Of course I dared not relate this episode to anyone. Too many “cry wolf” stories had fallen on deaf ears; my grandmother would simply have boxed mine. In fact, very few paid heed to a would-be Eulenspiegel, whose merry pranks had the consistent habit of backfiring, so to gain the attention of my elders I began to imagine I was someone else, someone far superior, who like Kipling’s Kangaroo cried with frivolous impudence, “Make me different from all other animals! Make me also wonderfully popular by five this afternoon.” I blush to admit I quickly became a rather ruthless fabricator of facts who under the tender care of some blind and senile god had so far remained impervious to discovery. I also confess that from the very outset, my timing in life has been a trifle askew, slightly off season. Whenever an auspicious occasion has arisen, I have arrived just when the moment has decided to move on—a split second after the climax, if you’ll forgive the phrase. As I have never been at one with a horse, so have I never felt quite at ease in the present. The French have two little words for it—“sans époque”! If there is to be any blame attached to this somewhat hapless state, let it point to the time warp in which I found myself growing up.
UNLIKE MOST theatrical “gypsies” on this continent, life began for me on a tiny atoll of privilege in a late-blooming fin de siècle. Looking back, none of it seems quite real. There was always present a whimsical sense of the intangible, as if it were all a mirage—a Narnia among the tomahawks. It came and went in the time it takes a boy to become a youth, but it left behind its ghost—a lingering, not unsmiling ghost to remind me of its secret. In a land which many still believe is inhabited only by the Bear, the Beaver and the Mountie, it was a secret to be cherished, a jewel in the tundra. I was caught in an eddy which whirled about this little princedom by the lake; it made me drunk and it made me dizzy—I may be caught there still.
CHAPTER TWO
A Colonial Paradise
My great-great-great-grandfather, John Bethune, is the first known member of the Canadian branch on my mother, “Belle” Abbott’s side of the family. Boswell mentions him in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson in 1785. According to genealogy, Bethune claims descendence from a man named Bethan or Beaton who came to the Isle of Iona with Saint Columba around AD 563. For a great many years the Beatons were ministers in the pre-Reformation Church. At the time of Boswell’s interview with my ancestor, Bethune was on his way to North Carolina. When the American Revolution broke out, he opted for the British side and was captured at the Battle of Widow Moores Creek Bridge in the winter of 1776. Being a padre he was released in exchange for prisoners and made his way north across the border where he founded many a Presbyterian congregation all over what is now eastern Ontario, including St. Gabriel’s in Montreal, considered the mother church of Presbyterian-ism in British North America.
Norman Bethune, the eccentric and rebellious doctor of the nineteen twenties and thirties, famous for throwing instruments away in disgust during operations, then going home and inventing new ones, is a descendant. In direct contrast to his patrician forebears, he was one of Canada’s earliest Communists. While serving a prison term he contracted TB, which he cured by operating on himself in his cell. Norman Bethune joined the freedom fighters in the Spanish Civil War. He had invented a method for transporting blood plasma and the mobile blood unit, which he used to great effect operating on the battlefield. He brought his units with him to China, where he formed a bond with Chairman Mao Tse-tung and served at his side against the Nationalists in the famous Long March where he saved a staggering amount of lives during the height of battle. He had to work so fast in the midst of gunfire that he became cocky and threw away his rubber gloves, complaining they were a waste of precious time. Ironically, he eventually was infected and died of blood poisoning. Bethune was just about the only white man Mao ever trusted, and to this day, he is considered somewhat of a saint in China. Whenever Chinese delegations, including their Ping-Pong team, come to Canada, the first thing they do is to go straight to Norman’s home in Gravenhurst, Ontario, to pay him homage.
