Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  Mackenzie King, very much on his dignity, insisted both that Canadians trained under this scheme would serve in the country’s own service, the Royal Canadian Air Force, rather than the British RAF, and that Canada would not have to foot the bill for the BCATP. JB saw his task as smoothing his Prime Minister’s feathers, while simultaneously keeping Neville Chamberlain apprised of Canadian sensitivities. He found himself cast as interpreter and even conciliator with the missions, roles that Mackenzie King seemed happy, just this once, for him to play, since it was in Canada’s interest to do so.

  One important sticking point, however, turned out to be the insistence by the British mission that British ground crews at the training establishments should not be commanded by Canadian officers. Time wore on and Mackenzie King became very anxious about this issue. He wrote to JB on 12 December: ‘The delay in reaching a final understanding with the Air Ministry of the UK on the important question of identity and command of Canadian units and formations in the field, which we believed had been settled weeks ago, has been unfortunate as respects the time of the announcement.’57

  The crunch came late on Saturday evening, 16 December. The Prime Minister wanted to announce the deal in his weekly broadcast the next day, which was also his birthday, a fact he thought highly propitious. More importantly, the Australians had just announced their own agreement, so he could not afford to be behindhand. Moreover, the first Canadian troops (including Johnnie Buchan) would be landing in Scotland that day, and he wanted to announce the plan before, rather than after, their presence in England became known. That evening, Mackenzie King decided to go to visit JB, to put the whole situation before him ‘as the representative of the King, and as one who could give Chamberlain the true story. I felt too that he might be able to assist in bringing the others together.’58 He arrived at Government House about 10 p.m., where he discovered the Governor-General in bed, having been there all day, and looking ‘pretty frail’. He asked him to intervene, saying it was the most important matter he had ever had occasion to discuss with him, and impressing on him the urgency.

  Thus was Brooke-Popham summoned from an ice-hockey match to attend the Governor-General in his bedroom. When he came out, having received a courteous but firm lecture from the small, fragile man in pyjamas, propped up on his pillows, he had conceded the point. For Brooke-Popham, who had not been on hand to watch the development of the Governor-General’s love for, and commitment to, Canada, his attitude must have come as quite a surprise. JB’s diary entry for that day reads: ‘Sent for Brooke-Popham and had long difficult talk with him. I thought his arguments far-fetched.’59

  Brooke-Popham proceeded to the Prime Minister’s office where the agreement was signed, a few minutes after midnight. Mackenzie King, triumphant, said he had never seen a man more deflated than Brooke-Popham; he looked as if he had been ‘spanked’. ‘His face was very red and his manner very crushed.’60 Sir Gerald Campbell, British High Commissioner in Ottawa, said that he ‘looked a broken man and bewailed the fact that, in yielding to the Governor-General’s pressure, he had been false to the traditions of his service’.61

  Mackenzie King later mused that he did not believe any more significant agreement had ever been signed by the government of Canada. The reason for this, as he said in his broadcast the next evening, was that the ‘United Kingdom government has informed us that … the air training scheme would provide far more effective assistance towards ultimate victory than any other form of military co-operation which Canada can give’.62

  It seems that the part JB played in the genesis of this plan, which during the Second World War trained 130,000 pilots and aircrew, was absolutely crucial. And he succeeded because he understood, as indeed did the Prime Minister, if intermittently, how useful informal, non-diplomatic channels of communication and operation could be, when exploited in the right way.

  At the same time, he was facilitating contacts between the ‘British Supply Board in Canada and the United States’, under its highly effective head, Colonel Greenly of the engineering firm Babcock and Wilcox. JB’s personal diary indicates that he entertained Greenly many times in those weeks, since the man was plainly very open to suggestions from the Governor-General, with his very wide acquaintance and lofty status among Canadian businessmen. JB’s contacts were second to none and he could open doors otherwise firmly shut.

