GEOFFREY BLUNDELL RIDDEHOUGH

Credit: U.B.C. Archives
(record no. 5.1/2594)

GEOFFREY BLUNDELL RIDDEHOUGH (1900-78) was  a man of wide-ranging interests, with a preternatural facility with languages, and a profound addiction to punning. His year book noted that he combined “a prof’s mind and a Puck’s imagination.”

Born in England, he received his secondary education at Penticton B.C..  In 1924 he took a  first-class honours degree at UBC in Latin  and English (specialising in Middle English and Anglo-Saxon), and won the Governor-General’s gold medal.  He was President of  the exclusive  Letters Club, to which he delivered papers on Oliver Wendell Holmes and  on the poets of the “Great War,” and shortly after graduation he brought out a slim volume of verse. 

Riddehough’s subsequent career led to an MA at Berkeley (1925), research in Oxford and Paris in 1930-31 on medieval Christmas carols, and stints  in the English department at Alberta, and in both the Classics and English departments at UBC.  He finally joined his alma mater’s Classics  department  as  a Lecturer in 1937, and, whilst teaching there, obtained a further MA (1939) with a thesis  The Mercenaries of Ancient Carthage. 

For his  PhD (1951) from Harvard he  edited the twelfth-century poet Joseph of Exeter’s Bellum Troianum.  Though this edition remained unpublished, it formed the basis for an English translation by another scholar published in 1970.  Riddehough's engagement with medieval studies was  maintained at UBC by his former pupil, Bettye Bongie, when in the early 1970s a Medieval Studies programme was developed in the Faculty of Arts, and Classics contributed a crucial service course in medieval Latin.

He  was a member of the British Society for Psychical Research, which investigated all aspects of  the paranormal, but  only a  few anecdotes (visits to a witch on the Isle of Man; expelling a malign spirit from a Vancouver residence) indicate the scope  of  his activities in this area.  Riddehough was also, and perhaps surprisingly to those who knew him  in later years  as a rather reclusive figure,  active in the late 1920s under the command of Colonel Logan in UBC’s Canadian Officer Training Corps, where he demonstrated considerable skill as a rifle shot.

JEAN M. AULD

JEAN M. AULD, the first woman faculty member in Classics, and known only from the evidence in the University Calendar, held an  undergraduate degree from Colorado, and an  MA from McGill.  She taught briefly at UBC as an Instructor in 1931-2, but when she returned for a longer stay (1938-43) she may have pioneered a new course that combined Greek art (one hour) with literature in translation (two hours).  (The calendars do not identify the instructor for this course, but Auld is the likeliest candidate, since the course was introduced in the year of her arrival and  suspended when she left the staff in 1943.)   It was called Greek 4, and its art hour was "a survey of architecture, sculpture, and the minor arts from the Aegean period to the Hellenistic, with consideration of their aesthetic value and their relation to Hellenic life and thought."  This segment  used "lantern slides and photographs from the Carnegie Collection" (i.e., donated, as much material was in UBC's early days, by the Carnegie Endowment.)  It remained on the books under different designations until 1952-3. Only in the 1960s did such courses in art return to the department's curriculum.  

PATRICK CRICHTON FRASER GUTHRIE (1912-72)

Credit: U.B.C. Archives
(record no. 5.1/1195)

PATRICK CRICHTON FRASER GUTHRIE (1912-72), born at Lac Achigan, Quebec, and educated at the Universities of Manitoba and Toronto, became an Instructor in 1937, but was soon absent on war service.  He had studied in the burgeoning  doctoral  program at the University of Toronto, where he specialised  in Roman imperial history under the versatile ancient historian, Charles Norris Cochrane, and wrote a dissertation (completed in 1949) on the Roman vilicus (or "overseer").   He lectured on Roman history, and taught prose composition.

LOUIS ALEXANDER MACKAY

LOUIS ALEXANDER MACKAY (1901-82) replaced Lemuel Robertson as the  department's senior Latinist in 1941.  He was  the first product of  the noted Toronto Honour Classics Programme to teach at UBC.  He had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (Balliol College; 2nd Class in Literae Humaniores, 1928), and had taught at Toronto during the 1930s.   He specialised as a critic of  the major Roman poets, but  was also a creative writer, who published poetry, and  had plays (including one in French) staged in Toronto.  He was also associated with the progressive journal,The Canadian Forum, in which, often under the pseudonym John Smalacombe, he published  poems, and literary essays on writers as diverse as Proust and Somerset Maugham.

