By now the old man was entering his final years alone. His beloved wife had died, his remaining son was teaching in Toronto and his flagging energies were devoted to defending the empire’s unity in its hour of need. The South African war was supposed to be a quick and glorious fight, but it soon turned into a bitter and costly struggle. Quebec refused to support the imperial venture, and the war soon widened existing national divisions. Laurier found himself defied within his own party by Henri Bourassa.
In his last public address, delivered on January 6, 1902, in a quavering voice, Grant appealed to Quebeckers, saying he understood why they wouldn’t want to fight for an English king in a faraway land. But he reserved his bitterest irony for those, including Laurier, who opposed the idea of Canada contributing to the cost of imperial defence:
We give the bravest of our children to die by the bullet or still deadlier disease; but some one else must pay their wages. We do not grudge the blood of our sons, but with a treasury so full … we grudge food, clothing and transport for them. Let Canada accept the blood money without a blush. This state of things cannot continue. The empire must be practically as well as nominally united.
Unity of nation and empire, unity of one through the consolidation of the other: this had been his life’s vision, and he stood by it to his last breath, as Canadian soldiers were cut down in the velds and kopjes of a faraway country, as the British herded the Boers into their new invention, the concentration camp, and thousands died of disease and starvation. I do not know whether my great-grandfather knew, at the end, that the empire had come to this, because in May 1902, as the war dragged into its third year, he died in his sleep, at the age of sixty-seven.
3
AFTER THE SOMME
William Grant was at his father’s bedside in those final days. He heard the old man whisper, “Give me a chance; Oh my God, give me a chance.” Then later, the son heard the father, his eyes shut, imploring, “Get it done, get it done quickly.” After days of growing weaker, he whispered “Jessie”—his wife’s name—and then slipped into unconsciousness.
On May 13, 1902, there was a funeral service at Convocation Hall at Queen’s, and afterward a procession of the coffin through the streets of Kingston. William followed the coffin to its final resting place, noting that the crowd lining the streets was as large as the one that had come out for the funeral of Kingston’s other favourite son, Sir John A. Macdonald. Late that afternoon, George Monro Grant was laid to rest in Cataraqui Cemetery, next to his wife and his son Geordie.
The death of parents always unleashes paradoxical emotions: grief, guilt, relief and liberation all at once. We can only infer which of these was strongest. The son could step out of his father’s shadow, yet the shadow had given his life shape and meaning. Moreover, he was now alone. He was a schoolmaster at Upper Canada College and, as he looked to the future, he saw before him a solitary life of teaching and scholarship. As for marriage, he did not think himself much of a catch: small in stature, wiry and balding, a sedentary and unadventurous bachelor approaching middle age. It is not that women had not caught his eye. From afar, he had admired Maude Parkin, the daughter of his principal at Upper Canada, George Parkin. In 1902 Parkin left for England to set up the Rhodes Scholarships and Maude left with her family. After the Parkins departed, William left UCC too, taking up another job as a schoolmaster at St. Andrew’s College near Toronto.
For the next two years, he wrote a scholarly biography of his father, Victorian in length and in piety. Principal Grant registers admiration, love and astonishment at the energy, briskness and drive of his father. He had truly been a “steam engine in trousers,” as one of the old man’s friends used to say. Poring over his father’s diaries and letters gave the son a last chance to stay close, but once the biography was published, we can imagine the silence that flowed into his life.
Fifteen years later, he admitted that he continued to see his father “so vividly that I am not yet fully sure in my own mind whether it was dream or vision, or resurrection if you call it so.”
His father was gone but his father’s causes remained his own. He believed his vocation now was to teach bright young men to lead lives devoted to public service in Canada and the empire. One of these young men at St. Andrew’s College was Vincent Massey, heir to the Massey-Harris tractor fortune. Truth was, Grant was soon restless at St. Andrew’s College, teaching worthy sentiments to the rich young sons of the Ontario business elite.
