Inch, R. B. (Robert Boyer), 1903-1983 : George Robert Boyer Inch, was born in 1903 at Oak Point, New Brunswick, the eldest child of James Nathaniel Inch and Phoebe Elizabeth Boyer. He was educated at Mount Allison Academy and Mount Allison University in Sackville, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in 1924. After working briefly for the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, he went west to Alberta where he attended the Calgary Normal School and taught at Mount Royal College. He was hired as a reporter by the Calgary Herald in June 1926 and moved to the Manitoba Free Press in July 1928. He left the Free Press in May 1929 to be secretary to the president of the National Research Council, Dr. H. M. Tory.
At the same time as he took up this appointment, Inch began a four-year term as editor of the League of Nations Society journal "Interdependence". Leaving the NRC in 1935, he succeeded T. W. L. MacDermot as National Secretary of the League of Nations Society. Attending the September 1935 session of the League of Nations in Geneva as an observer, he witnessed its handling of the Ethiopian question. He attended the Congress of the League of Nations Societies in Scandinavia in 1938 and was active in the creation of the Canadian National Committee on Refugees and Victims of Political Persecution. He left the Society in 1942 and worked creating a CBC radio program, "Of Things to Come - Inquiry on the Post-War World", broadcast in sixteen parts, for the Canadian Association of Adult Education. The series was aired in the spring of 1943 and continued on CBC as "Citizen's Forum". Inch enlisted in the Canadian Army as a private in 1943 and went overseas with the Second Division. He married Elizabeth Gowling, who had also worked for the League of Nations Society, in 1944 and she worked for the United Kingdom Information Office from 1943 to 1947.
After the war, they returned to Canada, settling in Sackville, New Brunswick where Inch was appointed Director of Alumni and Public Relations at Mount Allison University in July 1947. He became Director of Extension and Sessional Lecturer in Political Science at Brandon University in July 1967. After retiring from Brandon University he became the first secretary and National Director Emeritus of Amnesty International Canada and remained active in other international organizations. R. B. Inch died 8 January 1983 in Brandon, Manitoba. He and his wife Elizabeth, who had died in 1956, had two children, George and Jeanne.
