by Gordon Pitts
Catherine Bell credits Day for taking the long view at all times. He was able to balance the government’s fiscal imperatives with driving Rover’s strategy. “It was rare to see someone step into a company like Shipbuilders and then into something difficult like cars—and remain the golden person,” she says. His strength, she believes, was the courage to say, “This is what I believe in.” Indeed, he could feel comfortable telling Thatcher the truth.
Chapter 13
A Knight in the Boardroom
Graham Day did not look for baubles to repay his loyalty, but in time Thatcher and her government recognized his work in dramatic fashion. It was not straightforward, however. The knighthood of Graham Day serves as a small case study of the constantly evolving, always awkward dance of two sovereign nations, the United Kingdom and its former colony Canada, whose citizens are still subjects of its queen.
In late 1985, as Day was successfully privatizing British Shipbuilders, a senior civil servant asked to borrow his two passports, Canadian and British, for a day. When they were returned, he was told confidentially that the government was trying to determine his citizenship eligibility for an “honour.” He interpreted that to mean a potential knighthood. But it took a full three years before he received a letter from Thatcher’s assistant private secretary indicating it would finally happen.
Apparently, the delay had been in securing the agreement of the Canadian authorities. He was later told by a senior British official that the prime minister’s office had spent two years securing the “permission” of the Canadians. Earlier, he had heard that Thatcher had spoken with Brian Mulroney, Canada’s prime minister, and had received his agreement. But before the recommendation could go to the queen, she had to be assured that, in any action taken, her role as monarch of the United Kingdom did not conflict with her equivalent role in Canada.
The queen must have been given the required assurance, because Graham Day was included in the New Year’s Honour List of 1989 and, in spring 1990, he was dubbed Sir Graham. Day was immensely proud, as was his English patriot father, who was too feeble to travel to London but who shared in the moment. Sadly, his mother had died by then. For Day, it was an honour to be part of the eight-hundred-year-old tradition of Knights Bachelor, his particular category of knighthood, whose members have included Sir Thomas More and Sir William Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame.
Day’s service as a knight has been routine. He became a member of the council of the Imperial Order of Knights Bachelor, a registered charity in Britain. And he could proudly wear the insignia of a “Knight Bachelor” as honorary colonel of the West Nova Scotia Regiment and as colonel commandant of the Judge Advocate Branch of the military. In his appointments to the Order of Nova Scotia and as Queen’s Counsel, he was addressed as “Sir Graham Day.” But there is a postscript.
In 2014, Governor General David Johnston phoned to say he was being appointed to the Order of Canada in the rank of officer. Day received the information package, addressed to “Mr.,” and a questionnaire. Among the questions was an inquiry as to his “form of address.” He filled in “Sir.” Thus began a long series of exchanges that concluded with a letter indicating Canada’s Chancellery of Honours—the office of the governor general that deals with such awards—could not address him as “Sir.” Day conceded the point, but he believes his lengthy exchanges with the chancellery had an unintended consequence. The governor general’s website, which lists all appointments to the Order of Canada, has removed the knighthood appellations of the few appointees who had also been knighted. This is unfortunate, Day says, because the names affected by the removals include Sir Ernest MacMillan, Canada’s greatest orchestra conductor, and Sir William Stephenson, Britain’s US-based spymaster in the Second World War, who was a Canadian citizen. “‘I suggest that the Chancellery may be of the opinion that British titles, even in retrospect, threaten Canada’s sovereignty,’ Day wrote to me in an email message, a bit mischievously. However, I doubt that either Sir John A. Macdonald or Sir Wilfrid Laurier are in any danger, as their knighthoods predated the formation of the Order of Canada!” Day is now convinced that there are no circumstances in which Canada will support the queen’s conferring knighthood on a Canadian—even a dual national. Nor is it likely that the UK authorities would seek such permission from Canada.
This reality was underlined in 2001 when Welsh-born high-tech entrepreneur Terry Matthews and academic leader George Bain, both dual nationals then living in Britain, were put forward for a knighthood on the queen’s honours list—without Canadian government approval. That triggered an angry letter of protest from Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. Emotions were still raw from the controversy over Conrad Black’s pursuit of a British peerage and the Chrétien government’s opposition. One scholar argued that Canada was playing politics with the new knighthoods, and pointed to three dual nationals so honoured without controversy in the previous fifteen years: heraldry expert Conrad Swan, sugar executive Neil Shaw, and Graham Day. The UK government said it was sorry, and went ahead with the Matthews and Bain knighthoods.
As a Canadian born and residing in this country—and who was knighted without objection from the Canadian government—Day feels he is the survivor of a proud line. In his view, he is “the last Canadian knight.” Some might question his exclusive claim to that title, but not his reverence for the tradition. No one alive is more passionate, and combative, in defending this proud legacy, part of two countries’ shared history, but now sadly abandoned in the fog of politics.