After his biography of his father appeared in 1904, he took himself off to France and lived in Paris for two years. There he researched and wrote the life of Samuel de Champlain, founder of Quebec and New France, and mastered French and took classes at the Sorbonne. He loved Paris and even a decade later could still remember the names of the tastiest dishes in his favourite brasseries. He remained a committed francophile for the rest of his life. Living in France seems to have changed his view of the country back home, for among historians of his generation, he was unusual in his interest in the contribution of France to the making of his country. He spent several years editing Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle France for publication in English. When he wrote his History of Canada for the secondary schools of Ontario, many English-speaking Canadians found it strange that he should attach equal importance to the French fact in the making of Canadian distinctiveness. British Columbia school districts refused to use the book because of its francophile bias.
He was ambitious and hoped, for a time, he would become famous. For a Canadian of his generation, fame meant success in England, and when a chance for academic advancement offered itself, he took it. Alfred Beit, a business partner of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, endowed a lectureship at Oxford and Grant put his name forward. He had reason to be hopeful. In 1894, he had been the first Canadian to win a first-class degree in classics at Oxford. In 1906, he was named the first Beit Lecturer in Colonial History and quickly settled back into life in his old college, Balliol. He proved to be a productive scholar, completing worthy tomes on Canadian constitutional development and an edited volume of the Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial Series. Scholarly pursuits had some appeal to him. He was a shy man by nature, convivial in company, but never happier than when reading. He was also shrewd enough to realize that while he might lack his father’s self-confidence, he surpassed him in scholarship.
He would make his own mark as a scholar, but he was too full of life to be satisfied with the musty joys of the Colonial Office archives. He once said there were few sights more joyless than a library full of scholars buried in forgotten tomes. Boring academic papers could rouse him to scathing acts of mimicry. He was a scholar all right, but a restless one.
At Oxford, an unusual experiment in education was just then starting—the Workers’ Educational Association, or WEA, an alliance between labour and the universities to provide tutorial classes for working-class adults. Grant went to the meetings at Ruskin College and became an enthusiastic tutor for the WEA. Later in life, he was to become a founder of the WEA in Canada, as well as a supporter of Frontier College, a pioneering initiative to take university education to the logging camps and mining sites of northern Ontario. There was a certain noblesse oblige in this idea of university men teaching the working classes, but there was something admirable in the idea, too. He really did believe the class divisions of an industrial country could be healed by good teaching.
Being Beit Lecturer offered Grant a further means of escape into a wider and more influential world, since it brought him into contact with the leading British imperial figures of his day. The colonial governor of South Africa, Lord Milner, was now back in Britain, assembling around him a group of bright young imperialists known as the Milner Kindergarten. Grant delivered academic papers with Milner in the chair and befriended Milner’s intense acolyte Lionel Curtis, a Boer War veteran turned imperialist intellectual.
The Boer Wars left unclear what duties the dominions owed the mother country in a European conflict. Lionel Curtis pressed this issue
especially hard. Were the dominions—South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—sovereign over issues of peace and war? If they were truly sovereign, would they come to the aid of the mother country if she were attacked by Germany? If they were not sovereign, would they be automatically at war if Germany attacked? Curtis and Milner created the Round Table, an informal circle of bright young men from around the empire, to hammer out an answer. Grant took part in these debates but refused to be drawn in too far, arguing that Canada couldn’t make commitments until the threat from Germany and other states materialized.
One of the places where these questions were discussed was an imposing three-storey brick house modestly called the Cottage, in Goring-on-Thames, near Oxford. This was the home of George R. Parkin, now secretary of the Rhodes Trust. An elegant, handsome, supremely self-confident, pious Victorian always photographed in a wing collar and frock coat, Parkin was the most influential living exponent of imperial federation and was such a devoted admirer of William Grant’s father that he kept a photograph of George Monro Grant hanging on the wall of his study. Despite their mutual admiration, the contrast between Parkin and Grant was interesting. Grant remained the doughty, persevering Scottish Canadian, while Parkin had passed himself off as more British than the British. William took a respectful but ironic view of Parkin, once remarking that “I don’t think he got God and Oxford and the British Empire wholly separated.”
