{"id":161,"date":"2023-02-24T19:08:24","date_gmt":"2023-02-24T19:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitaleditions.library.dal.ca\/livesofdal\/?post_type=chapter&p=161"},"modified":"2023-02-27T15:37:49","modified_gmt":"2023-02-27T15:37:49","slug":"dalhousie-in-the-1920s","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/digitaleditions.library.dal.ca\/livesofdal\/chapter\/dalhousie-in-the-1920s\/","title":{"raw":"Dalhousie in the 1920s","rendered":"Dalhousie in the 1920s"},"content":{"raw":"The Board of Governors in the 1920s. George Campbell, G.F. Pearson, and President MacKenzie. Murray Macneill, Dalhousie\u2019s registrar. The style and idiosyncrasies of Archibald MacMechan. Founding the Dalhousie Review. H.B. Atlee and Obstetrics. The Dental Faculty. Completing Shirreff Hall. The President\u2019s house. The Dalhousie Student Council and the Gazette.<\/strong>\r\n\r\nhe charter of Dalhousie University in the 1920s was still the act of 1863, with an 1881 addition to comprehend the new Law Faculty and another in 1912 to bring in the Halifax Medical College and the Maritime Dental College. The Board of Governors consisted of twenty-three gentlemen and one lady, the alumnae representative, Dr. Eliza Ritchie. All were appointed by the lieutenant-governor-in-council (the provincial cabinet) on the nomination of the board. Close ties with the government made that process effortless. The board included George H. Murray (1861-1929), the premier since 1896. Most board members lived in or near Halifax; R.B. Bennett (\u201993) was one of the few not normally resident in Nova Scotia. He was MP in Calgary, leader of the opposition in the House of Commons after 1927 and from 1930 to 1935 the prime minister of Canada. W.S. Fielding, another important board member, was a Nova Scotian, former premier, but until 1925 mostly in Ottawa as Mackenzie King\u2019s minister of finance. The board of that time was powerful and vigorous, representing both sides of politics, federal and provincial, and with many ties, personal and business, to the life and work of downtown Halifax. The board can be described as conservative. It could hardly be otherwise. Dalhousie University was paid for by student fees and endowments, and the only source of endowment came from rich men and women within and outside the province. Scrounging money was the board\u2019s job and to some extent the president\u2019s. So far, certainly since 1908 when George S. Campbell became chairman, Dalhousie\u2019s board had made a fair fist of that.\r\n\r\nCampbell was influential in persuading the Dalhousie board to take over the Halifax Medical College after the disaster of the Flexner Report. In 1909 Abraham Flexner, a classicist from Johns Hopkins, was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to survey 147 medical schools in the United States and the eight in Canada. Flexner savaged most of them, and nearly half the American ones were forced to close down. The Halifax Medical College, distantly affiliated with Dalhousie, was not too well thought of either. But there had to be a medical school east of Montreal and in 1910 Dalhousie stepped in and the result was the creation of Dalhousie\u2019s Medical Faculty in 1911. Campbell it was too who brought the board to buy the Studley estate early in 1911. Campbell had also done much to forge links between Dalhousie and the city. And his presence as such an active working chairman attracted others.<\/a>[footnote]For the Flexner Report and its effects, see P.B. Waite, The Lives of Dalhousie University, Volume One, 1818-1925: Lord Dalhousie\u2019s College (Montreal and Kingston 1994), pp. 202-4 (cited hereafter as Lives of Dalhousie 1).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe Dalhousie men who conceived and brought Studley into being liked and respected each other, especially the triumvirate of Campbell, G.F. Pearson, and President MacKenzie. Pearson took a Dalhousie LL.B. in 1900 and on the death of his father in 1912, succeeded him as the owner of the Halifax Morning Chronicle<\/em>. As much as Campbell, Pearson brought Dalhousie into the Halifax business community. He used to stress the value of Dalhousie in plain business terms, likening it to a great enterprise with a capital of over $2. million, a plant estimated conservatively at $3 million, and contributing $1 million annually to the city\u2019s business. As president of the Alumni Society he galvanized that sleepy organization into life. When the new buildings were going up at Studley during and after the war, Pearson watched them almost stone by stone. He seemed more often at Studley than he was at his desk at the Chronicle<\/em> building on Granville Street. Pearson\u2019s recognition of the desperate shortage of student accommodation in Halifax after the war brought the purchase of the Birchdale Hotel on the North-West Arm in June 1920.[footnote]G.F. Pearson (1877-1938) graduated from Dalhousie in 1900. He was twice married, to Ethel Miller in 1900 and after her death to Agnes Crawford in 1913. See Alvin F. MacDonald, \u201cIn Memoriam,\u201d Dalhousie Alumni News, Nov. 1938.