HARRISON, THOMAS (1869-1935)
HARRISON, THOMAS, Presbyterian minister, Black River and Napan, 1919-26; b. Ballymena, Co. Antrim, Ireland, 17 Mar 1869, s/o Thomas Harrison and Katherine Kelly; m. 2nd, Mrs Doris Margery Reed, a native of England; d. Edam, Sask., 15 Jul 1935.
Thomas Harrison, who had been a soldier in the Sudan War in the early 1880s and had later served in the army in India, arrived in Canada in 1911 as a Presbyterian minister. He was stationed at Longueuil, Que., in 1912 and at St George, N.B., in 1913. His wife died at St George in 1914, and he remained there until 1916, when he joined the 64th Infantry Battalion and went overseas as a chaplain.
Following his discharge as a captain in 1919 Harrison was called to the Black River ministerial charge, of which he was pastor for seven years. Part of a poetic address entitled "Lest We Forget," which he delivered in 1921, was published in the Chatham World. When he left in 1926 he went to the tiny village of Edam, Sask., and he was the minister of the United Church there until his death in 1935, at age sixty-six. The United Church paper, The New Outlook, stated that he was a man "of large heart and wide sympathies" who put everything he had into his work. During the last year of his life he was awarded the King's Silver Jubilee Medal. At that time he was honorary national vice-president of the Canadian Legion and honorary chaplain of the Saskatchewan command.
Harrison was survived in 1935 by his second wife and at least eight children, four of whom had been baptized at Black River in the 1920s. His relatively youthful widow outlived him by forty-five years.
Sources
[b/d] official death records / Advocate 10 Jun 1924; annual 1936 (Sask.); Commercial World 5 Apr 1951; Harrison family data; Macdougall; New Outlook 21 Aug 1935; Telegraph 17 Oct 1914, 10 Jul 1915, 17 Dec 1915; UC archives; Walkington; World 13 Dec 1919, 9 Nov 1921
Remarques
The obituaries published by the Saskatchewan Conference of the United Church and in The New Outlook, together with the other sources cited above, provide the following on Harrison's early life: That he was the son of a Presbyterian minister; that both of his parents died while he was a youth; that he was taken to Cairo to live with his mother's cousin, Sir Herbert Stewart; that he attended school there until the outbreak of the Sudan War in 1882, when he was attached to Sir Herbert's battalion as a bugler; that in 1884-85, he was a member of the Anglo-Egyptian force which attempted the relief of Gordon at Khartoum; that he later served in India and was granted a commission; and that after his discharge, he continued his studies and was awarded MA and LittD degrees by Oxford University and an LLD by the University of London. A newspaper article evidently written for readers outside the province but printed by the Saint John Standard and the Chatham World in 1919 stated that he was a graduate of Dublin and Oxford universities; that he had been one of the finest pulpit and platform orators in the Canadian forces and one of the most popular padres at the front; that he was about to be inducted into "one of the most important charges in the lower provinces" (i.e., at Black River). The Union Advocate reported in 1924 that he had been granted a bachelor of laws degree, having studied law for two years in England and for three years through the extramural program of a Chicago institution. These particulars were omitted from the body of the sketch because some of them are contradictory, and none of them could be verified.