  It seems that JB’s personal connections with at least three British Prime Ministers, as well as Lord Halifax, the Foriegn Secretary, meant that, in the words of one modern Canadian historian, ‘his ideas about policy were considered at the highest political levels and that the information he sent reached these men unfiltered by departments’.63 His influence didn’t end there, for he was on such good personal terms with Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, as well as with successive British ambassadors in Washington – Sir Ronald Lindsay and the Marquess of Lothian – and bankers, politicians, soldiers, journalists and businessmen, that his views became common currency amongst senior opinion-formers in the United States as well.

  We shall never know the precise extent of his influence over American, Canadian and British foreign policy, but Professor Neilson has maintained: ‘By dint of personal prestige, widespread connections and an unwavering view of the importance of and functioning of empire, Tweedsmuir provided a framework for cooperation among these three states that proved its worth in the Second World War.’64 Neilson goes on to write, intriguingly if unverifiably, that the creation of the post-war condominium centring on the North Atlantic world owed much to JB’s work. What is incontrovertible is that he played a significant role in the development of Canada as a self-governing (and self-respecting) dominion – perhaps the pre-eminent one – in the post-war Commonwealth of Nations. That is not bad for someone who Lawrence of Arabia feared would be just ‘a figure’.

  The only extant private diary of JB’s is that for 1939, and it is instructive. In it he noted weather and temperature, who came to see him and at what times, the principal guests at luncheon or dinner, how he felt about his health, the bare details of his travels, occasionally news on the impending war, and its progress once begun, and regularly his weight in stones and pounds. Careful reading of this diary shows just how ill he was at times in 1939; it is easy to see how he had to steel himself to perform his duties. There is only one entry when he admits to feeling sorry for himself.

  In October 1939 he gained Royal permission to make a private visit to New York, in order to consult a well-known physician at the Rockefeller Medical Center, Dr Miller. At the weekend he travelled to Tom Lamont’s country house in New York State, where his fellow guest was the Marquess of Lothian, the newly arrived British ambassador. On Monday he lunched with the Morgan partners and a host of businessmen in New York, on Tuesday with journalists from the New York Times, leaving for Canada once more that evening.

  JB had an ulterior motive for seeking a second opinion from an American doctor. Much as they would have liked to meet, both he and Roosevelt knew that the time was not opportune, since the isolationist wing of the Democratic Party would kick up an unholy fuss and might jeopardise the President’s efforts to encourage Congress to rescind the Neutrality Act. Roosevelt told him that the ‘bill [had] a good chance of going through’ but that he was ‘almost literally walking on eggs … saying nothing, seeing nothing and hearing nothing’.65 However, Lothian, as the British ambassador, was a conduit to Roosevelt. In his turn, Lothian wanted advice from JB about the first public speech he was to make, a very important one to the Pilgrims of the United States at the Plaza Hotel in New York, and indeed the speech he gave has JB’s fingerprints all over it.66

  JB received the same diagnosis and much the same advice – one day a week in bed – from Dr Miller in New York as he had had from his Canadian doctors. It cannot have come as any great surprise. However, he went again in early November to New York for treatment (he was told his gastritis was ‘serious but not dangerous’) and took further opportunities to listen and talk
to opinion-formers, lunching again with New York Times journalists and spending an evening this time with John D. Rockefeller. These occasions made their way in fictional form into Sick Heart River.

  His extraordinary stoicism did not go unremarked. The novelist David Walker recalled about his time as one of JB’s ADCs in 1938: ‘There are so many things of praise to say about him. It was almost the last year of his life, spent in constant discomfort with an ulcer and other ailments. His diet was entirely bland, things like scrambled egg or slops, and after meals he would have to prop himself lopsidedly along the sofa. He said to strangers, “The doctor makes me stretch out like this”, but beyond that necessary explanation he never mentioned his health, or he never did to me, not once in our many walks and other times together.’67

  Sleep no longer refreshed him, his blood pressure was too low, he suffered from headaches, and his eyesight was failing, particularly the left eye below the bump on his forehead from the childhood carriage accident. But the only time that Susie’s lady-in-waiting, Joan Pape, ever heard him raise his voice was when luncheon was delayed during the Royal visit in May 1939, when tensions must have been running very high.68 Lilian Killick remembered that ‘the older he got, the kinder he got’.69 The wonder is how he could so often be good company in social situations, when he was, perforce, the centre of attention, while he felt so awful. And it must have often hurt to be pushing a piece of steamed fish around his plate, and sipping a glass of water, while his guests enjoyed a multi-course banquet.