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“Crotchety ”—Independent
“Charming, warm and straightforward”—Financial Times
“A very shrewd strategic thinker”—Times
“A dour Nova Scotian”—Sunday Times
“The country’s most ruthless crisis manager”—Daily Mail
If Graham Day’s British adventures were a movie—perhaps a biopic titled The Iron Man—you might say he got positive reviews, but the critics never seemed to figure out what show they were watching. Was this the tale of a cold-blooded hit man? Or of a charming man of the world? Or the quixotic adventures of an upstart colonial, a kind of Mark Twain–like fantasy, “A Nova Scotia Canuck in Lady Thatcher’s Court”?
Of course, they were all correct. There are many Graham Days, depending on the job to be done. Like the musical stage director he once was, being a senior manager in a corporation meant playing many roles. They all drew on parts of his personality.
The UK media was fascinated with his unprepossessing background. BBC-TV labelled him “the onetime cornpone country singer,” while running clips of him singing “Little Bo-Peep” on Singalong Jubilee. The press jumped on his Canadian roots, suggesting that Thatcher had a weakness for North American executives—after all, Ian MacGregor had built his career in the United States. Day insisted that performance, not birthplace, would be the test of his abilities.
He was “the Canadian-born Mr. Day,” the man from rustic Nova Scotia, but gradually they dropped the Canadian bit. He remembers his public relations aide during the Rover days saying to him, “Oh, Graham, you’d be interested to know, you don’t seem to be Canadian anymore.” He became a part of the British scene, like Cunard and Beaverbrook, Maritimers who fit in. But Beaverbrook was wilful and untrustworthy, changing his political affections as promiscuously as he discarded mistresses. Day built his reputation on trust—particularly trust to two women: his wife and a political mistress.
The anglicization of Graham Day was a natural outcome of his ubiquity. For a decade, the distinctive bearded man from Canada was constantly in the newspapers or on TV. Day attributes a lot of his good press to John Pullen, his loyal public relations aide. Pullen would say, “Graham, you can’t run and hide, that’s not an option. You can try and avoid it, but I don’t recommend that.” He said, “It’s part of your job. You’re going to have to be available and do it with a smile.” Day appreciated the advice
, because he knew he had to get certain messages out there. The audience was the public, the politicians, the investors, and, perhaps most important, the employees, who read newspapers and understood best what he was talking about.
He generally got along very well with journalists, and the press clippings from the era reflect his ease and eloquence. “I was only interested in how they reported the facts. And I never ever, ever lied,” he says, repeating a familiar Day canon. He remembers an auto reporter from the Daily Telegraph who questioned him: “You’re not telling me the whole story.” And Day agreed: “I’m in a competitive business, so I can’t tell you the whole story, but everything I tell you is true.” And so, “by and large, I figure that the British press treated me fairly, reported honestly, and I could live with the hyperbole about how they chose to describe me. That didn’t matter.” In fact, one article referred to Day as a whiz kid. It is hard to think of a fifty-year-old man as a whiz kid, but he no doubt seemed young compared to the dinosaurs who had been lumbering across the British industrial landscape. He laughs that “they always struggled to try and get a descriptor.”
He and his public relations team were good at media management. If the company had some bad news about to break, his people would approach journalists they liked. Rover was a willing participant in the “Friday night drop,” whereby business journalists would be fed information on Friday night to write stories for the thick, hernia-inducing Sunday papers. It was typical on a Friday evening to spend time with one or more Sunday journalists, principally those from the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph. He was always wary of the Guardian, which had a political edge. The Financial Times, which was generally sympathetic to business, didn’t do the Friday night drop, but its reporters were aggressive in going after the facts.
The newspaper coverage of that era shows the efforts to soften the image of this allegedly hard man. One interview with Ann was designed to reveal the kinder, gentler Graham Day. Shortly after the Night of the Long Knives, the Daily Express profiled Ann under the headline “He brings me pearls, cashmere, and silk.” The condescending piece somewhat illuminated their lives in London. It started with the public image of Graham Day as “the ruthless hatchet man of the Rover Group cutting a swathe through nervous executives to offset a dive in the car giant’s fortunes.” But, at home, the newspaper reported, “‘he is a pussycat,’ insists his loyal wife Ann.” “Ruthless he ain’t,” she was quoted as saying. “The kids say he’s marshmallow inside. He’s very soft in the best kind of way, very considerate of people’s feelings. When he’s had to cut jobs and get rid of people, there’s personal conflict. I’ve seen sleepless nights over these people’s problems.”
The story explained that Ann “refuses to put ‘housewife’ in her passport.” Her explanation was, “I do much more than that.” She said she organized their three homes: a family house in Nova Scotia, a lakeside holiday cottage, and a London flat. “She has masterminded 14 house moves with only two breakages. She copes with the household bills and chores.” Ann said in the article, “He could not operate without a support system. I try to set aside two hours a day organizing and writing letters. I am the general dogsbody, but pretty methodical.”
Over years of press coverage, Day had got fairly used to the celebrity status. During their second term in England, the Days were much more relaxed about their lifestyles. The kids were not part of it—they were back in Canada. The couple lived in stylish South Kensington and, left to herself during the weekdays, Ann could walk anywhere anonymously. When Graham was with her, it was different. He was recognized. “Celebrity was hard because we are corduroy and desert-boot people,” Ann says. On weekends, they could escape to their little two-storey place in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. “It was one down, two up, you could just slam the door and leave,” Ann recalls. “There were no treasures to worry about and people were lovely.” And Graham could tool around the English lanes in his latest Beetle, continuing the loving relationship with the car of his courtship. (It would still be going strong in his eighties, when he was having a circa-1960s Beetle rebuilt.)
