Earl, Lawrence

CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 2001
LAWRENCE EARL
to be Doctor of Letters

In a long and fascinating career as a journalist and photographer, Lawrence Earl has travelled the world, met and photographed the crowned heads of Europe, interviewed wartime and postwar notables from many countries, and published pieces in the best magazines and newspapers of Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. His reputation is international in scope, but he is also, we may add with some pride, a native New Brunswicker who has always kept in close touch with his roots. Now in his retirement, he lives in Grand Bay, not that far from where he was born and grew up.

He was born in the south end of Saint John, the son of a prominent shoe store owner, Herman Wiezel. By the time he was five, he recalls, he had decided that he wanted to be a writer. At Saint John High School, he started the school newspaper, The Red and Grey, and served as its first editor. He tried university briefly, at Dalhousie in Halifax, but left before graduating. In 1940, he became a photographer and feature writer for the Montreal Standard where he eventually met his wife, fellow journalist Jane Armstrong. Together they went to London to cover the war, and together they filed photos and stories that ranged from the invasion at Normandy to the home front in Britain and France. Notable were his photos of V-l flying bombs falling on London, a photo of the queen of the Netherlands rendered as a painting for the cover of Time magazine, and a photo essay of the rebuilding of the dikes of Holland which was published by National Geographic in 1946.

London captivated the pair, and although they both travelled widely and filed stories for newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, they maintained their London flat until retirement in the 1990s. Mr. Earl's articles appeared in Saturday Evening Post, the American Magazine, Maclean's and Weekend, as well as in leading British periodicals. For a time, he edited and wrote for the British magazine John Bull, while also collaborating with his wife on photo essays that appeared in Illustrated, the British equivalent of Life magazine. Later, he and his wife moved to Toronto where they worked for the Toronto Star, he as the editor, and they cemented life-long friendships with other writers including Pierre Berton and Ralph Allen, then the editor of Maclean's.

Lawrence's Earl's passion was writing, just as he had discovered at the age of five. It was, he once wrote, "a risky way of making a living" but it was also an exciting way. In 1950, he published his first book, The Yangtse Incident, the true story of the remarkable 1949 escape from communist-controlled China of the Royal Navy frigate HMS Amethyst. The book was turned into a movie, released in North America as Battle Hell, starring Richard Todd. He was eventually to write seven books, most of them non-fiction, but also including two novels and a children's book. For one, The Battle of Baltinglass, he received the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. This book told the unlikely story about a contest over whom should run the little post office in a tiny Irish village, a battle that eventually mushroomed until it toppled the Irish government. It established Lawrence Earl as a master story-teller with a penetrating eye for the human predicament and the journalist's ability to capture both the anguish and the humour in it all.

Lawrence Earl's books have been published in several countries, translated into Italian, French, German, Swedish, and Norwegian, and they have been widely read and acclaimed. Like Earl himself, their subjects reveal a fascination with the world and its people wherever they might be found, but they also reflect the values and outlook and simple pleasures of the place he came from, Maritime Canada. His children's book, in fact, captures the author's fascination for fishing on the Miramichi, while his last novel, Risk, powerfully recreates the tragic experience of a Nova Scotia coal mining community in the wake of a mine disaster. It is entirely fictional, he writes, but the ghosts of Springhill seem to hover over its pages and the curious combination of humour and tragedy, that runs like a theme through several of his books, seems suddenly exposed as a very Maritime Canadian phenomenon.

We honour Lawrence Earl today for his exuberant, adventurous career as a writer of international stature. But we honour him, too, as a New Brunswicker. In his long life he has returned regularly to his home base, drawn by his love of Saint John, the lower St. John valley, salmon and trout fishing on the Miramichi and elsewhere, or now, simply watching his neighbour's dog chasing fish in the nearby river. We honour him for his imagination and skill as a writer, yet equally for keeping his sense of perspective. Having seen the horrors of war, he chose to write about ordinary people, small towns, fishing, the human side of tragedy, and the simple values of perseverance, humour, and optimism. No matter where he has gone or what he has done, the imprint of New Brunswick has indelibly remained.

We are proud and honoured to welcome this accomplished man of letters to the family of UNB graduates.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 3