The following week, the Tweedsmuirs motored to Lorette, a village of the Huron people on the Saint Charles River not far from Quebec City, where JB was made a Chief and given the name Hajaton, meaning ‘The Scribe’, and a headdress of feathers. It was to be the first of several. They then set off with Johnnie, Alastair, James Cast, Annie Cox and the ADCs to tour the Prairies, stopping off to see Professor Meakins in Montreal on the way, since JB was still not entirely fit and Susie was convinced that Meakins’ reassurances had a beneficial psychological effect on her husband.
This tour, which included Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton and Vancouver, had many of the features of all the tours that the Governor-General was to make in his years in Canada: a reception at City Hall in the larger towns where they stopped, a drive around the area, taking in any particularly notable feature, a big dinner or a garden party at the provincial Government House, where he would be welcomed by the Lieutenant-Governor (his deputy in that province), and, on a Sunday, reading the lesson at a local Presbyterian church service. There was often a visit to a First Nations settlement. On this trip they visited the Plains Cree, at Carlton, outside Saskatoon. Under their Chiefs Ahenekew, Dreaver and Swimmer – the latter wearing a magnificent feathered headdress that reached to his ankles – they commemorated the signing of their treaty with Queen Victoria in 1876. JB was made a Chief and given a name, anglicised as Otataowkewimow (‘Teller of Tales’), which he found impossible to pronounce. He was thrilled that it meant the same thing as the name the Samoans had given to Robert Louis Stevenson.
At Edmonton, he unveiled the memorial to the Great War dead and then boarded the train for Victoria, which stopped at Jasper so the party could admire the Rockies, and go for a drive to catch a sight of black, brown and cinnamon bears. When they arrived in Victoria, JB addressed the Canadian Club of Vancouver,* inspected a naval dockyard, and then went fishing for a week with his family, steaming up the coast of British Columbia on the yacht belonging to Lieutenant-Governor Hamber. This week on board saw Johnnie recover somewhat from the illness that was still dogging him; nothing could have been designed to cheer up such a passionate angler more effectively than fishing for salmon on the Campbell River. The size and nature of their catches were reported on the local wireless news each evening.
No doubt prompted by this knowledge, the magazine Rod and Gun asked for a message from the Governor-General for their December issue. JB made a plea for conservation that must have sounded advanced for the time:
There is no question in Canada which interests me more than the conservation of Canadian wild life. [The first part of this sentence is one that he used often, in connection with a variety of Canadian preoccupations.] Canada should be the playground of North America, but in order to make this playground attractive it is most necessary to safeguard the assets which nature has given us, both in flora and fauna and scenic beauty. At present these assets are enormous; but it is only too true that the richest resources in the modern world will, unless they are safeguarded, disappear with tragic rapidity. I have seen in other countries carelessness in one generation destroy the wild life. I want to see facilities for sport open to every sportsman, to whatever class he belongs. To make that possible we must preserve the wild game. We must have wise game laws and they must be strictly enforced, and this is not in the interests of any coterie, but of the nation at large.20
For the Canadian Club speech, JB chose to talk in theoretical terms about foreign policy. He spoke of the need for a revised League of Nations to ensure collective security, since the Empire, though powerful, was not strong enough to provide that security on its own, and its constituents would need to develop the proper machinery for cooperation. The headline in the Toronto Globe ran: ‘Tweedsmuir Sees Common Defense as Unattainable; Empire as a whole cannot guarantee security in every part; he says Canada needs foreign policy.’21 The press reaction prompted consternation in government circles. Then at Calgary on 3 September, JB made a speech to the Alberta Military Institute, which was to prove even more controversial, and to JB unexpectedly so, which seems slightly odd considering the newspapers’ reaction to his Vancouver speech. In deference to the interests of the guests, he spoke about defence, pointing out that, with the disappointment that was the League of Nations, every nation had to think about their own defence: ‘No country today is safe from danger. No country can be isolated. Canada had to think out a policy of defence and take steps to implement it.’22 He said that his position as Commander-in-Chief made it his duty to take an interest in this.