Back in the early nineteenth century the elder Bethune’s son, Rev. John (John, Jr.), having converted to the Church of England, became rector of Christ Church Cathedral and Dean of Montreal. He was also a founding member of McGill University and its acting principal for eleven years until 1846, thus fortifying the foundations of our family’s long history with that great college. Settled comfortably in Montreal, the good reverend married and had a daughter, Mary, who became the wife of my direct great-grandfather, the Right Honourable Sir John Joseph Caldwell Abbott, one of Canada’s earliest successful corporation lawyers and its first native-born prime minister.
Great-grandfather reading on his yacht, ignoring everyone about him
Having amassed a considerable fortune and fascinated by the need for railroads to link our vast country, he bought his own, the Montreal and Bytown Railway. He also became president of the Canada Central Railway, which he amalgamated with the Brockville and Ottawa Line, and tracks like tentacles slowly began to extend westward. It is of little surprise, therefore, that he further encouraged Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s own private vision for the construction of a trans-Canadian railroad and that he, with his client and friend Sir Hugh Allan, then the country’s wealthiest man (Allan Steamship Lines, Merchants Bank, etc.) would begin to set the wheels turning.
Sir Hugh saw the railroad as a means to gain total control of the sea on both coasts, and he and Abbott were convinced that to achieve this link successfully and efficiently, the job could not be done without financial aid from the United States.
With Premier John A. Macdonald’s full knowledge, they secretly enlisted backing principally from American railway tycoon Jay Cooke, clearly aware that if this was uncovered, it would be extremely unpopular and highly embarrassing.
Unfortunately, the documents concerning the negotiations were stolen, and bribery, not so frowned upon then as it is now, became a necessary evil. A royal commission was formed to “investigate,” and this bold, daring and delicate exercise came to be known as the Pacific Scandal.
Macdonald resigned, Allan and Abbott went to England for backing there and were successful to a point, but Sir Hugh, fed up to the teeth, withdrew from the project and went back to his family business and his large estate, the Raven’scrag I have already mentioned, atop Mount Royal, whose stone walls I climbed many a time as a young boy. Although immersed in the scandal up to his sideburns, it failed to sink my great-grandfather. He survived and prospered and never once gave up on the Canadian Pacific dream. With Macdonald’s party back in power, he spent the major part of his time arranging financing for this massive undertaking. So, when his two clients, Lord Strathcona and Lord Mount Stephen who, with R. B. Angus and Sir William Van Horne, formed the big foursome that finally made the Canadian Pacific Railway a reality, it was the sole author of its charter, John Abbott, whose historic contract with the government had paved the way.
In the rather infamous St. Albans case of 1864, Great-Grandfather acted for the leaders of escaped Confederate soldiers who, after seeking asylum in Canada during the American Civil War, raided (in plain-clothes) the town of St. Albans over the border in Vermont. There they seized its principal officials, rifled several banks, tried to set the town on fire and finally withdrew back over the frontier. This breach of Canadian neutrality could not be overlooked and the leaders were arrested, but a writ of habeas corpus was requested. There ensued a certain amount of correspondence between my great-grandfather and President Lincoln, but the White House insisted the offenders were not Confederates, just ordinary criminals masquerading as army. Abbott proved in the court proceedings that followed the raiders to be indeed Confederate soldiers committing an act of war and not criminals and his clients were discharged. Two years before when Canada was threatened with invasion from the south during the Civil War, Sir John raised and commanded as its lieutenant colonel his own regiment, the Eleventh Argenteuil Raiders, and twi
ce led them on active service “to repel brigands within our neighbor’s territory.”
It was, however, in advising big business on both sides of the border that he excelled. His comrades jokingly nicknamed him the “Great Pooh-Bah” or “Lord High Everything Else” because he headed so many different organizations—government leader of the Senate for many years, Montreal’s chief justice and its mayor, a director of the Bank of Montreal and, keeping up the family relationship with McGill University, member for some considerable time of its Board of Governors. He had even found time to teach law there—one of his prize students, the future prime minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Later on, his niece, Dr. Maude Abbott (my grandaunt), would also become a fixture of McGill and one of the world’s authorities on congenital heart problems.
