Peter L. Smith
Credit: P. L. Smith

I spent three happy years (1951-4) as a student on the UBC campus at the end of the Harry Logan era, and returned for another year as a rookie instructor under Malcolm McGregor in 1955-6.  How swiftly the whole tone of the Department had been transformed! Because I never studied under Malcolm the Great, I shall limit my memoir to the previous regime, when Colonel Logan's quiet leadership was bolstered by the prestige of his still-conspicuous predecessor, the incomparable O.J. Todd.  In theory, I was a UBC student for my entire undergraduate career, having completed two years (1949-51) at the  affiliated Victoria College, then located on its idyllic  Lansdowne Road campus in Victoria.  Because this institution was an integral part of UBC from 1920 to 1963, I shall begin with some remarks on its own strong classical tradition.

Tiny though it was, Victoria College had long been a potent force in shaping the destiny of UBC.  Way back in the McGill era it produced such future luminaries of the UBC English department as  F.G.C. “Freddy” Wood (1887-1976) and Ira Dilworth (1894-1962),[3] and in the next generation its graduates included the likes of my future Classics teacher, W. Leonard Grant, and William Robbins (also of UBC’s English department).  As a young mathematics instructor between 1927 and 1933, the  mighty  Walter Gage had  energized the  Victoria campus, and later maintained from his administrative heights at UBC  a superbly effective line of communication across the Strait of Georgia. 

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Peter L. Smith in the early 1950s.
Credit: P. L. Smith

During my time in the 1950s, almost every upper-level undergraduate programme at UBC was packed with VC alumni.  When I arrived at Point Grey to begin a third-year combined honours course in English and Classics, four of the seven students in my English programme  were new arrivals from Victoria College, and that September I became (if I am not mistaken) the sole registrant in Honours Classics.  Just two years earlier, I had been preceded  from Victoria by classicist Elizabeth (“Bettye”) Bryson (later Bongie)  who earned UBC’s Governor-General’s medal in the spring before my arrival.  Between 1951 and 1960, no fewer than seven Victoria alumni won that annual award.

George P. Black
Credit: P. L. Smith

From 1929 to 1951, the lone Victoria College classics professor was George P. Black, a native of Ireland,  who was a gold medalist from the University of  Manitoba.  A shy and introverted bachelor, he later astounded his friends with a blissfully successful retirement leap into marriage and fatherhood.  He was a fanatically meticulous grammarian and a stern taskmaster; but his austere approach was tempered with unfailing consideration and kindness.  Once you got to know him, he could reveal a delightfully impish sense of humour.

His numerous Victoria College success stories had begun with Leonard Grant, of whose achievements he was justifiably proud.  On the threshold of retirement he anointed me as his final protégé, and I could not possibly have had a more generous or warm-hearted mentor.

Because enrolment in freshman and sophomore Latin was quite healthy, I received no special treatment in studying Livy, Cicero, Virgil and Horace.  Greek was a very different story:  our beginners’  class comprised only three students, and the next year I had G.P. Black entirely to myself.  His theory of teaching Greek, it seems, was that one should cover in two years what was normally accomplished on the Latin side in five or six, so that a student continuing in Greek might be fully caught up by the start of third year university.  Brutal though it seems, this strategy worked miraculously well for me. 

Not long ago I was surprised to hear a UVic colleague describe Greek as a harder language than Latin.  That was definitely not my experience.  After two years at Victoria College, and  aged 18, I was reading Homer and Plato with relative ease, when I was still struggling to come to terms with Horace and Cicero.  Yet I had begun Latin at age 12, with a splendid high school Latin teacher.