Considering the shortcomings of the League of Nations, the European problems of 1936 (the Italians in Abyssinia, the German occupation of the Rhineland), and the fact that enemy aeroplanes now had the range to cross the North Atlantic, these seemed to him to be reasonable things to say, and not ones that would startle his audience. But he had not taken enough note of how much controversy Viscount Elibank, a British politician and supporter of Beaverbrook’s United Empire Party, had already caused that August on his lecture tour across Canada, when he had several times criticised the Canadian government for its lack of military preparedness. JB’s speech hit the headlines in newspapers across Canada. The Toronto Globe, in particular, used the speech as a stick to beat the Liberal Party and its leader, Mackenzie King.
The news reports disturbed ordinary Canadians, who were worried about how a possible increase in defence spending could be squared with the provinces’ attempts to bring down their budget deficits but, more seriously, it shocked both Ian Mackenzie, the Minister of Defence, and the Prime Minister. The latter had a dread of war even more acute than JB’s, but there was for him the added complication of political dependence on the French-Canadian community, many of whom had been against Canada’s involvement in the Great War. He was also hyper-sensitive to what he considered meddling by the King’s representative in Canada, which went back to Byng’s day in the mid-1920s.
Mackenzie King wrote at once to JB in strong terms, telling him that his words in Calgary would be misconstrued, would create controversy and put difficulties in the government’s way. The same day he confided in his diary his belief that JB had hurt himself irreparably, would probably get ill and have to go home. ‘I am afraid it is the Tory in him and “the tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority”.’23
JB, realising he had gone too far, apologised, saying he had tried to be helpful, that criticising government policy was ‘the very last thing I should dream of’, and promised to be very careful. The row gradually blew over, particularly since both Mackenzie King and Mackenzie were only too aware that there were flaws in government policy on the matter, which really had to be addressed. Mackenzie King did, however, complain – confidentially – about JB’s behaviour, both to Malcolm MacDonald MP, Ramsay’s son, and the Earl of Halifax, when he stopped over in London the following month before he went to Geneva for the League of Nations conference.
Historians have spilled much ink attempting to understand the psychology of Mackenzie King. Certainly, as the result of a strange kink in his personality, the relationship that JB enjoyed with the Prime Minister was at times very fraught. He was of Scottish descent, with a grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie, who had been a Mayor of Toronto and had led an unsuccessful revolt, the Upper Canada* Rebellion, against the British government in 1837, thirty years before Confederation – something which his grandson could never resist telling anyone that he met. Mackenzie King had studied law and social policy at Harvard, and was first a civil servant who subsequently entered politics as a Liberal in 1908 and was Minister of Labour from 1909 to 1911. During the Great War he had worked for the Rockefeller Foundation on industrial relations, in which he became an expert.
He had proved himself to be an astute, even Machiavellian politician, with the result that he served as Prime Minister for twenty-two years, on and off, from 1921 until 1948. He is generally considered, despite his personal idiosyncracies, to have been a successful leader, adeptly steering the count
ry through the Second World War. He did it by a mixture of calculation – in particular not showing his hand unless he was forced to – luck and very hard work. (He was a terrible delegator.) He was also a platitudinous speaker, but had plenty of that Liberal ‘unction’ that JB had satirised years before in his short story, ‘A Lucid Interval’.
Mackenzie King was a rather lonely bachelor, who made few lasting friendships, almost certainly because he was so quickly roused to jealousy. Lady Byng’s lady-in-waiting was scandalised by having her thigh pinched twice by him, when dining at Rideau Hall in the 1920s, but he seems to have been most attached to his dead mother, to whom he erected an indoor shrine at the large house he inherited from his predecessor as leader of the Liberal Party, Sir Wilfrid Laurier. (Violet Markham called Laurier House ‘that mausoleum of horrors’.) Mackenzie King was a strict Calvinist, who believed himself to be ‘saved’, and was temperamentally inclined to look to God to approve his decisions. Unbeknown to almost everyone until his voluminous diaries were published after his death, he pursued an interest in spiritualism, holding séances at his country residence, Kingsmere, in the Gatineau Hills outside Ottawa. He thought that he and JB had much in common and saw him as a potential friend, rather than simply a man in public life with whom he must have cordial dealings. Since JB had more than enough friends already, not to mention a confidante in his wife, and was rightly wary of Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister was destined to be, at times, thoroughly disappointed.
