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Abstract
The memoirs of William C. Atkinson (1902–1992) Stevenson Professor of Hispanic Studies at Glasgow University for forty years, are published here for the first time, prefaced, edited and annotated by Ann L. Mackenzie. Written, in the main, c.1971–1972, his reminiscences take the form of five self-contained chapters (which he calls ‘Fragments’), dealing in turn with every decade in his career as professor and scholar. His memoirs offer many insights worthy of record into social and political conditions in Spain in the 1920s–1940s, and in many countries in Latin America (including Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Brazil) which he visited in the 1940s–1970s, on several lecture tours, usually sponsored by the British Council. There are many recollections of important events he experienced and people he came across. He was in Spain in the mid 1920s, at the start of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. He has much of interest to say about the career and activities of various presidents and other public figures in Latin America, including, for example, Perón and Eva Perón in Argentina. He is illuminating about conditions in the universities, both in Spain (he studied at Madrid University) and in Latin America, where he lectured in all twenty countries, and witnessed, at different periods, campus closures and student unrest. He also recalls his activities nearer home. During the Second World War, as described in Chapter 2, ‘1972–: One Man’s War’, he was seconded to the Foreign Office. Though based in Oxford, he was sent into Portugal and Spain on fact-finding missions. In Chapters 2 and 4 in particular, he tells us a great detail about how things were in the University of Glasgow, for both staff and students, in the 1930s (‘1932–: Glasgow and a Chair’) through to the early 1960s (‘1952–: Around and about a Quincentenary’).
Notes
* I thank Archive Services, Glasgow University, for supplying me with a copy of the typescript of Fragments of University Reminiscence. An allusion he makes in ‘A Rolling Stone Bows Out’ strengthens my impression that Atkinson wrote these memoirs, or most of them, between early 1971 and his retirement on 30 September 1972. In that article, Atkinson refers to a talk he had planned to give in Venezuela near the end of his final lecture tour of Latin America in 1971; the talk was titled ‘Reminiscences of a Septuagenarian’. See William C. Atkinson, ‘A Rolling Stone Bows Out’, Glasgow University Gazette, 67 (December 1971), 1–3 (p. 3); republished below (see its note 25). A.M.
1 A reference to his research thesis on ‘El maestro Fernán Pérez de Oliva’, for which he was awarded an MA degree by The Queen’s University of Belfast in 1925.
2 Atkinson did a BA Honours degree in Spanish and French, and graduated with First Class Honours in 1924. As an undergraduate, he had travelled widely in France and attended several university courses in that country.
3 The conditions George Buchanan had to suffer, when he ‘went in 1520 to Paris to study languages’, are briefly described in William C. Atkinson, ‘The Groves of Academe. Modern Languages in University Gardens’, The College Courant (The Journal of the Glasgow University Graduates Association) (Whitsun, 1960), 125–29 (p. 125). For more information about Buchanan’s studies at the Sorbonne, see P. Hume Brown, George Buchanan, Humanist and Reformer: A Biography (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890), Chapter II, 15–33 (esp. p. 30).
4 I have been unable to identify for certain the doctoral student of Atkinson’s referred to here. But it might have been James Dickie, who did his first degree at Glasgow University (MA Honours in Arabic Studies & Hispanic Studies [c.1959]). Dickie then went on ‘to pursue a Spanish doctorate'. See letter from Atkinson to Mackenzie, dated 26 March 1967; reproduced below.
5 A reference to Juan Hurtado y Jiménez de la Serna & Cándido Ángel González Palencia, Historia de la literatura española (Madrid: Tip. de la Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1921; republished 1925, 1932 etc.). Atkinson was to review this work, with two other histories of Spanish literature, in a review-article for the BSS in 1938 (see William C. Atkinson, ‘La Trahison des clercs: Notes on the Writing of Spanish Literary History’, BSS, XV:57 [1938], 4–19).
6 Tomás Navarro Tomás (1884–1979). See his Manual de pronunciación española (Madrid: n.p. 1918).
7 Andrés Ovejero Bustamante (1871–1954) was Catedrático de Teoría de la Literatura y de las Artes at the University of Madrid for many years. During the Civil War, like many left-wing intellectuals he was obliged to move to the provinces for his safety; having sworn allegiance to Franco’s Spain, he returned to Madrid and its University in 1939. He retired in 1941.
8 Atkinson had been awarded, for the best performance in the Final Degree BA examinations in English Language and Literature or Modern Languages, a Literary Scholarship, and also a Modern Languages Studentship, and decided to spend these awards in Spain, doing research in Madrid and getting to know the country (see his Application for the Stevenson Chair of Spanish, University of Glasgow, 1932 [reproduced below]).
9 I have been unable to trace this short story, evidently titled El Gordo, which may have been published under a pseudonym.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the editor.