Professors Todd and Logan frowned upon G.P. Black’s practice of approaching Greek through Homer, but Victoria College enjoyed semi-autonomy in curriculum, and UBC couldn’t argue with his results.  In the 1930s, his text of choice was Clyde Pharr’s Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners;[4]  by the late 1940s  he had switched to the recently published primer, Schoder and Horrigan’s A Reading Course in Homeric Greek (3 vols., 1947).  He disapproved of that textbook’s erratic approach to philology, not to mention its Jesuitical moralizing, and he provided us with copious lists of corrigenda et obliteranda.  But how exciting it was to begin Greek with Odyssey Books 9 and 10!  Our teacher’s zest for Homer was wildly contagious.  As we learned our paradigms, we had to master both the Homeric forms and their Attic counterparts — a daunting principle, perhaps, but a natural introduction to Greek historical linguistics. During my summer  “break”  between first and second year Greek, a quirky but practical assignment was to render chunks of the Homeric poetry I was reading into morphologically and syntactically correct Attic prose.

In Greek 200, after polishing off volume 2 of Schoder and Horrigan, I was required to study Plato’s Apology and Sophocles’  Antigone, in exhaustive detail, while wading through North and Hillard’s Greek Prose Composition and virtually memorizing Goodwin and Gulick’s Greek Grammar.  I don’t recall feeling at all exploited or abused.  Then, as now, my only reaction was a sense of joyous gratitude.  One may begin to understand the secret of Victoria College’s perennial success.

G.P. Black was a glorious eccentric, whose pedantry was endearingly uncompromising.  His unswerving faith in prescriptive English grammar went far beyond a disdain for split infinitives (an aversion he shared with Malcolm McGregor, who used to fulminate against the permissiveness of Fowler’s Modern English Usage).[5]  One of Black’s most quixotic causes was a one-man assault on his perceived misplacement of the word only:  thus the vulgar expression “I only have eyes for you” must always be corrected to “I have eyes only for you.”  Once I cheekily showed him a misplaced “only” in a sentence by Robert Louis Stevenson, a prose stylist I knew he admired.  He serenely replied, “Great Homer sometimes nods.”

Decades later, while reading well-thumbed old books from the UVic Library, I would occasionally spot interlinear numbers neatly pencilled above an offending “only”  phrase — G.P. Black’s amendment for posterity of a grievous fault in English word order.  Though we can easily smile at foibles like these, they bespoke a crusader’s zeal; and there was no doubt that George Black could inflame in bright students a passion for language and literature.

By the time I completed my B.A. I had studied with all  five regulars:  Otis Todd (former Head, then teaching part-time in retirement); Colonel Harry Logan (current Head, who had recently resumed his professorial career after a thirteen-year  hiatus); and three associate professors, Geoffrey Riddehough, Patrick Guthrie, and Leonard Grant.  One noteworthy feature of this scholarly team was its academic versatility:  there was no awareness (among students, at least) that Professor A specialized in Greek and Professor B in Latin, since they all taught both languages with equal skill and dedication.  This observation occurs to me only now in an era of intensive professional specialization.  At the time, I assumed that all classicists aspired to the ideal state of bilingual and comprehensive mastery.

I did know in advance that O.J. Todd was a Harvard man who had published important books on Aristophanes and Xenophon, but my first introduction to him was in Latin 406: General View of Latin Poetry, taught mainly from the Oxford Book of Latin Verse.  I loved every moment of that course, delighting in Dr. Todd’s quiet and magisterial control of his subject, along with his droll wit and congenial manner.  His teaching style was not what you would call dynamic, but I found myself mesmerized by his intellect and vast learning.  In deference to his advancing years, he usually lectured sitting down. 

His age and this seated posture betrayed him once into committing the ultimate academic misdemeanour.  Although I hate to snitch on one of my idols, I feel obliged to report that the maestro fell asleep while conducting one of his own lectures!  This event reduced our class to shocked bewilderment.  Luckily, the great man soon snapped back to attention, and continued as if nothing had happened.  The mishap affected me deeply.  Throughout my academic career, I dreaded that I might suffer a similar fate, and always resisted any temptation to sit down.

In the office that he  then shared with Colonel Logan in the old Arts Building (now Mathematics), Dr. Todd gave me a marvelous tutorial introduction to Greek drama.  The tragedies we read together were thrilling, and Aristotle’s Poetics was an eye-opener, but the most memorable experience was sharing his exuberant zeal for Aristophanes.  He knew the comedies virtually by heart; after all, he had compiled the definitive index.  As we worked through the Birds,  he would sometimes be chuckling so hard that further progress became impossible. 

