By now, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography has become so indispensable that it is hard to imagine that, due to funding uncertainties, this great scholarly project could have died. A cash crisis for the DCB began in 1989, when the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council drastically cut its grant. Further fiscal and administrative turmoil ensued a few years later, after the parent university transferred the DCB’s staff to University of Toronto Press. Only resourceful fundraising—and the negotiating skills of Ramsay Cook, general editor—kept the project alive, albeit with a much-reduced staff. Had the DCB succumbed, our awareness of the past would have been grossly depleted. Every writer of a Canadian biography or history within its chronological sweep necessarily dives into its deep, if sometimes chilly, waters. The bibliographies that accompany its entries are, in every sense, lifelines.
Volume XV (1921–30) reminds us of the riches to which we have...
Fraser Sutherland is a writer, editor and lexicographer who recently spent more than three years in China. He lives in Toronto. He has published numerous books of non-fiction, poetry, and fiction.
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