  Meanwhile, he continued to write Sick Heart River, as well as his book of ‘reminiscences’, Memory Hold-the-Door, and what he called ‘a Canadian Puck of Pook’s Hill ’ children’s story (published as The Long Traverse in 1941), to try to acquaint children with their history, since he thought the school textbooks were so dull. He also wrote two chapters of a book on fishing, which were appended to Memory Hold-the-Door and entitled ‘Pilgrim’s Rest’. The writing is lyrical and precise, as he relived his youthful fishing expeditions in Tweeddale. (The last page of all is a digression, strangely, on ‘the prose of mortality’ and it ends with Lockwood’s famous and comforting reflection over the graves of Catherine, Healthcliff and Edgar in Wuthering Heights.) George Trevelyan reckoned that the first chapter, ‘The Springs’, was the best thing JB ever wrote.70 The flame was still bright. Meanwhile, Susie had never been busier in Canada, going off on her own to complete engagements with women’s groups in particular, and organising a Red Cross work party, making ‘comforts’ (socks, gloves, blankets and so on) for Poles at Rideau Hall.

  JB had gone to Canada on the understanding that his tenure would be for five years. His time was therefore up in the autumn of 1940 and, after war broke out, he began to consider how best to refuse a second term of office. The Canadian government requested him to stay on for another five years and, when he refused, Mackenzie King asked whether he might remain for the duration of the war, or even just for one further year. But their entreaties were unavailing.

  ‘Roosevelt has unwittingly done me an unfriendly act,’ JB wrote to Walter, ‘and told the press that he would regard my refusal to accept a second term of office as a disaster both for the U.S.A. and for Canada! I can only reply in the words of my favourite quotation – “Not Ferdinand”!’* He was ‘dragging his wing’ and only a good long time at Ruthin Castle, he believed, would restore him to better health. Moreover, he did not feel he could subject Susie to another Canadian winter, and the war had made it worse: she had two sons in uniform, one of whom was already on the other side of the Atlantic in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, as well as one trying to get into the RAF,** and an elderly mother who had taken refuge at Elsfield.

  He wrote to Walter in late November with all the reasons why he wanted to go home: ‘But my case is not very strong. The case I put to the King, and with which he agreed – that I had had a very individual kind of term of office, and that I did not want my own idiosyncracies to be hardened into precedents and embarrass my successor – is unanswerable. But the argument falls to pieces in war, for the work I am now doing is that which anyone could do. I will plead my health and Susie’s sanity for all they are worth, but I am always liable to be met with the argument that everyone has to sacrifice a good deal in war, and that we are not being asked to sacrifice more than other people. I also have no notion what the King may say. He is my master, and he may simply tell me to get on with it.’71

  One thing JB achieved that autumn was to persuade the Queen to broadcast encouraging remarks to Canadian women, which could of course be heard in the United States as well. This was his initiative and he wrote the words she spoke. He told Walter: ‘I am very glad I have got the Queen to broadcast on November 11th. She is a legendary figure on this side of the water. The ordinary French-Canadian says, “Well, if She wants us we’re ready!” ’72 He spent much of his time reviewing troops, wearing the uniform of Commander-in-Chief as King George VI did in Britain. The last entry for 1939 in his diary reads: ‘What a year! God send that 1940 gives victory and sees our family safe!’73 It was rare indeed that he invoked the Almighty.

