Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  At the same time he wrote to the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin: ‘It is very difficult for me to judge the effect of my visit, but Ronald Lindsay puts it very high, and it certainly has pleased Canada greatly. The President’s last words to me were that he hoped it would show those rhetorical dictators in Europe how close England and America were!’ Conscious of the delicacy of his position, he continued, ‘I have, of course, no official standing in this matter, and I am only reporting to you as to a private friend. But I think you ought to know what the President feels.’58 He went on, in relation to Roosevelt’s idea for a conference: ‘it does offer some kind of hope, and that it is very much in our interests to meet any proposals half-way’.59 He had also said that he had impressed on the President the enormous psychological and economic benefits he saw in a trade agreement between Britain and America.

  In absentia, JB was appointed a Privy Counsellor on 28 May. Responding to Ramsay MacDonald’s congratulations, he told him that, along with the Royal Society, the Jockey Club and The Club, the Privy Council was one of the few reasonably select bodies left in the world. More importantly, that same day Stanley Baldwin relinquished office in favour of Neville Chamberlain.

  JB was not just thinking about European politics. Canada had increasingly pressing constitutional difficulties, in particular the need to recalibrate the relationship between the federal government and the provinces. He believed that, without reform of the Constitution, it was impossible to have Canada-wide financial, economic or social policies, which were all badly needed. He had a number of conversations with Mackenzie King about this and his influence can be seen in the appointment of the Rowell-Sirois Commission for this express purpose, in the late summer of 1937.

  At the same time, he was aware that economic gripes would invite a reawakening of French nationalism, especially as business in Canada was largely in the hands of ‘British Canadians’. He was beginning to think that the Governor-General was the only real trait d’union between the two groups, which was why he spent so much time in Quebec that summer in the company of French Canadians. He frequently met Cardinal Villeneuve and Fr Camille Roy (Rector of Université Laval), and spoke in French to 5,000 people gathered for the literary and cultural French Congress. He made a point of spending time with the Quebec Premier, Maurice Duplessis, who made what he thought a courageous speech against separatism during the Congress.

  He also thought that all sections of the population could unite around an interest in the north of Canada, which he believed could be developed sensitively to benefit the whole country. So, during the winter of 1936, he and Redfern began planning their ambitious trip ‘Down North’ (meaning to the far North), travelling 1,300 miles down the Mackenzie River as far as the Arctic Ocean, as Lord Byng had done in 1925. The summer of the following year was the time to do it, when the river would be navigable. That would then be followed by a trip to the newly designated Tweedsmuir Park in British Columbia.

  In early July 1937 the vice-regal party travelled to Alberta, first to visit the Frasers in Alsask and then on to Calgary to see the famous rodeo known as the Stampede. On 21 July they arrived at Waterways, where they left the train behind and took to a boat on the Clearwater, which soon joins the Athabasca River. They travelled on to Fort McMurray, where they were shown something of the Abasand Oils plant. It was there that the party was joined by the well-known American photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who landed on the Athabasca in a float-plane. Her editor at Life magazine had sent her in a hurry, when he discovered that JB was embarking on this epic journey. Young, pretty and dressed in tartan shirt and ‘slacks’, she provided a thoroughly unexpected aura of glamour to the trip.* As she had been sent at short notice on this assignment, she brought with her ten chrysalises of the Mourning Cloak Butterfly,** the emergence of which she was watching for, to ensure she caught their entire life cycle on camera. It was at this point that Susie and Alastair left the group, going on to Vancouver and Victoria.

  The party progressed north by an ancient wooden ‘sternwheeler’, by motorcar when circumventing the Slave River rapids, and then in a flat-bottomed wooden, wood-burning scow, the SS Distributor, which they boarded at Fort Smith. The Distributor made two extensive trips down to the Arctic every summer, carrying goods and people to be dropped off at little settlements on the way. Everywhere that they halted, JB would disembark with an aide, greet everyone who had turned out to meet them – indigeneous people, missionaries, teachers, fur trappers, Hudson’s Bay employees – and make a short speech.

