From Ottawa, the Royal tour travelled to Toronto, then continued west to Winnipeg, stopping variously on the way, and on to Regina, then Medicine Hat, Calgary, and through the Rockies to Vancouver. As they sailed out of Vancouver Harbour on the way to Victoria, 25,000 voices sang ‘Will ye no’ come back again?’ which was charming, if unhistorical, considering the King’s Hanoverian ancestry.
At places, the countryside around emptied, as people came to town to see the couple. Melville, a town of 4,000, swelled for the day to 60,000; at Edmonton, 90,000 grew to more than 200,000. At night-time, groups of people would stand on the side of the railway to watch the train go by, remaining silent so as not to disturb Their Majesties’ sleep. It is hard to overstate the impact such an extraordinary entourage had on the disparate communities that encountered it during the tour across Canada. The daylight had not yet been let in on the magic.
Three weeks after they arrived on Canadian soil, the King and Queen travelled to the United States, where King George VI made a deep impression on the President and vice versa. The King considered that the twenty-four hours he spent at Roosevelt’s country home, Hyde Park, was the apogee of the entire tour.* George VI told Mackenzie King that he felt exactly as though a father had been giving him his most careful and wise advice.34 The mutual regard and trust between King and President were to prove very beneficial during the war years.
The King and Queen arrived back in Canada after their five-day visit to the United States and visited New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island. One way and another they had seen parts of most of Canada, except for the far north. After a few days fishing on the Cascapedia River, the Tweedsmuirs travelled, with their staff, by ship from Quebec to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to say goodbye to the Royal party.
At a station at Truro, sixty miles north of Halifax, the Tweedsmuirs boarded the train, where JB was invested with the GCVO (Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order), awarded for distinguished personal service to the sovereign, and in his gift. Shuldham Redfern was knighted. The party received a rapturous reception when they returned to Halifax, and then there were the ‘affecting farewells’ onboard ship. JB described the scene in a letter to Charlie Dick: ‘a golden sunset, something like a hundred thousand people, and a forest of shipping, and the great liner, led by [Canadian] destroyers and followed by [British] cruisers, disappearing in the haze’.35
The rip-roaring success of the month-length tour was not a surprise to its architects, but the way the French Canadians reacted was, nevertheless, a profound relief and a cause for pride. And much of that was due to the personality of the Queen, her smile, unaffected grace and very fashionable clothes. Canadians thought her more beautiful in the flesh than in pictures. The King conducted himself with sincerity, courtesy and friendliness, and the bitter taste left in Canadian mouths by the Abdication was finally washed away. In an age when only newsreels and newspapers had pictures, and those only monochrome, the colourful, warm and distinguished presence of the head of the Commonwealth and his consort had an enormous and enduring impact on Canadians.
As JB wrote to a friend:
When I induced Their Majesties to come out here last autumn I did not realize I was pulling the string of such a shower-bath!…
Our Monarchs are most remarkable young people. I have always been deeply attached to the King, and I realize now more than ever what a wonderful mixture he is of shrewdness, kindliness and humour. As for the Queen, she has a perfect genius for the right kind of publicity…36
The King wrote in his own hand a personal letter to JB averring that the tour had done him ‘untold good’, and in a letter to Susie the Queen wrote, ‘We feel strengthened and encouraged by our trip, and filled with love and pride in Canada and her grand people.’ In the same letter she asked for a Karsh photograph of JB in ‘an Indian headdress’ for, it is said, she wanted to show the princesses what a North American ‘Indian’ looked like. The King told Burgon Bickersteth, a senior Canadian academic, who happened to be in England in the summer of 1939: ‘Well Bickersteth, they [the Tweedsmuirs] are an extremely difficult couple to follow.’37
Violet Markham, on whom no fly ever settled, teased JB about the real reason for the tour, namely the Royal trip to Washington and New York. She praised him for arranging it. She knew he couldn’t openly agree with her but hoped that he would send her ‘a transatlantic wink at the same time. To have engineered that visit to the President was a real stroke of genius on your part and may have incalculable consequences for the world.’38
The tour had also had a substantial impact in the United Kingdom, thanks to the newsreels and the broadcasts of speeches. The nation was so gripped that, when the King and Queen travelled to Buckingham Palace from Waterloo Station in an open carriage, huge crowds turned out to welcome them back. This prompted them to come out onto the balcony, accompanied by Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose, to acknowledge the enthusiasm. Pathé News reported that it was like the Coronation all over again.