Was Ann lonely? She did have the flexibility to fly home when she had to, and there were still aging parents and children just starting their work lives. “I was too busy to be lonely, and lonely is an inner thing. You have to be able to live with yourself.”
The children were getting on with life. Deborah was launched on an academic career as she gained advanced degrees in education, including a PhD in measurement and evaluation. Donna would get a business degree and gain accreditation as an insurance underwriter—and as an embroiderer, trained in the traditional craft by London’s City & Guilds art school.
Michael provided some surprises. As the Days prepared for their second round of British duty in 1983, they got a call from their son, then a student at the University of Saskatchewan. Michael, a track athlete, had suffered another in a series of dispiriting injuries. He was frustrated with university life as he drifted through a series of major subjects. As a lover of the outdoors, he couldn’t see being chained to a desk for the next thirty years. So he decided to drop out of school and join the military while he sorted out his life. He called his parents with the news that he would be heading to the Canadian Forces base at Gagetown, New Brunswick, for the selection course.
Graham gave one of his familiar profane responses. Then, stunned silence. But it was out of surprise, not horror. “They had miscalculated my academic ambition and ability at the time,” Michael says. Yet, from the first, his parents were supportive.
Michael Day would not leave the military for another thirty-two years. He emerged as one of the Canadian Forces’ leaders of his generation, rising in the counterterrorism and special forces community and serving as chief of Canada’s special forces. He would rise to a lieutenant-general of Canada’s armed forces, with postings to dangerous places such as Afghanistan and Bosnia. He was touted in the press as a potential chief of Canada’s defence staff before retiring from the service in 2015. Eventually, he did go back to university as a young officer, and he excelled, receiving a bachelor’s degree in politics and a master’s in war studies. As with his father, Michael was a late bloomer who needed to figure life out. In a sense, he had the career that Graham might have had if he had been allowed to sign up for the Korean War.
Beyond the lives of their children, the Days kept in touch with home. Old friends would visit from Nova Scotia, and they would be amazed at the Days’ life in London. Graham would come to their hotel to pick them up, usually with a driver, often in a Rover, and he had that constant security attention. They would end up at a favourite Italian restaurant where everyone knew his name and the other diners would gawk.
The celebrity status was underlined on vacation to the Mediterranean island of Crete. The Days loved Greece and the islands, and he and Ann had found a charming taverna, which they began to frequent nightly. One evening a British tourist bustled over and said, “Excuse me, but are you Graham Day?” It was unthreatening—he just wanted to know. Day was getting a lot of that. “I’ve tried to figure out why the hell they would be interested.” The Days never went back to the little taverna. The concern was not merely a result of shyness. With fame came worries about security—for himself, his family, and the businesses he served. When he moved to Britain in 1971 to head Cammell Laird, Day had to be processed for a security clearance—after all, Cammell Laird was a warship builder. He was cleared, and, for the first of several occasions, signed the Official Secrets Act.
It was a time when sectarian strife in Northern Ireland was bleeding across the Irish Sea. The security services were alert to the large numbers of “Liverpool Irish” in the Mersey area. Many were employed in the shipyard. Incidents in the yard caused shutdowns, curtailed work, and enhanced the need for surveillance. Security officers were always in the yard. When outsiders were present—for example, at ship launchings—the company would host members of the Special Branch and MI5. In the
1970s in Birkenhead, the Day children found themselves collected from school at times of high risk. The concern escalated in 1976, when Day led the organizing committee for British Shipbuilders, whose membership included other makers of warships.
When he left the committee, he was given an exit interview by the security services. He was cautioned that he continued to be bound by the Official Secrets Act. In a time of national emergency, if the United Kingdom needed his services, it was expected that he would return. Of course, return he did, quite willingly, at the request of the Thatcher government. By March 1983, the danger from terrorism, both in Northern Ireland and in Europe, was even more grave. When the Days relocated to London, they were required to have attack alarms in areas of their London flat, and they were instructed on appropriate behaviours. When Ann left the apartment, she would lower the floor-to-ceiling shutters with their bars and activate the alarms.
About six months into his job at Shipbuilders, Day was given the services of a new driver/security person, Jeff Stubbings, a former member of the Parachute Regiment and the French Foreign Legion. They were together for the next nine and half years, and Stubbings was a constant, forceful presence. In the mornings, if there was the sense of danger, he would knock on the door of the Days’ London home to inform Graham that his car was parked around the corner. The two men would joke that, while Stubbings slept, Day worked, and then the reverse. They agreed they probably spent more time together than with their own wives.
The high alert only intensified in October 1984 when an IRA bomb exploded at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the Conservative leadership had assembled for the party conference. Thatcher barely escaped with her life, but five people were killed and many injured, including cabinet ministers Norman Tebbit and John Wakeham. Tebbit’s wife was confined to a wheelchair for life.