Jane (or Jeanne) Dumont, was born Jeanne Lucie Breton in 1887, in Chaux-de-Fonds, Switerland. She married lyricist Ernest Francois Dumont, best known for his collaborations with Louis Benech in 1909. In 1923 she appeared in the silent film, “L’enfant roi,” filmed at Versailles; in the cast listing she is named as “Madame Dumont.” The newspaper Figaro mentions her in connection with another performance at the Théâtre de la Madeleine in 1925. Her husband formed a music publishing company, “Benech et Dumont,” with his collaborator, who died in 1925. When she was widowed in 1941, she took over the company with the help of Guy Sella. She herself began writing lyrics, often with Sella. Perhaps the first was “Sonnez les clochers de France” in 1943. The catalogue list on the back of the sheet music they brought out for “C’est la France de demain” (1946) cites over 60 titles. There is confusion about the date of her death. The archives of the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique (SACEM) have two other members who signed themselves “J. Dumont” from approximately the same period: Jules Dumont, another lyricist and Jan Dumont, an illustrator.
Maxwell John Dunbar was born in 1914 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His research interest was marine biology, particularly in the polar seas. As an undergraduate he went on expeditions to Greenland in 1935 and 1936, examining ice-free mechanisms at the face of the glaciers. From 1933 to 1937 he studied at Oxford University earning a B.A. and an M.A. In 1937 and 1938 he was awarded a Henry Fellowship to Yale University from Oxford. He made an expedition to Glacier Bay in Alaska in 1938, studying marine protozoa. He spent the summers of 1939 and 1940 as a member of the Government Party with the Hudson’s Bay supply ship, Nascopie, on the trips to the Eastern Arctic regions of Canada. Dunbar received his Ph.D. from McGill University in 1941. His research was interrupted by service as Canadian Consul to Greenland from 1941 to 1946. In 1946 joined the staff of the Department of Zoology as Associate Professor, and remained at McGill since then. He participated in expeditions to Ungava Bay between 1947 and 1951, and to Hudson Bay between 1954 and 1958. In 1963 Maxwell Dunbar organized the Marine Sciences Center, later the Institute of Oceanography, with the main research centers in the waters of the Canadian North, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the Caribbean Sea. He served as its Chairman until 1977. In 1982 he was appointed Emeritus Professor of Oceanography at McGill, and since 1988 he was a member of the Climate Research Group in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. Maxwell Dunbar was an active member in numerous professional associations, and a recipient of many honours. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1954 and was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada in 1990. He wrote about 150 scientific papers and other publications. Dr. Dunbar died in 1995.
Born in East Orange in 1903, New Jersey, Dorothy Duncan spent her formative years in the United States. She grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, with a Christian Science background. She received a Bachelor of Science in Botany from Northwestern University in Chicago in 1925 and worked as a journalist in the Chicago area for a number of years. In 1932, she made a trip abroad and on the return from England aboard the S.S. Penfield, she met Canadian Hugh McLennan. They fell in love, but McLennan’s father insisted that he should be financially independent before marrying. As a result, he wound up spending three unhappy years at Princeton doing graduate studies in Classics before he could look for a job, which was made more difficult by the Great Depression. They married in 1936 at her home in Wilmette, Illinois, and settled in Montreal, where MacLennan found work teaching at Lower Canada College. While Duncan was often addressed as Dorothy MacLennan in her correspondence, she published under her maiden name.
Duncan’s published works include “You Can Live in An Apartment” (1939), “Here's to Canada!” (1941), and “Bluenose: A Portrait of Nova Scotia” (1942). In 1944, she published a biography of the Czechoslovakian-Canadian Jan Rieger, entitled “Partner in Three Worlds,” for which she was awarded the 1946 Governor General’s award for creative non-fiction. Duncan was a member of the Authors’ League of America and the Canadian Authors’ Association. She was also the director of the North Hatley Library Association, the organization that ran the library in the small Quebec town where she and MacLennan summered.
Duncan encouraged MacLennan with his writing, and urged him to write about Canada rather than the United States or Europe, which were the settings for his first novels. While he had trouble finding publishers for those first books, he found success after following her advice with “Barometer Rising,” his first novel set in Canada. She often proofread his books. The character of Catherine Martell in Hugh MacLennan’s “The Watch That Ends The Night” is largely based on Dorothy Duncan.
In the late 1940s, Duncan’s health deteriorated, a result of rheumatic fever she had suffered during her youth. After her doctors advised her to stop writing, she took up painting, with some public success. Her health declined, however, and she died on Easter Day, April 22, 1957, two weeks before her solo gallery show was to open in Montreal.
