Colonel George Francis Gillman Stanley (July 6, 1907 – September 13, 2002) was a Canadian author, soldier, historian at the Royal Military College of Canada and Mount Allison University, public servant, former Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, and designer of the Canadian Flag.
George F. G. Stanley was born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1907 and received a BA from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He studied at Keble College, University of Oxford, in 1929 as the Rhodes Scholar from Alberta, and held a Beit Fellowship in Imperial Studies and a Royal Society of Canada Scholarship. He earned a BA, MA, MLitt and DPhil. Always a keen athlete, he played for the Oxford University Ice Hockey Club, which won the Spengler Cup in 1931. At Oxford, he wrote his book, The Birth of Western Canada: A History of The Riel Rebellions, and began his lifelong work on Louis Riel.
Stanley returned to Canada in 1936 and was appointed a professor of history at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. He joined the military upon arriving there and qualified as a lieutenant in the New Brunswick Rangers. He served as an infantry training officer in Fredericton and then proceeded overseas during World War II as historian (rising to Deputy-Director) in the Historical Section at Canadian Army Headquarters in London, England; he was also responsible for administering the War Artist Program, whose staff included Bruno Bobak, Molly Lamb Bobak, Alex Colville, Charles Comfort, Lawren P. Harris and Will Ogilvie. Stanley was discharged as a lieutenant-colonel in 1947. He then taught at the University of British Columbia, holding the first chair in Canadian history in Canada. He came out of military retirement in 1948 to help fight floods in the Fraser Valley and was on the Reserve of Officers until 1967. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1949) to do research into the history of Canadian government policy in dealing with Aboriginal people.
In 1949, Stanley began teaching at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) in Kingston, Ontario, where he remained for twenty years. At RMC, he became head of the History Department, served as the first Dean of Arts for seven years (1962–1969), and began building a faculty in the humanities and social sciences. He taught the first undergraduate course in military history ever given in Canada and wrote a textbook, entitled Canada's Soldiers, 1604–1954: The Military History of An Unmilitary People (1954), which became required reading for every service person for three decades. His students included John de Chastelain, Jack Granatstein, and Desmond Morton. Thanks in part to Stanley's efforts as RMC Dean of Arts, the Royal Military College of Canada Pipes and Drums were equipped in 1965 with most of their highland kit, including the Mackenzie tartan (RMC was established in 1876 when Alexander Mackenzie was prime minister).
While in Kingston he served as secretary and president of the Kingston Historical Society and edited Historic Kingston for several years. He was president of the Arts Society, director of the Art Collection Society, served on various committees working to save Kingston's old limestone buildings, was president of the St. Andrew's Society, and acted as clerk of his church's vestry council. Stanley was president of the Canadian Historical Association (1955–1956), a member of the Massey Commission's Committee on Historic Sites and Monuments (1950–1951), and a founding member of the Archaeological and Historic Sites Board of Ontario (1953–1969). He was chairman of the federal government's Centennial Publications Committee and acted as chairman of centennial celebrations in Pittsburgh Township, Ontario. While Stanley was at the Royal Military College, he suggested the design for the Canadian flag, which was adopted on 15 February 1965.
In 1969, Stanley returned to Mount Allison University to become founding director of the new Canadian Studies program, the first of its kind in Canada. He was also the first holder of the Edgar and Dorothy Davidson Chair of Canadian Studies (1969–1975). At Mount Allison, Stanley taught courses in Canadian civilization, dealing with literature, music, architecture and culture. He served as a member of the Commission de Planification Académique de l'Université de Moncton (1969–1972), and a member of the advisory panel on the Symons Commission on Canadian Studies (1972–1975). He was a founding member of the Atlantic Canada Institute. He also served as member of the Federal Government Advisory Board on Canadian Military Colleges (1973–1979), on the Council of the New Brunswick Army Cadet League and of the Maritime Automobile Association, and as president of the New Brunswick Council of St. John Ambulance. He was a director of the Canadian Association of Rhodes Scholars (1983–1987) and of SEVEC, served as a member of the Advisory Board of the Canadian War Museum (1988–1990) and as honorary colonel of the Royal New Brunswick Regiment (1982–1992), and continued his long-standing role as corresponding member of the Institut d'histoire de l'Amérique française.
George Stanley retired from teaching in 1975, but remained active in public life. From 1981 to 1987, he was Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick. While Lieutenant-Governor, Stanley continued to act as General Editor of The Collected Writings of Louis Riel in five volumes, which appeared in 1985 after seven years of work by five Canadian scholars; this project was published ahead of schedule and under budget. Well into his nineties, Stanley continued to research, write, read manuscripts, review books, give interviews and talks, encourage young scholars, and maintain an active interest in the militia, cadets, St. John Ambulance, and SEVEC. He answered a steady flow of letters from school children asking about the Canadian flag. He never missed an opportunity to promote Canadian citizenship and love of country. In 1998, he donated his book collection to the Special Collections of the MacKimmie Library at the University of Calgary; his personal papers are now also deposited there. Stanley died in 2002 and was buried with full military honours in Sackville, New Brunswick.
In 2003, a former student reflected: "George Stanley was a scholar revered by his peers throughout the world and equally he was held in the same regard by all his former students, many of whom became professional historians and leaders in their fields across Canada. Stanley was the Head of the History Department when I was a young cadet at RMC. In a highly organized and rigidly structured environment, he stood out to us as the perfect role model - a gentleman, a scholar, a friend and later a confidant. He led by example and set his students on a path of personal and individual achievement unhampered by his own prejudices and influences. As a result, Stanley sent his students into the world equipped to make up their own minds and not just echo what they had been taught."
Desmond Morton, one of Stanley's students at RMC in the 1950s, a Canadian military historian and author, and formerly the founding director of Montreal's McGill Institute for the Study of Canada observed: "George's books and their non-conventional wisdom are a great contribution to this country. When you do the unexpected, you make a difference, and George always argued differently -- especially for the rights of French Canada, which wasn't a popular thing to do at the time."
The historian, R.C. [Rod] Macleod of the University of Alberta, has written that: "Much of English Canada's understanding of the formative years of the Canadian West comes from George Stanley's remarkable work, The Birth of Western Canada. Considering that it was one of the earliest works by an academically trained historian in this country, it has stood the test of time remarkably well. No other work of Canadian history published before the Second World War is as regularly read by historians, students and the general public…. [This] subject will always be identified with his name." In 2015, a Supreme Court of Canada decision on language rights cited The Birth of Western Canada.