  Governor-Generals feel a responsibility to meet every kind of Canadian, of course, but it seems that JB took his duty to the First Nations particularly seriously, especially because there were usually treaty obligations between them and the British Crown. Many genuinely admired him as a result, the Chiefs treating him as an equal.60 During this trip he met Chipewyans, Dogribs, Yellowknives, Slavey, Hares (North Slavey) and Gwich’in. He was concerned about their physical condition and the high incidence of tuberculosis amongst them. He thought this mostly due to under-nourishment, as a result of seasonal difficulties in hunting and trapping, made worse by ‘the intrusion of the white trapper’, who he considered not nearly so good a conservationist as the indigenous population. He became convinced that trapping reserves should not just be extended in the North but be made exclusive to the First Nations. He communicated his view to the Ottawa government in a memorandum entitled ‘Down North’, which he drew up on his return. He wrote later that, in a healthy democracy, the majority should ‘respect a minority’s sacred things’.61 And as the Canadian historian, Professor Hutchings, has written, ‘Since Canada’s First Peoples – who comprise a small minority of the nation’s population – traditionally considered the land itself to be sacred, Tweedsmuir’s desire to limit the white man’s access to indigenous hunting grounds may be seen as a sign of such respect.’62 (These ideas come through clearly in Sick Heart River.) JB also criticised the quality of some of the (white) Indian agents he met.

  Generally, he found the trip very restful. He would sit reading in a deckchair on the barge being pushed along by the paddle steamer, or work on the index of Augustus on a trestle table set up for him in the boat’s stern. Margaret Bourke-White memorably recalled that ‘there he sat with the fluttering little white paper markers of his index all over the place. Our cargo almost swallowed him up.’63

  When they had crossed the Great Slave Lake, they arrived at the beginning of the Mackenzie River. At Fort Providence, JB had a ‘pow-wow’ with the Hare (North Slavey) tribe, and was impressed with the work of a French Catholic mission manned by Oblate Brothers, and with a particular missionary who had been wounded at Verdun in 1916. Redfern had to remonstrate with Bourke-White for suggesting to JB that she photograph him at the Roman Catholic church clasping the priest’s hand against a background of pictures showing the torment of souls in Hell. He told her that this was too much for the dignity and prestige of the Crown, ‘and although Maggie thought it was pretty fair drivel, as in fact it was, she took it in good part and philosophically remarked “Well you have your job and I have mine.” Obviously I am not the first officious, pig-headed, unimaginative and obstructive functionary with whom Maggie has had dealings. The sad part is that nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to have seen Maggie’s prospective masterpiece.’64

  At Fort Simpson, JB heard tell of the South Nahanni, a river that flowed into the Liard, a tributary of the Mackenzie, about a hundred miles above the settlement. No one had surveyed the South Nahanni valley, although it was rumoured to be rich in minerals, and the First Nations tribes avoided it. JB’s interest was piqued by the fact that nine white men had disappeared in its interior during the previous twenty years. That mystery, as well as portraits both of Oblate Brothers and Hare Indians, would find their way into Sick Heart River, which he began eighteen months later.

  It is hard to overstate the utter remoteness of the settlements in the Northwest Territories in the 1930s, consisti
ng as they did of little clusters of people living on the edge of lakes or along riverbanks, usually around Hudson’s Bay trading posts, dependent on the fledgling aeroplane service for mail, and to take the sick and injured to hospital. JB was, predictably, enchanted by the sturdy self-reliance, neighbourliness and ingenuity of the people he met along the river.

  When the party arrived at Fort Norman, the boilers of the boat had to be cleaned of the clinging grit that entered them from the river water. While this was happening, JB suggested that the party climb Bear Rock, which rose up a sheer 1,300 feet above the bank of the Mackenzie River. He behaved like an old hunter that pricks up its ears at the sound of a horn and gallops to the paddock gate. He decided to climb the face, which had never been climbed before, and some of the party followed him. Although JB reached the top, the rest became stranded on a crag and had to be helped down off their precarious perch by local guides with ropes. Thanks to Guy Rhoades, the journalist on the trip, the whole incident was reported in sensational terms in British Columbian newspapers, and Susie, who read the account while staying in Government House in Victoria, wrote to JB. ‘What possessed you to do a foolish thing like that? I have so often heard you inveigh against the people who climb not roped [and] without proper guides. It isn’t really sane for you to risk your life that way.’65 Perhaps not, but how tempting it must have been. Before he received this stern missive, JB made light of the incident to his mother, saying that it was ‘not bad for 62!’

