Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  It was clear that JB was now identifying himself strongly with Canada.

  The following month saw the resounding re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, which naturally pleased JB and indeed a number of his regular correspondents, such as the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, known as ‘Bal’, who wrote: ‘I look upon Roosevelt as the leading charlatan of history, but we want him to be re-elected. We think that if Europe misbehaves towards us Roosevelt is much more likely to use his friendly influence than [Alf] Landon [the Republican candidate].’36

  Not everyone agreed with that analysis. Ramsay MacDonald, like a number of politicians in Britain, including Neville Chamberlain, had reservations about whether Roosevelt could be trusted to put his money where his mouth was. He wrote to JB in early December: ‘I was interested in what you said about the international development that the United States may now show. I do hope it is going to be a development in actual help and not in mere verbal or paper declarations.’37

  Ten days later, JB wrote to Walter, his most trusted confidant, that Canada and the United States would be compelled more and more to think, and presumably act, together. ‘This does not mean in any way a weakening of the imperial tie, but it does mean that Canada may be the motive power towards that closer understanding between the United States and the Empire, on which I believe the future of the world depends.’38

  When JB returned to Ottawa he discovered that Johnnie’s ‘amoeba’ was still preventing him from putting on weight, and the young man was forced to endure a course of severe ‘inoculations’. So the Tweedsmuirs had worries about their children on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, Susie confided to JB, when she arrived in England in October, that ‘these eleven months of ceaseless anxiety have somehow worn down my morale and absolutely exhausted me – and I get stupidly jumpy’.39 Not always able to make up her own mind, she intensely disliked being out of reach of the advice of her husband and eldest son. But at least she was back amongst her friends once more, and heartened by how pleased they were to see her after a year’s absence.

  JB was about to leave for another trip to the west when the problems between King Edward VIII and the British government over his love affair with the American divorcée, Mrs Simpson, came to a head. Wallis Simpson had finally been granted a decree nisi in her divorce proceedings and it was not thought that the British press would keep silent much longer in these circumstances, especially as the American press had no such scruples. The British government, under Stanley Baldwin, considered that it was not just unconstitutional and illegal for a British monarch to marry a divorced woman, but it would be deeply unpopular with all the Empire’s peoples. Although Winston Churchill suggested that it would be possible if the marriage were morganatic, in other words the King’s consort was not made Queen, this was a minority opinion. As far as the British government and most politicians were concerned (with a few exceptions, such as Lord Beaverbrook as well as Churchill, both of whom disliked the Prime Minister), the King must choose between his throne and the woman he loved.

  This was an issue that affected the Commonwealth very closely. In mid-October the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Alexander Hardinge, wrote confidentially to JB, asking for his opinion of Canadian sentiment over Mrs Simpson. He wanted JB to write a letter that he could show to the King. The propriety of asking this of the King’s representative was more than a little questionable, and we may wonder how Hardinge could have thought that JB was in a position to give a properly informed answer – given the discretion of the Canadian press, and the reticence of all around him. JB, embarrassed, did his best, replying most unwillingly, and only because Hardinge had asked him directly. The letter was typewritten, since he could assure Hardinge of Lilian Killick’s discretion, and the gist of it was that Canada had come to believe the lurid stories circulating in the American newspapers, many of which were available in Canada, although the Canadian press was proving almost as stalwartly discreet as the British. He told Hardinge that he believed Canada to be the most sensitive part of the Empire about this matter, since it was still a church-going nation, where private life preserved ‘the Victorian decencies’ even if sometimes ‘pedantically and pharisaically’.40 He went on to say that the monarchy was considered in Canada a stable centre in an anarchic world and, moreover, Canadians idolised the charming, good-looking King, since he had made such an impression there on his visits in the 1920s. JB feared a reaction, especially among the young, if they discovered he had feet of clay.

  To JB this was an intensely distasteful business, not only because he cared neither for divorce nor for conflict (‘this is a nice job for a quiet man,’ he told his wife) but, more importantly, because he had been treated well by the King and was, in any event, by the nature of the position he held, loyal. Moreover, he knew how difficult his own position was. Hardinge should, properly, have gone to Sir Francis Floud, the British High Commissioner, who, frankly, would have found it easier to sound out Canadian opinion on such a delicate matter than could the Governor-General. News reached Mackenzie King that JB had communicated with Hardinge on this, which led him, once more, to criticise JB for interfering, although this time most unfairly. As the crisis deepened, Mackenzie King visited Government House a great deal and was, as JB put it, like ‘a wet hen’.

