The school was founded in the early 1960s by
Ted Byfield and Frank Wiens, who became the school's director. They started an
Anglican lay order called the
Company of the Cross, based on the writings of Christian apologists, such as
Dorothy L. Sayers,
C.S. Lewis, and
G. K. Chesterton. Originally, the Company of the Cross was under the authority of the resident bishop in Winnipeg, officially called the
Diocese of Rupert's Land. Ted Byfield, Frank Wiens, and over a dozen other men—many of them from the
St. John's Cathedral choir, formed a cell or group, that shared similar beliefs. They founded a lay Anglican order, affiliated with the
Anglican Church of Canada, which they first called the Dynevor Society, after the Dynevor Indian Hospital in Selkirk, north of Winnipeg, a property they had acquired. They believed that the education of boys in public schools was not training them to develop strong character and Christian values. They organized a boys choir at St. John's Cathedral, which first became a club, then a weekend residential school starting in 1957, and finally, in 1962, a full-time traditionalist
Anglican private boarding schools for boys. The Company of the Cross had acquired the abandoned Dynevor Indian Hospital where they held their weekend schools. The cell officially changed their name from Dynevor to the Company of the Cross under the Manitoba Societies Act. In 1962, Byfield and five other members of the Company opened the first in a series of St. John's full-time boarding schools for boys "dedicated to the reassertion of Christian educational principles"—Saint John's Cathedral Boys' School. Its primary focus was challenging boys from every social stratum to work together in order to grow morally, physically, intellectually and spiritually in the tradition of Victorian
muscular Christianity. The 1974 National Film Board Film described the St. John's Cathedral Boys' School as the "most demanding outdoor school in North America." Two other schools,
Saint John's School of Alberta and
Saint John's School of Ontario were founded on the same ideas in later years. The school closed in the early 1990s, struggling for funds and credibility after a canoeing disaster on
Lake Timiskaming where 13 people died of hypothermia. == Incidents ==