A CELEBRATION OF OUR UBC HERITAGE THE WAY WE WERE Anecdote Antic Absurdity at The University of British Columbia Philip Akrigg Ludlow Beamish Norman Beanie Pierre Berton Clare (Brown) Buckland Joseph Billyeald David Carey Cyril Chave Jean (Fraser) Crowley WardDeBeck Mildred (Osterhout) Fahrni James Gibson William Gibson Ronald Grantham Ken Grieve Peter Shinobu Higashi Katharine Hockin J.E. Kania JohnKask Stuart Keate Eric Kelly Mary (Sadler) Kelly Himie Koshevoy Tom Lea Clare (McQuarrie) McAllister Robert McDougall Malcolm McGregor Kae (Farquhar) McKenzie Arthur Mayse Russell R. Munn Nathan Nemetz Connie (Baird) Newby Eric Nicol Hugh Palmer Harvey Parliament SamRoddan Sydney Risk Alex Rome Mary (McGeer) Rupp Arthur Sager Winston Shilvock Samuel Simpson Dorothy Somerset Betty (Leslie) Stubbs Frances (Montgomery) Tillman Ross Tolmie Arthur J. Wirick The University of British Columbia Alumni Association 1987 Copyright by The University of British Columbia Alumni Association, 1987 This book is dedicated to our friend, Dr. Blythe Eagles, whose constant commitment to our university breathed new life into our traditions. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1. We wish to acknowledge the permission from the Department of English to reprint Sedgewick: The Man and His Achievement by Philip Akrigg. This work is the eleventh Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lecture, delivered on March 18,1980 in the Frederick Wood Theatre at the University of British Columbia. The contribution by Pierre Berton is adapted from Starting Out, to be published in the Fall of 1987 by McClelland and Stewart. 3. The Ronald Grantham Story is from material submitted by him and edited with the concurrence of his friend, Fletcher Cross. Message from the President: When asked by the Heritage Committee to write an opening message for The Way We Were - A Celebration Of Our UBC Heritage, I was delighted to know that a group of some of our most distinguished alumni had expended the considerable effort it must have taken to yield such an impressive collection of early UBC memoirs. It is a demonstration of the true affection alumni have for their University. As the year 1990 will mark the 75th anniversary of the University of British Columbia, The Way We Were - A Celebration Of Our UBC Heritage is a perfect introduction to the University's history. Each story brings to life some of the most colourful moments from UBC's past It will be a trip down memory lane for senior alumni and a link with the past for more recent graduates. I know that all who read this will take pleasure in a humorous and at times touching journey into the heart of UBC's past. David W. Strangway President The University of British Columbia INTRODUCTION Attribution, Approbation, Aspiration For he lives twice who can at once employ The present well, and ev'n the past enjoy. -Alexander Pope Graduates of the University of British Columbia classes of 1928 through 1944 at a meeting chaired by Helen Belkin, BA'40, on 29 November, 1983 were encouraged to engage in innovative projects on the university heritage by Dr. Blythe Eagles, BA'22, DSc'68, who had been asked to coordinate all heritage programs of the Alumni Association. Dr. Ludlow Beamish and Sam Roddan volunteered to record the student activities in liberal arts groups including the Players Club, Musical Society, Letters Club and others. Frankie Tillman offered to induce articles on the Student Christian Movement. Together these three and other adherents became known as the Humanities Group. These collected essays are the result of the group's efforts. Some articles were written prior to the formation of the group but are included as appropriate to the collection. While the main body of essays received are related to the liberal arts, others on more diverse topics encouraged the group to expand its mandate to embrace all UBC memorabilia and to change its name to the Memorabilia Group. Between the idea and the fact, a core group of four graduates from the mid-30s cadged, cajoled and coddled potential authors and formalized the current presentation. Ludlow Beamish, B A'37, the organizer and motivator, launched the group and navigated the course. Sam Roddan, BA'37, the idea man and free spirit, wrote enough letters to likely contributors to fill a volume equal to this. Arthur Wirick, BA'36, the dialoguer, cataloguer and chronologer, consistently sought order from chaos and can still smile. Cyril Chave, BA'34, who combines words into delightful scherzos, drew the line on individual freedoms with spelling. Through some forty meetings and many personal efforts in the acquisition and review of manuscripts and in the development of this modest book, the core group are still friends. Their views, past and present, have been enhanced through a glass held at the correct angle. May their futures be as well disposed. From time to time the core goup has been joined by Frankie Montgomery Tillman, BA'39, Philip Akrigg, BA'37, MA'40, Kae (Farquhar) McKenzie, BA'37, MSW'47, Betty (Leslie) Stubbs, BA'38, MEd'68, and Gerald Sutherland, BA'37, BCom'37. Ideas and support have also been received from Laurenda Daniells, the University Archivist, Bob Osborne, BA'33, BEd'48, Deputy Chair, Heritage, and the late Dr. James Morton, BA'44. Support for compiling and publishing the essays has come from Alumni Association staff, including Liz Owen, Anne Sharp, Terry Lavender, Linda Hall, Maureen Bums, Eric Eggertson, David Speed and Paula Heal. The publication is funded by the Alumni Association. Throughout the endeavour the encouragment of Dr. Eagles has been an inspiration to all. Most important have been the contributions of the individual authors listed throughout the book. Without their efforts this compendium of recollections would not exist. Few are professional writers. All have expressed unique personal experience within common periods and events. To all the above, the UBC Alumni Heritage Committee expresses its sincere thanks. This publication is a manifestation of an innovative heritage project. The biographical essays, histories and anecdotes are all microcosms of the total university history which scholarly writers will periodically consummate in more pretentious tomes. Some of the present material may be included and some may not; however, the only complete history of the university is that which embraces each of our memories from undergraduates days. If all alumni who read this book would write our own reminiscences then we would capture the full nutrient of these undergraduate years. And other volumes would follow. Our university experiences end only when we choose not to continue them. "Here is the fire, not the ashes." Burn on. Alec Rome, BASc'44 1928-44 Heritage Subcommittee March, 1987 TABLE OF CONTENTS FACULTY AND STAFF Sedgewick: The Man and His Achievement Philip Akrigg 2 Lionel Haweis at UBC Roderick Norman Beattie 10 John Ridington's Casde William Gibson 12 Reminiscences of University Life Malcolm F. McGregor 13 The Sedgewickian Legacy Hugh M. Palmer 17 Henry Angus: Soliloquizer Arthur J. Wirick 20 Dean Mary Bollert Elizabeth (Leslie) Stubbs 21 Gordon Shrum: A Titan Put Down J. Harvey Parliament 23 M.Y. Williams: A Portrait in Serenity J. Harvey Parliament 24 An Encounter With Ira Dilworth Sam Roddan 24 CAMPUS CLUBS 26 SCM Campus Beginnings Mildred (Osterhout) Fahrni 27 The First Gymnasium J. Ross Tolmie 28 The SCM at UBC Clare (Brown) Buckland 29 Memories of the SCM 1927-33 Katharine Hockin 29 Recollections of the SCM: 1928-33 32 Mary (Sadler) Kelly Recollections of the SCM: 1926-31 32 Eric Kelly Recollections of the SCM: 1936-39 Frances (Montgomery) Tillman 33 An SCM Grad News Sheet for 1943 Jean (Fraser) Crowley 34 A Day in the Life of the Literary Forum Kae (Farquhar) McKenzie 35 The Social Science Club - A Study in Sex and Censorship Samuel Leonard Simpson 36 The Players' Club As I Knew It Sydney Risk 37 Memories of the Players' Club Tom Lea 40 The Players' Club - Reflections from the Green Room Dorothy Somerset 41 The Founding of Phrateres Mary (McGeer) Rupp 43 CAMPUS POLITICS 44 The Ronald Grantham Story Ron Grantham 45 The Day We Tried to Fire the President Stuart Keate 49 The History of Student Publicity in the Campaign of 1932 Winston A. Shilvock 51 The Sixty Who Tilted at Windmills Cyril S. Chave 56 Civil Rights - 1942 Ken Grieve 58 LIFE OF THE UNDERGRADUATE 60 From Rock Piles to Hamlet's Ghost R. Russell Munn 61 Two Nickels to Snap Together WardF.DeBeck 62 A Reminiscence of the Class of '31 James A. Gibson 63 My Confrontation With Sedgewick John Laurence Kask 64 A Civilizing Education 1923-27 Clare (McQuarrie) McAllister 65 My UBC Memoirs Joseph E. Kania 67 Items From the Past Himie Koshevoy 68 A Campus Eccentric of the Thirties Nathan T. Nemetz 68 Campus Life David Carey 69 Remembrance of Hard Times Past Eric Nicol 71 The Golden Era of the English Department Connie (Baird) Newby 72 Hedda Gabbler to Hitler Arthur Sager 73 The Rites of Passage Sam Roddan 75 From Trams to Buses Ludlow Beamish 77 Walter Gage and the RCAF Radar Trainees Joseph Rudand Billyeald 79 A Triptych: UBC 1938-39 Robert L. McDougall 80 The Ubyssey Was My School of Journalism Peter Shinobu Higashi 81 The Donkey and the Nightingale Arthur Mayse 84 Recollections of a Tenderfoot Pierre Berton 85 Notes on Contributors 87 FACULTY AND STAFF 27 September. 1934: Had my first lectures in History and Latin. Sage, the History professor is an interesting fellow who I think I shall enjoy taking lectures from. (It took me a long time to see through Walter!) Somehow when he sailed into class, his Oxford MA. gown billowing behind him, dropped a great armful of books on his desk with a resounding thud, and gave us all a reassuring grin, he seemed like a real professor. The Latin professor is named Lemuel Robertson and looks like a sanctimonious Pickwick with a red nose. (I underestimated "Lemmy".) Later in the term when the class's supercilious Brit (John Watts) gave a cold, bored translation of a Horation ode, with mention of the lover's arms enclosing the white neck of the girl, Lemmy told him that if he couldn't show more fire, he Lemmy, would have to read the ode himself, "and show you I wasn't always sixty". Leaves From an Undergraduate's Diary Philip Akrigg Sedgewick: The Man and His Achievement Philip Akrigg Class of '37 Let me begin with an anecdote. One day in the 1920s five young men, English Honours students at UBC, went for a walk around Stanley Park. Hiking along, they got talking about a lecture that they had just had from Dr. Sedgewick. Rejoicing in their own brilliance and audacity, they began to attack their professor's ideas. One of the group became increasingly silent. Finally, unable to hold his peace any longer, he broke out: "Listen, you fellows are talking about a great man!" The day after this story was passed on to me, I was talking with a lady who had worked closely with Dr. Sedgewick on a project in music. Out of the blue she said, in the most matter-of-fact tones: "He was a great man". Was he a great man? Perhaps you will reach your own decision by the end of this lecture. All that I'll say is that he was certainly a most remarkable person. From my diary I find that it was on September 26, 1934, that I first met Professor G.G. Sedgewick. A raw youth freshly arrived from Southern Alberta, I was one of several hundred sophomores packed into Arts 100 (now Math 100) ready to commence the second year survey course in English literature. In strutted a short middle-aged man - tweed jacket, polka dot bow tie, glasses, a plume of white hair dancing on the bald pate of a disproportionately large nut-brown head. Throwing a penetrating glance over us, he began to talk about Shakespeare in short but rounded phrases. His voice was not mellifluous but mellow. If Shakespeare had lived in the 18th Century, he said, Shakespeare would not have written plays. He would have written satire ~ but not the sort of satire that Swift wrote. If he, Sedgewick, had his choice of all literary styles he would choose to write like Swift, not like Shakespeare. After all, anybody who wrote like Shakespeare would have to die young. A sudden strange look galvanized the lecturer's features. He did some arithmetic, sotto voce, then rejoined us. Why he, our professor, was the age that Shakespeare had been when he died! We digested this information. (I have checked, and it was accurate.) The hour ended with our new professor assigning us Hamlet to read. Five weeks later we were turned over to the next member of the team giving English 2. "After the exuberant Sedgewick the sombre Larsen," I noted in my diary. I remember the final lecture before "G.G.", as the students called him, left us. It was not on Hamlet, which I suppose he had finished. Instead he lugged into the room two huge framed portraits, Gainsborough's "The Hon. Mrs. Graeme" and one of Romney's portraits of Lady Hamilton. These he used to illustrate a lecture on classicism and romanticism. Some might think this an odd way to pass an hour in English, but Sedgewick always insisted that music and the fine arts were a necessary part of "a decent education". Teaching at a small university which offered neither, he did what he could for us. In the years that lay ahead, I got to know Garnett Sedgewick pretty well ~ initially in the classroom, then down at his house on Trutch Street where sometimes of an afternoon a group of us Honours students would drop around for a talk and a cup of tea; later during a desert year of Teacher Training, when, in total violation of a university regulation requiring me to give my full time to Education, he let me do an M.A. for him. Finally I became one of his junior colleagues. I saw many sides of the man: the fastidious, cultivated good taste, the rambunctious clowning, the finely tempered literary sensitivity, the razor-sharp mind, the short-fused temper. Once, in a spurt of anger, he called a friend of mine "a god-damn fool" in front of the class, because he had made a mess of scanning Chaucer. (When my friend went around to Sedgewick's office to say that, since he was a god-damn fool, he obviously should drop out of English Honours, Sedgewick magnanimously explained that he had got out of bed on the wrong side that morning and, with a jocular shove, propelled him out into the corridor.) I learned about other aspects of Sedgewick. One was his generosity ~ Heaven only knows how many students he helped with money even though his own finances were a bit precarious. When, after World War II, a