At the Royal Luncheon given by the Lord Mayor at the Guildhall in the City of London the following day, at which Queen Mary was also present, George VI delivered the last of the speeches that JB had written for him:
[In Canada,] I saw everywhere not only the mere symbol of the British Crown; I saw also, flourishing as strongly as they do here, the institutions which have developed, century after century, beneath the aegis of that Crown; institutions, British in origin, British in their slow and almost casual growth, which, because they are grounded root and branch on British faith in liberty and justice, mean more to us even than the splendour of our history or the glories of our English tongue … For it was not alone the actual presence of their King and Queen that made them [Canadians] open their hearts to us; their welcome, it seemed to me, was also an expression of their thankfulness for those rights of free citizenship which are the heritage of every member of our great Commonwealth of Nations.39
According to George VI’s biographer, John Wheeler-Bennett:
… even to this congeries of connoisseurs both the delivery and the content of the King’s speech were a revelation, and the effect of its import was not lost on the world outside. In Europe it was hailed as a declaration of beliefs and an indication that Britain was prepared to defend her democratic institutions; in America it struck a chord of response, warm and immediate; while from Canada Mr. Mackenzie King telegraphed to Sir Alan Lascelles: ‘I am sure that no Sovereign has ever uttered words fraught with greater good for mankind.’40
Tommy Lascelles told Mackenzie King that he had never heard George VI speak so effectively or so movingly. As both King and Queen were to say on more than one occasion about the North American tour, ‘This has made us.’41 Wheeler-Bennett believed that it was a pivotal episode in the King’s life, giving him self-confidence and assurance, and marking the end of his kingly apprenticeship.
In late July, Violet Markham visited the Tweedsmuirs at Rideau Hall. She found JB in good spirits, full of jokes and stories as in the old days. He told her that he had decided to kill off Edward Leithen in his latest novel. On being told it was the worst literary murder since Trollope killed off Mrs Proudie, he replied, ‘Leithen and the others have been on hand too long and I am getting bored with them and so must other people. It’s time they disappeared.’42
Despite the succession of bleak news stories from Europe, which had served as a counterpoint to the upbeat broadcasts from Canada, Anna and Walter decided to go ahead with their biennial visit and arrived in July, together with Alastair who had achieved a good Second in his ‘Schools’ (Johnnie had managed a Fourth), and wanted to spend the summer in Canada before enrolling at the University of Virginia.43 The family party travelled to the remote port and railhead of Churchill in Manitoba, on the western shore of Hudson Bay, in a train now returned to its usual chocolate-brown livery, to pick up Johnnie who was on his way back in the SS Nascopie from Baffin Island.
Johnnie disembarked, not ‘a wild man of the snows,
but a most elegant and civilised young man’,44 as JB told Violet Markham. And one who had not even heard of the Munich Agreement. He was completely cured of his illness. The party then travelled to Jasper so that Anna and Walter could see the Rockies, and further to the fertile Peace River district. JB called it ‘a sort of land beyond the North Wind, which the Elizabethan voyagers dreamed of’. At Tupper Creek they met some of the 500 anti-Nazi Sudeten Germans – amongst them a former member of the Reichstag – who had found refuge there, and who touchingly sang the National Anthem.
