Whither the Perley Trophy?

It is often the case that researching one subject will unexpectedly reveal some tiny detail which propels me onto my next search.

Yesterday, in the midst of writing the post about Ottawa Tech's late 40s/early 50s dominance, I came across the following portion of an article. It was written following Tech being toppled from the high school football throne by Glebe in 1951.

It was?

In a standard search for "Perley Trophy", I found an article by Martin Cleary for the Citizen from March of 2007. Someone else was searching for the trophy 13 years ago, a couple of decades after it was last handed out.

The article directed readers to a website which is no longer operational. It also included the following image.

This search also came up in an article by Rob Brodie for canoe.com in April 2007. It included something of an update on Mr. MacRea's "quest".

The search for the old trophy, which has a history that dates back to the 1930s, has been frustrating. MacRae...says he's "hit dead end after dead end," but isn't giving up yet. 

"I'm hoping," he said. "I don't know what will happen. It's a real nice trophy, almost the size of the Grey Cup, about three feet high." 

MacRae said if his quest comes up empty, "without a doubt" the current championship trophy will be rededicated to honour Graham and Wills. But he clearly hopes it doesn't come to that.

Then come November 2007, at least that much was confirmed in an uncredited story in the Citizen.

St. Mark will face Sir Wilfrid Laurier Lancers in the championship game on the Minto Sports Field at the Nepean Sportsplex. Game time is 7 p.m. It will be a battle of undefeated teams as the Lions and Lancers are 8-0 this year. 

This will be the 80th Ottawa high school senior football championship and the first one to present the inaugural Bob Wills and Ron Graham Cup to the winning team. The championship trophy has undergone a complete makeover, courtesy of an interested alumni group from the former Laurentian High School headed by Bud MacRae, who is a teacher at Bell High School. The new trophy is named after Bob Wills and Ron Graham, who coached at Laurentian for a quarter century and produced many successful teams.

So was the cup ever found? I would think that if it had been, it would have been a bigger part of the story in 2007.

I'm curious as to the Perley Trophy's story now because for as much as I've read about high school football in Ottawa, the name of the trophy didn't ring any bells.

I think that's a matter of the trophy being handed out well after the season, at least in some cases, rather than immediately after the game. This image appeared in the Citizen on December 10th, 1954, a couple of weeks after the championship was actually won.

Complicating matters, searches reveal a trophy of the same name being awarded to local baseball  and hockey teams and even women's curling champions. Also, the awarding of the trophy was not always reported in the sports section. It occasionally made its way into the local news instead. As a result, tracking it becomes quite tricky.

What we do know is that the trophy did come into play in 1931 but the first article above stating that it was intended to be used to recognize the winner of the Riders/Rangers game appears to be the accurate one. The first such game was played on November 11th, 1931.

In an article from the day before the game, Perley is referred to as a "well-known member of the Rough Riders executive". I believe he was later a Central Ward councilman.

I can not seem to locate other instances of the trophy serving to recognize a Riders/Rangers winner, but it pops up in a list of hardware handed out at an event at Ottawa Tech in 1937. Again, this is consistent with what is stated in the first article above.

After that, it is mentioned periodically, mostly in articles relating to a school event in which a number of trophies and awards are handed out. The last picture of it I've come across is from 1969...

...and the last significant mention of it, until Mr. Cleary's 2007 article, is from 1972 when St. Patrick and Fisher Park were forced to "share" the trophy as a result of their championship contest ending in a tie.

And that may be why the trophy went dormant, for lack of a better term. In 1973, for the first time, the city champion was determined by having the respective winners of the Ottawa and Carleton school boards meet. Perhaps a new playoff structure resulted in a new trophy being handed out. This 1978 celebration photo certainly seems to support the theory.

Whatever the case may be, I'm interested in its prior use as a "bragging rights" award between the Rough Riders and Rangers, similar to Pedro for the Panda Game between Ottawa U. and Carleton or the Old Boys Cup between Ashbury and Bishop's years ago. I hope to come across those results at some point.

Bud MacRae, by the way, is responsible for creating a list of high school champions dating back to 1927 that I used first for the Capital Region Football website I ran a few years ago then as the "skeleton" for the high school page on this site.

I've never met him; the list was given to me second-hand, but I've always hoped that he's seen me express my gratitude for that list. It was an invaluable starting point in tracking the history of football at that level in the region.