  In early November, JB received a confidential letter, along similar lines to Hardinge’s, from the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, to which he replied in much the same vein: that Canadians were both royalist and puritanical, and were infuriated by what they saw as the intolerable impertinence of the American press. ‘In this most delicate matter I believe that Canadian opinion is an important card to play, for the King loves the country and the people, and I believe is jealous of her regard.’41 He also pressed upon Baldwin that he should handle things alone, and keep the Archbishop of Canterbury (Cosmo Lang) and Ramsay MacDonald out of it. JB stressed that, as the King’s representative, he should not be quoted and that any public expression of Canadian opinion should come from Mackenzie King. Susie was invited to lunch with Stanley Baldwin and his wife at Chequers the following week. Afterwards, she wrote to her husband: ‘He said “John cannot write to me too often or too strongly”, as we parted. You will understand.’42

  Hardinge wrote to thank JB for his letter, which he had shown to the King and the Prime Minister. He asked rhetorically: ‘A year ago would one have thought such degradation of the British Throne possible?’43

  On 1 December, just a day before the crisis became public, Susie went to see Queen Mary, King George V’s widow, about the Prairie Book Scheme. She wrote to her husband, ‘I really enjoyed my half hour with her. She was looking tired and a little older but as upright and handsome as ever … My dear, what are we going to do if the King abdicates? Shall we return or what? I am dreadfully sorry for you … as I know in some ways Canada minds more than any one, although Australia appears to be absolutely on end. I feel a desperate sense of discomfort, misery and unhappiness, everything else is put into the background, nobody mentions the war or anything else.’44

  The Abdication Crisis followed JB to the Prairies. He received daily cables from London which, as they were always in cypher, had to be decoded by the ADCs, and he was forced to make a number of transatlantic calls from remote Prairie telephone offices.

  At times, however, he managed to set aside these anxieties to concentrate on the tour. He wrote to Susie from Winnipeg on 1 December: ‘At Regina on Saturday afternoon I visited the community halls of the Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians, Ukrainians White and Red, and the Jews, and spoke in each. The Police didn’t want me to go to the Red Ukrainians on the ground that they were dangerous Communists, so of course I insisted on going, and was received deliriously in a hall smothered in Union Jacks, and they nearly lifted the roof off singing the National Anthem.’45

  JB arrived back in Ottawa on 6 December to be greeted by a very anxious Mackenzie King. He wrote to his mother: ‘All yesterday and evening I was closeted with my Prime Minister. Tod
ay is the critical day. I am seeing eye-to-eye with my PM all through, and have been in daily correspondence with S.B [Stanley Baldwin]. We have to take a major part in the whole business, and I have never had any doubt about the right line to take. It has been a terribly anxious and sad time.’ The letter was continued the next day: ‘No settlement yet! It cannot be much prolonged for the Australian Parliament is in special session waiting for news … Baldwin’s speech in the House yesterday seemed to me excellent. Winston [the romantic monarchist] is surely making a blazing fool of himself.’46

  King Edward VIII made up his mind to go and on 10 December he signed abdication papers at Fort Belvedere. The same day JB signed an Order in Council on behalf of Canada, approving the Abdication. He told Susie, ‘It has been a miserable time, and for the last five days the Prime Minister and I have never been off the telephone.’ He thought both Baldwin and Mackenzie King had been magnificent. ‘It reveals an entirely new mechanism in the Empire. I am desperately sad about the whole business. I cannot bear to think of that poor little man with no purpose left in life except a shoddy kind of amusement. Canada is curiously bitter about the whole business. There is not a scrap of sentimental sympathy. That seems to be the feeling of the whole Empire.’ He went on to hope that the new King and Queen would bring back the atmosphere of George V, ‘and this horrible night-club, jazz, cocktail raffishness may go out of fashion’.47 To his mother he recounted a witticism that was going the rounds: ‘This is the first case of a British Admiral who has become third mate to an American tramp!’48 By early February 1937, JB was writing to Baldwin: ‘The recent Palace troubles are almost forgotten. Canadian opinion on the subject was curiously hard, harder, I think, than at home. There is never much mercy for an idol whose feet have proved to be of clay.’49

  Christmas 1936 at Government House was pleasant, now that the Royal crisis was past and the new dispensation in place. JB was in cheerful mood and even prepared to join a game of Hide and Seek, during which the naval ADC, Gordon Rivers-Smith, caught him in a dark corridor, on hands and knees, as if he were stalking a deer. He also took the opportunity of a slack time to work hard on his biography of Augustus, which he finished the following summer. Much to his relief, Susie landed back at Halifax on New Year’s Eve, accompanied by the convalescent William. Susie was still finding the Ottawa winter hard to bear and it is probably at this point that Shuldham Redfern drew a cartoon of her in a ball gown, decorated with prison arrows, with a chain around her neck, earrings in the shape of keys and bracelets that were handcuffs. The caption read: ‘Her Excellency the Lady Tweedsmuir attended the ball of “The Return to Ottawa Life” in a most original toilette of sackcloth de soie embroidered in broad arrows of sequins…’50

  The long-awaited trip by the Governor-General to Washington, about which King George VI was content, since it was a visit to the President and not to the American government, took place in late March 1937. The Tweedsmuirs arrived in Washington just as spring was beginning and the tulip trees and golden forsythia were in flower. At Union Station the platform was lined with sailors, and a squadron of cavalry escorted their car down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, where the Roosevelts met them at the porch. JB was given Abraham Lincoln’s study as his sitting room, which must have had a piquancy for the man who had written The Path of the King, displayed pictures of Lincoln in his study at Rideau Hall, and had talked of the great man at Milton Academy in 1924.

