Department of History reveals identity of anonymous Shannon donor

The Shannon Lectures in History, the Department of History’s annual autumn public lecture series, endowed by an anonymous friend of the Department, are now in their sixteenth year.  The lecture series topics have included both popular and cutting-edge fields of study, and lecturers have come from 25 Canadian universities and 11 in the United States, as well as 9 locations overseas, from Oxford to Sydney, Germany to the Sorbonne, plus several Canadian and overseas museums and cultural institutions.

The department’s anonymous benefactor also endowed the prestigious Shannon Scholarships in Canadian Social History, which have allowed the Department to recruit and to reward some of its most outstanding graduate students.

At the final Shannon Lecture of the 2017 series, on Friday, December 1, Professor Bruce Elliott, a long-time friend of the donor, revealed the identity of the Department’s anonymous benefactor.  She had sought no recognition, and had wanted to remain anonymous in life, but she had agreed to allow her name to be revealed in death.  She passed away on August 14, 2017 at the age of 95.

Beatrice Lois May Long, known as Lois, grew up on a dairy farm in Nepean, a descendant of early Irish settlers.  Following a career as a medical laboratory technologist that took her to the Canadian North as well as to work in Ottawa, she traveled extensively and explored long-standing interests in photography, local and family history, western migration, and the historical links between Ireland and Canada.

Miss Long was a major source of support, advice, and information for published works by Carleton history students, including histories of Britannia and Nepean and a study of Irish immigration.  She was responsible for the photographs in an earlier Nepean history.  Miss Long was a founding member and donor and a continuous benefactor of the Nepean Museum and of the East Clare Heritage Centre in Tuamgraney, Ireland.  She was also a member of the Gloucester and Osgoode Township Historical Societies.

In 1998 Lois donated her collection of 1950s Inuit sculpture, collected during her travels in the Arctic, to the Carleton University Art Gallery.  The Shannon Fund was established in 1999 and the first series of the Shannon Lectures in History funded by the endowment was held in 2002.

In accordance with Lois’s wishes, the funds donated to Carleton University will continue to be known by the name of the Shannon Fund (and the Shannon Lectures and Scholarships), but the Shannon name will now be qualified by the phrase ‘Donated by Lois M. Long in memory of her parents James Buchanan Long and Ida May (Davidson)’.  The name Shannon comes from the location of the Nepean pioneer Long family’s former residence on the Shannon River near Mountshannon, County Clare, Ireland.

Lois’s father James Buchanan Long (1876-1947) was a trustee of the Merivale School Board, a member of Nepean Township Council, president of the Ottawa Valley Milk Producers Association, and president of the Carleton County Conservative Association.  The stone house that he built for himself in 1904 still stands in the Longfields subdivision that occupies the site of the family farm.  He married later in life, in 1919, to Ida May Davidson, who died in 1986.  The stone house, home also to Jim’s wife Ida and only child Lois, was designated as a heritage building by the former City of Nepean in 1990.