vet with a wife and three children lacked any decent clothes to wear at an interview for a graduate fellowship, Sedgewick gave him a blank cheque made out to Chapman's. I learned, also, how Sedgewick could use people — for instance, dropping a Chaucer course on a non-Chaucerian instructor with only five days' warning. Some of his junior instructors and markers really were exploited. I learned about the Sedgewick wit. It was impossible, generally, to top him. Two former Honours students, husband and wife, met him once at an Art Gallery show. "Ah," said G.G. with a dangerous smile, "acquiring some culture?" "Why, Dr. Sedgewick," countered the lady, "how could anyone who has studied under you lack culture?" "Oh," he said darkly, "sometimes it doesn't take." Probably Professor Angus in Economics and Professor Ashton in French were the only two who could hold their own against Sedgewick in repartee. Certainly his quick wit was one of the attractions of his Shakespeare course. One day a young lady raised her hand in class and asked, "Dr. Sedgewick, what is a maidenhead?" "The technical evidence of a woman's virginity," said he and went on with his lecture. One thing I discovered early was that Garnett Sedgewick was the absolute autocrat of the English Department. When those of us who were teaching Freshman English met each September, he had a bit of a syllabus and a reading list ready for us, and that was what we taught. But he, with his picked section containing all the brightest scholarship boys, was limited neither by syllabus nor reading list and took off into the bright blue with his class, doing whatever he pleased. At the end of the year we all reported our distribution of marks to him. "You've been marking too hard again," he said to one of his full professors. "Raise them all ten per cent." And like a chidden schoolboy, the full professor went to a comer with his exam booklets and raised them all ten per cent Among recollections such as I have been offering you are vivid pictures of the man's physical presence. Sedgewick patting himself on top of his bald pate while he plotted strategy in mid-lecture, or sucking in his cheeks while he considered a moot point or savoured a nuance. Sedgewick walking about the campus, his coat flung like a cape over his shoulders. Sedgewick holding a couple of hundred students absolutely spellbound while slowly he pulled a handkerchief from up his cuff, flicked it, buried his nose in its white folds, gave a tremendous blow, and equally deliberately stuffed it up his sleeve again. But with the handkerchief we come to the famous Sedgewick Act, and some time must be taken to consider this, if only because some students were so fascinated by the Act that they never saw far beyond it Garnett Sedgewick, liked every other great teacher, was a showman. Both in and out of the classroom he constantly dramatized. He and his old mother, Bessie, for instance, had a routine that they liked to put on, with G.G. teasing the old lady and her declaring Garnett an ornery ungrateful son fit to drive a person mad. Professor and Mrs. Steinberg well remember the first time that they entertained the Head of the UBC English Department, which they had newly joined. They had sat down to dinner when Garnett and his mother began their show, briskly exchanging insults, with asides for the benefit of their host and hostess. The pace got brisker and brisker. Finally the old mother got up from the table, grabbed a piece of kindling, and bore down on her distinguished son. Chortling with delight, he skipped smartly around the table, adroitiy keeping just out of range of his flailing ancient parent. Should any sober souls among you shake your heads over such proceedings, let me quote from Dr. Sedgewick's tribute to Professor Paul Boving, one of his closest friends: There is another utterly engaging aspect of his spirit of play: I mean his delight in intelligent fooling.... He rejoiced in a dogma of his favourite poet Horace: dulce est desipere in loco — 'tis sweet to play the fool in season. That quotation tells you as much about Sedgewick as Boving. For university purposes the Act rested upon two premises. One, mockingly suggested by its principal, was that Garnett was a great-souled scholar of quite incredible distinction, totally eclipsing everybody else at UBC. Playing that role, he once mischievously confided to me while we were walking towards today's Main Library that the niche at the apex of its facade was reserved for a statue of himself. Little did he imagine that, after he had left this earthly scene, the path on which we trod would have buried beneath it the Sedgewick Library. The other premise was that his students were barbarians, almost invincibly ignorant, who might just possibly be saved from complete mental darkness by the ill-rewarded labours of the same great G.G.S. This was a game in which professor and students gaily conspired. A bout of the game would begin with Dr. Sedgewick entering the class amid total respectful quiet He would put a question to see how well the class was prepared. Sometimes nobody would answer. The question would be put again, with still no answer. There was a third time of asking. Then, bearing down on the front row, Sedgewick would put the question direcdy to one particular student. When that student failed to answer, the professor would flick his fingertip against the nose of the ignoramus and so proceed to the next and the next until either he got his answer or tired of the game. As an alternate "ploy" he would sometimes retreat to a corner at the front of the room and despairingly bump his head against the wall. Of course, not all students relished having their noses flicked in class, or their ears lugged in the corridors. "Who does he think he is?" demanded one recalcitrant, "Peter Pan?" A few people always did insist that Sedgewick was a charlatan. Sometimes the Sedgewick Act extended to new and unimagined dimensions. Once, in front of his freshman class, G.G. discovered that absentmindedly he had left home that morning without putting on the polka dot tie that was his trademark (one is preserved in the University archives). Continuing his lecture without missing a beat, he coolly surveyed the lads in the front row (they all wore ties in those days), bore down on the tie which suited him best, took it off the boy and adjusted it about his own neck. Sedgewick never allowed latecomers to enter his classes. A young lady who tried to sneak into his Shakespeare class while he was writing on the blackboard found herself transfixed by a steely eye while an imperious thumb jerked towards the door. Once a big footballer marched in after the bell had gone, and disturbed everyone while settling into an empty front seat. Sedgewick stared at the fellow, incredulous, marched up to him and declaimed from Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel: Yet, Corah, thou shalt from Oblivion pass; Erect thyself, thou Monumental Brass. Other things could bring summary eviction: Sally Murphy, having lost a point in argument with G.G., rashly bit her thumb at him in the Shakespeare class - and this just after he had commented upon that insult in Romeo and Julietl Out she went I have been giving you rather random recollections, supplied to me by many people, touching on various aspects of Sedgewick. Perhaps it is time to become a bit more organized and so, for a while, we shall hew to a straight chronological line and view the Sedgewick biography. His father, John Sedgewick, was a son of Dr. Sedgewick, a Presbyterian divine renowned in the Musquodoboit Valley of Nova Scotia. His mother, Bessie Woolery Gladwin, belonged to a Tory Anglican family which counted among its members that Colonel Gladwin who was defeated by Joseph Howe in an election notable in local history. The newly-married couple moved from Musquodoboit to the western United States. There the young wife became pregnant, did not feel well, found conditions rough, and returned to Nova Scotia to be with her family. Letters from her husband became increasingly infrequent and finally ceased entirely. Garnett Gladwin Sedgewick, bom in May 1882, never saw his father. Since all his life he would prove a person with a large capacity for affection, it would be strange if the bookish litUe only child did not grow up with a great compassion for his deserted mother, and a determination to care for her when he came to man's estate. In 1898 the youthful Sedgewick entered Dalhousie University. He took a year out to teach ten grades in a one-room school at Oyster Pond, then graduated in 1903 with double Honours in Classics and English. He had edited the college paper and had surrendered to a class mate a fellowship awarded in English. For several years he taught in Nova Scotia then, in 1905, he was appointed principal of the two-room Nanaimo High School in British Columbia. Apparendy while teaching in Nanaimo he had a love affair which ended disastrously. In a letter to one of his closest friends, a letter which I have been privileged to read, Dr. Sedgewick years later indicated a parallel between his own experience in love and the last chapter of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel — not that his own story ended with death for the lady. Taking into account pieces of evidence along the way, it is hard not to feel that his mother, set against his marrying, played a role somewhat analogous to that of Sir Austin Feverel. In any event, after only two years, the young principal of the Nanaimo High School resigned his post and moved to Toronto where he became a history master at St. Andrew's College, a private school for boys. After one year away from British Columbia, Garnett Sedgewick returned, this time to teach at Vancouver High School, soon to become King Edward High School. Three years later he became a graduate student at Harvard University where he took his M.A. in 1911 and his Ph.D. in 1913, his dissertation winning an award for excellence. Later, F.N. Robinson, the editor of Chaucer, would recall Garnett Sedgewick as "the brightest graduate student we ever had". From Harvard, Sedgewick went to teach at Washington University in St. Louis. He was an assistant professor there when, in 1918, he was appointed an associate professor at the University of British Columbia. Initially Sedgewick was intended to be the number two man in the English Department at UBC, President Wesbrook planning to get his departments well launched with able younger men before bringing in scholars with international reputations to head them. Two years later Wesbrook was dead and the University's finances straitened. Under these circumstances, Dr. Sedgewick was promoted to full professor and appointed the first Head of the English Department, giving us the 60th anniversary which we commemorate with this address. The 1920s were a happy time for Garnett Sedgewick. UBC was a vital young university and there was real rapport between the students and faculty. Dr. Sedgewick was the cheerleader for the faculty in their annual basketball game with the students. Over the years come echoing some of the calls he composed for his colleagues: Reading rooms, library, caution money, fees, Lab. regulations, breakages for sprees, Registrar, Bursar, President, Dean, Guaranteed machinery to pick the student clean! Faculty! Reserved for moments of real crisis was a call invoking the saints: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Help the brains to beat the brawn! At rugby games the diminutive Sedgewick, deep in a greatcoat, a long blue and gold scarf coiled about his neck, was almost a mascot for the UBC team. Rugby was always his game. How he scorned the "amazingly fast waddle" of the "dinosaurs" who played Canadian football! It was in the 1920s that Dr. Sedgewick first built his reputation. In the old Fairview shacks he filled the University's largest lecture theatre, every spare seat being taken by students from other disciplines who thronged to audit G.G.'s Shakespeare lectures. And it is hard to reckon how many hundred lectures he gave off campus: to the Vancouver Rotary Club on "The Value of Universities"; to the New Westminster Kiwanis Club on "The Status of Teachers"; to the Graduate Nurses Association on "Recreation in Reading"; out to Ladner to the Educational Club to speak on Shakespeare, a talk which he apparently repeated for Mrs. Henshaw's Lenten Lectures at the Hotel Vancouver. Well, why continue the list? One day in 1928 Professor Sedgewick came to his Shakespeare class invested in his full academic robes and delivered a eulogy, not on Shakespeare, but on Thomas Hardy, newly dead. Hardy, he declared, was an author to be judged by the same measure as Sophocles or Shakespeare. When Sedgewick published his tribute he did so in the "Literary Supplement" of the Ubyssey. In the early 1930s Garnett had to nurse his Department through the Great Depression when, to use his own phrase, the provincial government "unnecessarily and brutally crippled the University", slashing its budget by fifty seven per cent in a single year. In 1933 Dr. Sedgewick, who was repeatedly described by Professor Woodhouse as the finest teacher of English in Canada, was invited by him to give at the University of Toronto the prestigious Alexander Lectures for the coming year. The result was Sedgewick's book, Of Irony: Especially in Drama, a minor classic which went on to a second edition in 1948. In 1938 he published privately, in a handsome hardcover art edition, The Graveyard by the Sea, his translation of Paul Valery's Le Cimetiere Marin, complete with the French text. Meanwhile, for the delectation of a broader audience, Garnett Sedgewick had become a columnist appearing twice weekly in the Vancouver Sun. Having just read the 126 pieces which appeared in Sedgewick's column entided "More Light than Heat", I would like to be able to tell you that they scintillate with brilliance. Unfortunately, that is not the case. For them I must award my old professor a "B", not an "A". Of course he did function under certain limitations. For one thing, the editor had cautioned the master ironist not to attempt any of his irony on the readers of the Sun. The main trouble, probably, was that Dr. Sedgewick was spreading himself too thin. When one thinks of all his other activities, the wonder is that he got the columns written at all; but though some of them fall a bit flat, not one of them is slovenly written. Of course some of the pieces are first-rate. One such is a most perceptive appreciation