Obituaries

Peter H. Russell, was a distinguished Canadian political scientist, passionate educator, and esteemed member of the University of Toronto community as well as a devoted husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Peter left this world on January 10, 2024, leaving behind a legacy of unparalleled contributions in the fields of political science, judicial politics, and Canadian Constitutional Law. He has left an enduring impact on the institutions he served. He died peacefully, surrounded by his family.

Born on November 16, 1932, in Toronto, Peter embarked on a lifelong journey of intellectual exploration that would become the hallmark of his distinguished career. He was awarded the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he immersed himself in the study of philosophy, politics, and economics, laying the foundation for a lifetime of scholarly achievement. Peter also distinguished himself through athletic accomplishments: he captained the Oxford hockey team and served as coxswain on the Oriel College rowing crew.

In addition to many other prestigious career awards, Peter was recognized by the American Political Science Association with the Mildred A. Schwartz Award, a testament to his significant impact in the field.

Peter dedicated nearly four decades of his life to the University of Toronto, where he served as a professor of political science and was honoured with the special designation of University Professor in 1994. His tenure, spanning from 1958 to 1996, saw the nurturing of countless minds and the shaping of political discourse in Canada. Peter's passion for his field was matched only by his dedication to his students, leaving an indelible mark on generations of aspiring political scientists.

Peter's illustrious career extended beyond the classroom. He served as the Principal of Innis College at the University of Toronto from 1972 to 1977, and he was the founding principal of Senior College at University of Toronto. He served as president of the Canadian Political Science Association in 1990-91 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His extensive involvement in various commissions and task forces included his role as Research Director on the McDonald Commission on Certain Activities of the RCMP, and the Federal Task Force on Comprehensive Land Claims. In recognition of his outstanding contributions, Peter was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada, highlighting his profound influence on the nation's political landscape.

Peter was no less active and accomplished in his personal life. He spent his childhood summers in Georgian Bay, where he became an avid fisherman and developed a lifelong love of the Bay. Georgian Bay is also where he met his future bride, Sue Jarvis. Peter and Sue spent the following 65 summers on Minnicog Island raising four children, and teaching them the essentials of life on the Bay: swimming, fishing, boating, cutting trails through the woods, and playing cards. He will be remembered as a daunting opponent and the founder of the Minnicog Cribbage Tournament. 

Dr Black was a CUF lecturer (now Associate Professor) at the [University of Oxford] English Faculty, and a Fellow of Oriel College from April 1978 until his retirement in 2010. He is remembered as a beloved colleague who worked tirelessly and with enthusiasm for our students. He was an early modernist, with wide interests, and will have been known to many as an editor of Notes and Queries for many decades. He was also a Proctor and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the University. He will be missed by many at the English Faculty.

Eliot attended The Buckley School and then Groton Schools, and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard University College, where he was president of the Fly Club and captain of the squash team. From 1954 to 1956, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, University of Oxford. He then served in the United States Army at Fort Sill in Oklahoma from 1956 to 1958, achieving the rank of First Lieutenant. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1960 and worked as a trust and estates lawyer, first at Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts; at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, & McCloy as a partner; and at Teahan & Constantino in Millbrook, NY. He served as president, a member, and a trustee on the boards of numerous organizations, including the Friends of Clermont at the Clermont State Historic Site, The Edgewood Club of Tivoli, NY, The Southlands Foundation in Rhinebeck, NY, and The Community Service Society of New York. Eliot was known for his love for his family and friends and his meticulous and devoted service to his clients. Besides family and the law, his other lifelong interests were Greek classical language, the New York Yankees, tennis, and horseback riding. Eliot's dry wit, intelligence, modesty, and keen sense of justice will be greatly missed by all who knew him. 

Alan was born in August 1937 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe to Rand (Fred) and Iza Bishop. He studied at Rhodes University, South Africa, and completed a Masters and DPhil in English Literature at the University of Oxford (Corpus Christi), where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He taught at Mpopoma High school, Zimbabwe, the University of Cape Town, and Mount Allison University, before spending 34 years in the English department of McMaster University. Alan had a strong interest in gerontology and peace literature. His own writing included a memoir of novelist Joyce Cary, and the edited papers of pacifist Vera Britain: chiefly "Chronicle of Youth" and "Letters from a Lost Generation". Under the name of Peter Abbot, he also wrote several novelettes. Alan was a gentle, kindly man, whose sense of justice was profoundly influenced by his own expulsion from apartheid South Africa in 1966. In later life, he spent many years as a volunteer visitor at McMaster Hospital, Saint Joseph's Hospital, and Shalom Village (senior centre). He was also a board member of several Hamilton boards. He was a compassionate listener, had a gentle sense of humour, and was passionate about music, art, and eating ice cream.