JB and Susie privately called him ‘Mr Micawber’ because he was short, round and bald, and reminded them of Phiz’s depiction in the first edition of David Copperfield. Others might be put in mind of Mr Pooter, especially when in the presence of royalty, and even sometimes Bertie Wooster or his Aunt Dahlia, in his predilection for writing very long, explanatory telegrams.
*
At Edmonton, the family prepared to part. Susie and Alastair were returning to England – Susie to look after William, who had had a serious operation, while Alastair was due to take up a place at Christ Church, Oxford. Johnnie was still not well enough to stand the kind of long car journeys on which his father was about to embark. JB told his mother that there had been 8,000 people waiting for them at Edmonton Station and that ‘Susie said she felt for the first time in her life like a film star. They are a most wonderfully welcoming people here … It is rather melancholy, this breaking up of the household, for we have all been very happy together.’24 The trip had been a substantial eye-opener, and not just about how careful JB was going to have to be in his public utterances. The party was struck by the warmth and friendliness but terrible poverty in the Prairies, which contrasted so very starkly with the lush growth, wonderful flowers, varied landscapes and relative prosperity of Vancouver and Victoria.
Susie recalled years later:
We first saw the southern Prairies in the tragic days when a long drought had made the land into a desert … The whole countryside appeared to be blowing away and there were drifts of grey dust over everything. Huge thistles grew and maleficent little gophers peeped out of their holes. The only feature of the place that was not depressing was the fortitude and optimism of the people. I enquired of some of the women what I could do for them, and they asked me to send them books. With John’s constant help and encouragement I started what was called the Lady Tweedsmuir Prairie Library Scheme, and with generous help from Canadians, from England and from the Carnegie Trustees in New York, I managed to send out forty thousand books from Government House.25
In a terse paragraph she described one of her most successful and long-lasting contributions to Canadian life. She secured $500 from the charitable Massey Foundation, via Vincent Massey, the Canadian High Commissioner in London, and also wrote to the President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, whom she knew to have helped rural libraries in British Columbia. He could do nothing then, but in November 1937, by which time the scheme was in full swing, the Carnegie Corporation did provide $1,500, as well as another $1,500 in early February 1940.
Here was a respectable and useful project that captured Susie’s imagination and into which she could throw herself, escaping, thereby, the dreariness of a consort’s life. JB encouraged her in this, partly because he could see the good it would do for very isolated communities in an age before television, but also because he knew how much she needed positive distraction. He provided books (he was sent a great many by hopeful authors) and gave her wise counsel about what would be suitable. Publicity about the scheme brought books from all over Canada, and also from Britain. There were many Nelson’s ‘Sevenpennies’ among them, the print still clear and black and the spines unbroken. Susie herself oversaw the scheme from Rideau Hall, with Lilian Killick and Joan Pape (her lady-in-waiting from early 1937) in support. It gave purpose and structure to her daily life. The greatest demand was for children’s books and the Bible, both of which secured Susie’s approval, but she was careful to see that books about handicrafts – a subject about which she knew little and cared less – were also made available. She persuaded the Canadian railways to carry the books out west free of charge. When in England in 1937, she succeeded in interesting King George V’s widow, Queen Mary, in the scheme. Enough books found their way westwards to stock dozens of small libraries.
