The following tribute to Beverley Ormerod Noakes, lecturer in French Studies at UWA from 1970 until her retirement in 2002, was written by Jane Southwood, Honorary Research Fellow, UWA.
In August 1973 I met someone who was to become one of the most important people in my life. At our first meeting Beverley Ormerod impressed with her exotic Jamaican looks, resonant voice and attractive Batik dress. We soon met to discuss the work on which she was lecturing and I tutoring.
So began a gloriously rich relationship with Bev, teacher, thesis supervisor, mentor, colleague and very dear friend. Countless hours of fun, laughter and shared ideas took place in her office, over the lunch or dinner table, in the company of mutual friends, in seminars, by phone and email. It was a friendship which lasted until her death on 20 January 2022 and continues to bring joy in recollection, inevitably tinged with great sadness.
Endowed with brilliant French, a vast knowledge of, and passion for, world literature, a rigorous and scintillating intellect, a great gift for teaching, coupled with brilliant organisational skills, as well as Caribbean warmth and a delicious sense of humour, Bev was exactly the right person to expose students to fine literature and to encourage them to aim high.
She herself had aimed very high. In 1956, young Beverley Evans had left Jamaica, and taken up a scholarship at Cambridge, where she was introduced very fully to the joys of French Renaissance literature (as it was called then), complementing the familiarity she already had with certain aspects of the era.
One author she re-familiarised herself with, who subsequently sustained her for the rest of her life, was the essayist, Michel de Montaigne (1533—1592), whose humanity Bev adored, as she pointed out during an interview with Jean-Marie Volet, published in the Festschrift volume in her honour (Essays in French literature, 41, 2004). Montaigne’s comment about not being sure whether he was playing with his female cat, or she was playing with him, appealed enormously to Bev, the cat-lover.
Image: (L-R) Jane Southwood and Beverley Ormerod Noakes and (right) Beverley Ormerod on the day of her wedding to Tony Noakes, January 2, 1999.
One of the important themes of Bev’s lectures on Montaigne, later dealt with in an impressive work she very much enjoyed, Sarah Bakewell’s illuminating discussion, How to Live. A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer (London: Vintage, 2010), was the overriding love and friendship of Montaigne and Etienne de la Boétie, author of De la Servitude volontaire (On Voluntary Servitude). The two men became friends in 1558-1559. Though of short duration, de la Boétie succumbing to the plague on 18 August 1563, it was a relationship which informed Montaigne’s life from their first meeting and shaped essays such as ‘De l’Amitié’ (‘On Friendship’). The relationship in the sixteenth century between these two friends is emblematic of the importance Bev, too, placed on love and friendship in her own life, four centuries later.
Bev also relished the work of poets such as Pierre de Ronsard (1524—1585) and Joachim du Bellay (1522—1560). She was especially attracted by an anthology of four hundred and forty-nine dizains, ten-line love poems, written in the vernacular by the Lyon poet, scholar and Neo-Latinist, Maurice Scève (c1501—c1560). Published in 1544 as Délie, the name evokes the goddess Diana, born on the island of Delos. In this way Scève hides the identity of the woman he was addressing, believed to be his fellow Lyon poet, Pernette du Guillet. Even more importantly, he aligns himself with a tradition established by Latin poets of exploring all the resonances contained in the Lady’s name. Bev’s knowledge of the iconology of the period, of Neoplatonic doctrine, of the work of mythographers and emblem writers, of Petrarch, of Latin and Greek writers and of biblical inferences was instrumental in her delivering stimulating lectures to her students. Through this knowledge she also produced a string of articles on the symbolism of the Beloved: the materia medica of the goddess Diana, botanical and animal references and biblical allusions. All illuminate Scève’s complex and rich verse.
Over the years Bev reiterated her love of Scève’s poetry. She was, she said in an email of 6 July 2018, looking in retirement at the poetry again, adding how much she had benefited by the lecturing on Délie at Cambridge of the great scholar and editor I.D. McFarlane, subsequently an examiner for students at The University of Western Australia. Early on she declared never before having encountered such poetry, an opinion I shared with her. I undertook a dissertation and a thesis on Délie, both of which Bev supervised.
Another string to Bev’s bow was her work on French Caribbean and French African literature, which she had introduced at the University of the West Indies and continued at UWA. Her first book on the subject, An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel (London: Heinemann, 1985), was avidly read by all her friends and colleagues and remains an important text. A full account of this side of her teaching, research, publication and thesis supervision can be found in a heart-warming tribute posted on [email protected] by Bonnie Thomas, Associate Professor in French Studies, UWA. Ever responsive to works from all around the world, not long before she died, Bev had mentioned to a former UWA colleague the Cape Town poet Gabeba Baderoon.
On 2 January 1999, Bev married Tony Noakes, one of the happiest days of her life, she declared. Brought together by her niece Söla, to whom Tony and his late wife had given accommodation, when, as a friend of their daughter, Julia, she was studying in London. Tony and Bev had twenty-three years of shared happiness before she died, eighteen days after they had celebrated this anniversary.
Joy there had been in Bev’s life, but sadness, too, in the incarceration of her sister, Phyllis Coard, one of the so-called Grenada 17, all Cabinet members, who were wrongfully imprisoned for decades from October 1983. She was, she said, sustained during these difficult years by the love and support of colleagues and friends throughout the world.
Bev’s contribution to UWA was enormous and long-lasting. Not surprisingly she won the first distinguished teaching award at UWA and amused her friends by saying she thought she could buy a gown from Aherns with the award money!
Successive heads of the discipline of French Studies at UWA stressed what a joy Bev was as a staff member. One was Jim Lawler, Foundation Professor of French at The University of Western Australia, who often spoke in his correspondence and during his return visits to Western Australia of the delight Bev afforded by her well-informed teaching, rigorous thesis supervision, diligent research and publication, as well as through the pleasure one had in her company. In many ways one can see Bev as continuing Jim’s legacy, begun at UWA, with his very high standards for the discipline. His brilliant intellectual gifts were matched by hers, the warmth of the courteous and considerate treatment he extended to staff, students and friends was also a hallmark of Bev’s relations with students, colleagues and friends.
In the final paragraph of his final essay (Book III, chapter XIII) Montaigne states ‘C’est une absolue perfection, et comme divine de sçavoir jouyr loiallement de son estre’, ‘It is an absolute perfection and as if divine to know how to loyally enjoy one’s being’. It was a dictum Bev followed in every aspect of her life.
Vale Bev.
Jane Southwood is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Discipline of European Languages and Cultures at The University of Western Australia.