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nPresident Arthur Stanley MacKenzie (1865-1938) had been since 1911 the executive head of Dalhousie upon whose shoulders had fallen the weight of responsibility, correspondence, and supervision, together with the unending and thankless work for the federation movement. Much of the tone and character of the university, for good or ill, depended upon what sort of man the president was. Having been a widower since his wife\u2019s death in 1897 (after barely more than a year of marriage), himself bringing up their infant daughter, MacKenzie\u2019s life had a different centre to it than had other Dalhousie presidents. He never remarried, and there is not a scrap of evidence that he ever cared to. After he came as Munro professor of physics in 1905 MacKenzie established a powerful reputation; as a teacher he had a commanding presence and was a positive artist with chalk and blackboard. He was the first Dalhousie graduate to become its president, and from then on Dalhousie became the core of his life. Loyal, patient, far-sighted, generous, MacKenzie was a rare president, blessed with dignity and common sense, who seemed to be able to mix Scotch and fishing with his many Dalhousie responsibilities.\r\n\r\nOne illustration of MacKenzie\u2019s style, his feeling for Dalhousie and her traditions, was his reply to Professor Archibald MacMechan who in 1923 wanted out of invigilating examinations. Most professors hated that chore, and MacMechan at age sixty-one felt he was entitled to look for an easing of that unrewarding burden. MacKenzie was both kind and firm, reading MacMechan a lesson in old Dalhousie democracy:\r\n
\r\n
I was surprised and pained to receive your written complaint this morning about the work of invigilating. You have mentioned it to me verbally once or twice, and I took it in the only spirit in which it should be taken. Have you forgotten the good old adage \u201cnoblesse oblige\u201d, which in this case might be read \u201cvieillesse oblige\u201d? I do not see how any distinction can be drawn between one member of the staff and another, unless decrepitude sets in, and have that democratic spirit retained through the whole faculty which is an essential of our Dalhousie mode of life. Personally, I hope the time will never come in my stay at Dalhousie when I shall feel superior to attending to the miserable, petty, time-consuming little details and jobs that come before me every day.[footnote]There is a curious story about Mackenzie\u2019s widowerhood that ought to be recorded. When his wife was dying she is reported to have said to him as prophecy, \u201cYou will never marry again.\u201d This comes from Murray Macneill via his daughter, Janet Macneill Piers ('43). Interview with Janet Macneill Piers, Chester, NS, 17 Sept. 1992, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 49, Dalhousie University Archives. For two retrospective views of MacKenzie, see Alumni News, Nov. 1938, J.H.L. Johnstone, \u201cMacKenzie - the Teacher,\u201d and G.H. Anderson, \u201cMacKenzie - the Scientist.\u201d MacKenzie\u2019s chiding of MacMechan is in letter from A.S. MacKenzie to MacMechan, 19 Dec. 1923, President's Office Fonds, \u201cArchibald MacMechan,\u201d UA-3, Box 96, Folder 25, Dalhousie University Archives.[\/footnote]<\/div><\/blockquote>\r\nOf course Dalhousie asked much of its professors. Some had to earn, some chose to earn, extra income. MacMechan worked many of his summers, teaching at Columbia, Harvard, or elsewhere, in the heat of big cities. In winter he wrote a weekly book column for the Montreal Standard<\/em>, \u201cThe Dean\u2019s Window.\u201d Salaries were not unreasonable for the standards of the time, but after 1917 inflation made life more difficult on a fixed income.\r\n\r\nMurray Macneill, Archibald MacMechan, and others<\/strong>\r\nAfter the president, the most important university official was the registrar, Murray Macneill, professor of mathematics. He was a power in the university. Registrars had to be exigent to prevent the world, professors, and students, from making end runs around rules and regulations. Murray Macneill had come to Dalhousie in 1892 out of Pictou Academy at the age of fifteen, a brilliant student and still growing up. He graduated in 1896 at the age of nineteen with the Sir William Young medal in mathematics. He made a lasting impression on a number of people, not least Lucy Maud Montgomery who was at Dalhousie for a year in 1895-6. There is a Macneill family tradition that the character of Gilbert Blythe in Anne of Green Gables (published in 1908) was modelled after Murray Macneill. He was not enthusiastic about the alleged resemblance. He went on to do graduate work at Cornell, Harvard, and Paris. When Professor Charles Macdonald died in 1901 Macneill was a candidate to succeed him. But he was only twenty-three years old and the professorship went to Daniel Alexander Murray ('84), a PH.D. from Johns Hopkins. Macneill was too young then, but when the mathematics chair again became vacant in 1907, Macneill was appointed. He came back to Dalhousie from McGill and stayed for the next thirty-five years.