What is the meaning of this phrase?
Mr. Jones was to have spoken at the meeting, but we had to cancel it because of his illness.
Does this mean:
- He was scheduled to speak at the meeting?
- Someone wanted to speak to him at the meeting?
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Sign up to join this communitywas to have + past participle means something was supposed to happen but didn't.
was to have + past participle is more elegant and more formal:
He was to have spoken but then cancelled.
He was supposed to speak but then cancelled.
I see no other way to explain this except as a style issue.
"I was to have explained the ideas and then couldn't."
If you work for a company or non-profit organization, you will see that used in writing. It is not old fashioned: it is formal.
And yes, would also be common in academic writing, for example.
Both the tense of the first clause, and the context clues in the second part of the sentence imply that it's your first interpretation: He was scheduled to speak at the meeting. Or more accurately: He was supposed to speak at the meeting.
Here "was to have spoken" is a conditional clause describing what should have happened, while "but we had to cancel it because of his illness" is describing what actually happened.
If the sentence had meant your second interpretation, "Someone wanted to speak to him at the meeting", then the first clause would not have used conditional. Conditional clauses are used to talk about hypothetical situations contrary to what actually happened. The narrator desired (or didn't desire) Mr. Jones to speak regardless of whether he actually did speak, meaning it would have used regular preterite tense (aka regular past tense without constructions like "was to have" or "would have".) Ex. "I wanted Mr. Jones to speak, but we had to cancel it."