Brooks, Alfred Johnson

CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1957
ALFRED JOHNSON BROOKS
to be Doctor of Laws

Peace-loving though our University is, she has proudly given her sons to the Commonwealth forces, she has welcomed and educated the veterans of three great wars, and she has supplied two cabinet ministers in the past decade to guard their welfare.

A. J. Brooks is that type of statesman whom his countrymen most trust, and whom his Alma Mater, especially in her younger and more intimate days, seemed to be able to produce -- the vigorous, all-round man.

Too many-sided for brilliance, he was a sound student, a pillar of rugby and basketball sides, a track champion and, as befits an Arts man, a prominent debater. He embodied the spirit of that great age, inaugurated by the late Dr. C. C. Jones, who breathed it himself and nursed it, by vigorous precept and more vigorous example, in his students. Happy all, and famous many, the living monuments of that lusty, if less specialized, regime.

But two individual talents -- shall we say one talent with two aspects? -- qualify the Hon. A. J. Brooks for his new post. At College he was known as a man without envy or enemies; in politics be sat for twenty years unruffled in the Opposition, for the first lustre thereof the only Conservative in Parliament from East of Montreal.

Now is his chance, in that ministry most free of party strife, to bring the whole range of his character into play and to show, as did our beloved past-President, his predecessor, an old soldier's devotion to his comrades-in-arms.

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