[footnote]MacMechan once described Macneill as \u201cthat Ferocious Registrar,\u201d letter from MacMechan to A.S. MacKenzie, 9 July 1919, from Windsor NS, President's Office Fonds, UA-3, Box 96, Folder 25, Dalhousie University Archives. In the Macneill family papers there is a letter from Lucy Maud Montgomery in 1908 explaining how she has just begun work on the successor to Anne of Green Gables, interview with Janet Macneill Piers, 17 Sept. 1992, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 49, Dalhousie University Archives. Macneill\u2019s account of his life at the Sorbonne in Paris is in Dalhousie Gazette, 3 Mar. 1899.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nHe became Arts and Science registrar in 1908 and in 1920 registrar of the university. The same year he was given an associate to help him in teaching mathematics, while he took over the correspondence with students and getting out the calendar - for all of which he was given an additional $500 a year. It was a taxing job. He would see each student at registration, and would consider in the light of their matriculation marks, their own wishes, and Dalhousie\u2019s rules what best they ought to do. More than one student found not only hopes for dodging hard courses thwarted, but ended up the better because Murray Macneill found some combination of classes that suited the student\u2019s talents, knowledge, and experience. Frank Covert, who walked up to Dalhousie in 1924 at the age of sixteen, had reason to be grateful to Macneill not only as registrar but for his luminous teaching in mathematics. Covert said he was \u201cone of the greatest teachers I\u2019d ever known.\u201d Macneill\u2019s specialty was analytical geometry. John Fisher, not as able as Covert, entered a few years later; his matriculation marks in French and Latin were abominable and, heading for Commerce, he wanted to avoid Latin at all costs. Could he not take another language instead? Macneill\u2019s massive head with the fuzzy fringe made a slow and deliberate negative sweep. \u201cWell thanks, Mr. Macneill,\u201d said young Fisher. Then he played a desperate card put into his hands only minutes before. Macneill was an avid and successful curler; Fisher asked if he could come and watch Macneill curl sometime. The registrar pricked up his ears. \u201cCome and see me next week when I\u2019m not so busy,\u201d he said. Fisher duly came back, expecting to get out of taking Latin. It was not even mentioned; they discussed curling. Fisher never did escape Latin. Perhaps it was good for him. He reflected later, \u201cAfter all, his [Macneill\u2019s] first love was Dalhousie University. He had helped to guard her high standards.\u201d[footnote]For Covert on Macneill, see Harry Bruce, \u201cThe lion in summer remembers Dal,\u201d Dalhousie Alumni Magazine 1, no. 1 (Fall 1984), p. 15; for John Fisher, transcript of his CBC broadcast of 11 Mar. 1951, President's Office Fonds, \u201cMurray Macneill,\u201d UA-3, Box 98, Folder 3, Dalhousie University Archives.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe oldest of these guardians of standards in Arts and Science was Howard Murray, McLeod professor of classics since 1894, dean of the college since 1901. He was sixty-six in 1925, happy in his work, and would not hear of retirement. Murray was a careful, solid, and for some students too stolid, lecturer; but he was much in demand as after-dinner speaker, for he had wit, with mordant sarcasm and cryptic apothegms thrown in for savour. Once a year in Latin 2 he would relax and read slangy versions of Horace\u2019s odes, including one that began, \u201cWho was the guy I seen you with last night?\u201d After one of those he would double up with laughter.[footnote]Dalhousie Gazette, 9 Oct. 1930, letter by T.A. Goudge ('31) on Howard Murray; see also President's Office Fonds, \u201cHoward Murray,\u201d UA-3, Box 98, Folder 15, Dalhousie University Archives; letter from Andrew C. Hebb ('25, '28) to Peter B. Waite, 14 Dec. 1990, from Toronto. Mr. Hebb\u2019s reminiscences are of unusual interest since he was editor of the Dalhousie Gazette from 1926 to 1927.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nArchibald MacMechan, Munro professor of English since 1889, was three years younger than Murray and quite a different character. He was often the first professor the first-year students encountered, for he did English 1 himself. There he would stand in the big Chemistry theatre, well-proportioned, elegantly dressed, with gown, handkerchief in his left sleeve, his squarish face made less so by a well-groomed, pointed beard. He expected his students to comport themselves as gentlemen and ladies. He much disapproved of chewing gum, and it was not tolerated in his classes. He also had a horror of sweaters, so much so that he would not even use the name, calling them, with disgust, \u201cperspirers.\u201d Any student who was misguided enough to wear a perspirer would be politely asked to leave the lecture.