The Grants’ vision of empire was less romantic than Parkin’s. While the Grants thought Cecil Rhodes was a rascal, George Parkin was carrying out the old rascal’s dying wish to create a scholarship that would create a new English-speaking elite among the empires of the day.
Nobody meeting the very British Parkin could have guessed that he had begun life amidst the farms and lumber mill towns of New Brunswick’s St. John River valley. He had started out as a rural schoolmaster and had managed, by sheer force of personality, to get himself to Oxford in the early 1870s. There he astonished audiences at Union Debates with his vision of the British Empire as the bearer of Christian civilization to the lesser breeds. Alfred Milner attributed his dedication to the imperialist cause to the impact of the young Parkin. After his miraculous year at Oxford, Parkin returned to schoolmastering in New Brunswick, but he had made such a vivid impression that when the Imperial Federation League was looking for a spokesman, they sought out the tall and impressive young man from New Brunswick. Through the late 1880s and early 1890s, he became the movement’s chief representative, travelling to Australia and New Zealand and across Canada preaching that the dominions should seek representation in the imperial parliament in London. In this way, they could affirm their national identity and their imperial destiny.
Parkin was a master of the podium, but he did not convince every audience. Imperial federation proved controversial in the Antipodes. Most Australians and New Zealanders didn’t like the idea that their citizens might be taxed and sent to die in imperial wars. Imperial federation drew a warmer hearing in Canada because of the threatening proximity of the United States. Parkin, like Grant, felt certain that Canada could not survive unless the British connection was paramount in Canadian national life.
For William Grant the Cottage at Goring-on-Thames would have felt like the old family house in Kingston, if on a grander scale: carpeted with Afghan and Persian rugs, the shelves of the study library crammed with history, philosophy and theology, the drawing rooms filled with the sounds of piano, all available surfaces crowded with the African knickknacks the paterfamilias had brought back from his travels. On becoming secretary of the Rhodes Trust, Parkin had journeyed to southern Africa to visit Rhodes’s grave. At some dusty roadside stand, he brought as presents for his daughters, Maude, Alice and Marjorie, and his son, Raleigh, a set of wooden carvings of a wildebeest, an ostrich, a leopard, a hippo and a giraffe. These endearing carvings were to follow the Parkin children and their descendants through every twist and turn of their lives.
In 1909 and 1910, William returned again and again to Goring to enjoy the company of the Parkin girls, especially Maude. She was six years his junior, a vivacious and accomplished blue-stocking. She had graduated from McGill, still a relatively rare achievement for a woman of her time, and, after following her father to England, was serving as a warden at a woman’s residence at the University of Manchester. In the photographs of her as a young woman, with hair piled up on top of her head and prim white blouse buttoned up to the neck, the striking features are her thin pursed lips and the set jaw. She was a thoughtful, earnest young woman, but also stylish, refined and full of life. At Manchester, she impressed many with her organizational abilities and skill with undergraduates. One of her friendships was with a young chemist, Chaim Weizmann, just then beginning his career as a leader of British Zionism. Maude Parkin made a sufficiently vivid impression on Weizmann that, forty years later, when he was president of Israel, he still remembered his old Manchester colleague.
At the end of each Manchester term, Maude would return to Goring, and there, as often as not, she would find herself sometimes alone in the salon, sometimes in the gardens, with William Grant. She would have noted that her father, on whom she doted, thought him a clever and coming man. But she would have had little idea of William’s feelings for her, for they were all bottled up inside.
