, the vice-regal couple had a private tour of the hospital in addition to the day’s official events.22

Major Hope served as the GWM Hospital’s president until 1933, when he was appointed to the bench of the High Court of Ontario, and he and his family relocated to Toronto.

Afterwards

For the next 20 years, John Hope continued to make an impact outside his chosen profession of law, particularly in the fields of health and education. He served as a trustee for the IODE Hospital for Convalescent Children (a branch of the Hospital for Sick Children) and The Banting Research Foundation. In 1945, he was named a governor of his alma mater, the University of Toronto, and in 1945-50, he chaired the Royal Commission on Education for Ontario, which produced a 1,200-page report advocating significant reforms, including eliminating Catholic secondary schools, abolishing Grade 13, reorganizing teacher training and expanding programs for children with learning disabilities.

In 1935, he was awarded the King’s Jubilee medal and, in 1937, the Coronation medal.

He was a member of the United Grand Lodge of England (freemasons), initiated into the Moira Lodge in 1916.

He was an ardent horseman and skier who also enjoyed playing bridge and canasta.

He passed away on December 31, 1954, after a week’s illness. He and his wife were both interred in Elmwood Cemetery, Perth, Ontario.23

Acknowledgments

The Ontario Heritage Trust gratefully acknowledges the research and writing of Susan Code in creating this paper.

© Ontario Heritage Trust, 2026

1 The Bench,” Obitur Dicta, Volume XXV, No. 2, February 1951, p. 24.

2 Peter Hope established a tinsmith business on North Street in 1871. As business improved, and realizing the need for a better location, in 1889, he built a two-storey brick building, with mansard roof, with family living quarters on the second and third floors. In 2006, the Town of Perth designated this a heritage building, at 71 Foster Street, as an excellent example of the craftsmanship of its day. Eventually known as Hope Hardware, the business operated until 1938, selling stoves and ranges, and manufacturing all types of tin and copper ware and stovepipes, as well as handling hardware, household goods, farm and garden tools and all types of cheese factory supplies, as the Hopes had interests in three cheese factories. HistoricPlaces.ca

3 “The Bench,” op cit., p. 22.

4 Uncredited article, John Andrew Hope (1890-1954) — Find a Grave Memorial.

5 1921 census.

6 Hon. John Alexander Stewart, KC, LLD (1866-1922). In addition to his legal practice, Stewart served as a councillor and mayor for the town and was instrumental in bringing major industries to Perth. At the time of his death, he was a member of Parliament for Lanark County and minister of railways and canals under Sir Arthur Meighen, whose cousins were prominent Perth merchants. The town park was donated and named in his memory.

7 Hugh Anthony O’Donnell (1893-1958) also served as one of the original directors of the GWMH. Obituary, Perth Courier, 13 February 1958, p. 1.

8 The firm is still active, albeit under the name Anderson Foss Anderson Foss | About Us.

9 In 1906, Stewart had the three-storey building located at 65 Foster Street constructed, with space for a bank on the ground floor (since 1919, the Bank of Nova Scotia/Scotiabank), law offices on the second floor (until 1973) and the True Britons Masonic Lodge on the third. Gus Quattrocchi, The Merchants, Professionals and Tradespeople of Perth, n.d., p. 8.

10Perth Courier, 6 May 1921, page unknown.

11 Founded in 1917, the GWVA was Canada’s largest and most powerful veterans’ organization until it merged with other groups in 1925 to create the Canadian Legion. The Great War Veterans' Association | Wartime Canada.

12War Losses (Canada).

13 The Soldier’s Aid Commission of Ontario was founded in 1915 to assist returning First World War veterans and their families as they re-entered civilian life, such as finding work and housing. It operates still as an agency of the Ontario Government.

14Perth Courier, 8 August 1919, p. 1; equivalent to approximately $30K in 2026.

15Perth Courier, 1 August 1919, p. 8.

16Perth Courier, 13 August 1920, p. 4.

17Perth Courier, 3 December 1920, p. 1.

18Perth Courier, 16 March 1923, pp. 1 and 4.

19Perth Courier, 25 May 1923, p. 1.

20 Ron Shaw, “Genesis of a Hospital — The Great War Memorial Hospital of Perth & District,” Perth & District Historical Society, Genesis of a Hospital.

21Perth Courier, 14 November 1924, p. 1.

22Perth Courier, 5 December 1924, p. 4.

23 Obituary, Perth Courier, 6 January 1955, pp. 1 and 5.