\r\n\r\nMacMechan was proud of Dalhousie, proud of her traditions, proud of what he sometimes called \u201cthat pastry cook\u2019s shop,\u201d proud of his students. His lectures were not flashy; they were, rather, carefully crafted and they covered a great deal of ground. He commended Ruskin\u2019s definition of poetry: \u201cthe suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions. \u201d That says something, also, of MacMechan. He touched other literatures besides English; G.G. Sedgewick ('03) later professor of English at the University of British Columbia, first learned of Goethe\u2019s magical \u201cKennst du das Land\u201d and Beethoven\u2019s music for it from Archie MacMechan.\r\n\r\nMacMechan worked hard. He read and marked all of the twenty themes each student in English 1 had to write, until in 1922-3 he got an assistant, C.L. Bennet, a New Zealander, to help him. His comments he would put on the themes in red ink; beside something he particularly liked he would put a wavy red line, what he called \u201ca wriggle of delight.\u201d MacMechan\u2019s own writing was like him, fastidious not forceful, full of grace and delicate elaborations. Yet he liked blood-and-thunder history and could render it, writing majestically of ships and the sea. And he could rise to occasions. He gave a speech to a football pep rally once, though it could not have had that name or Archie would never have come to it; he knew the game of rugby, although he was lame and could not play. He gathered the Dalhousians around him, and spoke. It was grave, quiet, almost solemn. One felt more in a chapel than in a pep rally. He made the Dalhousie students feel as if they were the privileged citizens of a great and wondrous city. \u201cNo one will ever persuade me,\u201d wrote one of the students present, \u201cthat Archie did not turn the trick of victory (it was a near thing) on the next afternoon.\u201d<\/a>[footnote]On Archie MacMechan the best essay is by G.G. Sedgewick ('03), \u201cA.M.\u201d in Dalhousie Review XIII, no. 4 (1933-4), pp. 451-8; also letter from Andrew C. Hebb to Peter B. Waite, 14 Dec. 1990, from Toronto; Eileen Burns ('22, \u201924) gave me the story of \u201cperspirers,\u201d interview with Eileen Burns, 20 Aug. 1990, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 2, Folder 62, Dalhousie University Archives; MacMechan\u2019s views are also noted in the Dalhousie Gazette, 22 Feb. 1916.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_187\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"607\"]\"Image<\/a> Professor Archibald MacMechan\u2019s book plate, showing the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the lamp of learning. The German under MacMechan\u2019s name reads \u201cIch bin Dein,\u201d \u201cI am yours.\u201d[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThere were the younger men; Howard Bronson, Munro professor of physics who had come in 1910 out of Yale and McGill. A fine teacher with a knack for asking seriously inconvenient questions on examinations, he was becoming preoccupied now with the Student Christian Movement and was losing his grasp of research in physics. His younger rival was J.H.L. Johnstone, short, strong, and with a robust practical edge to his physics. George Wilson in history, and R. MacGregor Dawson, a political scientist who taught economics, roomed at 93 Coburg Road with Sidney Smith, the new lecturer in law. They were three young bachelors and could kick up a precious row now and then, like overgrown schoolboys. Dawson was from Bridgewater via the London School of Economics, and as Wilson once said was \u201cnoisy as hell and straight as a tree\u201d; Dalhousie would not be able to hold him. George Wilson loved the place, admired MacKenzie, and had no urge to move. He migrated to Ontario each summer to the family farm in Perth or to the Ottawa Archives to finish off his Harvard PH.D. Sidney Smith it was, newly appointed in law, who chased Beatrice Smith, the eighteen-year-old secretary of Dean MacRae, down the hall of the Forrest Building on his bicycle. She escaped and the new lecturer ran into President MacKenzie instead. Dawson and Smith were Nova Scotians who ended in the University of Toronto; Wilson was an Ontarian who ended in Nova Scotia. All were unusually bright and vigorous teachers.<\/a>[footnote]George Wilson gave me the description of Dawson, and also the story of Sidney Smith and the bicycle, the latter confirmed in interview with Beatrice R.E. Smith, 31 May 1988, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 64, Dalhousie University Archives.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_188\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"437\"]\"Photograph<\/a> A New Zealand veteran of the First World War, Bennet came to Dalhousie via Cambridge in 1922 and stayed for the rest of his life: George Munro Professor of English, 1931-58; Dean of Graduate Studies, 1956-61; Vice-President, 1958-61.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nH.L. Stewart and the Dalhousie Review\r\nAmong the Europeans at Dalhousie was H.L. Stewart (1882-1953), Munro professor of philosophy since 1913, hired from the University of Belfast. Writing was Stewart\u2019s forte and he had a sharp eye for the contemporary scene. With good reason he was appointed the founding editor of Dalhousie\u2019s first venture into academic publishing, the Dalhousie Review, which appeared in 1921.