Bryant, Arthur Wynne Morgan

CONVOCATON, OCTOBER, 1964
ARTHUR WYNNE MORGAN BRYANT
to be Doctor of Laws

Sir Arthur Bryant is one in that lengthening series of English historians invited by our late Chancellor to share for a few precious Autumn days his wisdom, words and presence with us.

The author who has written into history the Alanbrooke Diaries needs no fanfare. And if I add that this soldier of the first world war, who subsequently was called to the Bar, is an Oxford man, headed the Cambridge Technical College, became a leader of adult education at Ashridge and, in addition to being a felicitous lecturer, essayist, and broadcaster, has been a producer of naval pageants, a breeder of Jersey cattle and for many years a keen forester, I shall merely be reminding you that he is a far from one-sided genius.

I propose rather to dwell on matters that rank this Englishman in a grand English tradition.

Harrow and Oxford stamp him as belonging to what, from motives that ill conceal a grudging admiration, is termed over there the Establishment. With another Old Harrovian, in the same opprobrious category, Winston Churchill, he shares the honour of being the only other writer to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal United Services Institute, for his contribution to military history in the immediate post-war period.

Bryant has, however, not merely written British imperial history, he has married into it: his wife, Anne, is a Brooke of the legendary white Rajahs of Sarawak.

Is history an art or a science? When one reads Bryant one ceases to question. England in all her puissance rises from his pages, prescient, steadfast, and Mistress of the Seas. It matters not whether Pepys is saving the Restoration Navy, whether Wellington is being supplied in the Peninsula or Montgomery before Alamein, whether Nelson is marshalling his three-deckers for the kill, or a clear-eyed Pitt or Alanbrooke is struggling with suspicions in the West, or incomprehension in the East, of the canons of British naval strategy; the majesty of a single grand design, implemented by hearts of oak with a single grand understanding, rings through. A Hitler may gnash his teeth like Napoleon at Boulogne -- and call off the vaunted invasion. The blockade of the continent never relaxes, and the sea lanes are kept open.

Indeed, parallels unpointed by Bryant rise irresistibly from book to book. When of Villeneuve he writes that "this brave but mediocre man had encountered in Nelson one of the great elemental forces of Nature", the mind leaps to Bryant's considered verdict of the Prime Minister whom he and his diarist are sometimes accused of denigrating. "Without him" runs his Prelude, "there would have been neither turn of the tide nor triumph in the west."

Mr. President, Members of the Senate, I shall now, in our traditional Latin, present to you Sir Arthur Bryant to be made a Doctor of Laws, and leave him in his own inimitable English to address this gathering on a subject as dear to his heart as ours, The British Tradition in the West.

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