  The next day he went to a press conference, made very cheerful by the presence of so many journalist friends from his Great War days. He was then driven to Arlington Cemetery, the destination for all visiting dignitaries, where he laid a wreath at the Cenotaph to the Unknown Soldier and at the tomb of American soldiers who had fought in the Canadian Army during the Great War. After that he was shown round Arlington House, and ‘It was thrilling to see the room where he [General Lee] walked all night making up his mind, when he was offered the commandership-in-chief of the Northern Army.’51

  He lunched with the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, with whom he had a long conversation ‘on international questions’. In the afternoon he embarked on the presidential yacht. It sailed down the River Potomac to Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, with the ship’s bell tolling and the flag at half-mast, as had been customary ever since Washington’s death. In the evening, after a State dinner, JB and FDR continued to talk ‘until far into the night’. He was not supposed to talk policy with the President, without the Canadian Prime Minister being present, but, as Roosevelt told the press, although there would be no official talks the two men could ‘sit on a sofa and soliloquize, and each could not help overhearing the other’.52

  The next morning he was driven to the picturesque town of Annapolis to visit the United States Naval College, after which he came back to lunch with the British ambassador, Sir Ronald Lindsay, at the Embassy. ‘Then we went to Congress, and that, I think was one of the most difficult experiences of my life. I asked beforehand whether I was required to speak, and they said that I need only formally thank them for their greeting.’ He was taken to the Senate. ‘The Vice-President moved that the House adjourn, which was carried, and then to my horror he said, “His Excellency will now address you.” I did my best, and happily what I said seemed to be well received, for they unanimously moved that it be recorded in the Minutes.’53 He was the first Briton ever to address the US Congress.

  He reminded the assembly that he had once been a free and independent politician like them; he had had an official character and a private one and he illustrated this with one of his hoary Scots stories about a minister who felt that, once a month, he had to deliver a sermon upon the terrors of Hell, but being a humane man would conclude ‘Of course, my friends, ye understand that the Almighty is compelled to do things in his official capacity that he would scorn to do as a private individual.’ Now he had only an official position, and had to be very careful what he said in public. Nevertheless, he expressed his belief that the future of civilisation lay principally in the hands of the English-speaking peoples. ‘I want these great nations not only to speak the same language, but to think along the same lines. For that is the only true form of co-operation. …[But] the strength of an alliance between two nations lies in the fact that they should be complementary to each other and each give to the other something new.’54 Harry S. Truman wrote to his wife that day, in terms that would have amused JB: ‘The governor was a real Limey. He made a very good speech, and then we all walked around and shook his hand.’55 After that, JB went back to the White House for more talk, then dinner with the Canadian Legation, before boarding a train north once more.

  Although he was to qualify his opinion of Franklin Roosevelt somewhat over time, discovering him not to be so straightforward as he was himself, JB had nothing but praise for the President after this visit. He wrote to Walter:

  The President, of course, stands by himself. His vitality oxygenates all his surroundings, and his kindliness diffuses a pleasant warmth about him wherever he goes. His reception out of doors was unbelievable. He is a real leader of the people. What impressed me most was his extraordinary mental activity. I have never met a mind more fecund in ideas. And these ideas are not mere generalities, for he has an astonishing gift of worming his way into a subject. His thought is not only spacious, but close-textured … I was also profoundly impressed by Mrs Roosevelt, who is a very great lady. [She had looked after Susie while their husbands were occupied.] Her simplicity and her sincerity make her as widely popular as her husband.

  The Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, is a very remarkable man. There is a quiet patience and tenacity about him which makes him a very real force in his country’s policy. He is without any kind of vanity or rhetoric, but he has an uncommon stock of practical wisdom…56

  The talks between JB and Roosevelt concerned the American President’s desire to call a conference of world leaders, to discuss the economic issues believed to be behind the unrest in Europe and the Far East
, an idea to which JB was highly sympathetic. He wrote a private memorandum immediately on his return to Canada, entitled ‘Note for the President’, based on their discussion, in which he suggested that this was a propitious moment ‘for some attempt to break the vicious circle of fear among the nations of the world. Recent events have, I think, disposed all the European dictators to reflect upon the future.’ And he detailed these: British rearmament, the better position of the National Government in Spain, and the growing rapprochement between the great democracies – the United States, Britain and France. ‘[They] all point a moral which even the blindest cannot miss. A pause for reflection, and an attempt to obtain some settlement of the fundamental economic questions which are behind all the unrest, would do something to save the face of both Germany and Italy; and it is desirable to save their face, for the situation would be in no way bettered by an internal breakdown in either country.’

  He believed that only the President was in a position of sufficient detachment and authority to take the initiative. The first step was the most difficult – getting Italy, Germany and Japan to agree to join a conference of world leaders. If that were achieved, however, it was important to make clear that it was not called to provide answers but to take soundings of problems, with the aim of agreeing general principles, and that it would have nothing to do with the discredited League of Nations. He suggested Geneva as a suitable place to meet. He was most insistent that the President be present ‘both for the sake of his personal influence and as an advertisement that America means serious business’.57