Part 11 (1/2)

Even if he didn't really say it. The closest Laurier came to coin ing that aphorism was during his Canadian Club speech in Ottawa onjanuary 18, 1904. ”Canada has been modest in its his tory, although its history is heroic in many ways,” he declared.

”But its history, in my estimation, is onlv commencing. It is com mencing in this centur ” y. The nineteenth century was the cen tury of the United States. I think we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century.”

CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 183.

Smith, who as a youth sixty years before had wors.h.i.+pped British royalty from afar, could now partic.i.p.ate in history's grandest festival of Empire, Queen Victoria's Diamond jubilee, celebrated in the s.h.i.+mmering summer of 1897.

The Empire on which the sun dared not set then encompa.s.sed more than a quarter of the earth's land surface occupied by 372 million people, whose representatives came to parade for their Queen. ”There were Rajput princes and Dyak headhunters,” rhapsodized Jan Morris in her epic Farewell the Trumpets, ”there were strapping troopers from Australia. Cypriots wore fezzes, Chinese wore conical straw hats. English gentlemen rode by, with virile moustaches and steel-blue eyes, and Indian lancers jangled past in resplendent crimson jerkins. Here was Lord Roberts of Kandahar. . . . Here was ... Wolseley, liero of Red River, Ashanti and Tel-elKebir. . . . That morning the Queen had telegraphed a Jubilee message to all her subjects....

The occasion was grand. The audience was colossal. The symbolism was deliberate. The Queen's message, however, was simple. 'From niv heart I thank my beloved people', she said. 'May Go~ bless them.”'

And He did. The forces that held the British Empire together seemed at times to be more theological than political. True adherents felt little confusion about what to believe or how to behave: G.o.d, Queen, Union Jack and family were the icons that mattered; being patriotic, disciplined, uncomplaining, frugal, chivalrous, stiffupper-lipped and not too expert in any one thing (the cult of the all-rounder reigned supreme)-these were the coveted virtues. ”The British as a whole,” Jan Morris astutely observed, ”

would have been shocked at any notion of wickedness to their imperialism, for theirs was a truly innocent bravado. They really thought their Empire was good ... they meant no harm, except to evil 184 LABRADOR SMITH.

”W, 'k-. 1~ PW.

Lord and Lady Stratbcona in London

enemies, and in principle they wished the poor benighted natives nothing but well.” The pa.s.sion in which the Empire was held is difficult to exaggerate. Typical was the story of Warburton Pike, an Englishman who had graduated from Rugby and Oxford but spent most of his adult life trapping, hunting and hiking in the Canadian wilderness. An archetypal imperial adventurer who took many risks exploring the outer edges of the northern tundra, be never forgot his British roots. Fifty-four when he reached home to enlist shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, he was rejected as too old. Pike was so upset he hiked to Bournemouth, walked into the sea, and plunged a knife into his heart.

At this high noon of Empire, the pervasive influences of what O.D.

Skelton, the great Canadian public servant, called ”the dervishes ofAi-igio-Saxondom” were in full and glorious flight. The Jubilee was pure light opera, with Edward Elgar writing the score and Rudyard Kipling the libretto. British society had little conception of how to treat the slightly awkward representatives of their newest ”self-governing colony.”

One London matron who had condescended to include CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 185.

colonials at her garden reception addressed a special request to the Canadians suggesting that Wilfrid Latirier an(] his party kindly appear in their ”native costunies.” Canadians it home found themselves caught up in the fever of the occasion, with local parades, fireworks, floral arches across main streets and patriotic speeches. ”-As a warm darkness fell on the exhausted town that evening,” June Callwood wrote of the elaborate jubilee celebrations held in London, Ontario, ”fireworks spelling VICTORIA hung for a long, poignant moment in the black skv. People watched it sputter out and were transfixed. It seemed something important had happened to them, to the whole countrv. It felt like a flowering, a future greatness just opening to enfold them all.”

The Jubilee rewarded Smith with a royal accolade. Summoned to Windsor Castle, he received a barony frorn Queen Victoria. Becoming a peer of the realin was no trifling matter. So Smith did what he always did on such watershed occasions. He remarried Isabella. The secret ceremony, held according to Anglican rites at the British Emba.s.sy in Paris, reunited the bride and groom (then seventy-seven) for the fourth and final time. That requisite guilt-pacifier out of the way, Smith set about finding a t.i.tle, crest, motto and coat of arms appropriate to his elevated rank. The crest was easy: a beaver gnawing at a maple tree. The motto was one exquisitely apt word: ”PERSEVERANCE,” the coat of arms a canoe paddled by four HBC traders, and a hammer with nail to symbolize the last spike. But the t.i.tle proved more difficult. Queen Victoria usually referred to him as ”Your Labrador Lords.h.i.+p,” but Smith finally settled on a characteristically convoluted moniker-in the words of Burke's Peerage, ”Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, of Glencoe, co. Argyll, and of Mount Royal, Quebec, Canada”-in tribute to both his Canadian 186 LABRADOR SMITH.

domicile and the large estate he had recently purchased in western Scotland.*

The freshly minted peer's love of Empire knew no bounds. In a speech during the launching ceremony of the steamer Mount Roval at Wallsend in the summer of 1898, Strathcona laid down some new definitions. ”I do not,” he trumpeted, ”care to speak any longer of Canada and the other countries const.i.tuting the Empire, as Colonies. They are const.i.tuents of an Empire, one and indivisible. They are Fnglish quite as much as is Great Britain, and to remain so to all time is the desire of Canada and all other possessions of the Empire.”

Strathcona and some of his more imperialist-minded friends conceived the idea of girdling the globe with telegraph wires and a transportation service, to be known as the All-Red Route, that would link railway lines with accelerated British steams.h.i.+p schedules. Telegrams, mail, people and merchandise could then move aboard conveyances inviolably British. Express timetables called for a twenty-knot service across the Atlantic, with sailings from Liverpool to Halifax taking only four days. ”The All-Red Line,” declared Sir Sandford Fleming, one of the project's enthusiasts, ”would, in some respects, resemble the spinal cord in the human body; it would prove to be the cerebro-spinal

*The Strath in Strathcona is the Gaelic equivalent for glen or valley. The difference between being just plain Donald Smith and becoming Lord Strathcona was most visible in the new peer's signature. The Bank ofMontreal at that time issued its own currency, bearing the printed autograph of its president. As Donald A. Smith he had signed his name un.o.btrusively, the neat, tiny letters taking up only thirty-nine millimetres on the banknote; the hold new scrawl, Stratbcona, could not be contained in its alloted s.p.a.ce, spreading over nmet~-five ruillimetres and puting into the bill's margin.

CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 187.

axis of our political system, and give origin throughout its length to many lateral groups of nerves ... through which would freeiy pa.s.s the sensory impressions and the motor impulses of the British people in every longi- tude.” Using a slightly more comprehensible metaphor, Strathcona's doctor once remarked to his patient just before a heart examination, ”Now we must attend to the All-Red Route, my Lord.” Strathcona tried hard to promote the project, but the fact that it would have required government subsidies of more than $100 million considerably cooled the ardour of its supporters.

'rhe Hudson's Bay Company Governor turned his attention to more practical pursuits.

THE SECOND-STOREY WINDOW of the Canadian High Commission on Victoria Street glowed through London's nocturnal smog into so many long evenings that pa.s.sersby nicknamed it ”the Lighthouse.” Here Strathcona spent eighteen years, occupied with the business of his life. While he placed the HBCA affairs at the top of his agenda, actively partic.i.p.ating in the Company's daily management and ongoing policy formation, his energies were dispersed in many directions.

He sat in his office, signing cheques, justifying accounts, writing letters (always by hand, because he considered typewritten correspondence a breach of courtesv): to the Queen's Chamberlain, asking for special seats at a royal ceremony for a visiting politician; to an old fur trader at Temiskaming, thanking him for a box of lightly salted deer tongues; to another former FIBC Chief Factor, forty-three years in the service, bitter about having to live out his days with no Company pension; to his cronies at the Bank of Montreal, requesting them to approve a loan to help James J.

Hill ”fight 188 LABRADOR SMITH.

off the Harriman forces.” His cable messages flew around the world. He bargained for tea and silk s.h.i.+pinents frorn Yokohama ;md sent timber to the Orient; he settled Lewis crofters in northern Saskatchewan and sold Labrador sable to Chinese aristocrats; he tied down a Canadian company that would ,ive him a monopoly on salt production; he s.h.i.+pped flour from Vancouver to Fiji; he arranged for the Bank of Montreal to underwrite the bonds for construction of the New York ”El”; and he approved plans to expand the HBC's department store in Vernon, B.C. The work never stopped, and even if being Governor of the HBC was his dominant concern, he seemed frantic to keep expanding his reach, as if he could never have enough money, pom er or prestige.

Calculation of an individual's private wealth was not a suitable topic for public discussion in Victorian England, but Strathcona arguably ranked as one of the Empire's richest men. His vast holdings of HBC stock returned record dividends; the Bank of Montreal, with himself as its second-largest shareholder, was Canada's most profitable bank; and the CPR shares that he had purchased for $25 or less appreciated to $280 in his lifetime. Besides holding these highly visible directors.h.i.+ps and major stock positions in these companies, he enjoyed similar arrangements with Royal Trust, the Canada North-West Land Company, the Canadian Salt Company, the Commercial Cable Company, the Great Northern Railway, the Minnesota Imperial and Colonial Finance and Agency Corporation, the London & Lancas.h.i.+re Fire a.s.surance Company, the Manitoba South Western Colonization Railway, the

*Although he was offered a thousand dollars a share by E.H. Ilarrinian for his Northern Pacific Railway stock, Strathcona stuck with his old friend Hill, rescuing hirn froni bankruptcy and he didn't even send I lill a bill for use of his proxy.

CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 189.

New Brunswick Railway Company and the St Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway. fie was also an important shareholder of Barings, the London merchant bank he helped rescue after the 1890 crash. Strathcona continued to use the Bank of Montreal (which during his term as High Commissioner was hired as Canadas chief fiscal agent abroad) as his private cash dispenser and in his first nine years in London did not surrender the bank's presidency. In 1905, on his eighty-fifth birthday, Strathcona decided it might be time to give the young bucks a chance. Fle allowed himself to be named honorary president and was succeeded by Sir George Drummond, who was only seventy-six. Drummond in turn was followed live years later by Richard Angus, then a spry seventy-nine.

The High Commissioner still returned regularly to Montreal (once estimating he had crossed the Atlantic at least a hundred times), but his heart belonged to London. Although he had long ago achieved life's highest social and economic peaks, Strathcona continued to labour like a man possessed, with no detail small enough to escape his fussy attention. More pathetic than admirable, his devotion to duty finally affected his health-though he always remembered the warning of a leading London physician, Sir Andrew Clark, that for him to stop work would be fatal. After one of Strathcona's bouts of illness, Sir Thomas Shaughnessy, then president of the CPR, reported in mock serious tones to an Anglo-Canadian gathering in London that ”yielding to the earnest entreaties of his physician ... [Lord Strathcona] has decided to relax his energies. He has succ.u.mbed to the united pressure of his medical man, his family, and his friends, and has been induced to promise to leave his office at 7.30 each evening instead of 7.45.” During a holiday in rural England, Strathcona began dictating letters to his newly hired secretary early 190 LABRADOR SMITH.

Sunday morning. The a.s.sistant politely but firmly declared he could not work on the Sabbath. The High Commissioner courteously agreed to indulge the young man, then spent most of the day impatiently pacing his room.

Promptly at midnight he woke the startled clerk with the command: ”The Sabbath is over. We must make haste with those letters!”*

His daily office labours done, Strathcona spent most evenings hosting or attending dinners and receptions at the Athenaeum Club, the Imperial Inst.i.tute, and the Savoy or Westminster Palace hotels. As these and other venues proved insufficiently exclusive for the grand scale of the High Commissioners hobn.o.bbing, he eventualtv acquired seven houses and did most of his own entertaining. In Canada he had retained his magnificent dwelling on Dorchester Street in Montreal,t Silver Heights near Winnipeg, with its buffalo pound, and Norway House, his stone mansion at Pictou, Nova

*Such work habits weie not new. Dr Wilfred Grenfell, the Labrador medical missionary, noted how he had been granted an appointment to see Smith at Hudson's Bay House, on Montreal's St Peter Street, one Christmas Day. ”I still remember vividly the deserted streets ... the silence and entireabsence ... of any living thing,” he later told a friend, ”and at last the great, towering portals of the world-fainous Company's offices.