A great archivist, Hugh Taylor passed away recently. In my time in the archival community over the past thirty odd years, no one was held in higher esteem than Hugh. Hugh was born in 1920, served in the Second World War, after which he was educated at Oxford and at Liverpool, where he took archival courses. He held several archival posts in England between 1951 and 1965. In 1965, he became the first provincial archivist of Alberta, a feat he repeated in New Brunswick, 1967-71. He was at the Public Archives of Canada from 1971-77, where he was instrumental in founding the division for sound and moving image archives, and was provincial archivist of Nova Scotia from 1978-82, during which he saw to the construction of a new building. As you can see from this list of his posts, Hugh loved to start things, loved to set his formidable imaginative powers to the task of laying the foundations of a new program or a new initiative. At every one of these Canadian institutions, he left a strong imprint of those powers, even though many of his stays were relatively short.

Known by us all in the 1970s as a kind of philosopher archivist, who used to get up at meetings and offer wise and often witty reflections on the topic of the moment, Hugh and crossed paths with me in the 1980s after he retired from his archival work. In 1981, I went from the Provincial Archives in Victoria to UBC to start the Master of Archival Studies Program. I was appointed in April, and in June the annual conference of the Association of Canadian Archivists was held in Halifax. One evening a reception was held in the new Public Archives Building Hugh had had built. He was very proud of its energy efficiency, and of the design of the building to facilitate reference to the various types of records the institution held. Archivists have not always liked the building, but users of it that I have encountered invariably say it is the best place in the country to do research. During the reception Hugh took me aside to discuss the new program at UBC. I remember the meeting well. We went into his office. He sat me down and then sat at his desk with his feet on the desk, and mused about the program and his future. I listened intently, for Hugh had had a life long interest and commitment to archival education. He and Edwin Welch had written the first ACA guidelines on archival education issued in 1976. He told me that he intended to retire the next year, and would be available to help with the teaching in the program.

Beginning in the fall of 1982, Hugh was an adjunct professor in the M.A.S. program for four separate terms. It was a delight to have Hugh’s wise counsel and support in those early years. Looking back, I see how green I was, and how much he helped to guide the program along productive lines. Of course, he brought his philosophical bent and imaginative approach to thinking about archives to a course he developed and taught during those years. While I was flying the bloody flag of practice, Hugh was trying to expand students’ horizons and to make them think deeply about what archives were and the role caring for them played in the community, whether national, provincial, or local. Much of that thinking is reflected in articles that have recently been republished in Imagining Archives: Essays and Reflections by Hugh A. Taylor. He had a wonderful and sometimes quite biting sense of humour. On one occasion, in a mock debate we put on, he played Muller of the Dutch archival trinity Muller, Feith, and Fruin. It was a hilarious display of fun with archival principles and the effort to articulate rules for practice, both of which exercises Hugh actually supported, but he could see the funny side of such efforts as well. He could be shockingly irreverent. One day, he was showing students an ancient English deedfrom Special Collections in the Library. He held it up and fragments of it fell to the table, which, he noted by their reaction, was greeted with some alarm by the students. He said: "Don’t worry, there are hundreds of thousands of these in England," and went on to make his point.

Hugh believed strongly in grass roots archival activity. He loved to speak about a fictitious local community, variously called Upper Rubber Boot, Nova Scotia or just Cupcake Corners, and its need to preserve its archival heritage. He believed deeply in scholarship, in democracy, and in stewardship of the planet, and managed to connect archives with all these passions. In his later years, he volunteered as the archivist of the Sierra Club in Victoria, where he was able to indulge his passion for ecology and environmental concerns and for archives. I think it is fair to say that Hugh never met an archivist he didn’t respect and few he didn’t like. For all his irreverence and high-mindedness, he believed deeply in the archival calling to which he devoted his life and his many extraordinary talents. He will be greatly missed. I doubt that we will see his likes again

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