Part 22 (1/2)
in charge, every stenographer knew not to cross her legs in front of a man while taking dictation.” Bob Chess.h.i.+re, who worked for the Company at the time, remarked, ”He was a peculiar sort of chap who suffered from a trop- ical liver and was quite likely to pick up a dictionary and heave it at someone he didn't like.”
THESHARPE'ST BREAK INTHE coNrINUITY of the old executive system in the Company was caused by the war. The immense profits from the French engagement perpetuated the illusion of management by the London Governor and directorate while the end of the temporary profits eventually made all too plain the dilapidation of its Canadian affairs.*
Ignoring this underlying weakness, the Company chose this very moment to stage the most elaborate and most expensive pageant in its history. The Hudson's Bay Company celebrated its 250th birthday on May 2, 1920, and Sir Robert Kindersley decided to visit Canadaonly the third reigning Governor ever to do so.t Each Company unit, including every northern post, was given
*One business that briefly flourished aromi d that time was bootlegging, Canadian provinces had pa.s.sed laws prohibiting the sale though not the manufacture of alcoholic beverages, but since each province could enforce laws only within its own borders, booze could easily be transported for sale in other jurisdictions. The HBC immediately established a dozen mail-order houses from Kenora to Revelstoke and installed a Winnipeg bottling plant, capable of turning out four hundred cases daily, to supply its own brands to these outlets. Income peaked in 1917 at $2,260,627.
tThe others had been Sir Stafford Northcote, who had briefly visited Montreal and Ottawa in 1870, and Lord Strathcona, though that was a special case because he had been the only Governor in the Company's history to work his way up through the HBCs Canadian service.
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a grant to join in the festivities and every employee received a month's extra wages.* Philip G.o.dsell, an imaginative veteran who after joining the Company in 1906 had travelled more than 100,000 miles by dog team, snowshoe and canoe, was placed in charge of planning the celebration. It was to be the last great Company occasion, and G.o.dsell made the most of it.
On May 1, 1920, K-indersley addressed the Winnipeg staff at a gala dinner in the Hotel Fort Garry. He quickly got the guests on side by announcing a relatively generous non -contributory pension plan and pledged $1,225,000 to its trust fund. ”I look to the future of the fur trade with a feeling of utmost confidence,” he declared. -The last three years have shown the best results of any years in the history of the Company.” The speech prompted loud cheers, several choruses of ”For lie's a Jolly Good Fellow,” and a new Company song to the tune of ”There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding.” The fur traders, s.h.i.+ps' captains, department store man- agers, clerks and servants formed a happy, chanting line, marching around the dining-roorri enmeshed in nets of paper streamers.t Climax of the Canadian celebrations was the great spectacle G.o.dsell staged at Lower Fort Garry, once the proud domicile of Sir George Simpson. Indian chiefs and
*The Company's a.s.sets at the time consisted of eleven major department stores, six wholesale houses, three hundred fur-trading posts, eighty-six steam and motor vessels, twelve hundred canoes, six hundred sledge dogs and 2.5 million acres of desirable prairie agricultural land.
t At a dinner for the London staff, Deputy Governor Sale gave a similar oration, handing out 134 long-service medals. One warehouse worker topped the list with sixty years of servitude. In Winnipeg, John George McTavish Christie was presented with a special medal; his family had served a combined 2 3 8 years with the Company.
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their retinues came from every corner of the HBCs former empire-Swampy Cree from Hudson and James bays, Saulteaux from Lake Winnipeg, Ojibwas from the Nipigon country, Sioux from the Portage Plains, and mighty warriors from the Peace and Athabasca valleys. ”For a while,” G.o.dsell noted, ”the atmosphere of earlier and more picturesque days hovered about the Old Stone Fort. Silhouetted against the painted tepee covers at night the shadowy figures carried the mind back to days of long ago. ... Within the walls all was quiet and silent though the tent occupied by the two Mounted Policemen who kept watch was dimly lighted with a coal-oil lantern. An occasional light flickered from the Governor's residence and there was a peculiar tranquillity permeating the old fort and its surroundings, so different from the bustle of the city but a few short miles away.” The following morning the Governor took the salute as birchbark canoes, York boats and dugouts sailed by the great stone fort, and cheering Winnipeggers; lined the riverbanks. Salute guns boomed, the Governor's flag snapped in the wind, and G.o.dsell introduced each tribal chief to the six-foot-six Governor, who looked exactly the way a benign despot should look. G.o.dsell had arranged for the Company interpreter to censor the Indians' comments, so that when the Chief of the York Factory Cree, for instance, complained because the Company was not feeding his dogs, the comment was translated into a flowery tribute to ”the Great Master of the Company.” Long into the night could be heard the screech of fiddles and the tattoo of moccasined feet stamping out the Red River Jig and Fightsome Reel. ”As I gazed at the flickering lights of the tepees and watched the shadowy forms of the old Indians pa.s.sing the pipe once more from hand to hand,” G.o.dsell lamented, ”I realized with a keen pang that history had been made that day, and that, with its pa.s.sing, the old fort and the traditions which surrounded it had taken another long step towards antiquity.”
