Winnipeg’s forgotten Stanley Cup champ

On what would be his 150th birthday, the story of Maj. John Robinson Benson — Winnipeg’s forgotten Stanley Cup champion — deserves to be told.

On May 10, 1876, Dr. Edward Benson’s wife Annie gave birth to a son they named John Robinson, after the boy’s grandfather, Col. J.R. Benson. Dr. Benson had arrived in Winnipeg in January 1874 by horse-drawn sleigh via the end of the rail line in Minneapolis. He quickly established his medical practice and became one of the founding physicians of the Winnipeg General Hospital.

Young Rob — as the family called him — grew up in a household that helped build the institutions of a frontier city. At 19, he was the youngest member of the 1896 Winnipeg Victorias, the team that brought the Stanley Cup west for the first time. He had already earned his place across two Anderson Cup-winning seasons and appears in every team photograph from the era: the championship portraits, the Montreal dressing room, the commemorative poster. Listed as the squad’s spare, he was not a marginal figure. In a seven-man game with no line changes, the spare was the one player trusted to step into any position at any moment.

On Valentine’s Day, 1896, the Victorias entered Montreal’s Victoria Skating Rink for a sudden-death challenge against the defending Stanley Cup champions, the Montreal Victorias. Winnipeg’s starting seven included some of the finest athletes in the country: Captain Jack Armytage, who had founded the Victoria Hockey Club and played in the first hockey game in Manitoba history; Dan Bain, later voted Canada’s outstanding athlete of the last half of the 19th century; Rod Flett, the Métis point player whose steady, unshakable defence anchored three Stanley Cup campaigns; and George “Whitey” Merritt in goal, who startled the Montreal crowd by wearing protective cricket pads on his legs — a western innovation the easterners had never seen.

Stunned fans

A skeptical Montreal crowd had gathered more out of curiosity than concern. They called the Winnipeggers “the blizzards from the land of the setting sun.” Armytage scored in the first 10 minutes, Campbell added a second nine minutes later and Merritt shut out every Montreal attack. The 2-0 victory stunned Montreal, but not the fans back home, who had followed the game via Canadian Pacific telegraph dispatches relayed to buildings in the Exchange District. When the team’s train returned home on Feb. 24, its cowcatcher adorned with hockey sticks and brooms, thousands lined Main Street for what is considered the first-ever Stanley Cup parade.

At 19, Benson was a Stanley Cup champion and the son of one of Winnipeg’s most respected families. A successful life of his own soon followed. Benson married Ida Mary Vassar on June 22, 1904. Ida was, by her own account, the first female stenographer with the Canadian Northern Railway, working under her uncle Sir William Mackenzie, the railway entrepreneur whose lines were reshaping the Prairies. Through this connection, Benson became a railway contractor during the great era of Canadian rail building, spending over half a dozen years developing new routes across the Prairies and into the northern bush of Manitoba.

By 1914, the Bensons had four children. Benson had served as a Militia Lieutenant with the 90th Winnipeg Rifles and he immediately enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force at age 38 — reportedly the only member of the 1896 Victorias to serve in the CEF and serve on the Western Front. He was appointed to the Canadian Army Service Corps and promoted to captain.

Within days of his sailing for England, Ida gave birth to their fifth child, Patrick Campbell, a son his father would not hold for three years. Benson was transferred to the Western Front in early January 1918.

As a CASC officer, he led horse trains that supplied multiple Canadian and British units through the Hundred Days Offensive. To get a minimal sense of the death and destruction during this offensive, at Amiens alone — on Aug. 8 — Canadians suffered 1,036 dead, 2,803 wounded and 29 captured. In the Canadian Cavalry Brigade’s last action, which included Winnipeg’s Fort Garry Horse, 168 men and 171 horses were reported killed, wounded and missing in the Battle of Le Cateau, on Oct. 9. Capt. Benson was recognized as a stellar officer and promoted to major while stationed in France in 1919.

Back in Winnipeg, Ida and their eldest children, Edward and Mary, had held the home front together through four years of war — managing the family, the finances and the constant anxiety of waiting for news from France. Many Winnipeg families would lose sons and fathers. In his book Winnipeg’s Great War, Jim Blanchard notes that 1,658 names of the fallen were attached to the Loving Hearts memorial on the Manitoba legislative grounds, and that this did not constitute a complete list.

Shell-shocked

Maj. Benson returned from France carrying shell shock and the effects of mustard gas exposure. He was a proud man from a proud family — the son of the city’s coroner, a Stanley Cup champion, an officer — and that pride made it harder, not easier, to ask for help. By the early 1920s, he felt unfit to cope. That place in his marriage, family and work no longer existed. He left for Gold Bridge, a remote mining settlement in British Columbia’s mountains, where he worked as a cook in lumber camps and prospected for gold.

He would spend 25 years there, writing letters home, finding camaraderie among loggers, and drawing strength from his Catholic faith and the companionship of a German Shepherd named Old Pal and a horse called Imp. His wife and daughter, Mary, wrote back faithfully for decades, keeping the thread of family alive across the mountains and the years. In 1941, Benson wrapped his most treasured possession — rosary beads he had carried since 1904 — in a small basket woven by the Xwisten people (a.k.a. the Bridge River Indian Band), and sent them to Mary for her wedding day.

He died at Shaughnessy Hospital for veterans in Vancouver on July 19, 1952, his health issues compounded by gas exposure during the war. He is buried at Vancouver’s Mountain View Cemetery — a fitting resting place for a Prairie boy who followed Indigenous trails laying down track to Hudson Bay, travelled to Montreal to claim the Stanley Cup, served king and country in the nightmares of France and ultimately found peace in the Canadian mountains.

Last November, a mural celebrating the Winnipeg Victorias’ three Stanley Cup victories was unveiled by the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame at 436 Main St. The faces of Armytage, Bain, Flett and their teammates look out over the street where fans once paraded them as champions. A 19-year-old Rob Benson stands with them, on the right side of the back row. On May 10, his 150th birthday, Winnipeg might remember not only a talented young athlete, but a man and a family who bore the cost of war in silence so we might enjoy peace.

Rick Benson is John Robinson Benson’s grandson. He is writing a historical-fiction novel, Bring The Major Home, based on Maj. Benson’s life.