A cosmopolite, his many and varied interests and accomplishments took him around the world, where he made lifelong friendships and contributions to his field of condensed matter physics.

Henry was born and grew up with his older sister Helen-and younger brother Gerald, in Alberta, Canada. His parents, Henry George (H.G.) and Hilda emigrated from England. After H.G. completed a one-year art teaching fellowship in 1936 they decided to stay in western Canada where H.G. became a prominent landscape painter, teacher, and leader in shaping art in Canada.

A Rhodes Scholar, Henry earned a doctorate in physics at Wadham College, Oxford, and went on to be a professor at the University of Ottawa, University of Alberta, and University of Delaware where he was Chair of Physics from 1982 to 1989. He was a visiting professor, guest scientist and collaborator at institutions as varied as Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok Thailand, Brookhaven National Lab, National Research Council of Canada, and the lnstitut Laue­Langevin (ILL) in France.

His many professional honors and awards included the 2001 Wheatley Award from the American Physical Society. Among his most cherished roles was mentoring post-doctoral physics students from Thailand. Henry pursued his passion for physics his entire life, continuing to the end to review and edit articles for Physical Review Letters.

Henry's love of France, which he shared with his late wife Eva Daicar shaped his later decades. There, he enjoyed "doing physics" when not skiing or hiking in the Alps and enjoying fine food and wine with friends and colleagues at his apartment at Chateau d' Allieres near Grenoble.

A champion distance runner, Henry set the Masters (age 40-44) Canadian Indoor Record for the 1500 meters in 1982, won the Masters {age 45-49) mile and two-mile races at the U.S National Road Race in 1984, and competed for Canada at the 1959 Pan American Games in Chicago.

Henry was a modest man. He rarely spoke of his many accomplishments and recognitions. His sons learned of them mostly from others. He was a devoted and generous father who wanted them to pursue careers and interests that brought them joy. His one caveat: whatever that is, "do it well."

Even casual acquaintances remember Henry as a true gentleman for his kindness, grace, and good humor. An engaged listener as well as skilled conversationalist, Henry could talk in an informed way about topics ranging from international relations and finance to climate change and the arts.

Bill Neville grew up in Winnipeg, studied at the University of Manitoba, and went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He became a university professor and went on to head U of M’s department of political studies, retiring in 2005. Before he chose that academic path, Neville entered the political sphere.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was an adviser to Sidney Spivak, then-provincial minister of industry and commerce in Duff Roblin’s Conservative government. While they were both working for Spivak, Neville met Lee Southern in 1969.

Southern described Neville as a true “public intellectual.” He became a prolific columnist for the Free Press in the late 1980s and through the 1990s. He continued to write and serve as a political contributor to local news outlets into the early 2000s, becoming a thought leader and influencer of public opinion through his well-researched prose.

He served as a Winnipeg city councillor for the Tuxedo ward through the late 1970s and ’80s.

Read the full obituary here.

James Ross Macdonald was awarded a four-year Tyng Scholarship during his freshman year at Williams College and won the freshman Pentathlon, which led to his immediate membership on the varsity swimming team. At the beginning of 1943, he transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts where, in a special wartime program, he was awarded an SB in Electrical Engineering from MIT in February 1944 and a BA in Physics in June of that year from Williams.

He joined the U.S. Navy in 1944, trained as a radio-radar officer and was preparing to go with a night-fighter air squadron to the Pacific war theater when the war there ended in 1945. After marrying Margaret Milward Taylor in 1946, he returned to MIT, where he worked on Project Whirlwind, an early vacuum-tube, room-size computer. He received the SM degree in Electrical Engineering in 1947 from MIT.

That year, after starting a PhD program in physics at MIT, he applied for and won a Rhodes Scholarship from Massachusetts to attend New College, Oxford University. He and his wife were in Oxford from 1948-1950, and he received a D.Phil. degree from Oxford in condensed-matter physics in 1950.

After carrying out physics research at Armour Research Foundation and Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago from 1950 to 1953, he joined Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas, near the beginning of its very successful silicon transistor development program. He subsequently became the Director of the Physics Research Laboratory, the Central Research Laboratories, and finally Vice President for Research and Engineering in 1968.