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HBC celebrations at Lozver Fort Garry, May 1920
The most important legacy of the celebrations was Kindersley's decision to establish The Beaver, a magazine ”Devoted to the Interests of Those Who Serve the Hudson's Bay Company.” It eventually became a superb journal of record chronicling the history of the Northwest. But under its first editor, a Chicago advertising man named Clifton Moore Thomas, The Beaver limited itself mainly to a hodgepodge of curling scores from the Saskatoon store, news of an engagement in Kamloops, photos of an office picnic in Victoria, the results of a pie-eating compet.i.tion at Fort ii la Corne, word of new tennis and quoits courts for the Winnipeg staff-all interwoven with hair-raising fur-trade accounts and glued together with bad Irish jokes and harmless homilies on how to increase sales.*
The Beaz,ers scope and quality improved dramatically under its subsequent editors, Robert Watson, Douglas MacKay, Clifford Wilson, Malvina Bolus, Helen Burgess and Christopher Dafoe.
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Kindersley also signed a contract with Bruno Weyers, a New York business agent who'd had previous dealings with the Company, to produce films. The subsidiary eventually purchased two Hollywood studios and during the next decade produced thirty-seven two-reel films featuring such stars as Buster Keaton, Helen Morgan, James Melton, the Easy Aces and the Pickens Sisters. Some of the films premiered in Broadway's best first-run houses, but the advent of the big Hollywood productions killed the business, and the HBC wrote off its investment.*
THE PROFIT WINDFALL from its s.h.i.+pping operations had camouflaged its financial instability, but the Company could not compete in the volatile post-war market because its traditional methods emphasized conservative mark-up policies instead of customer-enticing price cuts and quality of service ahead of high volume. Charles Vincent Sale took over as Governor from Kindersley in 1925 and a year later the new Winnipeg super-store was opened. It covered an entire city block and had all the latest equipment.
Its two ma.s.sive banks of six elevators each faced one another on the street floor in a concave configuration. ”The consequence of this layout,”
noted James Bryant, who worked there at the time, ”was that
*The Company commissioned a forgettable eight-reeler about itself called The Romance of the Fur Country, and jealously guarded its reputation. When another film-maker produced a shoddy thriller ent.i.tled rhe Lure ofthe North, the HBCs lawyers got changes made in the print depicting a heroic-looking free trader being crushed by a brutal (unnamed, but British) fur monopoly whose agents burned his shack, stole his provisions, then dispatched him across something ominously called The Long Traverse.
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Elevator lobby at Winnipegs new super-s-tore
every customer wis.h.i.+ng to visit any floor other than the main one, congregated in the elevator lobby. It was so restricted in size and shape that even small crowds caused utter confusion.... Customers ran back and forth to catch elevators, only to have doors close as they reached them.
Many became convinced that all the elevators on one side only went up and those on the other side only went down, an idea encouraged by some management trainees who, despite the scarcity of jobs, were not above having a little joke at the customers' expense.”
Sale, who enjoyed risk and knew the Company desperately needed to diversify, had entertained an unusual visitor in his London offices before coming to Canada for his annual inspection tour in 1926. He was Ernest Whitworth Marland, born at Pittsburgh in 1874 when oil was $2.70 a barrel, who had struck his first gusher in West Virginia and soon founded his own Marland Oil company with headquarters in Ponca City, Oklahoma.
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Applying his practical grasp of petroleum geology and his natural instinct for the hunt, he hit it big in 1911 with the ninth well drilled on land owned by Willie Cries-forWar near the Osage Indian Reservation. He went on to develop Marland Oil into a major company but spent his money even faster than he made it.
Marland fenced in a tract of four hundred acres near Ponca and turned it into a pseudo-upper-cla.s.s British estate, complete with polo fields, peac.o.c.ks, ponies and hounds. Across the savage prairie of Oklahoma Marland and his pals would spend long afternoons, mounted on British hunters, following British hounds on the scent of British foxes. The son of a Scottish mother and an English father, Marland was so infatuated with Anglophile values that he went to grade school dressed in a kilt, and arrived in the wild Indian country during his oil-hunting days wearing a belted tweed jacket, knickerbockers and spats. He often visited London to recharge these pretensions and OD one such trip made a deal with the Hudson's Bay Company to exploit the mineral rights it had retained (from 1910 onwards) on 4.5 million acres of the Canadian West, checkerboarded across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Sale and Marland worked out a simple arrangement: in return for providing the technical knowledge and paying all exploration expenses, Marland was granted a twerlty-five-year option to lease any parcel of land for drilling purposes, with the HBC receiving a royalty on any oil or gas produced.* Three years later, when
*Significantly, the partners.h.i.+p missed leasing the Athabasca tar sands, said to hold the world's largest oil reserves, because it viewed them only as a subst.i.tute for asphalt in road building. The two companies opened only one filling station, near the liBC's Winnipeg store, which sold Marland lubricating products but gasoline supplied by Imperial Oil.
THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 377.
Marland's, personal spending habits caught up with him and he had to amalgamate his company with Continental Oil, the two concerns formed Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas (11130G), with the I IBC owning 2 5 percent (later reduced to 21.9 percent) of the stock.