In 1953-4, when I took a year of postgraduate work at UBC, I would trudge regularly across campus to Dr. Todd’s  home in order to read Aristotle’s Politics under his tutelage.  I felt sure this was a purely voluntary undertaking on his part, and considered myself enormously privileged to work so closely with a scholar of his stature.  Once, appearing to be almost embarrassed by his own achievements, he presented me with a bundle of offprints on Greek and Latin literature, testimony to his astonishing versatility.

Because Harry T. Logan is such an enduring icon at UBC, there is no need for me to sing his praises.  A British Columbia Rhodes scholar and a decorated World War I hero, he was always addressed, or referred to, as “Colonel” Logan, and his mustachioed, well-groomed appearance was persuasively military.  But a gentler, kinder, more softly spoken man would be hard to find.  He and my father had been classmates at McGill, so I was soon taken under his protective wing. He kept hoping unrealistically that I would win a Rhodes scholarship, though I tried to convince him that my athletic aptitude was abysmal.

Uncommonly wise and civilized, the much beloved Colonel Logan was a scholarly humanist of the old school.  I derived great pleasure and profit from his courses in Virgil, Silver-Age Latin literature, and Plato's Republic,[7] despite his ever-increasing tendency to drift into anecdotal digression.  (The stories were always charming and informative.)  He was an ideal foil to O.J. Todd, and the two men provided living proof  that good teachers are not cast from a single mould.

The three who were then associate professors continued to teach at UBC well into the 1960s, after Victoria College had been transformed into the University of Victoria.  GeoffreyRiddehough  was a celebrated character at UBC.  In the words of Horace (Serm. 2.7.86), we might describe him as teres atque rotundus, a familiar figure as he glided around campus with a faintly Chaplinesque gait (imagine a graceful and cerebral  penguin).  He may well deserve a full-blown biography; I am sure there are some great stories to be told.  Legendary for his brilliant student record  at UBC, Berkeley, and Harvard, he was blessed with many talents, including an exquisite gift for composing frivolous, often ribald, English poems.  (In 1972 he published the best of the  printable under the delicious title of Dance to the Anthill.)

 His research accomplishments were impeccable in quality, but not very extensive; his interests also often extended to the recondite.  Given his potential, he might be described as an underachiever, if one measures academic fame only in conventional terms.  I found it strange that a man of his dazzling intelligence and sharp wit[8] should ignite so few sparks in the classroom.  To be fair I must add that I knew him mainly from Latin and Greek composition courses — not exactly ideal turf for intellectual razzle-dazzle.

Despite Riddehough’s  distant and distracted manner, I felt that we were good friends.  Years later we marked government Latin exams side by side in Victoria, and he kept me constantly in stitches.  At  UBC he had a coterie of female student admirers with whom he used to hold court at mid-morning in the old cafeteria.[9]  It was hard to reconcile those glimpses of a sparkling and convivial Dr. Riddehough with his rather melancholy classroom persona.

Patrick Guthrie I knew least well among the five regulars.  I viewed him as a thorough, obviously well trained,  professor of Greek and Roman history, and a very helpful teacher of Greek prose composition.  He struck me as an exceptionally nice man, with a warm and cordial manner on social occasions.  In his lecturing  style, Dr. Guthrie had some memorable idiosyncrasies, including an odd way of delivering solemn pronouncements to the class:  while slicing the air with his right hand, he would lean forward confidentially,  as if to share some profound revelation.  He thus became a natural target for mimicry: “Funnily enough [for so the spoof would always begin], old Empedocles was no cloistered pedant.”  Here, as in most cases, student imitation was a sign of affection far more  than of disrespect.[10]

The last of the five was W. Leonard Grant, whom I did not meet until the fall of my senior year, on his return from sabbatical leave.  We had much in common as fellow Victoria High School grads who had studied under G.P. Black — teacher also of Leonard's wife Kathleen.  Almost at once he became a great favourite of mine:  I admired his deep learning, his suavity, his lively and energetic teaching style.  He would eventually publish a major book on neo-Latin poetry,[11]  but his firm control of  all  Greek and Latin literature was what impressed me most. 

I was registered for his course in Homeric Greek.[12]  Aware of my background at Victoria College, he would assign me two or three times the standard number of verses, and I gobbled them greedily.  Even more rewarding, I think, was our class in advanced  Latin composition.[13]  Having had the full treatment himself at Harvard, under E.K. Rand (1871-1945), Leonard  initiated me into the mysteries of Latin verse composition.  It was an experience that profoundly increased my love and appreciation of classical Latin poetry.  I  have  since composed very little Latin verse, but the course gave me a far greater sensitivity to the nuances of verse rhythm, diction, and word order.  I hope there will always be a few institutions that keep alive this precious, but fast disappearing,  pedagogical art.

When I finished my BA in 1953, I was still very young and unsure of my future goals.  Harry Logan suggested that I stay on for another year, either to complete an MA,  or simply to prepare myself better for graduate school.  It was wise advice, if only because it allowed me to relax and enjoy without pressure a year of further reading. 

Colonel Logan had found the munificent sum of $400 as a teaching assistantship, in exchange for which I was to instruct two sections of Latin 110.  (At eight hours a week for twenty-five weeks, that worked out to $2 a contact hour, not counting preparation or marking time!)  The teaching experience was an excellent trial by ordeal — though if I had been in Harry Logan’s shoes I would not have given a raw and immature 20-year-old full authority for even one academic course.

A fringe benefit of being a T.A. was the fact that I got to rub shoulders with the Classics Department's two distinguished part-time lecturers, Father Henry Carr and Dr. A.W. de Groot.  Father Carr’s attainments are recalled earlier in the memoir by Father Owen Lee.   Dr. de Groot was  an astonishingly eminent Dutch classical scholar and linguist — another of President Norman MacKenzie's wild recruiting coups.[14]  I was overwhelmingly impressed that both these learned men were so self-effacing and so considerate.  I decided that all world-famous scholars must be candidates for sainthood, a misapprehension that would soon be corrected when I arrived at Yale.

During my student years at UBC there was no one individual who so dominated the UBC Classics Department as did Malcolm McGregor a few years later.  It was, as I have suggested, an effective and successful team effort.  How well, then, did that team equip me for the future of my choice

As I began to get my bearings at Yale University in the high-powered world of the Ivy League, I developed some doubts about my state of preparedness for doctoral studies in Greek and Latin philology.  By the prevailing mythology, Canadian students were thought to be somewhat further ahead, but I was not so sure.  My languages were in fine shape.  Some of my American classmates had read more than I, and could perhaps read faster, but their linguistic control was not nearly as solid — or so it appeared.  People also seemed impressed by my skill in declaiming Latin (a priceless legacy from Colonel Logan),  and by my facility in quoting classical texts from memory.  However, I had been dismally schooled in the apparatus and methodology of research:  I had never even heard of  Pauly-Wissowa or L'Année Philologique, nor had I been warned about the crucial importance of German in the world of classical scholarship.  Had it not been for my healthy exposure to the UBC English Department, I would have felt seriously out of my depth as a literary classicist on a campus that was a hotbed of the New Criticism. 

Was UBC,  then, typical of the Anglo-Canadian classical tradition in placing almost all emphasis on the accurate reading of texts, at the cost of ignoring critical judgement?  Even O.J. Todd, that great scholar whose background was pure Harvard,  had seldom challenged me  to ask really searching questions about the works we read together.  Probably I am wrong to imply that the fault lay even partly with my teachers; it is far more likely that I was solely responsible for my own defects.  And why should I be assuming that the raison d’être of  the UBC Classics Department was to prepare students for American graduate schools?