  On the evening of 1 August they finally crossed the Mackenzie delta and reached Aklavik, five days ahead of schedule. Aklavik was a great disappointment to JB, indeed he found the delta the ‘most sinister place I have ever seen’.66 It was an enormous quagmire – what he called a ‘muskeg on a colossal scale’, coarsely lush and very unhealthy. They were met by the entire population of the place, led by ‘Archibald the Arctic’, the Bishop of the region, a Scottish-born, Inuit-speaking missionary called Fleming. A party was held on board, and then the Governor-General opened the new Anglican hospital, complete with X-ray machine, iron lung and operating theatre, built with money that had come from Christian groups around the world. After that, he inspected the new school and church, driving a final nail into the central step of the chancel. While they were together, Archibald the Arctic tried to express his admiration for JB to him: ‘He looked at me solemnly for a moment and then a flicker of a smile passed over his face as he said somewhat sadly, “Bishop, there is one thing I covet more than success and that you seem to possess – good health.” ’67

  The company stayed in the hospital for a couple of nights, the Governor-General’s flag fluttering over the building, as it did wherever he went. They were thwarted by a north-east wind from taking a trip to Herschel Island, to see the rich wildlife, so instead they went to Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic shore and the furthest northern post on the mainland. JB told Beverley Baxter: ‘When you follow the North Star until you come to pack ice, then there is such a sense of infinite peace and lonely, shimmering beauty that it is hard to persuade the soul to come away.’68 Here he met Inuit from Bank’s Land and Victoria Land, and then they flew up to the edge of the Polar ice pack to visit more at Coronation Gulf. He was charmed by the Inuit he met, admiring their independence, practical skills, ready smiles, and the way they looked him steadily in the eye.

  After the Arctic trip, JB, the Redferns and Rivers-Smith joined Susie and Alastair in British Columbia and the party set off – together with a cloud of witnesses, including a sparrowhawk called Tertullian – for the second leg of this extraordinary tour. They were following a similar path to that taken by the eighteenth-century explorer, Alexander Mackenzie, to an area of remote wilderness that had been established as a reserve in March 1936 and named Tweedsmuir Park.* Some 5,400 square miles of land, 300 miles north of Vancouver, and the other side of the Rockies from the Northwest Territories, its attractions for the Tweedsmuirs were the astonishing beauty and unspoilt wildness, the rich possibilities for camping, riding, fishing and watching wildlife, as well as meeting First Nations people, pack riders and ‘old-timers’, who remembered the Caribou gold rush of the 1860s. JB was made a full Chief of the Babine branch of Carrier Indians, and named ‘Chief of the Big Mountain’, and later the Nuxalk (Bella Coola) people made him a Chief with the title ‘The Man from Above Who has Come to Help Us’.

  They camped on a headland in Ootsa Lake, which was named Point Susan after Susie. They fished in lakes that had never seen an artificial fly, and caught rainbow trout, which were then cooked on campfires. They saw woodland caribou, moose, lynx and beavers, not to mention tiny rufous hummingbirds, which could be held in the hand, as well as masses of alpine wildflowers. To explore the southern part of the Park, they flew in a small aeroplane, Susie’s pronounced vertigo ensuring it was a complete penance for her. She spent the flight with her scarf against the window, trying to read a book. ‘We had to do a good deal of rather difficult flying, and Susie is thoroughly acclimatised now,’ JB told his mother controversially.69 Once at Bella Coola, they drove forty miles eastwards to Stuie Lodge, where they were met by the Prime Minister of British Columbia and, for some unexplained reason, the Federal Minister of Defence. From here – grizzly bear country – they followed Mackenzie’s route up the valley, in the shadow of the Rainbow Mountains, so called because of the extraordinary range of colours that minerals and lava have given to the volcanic rocks. They reached Dean Channel on the Pacific coast and saw the memorial commemorating Mackenzie’s arrival there in July 1793.