of the architecture of St. James Anglican Church at a time when its plain concrete was upsetting some local aesthetes. Shakespeare was, of course, one of the elements in which Sedgewick lived and, in a column entitled "Texts for the Times from Shakespeare", he offered the perfect cautionary quotation for Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson a few days before the King's abdication: A wild dedication of yourselves To unpath'd waters, undream'd shores. (W.T., IV, iv, 577) though he kindly omitted the next phrase, "Most certain to miseries enough". When a pronouncement came out of Teachers' College, Columbia University, that the old nursery rhymes lack relevance for modem children, Sedgewick offered some amended versions. One ran: Clickity, clackity, knock. The burglar busts the lock. The cops who come Batter the bum. Clickity, clackity, knock. His column served various functions for Dr. Sedgewick. He used it to help his friend Dr. Weir in his batde to bring health insurance to British Columbia. He used it in his own unceasing war against provincialism, which he saw equally manifested in Vancouver by an overvaluation, by some, of whatever was local, and a snooty refusal, by others, to recognize what was good locally. For himself, he deplored the fact that "so much debris from nineteenth century England has washed up on the walls" of the Vancouver Art Gallery. On the other hand, he could declare "proud delight in the music that Vancouver can produce" and give generous approval to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, observing: Not many cities our size have anything like it. Further it is one of the best promises we have of being able to escape from provincialism into something not only big but significant.... our orchestra is not a great orchestra. But it vasdy surpasses anything we deserve to have. Well, enough of Sedgewick the columnist Garnett Sedgewick probably stood at the peak of his reputation in the late 1930s. Significandy it was Dr. Sedgewick who was asked to write the City of Vancouver's address of welcome when King George VI and his queen visited the city in 1939. World War II brought dark days with the casualty lists carrying the names of former students. And there was the unhappy matter of the forced evacuation of the Japanese-Canadians from the West Coast. Dr. Sedgewick spoke out publicly against the operation and feeling ran so high, I am told, that at the end of one meeting he had to be rushed out of the hall by a rear exit The mid-1940s brought the pressure and confusion of an incredible expansion of the University and of Dr. Sedgewick's own department to cope with the vets who were pouring into UBC. Staff was hard to find. A slighdy malicious story has G.G. Sedgewick standing at the end of Granville Street bridge and buttonholing passers-by with the query, "Can you teach English?" Sedgewick was near total exhaustion when he retired at the end of June 1948. But retirement brought neither ease nor leisure. At home his old mother was dying. He kept her there with special nurses until her death at the end of October. Life thereafter was desolate around the house. Bob and Ruth ap Roberts, whom he liked to call his children, had left and were living in Berkeley, along with their litde girl, Mary Garnett, whom he loved. At Christmas 1948 he had a wonderful holiday with them. Upon his return he wrote to his old friend Professor Lehman of the University of California: The visit to Berkeley was a fortnight of unbroken joy... every minute of my time was spent in the company and conversation and graciousness of friends.... Besides, the days and evenings of the rare wine of talk. (God, I do so love to talk!) And finally my Mary G. with her wickedness and her dear love and loveliness. Then it was back to UBC where he still taught Shakespeare, and Chaucer, and gave an extension course. But he no longer became airborne so often when lecturing. Rather, in his "retirement" he found himself caught in a morass. "Morass", "morass" — the word recurs in his letters. In April 1949, for the first time in memory, he cancelled his last two weeks of lectures, but he was haled back by students intent upon making a presentation. (By the way, that portrait of him in the Sedgewick Library was paid for by former students who raised the money at the time of his retirement.) There were other consolations. He had always loved music. When, early in 1949, the Friends of Chamber Music came into being, he was not only a founding member but went on the board. But the horizon was dimming. Referring to an increasingly troublesome physical ailment, he ruefully likened himself to an elegant Victorian mansion with bad plumbing. This spring he gave a book off his shelves to a visiting former student and wrote in it merely, "One of the remnants, GGS". Friends felt that the will to live had died in the man. One day in mid-August he took a cab to a CCF meeting in South Vancouver where he delivered what was, in effect, his political testament, setting forth the philosophy that had made him a moderate leftist A week later he went into hospital for some overdue surgery. The day before the operation Roy Daniells looked in on him. At parting he assured him that he'd be around to see him after the operation. "We'll see," said Dr. Sedgewick. He died on September 4, 1949, of coronary thrombosis following the operation. For his funeral Christ Church Cathedral was filled to overflowing. It remains to appraise Garnett Sedgewick's achievement. With any man, I suppose, the first question is, "What had he been able to make of himself in his three-score years and ten, or that portion of them which had been vouchsafed to him?" "That which is creative," said Keats, "must first create itself." What had Garnett Sedgewick made of Garnett Sedgewick? Well, he became a tremendously civilized man, developing to the fullest a most formidable intelligence and the keenest sensitivities where all the arts are concerned. And he was kind — a very kind man according to one of his earliest Honours students ~ though I hardly begin to echo her phrase when I become aware of a quizzical glance shot at me through the Sedgewickian spectacles from some height on Olympus, and I hastily amend it to say, "He was a very kind man with a leaven of malice." But that phrase will not serve either and, with a sigh of relief, I fall back upon a quotation from a recent letter from the person who, probably, knew him best in his final years: If I had to choose a phrase to describe Garnett it would be the one Kittredge used to describe Chaucer - "a sympathetic ironist". Garnett was not gullible, but he was not cynical. He was aware of human shortcomings and failings but he still sympathized with those who exhibited them. And this same person goes on to mention the number of people, students especially, who came to Garnett with their troubles, and how patiendy he listened to them and said what he could. Of course most of those who dropped in at 1719 Trutch Street for a session in the somewhat dingy book-littered living room came for the good conversation there, an immensely pleasurable and stimulating experience in which generation after generation of Garnett's best students participated, coming whenever they wanted to, without any special invitation. At the time of Dr. Sedgewick's death a member of faculty described him as "an educated man rather than a scholar". That point was not well taken. Dr. Dorothy Blakey Smith had the right of the matter when she said, "He did not publish much, but what he did publish was good." Professor Robbins put it a bit differendy: "He was a scholar when he chose to be one." Precisely. He set himself various roles in life, and that of the scholar, while important, was only one of many. Actually the legend of Sedgewick as a non-scholar rests on a naive equating of scholarship with publication, and it probably originated in the 1920s when Dr. Sedgewick published hardly anything. The picture changed in the 1930s, and even more in the 1940s when he put out an unexpected number of publications — though many of these were ephemeral and intended only for private circulation. It was during his final period, however, that Sedgewick produced his notable Chaucer articles on "The Progress of the Pardoner" and "The Structure of the Man of Law's Tale". And it was then that he published in The University of Toronto Quarterly a most perceptive article on Stephen Leacock. This latter essay apparendy had its rise in a statement in the New York Times that the only Canadian authors known to Americans were Robert Service, Bliss Carman, Ralph Connor, Stephen Leacock and Mazo de la Roche, and that not one of these was an important writer. On the whole, Sedgewick was inclined to agree. After all, he himself regarded the Canadian literature of his era as essentially insignificant and repeatedly refused to permit a course in it at UBC. But he found he had reservations about putting Leacock among the lightweights. I commend the resultant article to you. Yes, Sedgewick was a scholar all right. His book on irony, by itself, gives him sufficient credentials for that tide, let alone the tributes from men as diverse as Professors Woodhouse, G.B. Harrison, and Lumiansky. To get our focus right where Sedgewick is concerned, we need to see him as a scholar who addressed himself not so much to other scholars as to his students and the community at large. Significant in this latter connection are the many radio broadcasts that Dr. Sedgewick made in his lifetime. When we consider these, his Sun columns, his book reviews in the Province in the mid-1920s, his extension lectures, his participation in forums, his constant efforts on behalf of whatever held cultural promise for this province, we realize another of the man's achievements. This was stated succincdy and effectively at the time of Sedgewick's death by D. A. McGregor, associate editor of the Province: Vancouver was a pretty erode place when Dr. Sedgewick came to it. It wasn't much interested in the University or the things the University stood for, and was quite content to let the institution languish in the "Fairview Shacks". It has changed a lot in three decades. It is more friendly to the University, and more appreciative, and for this, in large measure, it can thank Dr. Sedgewick. Let us turn to what Garnett Sedgewick achieved within the University. First of all, he created its Department of English. "Respectable" rather than "brilliant" describes the quality of the men whom he chose to serve under him. But essentially, as everybody knew, the department, numbering not more than seven or eight, was a one-man show. It was Dr. Sedgewick who fixed its goals and set about trying to attain them. For anyone interested in the development of the UBC English Department, a valuable article is that published in the Dalhousie Review for October 1928, "The Unity of the Humanities". This is, in fact the address that Dr. Sedgewick had given the previous May at the first conference of "The Professors of English in Canada". In it Sedgewick uses a series of questions to define the sort of person that he wants the universities to produce: How to give breadth to a student's education? How to give him or get him to acquire a sense of relations? How to give him a sense of proportions? How to make him a man of culture in Arnold's sense?.... How, to use Whitehead's term to make out of a student a man of imagination? Imagination! That was always for Sedgewick the great quality. He scorned that diet of mere facts which he saw as producing "sclerosis of the imagination". Before reporting to the conference what was being done at UBC by its English Department, Dr. Sedgewick endorsed the lecture system of instruction on the grounds that "it has virtues of system and order and unity and social interest". He was careful to note, however, that lectures need to be complemented by the immediacy of individual conference. But, though Sedgewick saw the lecture-conference system as best for the generality of students, he made an exception for the Honours students, whom he defined as "the saving remnant" whom it is most necessary to reach. For them, the UBC English Department had done something apparendy unprecedented in Canada, allowing fourth-year Honours students exemption from lectures for 40 per cent of their credits as they prepared for the Honours exams. Sedgewick declared: In my opinion such exemptions (replacing lecture courses with private reading and the writing of a major research essay) yield highly satisfactory results in the case of the students mentioned. They are compelled to be self-dependent they learn the resources of the library, they get at least a bit of an inkling of what research means, and they get the satisfaction of sensing all this by themselves. But best of all, in my belief, they are given more time and privileges for grasping a subject in its broad relations, for grasping it imaginatively. Guidance, Sedgewick noted, was available for these exceptionally competent students if they wanted it, but they did not have to accept it "At their peril, they may trust entirely to their own initiative and the library." Of fifty students who had taken English Honours at UBC over the preceding nine years, only two had abused their freedom and paid the price. The department said Sedgewick, was about to extend this exemption from lectures to third-year Honours students, but on a smaller scale. Well, there you have, in essence, the Honours English curriculum at UBC as it exists today. The Honours graduating essay is still with us, and directed reading courses are available in both third and fourth years. Never mentioned in the Sedgewick paper is graduate study. Now last term at UBC we had a Cecil Green lecturer from MIT deliver a notable lecture on "The Epistemology of Practice". Concerned to show how powerful a determinant the existing way of doing things can be, Dr. Schon seized on the Ph.D. degree as an example. Splendidly suited for the sciences, the Ph.D. gained such prestige in the science-dominated late 19th century that, to obtain or retain status in the universities, those engaged in various non-scientific studies adopted the degree even though it was essentially unsuitable for them and, indeed, inimical to their ends. Only in the 1960s and 1970s, declared the Cecil Green lecturer, has there developed significant dissatisfaction with the Ph.D. outside the sciences. Dr. Sedgewick would surely have appreciated the irony that an emissary