The ruins of Fort Senneville on our property
When I was a child, I loved this jolly, bustling, rotund, generous lady because every time she visited us she would bring me presents and make me laugh.
She had become the partner and friend of Dr. Paul Dudley White, the famous heart surgeon from Boston, and would travel with him and his family, lecturing throughout Europe. She was recognized and admired by the leading pioneer of heart disease, her teacher and mentor Sir William Osler. She was known and respected in Vienna and Rome, at Edinburgh University and Harvard, and in Mexico, where Diego Rivera painted her in his famous mural for Mexico City’s National Institute of Cardiology. But McGill, in spite of her incredible groundbreaking work for that college, refused to accept her on its faculty. This was not just because she was a woman in a man’s world—it was sadly due to the consistent failure of our country to recognize its own talent. Only at the end of her selfless and uncomplaining life was she finally accepted and came to be known affectionately as “Maudie of McGill.”
Her uncle, my great-grandfather, had himself paid homage to medicine as incorporator of the country’s then foremost hospital the Royal Victoria, selecting the architect, supervising its building and serving as its president and chairman of the Board of Governors till he died in 1893.
The Golden Square Mile on the southern slopes of Mount Royal had since 1850 been the most influential and affluent neighborhood in the country. Three-quarters of Canada’s wealthiest families lived there. One luxurious mansion after another exhibited a diversity of architectur styles — Gothic Revival, Romanesque, Scottish Baronial and the favorite of all, French Second Empire.
Very early on, my great-grandfather built his mansion on the Sherbrooke Street side of the “Mile,” swiftly followed by his railway compatriot the “Brasspounder from Illinois,” Sir William Van Horne, who erected his own on the adjacent corner of Stanley Street. He also took particular delight in the salmon river he owned on the north bank of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was called the Great Wacheeshoo and boasted rushing falls where the salmon jumped, and for most of his free days, he fished there regularly.
On one occasion, while sailing by the Wacheeshoo on his steam yacht towards the mouth of the St. Lawrence, he was passing Anticosti Island when the vessel came to ground on some rocks and was wrecked. He and his surviving party somehow made it to shore, where they were rescued by a group of men who took them straight to a large castle on the island. They were warmly greeted by its owner, who, it turned out, not only owned the castle but the vast island as well. Monsieur Henri Menier was a descendant of the famous founder and maker of France’s Menier Chocolates, known the world over as the “Chocolate King.” He insisted that his marooned guests stay as long as it took to repair the boat. Menier was so tickled and amused that the country’s prime minister had been discovered wading onto his shores that he never forgot the incident and for the next half century, our family received carton aftercarton of miniature wooden trunks furnished with golden keys filled with delectable Menier bonbons! More shipwrecks, s’il vous plaît!
Boisbriant, my great-grandfather’s old pile, of which I knew every cranny
Bois de la Roche, Polly’s family home, which I haunted as a boy
Great-grandfather’s happiest leisure hours were spent at Bois-briant. In the mid-nineteenth century, he had acquired an ancient seignory, at the tip of the island of Montreal, which not only satisfied his sense of history’s continuity but endeared him the more to the local French Canadians whose language he spoke so accurately and fluently. It had been created a fief noble in favour of the Seigneur de Boisbriant as far back as 1672 by the original de Casson family who were the ancient seigneurs of Montreal’s island. It included a large, ruined fort, Fort Senneville, down by the water (still standing today), which had been built as protection against the Iroquois in 1679.
Great-grandfather at once transformed the seignory into a beautiful estate, upon which he built an imposing country house overlooking the Lac des Deux Montagnes and the Oka Mountains. He had also purchased a considerable portion of the surrounding countryside, which was called Senneville, and another large Abbott house was built nearby for his brother Christopher (for whom I was named) called Bally-Bawn. Sir John began to cultivate his estate with extensive gardens, a model farm and spacious conservatories, where he developed a great variety of rare orchids; here were fine orchards slanting towards the lake, and in his fields grazed Guernsey cattle, which he was among the first to import for the improvement of the Canadian strain.
