Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 13

department stores was commissioned, starting with Calgary and Vancouver in 1913. By the end of that year, the HBC had fifteen sales shops in operation, with $5 million invested in expanding the facilities.

Strathcona continued to occupy the Governor's majestic office, but the Company was beginning to slip away from under him.

-XS TOUGH AS OLD PEMMICAN, Strathcona had finally begun to betray signs of his advanced age. During his 1909 Canadian visit when he had been on a buggy tour of the Okanagan Valley, the horses stumbled while going downhill and his carriage overturned. Both of the driver's legs were broken, but the eighty-nine-year-old High Commissioner survived intact except for a slightly strained arm. The same summer when he was back in England, a Royal Navy flotilla sailing up the Thames fired a salute salvo that exploded too close to Strathcona's eardrums. He was temporarily deafened and grew cranky and even more fusty than was his habit. When he heard that WEI. Duff-Millar, Agent-General for New Brunswick, had ordered a ceremonial uniform for a roval reception, he personally tracked down the tailor, wall~ed into his shop and, waving his cane for emphasis, insisted that work on the garment be stopped immediately because provincial agents-general had no official standing and were not ent.i.tled to special dress.

In the spring of 1910, feeling poorly and having reached the great age of ninety, Strathcona reluctantly offered Laurier his resignation. The Prime Minister just as reluctantly accepted it and officially announced the High Commissioner's retirement at the Dominion Day banquet in London the following summer. The resignation having been offered and accepted, nothing more happened. There was an election in the air, and neither 218 LABRADOR SMITH.

Lord Stratbcona visiting missionary Fatber Lacombe in Edmonton, 1909, after being tbrou,n from bis carriage in the Okanagan.

(His rigbt arm is in a sling)

of Canada's political parties wanted to press for the old man's departure.

Any partisan demand for the High Commissioner's scalp would have left the offending politician open to Strathcona's wrath and the possibility of financial aid to his opponents. And so Strathcona was able to stay on through a simple stratagem: neither of Canada's political parties wanted him back because each was fearful of his possible support of the other.

Laurier had earnestly tried to accommodate Strathcona's every whim during the fifteen years of their political partnership. But in 1911, as the Liberal Prime Minister faced his toughest election campaign, advocating support for a reciprocity agreement with the United THE RECKONING 219.

States, Strathcona remembered the one disagreement of their relationship and publicly came out against Laurier's trade scheme.*

Laurier's subsequent electoral defeat brought the Conservatives back into office under Robert Laird Borden. That pleased Strathcona because one of the new Prime Minister's first decisions was to order construction of three dreadnoughts as Canada's contribution to the Royal Navy. Borden and Strathcona had first met during a London visit by the then Opposition Leader two years earlier. "[Lord Strathcona] was most kind and attentive in every way," Borden later recalled. "I was struck at that time with an almost pathetic earnestness in the discharge of even the minor duties of his office. . . . He was in evidence on every occasion. He met us at the station upon our -arrival in London; he regularly called upon us at our hotel; when I left to visit Paris, I found him (to my great astonishment) waiting for me at the hotel door early in the morning in order to accompany me to the train. On that occasion he reproached me for not having given him formal notice of my departure; and he seemed to feel that his failure to attend would have been almost a disgrace." Once in office, Borden reappointed Strathcona-now in his ninety-second year- unaware that the old man had turned his mind to one final project.

Strathcona was still nursing his recollection of the time the heir to the throne had visited Canada and stayed at his Montreal residence. When the royal party left for the West, Laurier would not allow the High Commissioner to attach his private car to the royal train-even though Strathcona prornised to ride along only as far as Calgary. Another, more weighty reason for umbrage involved Laurier's enthusiastic support for construction of two transcontinental railways, the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern, that cut into the CPR's earnings.

220 LABRADOR SMITH.

STRATHCONA'S LASTADVENTURE, historically his most significant, ensured that in the decisive run-up to the First World War the Roval Navy would have adequate fuel reserves to take on & Kaiser's fleet.

Strathcona had been interested in petroleum explo ration since it was reported to him that a CPR construc tion crew drilling for water in southern Alberta had struck gas. Besides retaining the Company's rights to minerals found on the lands it sold, he also instructed the new Canadian Committee to search for oil. Not much happened at first, but Strathcona was rewarded with a rich geological sample of oil seepage formations found near what is now Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories.* Through his Scottish connections, the High Commissioner had meanwhile obtained control of Burinah 011, a firm founded in 1886 by Glasgow engi neers who pioneered the extraction o ' f oil from shale.

