UBC Law: History

Chapter 10: Buildings and Books

Building a Place for Learning

IN THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION it is perhaps too easily forgotten that ideas, curriculum, teaching methods, and student social life actually need a place to happen. Formal education—legal or otherwise—needs some sort of infrastructure. Classrooms, books, library quarters, offices, support staff, telephone, books, and office equipment and supplies are indispensable to the functioning of any educational institution.

Once the infrastructure is in place its users, without exception, take it for granted. Yet its development takes an enormous amount of the time and energy of institution-builders. Whereas the earliest University of British Columbia law faculty did not have even an embryonic physical plant, within seven years the faculty boasted one of the finest libraries and arguably the best building in the country.

The evolving physical surroundings of the post-war years were an important part of the student experience of the earliest generations of university-educated lawyers in British Columbia. It was also essential work that required enormous energy on the part of the institution’s founding dean.

Status in 1945, part 1

In the first month of planning their new educational endeavour Dean Curtis, Professor Read, and the law faculty secretary, Miss Wright, worked as temporary "squatters" in the university senate chambers. Little more was in place when the faculty began its teaching programme. Lloyd McKenzie recalls that the first University of British Columbia law students began their professional education as temporary tenants of the university’s existing facilities:

We didn’t have any building. . . . the law school existed in the mind of [University of British Columbia president] Norman Mackenzie, and I mean that literally because there was no facility. There was no law school in the bricks and mortar sense. We used a room in Brock Hall, and our lectures were there. . . . We didn’t really have any facility, it was an idea. The law school was an idea. It was people. You know it is sort of a tradition of the teacher at one end of the log and the student at the other, except we didn’t even have a log.

The chronically underfunded university’s facilities had already been stretched to the limit when the war ended in 1945. The institution could scarcely have been less prepared for a flood of war veterans seeking an education. Further, the problem of providing physical space was considerably worsened by the severe shortages of building materials that was also a direct result of the war. There was not the least hope of erecting even the most make-shift temporary structures to accommodate the new students. Fortunately, General Pearkes had offered to make nearby vacated army huts available to the university. During his interview for the deanship, George Curtis had discussed the problem with President MacKenzie, Professor Gordon Shrum (who had taken on responsibility for accommodation), and Jack Lee, the university’s superintendent of buildings and grounds. Dean Curtis recalls that this group decided then "to move six of the proffered huts . . . fit them up for lecture and office space and see how they worked out". If all went well, the law faculty would in due course get its own huts.

The army huts worked out tolerably well and before long British Columbia’s budding Blackstones and Portias were housed in buildings of their own. Two distinctly divergent accounts tell of how the "huts" arrived on campus to form the physical nucleus of the new institution. The more romantic version is provided by E. A. Lucas in an article, "The Law Building", which was published in the Advocate in 1952. In this version the law faculty has its origins in a night-time raid on a deserted army camp:

Seven years ago the war ended and the young men came home to get on with their education. One bright group of them wanted to study law, and there was no law school here. Just the sort of immovable object to challenge George Curtis, backed by an irresistible force known as Norman MacKenzie. One late evening, during the dark of the moon, a number of men went to an empty army camp, sawed several of the huts in two, loaded them on log trucks and landed them on the campus. Permission to do this was said to be expected from Ottawa almost any time. Shortly afterwards, Dean Curtis guided me through mud and darkness by flashlight and his luminous grin into one of the huts.

It may be that Lucas took a certain poetic licence in providing this description. A more matter-of-fact tone is adopted in Dean Curtis’s version of the story. It lacks entirely the elements of stealth and surreptitious visits. Nevertheless, his account too has a quietly heroic quality about it. In late October 1945:

[T]wo forty-foot huts were brought on campus. . . . One morning I was at the office of that kindly man, Dean Daniel Buchanan, talking over some common concern when, with his habitual politeness, the Dean said to me: "I am sorry to break in. But do look out the window. There is the Law School going by."
Along the main mall a flat top was laboriously making its way onto the campus with a hut aboard.

[Within a few days of the law faculty huts arriving], a photographer was hustled up and everyone massed in front of the huts. Just as the photographer was about to press his bulb, a passing dog came up with a vigorously waggling tail. It sat down in front of Ormond Hall, lately of the Air Force. The ancient superstition of Service men that a unit to which a stray animal attaches itself is in for good luck, at once came to many minds.

The original huts provided somewhat cramped but welcome quarters for students and faculty alike. Lucas recalled the huts as "now warm and bright", with "the Dean’s Office in one small corner, closed in by some sort of screen to give it dignity". At first only two huts were used. Dean Curtis remembers "[t]hree miniature offices were squeezed into the end of one of them and shelving put along the walls". Within a few days an order of the Dominion Law Reports arrived to form the nucleus of a law library. Impatient and unwilling to await the arrival of university staff, the students immediately took fire axes to the shipping boxes and shelved the books themselves. Now housed and equipped in this rudimentary fashion, a tremendously important phase had been reached in the development of the new institution. University legal education in British Columbia was now tangible.

Chapter 10 continued