Rica Brown (1909 to 1984.)
By Helen Grant*
Girton College, Cambridge.
The death of Rica Brown after what had seemed a successful hip operation is a grievous loss to her family, her friends and to hispanists everywhere. She was loved by those who knew her best and held in warm regard by many for her learning, scholarship, gift of friendship and for the quiet dignity with which she bore the painful arthritis that troubled her later years.
Rica’s maiden name was Jones. She loved Wales, and was proud to be Welsh, though ihe was not Welsh speaking. Her father was a journeyman baker, who took pride in his skill. Her mother, a sensitive and intelligent woman, who worked as a laundry maid in well-to-do families, was Welsh-speaking, but learned to love the English language, and in this and many other ways influenced Rica. The Jones family did not live in real need but life was not easy for them. Rica never had any sense of inferiority or resentment, but her background instilled in her a quiet determination to make the most of the opportunities open to her.
Rica was born in Flint on an October night just as the Holyhead express passed the signal box manned by her paternal grandfather. From her primary school she, like her elder brother, won a scholarship to Holywell County School, a mixed school, later to become a grammar school. The teachers were dedicated and effective, their methods traditional rather than imaginative. There was, she once said, nothing of the ‘them’ and ‘us’ and she was grateful for their encouragement. She was particularly influenced by Sarah Grace Cooke, a remarkable and determined Yorkshire woman, who taught French and introduced her pupils to Spanish. She is the Miss Moffat of Emlyn Williams’ “The Corn is Green”. His autobiography, “George”, also contains a graphic account of what he owed to her. Miss Cooke was determined that Rica; like Emlyn Williams and Goronwy Edwards (later Senior History Tutor at Jesus College), should go on from Holywell County School to Oxford. She took Rica to France for a term to a school and family in Arras. Later this same Miss Cooke also sent Rica to the Allison Peers Summer School at Santander (it was on the boat to Santander that she first met her husband Reginald Brown). For all her quiet, reserved character, Rica had a rich and imaginative inner life. These years from 1922 were for her a ‘love affair’ with words and poetry. She was an all-round success at the school. Norman.Lamb, a younger contemporary there, remembers that she was not only outstanding academically (she won many school prizes) but also good at games, besides doing well in the school eisteddfod an in original writing, and in amateur theatricals. When she left she was head girl and captain of hockey.
Rica was awarded one of the eleven State Scholarships to university open to girls in her part of the United Kingdom. She took the entrance examination for Oxford and was offered a place at Somerville College to read Spanish and French. She matriculated in 1929. Her full State Scholarship and County Exhibition were not sufficient to cover all her expenses at Oxford, and she took out a loan from the County of £40 per annum which she paid off when she had her first teaching post. At Somerville she had to be very careful and there was little over from essential expenses. None the less she got the most out of her time there and looked back on it as her golden age’. She made many close friends of both sexes. She loved her work, above all the facilities of Somerville Library. It was her first real chance to use a good library and explore and use to the full its resources. There she spent many happy and fruitful hours. In recognition of what she owed to it and to benefit others, she bequeathed her books to Somerville library. They were on exhibit there at the 1984 Gaudy.
She enjoyed her French studies and became a friend of her teachers Dr Enid Starkie and the Hon. Alice Bruce and Miss Pope (later Professor at Manchester) but she decided to make Spanish her main subject. Norma Jacob (née Sherlock), Rica and myself felt ourselves rather special because of our interest in Spanish and Spain. I was in my third year when Rica came up, but we became friends for life. In her second year Rica was awarded by the College the Shaw-Lefèvre scholarship for outstanding distinction and progress, and later the Smithson prize. She took her ‘Schools’ in 1932 and was disappointed not to get the First everyone expected of her. In fact, no one in her year got a First in Spanish, and it was felt that the examiners had been hard to please that year. Rica felt that her time at Oxford (together with her visits to France and Spain) had opened many windows for her. She never thought of herself as one of an élite, but valued the academic and creative excellence with which she came in contact there. At Oxford Rica laid the foundation of her friendship with the Spanish poet Jorge Guillén who was then Lector in the University. Guillén was fqllowed by Dámaso Alonso, both of whom taught her.
