McLeod, Edith Gordon

CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1966
EDITH GORDON McLEOD
to be Doctor of Laws

It is my happy lot to be the Presenter of a friend of thirty-seven years standing, bound by ties longer and deeper still to a greater company who cannot, alas, be present.

To U.N.B. she has given her unswerving devotion and all but five years of her working life. Herself an Honours graduate, she returned in 1927 to become Secretary to Dr. C. C. Jones. This led her to being not only secretary but counsellor and friend to an entire faculty of thirteen, and to typing most of the university exams.

In 1945 she was made Registrar, and five Presidents have profited from her sibylline wisdom. The age of the machine has never caught up with her; for to-day's august Exercises, she has been obliged to await from a computer statistics that, with greater speed and realism, she could have produced unaided herself.

Beneath a deceptively frail frame beats a braw Scottish heart, fiercely loyal to all things British: to Crown, to 'Hameland', to Dominion, to College -- and to Rugby football. It has been whispered that in the Golden Age she would fight for a matriculant whose average was only x--if he could play Rugger. This is a gross exaggeration. His average had to be at least x+y, and some loophole might then be found by a President, who had himself been a U.N.B. forward!

Tough lads or tender lasses, all were her brood. And when, in after years, they would return to their Alma Mater, it was from "Edie" that they sought guidance about a new Pharaoh or a changing campus, and to "Edie" that they brought sweethearts, spouses, or offspring, for her approval.

In honouring our dearest of Alumnae, we are honouring what is really precious and enduring in this old institution. For Edith Gordon McLeod embodies the immortal spirit of U.N.B.

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