Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  Anna and Walter came from Scotland to keep JB company when they could, and William arrived at the end of the month and, not being well himself, was duly ‘binned’ in a room next to his father. JB reported that he was a ‘great support and joy to me’.14 Other visitors included Moritz Bonn, who was hag-ridden by fears that Chamberlain was going quite the wrong way about dealing with Hitler. JB was still convinced that Chamberlain had no alternative to his course of action, since nothing could be worse than another war, especially with Britain not yet prepared. It was not until the following spring that he told his daughter that ‘now the time has come for a definite stand along with the other Democracies. I am coming to believe that things will not get right without a smash, but I hope that by the time Germany’s outbreak comes, we will be strong enough to squash it at the start.’15

  Susie’s task in Canada, when she arrived back in Quebec in late August, was to hold the fort (almost literally) in the Governor-General’s absence. Like countless others, she was beset with anxieties about what was happening in Europe, especially since she had three sons of military age. ‘The papers here are awful, full of the most sinister rumours and conjectures. I must say I wish I was in England and with you, it is awful being so far away and not knowing and dreading things all the time. You could perhaps calm my fears.’16 But JB was almost as much in the dark as she was, since the Foreign Office papers were not sent to him at Ruthin. Although she could get little out of him to settle her nerves, Susie was cheered by his reports of how well his treatment was going, and the fact that William was ‘binned’ with him. She ended with ‘If war is declared please come back on an American boat and don’t put me to the torture of thinking you might be torpedoed.’17

  Feeling very fit, JB went from Ruthin to Elsfield for a few days, writing to Susie on 25 September that he hoped it would be the last letter he would write before he clasped her to his ‘meagre bosom’. ‘The situation is now a melancholy diplomatic tangle, when honest men are arguing with rogues – a wretched business, but I still think war is improbable.’ He prowled around his old haunts, dropped in on his farming friends, the Wattses, and attended Harvest Festival in the church, ‘which was charmingly decorated, principally from our garden’.18

  The next day he had an audience with the King at Buckingham Palace, to talk over the proposed tour the following May. JB wrote to Susie: ‘I was enormously affected by our talk – he looked so small and lonely and anxious. He seized both [my] hands when we said good-bye. The Palace thinks the odds slightly on war, I think them slightly against, but no one can forecast Hitler’s mind.’19

  On arrival in Canada on 8 October, he reported to Mackenzie King the gist of his meeting with the King, and the public announcement of a Royal Tour, to last a month, was made that day. Roosevelt told JB in early November that he had been corresponding directly with the King, and had asked the Royal couple to stay at Hyde Park, his house on the Hudson River, so that the formal functions ‘could be supplemented by a peaceful and simple visit to a peaceful and simple American country home’.20 The American leg, although hugely important to JB, was the part that worried him, since it was by no means certain that the American people would take the new British King and Queen to their hearts.

  The arrangements for Canada turned out to be time-consuming and difficult, in particular for Shuldham Redfern. He was the Governor-General’s representative on the Royal Visit committee, which mainly comprised rather dilatory officials from the Department of External Affairs, and where he found himself the driving force. The hardest part was agreeing a timetable, for the provincial politicians could not see beyond their own boundaries and the committee had to balance the desire of the entire nation to catch a unique glimpse of serving Royalty – something never before experienced in any Dominion – with the very real anxiety about Their Majesties’ staying power. Redfern and his committee had to ensure that one province did not see more of them than another. In such a vast country, with four different time zones, this was no small difficulty.

  However, the man who should have been a source of impartial wisdom raised the most serious problems. It soon became clear to JB and Redfern, if they had not known it before, that Mackenzie King’s amour propre was a matter of supreme importance to him. Although a Liberal, and a quasi-Republican, who refused to recommend the names of Canadians to the Sovereign for honours and was critical of the formality of Government House, he was very keen to be in the forefront of this regal jamboree.