In 1967 he was awarded a D.Sc. degree from Oxford for his published research done since graduation. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1970 and in 1973 to the National Academy of Sciences, one of only fifty members of both academies at that time. Upon taking early retirement from Texas Instruments in 1974, he joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics. He took emeritus status there in 1989.

Both as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the National Academy of Engineering he served on many government advisory committees and university visiting committees and was a member of the NAS Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Resources. In 1986 he received the George E. Pake Prize of the American Physical Society, an award for combining original research accomplishments with leadership in the management of research in industry.

Dr. Macdonald was a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, served on many of its committees, and was the recipient of several awards from the IEEE and its predecessor, the Institute of Radio Engineers. He was awarded the 1988 IEEE Edison Gold Medal “for seminal contributions to solid state science and technology, and outstanding leadership as a research director.”

During his years at UNC, in addition to his productive teaching and research activities, he and his associates developed LEVM, an important computer-oriented immittance- spectroscopy data analysis program which he continued to improve and keep up to date after his retirement. It has been freely available since 1990, and its current version, LEVMW, involving the possibility of errors in both real and imaginary data, is used around the world by thousands of scientists, engineers, and students in many fields.

After retirement from UNC, he continued writing papers and reviewing many more for various journals and took the position of reviewer very seriously. His love of research, as well as a facility with words, led him to a prolific research career with 10 patents and over 255 papers published in refereed scientific journals. This work, as well as a pioneering 1987 book he edited and contributed to on Impedance Spectroscopy, and his continuing help to students and colleagues around the world in using LEVM/LEVMW for data analysis, resulted in international recognition for his experimental and theoretical contributions to condensed matter physics, electrochemistry, and to data analysis. He is also a published poet.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, the Electrochemical Society, and the Audio Engineering Society. He participated in many civic organizations, particularly in Dallas, TX, and was a Wilson Fellow of the University of North Carolina Library.

Morrison was appointed to serve in the Court of Appeal of Jamaica in 2008 and in January 2016, he was appointed president.

Reacting to the news, Justice Minister Delroy Chuck hailed Morrison, a former Rhodes Scholar, as an "outstanding jurist" who taught "probably most of the lawyers presently in practise". "He has been a friend for the better part of 50 years.... he and I were in Oxford [University] together and he will be remembered for his outstanding scholarship, humanity, and great contribution to the development of law in Jamaica."

Called to the Bar in Jamaica in 1975, Morrison practised for 25 years before transitioning to the Bench.

He also served as a judge of the Court of Appeal of Belize (2004 to 2015) and acted as a judge of the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal (January 2015).

He has been serving as a judge of the Court of Appeal of the Cayman Islands since 2015.

Morrison retired in 2020.

Ed excelled in academics and athletics at the Fessenden School, Phillips Academy Andover, Yale University, where he studied English literature, and Merton College Oxford, where he studied philosophy as a Rhodes Scholar. He later served those schools with great loyalty. He studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary and earned a law degree at Harvard Law School.

In Washington, D.C., Ed worked at Covington and Burling and then joined the U.S. Justice Department in the Office of Legal Counsel. He then moved back to the Boston area to help run the Council on Law Related Studies at Harvard Law School. That work led to his interest in the emerging field of environmental law, in which he became an early expert. In his practice, he focused on water and air pollution control. One of his proudest achievements was drafting the original Massachusetts Clean Water Act, which went further than federal laws of the time by defining “waters of the state” to include groundwater, thus requiring stricter regulation. Ed also taught environmental law courses at BU and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Ed served on a number of boards, including the Merton College Charitable Corporation and the All Newton Music School. On his retirement from law practice, he became a mediator, volunteered with the Executive Service Corps, and returned to English literature, his first love, leading classes on poetry, short stories, and philosophy for adult learners.

Ed pursued other passions after retirement as well. He took up piano lessons, learned to prepare gourmet meals, and participated in book clubs. Whatever he undertook, he set high standards for himself. Ed also reveled in becoming a grandfather.

Central to Ed’s life were his friendships, many dating to his youth. He and Renata, his beloved wife of nearly 64 years, maintained deep and lifelong connections with classmates and friends, traveling with them over many decades. They hosted numerous guests at their home with hospitality and warmth.

Ed loved poetry, from lyric odes to off-color limericks. He was especially moved by Shakespeare, Yeats, Thomas, Eliot, and Frost, with dozens of poems committed to memory. He was an elegant writer who took great delight in the English language, relishing puns, jokes, word play, and rules of grammar. With great wit, he crafted clever verses to celebrate friends and relatives. He loved classical music, especially works by Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Bach, and Mozart. He cherished laughter and lively conversation over good food and fine wine.