The Canadian Red Cross Society’s 1909 incorporation sparked a broader reorganization and revitalization among its long-time supporters and leaders. This included establishing new habits, like the deliberate record-keeping represented by this volume of meeting minutes. Today, records like this provide historians with important insights into the early work and development of the organization.

This small book contains the handwritten minutes of the new national Executive Committee – a Toronto-based group that included founding members from 1896 like Dr. George Sterling Ryerson and James Mason. The committee began meeting in December 1909, and recorded the minutes of its 1910-11 meetings in a volume which was later lost. 

The first Annual Report (1910) of the revamped organization tells us (briefly) that the Executive Committee used that year to try to build a nation-wide peacetime Red Cross. Correspondence from the Boer War period was used to create a list of people and organizations that might be willing to establish provincial branches.

The second (but first surviving) volume of minutes shown here begins with the meeting of September 20, 1911, and ends on April 9, 1915. Within its pages a remarkable transition unfolds: a small, unassuming organization struggling to increase its membership bursts into activity at the outbreak of war in August 1914.  

The First World War triggered a rapid and massive expansion of the Canadian Red Cross. Ultimately it would turn the small, male-dominated organization represented on that first page of September 1911 minutes into a quaint historical relic.