The news when they arrived back in Ottawa was heart-stopping, Germany having that day signed the Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union. This piece of treachery on the part of Joseph Stalin sank everyone’s spirits and prompted Anna and Walter to leave earlier than originally planned. It was as well, for they arrived home in Peebles only the day before war was declared. On 1 September the Germans marched into Poland. The British ADCs and footmen prepared to leave Rideau Hall for home. ‘Eheu! “Now is the whole Round Table broken up” ’, reads JB’s diary for that day.45
Johnnie and Alastair immediately joined the Canadian Army, Johnnie receiving a commission in the Governor-General’s Life Guards while Alastair, the better horseman, joined the Princess Louise Dragoon Guards. This decision points not just to their father’s commitment to Canada, but also their own. They were based in Ottawa initially, which was some comfort to Susie who was, not unnaturally, anxious about the rest of the family on the other side of the Atlantic. Early in September they received a letter from William saying that he was going to marry Nesta Crozier, the daughter of an army officer who lived near Oxford. Although not even Susie had met her, William’s indifferent health and unsettled ways inclined his parents to think that it would be good for him to be married, with someone to look after him. The couple married at Elsfield in October, Anna and Walter making the journey from Scotland to attend the ceremony. JB told Sandy Gillon: ‘By all accounts William’s spouse is a most charming girl and well-fitted to be a poor man’s wife.’46
On 3 September, Britain declared war on Germany, but Canada remained neutral for another week, ensuring that a certain amount of war materiel, aeroplanes and munitions in particular, could be moved across the border from the United States, without violating the latter’s Neutrality Act. (The arms embargo was effectively ended in early November, when a new Neutrality Act was passed that allowed a ‘cash-and-carry’ arrangement with Britain.) Mackenzie King played the political game acutely, jollying along his colleagues, while not frightening the French-Canadian constituency. JB later told the King that the credit for bringing Canada into the war with almost complete unanimity belonged to the Prime Minister, ‘by not asking for premature commitments he prevented people going off on the wrong lines and then being ashamed to retrace their steps’.47
Just after midnight on Sunday, 10 September, JB was wakened and asked to sign the proclamation of war for Canada, which was then relayed to London to be approved by George VI. Instead of the King asking Canada to declare war for him, Canada asked him to declare war on behalf of Canada. According to the British High Commissioner, this was ‘the outcome of a deliberate decision of a free people by their own representatives in a free parliament’.48 Alastair later recalled that only twice in Canada had he seen the light go out of his father’s eyes – once when endorsing a death warrant and the day he signed Canada’s declaration of war. He was sick at heart. To Anna he wrote, ‘I hate this war as I never hated the last. Then we were fighting with a barbarous and dangerous enemy, but at any rate he was adult. Now I feel that we are contending with diseased and vicious children.’49
‘The only duties left to me which matter will be vis-à-vis the United States and consultations with Ministers,’ he told Walter, ‘otherwise any stuffed shirt could be Governor-General. I do not feel too happy at the prospect, but of course I won’t budge unless I am definitely recalled. It is rather a miserable time, because the weather is exquisite and sharpens the contrast between the beauty of nature and the folly of man … In 1914 the Germany we fought had dignity and history behind it; the present régime seems to be a mere oozing of filth from the gutters.’50
He entertained Americans – bankers, industrialists, journalists and the like – at Rideau Hall, giving influential people space and time to make fruitful connections. He also met with a number of patriotic organisations, since he was honorary President of most of them. On 13 September he prorogued Parliament, with Alastair acting as ADC. ‘It makes me want to howl to see him in khaki,’ JB told Walter, ‘for he is the living image of our Alastair, only about half a foot taller.’51
Walter was JB’s most trusted confidant, for he could depend on the Scots lawyer to be completely discreet. Even so, he sometimes wrote cryptically. For example, when severely condemning the anti-Semitic comments of the Peebleshire MP, Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay (imprisoned under the Defence of the Realm regulations in wartime), he referred to him not by name but, ironically, as ‘our friend’.
JB nicknamed his brother the ‘Peebles Fuehrer’ since, as Town Clerk, his brother acquired a number of immediate wartime duties, such as organising the arrival and placement of children evacuated from Scottish cities, as well as the turning of the Peebles Hydro into a hospital. For her part, Anna, as a substantial literary celebrity in Scotland, devoted considerable time to speaking in public in aid of war charities.