\r\n\r\nThe Dalhousie Review was a successor journal to the University Review which, before it faded after the war, had been a quarterly based on contributions from McGill, Queen\u2019s, Toronto, and Dalhousie. The proposal to begin a literary and scientific quarterly at Dalhousie was discussed at MacKenzie\u2019s house just before Christmas 1920, with the board executive, Dugald MacGillivray of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, Clarence Mackinnon, two other board members, and a group from the Dalhousie Senate - Dean MacRae, Archie MacMechan, Howard Murray, H.L. Stewart, together with Alumni and Alumnae representatives. The journal was announced to the three thousand or so Dalhousie alumni in March 1921, and promptly produced fifty subscribers. Despite that thin start, the Review Publishing Company was formed and the shares were taken by board members and alumni; thus its board of directors was a subset of the board itself.\r\n\r\nThe early years of the Dalhousie Review was a savoury feast, a deft blending of old and new, popular and academic, eminently readable. Stewart would run it for twenty-five years. He endeavoured, with some success, to render untrue a limerick he received in the mail in 1937:\r\n
\r\n
There was a young man from Peru\r\nWho\u2019d a cure for insomnia, new,\r\nLet the insomniac\r\nJust lie on his back\r\nAnd read the Dalhousie Review<\/em>.<\/div><\/blockquote>\r\nIt was the first of the important university quarterlies - critical, independent, and crossing a wide spectrum of interests. H.L. Stewart\u2019s work on it meant, however, that his attention to his philosophy classes was thinner than before. When he first came he was an able teacher; by the 1920s there were suspicions that he was easing up on the oars. That was the view of the registrar, Murray Macneill. In 1919 only one student registered for Philosophy 4. Dalhousie practice was to give a course even if there were only one student. The student withdrew; Macneill believed the student had been \u201cpersuaded,\u201d although Stewart denied it. With good students Stewart was generous, inviting them to his house for tea and talk; but generally by the mid-1920s it was known privately that Dalhousie philosophy teaching was a far cry from the great days of Schurman, Seth, or Walter Murray. Stewart\u2019s publications and research, his work of editing the Review<\/em>, and by the 1930s his work in radio, would take their toll on his undergraduate lectures, upon which Dalhousie set such store.[footnote]Letter from D. Macgillivray to A.S. MacKenzie, 23 Dec. 1920; memorandum of same date; circular, Howard Murray to Dalhousie alumni and alumnae, 24 Mar. 1921, President\u2019s Office Fonds, \u201cDalhousie Review, 1920-1933,\u201d UA-3, Dalhousie Univeristy Archives. The original incorporators of the Review were Macgillivray, Pearson, I.C. Stewart, and J.S. Roper. Capital was $5,000 with two hundred shares. Fifty shares were held by the board, others were bought slowly over the next decade by governors, alumni, and professors, and in due course ended in estates. The first print run of 1921 was 7,100 but that was too ambitious; in the 1920s subscribers averaged 2,500. This information is in the R.B. Bennett Papers in the University of New Brunswick Archives, \u201cHistory of the Dalhousie Review,\u201d dated 27 Feb. 1936. The limerick comes from Henry D. Hicks to whom Stewart told it, interview with Henry D. Hicks, 8 July 1988, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 4, Folder 6, Dalhousie University Archives. Of Stewart\u2019s carelessness with lectures the stories are legion. The 1919 incident is in a letter from H.L. Stewart to A.S. MacKenzie, 4 Oct. [1919], President\u2019s Office Fonds, \u201cPhilosophy 1915-1955,\u201d UA-3, Box 289, Folder 7, Dalhousie University Archives. There was another incident in 1921 about his being late for classes, about which Stewart wrote President MacKenzie, \u201cThe eagerness of the [Registrar\u2019s] Office to report - or invent - charges of negligence on my part is not new to me.\u201d Letter from H.L. Stewart to A.S. MacKenzie, 19 Oct. 1919, UA-3, Box 289, Folder 7, Dalhousie University Archives. George Wilson, dean of arts and science 1945-55, used to say that students in Stewart\u2019s philosophy classes claimed they could use the notes made by their mothers or fathers, jokes and all.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_189\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"879\"]\"Photograph<\/a> Herbert Leslie Stewart, Professor of Philosophy, 1913-47, founding editor of the Dalbousie Review. An able writer and well-known CBC radio commentator, by the 1930s his philosophy lectures were a disaster.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nH.B. Atlee and Obstetrics<\/strong>\r\nIn 1922 a Dalhousie professor was hired who would become just as well-known as Stewart at publication and a good deal better at his lectures, a young gynaecologist and obstetrician, Harold Benge Atlee. He had graduated from the old Halifax Medical College in 1911 on the eve of its metamorphosis into the Dalhousie Medical Faculty. Atlee (1890-1978) was born in Pictou County, brought up in Annapolis Royal; he carried off school prizes, tied for a prize at medical graduation, and went overseas for postgraduate study after two years of private practice in rural Nova Scotia. He took up surgery, came to specialize in female surgery, and was in charge of that division at St. Mary\u2019s Hospital, London, when the 1914 war broke out. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, served at Gallipoli, Salonika, and in Egypt, emerging a major with a Military Cross and twice mentioned in the despatches. He took his FRCS (Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons) in Edinburgh in 1920. He then sat down and wrote President MacKenzie.\r\n\r\nIt was not exactly a modest letter, but Atlee had never been modest. He said there were few Halifax doctors who had given more time to postgraduate study than he had. He was planning on returning to Halifax, and he hoped the president would keep him in mind should an opening develop at Dalhousie in Obstetrics and Diseases of Women. MacKenzie encouraged him, saying that Dalhousie was confidently expecting Rockefeller money to help finish the new maternity hospital. As Atlee doubtless knew already, the professor of obstetrics and gynaecology, Dr. M.A. Curry, performed no surgery at all, and was close to retirement. The Grace Maternity hospital would open soon. Part of the agreement between the Salvation Army and Dalhousie (with the Rockefeller Foundation as the benign and rich uncle in the background) was that there would be public beds in the Grace to which Dalhousie would have the nomination of medical staff. Five were duly nominated, active in obstetrics, one of them expecting to be named professor when Curry retired. None was. The reason was the Victoria General and Dalhousie had concluded that drastic action was needed to improve the teaching and clinical work in obstetrics and gynaecology. It meant the appointment of a new professor and a department that would combine the Obstetrics at the Grace and the Gynaecology at the Victoria General. In September 1922 the dean of medicine, Dr. John Stewart, and President MacKenzie recommended, as professor and chairman of the first combined Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, as chief of service at the Victoria General, the thirty-two-year-old Harold Benge Atlee.[footnote]Letter from Atlee to A.S. MacKenzie, 11 Apr. 1920, President's Office Fonds, \u201cH.B. Atlee,\u201d UA-3, Box 87, Folder 10, Dalhousie University Archives. See Harry Oxorn, H.B. Atlee, M.D. (Hantsport 1983), pp. 11-36. This biography has been criticized as unfair to Atlee by a fine Dalhousie surgeon; interview with Dr. Edwin Ross, 19 June 1989, Peter B. Waite Fonds, MS-2-718, Box 3, Folder 53, Dalhousie University Archives. It is at time brutally frank, that can indeed be said. Whether the result is a balanced portrait is an open question. It is badly proofread and has no index, but vigorous it certainly is.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe appointment of Atlee created an almighty row. The obstetricians resented the young outsider. The surgeons at the hospital took the view that their level of competence required fifteen to twenty years of practical experience. Moreover, they had substantial gynaecological work; any appointment that aimed to separate them from their gynaecological surgery would be resented, indeed resisted. What made this one worse was that this young man, from out of town, seemed to think he could do it, and he would have control over such patients in the general wards. The Halifax Mail<\/em> called the appointment \u201ca quite extraordinary one.\u201d At this stage Atlee was technically on leave, still working in specialist hospitals in London, where he was earning the highest praise from eminent surgeons. In Halifax the Hospital Commission met the outrage of the four surgeons most affected with the rejoinder that the recommendation for the appointment belonged to Dalhousie and Dalhousie alone, and it would not be undone. Nevertheless, President MacKenzie suggested to Atlee that he continue to work in England until June 1923 to let the furor cool down. That would take some time; on 12 April 1923 there was an evening\u2019s debate about it, with criticism of the government, in the House of Assembly. Atlee, who was then at the Royal Chelsea Hospital for Women, took it all as free advertising, confident that by the time he returned to Halifax reports by senior colleagues in London would abundantly justify Dalhousie\u2019s decision. \u201cThe impression we have all got,\u201d wrote Dr. Comyns Berkeley, FRCS, senior surgeon at the Royal Chelsea Hospital, \u201cis that Professor Atlee is a very able man, both in judgment, diagnosis, operative dexterity and the after care of patients... \u201d<\/a>[footnote]Halifax Mail, 26 Sept. 1922; letter from Atlee to A.S. MacKenzie, 11 Oct. 1922; letter from A.S. MacKenzie to Atlee, 7 Nov. 1922; letter from Dr. Comyns Berkeley to A.S. MacKenzie, 27 June 1923, Presdient's Office Fonds, UA-3, Box 87, Folder 10, Dalhousie University Archives; Halifax Herald, 13 Apr. 1923.