By Jeff Morris (Photos from Carleton Athletics)
It is a special anniversary for Carleton University’s sports teams.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Ravens moniker that the school’s teams, students, graduates, faculty and fans have all lovingly embraced for generations.
Carleton College was formed in 1942 as a school primarily for soldiers returning from military service to study and transition back into the civilian world. In 1945, a group of students got the idea of forming a football team, as many had played before serving in World War II. They found a coach in former Ottawa Rough Rider star Tiny Hermann. Over a midnight meeting at the Bytown Inn, Carleton’s football team was born. The school endorsed the idea, and it led to the addition of basketball and hockey teams.
The Carleton football team played for three seasons. They played at Lansdowne Park against teams like Macdonald College, St. Patrick’s College, Queen’s University and the University of Ottawa. But there was one thing missing.
They were a team with no name.
Seventy-five years ago, that changed. In its first year, the team was known as the Carleton Originals or the Tri-Colour for their black, red and white uniforms. But, when Carleton took the field for the 1948 season, they took it as the Ravens.
On October 22, 1948, the Carleton football team was referred to as the Ravens in The Carleton, which was the school’s student newspaper that was renamed the Charlatan many years later. In their essay on the history of Carleton football, students of Professor Joe Scanlon’s 1965 Journalism class assumed that someone from the school newspaper came up with the name because the players, in their black uniforms, looked like Ravens. The October 29 edition of the Carleton referred to the Carleton football team as the Ravens in a headline.
But the Carleton was not alone in their use of the Ravens name. The Ottawa daily newspapers caught on as well with the Ottawa Citizen and the Ottawa Journal both referring to the Carleton football team as the Ravens on Oct. 23, 1948, in their preview of that season’s first game, against McGill. The Journal ran a headline on their sports pages that day, “Carleton Ravens Play McGill Today”.
The use of the word Ravens by the dailies all but ruled out the 1965 theory that the Charlatan arbitrarily gave the team a name.
A deeper dive shows that credit for having a team name goes to the newly hired athletic director, W. T. “Wib” Nixon.
Having a new team name was just one of several steps that Nixon took in solidifying Carleton’s football program. Nixon was a former Ottawa Rough Rider who had also been a national-level track athlete and basketball player.
In 1931, Nixon led the Glebe basketball team to the national junior championship. In 1936, he played for the Morrisburg Seniors, who lost in a playoff to the Windsor Fords in a game to determine who would represent Canada in basketball at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
He played college football at the University of Ottawa after leading Glebe Collegiate to the Eastern Ontario championship. He also won five national track titles, in the hurdles, long jump and 400 metre hurdles before moving on to play for the Ottawa Rough Riders.
Nixon enlisted after the outbreak of World War II, and was a sports officer in Cornwall and Brockville, before joining the National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa in Intelligence. He saw action overseas with the Essex Scottish.
Upon returning to civil life, Nixon was athletic director at the University of Ottawa before moving over to Carleton.
While Nixon had the idea of giving Carleton’s young teams a name, there was no promotion. There was no “name the team” contest, no pomp or fanfare. The name Ravens just appeared. There was also no record of why black with red and white trim was chosen as the school’s colours, other than those were the primary colours of all of Ottawa’s professional sports teams. The first sweaters worn by the Carleton football in 1945 were actually brown with orange trim, as the original football team played in a set of borrowed rec league hockey jerseys.
After the first appearance of the Ravens' name in the media, the name was adopted by all Carleton athletics teams.
An interesting twist was that Carleton was soon to field two basketball teams. The Ravens would be the intercollegiate team, while the second team, called the Cardinals, would play in the Ottawa city league.
The name Ravens was not the only big change Nixon approved. He also wanted the school to have a fight song. Musician Garry Nason founded a band and adapted John Phillip Souza’s march, The Liberty Bell, as Carleton’s fight song. The song would later become famous as the theme for the Monty Python Flying Circus.
As documented in Scanlon’s document, among the songs lyrics were:
“We’ll spill their gore, then down the field we’ll roar,We’ll lead the pack with the red, white and black, fight,Carleton on to victory.”
While we will never know if Wib Nixon thought of the name himself or if someone gave him the idea, the name certainly stuck and has been the cornerstone of the school’s identity for three-quarters of a century.
