The Great Depression (73 page)

But one problem remained hidden. On the advice of S.J. Wood, now Commissioner of the RCMP, the government subsidized the provincial forestry camps until the end of the tour to forestall jobless protestors from demonstrating in the cities. Further, it invoked the Railway Act to keep the boxcars free of transients.

The western trip took on the character of a gigantic carnival, as each city vied with its rivals to mount an extraordinary variety of pageants, street dances, thrill rides, and Indian powwows that marked a return to enthusiasm after a decade of despair. The
people were saying, “Look what we can do!” not just to the royal couple and to the international press but also to themselves.

There were the usual complaints, especially from politicians who had been snubbed in their efforts to see the royal couple and from private citizens who complained that there were too many politicians getting in the way. King himself was sensitive to the criticism that he was in attendance for the entire tour. After hobnobbing with royalty for a fortnight, he ventured to bring up the matter with the Queen during the stopover at Banff, remarking that he had felt “somewhat embarrassed” at spending the entire period at Their Majesties’ side. “It looked like pushing myself to the fore, yet I felt that unless some evidence of Dominion precedence existed, one of the main purposes of the trip would be gone.” The Queen, who showed herself a mistress of diplomacy at every whistle-stop, told him exactly what he wanted to hear – that they had both thought all along he should come with them.

In later years, people would speak of the moment when “the Queen looked at me.” It was always the Queen. She charmed the nation with her intense blue eyes and her stunning pastel dresses, including her favourite colour, which the press dubbed “Elizabeth blue.” She looked at everybody, it seemed – at the acres of Boy Scouts, schoolchildren in middies, bemedalled veterans, feathered Indians, pigtailed girls in ethnic dress, and even, on one memorable occasion, a group of nudists waving from an island in the Gulf of Georgia. When her frailer husband – grey with fatigue at tour’s end – began to lose interest, she nudged him to look too. She had developed a personal salutation that saved energy, a twirl of the hand that became her trademark.

Her spontaneous gestures contrasted with the stiff newsreel formality of her predecessor, Queen Mary, with her solemn features and formidable mien. One moving moment occurred during a brief stop in the Rockies when the Queen spied a three-year-old child crying bitterly because she could not see over the crowd. Elizabeth moved quickly, picked up the little girl, hugged her, and stanched her tears.

The tour seemed to give the Prime Minister a new lease on life. There were fifty-five journalists accompanying the royal train and scores more at the way points, and here he was, always in the spotlight, the first to jump off the car almost before it
stopped to rush forward and introduce local dignitaries to their sovereign and his consort. The protestations of fatigue and exhaustion that had peppered his diaries vanished. By the end of the tour he was fairly bursting with good health, while the King and Queen were close to a breakdown.

King’s new glow seemed a metaphor for the nation. A dispirited people had suddenly discovered a hidden source of energy. The realm was a-flutter with flags of every size (one man in Toronto sold two million that summer), with miles of bunting and dozens of triumphal arches, one of which, in East Angus, Quebec, had required a million cords of lumber. The tour could only help a faltering economy. There was a brisk business in items ranging from rented top hats to cardboard periscopes. Cadbury’s, the chocolate people, devised a special medal; Seagram’s distilled an expensive whiskey, Crown Royal.

The country was eager for a return to pomp and ceremony. In Vancouver, the new CCF mayor, Dr. Lyle Telford – the same man who had signed so many passport applications for the Spanish volunteers – decided for the first time to wear his purple robes and golden chain of office. Until this moment he had felt that they would appear too pretentious in a city overrun with jobless transients.

By the time the royal couple returned to Vancouver from a boat trip to Victoria and headed east again – this time on the tracks of the government-owned CNR – the most jaundiced American newspapermen were turning out such effusive prose that the editor of one anti-British publication thought his man was drunk. The side trip to Washington and New York, which many thought more important than the entire Canadian tour, produced an even greater gush of enthusiasm.

George VI and Franklin Roosevelt got along swimmingly, and Mackenzie King basked in their presence as the three sat around drinks in the drawing-room at Roosevelt’s mother’s Hyde Park estate and frankly discussed world affairs. “The King,” wrote the Prime Minister, “indicated he would never wish to appoint Churchill to any office unless it was absolutely necessary in time of war. I confess I was glad to hear him say that because I think Churchill is one of the most dangerous men I have ever known.” But King, who had once thought Roosevelt a dangerous man too, would soon be luxuriating in Churchill’s shadow.

The Prime Minister was convinced that the British Embassy was snubbing him, but the diplomatic president made a point of including him in the talks and, in the diarist’s words, “told the King repeatedly that he and I understood each other perfectly and worked together on all matters of mutual relationship.” The British, including the King, had wanted Lord Halifax as Minister in Attendance, but Roosevelt said, “Mackenzie and I know each other so well I was most anxious he should come.” Roosevelt had made much of the fact that he and King were on a first-name basis. Actually, the President was the only man in the world who called the Prime Minister “Mackenzie.”

King himself was in a near delirium over this cosy relationship. The real significance of the side trip to the United States, however, was its salutary effect on the isolationist American press and public.

Following a much-publicized luncheon at which Roosevelt served hot dogs, the tour returned to Canada and moved east. As the train slipped out of Quebec, George VI summoned his Prime Minister to the royal carriage to tell him how much the tour had meant to him and the Queen. Then, as King recorded, he asked “if I thought he had grasped the new idea of kingship.” The Prime Minister asked if he meant the “common touch with the people, the first hand interest in their affairs.” The King replied, “Yes, no more high hat business, the kind of thing that my father and those of his day regarded as essential, as the correct attitude. That certain things could not be done.”

There followed an intimate and touching revelation by the King. The press was continually saying that he knew little about affairs, he said – that he could not speak, “was merely filling a place.” He turned to the Prime Minister. “You know how all of this started,” he said. Then he explained, “When my father was alive, he filled an important place; was very much before the public. My brother was equally prominent before the public. I was kept in the background. My father used to tell me that I could never do anything because I could not speak.”

Mackenzie King was moved by this cry from the heart from a man who had never been able to master a childhood stutter and was painfully conscious of it. But as the Prime Minister noted, during this tour the stutter had diminished as the King gained new confidence.

The crowds increased in size as the tour drew to a close. One hundred thousand people jammed Halifax, so many that some were forced to walk the streets all night, unable to find a bed. In the Nova Scotian Hotel, the King and Queen made their farewell speeches. The King trudged bravely through his, though he was close to exhaustion and it was noticed that his stutter had grown worse. The Queen told the Prime Minister that when her husband spoke it was all she could do to keep from crying. The King said he felt the same way when the Queen spoke.

The Governor General had finally been allowed to take part on this last day, June 15. As the couple made their farewells aboard the
Empress of Britain
, a little bit of political jockeying took place. The Prime Minister had expected to walk off the ship last in company with the Governor General. But Tweedsmuir wanted it on record that
he
had been the last to leave Their Majesties. A contest of wills followed as the two manoeuvred for position. King won handily, purposely falling behind the vice-regal party and triumphantly bringing up the rear.

With the sun shining brightly on its white prow, the
Empress of Britain
pulled out to sea, accompanied by an informal escort of British warships, Canadian destroyers, and the entire fishing fleet, including the famous
Bluenose
. The watchers on shore could see the King and Queen at the very top of the vessel, waving gallantly and, no doubt, more than a little wearily, for the last time. The Royal Tour was over. For a month it had suffused the nation in a golden glow that would be dissipated only by the darker shadows of the coming war.

While the King of England was proceeding across his senior Dominion with his subjects’ plaudits ringing in his ears, another, grimmer voyage was under way across the Atlantic. By a bitter coincidence, the luxury liner
St. Louis
left Hamburg just one day after the royal couple reached Canada and returned to Europe just one day after they arrived back in London. It carried 907 Jews who had lost everything at the hands of the Nazis and who had learned, to their despair, that no country in the New World would give them refuge.