JB thought much about propaganda to the USA, telling George VI, ‘I am certain that really authentic information of every kind sent by way of news to be the best, indeed the only, kind of propaganda.’52 He exchanged a number of letters with his old colleague, Lord (Hugh) Macmillan, who had been appointed Minister of Information as soon as war broke out. He offered him friendly guidance over the British or American personnel in the States that might be helpful, taking into account that the Ministry would have to tread very warily. ‘I have an excellent conning-tower in my position here, for I am not only in constant touch with American friends through correspondence, but we entertain a very large number of them.’53 He warned Macmillan of the mistakes made in the years before the United States entered the war in 1917: ‘Facts are the only argument that matter, and she [America] has a very shrewd eye for facts. She must be allowed to do her own persuasion, and there are many forces across the border working to that end.’
He also warned of battles with the War Office and the Admiralty. ‘As you know well, the minor military and naval mind has a passion for babyish secrecy. Ninety per cent in the last war of what was censored in the first three years could have been published with impunity.’ In the event, Macmillan lasted only four months in office for he was no administrator; moreover, he was dogged, unfairly, by the enormous size of his Ministry, built up in expectation of war in the late 1930s, which immediately attracted a great deal of criticism in Parliament and the country. At the end of 1939 he was replaced by Lord Reith, who famously reintegrated censorship into the Ministry, something that JB deprecated. ‘The idea of mixing up propaganda and censorship in one department is insane,’ he wrote to Walter, ‘for the essence of propaganda is that you have to fight censorship!’54
One person who JB encouraged to become, in effect, an agent of influence in the United States was Professor Moritz Bonn. He had worked on German propaganda sent to the United States during the Great War but was keen, for obvious reasons, to do the same for the British this time round. And he was particularly useful to them because he had experience of developing propaganda against them. Bonn crossed to the United States in October 1939 for a few months, staying at Rideau Hall in November. In the end he remained in America for the duration of the war: ‘Thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation and to the Institute of International Education, a number of visiting professorships were offered to me. I accepted them on the advice of Lord Tweedsmuir and Lord Lothian; both were of the opinion that such qualifications as I possessed were more useful in the Western Hemisphere than in England.’55 He was doing just the kind of propagan
da work for the Allies that Gilbert Murray and others had done during the Great War, but his status as a German Jewish refugee was a recommendation to his listeners that Murray could not command.
The best, but by no means the only, example of how JB worked round the fringes of diplomacy was the decisive part he played in closing the negotiations over the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP). This has been called, by a Canadian historian, ‘a highly irregular, somewhat surreptitious, but enormously effective intervention in something of great import to the Empire-Commonwealth’.56
Just after war broke out, the Canadian and Australian High Commissioners in London, Vincent Massey and Stanley Bruce, had – on their own initiative – met informally with Air Ministry officials to try to work out some kind of plan for training pilots in the Empire to serve in the RAF, since British aerodromes were likely to be vulnerable to German bombers in time of war. They believed Canada was the best-placed country for training aircrew from all over the Commonwealth. They were pushing at an open door, since the British government had also been thinking along these lines; but the government knew how sensitive Mackenzie King was, so Massey himself helped to draft the air-training proposal.
Mackenzie King was attracted by the idea, since such a plan had the advantage of conferring prestige on Canada, without her having to commit large numbers of troops overseas. This would prove impossible anyway without conscription, which he had promised not to introduce. So a British delegation, known as a ‘mission’, led by Lord Riverdale and including a former Governor of Kenya, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, who was acting as the chief negotiator for the RAF, arrived in late October; Australian and New Zealand delegations followed soon after.
It soon became apparent that the British mission had very little idea of how Canada (and indeed Australia and New Zealand) had changed and developed since the Statute of Westminster was enacted, both with regard to its image of itself and in its attitude to the outside world. The inclination of British officials to throw their weight about irritated the Canadian politicians, who felt patronised.
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps Page 47
