Manny, Louise Elizabeth

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1961
LOUISE ELIZABETH MANNY
to be Doctor of Laws

Doctor Manny -- for Doctor since yesterday she is -- has come today to us for her second accolade as the North Shore's learned and lively remembrancer.

Two slim but invaluable publications are the scholarly evidence for a career dedicated to the Wooden Ships and Iron Men, to the coasts, the hinterland, and the fabulous river which, by habitation as by record, she has made her own. In her Ships of Kent County and Ships of Miramichi she has garnered, with painstaking accuracy and relentless research, the details and, where possible, the destinies of those storied craft which made our golden epoch. But romance is for ever flouting her historian's stern economy. The passing glint that she vouchsafes of the boisterous celebrations at a launching, or of ravages by gale and fire, flushes to a generous glow as the names of such master-builders as Bowser and Desmond, and of those nigh legendary owners, the Jardines, the Cunards, the Gilmours, the Rankins, the McLeods and the Burchills, swell the roll.

A catalogue so exacting would have crushed all but a Manny. She who had thundered (and thunders still) at "our thousand dollar kitchens and our ten dollar libraries", was forced to begin her researches in a neighbouring country, for lack of facilities in her own. And then she found a patron of libraries and learning who, like herself, had come to Newcastle as a child and was determined that his childhood home and its glories should never be forgot.

And so, with Lord Beaverbrook's backing and her own devotion, she came to embrace not only the ships and the shipbuilders but also the breed that cut for them the lumber and sang their lumbermen's songs. Before the latter Homers of those tough crews had all passed into limbo she had caught their accents on her ubiquitous disc and tape, and given permanence to their crude ballads by a hundred broadcasts and an annual festival -- the only non-professional Eisteddfod of folklore in North America.

For all of which our brothers of St. Thomas College, Chatham -- and we begrudge them not the prerogative -- have christened with their doctorate this latest and worthiest vessel to grace their river's shore. And they have sent her to Fredericton, her provincial port of registry, for fitting with a second suit of scarlet sails. And, as she takes her academic tide at the flood, there rises from beyond the grave, echoing our own terrestrial plaudits, a gruff and grisly Come all ye from those throaty woodsmen whose songs she has made imperishable:

"Come all ye jolly lumbermen
Whose earthly days are sped,
Whose axes ring with nether steel
On the forests of the Dead.
Your ghostly chorus wheeze aloft,
And Hell's Jamaica drain,
To her who gives you second life,
And lets you sing again."

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