In 1945-6 MacKay held  a Guggenheim Fellowship, and spent part of his sabbatical at Berkeley, where the department was headed by another Canadian progressive, and fellow contributor to the Canadian Forum, William Hardy Alexander, formerly of the University of Alberta.  After producing  the now forgotten The Wrath of Homer (1948) (castigated in reviews for  neglecting  the revolutionary research of Milman Parry into oral poetry),MacKay succeeded in 1948 in obtaining a position at Berkeley where he remained for the rest of his career.  He may have been glad to leave UBC, if his morose poem “Downtown Vancouver”  is anything to go by.  Here he complained about "glum-featured women," and described the city as "this tight-lipt town, grim-woman'd and grim-girl'd." 

MacKay  later (1959-60) served as President of  the American Philological Association.  Towards  the  end of his career in the late 1960s, as student protests raged around him, he  provided some unexpected instruction in Latin verse composition for Phillip Harding.

WILLIAM LEONARD GRANT

Credit: U.B.C. Archives
(record no. 5.1/1156)

WILLIAM LEONARD GRANT (1914-67), according to the program  for his doctoral oral examination, was born at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, an intriguing fact on which  his surviving contemporaries have been unable to enlarge.  Like Bettye Bongie later,  his undergraduate years were divided between Victoria College and UBC, where he graduated in 1936 with first-class honours in Classics, and served as President of the Classics Club.  An MA at Harvard in 1938 was followed in 1943 with a doctorate at Toronto earned for a dissertation on Cicero's Partitiones Oratoriae, written under the direction  of Charles Cochrane.  He focused on neo-Latin poetry, and  published prolifically in this area over the next twenty years, concentrating on  the pastoral poetry of the Renaissance.  He also maintained a departmental  sub-culture (originated by O.J. Todd) by teaching some Latin verse composition. 

MALCOLM FRANCIS MCGREGOR

Credit: U.B.C. Archives
(record no. 5.1/1883)

MALCOLM FRANCIS MCGREGOR (1910-89) had come as a teenager to Vancouver from  Beckenham, in Kent, where he had developed an early and enduring loyalty to the soccer team Crystal Palace, and a passion for the sport of cricket.

 He  left UBC in 1931 with a BA (2nd. Class Pass), an MA  (his 51 page thesis, “Rome and Germany” offered no indication of future interests), and impressive extra-curricular achievements that included  goalkeeper for the Varsity soccer team, Sports Editor of the student newspaper, the Ubyssey, and vaudevillian in the pantomimes produced by the Society of Thoth.   In this all-male thespian freemasonary, he held, according to his yearbook,  the title “Scribe of the Papyrus,” and as a member of the “Royal Egyptian Ballet,” starred as “a Hula girl, Druid, and Egyptian maiden” in the Society’s major annual production, the Annual Homecoming Ballet.   The yearbook also reports that during his second year he won the “Muck-a-Muck Male Beauty Contest.”

After following Homer Thompson’s path to  the University of Michigan (1931-33),McGregor  moved to  the University of Cincinnati, where he took his doctorate (1937), and joined the faculty,   in the exciting years in which Carl Blegen (1887-1971) was redefining the chronology of Troy.  When his supervisor, Allen Brown West (1886-1936), died prematurely in an automobile accident, McGregor succeeded this “gifted polymath” (as he later recalled him) as collaborator with Theodore Wade-Gery and Benjamin Meritt in a monumental four-volume edition of  the set of fifth-century BC inscriptions known as The Athenian Tribute Lists (4 vols. 1939-1950). 

McGregor returned to  UBC in 1954 as Head of a department of four aging members, and retired in 1975, leaving behind a department of thirteen young members.  An indefatigable and prominent campus personality, he headed the Ceremonies Office for many years.

McGregor carrying the mace at Congregation, 1959.
Credit: U.B.C. Archives (record no. 1.1/6790)

He became the department’s second Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in1970-71 served as President of the American Philological Association.  He also arranged for the Association to meet in Vancouver in December1978.  In 1981 he became the first, and so far only, member of the department to be the recipient of a Festschrift (Classical Contributions).

He was an inspiring teacher and a vigorous champion of liberal education as theguardian of the purity of the English language.  He once wrote: “I want my liberally educated man, when he hears the pilot assure him ‘Hopefully, we shall take off momentarily,’ to shudder — twice.”

ELIZABETH AGNES EMILY (“BETTYE”) BONGIE

Bettye Bongie at the time of her first appointment at U.B.C. (1956).
Credit: U.B.C. Archives
(record no. 5.1/4490)

ELIZABETH AGNES EMILY (“BETTYE”) BONGIE (ebongie(at)interchange.ubc.ca) became, as Elizabeth Bryson,  the department's first woman tenure-track appointee when she became a Lecturer in 1956, after taking a doctorate at the University of Illinois under the great Polish emigré  scholar Alexander Turyn (1900-81).  Her dissertation was one of enduring value on the Byzantine recension of the manuscripts of Aeschylus.  She later assisted Turyn in his codicological publications. 

