Part 24 (1/2)

*Cooper was happy to borrow His Ex's rail car but would far rather have had his own. Repeated entreaties to have the Canadian Committee purchase or lease one for hini were manhilly rebuffed by George Allan, who patiently explained that ”we are, of necessity, driving our rank and file pretty hard these days of reduced salaries and wages ... and my own hunch is [that you should avoid] a breath of criticism by any member of the staff, no matter how Bolshevistic he might be.... Democracy in Canada has made great advances and Canadians ... are critical of people of importance from Great Britain and other countries visiting Canada ......

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annoyance, confusion and misunderstanding. ”One thing that particularly riled Mr. Chester,” remembered Winifred Archer, his loyal secretary, ”was that when Governor Cooper visited Canada and was with, say, the manager of a large store, he would question the Canadian executive on matters not under the control of London. Mr. Chester I-elt this was not only unfair to him -self, but also unfair to the manager.” That didn't stop Cooper, and he always made a special point of inspecting the Winnipeg store. On one such occasion, his wife expressed a desire to view the competing Eaton's store, then managed by Bill Palk. ”How do you like it?” Palk politely inquired, after she and Mrs Conrad Riley had spent some time touring several departments.

”Well,” Kathleen Cooper replied, equally politely, 94actually, I don't like it at all. We've just been all through the Hudson's Bay Company store and it's nice and quiet. You can do your shopping in peace. But here, the aisles are crowded and everyone is pus.h.i.+ng you around all the time.” Palk, who read the riot act to any department manager whose aisles weren't crowded enough to force him and his a.s.sistant to walk through in single file, knew at that moment why Eaton's was outselling the Bay.

The first Governor to undertake northern inspection tours by air, Cooper posed a special problem for his keepers. The Governor insisted that his official flag be fluttering bef~re he arrived at any Company post.* Many stores, especially in the North, didn't have one, or it had been eaten by rats, and often the FIBC Beechcraft kept circling for some time.

Chess.h.i.+re recalled being stuck in just such a situation, trying to land the HBC plane against an incoming low-pressure front, when Cooper exclaimed: ”I can't see the Governors flag flying!”

*This was the Company's coat of arnis on a white field, which today flies frorn all FIBC stores.

TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 403.

Patrick Ashley Cooper and others, v?ith thefirst airplane purchased by the Hudson's Bay Company. Left to right: Harold Winny, Pilot; Patrick Ashley Cooper; Duncan McLaren, Mechanic; Paul Davoud, Manager, Transportation; Philip A. Chester, General Manager HBC; Bob Cbess.h.i.+re, Nrzv Manager, Fur Trade Department.

”But Sir,” Chess.h.i.+re replied, ”they don't have a flag.” ”Well, they should have.”

”What good would it do?”

”The Indians would know the Governor's in town,” explained Cooper.

Chess.h.i.+re had no answer for that except to shrug and turn his eyes heavenward.

Cooper inspected not just every store but every warehouse. While at Fort Chipewyan, he once found ”numbers of horse collars, horse shoes although I ascertained that there were only two horses in the whole district.

These have been written off the books but it is an obvious weakness that they are not moved somewhere where 404 MERCHANT PRINCES.

they can be sold” [September 16, 1932]. One problem with Cooper's northern sojourns was that he demanded a full press corps reception when he returned to Winnipeg. Local journalists obliged the first time but soon found more interesting copy. Murray Turner, then in charge of public relations, solved the problem by recruiting eight tea and coffee salesmen from the wholesale department, handing them cameras-but not filmfrom the retail store, and telling them to pretend they were photographing the Governor's every limb movement as he descended from the aircraft. That made Cooper very happy, but every year when he returned to London, he would puzzle about it. ”Extraordinary,” he would say. ”I have lots of photographs taken when I'm in Canada-and they never let me see them . .

COOPER'S MOST NOTABLE-and most bizarre-adventure was his 1934 journey into Hudson Bay. ” 193 3 was a year of depression and losses,” Chester noted when the Governor's decision to go North the following summer was being debated. ”Within the Company the prospect of an Arctic pageant was received with misgivings and hopes that nothing would come of it. But as events quickly proved, such hopes were reducing the man and his plan to too simple a simplicity, as in no time at all London and Canada were organizing a voyage that would be the talk of Arctic circles for years to come.” The Nascopie was turned over to a s.h.i.+pyard for reconfiguration of her pa.s.senger s.p.a.ce to accommodate the Governor and his retinue. Bronze commemorative medals were struck featuring the profile of Cooper; hundreds of hunting knives were inscribed ”From P. Ashley Cooper, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1934” on one side and ”Be happy while you hunt” on the other; and an extra stock of Governor's flags was ordered.

TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 405.

On July 7, 1934, Cooper boarded the s.h.i.+p at her home berth in Montreal.