They had left, full of hope, carrying entrance visas to Cuba, but at the last minute the Cuban government turned them down. They appealed to Uruguay, Paraguay, and Panama, but all their entreaties failed. Nobody wanted them. Their only hope was that the United States or Canada would take them in, but that was a forlorn expectation. The Americans sent a gunboat to prevent the ship from landing. Canada, as it always had, flatly turned down their request.

When Mackenzie King met Roosevelt in early June, the matter was dismissed in a few sentences. It wasn’t Canada’s problem, the Prime Minister indicated in his diary. The
St. Louis
and its frantic passengers steamed back to Europe. England finally agreed to take in 288 refugees. France and the Low Countries, soon to be overrun by Hitler’s panzers, admitted others. Of the 907 Jews who left Germany in May, only 240 survived the war.

But the prospect of war seemed remote and failed to dampen the revelry that attended the royal entourage that spring. The whole idea of war was anathema to Canadians. There were no hawks in Parliament and few if any in the country – only doves. There were no peace marches in those days – no chanting students carrying banners, no street demonstrations urging an end to war, no massed protests. None were needed because the entire population was firmly convinced that war was folly and peace preferable – at any price.

The nation had breathed a collective sigh of relief after the Munich crisis. Even Hitler’s unwarranted attack in March on what was left of Czechoslovakia had not changed the general isolationism of Canadians. The unprecedented slaughter of the Great War – twenty thousand soldiers blown to bits in a single day on the Somme – had convinced politicians and proletariat that war was unthinkable. A soldier’s life in Canada was scarcely a glorious one. Some mothers even refused to let their sons join the Boy Scouts because they were opposed to the wearing of uniforms.

A succession of anti-war novels such as Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front
had bolstered that view. Beverley Nichols’s best-selling
Cry Havoc! –
an attack on munitions makers – had convinced his readers that the “merchants of death,” to use the common expression, were evil men. When it was suggested to Mackenzie King that more jobs could be created if the country
started producing munitions, the Prime Minister was outraged. Apart from his own pacifism, he knew only too well that such a program couldn’t be sold politically.

King blamed the Poles as much as Hitler for the war in Europe. Why had this insignificant people taken so long to reply to the Führer’s ultimatum? Why hadn’t they been prepared to meet his terms? The delay “had helped to infuriate Hitler” when everything seemed to be so close to a settlement. King was quite prepared to agree to let Germany have all its colonies back, if it meant peace.

King was convinced there was still good in Hitler, that his actions could be explained by understanding the two-sided character of Richard Wagner, whose “life and music represented the study of good and evil” – the Christ versus the anti-Christ. The pagan (evil) side of Hitler’s Wagnerian personality, King thought, had won out over the Christian side, with its higher inspiration. “I feel very strongly that Hitler’s whole conduct is to be explained by his belief in himself as a reincarnation of some mythical or other personage – Siegfried, most probably.”

But there had been no doubt in King’s mind for some time that if war came Canada would stand with Britain. At the same time, he and Lapointe maintained the public fiction that the government was seriously considering neutrality. When the Lord Chancellor of England, Lord Maugham, arrived in late August to open the Canadian National Exhibition, he told the Prime Minister he intended to state that he had “been pleased to have assurances that Canada would be at the side of Britain in the event of war.” King was infuriated at that suggestion; it would, he said, do irreparable harm. The idea that Canada was acting at the instance of the old country, or that the government had made up its mind before Parliament was given a chance to decide on the nature of the commitment, shocked him. Maugham struck out the offending sentence but was undoubtedly mollified by King’s private assurance that the Cabinet was solidly united behind the war.

“I could not help thinking how desperately stupid some Englishmen are in appreciating any attitude other than their own,” King wrote. “The superior way some of them have of assuming to know everything fills one with both exasperation and dismay.”