Her undergraduate career was  divided between Victoria College and UBC, and she graduated in Honours Classics in 1951, winning the Governor General’s gold medal, as had her teacher Geoffrey Riddehough twenty-four years earlier.  An active member of the Classics Club, she starred in what appears to have been its first full-length dramatic production, that of Euripides’Alcestis in translation staged at Brock Hall on  February 8th.,1951.  She took the part of Alcestis’ servant, while Heracles was played by another future classical scholar, the Latinist Edwin Ramage (later of the University of Indiana).

The cast of the Classics Club's production of the Alcestis:
front and centre E. Bongie, back row right E. Ramage.
Credit: E. Bongie

Bettye retired in 1992 after a long and distinguished teaching career at UBC, which included a Master Teaching Award.  In 1995 she published an annotated translation of Ps.-Athanasius’ Life and Regimen of Syncleitica.  

Credit: U.B.C. Archives
(record no. 5.1/848)

CHARLES WILLIAM JOHN ELIOT was the department’s first professional archaeologist, appointed in 1957.   He was born in 1928  in Rawalpindi (now in Pakistan, then  in the British Raj),  the son of a Canadian colonel in  the Royal Artillery.   Educated in Ottawa, he had, after taking an undergraduate degree in Classics at Toronto,  tried to initiate  an unlikely career as a chartered accountant.  He soon returned to academia, and following  his MA at Toronto in 1952,  headed for Athens, and the American School of Classical Studies.   His Toronto doctorate, written under Mary White and J. Walter Graham,  was awarded in 1961 for a dissertation on the coastal demes of Attica, which was  published in the following year.  Eliot remained  at UBC until 1971 when  he  returned  to the American School as Professor of Archaeology.  He later  (1985-93)  served  as  President and Vice-Chancellor of  the University of Prince Edward Island.  At the end of his time at UBC, and for some years thereafter,  he collaborated with two later  appointees in classical archaeology, James Russell and Hector Williams, on an excavation at Anemurium in southern Turkey.

Willie Eliot, shown here during the sabbatical year (1984-85) that he spent in UBC's Classics Department.
Credit: CNERS archive

WILLIAM J. DUSING

William J. Dusing in the Classics Corridor (1985).
Credit: CNERS Archives

WILLIAM J. DUSING (1938-1993).  The following notice is taken from the tribute by Harry Edinger published in the Department of Classics Newsletter No. 14, Autumn-Winter 1993, p. 1.

“Bill Dusing came to the UBC Department of Classics in 1962, after three years in the graduate schoolof the University of Toronto.  The early sixties were a time when Canadian universities were expanding rapidly, and Malcolm McGregor, then Head of the department, was recruiting young scholars at a rate that seems inconceivable in today’s academic climate. What attracted him to Bill Dusing were Bill’s qualifications as a Roman historian, no doubt, but the close connection to Cincinnati must have counted as well.  Bill had been born in Covington, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, in whose university Malcolm had taught for some seventeen years.  That connection also meant an interest in the Cincinnati Reds, another qualification in McGregor’s views.”

“Bill was always ready to make friendships and he quickly became well known throughout the Faculty of Arts, which was much smaller and more socially lively than it is now.  Apart from his teaching in the department Bill was soon serving as an assistant to the then Dean of Arts, Dennis Healy (1911-1984; Dean of Arts 1965-1969), and as a faculty adviser.  Under Dean Robert Will (Dean of Arts 1975-1990) he became Senior Faculty Advisor, an important administrative post that he held for nearly twelve years.  He was awarded a UBC 75th Anniversary Medal for his services to the university, which went beyond the day-to-day business of the Senior Faculty Advisor’s office.”

Dennis Healy
Credit: U.B.C. Archives (record no. 5.1/1318)

Robert Will
Credit: U.B.C. Archives (record no. 5.1/3274)

"His highest university degree was his MA from the University of Toronto, where he had also been an undergraduate at St. Michael’s College.  In his field of Roman history he was a wise and witty lecturer, and he was a fine Latinist as well.  He was a leader in the group that persuaded a reluctant Malcolm McGregor to enhance the Classical Studies (Classics in translation) programme at UBC, and convinced him of its worth. Bill Dusing eventually developed an undergraduate course in Roman law that was a favourite with students because the quality of his teaching made the potentially dry material so lively."

He is survived by his wife Ann, now Emerita Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical Near-Eastern and Religious Studies.

Bill and Ann Dusing
(1985)
Credit: CNERS Archives

A Motley Quartet at the UBC Faculty Golf Tournament, 28 April 1971.
Standing: W. J. Dusing, A. A. Barrett, M. F. McGregor
Crouching: P. C. F. Guthrie.
Credit: CNERS Archives