Frank Manning Covert, OC OBE DFC QC (January 13, 1908 – November 1, 1987) was a Canadian lawyer.
Born in Canning, Kings County, Nova Scotia, the son of Dr. A.M. Covert and Minnie A. (Clarke) Covert, he graduated from Dalhousie University in 1929 at the top of his class. He joined the law firm of Stewart McKeen in 1930 where he mentored under James McGregor Stewart and became a partner in 1936. It later became Stewart McKelvey, the largest law firm in Atlantic Canada.
From 1940 to 1942, he served with the Department of Munitions and Supply and was a protégé of the C.D. Howe. He enlisted in the RCAF in September 1942. On May 10, 1945, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
A well known corporate director, he served on more than 50 corporate boards, including the Royal Bank of Canada.
In 1982, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in recognition of having "shown outstanding ability in the field of industrial relations" and "given generously of his counsel and leadership to universities, hospitals and charitable organizations."
In 2004 the book, Frank Manning Covert: Fifty Years in the Practice of Law, based on his diaries and edited by Barry Cahill was published by McGill-Queen's University Press.
In 1934, he married Mary L. Covert, the daughter of his uncle Walter Harold Covert, the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia (1931–1937). They had four children: Michael, Peter, Susan and Sally.
Famous quotes containing the words frank, manning and/or covert:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)
“The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There was the murdered corpse, in covert laid,
And violent death in thousand shapes displayed;
The city to the soldier’s rage resigned;
Successless wars, and poverty behind;
Ships burnt in fight, or forced on rocky shores,
And the rash hunter strangled by the boars;
The newborn babe by nurses overlaid;
And the cook caught within the raging fire he made.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)