  The only drawback to this extended trip was that JB’s health took a turn for the worse afterwards, and would not substantially improve until his visit to a clinic in the summer of the following year. He later wrote to Alice: ‘I am always well on tour, but when I am settled anywhere I get upsets, which looks as if psychology had something to do with it.’70 Elsewhere he told her, ‘I am an orthodox Christian who believes in the resurrection of the body, but I am hanged if my tummy will be resurrected!’71 Alice also suffered from digestive troubles and he told her with feeling: ‘Cherish the brute [her digestion] as if your salvation depended on it, for if it becomes malevolent it can poison life.’72

  On their return east, JB made his third and most important incursion into politics. His speech to the Canadian Institute of International Affairs in Montreal on 12 October (for which he first gained approval from Mackenzie King) offered a good resumé of how he felt about Canada’s present position in the world:

  [Canada] is a sovereign nation and cannot take her attitude to the world docilely from Britain, or from the United States, or from anybody else. A Canadian’s first loyalty is not to the British Commonwealth of Nations, but to Canada and to Canada’s King, and those who deny this are doing, to my mind, a great disservice to the Commonwealth. If the Commonwealth, in a crisis, is to speak with one voice, it will be only because the component parts have thought out for themselves their own special problems, and made their contribution to the discussion, so that a true common factor of policy can be reached.73

  This affronted some imperialists and constitutionalists but went down very well with the French Canadians.

  A week earlier, Franklin Roosevelt had delivered his famous ‘Quarantine’ speech in Chicago, the fact of which may have emboldened JB. Seemingly out of the blue, whilst opening a bridge, FDR spoke of the need to take steps against the world ‘gangster states’ and, in effect, directly challenged the isolationists in his own party and beyond. He went on to say that if a disease begins to spread, ‘the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect … against the spread of the disease’.74 Although Roosevelt was simply issuing a warning, this was still a great moment for JB since, as he told Gilbert Murray (enjoining him to keep it secret), this speech ‘was the culmination of a long conspiracy between us’.75

  Hard on the heels of this, Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, came to Ottawa to talk to Mackenzie King about the possibility of a Nine Power Treaty Conferen
ce on Japan, whose invasion of China in July 1937 was causing huge disquiet in North America. He impressed on Mackenzie King, and almost certainly on JB since he stayed at Government House, how dangerous things had become. After Hull left, JB wrote to Neville Chamberlain about Hull’s visit and American attitudes. Chamberlain replied that he had made a point of speaking in public to encourage those elements in America that favoured the Chicago speech, but that there were difficulties still to be overcome by the President before it could be said he had the people with him. The difficulties included the improving of trade relations when there was the question of war debt still to be resolved. He issued a stern warning to JB that a ‘policy of silence’ was best at that moment, something backed up by the Chancellor, Sir John Simon, when he wrote to JB the following week.

  What JB did not know was that Chamberlain and his advisers had been told that Mackenzie King was looking askance at JB’s intrusions into politics,76 and that was the reason why they were keen to warn him off. As a result of Chamberlain’s and Simon’s cool responses to his letters, JB shut up.

  *

  About this time, Augustus, his most substantial work of Roman history, was published by Hodder and Stoughton, and dedicated ‘To my friend William Lyon Mackenzie King, four times Prime Minister of Canada’. King chose to take this dedication as an amende honorable for the hurt he felt he had suffered from JB’s determination to keep him at arm’s length.77 It was obviously no such thing.

  JB did not see Augustus as a genius, like his great-uncle Julius Caesar, but as a practical statesman, a builder not concerned with fancies, a ‘Scotsman in excelsis’, brilliant at carrying out the ideas of others, and someone he thought had saved his world from disintegration. The book gave him a chance to reflect on the nature of dictatorship. On the last page, in particular, he drew some stern comparisons with the present: