Part 1 (1/2)
Merchant Princes.
by PETER C. NEWMAN.
COMPANY OF ADVENTURES.
PROLOGUE.
To be a Bay man was like belonging to a religious order that now only bottles brandy but had once touched the hand of G.o.d.
THE PRIORY AT THE DON BOIS in Ess.e.x, northeast of London at the far side of Epping Forest, is more than six centuries old, and feels it. It was, until the lands of the Roman Catholic Church were taken over by the state, occupied by a devout brotherhood of Benedictine monks. Its floors slope towards lopsided windows set three feet deep in stone alcoves; carpets are worn thin from generations of pacing; the air seems stale and heavy, though the visitor senses not so much decay as the weight of history.
The onl~ functioning monument to the priory's original purpose is a crypt, below the main vestibule, that leads into an underground pa.s.sageway connecting the building to the nearby abbey. Every Sunday morning the priory's owner still makes the subterranean journey to read the lesson for local paris.h.i.+oners. The priorys furnis.h.i.+ngs are a decorator's nightmare of crossed Zulu swords, narwhal tusks, abandoned harps, boulle cabinets, overstuffed sofas (which Queen Victoria might have envied), George Chinnery canvases of early trading sequences in Canton, Shanghai and Hong Kong, plus the obligatory hunting scenes (hounds, foxes, splashes of blood) that decorate almost every upper-cla.s.s Englishman's hearth.
This is the home of Sir William ”Tony 11 Keswick, the Hudson's Bay Company's last merchant adventurer.
An imposing presence, Keswick (p.r.o.nounced Kezzick) turns out to be more than six feet tall, with a ruddy complexion and the commanding air of an Imperial Army brigadier, which lie was. He appears to be the ideal British aristocrat-a cross between a Puncb cover and a bulldog. Although he is eighty-four and his periwinkle eyes have grown watery, he retains an aura of authority.*
”Look here,” Sir William exclaims by way of introduction, showing me his pa.s.sport, ”I'm the only Englishman who officially lists his occupation as 'Merchant Adventurer.' Gets me into awful trouble crossing borders, particularly in the Orient. 'Merchant' is easy; that means someone prepared to lay his hands on anything. But 'Adventurer'-the customs people have trouble with that. Still, I love being an adventurer-the romance of it, to risk everything, to make things go.”
Three decades (1943-72) a director of the Hudson's Bay Company and for nearly thirteen years its Governor, Keswick regards his t.i.t-ne with the Canadian trading giant as the highlight of a crowded and audacious life. ”I adored the HBC,” he sighs. ”I'd have done anything for the Company, within reason-or without reason. It was a wonderfully romantic concern, and its people would have cut off their hands to help. We British are fanatically romantic about our history. The magnificent Prince Rupert was the Company's first governor, our great Duke of Marlborough the third. The
I keep trying to forget the briefing b) a mutual friend that while Sir Wil liam is indeed a distinguished merchant adventurer, he is also a very careful man. So careful, I was told, that he has b.u.t.tons on the flies of his trousers-just in case the zipper sticks.
second-the Duke of York-gave it up only to become King of England. I've seen the minute book in which the Duke apologizes for not being at the next board meeting because he has just taken on the throne. I mean, that's absolutely honey to a Briton. You'd pay a dollar more for your twenty -dollar share if you could get that thrown in-even if it has no practical merit!”
Keswick's claim to being a merchant adventurer is not entirely based on his time with the HBC. In 1886, his Scottish grandfather took over the firm founded by Dr William Jardine, who with his partner, James Matheson, had in 1832 established Jardine, Matheson, the company of piratical Far Eastern traders and opium dealers that became the far Pacific's most princely hong, and later the model forJames Clavell's n.o.ble House and Taipan. The Keswichs have run it ever since, and Sir William himself was a director and chairman of Matheson's, the London affiliate, for thirty-two years.
WETALK INTO THE AYFFRNOON, and several cups of tea have grown cold between us when Keswick starts rambling on about his great heroes-Hannibal, the Carthaginian general whose army used elephants to cross the Alps, and Sir Edward Peac.o.c.k, the Canadianborn financial Merlin with whom he sat on the board of the t4BC-then briefly switches to his favourite villains: Moses and Cromwell. ”They were such negative boysalways telling us not to do things.”
*Not only a romantic but a nuschicvous romantic, Sir XNilliam named hi,, middle son John Chippendale Keswick because the boy was conceived in ~i Chippendale bed. The husband of Lady Sarah Ramsay and a successful merchant adventurer in his own right (he is chairman of l4ambros Bank), the vounger Keswick is still known as Chip.
I bring the conversation around to the Hudson's Bay Company and remind him that I have come to see The Chair. No outsider has ever seen it.