With him were his wife, her inaid, his secretary (G.R. Macdonald), a piper from the Black Watch of Canada (Pipe Sergeant Hannah) and Michael Lubbock, who was to act as Cooper's executive a.s.sistant and speech writer.* Aboard also were Ralph Parsons, the Company's Fur Trade Commissioner, a King's Scout (one a year was awarded the trip by the IiBC), eight Mounties and several new HBC clerks, an archaeologist, an astronomer, an ornithologist and a newsreel production team. A thousand spectators lined the dock as the thirtieth Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company was piped aboard his s.h.i.+p for a six-week voyage into the Company's original territory that none ofhis predecessors had ever bothered to make.

The Nascopie, her pennants flying, steamed along the north sh.o.r.e of the St Lawrence, through the Strait of Belle Isle, then up the rocky coast of Labrador to Cartwright and later Port Burwell. The piper first did a round of the decks, frightening the caged chickens and sheep, then climbed into the bow of the s.h.i.+p's cutter and began playing ”Oh where, tell me where, is my Highland laddie gone?” He was followed down the ladder by the Governor and his wife, Captain Smellie of the Nascopie and Parsons. ”Sir G eorge Simpson in his 3 0-foot canoe, with his beaver hat, piper and singing voyageurs, made no braver picture than this,”

rhapsodized R.H.H. Macaulay, a Company scribe. ”A white motor boat of trim lineamids.h.i.+ps, on a high-backed seat, the Governor and Mrs.

*The highly educated son of a director of the Bank of England and a former director ofthe HBC, Lubbock was not unduly fond ofCooper. ”He was almost illiterate,” Lubbock claimed, ”so that whenever I wanted him to express rather loffier sentiments, I would insert, 'as the seventeenth-century writer said'-and then put in my own words. I even got quoted in a number of papers, and I knew he'd never dare ask me who the writer was.”

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0~.

Patrick Ashley Cooper and Mrs Cooper posing on the ice during the Hudson Bay tour, 1934

Cooper, by the Governor's side the Commissioner. At the small wheel immediately behind the seat stood the 3rd mate in uniform, and by his side a uniformed seaman to tend the motor. Behind them, standing with arms folded, was the Captain, with his gold ribbon and oak leaves, and aft the Governor's flag. In the bow ... the piper keeping time to his 'Highland Laddie' with one brogued and buckled foot, the ribbons decorating his pipes flying in the breeze.” The Coopers inspected the tiny settlement, handed out the inscribed knives to the hunters, and mouth organs, toques, beads and rattles to the children, then officiated at the laying of a cornerstone for a new Bay store.* ”It is no exaggeration to say,” Macaulay reported with all the paternalism he could muster, ”that those Eskimos were overcome by this unprecedented shower of

”Possibly arranged,” as Chester later noted, ”by the Post manager to express hopes for a new building; but after the Nascopic left, the ceremonial platform and inscribed cornerstone (a wooden crate filled with rocks and covered with concrete) were sadly dismantled.”

TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 407.

gifts; never before in their lives had such a thing happened, and, in consequence, they could only sit and look at their presents, touching them gently every now and then to see that they were real, and, finding that they were, giving delighted little laughs.”

As he would at all his stops, Cooper then showed his Inuit audience a film of King George reviewing the trooping of the colour, explaining through an interpreter that this was their King too. There is no record of local reactions to the movie-the first they had ever seen-or to the notion that somebody who usually went around on a horse was their King, but everybody's attention was soon distracted by a kayak race, a square dance and fireworks.* Next morning, as the Nascopie struck her anchor and pulled out of Cartwright on the way to Port Burwell, Cooper got ready for the broadcasts he intended to give just before his arrival or just after his departure at each stop. He would rush to the radio room and, sitting in front of a large microphone, drone on about how glad he was to be here, bow the Eskimos should be more diligent in trapping foxes, how it had taken ”many moons travelling” to reach them, and how they must always be loyal subjects of the King who was sponsoring this message. Then, straining even his own considerable limits of condescension, the Governor would conclude with the admonition: ”We ... leave you with confidence that you

*At Stupart Bay, the Governor gamely climbed into a kayak, got his balance, and paddled around the cove until his legs got cold. One highlight of the journey, recalled by Michael Lubbock, was stepping off at Lake Harbour, where the piper started to wail for a group of elderly Inuit. ”I noticed they were in a sort of ring, shuffling around, and it suddenly struck me that they were going through the rudiments of a Scottish reel. It was a most curious spectacle, but of course the Dundee whalers used to come here regularly, and they were doing what they had been taught so many, many years ago.”

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will work with our post manager as one large happy family, you following his advice as if he were your father, for he does the things which I tell him and I want you to do the things which he tells you.”

There were three problems with the Governor's broadcasts: