Peter Swann was the founder of ACE and passed away in 1998. Here is the eulogy in his honour.

There was a memorial service for ACE Founder Peter Swann at Renison College, University of Waterloo on January 21, 1998. ACE was represented by former board president Warren Garrett and former board member Bill Poole both of whom had an opportunity to chat with and express condolences to Peter’s widow, Susan. The eulogy presented by Dr. Gail Cuthbert Brandt, Principal, RenisonCollege and follows in its entirety.

We have come together this afternoon to celebrate the life of Dr. Peter Charles Swann and to honour his memory. Like life itself, Peter was multi-faceted, complex and thoroughly engaging. He was a man of vision, and a man of action, an accomplished academic and a dynamic administrator. His accomplishments in the area of art and culture were numerous, earning for him international as well as national accolades.
For all his outstanding achievements, Peter remained a very modest man. He kept his curriculum vitae to two single-spaced pages, but every line speaks volumes about the breadth of his intellect and the scope of his enterprise. If I were to read that succinct and incomplete summary of his professional life aloud, we would be here for some time, and still we would not have a proper measure of the man. So I will attempt to highlight but a few of the fascinating dimensions of his life, and to reflect on what that life has meant for this college and university, and for this nation.
Peter was born in London, England in 1921, and attended Tottenham Grammar School. He studied at Oxford and at the School of African and Oriental Studies at London University before being commissioned a sub-lieutenant with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1942. Peter was chosen to take a 14 month intensive course in Japanese translation, after which he was posted to the Combined Chiefs of Staff Intelligence Service. By war’s end, he had been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant, and after demobilization, he went to study at Leyden University in the Netherlands for a year. In 1949, he completed his undergraduate studies at Oxford, graduating with First Class Honours in Classical Chinese. Three years later, he was granted a Masters of Arts from the same university.
Peter’s love of Chinese art and culture had begun at the age of fifteen when he acquired two exquisite imperial yellow Chinese tea bowls from a London antique dealer. The dealer sold them to him at a substantial loss, because he saw in him an already discerning and appreciative collector. It was undoubtedly the same qualities which lead the management at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford to appoint Peter to the position of Keeper of the Department of Oriental Art in 1950. Over the ensuing 16 years, Peter redesigned and completely rebuilt the Oriental Art galleries at the Ashmolean to make the spaces more open and inviting to the public. In this first appointment, then, it is easy to discern several of the hallmarks that would define Peter’s subsequent career: he was an innovator, a builder, and a scholar who passionately believed in the duty of the museum curator to make museums accessible and lively centres of learning.
In 1965, Peter was commissioned by Princeton University to design and install the university’s Eastern Art galleries. When he arrived at Princeton, he found that no personnel had been assigned to do the actual physical work involved in the reconstruction. Undaunted, and in keeping with the characteristics of a true pioneer, he bought some hand tools, conscripted the janitor, and undertook the work himself. Now I understand why, later in life Peter truly appreciated the gift-in-kind of some power tools a Japanese-based company made to this college!
In 1966, we Canadians got lucky when Peter accepted the position of Director of the Royal Ontario Museum. During his seven-year tenure there, Peter brought a new vitality and a new vision to that institution. He helped transform it from an institution that, in many ways, was still considered a U of T agency whose main purpose was to provide a research base for its curators, into a nationally and internationally acclaimed public education centre. Here again, we see at work Peter the innovator. It was during Peter’s directorship that the museum’s well-known publication, Rotunda, was launched, a publication which continues to inform thousands of museum members. But perhaps a more telling example of Peter’s inventiveness was the occasion when he extended an invitation to taxicab drivers to bring their families, and their cars, to the Museum. What better front-line salespersons for the ROM than the taxicab drivers of Toronto? In recognition of the outstanding contribution he made to the ROM, Queen’s University granted him an Honorary Doctorate (LLD) in 1972.
Over the next twenty years, Peter would continue to be a builder and an innovator in the areas of culture and education. In 1972, he was appointed Executive Director of the Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation, a position he held for the next decade. It was during this time that he founded the Association of Cultural Executives, a professional organization for managers in the cultural sector. He subsequently designed and then directed The Seagram Museum, here in Waterloo, and he also became an Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo.
In 1989, Peter joined the faculty of Renison College as Professor and Founding Director of the East Asian Studies programme, a position he held until his retirement in 1992. When Peter launched the programme in January 1989 there was his course in East Asian culture and two sections of Japanese language taught by Akiko Maruoka. The total number of students registered was 35; in the last academic year, we offered 16 sections of Japanese, 10 sections of Chinese, 3 sections of Korean, and 2 sections of East Asian culture with a total of over 550 course enrollments.
Peter was indeed a visionary; like the hero in the Field of Dreams, he took the approach "build the programme, and they will come". But it took more than vision to build the programme; it took many hours and a lot of hard work to raise the necessary funds to launch a new academic venture at a time when no provincial government funding was available for new initiatives. Renison College was indeed fortunate that, in Peter, we found not only an accomplished expert in the area of East Asian culture and a stimulating colleague, but also an energetic entrepreneur. In large measure, another innovative UW programme, the Applied Studies programme in Cultural Management, owes its creation to Peter through his connection to the Association of Cultural Executives and the Bronfman Foundation.
Indeed, one of Peter’s defining traits was the ease with which he moved back and forth among the academy, the museum, and the corporate board room. Through his career, he continued to hold academic appointments, to research, and to write. He was the author or co-author of several books relating to the history of Chinese and Japanese art. He also re-established and edited "Oriental Art" (1954-70), still the leading periodical for specialists in the field, and he contributed many articles to other periodicals and encyclopaedias. An outspoken champion of the arts, Peter also penned numerous articles over the years to newspapers such as The Manchester Guardian, The Oxford Mail, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. Government agencies and business people often sought out his expertise in cultural matters, and he did considerable amount of consultation work.
This brief resume can only hint at the breadth and richness of Peter Swann’s contribution; that fact that he was the recipient of three additional honorary doctorates (from Brock University, Wilfrid Laurier University and University of Waterloo) clearly underscores how extraordinary that contribution was. An educator par excellence, he was equally at ease communicating with the so-called "average citizen", the novice undergraduate, or the erudite expert. And he could carry on a conversation in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Dutch, or Italian. Founding, building, transforming - whatever he undertook, he did so with the same boundless energy and total dedication he displayed as a young champion diver, or when he played rugby for the Oxford Greyhounds and as back-up on the British Olympic team. At Renison, we also remember him fondly for his great personal warmth and humour.
I am sure that Peter’s children - Alexander, Francesca, Sebastian, Claire, Geron, and Toby - could each add important details to this account of his life. I want to acknowledge the invaluable contribution his wife, Susan, made to this narrative by sharing with me her knowledge and her memories. I also want to express to her our heartfelt sympathy, and to thank her for so graciously granting us this opportunity to celebrate Peter’s life and to express our own sense of great personal loss.