By the summer of 1910, Grant had been lured home to Canada by an offer of an endowed chair in colonial and Canadian history at Queen’s. He had been away six years. If he remained in England, he knew that he would never be accepted as one of the tribe. Parkin had done well passing as an Englishman, but Grant lacked his graces and political finesse. If Grant went home to Queen’s, he reckoned, life might be more provincial, but he knew he belonged there.
It was not until early August 1910, with departure for Canada only a month away, that he screwed up his courage and wrote “Miss Maude” a letter in which he declared his true feelings. He admitted that he had always seen himself as a confirmed bachelor, but their last few months together had changed his plans for life. He confessed that he was old, pushing forty, but hoped there was still the play of life in him yet. He burst out finally: “I have come to love you very deeply. There! It is said now, and nothing else makes much difference.”
He told her that with her at his side “we can do ten times as much for Canada” as he could do alone, and then, realizing she might think he wanted her just for what she could bring to his work, he blurted out: “My dear, whenever I think of you, when I speak your name, the pulses in my neck quiver and tighten, and all my blood seems to be in my throat.”
It was a touching letter and it did the trick. Within a week, they met in London, Maude accepted him, Mr. and Mrs. Parkin gave their approval and the engagement was announced.
It is worth pausing over the phrase in William Grant’s declaration about working together for Canada. Commit to help each other, commit to stay with each other in sickness and in health, certainly, but commit to Canada? Yet it was not just a fine phrase, but central to Grant’s sense of what his life—and hers—were for.
By mid-September 1910, he was on his way across the Atlantic, back to Kingston, and she back to Manchester. Letters, sometimes two a day, would pass back and forth between them. He confessed, “I am not a great man. I have read their biographies and they all write to their lady loves as if they were addressing a large and highly cultivated Public Meeting … whereas I write to you about You and Me.”
Sometimes, as the days passed and a letter would not come, he would break into a kind of half-comic despair:
Will you always love me? Always? In the commonplace days? If my hair falls out? If the maid gives warning and we have to cook our own dinner? If I make a bad speech? And my class despise my lectures? If all goes wrong? When you are overworked, and we have to take a second best holiday because we can’t afford the one we want? Will you always love me?
As 1910 turned into 1911, she wanted to know what position he took on the issue of trade reciprocity, the grea
t question dividing the country. Laurier went into the elections with a proposal to lower tariffs on all American goods. The Conservatives opposed, believing that reciprocity would jeopardize Canadian manufacturers, weaken the British connection and threaten the identity of the country. Maude’s father was almost certainly with the Conservatives on this issue. Grant sided with Laurier and the Liberals but added, pointedly, that “we prate of our Canadian nationalism … yet we have so little real confidence in our nationality that a large part of us think it likely to founder if the US take off their tariff on a few of our natural products. A somewhat precarious nationalism, surely!”
In the election of 1911, Robert Borden became prime minister, and Laurier was swept from office on fears in English Canada that continental integration with the Americans would weaken Canada and on suspicions in Quebec that Laurier had wanted to tie the country too closely to the British Empire.
Over the seven months that Maude and William were apart, from September 1910 to April 1911, they slowly revealed their secrets to each other. She wrote to him a solemn letter about her ideals and about the “need for grace and refinement and restraint as well as strength,” and he agreed but told her that these were very hard ideals to realize in Canada, where “the tendency is all slap-dash hustle.” He jokingly called her “my little Puritan,” but he knew he was one too. They were both faithful churchgoers, yet something was changing inside him, taking him away from the faith of his father. He confessed to her, “I rarely, terribly rarely now feel the need of Divine Aid or Communion. I want to work for my fellows, to be in communion with them, but God comes terribly little into my thoughts and I fear Christ even less.”
The simple truth may have been that he was discovering, in those solitary months alone, grading student papers, eating a lonely meal at the local Chinese restaurant in Kingston, waiting for her letters to come, pouring out his heart to her, that love and desire mattered more to him than faith.
True Patriot Love Page 6
