Reginald Francis Brown 1910 to 1985.
Gareth A Davies.
University of Leeds.
Reg Brown was every bit a Lancastrian. Born in Rochdale on 23rd April 1910, he studied at the Royal Grammar School in Lancaster (1921—29), and subsequently entered the University of Liverpool in 1929. During the rest of his lifetime he maintained an association, part real part nostalgic, with that damp, hospitable land across the Pennines. Much later his frequent forays into the Lake District, often accompanied by colleagues, friends, and students at the University of Leeds, were also in their way a means of recovering an adolescence spent in climbing those peaks. But he was, in addition, a child of the Depression, who had to fight his way to the top, and was possessed of a competitiveness of spirit that inspired, as much as it often dispirited, those who ventured with him in the same race. His also was the loneliness of the long-distance climber, a fact neatly obscured by his gregariousness and love of conversation.
He entered academic life by an honourable and well-trodden route, since at Liverpool he was a pupil of Professor Allison Peers, in whose department he gained 1st Class Honours in Spanish in 1932. He was not uncritical of Peers, but the continuing strength of that relationship was shown by the fact that he always had a photograph of the maestro in his room at the University. Certainly Peers’ stamp and influence were upon him, since Reg embarked on research in the field that his professor and supervisor had harrowed and sown.
The degree of M.A. was awarded him in 1934 for a critical analysis of sixty-five Spanish periodicals in the years 1813—54, and he gained a Ph.D. in 1939 on a subject that occupied him during a long spell of his professional career, The Development of the Novel in Spain between 1700 and 1849’. Years later an aspect of that study emerged into print, Bibliografia de la novela espanola, 1700-1850 (1953).
Reg Brown began his teaching career as lecturer in Spanish at Liverpool University (1937—39), but the outbreak of war carried him in a new direction, giving him his first exciting taste of the United States of America and some of its universities: Columbia, New York University, and Dartmouth College. He crossed the Atlantic again in 1943, to join the Intelligence Service at Bletchley Park, an experience of which he never talked, not even during our recent fashion for self-revelation: if this was a sign of the secretiveness that marked him, it was a sign too that a confidence shared was as safe with him as with a bank
His career began again in earnest in 1945, when he was appointed as head of a miniscule department in Leeds University, his only colleague the learned and long lamented Agustin de Irizar. In later years Reg commented on the lack at that time of adequate library resources and of what would now be called technical back-up; on the lack, too, of students. His greatest triumph was to build up that department over a period of thirty years, until it was a team of eight permanent members of staff, and four lectores. As part of that achievement he introduced Portuguese as an integral element of the degree structure, built up its staff, and gradually made it one of the largest and liveliest sub-departments in that subject in British universities. Meanwhile his success had begun to be recognized by the University, which appointed him as the first holder of the Cowdray Chair of Spanish in 1953.
Reg Brown’s other great achievement at Leeds was in the Brotherton Library. Buying when books were cheap and librarians generous, he transformed the Spanish collection into a rich and varied holding. Understandably, he bought massively in the area of nineteenth-century literary, historical, and biographical texts, thus creating a nucleus for research that will remain, alas, unused until sanity is restored to national policy in higher education. Significantly, he chose the Library (which he long served as a member of its Committee) as an appropriate place for his own memorial, a fine brass chronometer. His was certainly a lifetime devoted to books.
An earlier Vice-Chancellor commented once that Reg Brown talked as though the Spanish Department was the very centre of the University. For him it was. And he brought to Spain and its language a proselytizing zeal that helped strengthen the position of the subject both inside and outside the University. He was a member of the Editorial Committee of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. He helped found the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, having attended its first meeting at the Burn; he was proud too that the annual conference had been held in Leeds in 1964, and greatly looked forward to that conference’s return there in March 1985, a deadline which he failed to meet. He did much hard work for Spanish and other subjects as a member of the CNAA panel. He was very active in the Modern Language Association (of which he became president in 1969—70), supported local activities such as the Modern Languages Circle in Bradford, and yearly organized a jornada española that brought school-pupils from over a wide area into contact for the first time with the Spanish-speaking world. His work over the years was given public recognition when he was awarded a Diamond Jubilee medal of the Institute of Linguists, in 1973.