  The first dispute that came to a head was over who should meet the King and Queen when they arrived at Quebec. The obvious answer, as far as Government House and Buckingham Palace were concerned, was the Governor-General, since he would be symbolically handing over the country he was representing on behalf of his master, when that master arrived. Mackenzie King was unsuitable on the grounds that he was a partisan political figure. JB would then disappear into the shadows until just before the King went home, when the latter would confer on him the honour of representing him once more. But the Prime Minister was having none of it. He would meet them at Quebec and that was that. Neither the British High Commissioner nor Tommy Lascelles, the King’s assistant private secretary, who came out to help plan the visit in February, could move him. Buckingham Palace continued to believe that Mackenzie King was wrong, since he only represented the majority, at best, of the people of Canada. In the end JB decided to swallow the constitutional irregularity, and advise the Palace that he was happy to meet the King and Queen at Ottawa, once Mackenzie King had greeted them in Quebec.

  Worse was to come. On the evening of 11 March, Mackenzie King arrived at Rideau Hall for a conversation with the Governor-General. Their discussions began calmly enough but, at some point, King began a tirade about all his grievances, real and imagined, stumping up and down the room and working himself into a towering passion. The Governor-General had to endure an hour of this and, as Redfern indignantly remarked, exercise all his restraint to avoid taking substantial exception to some of the Prime Minister’s observations.

  What was the cause of this unseemly outburst? Mackenzie King had convinced himself that there was a conspiracy by Buckingham Palace courtiers and members of the British government to prevent him, in his role as head of the Department of External Affairs, from accompanying Their Majesties to Washington. There is, extant, the pencil draft of a letter to Tommy Lascelles, dated 13 March, written by Redfern and with some small emendations by his boss. The letter said that they believed that, in some respects, they were having to deal with ‘a mental case’. Redfern told Lascelles that the man was ‘bordering on insanity’, but these words were amended by the emollient and circumspect JB to ‘in an abnormal and unaccountable mood’.

  Mackenzie King’s comments were breathtakingly unfair, since JB had consistently made it clear to the British government and Buckingham Palace that it would look better if Mackenzie King accompanied the King and Queen to Washington, rather than the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Halifax’s presence risked spooking the isolationists in Roosevelt’s party. Mackenzie King traded on the fact that JB never sought a fight, and usually tried to deflect unpleasantness. Since he had no such qualms, he was at a definite advantage. Reading between the lines of the Prime Minister’s self-serving account of this meeting in his Diaries, it is plain that he had been a bully.

  JB added a P.S. to Redfern’s letter: ‘Please burn this.’21 He could trust Lascelles, of all people, to be discreet and to do what he asked. It is hard to imagine the repercussions if it had ever become public that the Governor-General of Canada thought that his Prime Minister was mad.

  Colonel Willis-O’Connor, a kindly man, thought that this encounter had made JB look very unwell. He told his boss not to distress himself, to which he replied, ‘Nothing will come of it. There will be no constitutional crisis. I will let him have his own way, and stand on my head if that’s what he wants of me.’22

  Their Majesties therefore had the prospect of four weeks in the constant company o
f the Canadian Prime Minister, the only politician in attendance all the time, something rather less congenial to them, one supposes, than the society of the Tweedsmuirs. This was probably the worst example of Mackenzie King’s volatility during JB’s time as Governor-General, and it required the latter to exert all the patience at his command to see it through without the kind of row that had erupted publicly between Mackenzie King and Lord Byng.

  The year 1939 had opened with see-sawing temperatures and JB’s see-sawing health. When well, he took what exercise he could, snow-shoeing with Susie or skating, but he was now spending at least one day a week in bed. He submitted to frequent massage sessions to help ease the pain. He weighed just over 9 stone. He took morphine. Well or not, he walked every day in the grounds and, when the weather was sunny, he would sit in a chair on the verandah, enveloped in a buffalo hide coat. He had begun to write Sick Heart River, his tale of illness, endurance and self-sacrifice in the Northwest Territories. It was much influenced by discussions with his son Johnnie, who had spent part of a winter near Prince Albert in northern Saskatchewan. Meanwhile, JB had to open Parliament, host luncheons, a state dinner and a ‘drawing-room’, as he had done in earlier years.