Without a First, Rica had to give up hopes of research, and so took a Diploma in Education. During this time she lived with Miss Bruce, the former Vice-Principal of Somerville, who helped her in many ways. Her first teaching post was as Assistant French mistress, with some Spanish teaching, at Manchester High School for Girls. It was a post of some prestige for a beginner in the profession. Rica always enjoyed teaching and found it rewarding when she could light up a spark of genuine enthusiasm in her pupils and she was delighted when one of them (Mary Burgess) was accepted by her own college, Somerville. It was clear to me when later I gave tutorials to Mary there how much she owed to Rica, and the friendship between the three of us lasted many years. After three years, as was customary at that time, Rica had to take another post. She turned down the more prestigious post offered her at Bedford High School and moved to Holly Lodge Municipal High School in Liverpool in 1936, where, though there were fewer pupils of high intellectual caliber, she was very happy. In the spring of 1937 Rica went to Barcelona to help her Somerville contemporary, Norma Jacob, at the Friends Service Committee to deal with the refugees from Málaga, Aragon and the Basque provinces who had fled to Barcelona as the Nationalist Forces in the Spanish Civil War advanced. Rica was distressed by the problems of the refugees, and by news in the letters from old Spanish friends, but though no supporter of Franco and the Nationalists she was never a very politically committed person. She did not feel the work she was doing in Barcelona was indispensable and returned to her teaching in Liverpool.
Is 1939 Rica married Reginald Brown whom she had known for some ten years. They had not had a chance to see much of each other but ,had exchanged letters. He had been offered a post at Columbia university, under Federico de Onís whom Rica already knew well, for he had lectured at Oxford for a time. This period in the States was a very happy one for them both. At Columbia they made many friends and acted in Lorca plays with Lorca’s brother Francisco (Paco) his two sisters and Laura de dos Rios who later married Paco. At the Middleberg Summer School they met a galaxy of Spanish intellectuals many if whom had left Spain after the Franco victory: Américo Castro, Navarro Tomás, her old friend Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas and many others. It was at this stage that Rica began to work on her biography of Bécquer. Vacations were spent working in libraries up and lown the East coast—Yale, Harvard, West Virginia, Williams College, Library of Congress, Smith and Philadelphia etc. The following year was spent at New York University; and their last year before leaving for England at Dartmouth College. Rica had also spent a year at Oberlin University as instructor. In war-time England she spent some time in the Spanish Intelligence Section of the European Service of the BBC where she became friends with Rafael Martinez Nadal, and finally in the Foreign Office Research Department. After the war her husband was appointed to a chair in Spanish at Leeds University and Rica went with him where she was hostess to visiting scholars from many countries and to examiners who became her friends and admired her knowledge and enthusiasm for Spanish literature.
In 1963 Rica’s work on the life and poetry of the poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was ,published by Aedos of Barcelona and awarded the Aedos prize. Her name was suggested for this project by Antonio Rodriguez Moñino, an indication of the high esteem in which the was held by Spanish scholars. I remember Dámaso Alonso telling me at the time that he thought her the person best equipped for the task. Among. manx serious and appreciative reviews of the book the review article in Insula (No. 207, 1964) by José Luis Cano stands out. He judged it the ‘mejor y más completa biografla de Bécquer, de entre las muchas ya publicadas’. Nigel Dennis of Ottawa University, who came to know Rica well in her later years, considers that ‘she did an enormously thorough job and unearthed a good deal of new material on the subject’. ‘It is’, he writes, ‘a scrupulously written book, and her affectionate commitment to the poet shines through’. It was at his request that she reviewed Rafael Montesinos’ Bdcquer. Biografla e imagen (for the Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispdnicos V [ No. 2), a book which had won the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1977. Hers is an important review, typically meticulous and scrupulous. It puts into perspective a book more highly acclaimed when it came out than it perhaps deserved. Montesinos nowhere refers to Rica’s book in which she had already included documents and other material which he claimed to be publishing for the first time.