  The first official event of 1940 was his last New Year’s ‘levée’ at Government House. ‘There is always something melancholy about doing something for the last time, even when you are glad. Susie keeps on saying, “Never again” about things, and then feeling regretful.’74 He said that leaving Canada was like pulling up mandrakes. ‘The appeals I get from humble folk, Prairie farmers, habitants, etc are really rather heart-breaking. They all say they feel so “safe” with me here – whatever they mean by that!’75

  By the beginning of 1940 he had finished Memory Hold-the-Door and invited Yousuf Karsh to help him sort photographs for it. He wrote to Sir Alexander Hardinge, asking whether the King would mind if the book were published in serial form before he left Canada, George V having said he could publish, provided that the subject was not current politics. He read John Morley’s Gladstone and told Sandy Gillon that he had become, late in life, a Gladstonian Liberal: ‘I was in revolt in my early political days against Gladstonianism, for it seemed to preach only platitudes which had become generally accepted. But now it is just these platitudes which are at issue, and they have become living things for us.’76 He was feeling surprisingly well, a source of particular satisfaction to his wife.

  Memory Hold-the-Door (the title, with its curious hyphenation, is a quotation from Stevenson) was published in the summer of 1940 in Britain and as Pilgrim’s Way in North America. Hodder and Stoughton called it an autobiography but Houghton Mifflin, under the influence of Ferris Greenslet of course, subtitled it ‘An Essay in Recollection’, which is what it is. JB wrote about it: ‘This book is a journal of certain experiences, not written in the experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory.’ He went on to say about experiences in youth being overlaid but not lost. ‘Time hurries it [an experience] from us, but also keeps it in store, and it can later be recaptured and amplified by memory, so that at leisure we can interpret its meaning and enjoy its savour.’ He wrote that at first he had thought the chapters were so brazenly egotistical he should have them privately printed. ‘But I reflected that a diary of a pilgrimage, a record of the effect upon one mind of the mutations of life, might interest others who travel a like road.’77 There were certainly many fellow travellers, for after its very lucrative serialisation in The Sunday Times, the hardcover book had a print run of 46,000, which almost immediately sold out. In wartime, between August 1940 and the end of 1945, despite paper shortages, there were twenty-eight reprintings.

  The chapters take the conventional linear course of an autobiography: childhood, youth, Oxford, London, South Africa, London again, the Great War, Elsfield, Parliament. But only up to 1935; there is almost nothing about Canada in it, for obvious reasons. He wrote about his father, his mother, his dead brothers, but scarcely a thing about his living siblings, his wife or children. Along the way there are portraits of dead friends, such as Lord Milner and Raymond Asquith, som
e of the passages plucked straight from the privately printed These for Remembrance. There is a chapter on ‘My America’ and then a final passage in which he looks at civilisation and the challenges of the future. It is an unusual mixture of preoccupations, only really comprehensible if understood as the musings in late middle life of a highly intelligent, reflective, private and discreet man, hampered by the confining circumstances in which he finds himself.

  In his early life, he had been concerned with the promotion of civilisation, and the part-terror/part-attraction he felt for the primeval and savage. By 1940, in a passage that may give the modern reader pause for thought, he voiced his fears of what he called ‘de-civilisation’. Although he categorically did not reject increased mechanisation and scientific discovery, he did worry about what would happen once science had gained its major victories and all the globe was explored and exploited. In a nightmare scenario:

  Broad highways crowded with automobiles threaded the remotest lands, and overhead great air-liners carried week-end tourists to the wilds of Africa and Asia … What once were the savage tribes of Equatoria and Polynesia were now in reserves as an attraction to trippers, who bought from them curios and holiday mementoes. The globe, too, was full of pleasure-cities where people could escape the rigour of their own climate and enjoy perpetual holiday.

  In such a world everyone would have leisure. But everyone would be restless, for there would be no spiritual discipline in life. Some kind of mechanical philosophy of politics would have triumphed, and everybody would have his neat little part in the state machine. Everybody would be comfortable, but since there could be no great demand for intellectual exertion everybody would be also slightly idiotic. Their shallow minds would be easily bored, and therefore unstable. Their life would be largely a quest for amusement…