from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology should bring this message to us. I think one can, in fact make rather a good case that Sedgewick, an Athenian in spirit was far from enamoured with that rather unlovely thing, the Ph.D. in English. Looking back on his own mentor, McMechan at Dalhousie, he could only marvel how the man, having taken a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University of the 1880s, could come through the experience intact Labelling Stephen Leacock's book on humour his second dissertation, Sedgewick could refer to it as "the only entertaining specimen ever published in that dismal kind". As for the wasteland of petty publication produced by those who have taken Ph.D.s but never recovered, Dr. Sedgewick was downright disrespectful. "Mr. Robert Benchley's recent burlesque of Shakespearean scholarship," said he, "is already as dusty as the thing it mocks." Realizing that the upper undergraduate level is the most rewarding on which to work with bright young men and women, Sedgewick was content to be at UBC where graduate studies stopped with the occasional M.A. But what a stream of gifted scholars he produced in English Honours: Dorothy Blakey, Lionel Stevenson, George Kane, William Blissett, Roy Daniells, Earle Birney, William Robbins — and the list could continue. Garnett assuredly knew whereof he spoke when he said that his students were his publications. You will have noted that various of his Honours students, having dutifully earned their union card, the Ph.D., returned to UBC to teach, thereby creating a notable tradition - would that we still occasionally hired our own! Finally, something about Garnett Sedgewick as a teacher himself. Recalling rather bitterly those days when Sedgewick was less than Sedgewick, one of his former students said to me, "He was the best teacher in the world, and the worst" Others would feel no need for reservations. "It was a revelation!" exclaimed another former student, recalling for me her first experience of Sedgewick. "He was absolutely superb," said another. A third could only wonder at the "impact" Sedgewick had on his classes. And a fourth writes, "In the classroom Sedgewick was a magician, a man possessed. I was not much of a note-taker, being absorbed in the sheer experience of a Sedgewick lecture." What made Sedgewick such a superb teacher? For one thing, he brought to class all the resources of a man who was very widely read indeed ~ not only in English but in other languages, in philosophy and psychology, in history, even in science. For another, he was amazingly sensitive to words, cleansing them of what was shopworn and tarnished so that they gleamed as if fresh from the mint. Something more. This professor was a great actor. Almost without exception those who met him in the classroom came away convinced that if only Sedgewick had had the physical stature he would have been one of the great actors of the stage. After a merciless criticism of a performance of Hamlet, he burst out "Now / could play Hamlet" Taking up Romeo and Juliet, he acted out Romeo, became Romeo, then suddenly became Juliet too, acting out the young girl's part. And not a student smiled at the middle-aged professor. Finally there was that superb voice. Garnett Sedgewick wrote, "I have spent forty years trying to smoke the Halifax dialect out of my speech." Once he remarked, "I tempered my raw Nova Scotian!" He could not understand how people could endure living with poorly enunciated, imprecise or ugly speech. "Don't be afraid to improve your speech," he said. "There is nothing affected in doing that If you use a horrible harsh flat Ontario "a", for God's sake get rid of it." Dr. Robbins once asked Sedgewick how he could make himself heard with even the quietest voice in a large hall like Arts 100. Garnett answered, "I took elocution lessons". And he had, in Nanaimo. Today we drill our graduate students in bibliography, and turn some of them out incapable of giving a decent reading to a sonnet. With Sedgewick, who linked total comprehension of a poem with flawless use of that infinitely varied instrument, his voice, the reading of a poem could be an epiphany. Just about all those former students I have of late been speaking to recall from thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years ago Sedgewick's reading of some particular poem. With one it is Blake's "The Tyger", with another Eliot's "The Hollow Men", with another Henley's "Invictus". For myself it is Christina Rossetti's "When I am dead, my dearest". The reading of a poem can be the teaching of it. After the perfect performance there is no room left for exegesis, and Sedgewick on such an occasion did not attempt it Well, there was Sedgewick the teacher. Maybe you can understand now why, at the end of one particular lecture on Henry V, the class arose and gave their professor a standing ovation. I regret that we no longer have with us one who might more fittingly and effectively than myself have lectured to you on Dr. Sedgewick. Let me, in conclusion, however, quote Dr. Daniells in praise of Dr. Sedgewick: He gave many of us the grace and the hope of glory, and in the intellectual sense he made us see that learning is difficult, and literature, to which it gives access, a ravishing delight. Lionel Haweis at UBC Roderick Norman Beanie Class of'39 Lionel Haweis was one of my best friends during my three years as an undergraduate at UBC, class of '39. I became acquainted with him through Helen Ferguson, class of '34, who was teaching in a Vancouver high school. Our families both lived in Nelson, "Queen City of the Kootenays". Helen was an accomplished violinist That fact, added to her being very attractive and sociable, had given her an entree to Lionel's circle of friends, some of whom were professors at UBC. When we met Lionel was a widower in his sixties who lived alone in a bungalow just a couple of blocks away from my first rooming-house near Tenth and Sasamat He worked in the UBC Library, doing mosdy the kinds of jobs — repairing, lettering, and so on — that meant he had very little contact with undergraduates. But he was very interested in music and theatre, especially at UBC. 10 During my many visits to his home I gradually learned about his early life, but writing about it now, I've had to refresh my memory by visits to Toronto's libraries, especially our main reference library. Lionel was bom in London in 1870. His father, Hugh Reginald Haweis, was an Anglican priest who was to become world-famous during the next 30 years as a writer, preacher, and lecturer on a wide variety of subjects - besides Anglican Christianity, American Humorists, Music and Morals, Wagner, and Violins. New editions of his books appeared regularly in England and the United States. hi 1896 he published Travel and Talk which he prefaced with "My 100,000 miles of travel through America, Australia, Tasmania, Canada, New Zealand, Ceylon, and the paradises of the Pacific." Ceylon may have been included in that itinerary because his son Lionel was working there on a tea plantation. At any rate, it was in Ceylon that Lionel launched his own writing career with Island Tales of Ceylon that was published in Colombo in 1899.1 think he told me that he was able to work part-time as a journalist during his tea-career and that it was at that time that he began his lifelong study of the mythology and literature of Southeast Asia. The production from that study by the time I saw some of it was enormous in typescript. The Rose of Persia, a dramatic piece in three acts, was published in typescript in Vancouver in 1917 according to the Library of Congress Index. That date is the only clue I have as to when Lionel emigrated to Canada. The only printed book of his in my own library (a prized gift from the author) is Little Lanterns, the tide page of which goes on: "Or as it might be said, Things Lantemized', and arranged by Lionel Haweis for all who enjoy flirting with literary fancies as they float through the world of ideas — like smoke." Classicists among my readers may be able to connect that with "Dare pondus idonea fumo!" which stands alone two pages farther on. The twenty-five lanterns in this really "slim" volume apparently form Series 2, having been preceded by Series 1 "out of print". The publisher of both series was The Citizen Printing and Publishing Co., Vancouver, B.C., 1923 and 1924. The final Lantern in my series seems appropriate to illustrate Lionel's style. It certainly reminds me of him and the many enjoyable (and often cryptically puzzling) conversations I had with him long ago. BACKGROUND is everything... Or none of us Puppets Would ever be dancing, Nor would we, every moment, Be dissolving into it THE FOURTH DIMENSION My postscript should explain why Helen Ferguson's violin-playing was the key to her entree to Lionel's circle. He had inherited his father's Stradivarius violin and had brought it to Vancouver. From time to time he would withdraw it from its secure storage in a bank vault as a special treat for some deserving and skillful violinist 11 John Ridington's Castle William Gibson Class of '33 Soon after arriving at UBC in 1931,1 found myself listening to a bearded "tour guide" in the high- vaulted and impressive main concourse of the Library. Only later did I discover that the "guide" was none other than John Ridington, the University Librarian. His instructions were crisp, not to say pejorative. He instructed us to walk on the black squares on the floors, as they were easier to clean than were the white squares. Already the massive budget cuts were in evidence as the Great Depression increased in severity. With a six-week course in librarianship at Albany, New York, in 1914, John, or King John as we called him, developed a great love for books. With Walter Lanning holding the journal collection inviolate against all future budget cuts, a wonderful service was rendered to future generations. The library functioned somewhat as the campus social centre also, especially the Smoking Room for men in the basement. There the studious janitor Bill Tansley held clinics on philosophy, and between these he assiduously collected all burned-out light bulbs for the distinguished public health professor, Dr. Hibbert Winslow Hill, one of President Wesbrook's early imports from Minnesota. Dr, Hill lived with us at Union College and had set up on stakes, in the surrounding bush, holders for these faded electric light bulbs. He had a powerful air rifle and from his open window on the second floor of the theological college used to pick off the bulbs on bright days. When a few ingenious engineering students in residence dropped some super-heated five-cent pieces into the pay phone near Dr. Hill's room and were about to be chastised by the telephone company, it was this aging and most respectable physician who defended the students and chastised the company for poor service. Back to the Library, and to conclude, there was an incident which almost closed it before its life had begun in 1925. King John had posted a terse notice on the board at the imposing front doors, which read "Students wishing carrel privileges should see me." The playful editor of the Ubyssey of the day, Earle Birney, with his pen changed the "carrel" to "carnal". Ridington demanded that the entire University be closed until the culprit was apprehended! The library system, like the rest of the University, has grown to massive proportions and still ranks among the continent's best, though still starved for funds. If the outmoded central library building becomes the Norman A.M. MacKenzie fine arts gallery — as it should — a great quadrangular building will rise to the west off the Main Mall, replacing eventually the 1925 "temporary" buildings, once known as the Agriculture building and the Arts building. "King John" may rotate in his grave but the academic facility which he presided over will go on from strength to strength. 12 Reminiscences of University Life Malcolm F. McGregor Class of'30 In April, 1975, as my twenty-one years as Head of the Department of Classics neared their end, I was invited to address the Classics Club and so to reflect upon the University and the Department in the Golden Age, i.e., the Age when I was an undergraduate. The paper that I produced ("Reminiscences of an Autocrat") includes a number of passages that may be of interest to the Alumni Association's Heritage Committee. I therefore put together excerpts. ....I ask you to return with me to September, 1926, when, as a boy of sixteen who had been urged in high school to avoid the University, for which he was not fitted, I appeared in the Registrar's office of the University of British Columbia. Travel had been by streetcar from downtown to Tenth and Sasamat ($.07), thence by bus to the site of the present [1975] bookstore ($.03). Registration in that Golden Age was a simple process, administered wholly by people, in my case by the Registrar himself, unimpeded by the expensive and prolonged inefficiency of machines. For the freshman, two courses had already been printed, inexorably, on the appropriate card: English 1, Mathematics 1. The normal student then added a language (required), a science (required), and ONE elective. But I was not normal and I found the single escape: one could take three languages and postpone the science. I thus resumed my study of Latin, French, and Greek (in that Age Greek was offered in the best high schools, such as King George). All these courses were numbered "One" and presumed continuous earlier study. The Department of Classics was not designed to teach Latin to beginners; for the ambitious, Greekless Greek A, which did not merit the dignity of a number, offered a belated opportunity for salvation. The enrollment of the University when I came up was about 1,600, distributed among three Faculties, Arts, Applied Science, and Agriculture. Two permanent buildings graced the Campus: the Library (the centrepiece of the present structure) and Science (the basic section, of "college Gothic", of our Chemistry Building, McDowell's Empire). The others were semipermanent: Arts (which is now Mathematics), Applied Science (now Geology-Geography), Agriculture (still existing just south of Mathematics), the Auditorium (which also housed the single-roomed Bookstore, the Ubyssey, and the "Caf'), and Administration (recendy named, by an aesthetic Board of Governors, the Main Mall North Administration Building; then giving shelter to the Registrar and the President). To