  As a result of the Royal visit, plans were laid to redecorate both Rideau Hall and The Citadel. JB told Walter: ‘Susie is just back from Toronto, where she has been pilfering things from the Museum to decorate this house for Their Majesties … When you come you will find Rideau a miniature palace!’23 But, amid this domestic busyness, there were gnawing anxieties about the European situation. On 26 January, JB received a very grave ‘most secret telegram about Germany’s intentions’.24 These telegrams, together with despairing letters from British correspondents, continued to arrive through February. Chamberlain’s gamble of the previous September had failed. JB wrote to his brother Walter in late January: ‘The [Foreign Office] despatches recently, especially the secret ones dealing with the internal conditions of Germany, are horrible reading. The treatment of the Jews has been beyond belief brutal.’25

  Once the Royal itinerary had finally been agreed, JB’s main task was to write speeches for the King and Queen to give, while other members of the household wrote them for all the mayors when they met them, as well as the written replies from the King. All the paperwork was then sent to Buckingham Palace for approval.

  The Tweedsmuirs set off for another trip to the Canadian west. ‘We shall find an English spring in Vancouver, and the winter will be shortened for Susie,’ JB told Violet Markham.26 There was the usual round of Canadian Club speeches, inspections of new works, experimental farms and so on, with some fishing thrown in, but they also had the chance to go to the Hudson’s Bay headquarters in Winnipeg and send a message to Johnnie, at Lake Harbour, way beyond the Arctic Circle. He was thriving in his northern solitude and finally putting on weight.

  The King and Queen embarked on the journey across the Atlantic in early May on the Empress of Australia, and about the same time an article appeared in The Sunday Times entitled ‘Canada and the Royal Visit’. The byline was Alice Buchan and, in this upbeat article, she set out some of the background to the visit, something of Canada’s history, and explained accurately and neatly the constitutional position: ‘He [the King] comes to Ottawa as to his own capital city, and to Rideau as to his own palace.’27 (That cadence is unequivocally Buchanesque.) She also gave British readers a foretaste of what the Royal couple would experience, in particular staying in Rideau Hall, ‘this pleasant rambling house’, as well as the multifarious people they would meet on their travels. A map of Canada, showing the Royal route, accompanied the piece.

  JB did not write this article, but he will have instigated it, knowing that he could trust Alice to produce a suitable and readable article if he gave her the background. Experienced publicist that he was, he could not pass up an opportunity to hammer home to the British public the importance of this visit, and to keep the record straight about his constitutional position.

  It was inconvenient that he should be thinner than ever at this point, weighing on 7 May a mere 8 stone 4 lbs, his lowest as an adult. He had lost all the gains of the September before. And the imminent arrival of the Royal party did not help matters.

  Susie took much of the strain of overseeing preparations, and anyone who has ever had a dream about preparing for the Queen to come to tea will have sympathy for her. She chose new chintzes and curtains for both Rideau Hall and The Citadel, finally expelling the purple that was Lady Willingdon’s favourite colour, and inspected the open landau carriage as well as the Royal train, which shone in its new blue and silver livery, with the Royal coat of arms now attached to the front of the engine. The train was made up of twelve carriages, and would have to accommodate ladies-in-waiting, equerries, maids, dressers, private secretaries, stewards, a chef, policemen, telephone officers, the Prime Minister and his staff, as well as members of the government in their own provinces. There was also a ‘pilot train’, to go ahead, just in case there was an ‘obstruction’ (by which, presumably, was meant either a cow or a bomb) on the line, and to carry RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) officers, members of the press, broadcasters – this was the first Royal visit to be broadcast on the radio – photographers, postal officials and a barber. This train had its own dark room and post office with a ‘Royal Train’ postmark stamp.

