Qualicum College opened in 1935 and ran on the British public-school model, transplanted whole to a stretch of Vancouver Island coastline. Boys boarded. Rugby was close to universal and taken seriously. A military cadet programme supplied war games and camping trips. Evenings meant a proctored study hall three hours long, aimed squarely at the government examinations, and discipline included the cane - unremarkable in such schools at the time, which does not make it any lighter on the boys who took it. The teaching was uneven. British Literature was, by the accounts of those who were there, genuinely excellent; much of the rest was memorisation with an exam at the end of it. The quiet exception was the study hall itself. Boys who used those three enforced hours to actually read, rather than to grind, got something out of the place that the timetable had not planned for.

By the late 1960s the arithmetic had turned. Costs rose, enrolment fell, and the model the school was built on had begun to look less like rigour and more like inertia. Public education in British Columbia was improving fast in exactly the areas a discipline-based curriculum found hardest to follow. The Knight brothers, who ran the school, closed it in 1970. The grounds came apart quickly after that: the playing fields where generations of boys had played rugby were subdivided for housing, and the main Tudor building was bought by a group who reopened it as the Qualicum College Inn.

For decades afterwards the old school served drinks and rented rooms. Guests slept in converted dormitories and walked corridors built for schoolboys, and the building accumulated the reputation such places always do - creaking floors, unexplained noises, ghost stories told with varying degrees of seriousness by staff and guests alike. In the mid-1970s a film crew arrived and used the Inn as the main location for a made-for-television movie, It Happened at Lakewood Manor, which premiered in December 1977. Then came the developers. An application to redevelop the site as a 90-unit condominium was withdrawn in 2007. In January 2008, demolition began on the wings and additions bolted onto the building during the 1970s. By 2011 the hotel and its grounds were being converted into Qualicum College Heights, a complex of forty condominiums wrapped around the original hall.

The building is gone. What remains is harder to bulldoze. In 2010 the Aboriginal Issues Press at the University of Manitoba published Voices from the Dorms: Qualicum Boys School, an oral history built from the recollections of the people who lived there - the dorms, the discipline, the rugby, the long evenings, the friendships and the homesickness. It is an odd and rather good fate for a small private school on Vancouver Island: not preserved in brick, which turned out to be negotiable, but preserved in the testimony of the boys who passed through it. The replica going up on the site will reproduce the gables and the timbering. The book holds everything the gables never showed.