the north of the Auditorium as far as Lower Marine Drive lay a vast expanse of undressed surface where the few plutocrats parked their lonely automobiles. Apart from an old bam and fields for the cattle on the south side, the rest was virgin forest, nice for walks with one's companion in the spring — or summer or winter. In the 1930s, when we could not afford to cut the grass, cows grazed in the area between Arts and the Library. In those days we knew the professors and the professors, unsegregated by Departments, knew one another. The Faculty, I suppose, included scholars; but to us — and to themselves, I suspect ~ they were teachers. There may have been some bad teachers: I did not meet one. Lemuel Fergus Robertson, a Maritimer, occupied the Classical Head's chair the day the University opened in 1915; he was given the formal tide in 1920 and held it until 1941. He was tall, with a shining pate and a formidable bearing. Without variation, he wore a thin red tie; it was generally believed that he owned only one tie, purchased the day he donned the toga virilis. My own belief is that he replaced it every few years - or at least had it cleaned and ironed. Robertson was a Ciceronian Liberal; rumor, which sometimes exaggerates, had it that in his courses one overtly worshiped Marcus Tullius Cicero and William Lyon Mackenzie King or one failed. In any case, Robertson provided my introduction to Canadian politics - - which is merely another illustration of the versatility of the Classicist who can recognize the present in the past I learned more than this. He first instructed me in the art of writing Latin. With him I read Homer and listened to his account of life on the farm on Prince Edward Island and admired the dexterity of the devoted young Classicist who milked the cow with one hand and held his text of Homer in the other. He was ambidextrous. He introduced me to Seneca, that model of hypocrisy who so richly earned his fate, if not for his past, then for his tragedies. Asked on the examination to discuss Seneca's view of pagan gods, I discoursed 13 upon the Roman attitude to barbarian practices such as Christianity, which was, I thought (reasonably, I still believe), pagan to a Roman. It did not occur to me that Robertson could designate Roman gods as pagan. Robertson approved of Seneca and delivered many a grave sermon based on a Senecan text. Seneca, of course, was revealed as a God-fearing Liberal, who had spent his youth in the pure atmosphere of the farm on Prince Edward Island. In the second term of the same course — the population comprised twenty-four women and me - we met Robertson's Juvenal. I think immediately and vividly of the most famous fish in all literature, the turbot, a delicacy to be avoided, for a turbot on the table marks the diner as an illbred glutton. The combination of Juvenal and Robertson taught me much about life and revealed many of woman's artful devices of which I had been ignorant. The passage on the use of pumice by Roman women inspired a condemnatory sermon on the removal of hair from the limbs, a perversion of which I had been unaware, one that caused me acute embarrassment in that company, especially since the professor normally addressed himself to the women and ignored me. Certain crude passages of the text were thoughtfully omitted as likely to offend me. The effects of that course linger. Today I worry when one of my colleagues teaches Juvenal. Does he point out that Domitian, transferred to a Canadian setting, would be a Conservative Prime Minister? Does he identify Juvenal as a fundamentalist Liberal pastor who, after a youth spent milking on Prince Edward Island, threatened a degenerate world with the fires of Hell? During my candidature for the MA — I was alone - I read Cicero's Letters under Robertson's tutelage. It was one of the lasting experiences of my academic life. I have encountered greater scholars than Robertson, I have read Cicero's works, I have heard papers about him, I have studied books and essays on him. But I cannot name a man who has equaled Robertson's mastery, his understanding, his subde appreciation of a statesman who believed desperately in a losing cause. For years afterwards the acta diurna of Republican Rome from 65 to 45 B.C. remained as firmly engraved on my memory as the mason's letters on the stele. Otis Johnson Todd reached Vancouver from the United States in 1918. By 1926 he had become Canadian and adopted Association Football as his recreation. As Honorary President of the Varsity Football Club he seldom missed a game, attaining eventually a reputation that won him the presidency of the Dominion Football Association. He had nothing but scom for what he called "armball", that gladiatorial combat that has eliminated sport from American campuses every Saturday afternoon in the autumn, and from the American home on Sundays. We, in Canada, indulge in an imitation. Todd succeeded Robertson as Head in 1941 and remained in the Chair until his retirement in 1949. My introduction to Todd came in Latin 1, where we read Cicero's de senectute. This lugubrious essay may be suited to the elderly and introspective philosopher; it is not suited to lively and impressionable young men and women at the beginnings of their undergraduate careers. At the end of our servitude I made a vow: I should never read the de senectute again. I have kept my vow. Todd was the scholar of the department He contributed regularly to the journals, he translated Xenophon's Symposium and Apology for the Loeb Classical Library, and, while I was a student, completed his Index Aristophaneus, which has remained a standard work. His solemn and preoccupied mien hid the sharp and mischievous wit that we came to know in (and outside) the classroom. Todd took me through my first Greek play, the Prometheus of Aischylos, the deep end of the tragic pool. This initial confrontation with the intricacies of a flexible language taught me how to use Liddell and Scott. At a higher level, now possessing the knowledge and scepticism of the fourth-year student, I registered for Todd's course in tragedy and comedy and thus encountered Aristophanes. While Todd did not match the uncensored earthiness of the young modems, he nevertheless, in the more restricted milieu of the 1920s, gave us a term of genuine Aristophanic comedy that I have not forgotten. We read every line; of course, we did not translate every line. In my graduate year Todd optimistically agreed to steer me through Aristotle's Poetics. In November he called it off, on the grounds that he could not find the necessary time. My own opinion is that he considered the attempt to instill in me a comprehension of Aristode's more philosophical style a completely hopeless task. In 1935 I published my first paper, a study of a controversial epigraphic and calendrial problem that required exhaustive analysis of a Greek pluperfect indicative and a preposition in the first chapter of Thucydides' fifth book. I sent reprints to my three masters in British Columbia. From two I received congratulatory replies. From Todd I received a learned and very useful commentary, with full references, on 14 the uses of the Greek pluperfect and the meaning of the preposition, a response characteristic of his learning and his kindness. Todd gave Canada six sons and a daughter. Five of the sons played football, three of them as members of the Varsity team in my last season. The eldest son embarrassed the family by engaging in armball. Eventually, he must have acquired money, because he retired to the wilds of Scotiand as the Laird of a Castie. The daughter sat as a classmate in a number of advanced classes in Greek. For Robertson and Todd I was and I am filled with an awesome and grateful admiration. My hero, however, was Harry Tremayne Logan. He was appointed to the Faculty as one of the originals in 1915 but spent the next three years in France with the Canadian Machine Gun Corps. Later, his academic career was interrupted by a twelve-year term as Principal of Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School, a post that took him to Vancouver Island, Great Britain, and Australia before he returned in 1949 to head the Department until 1954. He continued to teach effectively until he reached 80 years, when he retired at his own request Logan had been a Rhodes Scholar, the kind of man Cecil Rhodes must have had in mind: gendeman, soldier, statesman. He possessed that extraordinary capacity for understanding the student, for thinking with him, for treating him as an individual that is the indelible stamp within the Master Teacher. It was Logan, I am sure, who taught me to appreciate the poems of Vergil. Curiously, I think first of the Eclogues and the Georgics. Logan had a feeling for the landscape and the soil, a feeling that he imparted to us. By the time I entered my fourth year, I was confident of my ability to read Greek. Then came Thucydides. Logan the soldier laid siege to Syracuse and I think that I have never reached a more thorough understanding of Book VII than in 1929, when the Master Teacher interpreted the Master Historian. The vicissitudes of the Athenians and of the decent, slow-witted Nikians have remained unforgettable. I know why, in a different context some years later, I chose Thucydides as my special author, to the horror of my contemporaries. Logan possessed a philosophical turn of mind, which accounts in part for the fact that by choice he guided the young through Plato's Republic until the year of his retirement My mind is not philosophical, although I have met the major Greek and Roman philosophical writers on their own ground. But again, it is Logan's patient and sympathetic exposition to which I most often glance back. In that Age the responsibilities of a Department of Classics were rooted firmly in the Greek and Roman authors ~ in Greek and in Latin. The mere thought of ancient literature in translation would have been as repellent, as horrifying, as anarchistic, as placing students on committees or allowing women to smoke in public ~ wearing trousers. Greek and Roman History, however, occupied a position of respect partly, perhaps, because the teaching fell to Logan, and partly, I am sure, because Cicero would have approved. Logan's lectures were delivered quietiy and grippingly, without rhetoric but with a precise choice of diction and a skillful variation of tone to produce emphasis. He paced slowly to and fro, a pernicious habit you may say, unless you have watched an exciting rally in tennis or have experienced a similar spectacle elsewhere. And always we were aware that he knew these people whose achievements he was discussing. "Men make the city," said Nikias; "men make history," said Logan. Three words: they are the essential to comprehension. Logan it was who taught me that History includes all the achievements of man. I must have become a disciple, for during my graduate year I read Tacitus with him at his house and under his direction I wrote what I then thought was a historical thesis, Rome and Germany: the safe and uninspired tide hides a florid passage, one of many florid passages, portraying Arminius as a hero fighting against fearful odds. Arminius, I learned later, is the origin of the name Hermann. And Hermann recalls (at least to me) Richard Person's lines: The Germans in Greek Are sadly to seek; All save Hermann ~ And Hermann's a Germann. My tone would be different today. 15 When I came up in 19261 stood about 5*7" and weighed 130 lbs (dressed). In those halcyon days each student underwent a thorough physical examination. The doctor upon whom I waited found his task simple: there was not much to examine. As he concluded, he asked, with a sneer, "And what are you going to do, my boy, except study?" 7 am going to play football," I replied stoutiy. "For Varsity no doubt?", was his witty response, as he roared with laughter and I stalked out with an attempt at dignity, an impossible goal when one is still buttoning one's trousers. After all, I considered myself a goalkeeper, although, it is true, I could not reach the crossbar. But between my first and second years I suddenly rose to 6'0" ~ with no gain in weight; and for four years, as I patrolled the sometimes vast distance — 8 yards — between the posts proudly wearing the Blue and Gold of Varsity, I often thought of that miserable medico and his cheap humor. Normally, Todd paced the sidelines, grave and dispassionate as a scholar should be. Frequendy, he was joined by Monsieur Delavault, a volatile and exuberant Professor of French, in whose classes I sat. Delavault brought the French spirit to the game, not always to the taste of the referee. One afternoon, in a close match at Trimble Park, I made a sensational save of a penalty shot; any dive to my left merited the adjective. At half-time Delavault rushed on the field, embraced me firmly with both hands, and kissed each cheek, warmly and wetiy. In my helpless condition, I happened to catch a glimpse of Todd. I have never seen a look of such utter and revolted disgust on a man's face. Katharsis displayed on a football field was un-British. My many non-academic recreations included membership in the Society of Thoth, a secret organization that imposed an awesome and terrifying ceremony of initiation and practiced an arcane ritual. I can say no more, since members swore to keep their oaths of secrecy until the iron should float (classical influences were often at work). I mention the Society of Thoth because my membership led to my thespian career. Each year Homecoming was celebrated by a Theatre-Night in the Auditorium when the various classes and societies contributed numbers to the long show. In my day the epic pantomime produced by the Society of Thoth won a scintillating acclaim. The Society, I should have observed, banned women from its mysteries but allowed a selected number of camp-followers to make costumes, apply make-up, and attend its more licentious functions. I began in a humble way, as a Hawaiian dancing girl, and the reviewers ignored my performance. Harry Logan did not. He visited the dressing-room to shake my hand and it took him three days to remove the paint from his hands. As Robertson gazed at my face the following week he made it clear that my activity had been un-Ciceronian. Our next vehicle was "Antony and Cleopatra", with Himie Koshevoy, the Keeper of the Baksheesh, starring as Antony, and one who is today [1975] a well-known judge in the role of Cleopatra. I had been typecast - I think that is the