“There were a lot of good causes I could give to, but because of my background and attachment to Queen’s, it seemed like an obvious choice.”
That’s how Donald Travers, a long-time, now retired, member of Queen’s support staff, explains his decision to leave money to the university.
Although Travers never attended Queen’s, “I was more into the technical side of things,” he says of his decision to study at Ottawa’s Algonquin College, there can’t be many people who can boast a stronger connection to the school.
Don’s grandfather on his mother’s side was Professor John Cole Gwillim, professor of mining at Queen’s from 1903 to 1920. His mother, Gwyneth Travers, was a Queen’s Arts graduate (1933), who later studied at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre under André Biéler and Grant Macdonald, and achieved renown as a maker of woodblock prints and woodcuts featuring scenes of Kingston and Queen’s. “Probably her most famous work was of the Grant Hall clock tower,” Travers says. “People wanted that for their graduation present.” His brother Peter (Sci ’71) attended Queen’s, as did a cousin, Alan Travers, who worked for many years as the coordinator for career services in the Faculty of Education.
Growing up near Queen’s, at 234 Albert Street, Travers remembers the campus as “very green, like a park.”
“We played around there, used the tennis courts – and watched the antics of the students.” Their mother took them to watch Toronto Varsity burned in effigy in the middle of Leonard Field, and he and his brother sneaked into football games at the old Richardson Stadium. “We’d go in two hours early, avoiding the AMS constables, and hide under the stands. Then we’d come out and watch the Golden Gaels. I can remember the east side bleachers as a sea of Queen’s colours, with people swaying and singing the ‘Oil thigh na Banrighinn...’”
In 1970, his schooling finished, Travers was back home in Kingston, wondering what to do next. He saw an ad posted at Queen’s, applied, and got hired on as a laboratory technician in the Department of Pharmacology. Three years later, he moved over to the Department of Physiology.
“It was a good environment for me,” he says, “just made to order. I worked with a good bunch of people, and we definitely had a real commitment to the university and to the students.” Travers retired in 2007 after 37 years in the Faculty of Health Sciences.
His decision to remember Queen’s in his will grows out of his family’s long-time connection to the university and reflects their personal values.
“For them,” he says of his parents and his grandparents, “a house was a home, not an investment. These people really looked after things. The Gwillims had amassed investments over time, not massive but blue chip. Mother protected and preserved those assets.”
Travers continued their tradition of careful stewardship when he inherited these investments and, on the death of his brother, the old family home on Albert Street. “I came to realise – that it was their money,” Travers says, speaking of his mother and grandfather. He himself has never married and has no heirs. Leaving something to Queen’s to commemorate John Cole Gwillim and Don’s mother just seemed like the right thing to do.
Don’s gift to the university will include a substantial legacy that will help top up the J.C. Gwillim prize, an award given annually to a second year undergraduate in mining engineering that was founded by his grandmother in 1955. It will also establish the Gwyneth Travers Internship to provide students from the Faculty of Arts with the chance to work or take classes at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.
Says Travers, “If there are people who are interested in the arts and talented, I’m happy to support them.”
The third part of Travers’ legacy will go to the Campus Beautification Project, to help Queen’s maintain the park-like campus Travers played in as a child, those lush green spaces that mean so much to the university and the broader Kingston community. “I tell people if they want to remember me, don’t bother with a service, just plant a tree somewhere.” His mother had a tree planted more than three decades ago to honour his estimable grandfather and grandmother. Another will be a nice touch – a leafy, living reminder of a family and an association with Queen’s stretching back more than one hundred years.
