In 1920 the Victoria French Department numbered four teachers, the first two of whom we have already met in chapter 2. Harry E. Ford continued as head until his retirement in 1940. His interest in teaching and his experience in American universities led to his appointment in 1924 as special investigator for French of the Canadian Committee on Modern Languages. R.K. Hicks, later at Trinity, was also a member of this committee, and together they collaborated in the early thirties in developing educational measurements and placement tests. They also edited a series of texts designed to teach French by what they called the “reading approach,” which involved simplified, reduced, or graded vocabulary. A contribution of more permanent interest was Ford’s book on the Provençal language of Frédéric Mistral, and during his whole career at Toronto he taught a

popular graduate course in Old Provençal, sometimes alternated with Vulgar Latin, Romance Philology, or Dialectal Studies based on the Atlas linguistique de France. His enthusiastic presentation of nineteenth-century literature in the undergraduate programme and his warm friendliness are still remembered with pleasure.

Victor de Beaumont, who had been teaching at Victoria for nine years before Ford’s arrival, replaced him as head of the department for the trying years of World War ii and its aftermath (1940-49). He continued as special lecturer for three more years, fittingly enough, for he was first of all a great teacher. One of his students who became his colleague has paid him this tribute: “With a scholarly mind of unusual lucidity and penetration, he brought to all his work a meticulous precision of thought and method, and a mastery of fact that

became proverbial and was a source of continual astonishment to student and colleague alike ... His appreciation of literary and artistic values was delicate and discriminating, but it was his firm conviction that a sound humanistic education should contain ‘plenty for the mind.’” De Beaumont’s greatest strength was perhaps in his interpretation of French thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in the graduate school, where he was a pioneer with Ford, Will, Cameron, and Kittredge, he gave courses in Old French Literature and French Literary Theories.

The third member of the department, a graduate of 1898, brought back to Victoria from a post in Wesley College at the University of manitoba, was mary Coyne Rowell. Appointed lecturer in 1918, she was named associate professor eight years later, the first woman to be given professorial

many students took his graduate courses in that field or in the later French Social Drama. In 1941 he published Basic Written French, a textbook reflecting the painstaking language work to which he also devoted himself. He was active in the Alliance Française de Toronto, the Ontario Modern Language Teachers Association, and many good causes. He was cut off by serious illness and death in 1949, at the height of his career.

The language work of the department was strengthened in 1922 by the appointment as lecturer of Henri Lasserre, a native of Switzerland with a law degree from Paris and some legal experience in Geneva. Named associate professor in 1928, Lasserre continued to teach in the undergraduate programme until his retirement in 1942. His consuming passion appears to have been the co-operative community movement, but this preoccupation did not keep him from

cultural activities, such as lecturing on Anatole France at the newly organized Victoria French Club in October 1928 or playing the cello at the next meeting, accompanied by madame Lasserre at the piano.

In 1927 it was a graduate of the college in Moderns, Alta Lind Cook, who joined the department as lecturer. A gifted musician and an experienced high school teacher, Cook had lived and studied in France. She brought a contagious enthusiasm to her conversation classes and later, after graduate studies at Columbia University and the University of Toronto, to her literature courses. A younger colleague who studied the sixteenth century with her testified to her skill in bringing the Renaissance vividly alive in her lectures. The same quality infused her “transposition” into English verse of twenty-four sonnets by Louise Labé and the introduction that preceded it, published in 1950 by the University of Toronto

Press. Alta Cook was also remembered for her courses on modern French verse and theatre. One is not surprised to read in Acta Victoriana that, on the same Victoria French Club programme when Lasserre was lecturing on Anatole France, it was she who led French-Canadian folk-songs and games. She also acted in a number of Alliance Française plays.

The late twenties witnessed the arrival at Victoria of a teenager from Switzerland named Laure Rièse, who began her dynamic career in the French Department in 1929 as an instructor. Promotions followed her ma in 1935 and her PhD in 1947. Meanwhile, a generation of Victoria students had their French studies enlivened by living in the French Residence, over which she presided from 1929 to 1950. Acta Victoriana in December 1944 provides a four-page account of her first fifteen years in Canada, written by one of her students, with a photograph lending

Lacey’s untimely death, gave convincing evidence of his ability as an administrator. He won the confidence and co-operation of the department, and his was the wise, firm voice of experience that, as the colleges grew closer in a combined department, was to receive general respect in debate.

In the forties and fifties valiant service was rendered by ten appointees whose terms of teaching, often brief, ended before 1960. Longest of these was that of J.W. Peckham, who was lecturer from 1941 to 1949. He had suffered the misfortune of losing all his research notes for a PhD in his last-minute escape from the German invasion of France. marguerite L. Dubois, a graduate of McGill and Mount Allison universities, was lecturer from 1943 to 1948, and her bilingual talents were particularly valued. Gordon W. Hilborn, was special lecturer in 1940-41, before going into External Affairs in Ottawa, and G.A. Elliot, instructor

in 1936-38. Teaching fellows for a year or two, whose names appear in department listings in the calendars were Thomas Brian Barclay (who proceeded to a career in Hispanic studies at Toronto), Isabel F. Eastman, J.E. Du Bois, J.F. McNeill, and D.W. Quick. Arthur M. Fox was a teaching fellow in 1942-43 and returned as instructor in 1948-49, before taking his ma in Romance Languages and going on to a career in Spanish and French at Queen’s University.

The college was also able to enlist the good services, as special lecturer, of Ethel Granger Bennett, wife of Principal Harold Bennett. A graduate of Victoria with the McLaren Gold Medal in Modern Languages, she had taken an ma and PhD at the University of Wisconsin and was an experienced teacher of French, first at the Ontario Ladies’ College in Whitby and later at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania. Writing under the name of E.M. Granger-Bennett, she was also a

well-known novelist, with a special flair for painting Quebec scenes and characters in a historical setting. She is perhaps best known for her Land of Their Inheritance (1955), the story of Louis Hébert and his struggle to found a settlement in New France.

In 1946 another native of Switzerland joined the department. Daniel de Montmollin immediately showed that, academically at least, a man can serve two masters. While carrying a full teaching load as lecturer, then assistant professor of French, de Montmollin was pursuing research on Aristotle that he had begun at the Université de Neuchâtel for his licence ès lettres. In 1951 his thesis for the doctorat ès lettres in Classics was published at Neuchâtel in an impressive volume, La Poétique d’Aristote: texte primitif et additions ultérieures, which anticipated his eventual transfer in 1963 to the Department of Classics at Victoria.