Reg Brown was bitterly aware of the difficulties he encountered in translating ideas and learning into published work. It was a source of solace to him that during the last years of his professional career his profound interest in the Institución Libre de Enseñanza as both institution and influence was carrying him towards published research. The years of retirement—he was granted ten fruitful, happy years—strengthened that feeling, and he was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship in 1980/81, to begin work on cataloguing the Boletín de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza (1877—1936). Inclined always to be sidetracked by a new enthusiasm, he allowed his attention at times to wander in the direction of other influential reforming movements at work under the skin of Spanish society in the nineteenth century. These plans and intentions were eventually cut short by his death in April 1985, when he was, in many ways, at the peak of his intellectual career. There is hope; however, that certain items nearing completion will be published in due course.
It remains true that he was, above all, a teaching scholar, communicating at different levels, and to different audiences. His oral command of the Spanish language was masterly, his sometimes pernickety knowledge of idiom and vocabulary equally impressive. There were two areas that he dominated. One was the nineteenth century in Spain, whose byways he explored indefatigably. Here his instincts made him sympathize easily with liberal and free-thinking Spain, but they also made him much less receptive to the Catholic tradition, It is ironic, therefore, that his greatest contribution to an understanding of the period was made perhaps through his supervision of a massive doctoral thesis on the polemical controversies in which that most famous of Catholic apologists, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, engaged during the latter decades of the century. His second area of dominance was Spain itself. Very few Spaniards can have known Spain as intimately as he did. Indeed with each October he brought to Leeds a new list of
conquests seen, museums visited, but above all people met and talked to. He averred once that he would skip a museum in order to make a friend: his Spain, sometimes quirkily observed, was above all a gallery of types, and a congeries of characteristics.
Teaching was communication with persons. He would have heartily deplored the cost-effective denudation of university staffs, with the consequent increase in class size, and diminution in personal contact. But human relationships were for him always on the basis of that most Spanish and dangerous of principles, loyalty. If this made him at times over-possessive, it would on occasion guarantee a tenacious dedication to ensuring an individual’s rights, be it a student or a teaching colleague.
His intimate connexion with the literary scene in Spain, above all that of the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, was likewise based on personal relationship. Readers of the April number of the Bulletin, which carried a generous appreciation of Mrs. Rica Brown, will already know something of the unique contribution made by this remarkable couple. Their relationship with Spanish writers began in the late ‘thirties, their contact with Federico d Onís in New York and then with Rafael Martinez Nadal in London laid the foundation of their knowledge of Spanish writers and intellectuals both in and out of the Peninsula. If Rica Brown’s correspondence with Lois Cernuda provides the most tangible evidence of such a relationship (see Rafael Martinez Nadal, Espaho en La Gran Bretaña: Luis Cernuda, El hombre y sus temas [Madrid, Ediciones Hiperiôn, 19831], 138—48, and passim) the matrimonial alliance of Reg and Rica created equally fruitful contact—for others as much as for themselves—through the hospitality offered at their home in Rivington House, Horsforth. There Carles Riba, José Maria Pemán, José Angel Valente, José hierro, Camilo José Cela, Carlos Claveria, Damaso Alonso (who was made an Honorary Graduate of the University of Leeds) and many others brought to specialist and casual bystander alike a living contact with Spanish letters. Other acquaintances would come to us by word of mouth: Professor and Mrs Edmund King, Jorge and Claudio Guillen, Stephen and Teresa Gilman—the numbers seemed never-ending. The award of an encomienda in the Orden de Alfonso el Sabio in 1977 gave both Reg and Rica singular pleasure: it was, for one thing, appreciation of that Republic of Letters which both of them had together fostered,