Professor Charles Wrong

WRONG, Professor Charles February 3, 1917 - June 23, 2010 Professor Wrong passed away peacefully after a long period of failing health, despite which he was able to read and converse with friends until the last. These were his two favourite activities and his superb memory, his scholarship and his quick wit made him a delightful conversationalist. He was born and brought up in England but his father was Canadian and he spent summers in Ontario as a child and later in life became a Canadian citizen. He taught at Simon Fraser University from 1966 to 1970 and in 1986 retired from academic teaching and returned to live in Vancouver where he was fondly remembered by colleagues and former students. His subject was European history and his doctoral dissertation was on the French army under Louis XVI. He was educated at Winchester College, England and then at Magdalen College, Oxford. After graduating in 1938, he taught for eighteen months at an Anglican school in Kandy, Ceylon. Then the War came and, as a result, he returned to England, but to avoid submarines, travelled the long way round via Australia and New Zealand, across the Pacific to Vancouver, across Canada and then on to England. This journey took three months. Once back in England, he volunteered to join the British Royal Air Force, worked first as a wireless operator and later in intelligence and was stationed in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Italy. After the war he converted to the Roman Catholic faith. His interest in teaching started during his military service and after the War he lectured and taught history to both adults and school students in a number of settings before becoming a housemaster at the Admiral Farragut Academy in New Jersey. A family legacy enabled him to go to graduate school at Brown University where he did his doctorate, developing fluent French in the process. After a year teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he came to Simon Fraser which he described as pretty chaotic in those days but never dull. After four years, he moved to a more senior position at the University of South Florida where he taught for the remaining 16 years of his professional life. But Vancouver was the place he had liked best and on retiring he packed all his possessions in his small car and drove back to set up home in North Vancouver. He lived there until 1998 when he moved to a retirement apartment in Hollyburn House. Hollyburn was his home for the remaining twelve years of his life and the staff there treated him with love and considerable skill especially during his final months when he became physically frailer. He has been an active member of the community there while also volunteering for the Blood Transfusion Service at the Lions Gate Hospital, supporting the West Vancouver Library and corresponding enthusiastically with a large number of friends and his extended family. He never married but developed close relations with several of his nineteen nieces and nephews and corresponded regularly with his brother and sisters, three of whom survive him. We shall miss him for his good spirits, his sense of humour, his wonderful fund of stories, poems, jokes and epigrams and, above all his warm, compassionate, intelligent enjoyment of the company of others.