professional jargon — as an Egyptian dancing girl. Logan did not shake my hand. This time my unrehearsed stage-business ~ you see, I remember the vocabulary ~ brought deafening applause. Toward the close, as the dancers responded violendy to the eastern music, my left attachment slipped its moorings and landed on the trumpet-player's instrument. So impressed were the critics by our moving interpretation that we were invited to join the vaudeville show at the Pantages Theatre on Hastings Street the following week. We accepted. Finally, I reached stardom: I played the lead in "Helen of Troy". Now, I am a modest man and I must not yield to boastful temptation. I shall report merely that I was sensational. Never had the audience viewed such spectacular realism. Of course, we of the theatre have our own secrets and, after so many years, it will do no harm to reveal the lengths to which a seasoned actor will go to achieve perfection. As Troy burned, Helen was to stand at the walls tearing her long and beautiful and blonde hair. The walls were high and Helen was to balance on top of a rather degenerate ladder that was to be held in place by a high-ranking member of the Society, the Torturer-in-Chief, who is now Professor of Economics at a well-known university. In rehearsal all went well, although no zenith of emotion was reached. On Homecoming Night however, the holder of the ladder, unrehearsed, had attained a state of meandering absence of mind. Consequendy, as the flames rose accompanied by musical crescendo, the holder swayed, the ladder swayed, Helen swayed; the sheer terror of the intensely moving scene, heightened by the falling strands of golden hair, conveyed itself to the audience. At last, amid smoke and flame, the curtain fell. And so did I. 16 The Pub, the office of the Ubyssey, provided headquarters for aspiring journalists and writers, as well as, secredy, for the Society of Thoth. The Pub comprised one room in the northeast comer of the Auditorium. The premises are now called the Offices of the Summer Session. Here I toiled for five years, eventually reaching the chair of Sports Editor, which I occupied for two years. This incumbency allowed me to give front-page space to the exciting activities of the Football Club, at the expense, to be sure, of a semi-weekly battle with the Senior Editors. I was most successful when the Editor-in-Chief was a Rugby man. I made a deal: Football and Rugby would alternate as the featured story. You should not be thinking of the present Ubyssey as a parallel. We were fully literate, the Editor insisted on rigorous proofreading; and coverage of the University's activities, especially sport, was comprehensive. Our vocabulary did not require the assistance of obscenities, coarseness, and trite colloquialisms. Nor did we split infinitives or use "like" as a conjunction. In the Pub, hammering away at one of the two battered typewriters amid raucous disorder, I produced the final copy of my thesis. In my final year, the Editor-in-Chief was a serious and totally upright man, not wild enough for membership in the Society of Thoth, who, once having made a decision, could not be budged. That year the Ubyssey conducted an editorial campaign, in which I participated prominendy, directed against the Dean of Women to lift the ban on women smoking in public. As a result, we were satisfyingly unpopular by the time the provincial budget came down. The President of the University, alarmed by earlier comments, ordered the Editor to refrain from criticism of our benefactors in Victoria. The immediate response was a vigorous editorial written by the courageous Ron Grantham denouncing a parsimonious and anti-intellectual Government In those Utopian days authority did not hesitate: the President suspended the Editor from the University and banned the Ubyssey. There was no appeal from this non-negotiable edict Robertson could not really approve of these extra-curricular activities. After all, one cannot imagine Cicero relaxing as a gladiator in the arena. And Robertson had to tolerate the many non-classical interests of Todd and Logan. But he was a fair-minded man and I could read Latin, which was contrary to the proper order of nature. "O McGregor, McGregor," he sighed to me one Monday morning when I appeared with a black eye and without a front tooth, "Cicero never looked like that" The Sedgewickian Legacy Hugh M. Palmer Class of'36 "If I were told that I had to spend the rest of my life alone on a desert island and could take with me only two books," he would say in that lilting, sonorous voice of his, "I would unhesitatingly choose the Holy Bible and Antony and Cleopatra." The last word emerged as Cleo-pate-tra. "But why Antony and Cleopatra, sir?" asked a bespectacled boy in the front row of the English 9 class. And Dr. G.G. Sedgewick ~ Garnett Gladwin Sedgewick - head of the Department of English, Shakespearean scholar, author, teacher extraordinary, told him and the rest of us why, and so persuasively that we began to wonder whether indeed there were any other worthwhile choices. That little scene took place over fifty years ago, yet for me it has the vividness of yesterday. For Dr. Sedgewick is not only a legend in the annals of UBC - he also had the singularity of being a legend in his lifetime. In academia and elsewhere, how few achieve that astonishing reputation. George Lyman Kittredge, who taught at Harvard for some forty years, was one of these, and it is more than a coincidence that Garnett Sedgewick studied under him. But lest the legend persist that Dr. Sedgewick modeled himself on that eminent scholar, it is well to be reminded that Kittredge was a formidable teacher, remote from his students, dominating them utterly by his fierce logic. Dr. Sedgewick, on the other hand, had a very different personality. His was a generous nature and his manner open and friendly. Although his bantering style often extended to teasing his students, the teasing was always playful, never malicious. Brian Moore in one of his novels speaks of schoolmasters as soon learning "that boys remember them for eccentricities of dress, behavior, speech... that they exaggerate these in order to create a classroom 17 persona. We remember schoolmasters, as we remember actors", he writes. My vivid recollections of Dr. Sedgewick can to a large extent be accounted for by those eccentric qualities that Moore has noted in that group of humbler calling. It was these qualities that drew us to his classes in anticipation not so much of gaining a greater insight into Shakespearean drama, as it was of witnessing a one-man show. Although a habitual skipper of lectures, I cannot remember ever having skipped one of his. A small figure of a man, sitting cross-legged on top of a table in front of the class, he was sartorially distinct from his colleagues. Grey Harris tweed suit shirts as often as not of creamy flannel, a discreet, Paisley-patterned bow tie which he himself had loosely knotted, horn-rimmed spectacles behind which his normally solemn grey eyes would sometimes twinkle. Large face, smallish head, with thinning grey hair. Bow ties — and he had scores of them — were his favorite article of dress. To a group of us he once quipped, "I could do without almost any article of clothing, so long as it isn't one of these," and his hand went up as if to reassure himself that the bow tie was still in place. How clear one's memory is of that diminutive, comic, erudite man sitting there trying to impart something of the glory of the Elizabethans and of the plays of Shakespeare to a grab-bag assortment of undergraduates. How refreshing and, by comparison with other professors, how singular that he should tell us at the beginning of an English 9 course that he didn't want us to take notes; that if it were necessary to jot down a reference or two he would tell us when to do so; that if it was passing examinations we were interested in, he would give us the tides of suitable texts that we would find in the library. This was designed to free us from the slavery of note-taking in the interests of participation. But our attention was held in any event by his flamboyant style. "I would rather have lived in Elizabethan London, with all its open drains, with all its squalor, with all its disease, than to have lived in any other age or in any other city," he would declaim to us. A consummate actor, Dr. Sedgewick was rarely if ever in the room ahead of his class. He would wait until all had taken their places and then, instead of merely walking into the room, he would make an entrance ~ on wet days his raincoat romantically worn like a cloak. Usually his hand went up as if to toss back a lock of hair or, in a wonderfully deft gesture he would slip the raincoat off his shoulders and lob it on to a chair. One could almost hear the flourish of trumpets. Minutes later he would be asking rhetorical questions of the class as he strutted up and down, as upon an imaginary stage, quoting favorite passages, reciting the blank verse in a manner that maximized its meaning and imagery. The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails... For her own person, It beggar'd all description: she did he In her pavilion - cloth of gold, of tissue — O'er-picturing that Venus where we see The fancy outwork nature. On each side her, Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids... "Can't you just see it?" he would say to us. "Is there anything more magnificent, in visual terms, that is? Um-m? The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne... pure Canaletto, don't you think? As for the Queen herself, and those dimpled boys. Surely that's Tiepolo. Um-m?" And to a blond ill-at-ease boy on the aisle, he would ask, "Wouldn't you like to be one of those dimpled boys, Myron?" And a hundred heads would turn to watch Myron's predictable reaction. "And if you were one of those - those dimpled boys - just what do you think you would be doing? Um-m?" Hot blushes from Myron, accompanied by general laughter. But in some of the less literal, more allusive quotations which he would recite from memory, he would as often as not repeat them more for his own sake than for ours, as though his mind were reaching out and catching fugitive meanings that it was not in our knowledge or power to appreciate. For behind the man who seemed, on the face of it, happiest when besting a group of feisty male undergraduates in an exchange of quips ~ behind the mincing walk, the gesturing, the articulation that 18 verged on the precious - was a man of deep scholarship; hardly surprising considering the standards imposed by Kittredge on those enrolled in the doctoral program. He was a man who, although a specialist in Shakespearean studies, had a great sense of the sweep of history and a grand feeling for the liberating forces that had produced the modem humanist tradition, to which he himself subscribed. Although not a believer in Christianity, he strongly urged his students to read and re-read, for its great literary merit, the Bible in the King James version. My most vivid recollection of Dr. Sedgewick, however, happens to be a very personal one. Even now, after more than fifty years, I cannot reflect on what happened without receiving a twinge of embarrassment I had been sitting by the telephone one evening, waiting for a classmate to call me back after checking on the next day's French assignment Only minutes before he and I had been indulging in hilarious chatter, and I recall that I had been roaring with laughter at his powers of mimicry. The phone rang and I picked it up immediately. "Hello," I said in the deepest register I could manage. A very formal voice asked if Mr. Hugh Palmer were there. "This is Hugh Palmer speaking," I said with equal formality. "This is Dr. Sedgewick, Hugh," the voice said. "Dr. Sedgewick — eh?" I said knowingly, at the same time exploiting his own inflection. "Well, well... and how is the little lady?" There was a pause at the end of the line, and as it stretched out it seemed more like a yawning chasm into which I hoped to be swallowed. "You are referring, of course, to my mother," Dr. Sedgewick said evenly. "Yes, yes - " I replied, my voice full of desperate relief. "How is your mother, Dr. Sedgewick?" 19 Henry Angus: Soliloquizer Arthur J. Wirick Class of'36 It was only recendy that I discovered in my files some six or seven essays, my own compositions, each of half-century vintage. They were my submissions, as class assignments, to various UBC professors; and in general these instructors had added, by way of penciled annotations and marginal glosses, not only an assigned grade or mark, but comments of various kinds. One essay alone (concerning the political doctrines of Sun Yat-sen, with which I was then surprisingly well acquainted) bore no such insignia; only the assigned grade had been added to its cover page. This was the sole evidence that it had been perused by Dr. Henry F. Angus. My discovery of these essays prompted many memories. I must say that I remember my days at UBC with unalloyed pleasure — and cannot now recall any unhappy moments whatsoever. The many disorders of that world of the 1930s — chronic depression, unemployment, international anarchy — provided me and my friends and classmates with challenges, with the raw material for constant, stimulating debate. Italy invading Ethiopia, Japan trampling through Manchuria (and later on the whole of China), breadlines and relief camps at home, the civil war in Spain, appeasement, pacifism, communism, Marxism, socialism, collective security ~ all these gave us food for thought, grist for our arguments, material for the doctrines we ourselves espoused with such assurance. For many of us, only the summer months, away from the University campus, brought home the hard reality of under-employment - or no employment. Life at UBC in the 1930s was a world of great conversation. And yes! ~ of some great lectures too. My own contacts were with the English and History departments, and with certain courses in Government, offered by a single department which succeeded in containing "Economics, Political Science, Commerce and Sociology". (To this day I cannot explain why the department then proceeded to offer two classes in "Government" and none at all identified as "Political Science". So I remember names like Soward, Gage, Sedgewick, Angus, Wood, Walker, Thrupp, Dilworth and Cooke. There are stories to be told about all of these people. But I would single out Henry F. Angus. A student like me encountered that gentleman only in his teaching persona. I doubt if many knew him then as a man of great reputation; and indeed I do not know to what extent his reputation may have been acquired later in his career. * But it was as a teacher that we came to know him and to realize that he was capable of brilliant and sparkling lectures. We learned that he could occasionally be dull ~ as when he read from a book. We also became aware of a mild disposition, a gende soul, disinclined to impose harsh penalties for inferior work. Indeed, we found, all students, good or bad, tended to receive grades for essays and examinations which exceeded their expectations. As a lecturer, Henry Angus was outstanding. Oddly, at his most brilliant he scarcely required an audience: he addressed himself; he soliloquized. Entering his classroom, he presented his topic as a question to be debated. "Should matters in our society be arranged thus - or so?" The ensuing hour became a form of solitaire, played out before student observers. At half-time - Henry Angus having appeared to reach a singularly convincing conclusion - he would reverse himself, and largely demolish his own case. And yet he rarely if ever reached that point described as "paralysis by analysis". Readily and often, he took a stand ~ on many issues. But he made many of his students intensely aware of the complexity of human problems. And so I remember many of those lectures, and the man who gave them, with warmth and affection. Henry Angus — small and neat and rather shy and gende — would appear to address his own thoughts, occasionally and nearsightedly including an enthralled audience "up front". Students in the rear, less motivated, were unaffected. But still, learning flourished in those days! *Angus was born in 1891 and came to UBC in 1919. He left it as Dean of Graduate Studies, in 1956. He served from 1937 to 1940 as a member of the federal Rowell-Sirois Royal Commission which studied and made wide-ranging recommendations concerning the allocation and exercise of federal-provincial responsibilities and powers in fiscal and legislative matters. In 1986, he lives quietly in Vancouver. 