Eventually my anxieties and misgivings evaporated.  I was soon able to improve my reading knowledge of German, and before long I had become only too well acquainted with all the important research tools.  Through professors like Bernard Knox and Frank Brown,[15] I was introduced to a new and dazzling world of ideas.  Although it was virtually a flip of the coin that led me to  choose  Yale  over  Harvard, I know it was the right choice, at that particular time, for someone of my interests and temperament.  Once I had overcome my initial sense of inadequacy, my years in New Haven were among the happiest and most stimulating that I can remember.

In the Poetics (1450b26-27), Aristotle tells us that “a whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end” (). If my studies began at Victoria College and ended at Yale, my middle belonged to UBC.  Those pivotal middle years, I firmly believe, were more important than any others in shaping my academic values, my scholarly priorities, and my ultimate goals.  I could not be more pleased and satisfied with the classical education I received at that time.

[1] The footnotes in this memoir are mine.  R.B.T.

[2] See further P.L. Smith, A Multitude of the Wise: Uvic Remembered (Victoria 1993).

[3]  Wood was a member of the UBC department from 1915-50, and founded the Player?s Club which staged theatrical productions throughout the province. Dilworth moved from the Victoria High School to the UBC department in 1934, but left in 1938 for a long and distinguished career with the C.B.C.

[4]  This primer, first published in 1921, was also used at UBC between 1932 and 1936 before the department reverted to the First Greek Book (1st. ed. Boston 1896) of John Williams White (O.J. Todd?s mentor), its mainstay through the 1940s until it was replaced by H.L. Crosby and J.N. Schaeffer, An Introduction to Greek (1st. ed. Boston 1928), the text of choice during the McGregor years.

[5] ?We maintain that a real split infinitive, though not desirable in itself, is preferable to either of two things, to real ambiguity, and to patent artificiality?: H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd. ed. rev. E. Gowers (Oxford 1965) 581.

[6]   Roy Daniells (1902-1979), a Milton scholar, served as Garnett Sedgewick?s successor as Head of English from 1948-65.  Philip Akrigg (whose son George would take a BA and MA in Classics at UBC) taught in the department 1941-78; he is best known for his study Jacobean Pageant, and the books co-authored with his wife on British Columbia?s history and place-names.

[7]   The three courses involved were Latin 202 and Latin 304, Prose and Poetry of, respectively, the Golden and Silver Ages, and Greek 407: Introduction to Greek Philosophy.

[8]   These qualities are splendidly displayed in his devastating review at Phoenix 11 (1957) 132-3 of a translation of Lucretius? De Rerum Natura by Albin Winspear (1899-1973), a Canadian Marxist scholar who at the time was teaching in Vancouver at a private school.  Riddehough was an authority on translations, having published articles in Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1937, 1941, and 1946) on William Morris?s translations of the Aeneid and the Odyssey, and Queen Elizabeth I?s version of Boethius? De Consolatione Philosophiae.

[9]   This refectory was located in the basement of the Auditorium building.  It is currently (2000) known as  “Yum Yum’s.”

[10]   Guthrie’s statement about Empedocles, it should be added,  also correctly reflected the widely accepted testimony on this philosopher’s political activities at Diogenes Laertius VIII.63-66

[11]   Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral (Chapel Hill 1965).

[12]   Greek 305: Epic Poetry.  Selections from Homer’s ‘Odyssey’.

[13]   There were at this time two half-year courses in prose composition, Latin/Greek 310 and 410, the one preliminary, the other advanced.

[14] The Department of Linguistics at UBC was housed, though not merged,  with the Department of Classics during the 1950s and 1960s until attaining autonomy  in 1969.  De Groot was a lecturer between 1952 and 1957.  Yet prior to his arrival, Leonard Grant had taught a course entitled General Introduction to Modern Linguistic Science.

[15] Bernard Knox (b. 1915), in addition to being a prolific writer on Greek tragedy, has a wide range of other interests, notably reflected in his Essays Ancient and Modern (1989).  Frank Brown (1908-88), Thatcher Professor of Latin at Yale in Smith’s time, is known best as a Roman archaeologist who devoted decades to the excavation of Cosa in central Etruria.