While all this landscaping and development was in progress, others followed suit, tycoons and railway barons, both French and English, each trying to outdo the other, and between them they literally turned Senneville and neighboring Cartierville into the Newport of Canada. Apart from Boisbriant, two of the large houses I would play in so many years later as a little boy were Pine Bluff, which had belonged to the railway magnate R. B. Angus, and Bois de la Roche, Senator Louis-Joseph Forget’s house, Polly’s family home. They had both been modeled on French chateâux and were bountifully supplied with mysterious rooms and secret passages. I never dreamed that one day I would be making films at Bois de la Roche when it was an empty shell and being rented out to motion picture companies. I made two there, one opposite Bette Davis in Little Gloria Happy at Last, about the Vanderbilts, and one with Nicholas Cage called The Boy in Blue. For a good long time I had become as much a part of the wainscoting in that old house as any bold, inquisitive termite.
A few years before the century’s close, as my great-grandad’s clock began to slowly wind down through a lingering, undiagnosed illness, Fortune’s smile vanished, and gradually the grand Victorian days dwindled until very little of them were left. Whether there were simply too many Abbotts to care for amongst his huge and widespread brood, or whether he had sunk too much of his personal wealth into the various causes and schemes which drove his life—no one has yet come up with the answers.
Some say he went quite mad and this conjecture could have been entirely conceivable—for though his career both in law and in business was past any doubt a brilliant one, a lofty achievement, the journey there had been intense and quite ruthless, and being in private a gentle, retiring and rather religious soul, his assumed guilt according to his enemies could have pierced deep enough to have made him turn the corner. But not so—for it was cancer that claimed him in the end.
AS THE ELDER statesman crumbled, so did the farm, the stone walls, the fort, the boats and Boisbriant itself, the ceilings flaking, the colours fading from the rooms, the aviaries empty of birds. The once impeccable gardens were now wildly overgrown, but that sad and sorry state was not prolonged, for to the rescue with a welcome reprieve hot in their hands came the Cloustons—may their tribe increase!
The Cloustons were connections of ours by marriage only, but at least we could say that Boisbriant was to be kept as nearly in the family as we could wish, so to speak.
Sir Edward Clouston
The tribe’s chief, Sir Edward Clouston, had been quick to snap it up and, like some conquering potentate, began with a vengeance to reface, rebuild, reshape the old pile, furiously magnifying its already considerable proportions—
building bridges, adding bakeries, laundries, ice houses, extra stables and dredging the lake for his yachts. Sir Edward had made his millions in banking—he was a director of the Hudson’s Bay Company, where he had begun as a boy, and was a founder of the Royal Trust. All this had helped make him one of the country’s richest men. The young Max Aitken of New Brunswick, later the powerful press baron and Churchill’s air minister, had as a boy mightily impressed Sir Edward, who had hired him over a great many aspirants—“Send me back the little man with the big head.” Clouston gave the young man the boost he needed to embark on the sensational career he had cut out for himself.
To the end of his days, Max, Lord Beaverbrook never ceased to show his gratitude to the Clouston tribe. I use the word “tribe” not in the least frivolously, for they were indeed legitimately blessed with Indian blood. Several generations back, one of their ancestors had married a Cree Indian squaw with the magical name of Nahovway, which had brought their blood to a rich, boiling red.
Many generations had now passed. I was awakened one late night by the smell of smoke and snuck down to the lakeshore in my bare feet. There they were, the Cloustons, sitting around a fire which they had lit on the grounds of the old fort. I could see them through the cracks of the crumbling turrets and hear their soft laughter as they enjoyed a late picnic supper under the stars. They looked pale and ghostlike in the light of the dying embers; but there were others with them, I was sure of that, paler even than they, and to this day, I am firmly convinced that they had been joined for a peace pipe and a powwow by the phantoms of the lost Iroquois braves who had perished under those battlements.
In Spite of Myself: A Memoir Page 2