Rica’s love of words and poetry enriched her teaching, her published work and her friendship with Spanish poets, scholars and critics who recognized her special feel for poetry. In 1938 she published a very perceptive and illuminating article on the poetry of Luis Cernuda, at that time little known in this country (BHSV (1938), 195—202). In the article she points to the kinship between the vocabulary and verse patterns of Guillén and Cernuda. Some time later she met Cernuda, then in exile in England after the Civil War ended, and in her innate modesty did not refer to her article which he had not yet seen. After Cernuda had read it they became firm friends. She translated some of his poems and they discussed the possibility of publishing them in The Listener. In his book Luis Cernuda. El hombre y sus temas (Hiperion, 1983), Rafael Nadal includes the letters Cernuda wrote to Rica, and explains why Cernuda, a touchy and over-sensitive man in many ways, was unwilling to risk the poems in translation being rejected, because T. S. Eliot had once turned down for the Criterion those of his poems translated by Edward Wilson. Rica broadcast a talk to Spain in the Spanish service of the BBC on Bécquer, but not I think, on Cernuda.
Regrettably, Rica did not ever hold a permanent university post, but for more than ten years, from shortly after Trinity and All Saints College, Horsfall, was founded she gave a course there on Romantic texts, particularly on Larra and Bécquer. Margaret Rees has dedicated to Rica Brown the book which she has edited on Staging in the Spanish Theatre (Papers given at Trinity and All Saints’ College, 11—12 November 1983). She tells me that, apart from the courses on the Romantics, Rica helped to launch a programme of inter departmental lectures for students of French, German and Spanish. These were aimed at filling in a general background of European history, thought and developments in the arts, and Rica’s wide knowledge was a tremendous asset. She was also a familiar figure in the College library ‘where she would be deep in her research’. Even after arthritis made movement difficult, she would attend special events in the Spanish Department at the College, ‘making invaluable contributions to discussion’. Margaret Rees’ words of tribute to her friend and colleague are worth repeating here: ‘It is impossible to say anything adequate about Rica. She was so learned and cultured, and at the same time had a warmth and affection that made you feel that you and your family were also a part of hers’.
Rica was devoted to her two adopted children, Stephen and Bronwen (now married to Sr Sendero, a young Spanish Professor in Santander). Bronwen’s children and Stephen’s son, born shortly before she died, brought her great happiness. it was for her children that she went belatedly to Oxford in 1978 to take her Oxford M.A., to show them the Oxford that had meant so much to her. It was for them, too, that she started to write her memoirs, which she completed up to her marriage in 1939. The chapters covering her childhood in her beloved Wales-are well written and very moving and her account of her school days is of real interest, as is her description of her Oxford days, so different in many ways from student-life there nowadays. She felt that those who like her came of a working-class background and had the good fortune to go to Oxford were sometimes not sufficiently appreciative of the help and benefit they had derived from the experience. She also brings alive her early visits to France and Spain which created new friendships and opened so many perspectives for her. I should like to think that someone might edit her memoirs and publish them, for they would open the eyes of readers to much that is now forgotten.
When she died, Rica was still working on the correspondence of Christopher Hall, an Englishman who lived in Spain and corresponded with Spanish writers and art critics and whose sad life moved her. During her last year or so she was devotedly helped in deciphering his letters by Molly Twemlow, a great friend since her Oxford days, when Molly lived with Jorge Guillén and his family in Oxford. It was Rica’s wish that Nigel Dennis, who was a close friend and whose work on Bergamin and others she admired, would complete the work she had begun. With Professor Brown’s consent Dr Dennis has agreed to try and finish this task. it is sad that all too little that Rica wrote found its way into print during her lifetime for what she did publish is so very good, and her impact on several generations of hispanists has been deep and lasting. Rica Brown epitomizes the disinterested devotion shown by the best hispanists to Spain, its people and its culture, scholars whose lives and teaching as well as their writing leave their mark on young and old alike.
* I should like to express my thanks to those who so generously answered my questions and expressed their appreciation of Rica’s personality and work. In particular, I thank her husband Reginald Brown, who lent me her memoirs and filled in gaps for me, Gareth Davies, Norman Lamb, Margaret Rees, Nigel Dennis, Rafael Nadal, Molly Twemlow, Eric Southworth and Ann Mackenzie. I should have liked to be able to contact her many friends in Spain, and France and her Oxford contemporaries, but this was not possible. Some of them, alas, like Jorge Guillén and Carlos Claveria, are no longer with us, Sic transit gloria mundi.