Aitken, Violet

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1990
LADY VIOLET AITKEN
to be Doctor of Laws

We must first set the record straight. If there is anyone here who thinks that our chancellor spends her life in the tame and genteel pursuits of a stereotypical lady, you can forget it. Picture, if you will, Lady Violet dressed in crash helmet and racing jacket, seated in the driver's seat of a powerboat, and racing off full throttle in pursuit of victory. Mind you, she has since given up racing powerboats -- because they are too dull. Her pastime now is soaring in hot-air balloons.

Today is no ordinary day in the life of our university. Because today we not only honor our daredevil chancellor, but we take the rare opportunity to tell her how much we value the grace and the down-to-earth common sense with which she fulfills the obligations of the University's highest office. We must begin by expressing our gratitude to someone no longer with us, for it was Sir Max Aitken who, as chancellor, first brought Lady Violet to us. As we sit today in a building called the Aitken Centre, it takes little reflection to recall the many acts of generosity of the Aitken family to this university and to the province. It was the especial concern of Sir Max that he introduce to us friends and acquaintances whom he felt should know UNB and we them. Of them all, it was Lady Violet who proved to be our lasting friend.

She might easily have declined the invitation to become our chancellor in 1982. After all, New Brunswick is pretty far from Longstowe Hall, Cambridge, or the School of Citizenship, Woodelys, where Lady Violet was educated, or the parliamentary offices of Westminster or the Fleet Street offices of the London Sunday Express, where she once worked. She accepted, perhaps chiefly, because it would please us.

But having agreed to become our chancellor, she attacked her job with a loyalty to the University matched by few, past or present. Attendance at encaenia and convocation both in Fredericton and Saint John has been her priority twice a year for eight years. And beyond the call of duty, she has eagerly presided over the special encaenia exercises in Kenya in 1983, represented the University at the gathering of the Commonwealth Universities in Perth, Australia, and visited the most distant chapter of UNB alumni in Hong Kong, where she was an enormous hit.

She has maintained this loyalty not only to the University but to the province as a whole. Through her role as director of the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, she has generously supported the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the Playhouse, and the Aitken Bicentennial Exhibition Centre in Saint John. In the case of the Art Gallery, she has played an active leadership role, acting with the becoming modesty for which she is famous, but frequently also displaying a shrewdness of judgment which has filled more than one observer with admiration for her. When the situation demands it, she has the uncanny ability to know how she can, with a quiet word of friendly persuasion, advance the cause where another might fail. The arts in New Brunswick are the richer for her interventions.

Behind the public person, Lady Violet is a warm and friendly human being. She is a loving mother and a doting grandmother, and because family means so much to her, it is our special pleasure that she is joined here today by her son Maxwell, Lord Beaverbrook, and her daughter, Laura. We welcome them both. They have long known what we at UNB have come to know through our association with her: this is one terrific lady.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 2