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThat and other recommendations from England stopped public criticism, as Atlee and MacKenzie believed they would. But it would take years before the bitter resentment of hospital colleagues would dissipate. Even the nursing staff were against him at first. One result was that he got very few specialist referrals in Halifax. It was not really until his own students were established in practice that Atlee received a sufficient number of referrals.\r\n\r\nSo he had to do something else: he wrote stories for the pulp magazines and for Maclean\u2019s<\/em>. One morning in the middle of his class, the professor of pathology came in to say that Atlee\u2019s wife was on the telephone and had to speak to him. As he excused himself from class, Atlee wondered what new financial catastrophe was in store. What Margaret Atlee had to tell him was that the mail had just come and three of his stories had been sold! For a number of years Atlee would write a seven-to-eight-thousand-word story almost every weekend, some of them published under the nom de plume<\/em> of Ian Hope. By 1928 he was earning more than $5,000 a year from magazines.<\/a>[footnote]Harry Oxorn, H.B. Atlee, M.D. (Hantsport 1983) pp. 40-1, 275-5; Carl Tupper, \u201cAtlee,\u201d in Nova Scotia Medical Bulletin (Dec. 1978), pp. 161-3. There is an extensive bibliography of Atlee\u2019s writings in Harry Oxorn, H.B. Atlee, M.D. (Hantsport 1983), pp. 345-52. \u21a9 13. Harry Oxorn, H.B. Atlee, M.D. (Hantsport 1983), pp. 276-7; H.B. Atlee, The Gist of Obstetrics (Springfield 1957), p. 24.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nBetween 1922 and 1925 Atlee also wrote a weekly column in the Chronicle<\/em>, \u201cAs I Was Saying,\u201d under the initials P.D.L. Atlee was often outspoken and rough, the opposite of Archie MacMechan. There were hardly a dozen buildings in Halifax, he said, that were not architectural atrocities; not for Atlee the joy of the late nineteenth-century porches on Tower Road and South Park Street. He called those houses \u201cclapboard monstrosities.\u201d He was opinionated and he delighted in it. He would tell his students in obstetrics, via mimeographed notes (for he came to distrust student capacities for taking accurate notes), on symptoms of pregnancy, that as a rule their patients would be respectable married women; but it would \u201cfall to your lot occasionally to be called upon by a venturesome virgin, or an incautious widow...\u201d Atlee came to have opportunities to move elsewhere, but he never took them. He liked life where he was, feuds and all, architectural monstrosities or not. He eventually even lived in one, on South Park Street.<\/a>[footnote]Harry Oxorn, H.B. Atlee, M.D. (Hantsport 1983), pp. 276-7; H.B. Atlee, The Gist of Obstetrics (Springfield 1957), p. 24.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nTwo years after Atlee\u2019s arrival on staff, with the Grace Maternity Hospital going up, the Pathology Laboratory extended, the Medical Sciences Building completed, and the Public Health and Out-Patient Clinic at full service to the Halifax community, the council of the American Medical Association voted Dalhousie\u2019s Medical School the coveted class \u201cA\u201d certificate. Dr. A.P. Colwell, the secretary, had visited Dalhousie in the summer of 1924, and now sent this happy news to MacKenzie, adding, \u201cI know of no institution in which this higher rating is more richly deserved.\u201d That was especially sweet to Dalhousie ears, for Colwell had helped Flexner do his 1910 survey of the old Halifax Medical College, and the devastating report that followed. The Dalhousie Gazette<\/em>, the student paper, put out a special eight-page medical issue in November 1925 to celebrate the good news. The State Medical Boards of New York and Pennsylvania now gave recognition to Dalhousie Medical School degrees.[footnote]Letter from A.R. Colwell to A.S. MacKenzie, 4 Nov. 1925, President\u2019s Office Correspondence, \u201cMedical Faculty, 1921-1931,\u201d UA-3, Box 279, Folder 1, Dalhousie University Archives; also Halifax Mail, 25 Nov. 1925.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe Faculty of Dentistry\r\nDalhousie\u2019s newest faculty, Dentistry, had received outside recognition in 1922, ten years after it had been incorporated in Dalhousie. Nova Scotia had got its first Dental Act in 1891, and the Nova Scotia Dental Association was formed the same year. A board was established by which dentists were approved and registered. That did not mean they had degrees; in 1909 there were 114 dentists registered in Nova Scotia and nineteen of them had no degree at all. The other ninety-five had degrees, mostly from Philadelphia or Baltimore. The basis for the proper development of dentistry as a profession had to be a dental college in the Maritimes, and in 1907 a new Dental Act allowed the Dental Association of Nova Scotia to set up a College of Dentistry in Halifax. The following year Dalhousie Senate struck a committee to meet with Dr. Frank Woodbury, the dean of the Maritime Dental College, to establish an affiliated Faculty of Dentistry. It was an arrangement similar to the one Dalhousie had made with the Halifax Medical College: the Dental College gave the tuition and Dalhousie the degrees. Dalhousie also provided the Dental College with lecture rooms and clinical facilities tucked in at the southwest end of the main floor of the Forrest Building, where the library was, adjacent to where the present Dental Building now stands. The Maritime Dental College was owned and operated largely by the dentists themselves - a practitioners\u2019 school, but better than most, for the dentists had been conscientious in designing its program. In 1911-12 there were seventeen students in the college; eight were in the first year of a four-year program, for which entrance was the same matriculation standards as the Faculty of Arts and Science.[footnote]Senate Minutes, 14 Apr., 11 May 1908, Dalhousie University Archives. A new history of dentistry at Dalhousie has been a great help. See Oskar Sykora, The Maritime Dental College and the Dalhousie Faculty of Dentistry: A History (Halifax 1991), pp. 26-39.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe Flexner Report, which forced the Halifax Medical College into abandoning its name and becoming Dalhousie\u2019s Faculty of Medicine, had consequences for the Maritime Dental College as well. In 1912 Dalhousie took it over as it had taken over the Medical College. Thus the first class to register in the newly created Maritime Dental College in 1908 graduated in 1912 as Dalhousie\u2019s first class in the Faculty of Dentistry.\r\n\r\nThe moving spirit behind this rapid development, as rapid it was between 1891 and 1912, was Dr. Frank Woodbury. He was born near Middleton in 1853, graduated from Mount Allison, and took his dentistry degree at Philadelphia in 1878. He eventually established a practice with his brother in Halifax. His great work was the incorporation of the Maritime Dental College into Dalhousie\u2019s Faculty of Dentistry in 1912. Woodbury was one of those selfless men, sometimes from a Methodist background, with an uncompromising devotion to civil, provincial, and national work. Dean of the old Maritime Dental College, he became dean of the Dalhousie Faculty of Dentistry and it was Woodbury, as much as anyone, who helped to give Dalhousie Dentistry its standing. At the end of January 1922 Dr. W.J. Gies and four colleagues from the Carnegie Foundation (and the American Dental Association) visited Dalhousie\u2019s Faculty of Dentistry and gave it a glowing report. All that was inhibiting further development was financial need. Shortly after the assessment team departed, Dean Woodbury died suddenly of heart failure. It was a sad blow, for there was almost no one among the volunteer dentists whom MacKenzie could fall back on. His successor was Dr. F.W. Ryan and after Ryan\u2019s death two years later, Dr. D.K. Thomson, who would be dean until 1935.[footnote]Dalhousie Gazette, 29 Mar. 1922; letter from A.S. MacKenzie to Learned, 11 Feb 1922, President\u2019s Office Correspondence, \u201cCarnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1918-1922,\u201d UA-3, Box 173, Folder 6, Dalhousie University Archives; Board of Governors Minutes, 28 Apr. 1922, UA-1, Box 15, Folder 3, Dalhousie University Archives; Sykora, Dalhousie Dentistry, pp. 69-70.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nCurriculum and Students of the 1920s<\/strong>\r\nThe Dalhousie of the 1920s was crowded by all previous standards. In 1922 it had the largest enrolment so far, 753 students, of whom 60 per cent were in arts and science, the remainder divided between medicine, law, and dentistry. Women students comprehended 36 per cent of the arts and science programs as against 23 per cent in 1902. Some 45 per cent of arts and science students now came from Halifax, up substantially from twenty years before when only 30 per cent did. Overall, 35 per cent of Dalhousie\u2019s students were Haligonians. Noticeable shifts occurred in regional representation. Pictou County, which in 1902-3 contributed 13.5 per cent of Dalhousie\u2019s students, now gave only 8 per cent; Colchester County\u2019s representation halved, as did Prince Edward Island\u2019s; Cape Breton doubled.[footnote]Dalhousie Gazette, 1 Nov. 1922; for student statistics, see Annual Report of the President, especially for 1911-12 and 1924-5.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nAdmission to Dalhousie was by matriculation, sometimes called junior; students deficient in some subjects could make them up. In that case they were allowed to take only four classes in the first year. If they were weak in Latin or French, often the case with those whose matriculation was deficient, they were allowed to take only three classes. If students failed more than four classes at Christmas, they had to withdraw from Dalhousie, for at least a year. Class attendance of 90 per cent was required, and records were kept.\r\n\r\nThe big classes were in those old Dalhousie fundamentals, classics and mathematics, though modern languages were now required along with the classical ones. In effect some of the old mathematical core had been shifted over to modern languages. The twenty classes for the BA were the following:\r\n