20 Dean Mary Bollert Elizabeth (Leslie) Stubbs Class of'38 In the almost fifty years that have passed since our freshman days, memories of Dean Bollert have become rather dim. After the initial exposure during Initiation Week, most women rarely saw her except as one of the faculty who appeared in the halls of the Arts Building or in the Cafeteria. Miss Bollert took her office as Dean of Women seriously. She knew that she stood "in loco parentis" to all of us women and as such, felt entrusted with our moral guidance. She seemed to feel that if our outward behavior was correct our inner selves would remain pure and unsullied, for the theme of her annual "Talk to Freshmen Women" (Freshettes) was "decorum". Efforts were made, of course, to protect us from corrupting influences. The large classes in English and Mathematics were segregated by sex so that the men were instructed by Dr. Sedgewick or Dean Gage while we women had lesser luminaries. (My Math teacher, however, Mr. Richardson, was excellent.) Our textbooks were the same so that we did read Huxley, Lawrence, Faulkner, and Joyce, much of which we didn't comprehend, but which moved at least one father to write an indignant letter of protest to the President In her talk the dean stressed that we were never to forget that as university women we were ladies, and therefore good manners, conservative dress - NO trousers, NO ankle socks - and propriety in all phases of behavior were important Apart from the reference to "academic dress", which few but Theologs and the occasional professor ever affected, the following words of Vera Farnell, Dean, Somerville College, Oxford in the days of Margaret Thatcher, might have been quoted from Dean Bollert* If you aim at looking appropriate and "right" and would avoid the risk of looking common and vulgar, or unfortunately dressed, avoid associating academic dress with any but the very discreetest of make-up. As smoking in academic dress is a university offense, so are brightly colored lips and fingernails an offense against good taste. A friend from those days recalls the last sentence of Dean Bollert's talks as, "Now, ladies, never feel sorry for the poor boys." Thus, she felt, did the dean warn us against SEX! Many of us, naive as we were then, would have taken the words literally to refer to our friends who were struggling to finance their year on most limited budgets. Another ritual of Initiation Week was a tea at Miss Bollert's South Granville apartment, which seems to have been limited to out-of-town girls. Most of us turned up, partly because of the promise of food and partly because to attend was the right thing to do. We appeared, properly attired with hat and gloves, in clean blouses, and with our skirts (often one per wardrobe) freshly sponged and pressed. Senior girls in the boarding houses or congenial "Big Sisters" warned us to stay at least twenty minutes or until the Dean had spoken to us personally. The ensuing dialogue was generally painful for both Miss Bollert and the student who sat trying to juggle a small napkin, a plate with a sausage roll or a lush patisserie, and a delicate cup filled with piping hot tea. After valiant efforts on both sides to find some common ground beyond the weather and the home town (viewed very differendy by the two speakers), the dean would rise with a rusde of her dark blue silk dress, and assure us of her help if we would call at her office. She was said to have found jobs for some girls. (These were scarce and the wages provided little more than pocket money.) She paid my doctor's bill when I shot myself with a bow and arrow! (Tis true. I had enrolled in archery in response to a call from Miss Gertrude Moore that all women should make an effort to balance their sedentary studies with a wholesome athletic activity.) All boarding houses were vetted before appearing on the approved list Men and women were never to room in the same premises. Oddly enough, at one of my boarding houses, two science men batched in the basement, "The Hermitarium", while we two girls, suitably chaperoned by the mother of one, had rooms on the upper floor. 21 On one occasion a friend was summoned to the Dean's office by a note in the mailbox - a series of pigeon holes on a wall in the Arts Building. Her landlady had complained that she had been tossing apple cores at the wastepaper basket and hitting the wall! Miss Bollert was appalled by such unseemly behavior. My friend waxed indignant at the blatant falsehood, refrained nobly from any counter-charges, but drew the dean's attention to her own impeccable record as a student, and to the well-known position of her family on all matters of propriety including intellectual, moral and spiritual rectitude. She then said, "Goodbye", and stalked out, never to hear from the dean again. Smoking in any kind of dress, academic or not was anathema to Dean Bollert. Another friend recalls going to see her regarding a bursary. "The dean was quite nice to me. All went well until I opened my purse and she spotted a pack of cigarettes. Then warmth became glacial ice." And the student with a warning about the proven connection between smoking and failing marks, was sent to the bursar on what the dean implied would be a hopeless quest (It was not.) The first girl to smoke in the Cafeteria was said to have been a member of the Players' Club. Since the sky did not fall, many others then began to light up, and soon smoking was as common as non-smoking is today. That summer, some of us who worked as card filers on the Library of Congress Depository Card Catalogue actually wore ankle socks with our penny loafers and saddle shoes. Slacks appeared. War was declared and the role of the Dean of Women, as Miss Bollert envisioned it, disappeared. 22 Gordon Shrum: A Titan Put Down /. Harvey Parliament Class of'45 In the fall of 1938, after a number of years working at a mine, I entered UBC as a freshman. I immediately enrolled in the COTC, partly for the experience and partly because we received payment for the time we spent training. Much of the training was off campus at the Seaforth and other armories and Dr. Gordon Shrum, who was Colonel in command of the COTC, wanted to build an armory so we would have a suitable place to train on campus. To finance this project he decided that all members of the COTC would donate their pay toward the armory. To make this "voluntary" effort legal, he ordered a parade so we could all sign "pay waivers". So, one evening the battalion was filing past a table at about three miles per hour signing the appropriate documents when my turn came and I picked up the paper to read what it said. The line immediately came to a sudden halt and Colonel Shrum, who was watching the performance from the far end of the room, bellowed, "Sergeant-Major, what is holding up the parade?" The S-M yelled back, "Sir, someone up here is reading the documents!" The Colonel came roaring up to me and shouted, "You there, never mind reading, just sign and move along!" I came to attention and politely said, "Sir, I always read a document before I sign it" The Colonel looked as if he was having apoplexy and then he said loudly, "What is your name?" When I told him he said, "I'll remember that name!" For about twenty-five years after graduation (and more than thirty years after this incident) I had no contact with Dr. Shrum. Then one night in Vancouver, when I was on the executive of the CIMM, Dr. Shrum was our guest speaker and was at a small headtable gathering prior to the dinner. I went up to introduce myself and he said, "Hold on -1 know you — your name is Parliament, J. Harvey Parliament!" He really did remember my name! Another incident took place at COTC camp in Vemon and was on a "no-names" basis ~ it just happened. We were having P.T. in the frosty dawn with the whole battalion, including Colonel Shram, clad in shorts and singlets. After push-ups and the other usual exertions, the genius directing the exercises decided we would have a "wheelbarrow" race. This was between two-man teams consisting of one "wheelbarrow" who ran on his hands and one pusher who held up the legs of the wheelbarrow and ran with him. The object was to go as fast as possible without over-running the wheelbarrow and grinding his face in the dirt. The Colonel, who was not the most popular man in camp but who wanted to prove he was "one of the boys", insisted on participating as a wheelbarrow and he drew me as his pusher. So at the starter's "Go!" away we went with everyone cheering and yelling at me to go faster. Shortly after we started the Colonel somehow got the idea that I was trying to overrun him. So he went faster and I went faster - with him trying to keep ahead of me and with me trying to run him into the ground. Much to the disappointment of the crowd he managed to reach the finish line still on his hands. And we came in second! 23 M.Y. Williams: A Portrait in Serenity /. Harvey Parliament Class of'45 All engineering students were required to take Geology I in their third year. The section on historical geology and paleontology was given by Dr. M.Y. Williams, who was head of the Department of Geology. Many of the engineers, especially the Mechanicals and Electricals, thought the course unnecessary. "M.Y." was a very thorough but somewhat dry lecturer and quite a few found the subject boring, so toward the end of the term a group decided to try to liven up the proceedings. "M.Y.", who was a rather straightiaced and deeply religious old gendeman, always started his lecture by pulling down a large rolled "Geologic Time Chart" which hung in front of the class and which he constandy referred to as he spoke. The engineers obtained a very large, almost lifesize, picture of a beautiful woman, entirely nude. Just before the last lecture they unrolled "M.Y.'"s chart, affixed the nude to it and rolled up the chart again. With the whole class in on the joke and hardly able to contain themselves, "M.Y." walked to the front of the room and started his final lecture of the term. He said, "We have travelled through geologic time, tracing the tree of life from the Cambrian to recent, through trilobites, dinosaurs and primates and now we will discuss the highest form of life — Mankind." At this point he pulled down the chart exposing the lovely nude to full view and continued without missing a beat or batting an eye, "of which this is an excellent specimen." There was dead silence for a few moments and then the whole class gave him a standing ovation. An Encounter with Ira Dilworth Sam Roddan Class of '37 ha Dilworth taught at UBC from 1934-1938. At Harvard he had studied under Irving Babbitt and was a pupil of George Lyman Kittredge. Ira Dilworth's textbook, Nineteenth Century Poetry, published in 1931 when he was principal at Victoria High School, was in use for many years in B.C. classrooms. Ira Dilworth's great passion was the poetry of the Romantics and the music of Bach. His lectures at UBC were masterpieces of literary orchestration, measured recitatives of the romantic spirit. As an inspired conductor, Ira Dilworth, always clad in academic garb, guided us through the harmonics and disciplines of the heart Nor did he ever despair if students such as I were often tone-deaf to the mystic rhythms of the spheres. When Ira Dilworth left university life in 1938 for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he took with him the same enthusiasm and energy he displayed in the classroom. He carried on with his music, his very private charities, his support and guidance to struggling artists, notably Emily Carr who called Ira "Dear Eye" and "A Great Kindness". His standards of excellence in the arts made him an eloquent voice in the development of radio across Canada. One wintry morning in Montreal I noticed his familiar and portly figure, always a little jaunty, bustling along St Catherine's Street I had not seen ha for many years. A war had intervened, and he was now head of the CBC International Service. I still remember our exchange of greeting, the warmth and solicitude in his voice: "Look at you," he said. "You're all skin and bone. Tonight you must come to my place for supper. And no excuses. Just be there at six." Ira Dilworth's apartment was on Cotes des Neiges. It was comfortable and spacious. The walls were covered with paintings, many of them by Emily Carr. The air was rich with the perfumes of exotic curries. In the pantry he showed me his collection of spices and herbs, and in the oven, he proudly pointed 24 out the huge ham slowly turning on a spit From his kitchen window I could see the lights of the city hanging over the streets like necklaces of silver. As Ira busied himself with his culinary tasks, he was in a jovial mood and kept up a lively discourse on the role of the ham in everyday life. Later, over his table, we joked about ham actors and ham radio operators, Noah's second son, also known as Ham and Lamb's Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, and all of this as only Ira at his best could do. As the evening wore on, Ira spoke of his own daily tasks, reports he was writing, studies, the future of the CBC and the International Service, decisions, often painful, that everyone must make who carries commitments and responsibilities. "And what about you?" Ira asked at last "You have much life experience, been around, through a war. You're a survivor." It's hard to recall the advice Ira gave that night to a young man trying to find his way in a great city. In fact, it wasn't advice but mosdy a pointing out of the lay of the land, signposts, thoroughfares, detours, crossroads, places he himself had been over. Later I remember Ira shaking my hand at his door and saying goodbye. 