Francis, Frank Chalton

CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1967
FRANK CHALTON FRANCIS
to be Doctor of Letters

Sir Frank Francis, K.C.B., is a classical scholar and a Cambridge man. This is, of course, a considerable recommendation; but he has other and greater virtues. For four decades and a year he has been a guiding spirit at the British Museum. For forty of those years he has been associated with its Library, becoming in 1948 Keeper in the Department of Printed Books, a keepership which he had unofficially and very literally exercised, with the world's undying gratitude, during and after the "Blitz". In 1959, on the bi-centenary of the Museum's opening, he was appointed its Director and Principal Librarian.

His interests, broad and deep as they are, are focussed on bibliography, and he attaches great importance to his long association with the Bibliographical Society, having been for over quarter of a century its Honorary Secretary. UNESCO, whose committees he has advised since their inception, has contributed to his being a frequent visitor to North America. For, as he points out, "one can do so much by friendship that one cannot do by formal business contacts."

The catalogue of his library's printed books, of which he inaugurated the photo-print edition, is, as you have heard, included in our own. It runs to 263 odd volumes and its entries approximate to 4 million. For the British Museum contains the greatest collection of English books anywhere.

I have just received from London two pieces of corroborative detail. The first is the opinion -- si magna licet componere parvis (where parvis is more revealingly rendered as abbreviated) -- that Sir Francis has done for the British Museum what the mini skirt has done for British fashion. The other is purportedly from Sir Francis' own lips, that museums should be warm and comfortable places, and not musty and forbidding; which lends a Pooh-Bah-ish verisimilitude to my next paragraph.

The B.M.'s famous reading room welcomes a motley assortment of zealots -- provided only that their activities are silent. Karl Marx studied there, and there could be, and actually were, glimpsed, deep-rooted over unmeasured years, two such latter day Aristotles as a monk (bearded and portly) in his habit and skull cap, cheek by jowl with a researcher from the tropics (bearded and emaciated), distinguished by his stove-pipe hat and a mania for other readers' spectacles. It is small wonder that, in the words of one of Sir Frank's predecessors, "the British Museum is, next to the Royal Navy, the national institution which is held in most respect abroad. A visit to it is almost obligatory on travellers to this country; and foreign scholars regard it with a reverence which they sometimes extend to the temporary custodians of its treasures."

Let me assure the present custodian of our reverence. Had his retirement not been announced this week, we would have wished his custodianship to last for ever. We have listened with appreciation to his lectures for the Beaverbrook Foundation; with our own National Librarian he has graced the opening of the Harriet Irving Library; and we are proud now to enroll this most distinguished of bibliographers as our Alumnus and to confer on him our Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters.

From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.