  The Empress of Australia, bearing the King and Queen, docked on 17 May at Wolfe’s Cove, two nerve-racking days behind schedule because of fog and the unseasonal presence of icebergs. Mackenzie King greeted the Royal party in his Gilbertian, gold-braided Windsor court uniform. With breathtaking disingenuousness he remarked that he felt particularly sorry for the Tweedsmuirs because, as a result of the delay, they would not have the opportunity of seeing much of Their Majesties.28

  The next day, the King and Queen boarded the train to Montreal. The cheering crowds that met them everywhere in Quebec were a great source of satisfaction to Anglophone politicians such as Mackenzie King, although JB never doubted that the French Canadians would take the couple to their hearts. The conquest was made easier by the fact that they thought the Queen wonderfully glamorous, and were charmed by her smile and seemingly indefatigable stamina. The King also pleased the Québécois by speaking in French.

  The Tweedsmuirs went to the Union Station in Ottawa to greet the couple, after which the King and Queen climbed into the open landau and were drawn through the streets to Rideau Hall. After the diplomatic corps had had the opportunity to catch a sight of them, there was a private luncheon, then the Royal party went to Parliament in evening dress, where the King signed two treaties with the United States, one of which was the trade treaty. (JB, tactfully, stayed at Rideau Hall, reading in the garden.) Afterwards, the press corps came to Rideau Hall for a sherry party to meet the Royal couple, a shrewd piece of public relations by JB, which ensured glowing testimonials in all the newspapers. He encouraged Roosevelt to invite the press to the White House for the same reason.

  In the evening, there was a State dinner of considerable magnificence. According to Susie, ‘Joan [Pape] had surpassed herself. She had bagged silver bowls from everybody in Ottawa, and she had filled them with red tulips. The table was a horseshoe, and she had made a bank of tulips in the centre of it … The Queen had on marvellous jewels, including a necklace that Prince Albert had given Queen Victoria on their marriage.’29 Mackenzie King, who sat on one side of the Queen, told her of his meeting with Hitler in 1937 and of how the Führer didn’t want war. After dinner, the King and JB stayed up talking until 1 a.m.

  The next day, the Royal party witnessed, from the East Block of the Parliament buildings, the Trooping of the Colour by the Brigade of Canadian Guards, with the King taking the salute, then the Queen laid a cornerstone of the nearly built Supreme Court Building using a gold trowel. The couple were Mackenzie King’s guests for lunch at Laurier House. He showed them his mother’s ‘shrine’ and all his lares et penates, and surely only long training and good nature pr
evented the couple from betraying their amusement when presented by Mackenzie King with a framed photograph – of his mother.

  That afternoon an enormous garden party of 5,000 guests assembled in the garden of Rideau Hall. At one point the Catholic Archbishop of Ottawa got carried away and shouted ‘Vive La Reine!’ This was followed by a formal dinner held at the Château Laurier hotel, after which the King and Queen went out onto the balcony to wave to the dense crowd who had been waiting patiently all evening to catch a glimpse of them. ‘When the King and Queen appeared,’ JB wrote to Anna, ‘such a shout went up to heaven as I have never heard before. It was one of the great experiences of my life.’30 Back at Rideau Hall, the King again talked with JB late into the night.

  The next morning, the King unveiled the War Memorial in Confederation Square, close to Parliament Hill.* Watching the ceremony were several thousand veterans. The Queen told JB that she would like to go down amongst them. ‘I said it was worth risking it, and sure enough the King and Queen and Susie and I disappeared in that vast mob! – simply swallowed up. The police could not get near us. I was quite happy about it because the veterans kept admirable order. It was really extraordinarily touching; old Scotsmen weeping and talking about Angus [where the Queen came from]. One old fellow said to me, “Ay, man, if Hitler could see this!” ’31 Pathé News reported on ‘five riotous minutes of handshaking and surging enthusiasm’. American radio informed its listeners that no President would have dared to have done what the King and Queen did, with scarcely any guard at all.32

  Before they left Ottawa, the King and Queen presented JB with a silver inkstand,* a copy of the Queen Anne one at No. 10 Downing Street, bearing JB’s arms and an inscription in the King’s handwritng. Susie remembered that, ‘with a twinkle in his eyes, His Majesty handed me a most lovely gold cigarette case with a [Royal] monogram in diamonds’.33