After his family had left for Ottawa, JB travelled to Lethbridge in Alberta, accompanied by one of his ADCs, John Boyle, as well as Shuldham Redfern. They visited experimental agricultural stations, both there and also further east, where the drought was much worse, especially in areas on light soils. ‘What should have been miles of waving corn, or a golden stubble,’ he told his mother, ‘is now as brown as Leadburn Moss.’26
The vice-regal party drove north from Medicine Hat to beyond the Saskatchewan border, through drifts of sand, to stay in an inn in a village called Alsask, so that JB could visit his old ‘Hutchie’ friend Alec Fraser. A Prairie farmer, Fraser had fallen on very hard times, since there had not been a harvest to speak of for seven years. The two men had a ‘great talk’, even though they hadn’t seen each other for forty years, and the vice-regal party was most hospitably entertained. JB admired Fraser’s sons and daughters, one of whom, some years earlier, had trained as a teacher at his expense.27
The people who came to cheer him in the Prairies ‘all bore the marks of toil and struggle, but I never met a finer or more courageous race’, he told his mother.28 Many were Scots, some even originating from Tweeddale. (He never failed to tell his mother of these encounters, even discovering an old lady, originally from Peebles, who had made her wedding dress.) He then went south-east to Swift Current, where he toured yet more government experimental farms, to see what drought protection measures they were developing. As he was to do many times while in Canada, he surprised the people he met with the depth of his understanding and knowledge about farming. He also visited the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) nation at Kainaiwa reserve in southern Alberta, when Chief Shot-on-Both-Sides gave him the title ‘Chief Eagle Head’ – presumably impressed by his aquiline nose – and then visited the only Mormon temple in Canada in Cardston, supported by Americans from Utah who had come north to farm. ‘I tried to get a hang of the Mormon creed, but it is the most curious mixture of evangelical Christianity and primeval superstition.’29
At a Ukrainian settlement at Fraserwood in Manitoba, he told his audience that they would all be better Canadians for being also good Ukrainians.30 He said that ‘our Canadian culture cannot be a copy of any one old thing – it must be a new thing created by the contributions of all the elements that make up the nation’.31 He went on to a settlement of Icelanders at Gimli, brushing up the Icelandic he had taught himself at Oxford, so that he could say a few words in his audience’s own language, and praising them for not forgetting ‘the traditions of your homeland. That is the way a strong people is made – by accepting willingly the duties and loyalties of your adopted country, but also by bringing your own native traditions as a contribution to the making of Canada.’32
The three men then went up into ‘the bush country’ north of Prince Albert, staying for three days at a cottage belonging to Mackenzie King (he was Member of Parliament for the constituency of Prince Albert) at Waskesiu, in the Prince Albert National Park. This cottage was close to Kingsmere Lake, which at that moment was ‘in the full glory of its fall colours’.33 An aeroplane had been put at their disposal, so they flew to a lake fifty miles away, where JB caught an enormous eight-pound trout. They then spent a long afternoon in the woods with the conservationist Grey Owl, an Englishman from Hastings who pretended to have an Apache mother; JB wanted to meet him since he admired him as a naturalist and writer. Redfern took a picture of JB with one of Grey Owl’s birds of prey on his fist. According to Boyle, ‘Everything is tame, birds, beasts and beavers and we fed and handled all his pets. He [Grey Owl] is a remarkable character, very well self-educated but a bit of a scoundrel I should say; with a strong penchant for the bottle.’34 They were rewarded by the sight of beavers arriving to be fed.
While JB was in the west, he wrote – arguably beyond his remit – to Mackenzie King, who was in Geneva at the League of Nations conference:
What Europe is witnessing at present is not a conflict of genuine principles so much as the wrangling of ambitious mob-leaders, who have behind them nations who have lost their nerve. In this wrangling we have no real interest, except as peace-makers. I do not believe that the British people, or the people of any Dominion, would be willing to participate in a war, except in the unlikely event of an attack on British territory, or upon the Low Countries, which are Britain’s front door … The danger I fear is that we may be drawn insensibly into a diplomatic situation from which there is no retreat. You can do an immense amount to prevent that happening. Hammer into the British Cabinet’s head that the most loyal people of Canada will refuse to return to the old eighteenth-century game in Europe. We have other things to think about.’35
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps Page 42