'We all do what we must" he said. "Take care." It was a long walk back to my room in the old YMCA at 1474 Drammond Street The wind whipped through my thin coat but I walked briskly and with a certain jauntiness. Soon the darkness seemed to lift and I could see more clearly the side roads, blind alleys, dead ends and the black ice on the beaten paths far ahead 25 CAMPUS CLUBS 10 October. 1934:1 spent my two spare periods this morning memorizing my part for the Players' Club try-out this afternoon, I found that there was somebody else (Don Munro, future MJP. and Canadian ambassador to Turkey) whose partner had also dropped out. Together we rehearsed the scene, a conversation between two men about to jump off a pier, who discover that the one is married to, and the other jilted by, the same girl. A couple of rehearsals indicated that I didn't know my part very well and I swotted it up desperately. Finally we went on stage and, by the grace of Allah, I didn't forget my lines. Leaves From an Underpaduate's Diarv Philip Akrigg 26 SCM - Campus Beginnings Mildred (Osterhout) Farhni Class of'24 I dig down into the catacombs of my mind and what do I find about UBC in the twenties? An outreach into the problems of a growing, changing society coming out of the pioneering days to an increasingly complex society. Groups centered in specific issues came together to solve them ~ and we had every confidence that we could solve them in our time. Coming from a family life connected with the church, I gravitated towards those interested in religious issues and found myself in the YWCA where there were congenial people. However, I found more challenge in the International Club and the beginnings of a student socialist movement Some looked for economic solutions and some turned to the political arena When the YW's joined to become the Student Christian Movement, many of us carried with us our concerns and what we thought were solutions into the new movement, which soon became known as a radical movement challenging all the rigidities of more conservative organizations. I found it stimulating and exciting and was able to slough off some of the old restraints. Some of our best discussions took place in weekend or holiday gatherings when we met at places such as Copper Cove, Horseshoe Bay and Deep Cove. There in informal discussions where we faced the problems of the world, we exchanged ideas of possible solutions which, however, did not cause the old world to shatter. Memories of long walks and swims come back and special incidents such as shoving Jerry Hundal into deep water when we did not know he could not swim and having to haul him out Then there was the breath-taking moments when we discovered the hummingbird's nest filled with tiny birdlets. The inspiration of travelling secretaries and guests was long lasting and I remember especially the visits of Harry Avison, Gertrude Rutherford, Murray Brooks and Ernie Clark. Even though many names are gone, the impact remains. I attended at least one national conference in the area of the Muskoka Lakes, and remember getting drowsy over some of the speeches but I'll always remember the departure when from the back of the boat someone tossed Larry Mackenzie's hat into the air... and it never came back to the deck. Through the SCM, I became interested in the Sharman Seminars and was fortunate enough to attend two, one in Ontario and one at Qualicum Beach. Of all the insights into the way of Troth and Love, Dr. Sharman's incisive questioning was the most challenging and provided directives for "The Good Life"... which I've been trying more - or considerably less — successfully to follow since. 27 The First Gymnasium /. Ross Tolmie Class of'29 Probably the most interesting episode in UBC's first four years at Point Grey was the financing and building of the first gymnasium on the campus. This project was the first, and became the prototype of several other student-financed projects built on the campus. Sherwood Lett was the originator of the idea and supervised the incorporation of the student body and the raising of the first loan of $60,000 secured by a commitment from each student of the refundable portion of his Caution Money. This refundable portion of Caution Money amounted to an "income" of about $13,000 per year (2,000 students times $10 Caution Money minus the average deduction by the University from each student's Caution Money equals $6.50). Since the interest in those days was at the exorbitant rate of 6% per year (6% times $60,000 equals $3,600) the refundable Caution Money was more than double the interest expense and left a sizable amount available for paying off the debt The bonded indebtedness was paid off within ten years, as I recall. Of course the student body was increasing rapidly in those days and by 1939 it had grown to about 4,500 students. As a method of financing highly desirable student projects, this scheme proved very useful over succeeding years and was adapted to the needs of the second gymnasium, the stadium, and I believe the Brock Memorial. Another milestone in UBC Alumni activities that I remember was in the Cariboo Gold Rush of 1933. This was the second Cariboo Gold Rush, the first one having occurred in 1869. The 1933 Cariboo Gold Rush came in the depths of the Great Depression. At least 1,000 UBC students, many of them being unemployed Mining graduates, but some even being unemployed lawyers, like Alfie Watts and myself, and unemployed agronomists like Roger Odium, found their way up to Barkerville and Stanley in the depths of the winter of January 1933. Most of them lived off the land eating moose meat and an occasional partridge, but few found actual gold in the streams. A considerable number found employment underground in such lode mines as the Cariboo Gold Quartz and Island Mountain. None were officially recorded as boodeggers but at least three were licensed merchants operating under the name of the Lightning Creek General Store. By October 1933, the UBC grads in the Cariboo felt it was time to celebrate their survival from starvation and they organized a UBC Homecoming. Word was sent out to all grads up and down the Cariboo Road and by Saturday evening the grads started to arrive on the backs of trucks or as hitchhikers in various types of cars. At least seventy-five turned up at the Lightning Creek General Store in Stanley and paid $5 down (in cash or gold dust). This entitied them to three drinks of overproof rum and a bang-up Cariboo dinner at Hanafin's Hotel. After that the entertainment was strictly casual and spontaneous, but a considerable portion of the party reached Barkerville (fourteen miles away) and proceeded to demonstrate to the local dancers what they had learned through four years at UBC. 28 The SCM at UBC Clare (Brown) Buckland Class of'35 The Student Christian Movement in the early thirties was a tiny group with an unsuspected energy. Some of their members I knew through other organizations like Phrateres and the Letters Club, and I only went to one program in the spring of my graduating year. But that one program set in motion a domino effect that was to change the course of my life. It was a study seminar on "The Records of the Life of Jesus", following the method of Henry Burton Sharman. It was led by Bob McMaster. The questions he raised for our response were startling, and I decided to attend the annual Spring Camp at Gambier Island in '35. There were two leaders at the 1938 Camp who dropped bombshells into the lap of a conventional middle-class daughter well shielded in those pre-TV days from major social issues. Watson Thompson, who later became beloved of engineering students for his lively lectures in English literature, shared his firsthand experiences of cooperative communities. And Allan Hunter, a Congregational minister from Hollywood, friend of Kagawa and Gandhi, spoke at the '36 Camp of Christian pacifism, socialism, and racial issues. Never underestimate the potency of persons who live their philosophy! I learned to question readymade "solutions" and limited points of view. Brief though the contacts, I've never been the same since. Memories of the SCM, 1927-1933 Katharine Hockxn Class of'31 When I applied for the class of 1931 at UBC, the registration form included a listing of the religious clubs and activities. My mother was with me, and remembering her own participation in the YWCA at Mount Allison in the class of '08, encouraged me to indicate interest in the Student Christian Movement. When I actually got to a meeting, it was a bit of a shock to find Underwoods, Osterhouts, and their contemporaries in the postwar mood of keeping a considerable distance from anything traditional or "churchy". And they were a powerhouse of intellectual competence that made me feel most ignorant and juvenile! But Molly Phillips, then Molly Ricketts, took the freshettes under her wing and with considerable native managerial skill kept us involved, seeing that we were included and participating, especially if it were a gathering at her parents' home, where we were always most welcome! As time went on, the new generations moved more closely to acceptance of habitual church activities, for there was a gradual shift to young people with assumed church loyalty, yet being ready and eager for adventurous thinking and exploration of new directions. Fundamental to the gradual development oi what eventually proved for me, to be a grounding community, were several factors. We had our lunches each day in the SCM room on the second floor of the old Auditorium building. Most of us could not afford the Cafeteria and this was a congenial place to meet folk, to catch up on news and to keep informed of activities. Sometimes there was an interesting visitor with a chance for easy conversation. This was also where the study groups met and all us would be part of a "Records Group" using the outlines in H.B. Sharman's little green book, Studies of the Life of Jesus. It proved a framework for us to come to grips freely with the synoptic records, mosdy from Mark. I remember this as a process of active doubt and criticism that kept throwing out the miracles of seemingly obscure passages until there was very little left, but eventually leading to more discussion and gradually finding new meaning in the discarded sections, and ending with the original record fairly intact! There were also many weekends when we went off camping to Deep Cove, or some other facility on the West Arm. These were always fun times when we did our own catering and the shared activities meant deepened friendships and often new ideas as the national network of the SCM enabled us to meet with significant visitors travelling in Canada. I remember one camp when seven carried the name of George. This 29 was too good a chance for "George to do the dishes"! People who broadened our perspectives included Walter Kotchnig of World University Service, Mrs. Induk Pak Kim, Christian patriot from Korea, Dr. Shimizu of the Japanese community in Vancouver, R.B.Y. Scott from the theological college, and another visitor who, around a fireplace with brighdy burning logs, enchanted us with tales from the Old Testament, the Bible stories, reconstituted against the sociological details of their scholarship - great fun and memorable! SCM national staff were always welcome and seemed to stimulate new interests and concerns in their pattern of regular visits: Murray Brooks, Gertrude Rutherford and occasionally Harry Avison, then based in Winnipeg as Western Secretary. On weekends there were always late evening post-discussion hikes, when a few romances were nurtured. Yet the crowd was basically an open one and the spirit was one of inclusion and making new people feel they belonged. Spring Camp provided a longer period to structure well thought-out programs with several small interest groups under competent resource leadership. It was fairly normal to attract 150 students in the May Day weekend just after exams were over. One year Dr. Alex Kerr, later President of Dalhousie University, was at the spring event ~ my friends found me most indecisive about preferred choice of activity! I was waffling until I knew where Dr. Kerr would be — eventually we had a deliriously exciting small group who explored the bay in a rowboat with this "hero" of the occasion! I remember also people like Dr. MacNeill of First Baptist Church and Professors Topping and Carrothers who often responded to our invitations to share their wisdom and time with us. We were still in the era of inviting hostesses or "chaperones", generally one of our own mothers, who came to be really valued senior friends. Mrs. Alexander Kerr (no relation to the minister) moved with her husband to Vancouver from Saskatchewan, and we soon adopted her having learned of her interest in the movement at U. of S. Her home was great in its hospitality and generosity. Each May Day there were firm traditions to follow. The May Queen was crowned! This was always one of the men, who was chosen secredy, after which two other lads would be recruited to present themselves appropriately garbed as attendants who would "robe" and duly "crown" the unsuspecting royalty for the day. (