Keswick hesitates, then motions me to follow. We climb to a small room on the priory's top floor. St.u.r.dy and slightly oversized with a straigiit back, The Chair has a large upholstered seat. We stand very still, looking at it and at one another. On The Chair's seat, Keswick has reproduced in perfect needlepoint the Governor's Flag of the Hudson's Bay Company, with its intricate design that includes a fox, four beavers and twin elk rearing up on their hind legs. I can't resist looking at the former Governor's hands. They are ham-like, his fingers so thick that he cannot close them in repose; the joints are swollen and bent by arthritis. Embroidering that seat must have been excruciatingly awkward and required angelic patience, ~1 quality not usually a.s.sociated with merchant adventurers.
Keswick breaks the silence. ”I'd never done anything like this before, but found gros-point needlework very soothing,” he says. ”One can think while working, with no ulterior motive ... I used to do it after hunting, have tea, then come up here ... Took me a year ... Soothing, what?”
We both know he's fibbing. There are easier hobbies to soothe the soul But not the soul of this Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, one of its greatest, who was so upset about leaving his post (because he chose not to preside over the Company's departure from England) that he spent most of a year st.i.tching this chair, working out his sorrow and his frustration. ”I was and am in love with the old Company,” he admits, as he leads me downstairs. ”I don't know why one is so sentimental, really.”
We part. ”You're talking to a fanatical son of a gun,” he shrugs.
Xiv
I would never have guessed.
Keswick turns away, and says to n.o.body in particular: ”Takes a h.e.l.l of a lot of killing, the Hudson's Bay and shuts the door firmly behind me.
TIIEMEMORY OF THAF BRITTLE AFrFRN00N atTheydon Priory stuck with me during the writing of this third and final volume of my Hudson's Bay history.
Tony Keswick's enduring pa.s.sion for the Company was by no means unique.
Some of its bachelor officers willed it their savings; one woman executive confided to me that she loved the HBC more than either of her husbands.
Even the gruniblers, fed tip with their long, slow lives in some dreary posting, would vo,~N that thev were d.a.m.n well going to ”retire early”-after only thirty-eight years in the service.
, Fhe one emotion the IiBC never engendered was neutrality. In Canadas North, many Inuit and Indians insisted its initials should really stand for the Hungry Belly Company, while their women denounced it as the h.o.r.n.y Boys'Club. No one touched by the Hudson's Bay Company's Darwinian will to survive remained una~-fected. To be a Bay man was like belonging to a religious order that now only bottles brandy-but had once touched the hand of G.o.d.
BY 1870, ”IFIENTHIS VOLUME BEGINS, the IIBCs feudal empire was starting to unravel, its halcyon days buried with Sir George Simpson, the Company's great instrument of thrust and thunder, who had served as its viceroy from 1821 to 1860. It was under his Napoleonic direction, exercised from the belly of a birchbark canoe, that the I IBC reached its apogee, spreading its mandate across a private empire that encompa.s.sed a twelfth of
the earth's land surface.* In 1870, the Company's landholdings were sold to the newly confederated Dominion of Canada for Y,300,000 plus t.i.tle to seven million acres, its trading monopoly having been disrupted by the influx of settlers eager to till the rich soils of the Canadian plains. Following a brief interregnum, the HBC came under the spell of Donald Alexander Smith, the acquisitive Labrador fur trader who settled the first Riel Rebellion and eventually rose not only to preside over the FIBC, the Bank of Montreal and Royal Trust but also became the dominant financier of the Canadian Pacific Railway and the man who hammered in its last spike. Having lost one empire, the Hudson's Bay Company moved to consolidate another, establis.h.i.+ng its dominant influence over Canada's Arctic, organizing the trade in fox pelts, and eventually manning more than two hundred posts in the Canadian North. In western Canada, the retail trade was channelled into half a dozen downtown department stores that eventually became the nucleus of a mammoth merchandising operation, currently composed of 540 outlets with 38 million square feet of s.p.a.ce, selling goods worth $5 billion a year. There were other ventures, too, such as the HBCs entry into merchant s.h.i.+pping during the First World War, when nearly three hundred vessels flew the Company's flag, running the gauntlet with essential food supplies and ammunition to France and Tsarist Russia, a third of them sunk by torpedoes en route.
Between 1920 and 1970, when the Company's charter was finally transferred to Canada, turf wars raged between the HBCs patrician British Governors and the Canadian Committee's Winnipeg-based Good Old Boys. At times the internal struggle was more important
For a chronicle of Simpsons reign, see Caesars of the Wilderness, Chapters 9, 10, 14.
Xvi
to these memo-warriors than trying to modernize the Company, but the HBC did expand into oil as well as urban real estate. It captured control of such significant retail chains as Zellers, Fields and Simpsons. In 1979, Kenneth Thomson purchased three-quarters of HBCs issued shares-more than anyone else had ever held-for $641 million cash.
The second half of this book deals with the HBCs boardroom politics, as vicious and fascinating an endgame as was ever played out in the wild fur country. Under its new owner, the Bay lost more money than it had netted in the three previous centuries and came very close to foundering. The drama of that downfall and subsequent resurrection, revealed here for the first time, concludes the HBC story and this book. This volume's final section features the first intimate profiles of Lord Thomson-Canada's wealthiest individual-and his son and heir, David, who easily rank among the world's, not just Canada's, most fascinating capitalists.