The company's deposits up the Irrawaddy River in cen tral Burma were not particularly extensive, but at least they were under British control.

That suddenly became important as development of marine engines fired by oil instead of coal began to revolutionize the world's navies. The Royal Navy had continued to act as the guardian of the Empire, protecting garrisons "on every rock in the ocean where a cormorant could perch," as the parliamentary reformer Sydney Smith had caustically observed. The silent service;s selfesteem remained unaffected by the Boer interlude.

Admiral Algernon Charles Heneage habitually removed his jacket while reciting his morning prayers because he considered it unthinkable for a uniformed British officer to fall on his knees. Another salty character, Admiral Sir Robert Arbuthnot, was such a martinet that when,

*Located on the Mackcnzie River, the little settlerrient did eventually strike an econornic oilfieldand still produces a million barrels of crude a year.

THE RECKONING 221.

shortly after he pa.s.sed command of his ship to his successor, a seagull defecated on the foredeck, a chief bosun's inate deadpanned: "That would never have happened in Sir Robert's day." The navy's progressive element, led by the First Sea Lord, Sir John Fisher, was more concerned with transforming its obsolete coalfired vessels to oil. Coal engines took eight hours to flash up and some ships took days to coal; oil propulsion was faster, more efficient, produced less telltale smoke and nearly doubled the effective action radius of warships.

The Royal Navy's predicament was that 94 percent of the world's oil supplies were under Russian or American control, with Royal Dutch Sh.e.l.l and the Rockefellerdominated Standard Oil interests uneasily sharing the western oligopoly. Apart from the tiny Burmah Oil operation, Britain's only potential petroleum source was Persia (modern Iran), where William Knox D'Arcy, the wealthy developer of the Mount Morgan goldfield in Australia, had obtained a sixty-year oil exploration concession for only V0,000 ani 10 percent (later 16 percent) of net profit. He risked most of his fortune drilling the concessions, but his Polish and Canadian field crews reported only dry holes. Afraid that D'Arcy would be tempted to join the Sh.e.l.l or Rockefeller cartels, a delegation headed by Fisher secretly called on Strathcona and asked him to become chairman of a reconstructed and refinanced major oil consortium that would combine the Burmese and Persian properties.* Briefed on the

D'Arcy had in fact been negotiating with both rival concerns. At one point Sh.e.l.l had hired a freclance master-spy identified by British Intelligence as Sidney George Reillv to intercept D'Arcy during talks he was holding with the Rockefellers aboard a Rothschild yacht anch.o.r.ed off the French Riviera. Reilly dressed up as a priest and, inveigling his way aboard the vessel on the pretext he was collecting money for a nearby orphanage, took D'Arcy aside and on behalf of Sh.e.l.l offered to improve any Rockefeller offer.

222 LABRADOR SMITH.

strateiric siLmificance of the Royal Navy's maintaining defensible oil supplies, Strathcona 'immediately agreed to help finance the new oil firm and become its chairman. A new Anglo-Persian syndicate was hurriedly incorporated, D'Arcy was pushed aside, and at least Y, 1. 5 million was personally contributed to the oil hunt by the HBC Governor. He received 75,000 shares for his trouble, and by the very act of agreeing to become chairman of the highly risky enterprise provided the credibility required to raise more exploration funds. The joint venture struck oil at Maidan-i-Naftun soon after-wards and quickly outlined a ma)or oilfield.

At the personal urging of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, Strathcona signed over the Persian concessions to the British Crown for 22.2 million, guaranteeing the Royal Navy twenty years of oil at a price that Churchill estimated saved British taxpayers enough money to have paid for construction of all its pre-war dreadnoughts. The Anglo-Persian reserves fuelled the fleet that gave Britain the edge at sea over Germany in the First World War. "It was not as a mercantile company that I looked upon it," Strathcona explained, "but really from an Imperial point of view."

BY THE SUMMER OF 1913, Strathcona looked and acted his ninety-three years.

The old man's proud chin no longer jutted out before him but looked more like a manmade jaw in which the paraffin was melting. Ethel Hurlbatt, the Warden of McGill's Royal Victoria

*The Anglo-Persian Oil Company eventually grew into British Petroleum, the $50-billion London-based petroleum giant that now ranks, as the world's third-largest oil multinational. In January 197.5, Burmah Oil sold its 21.5-percent interest in British Petroleum to the Bank of England for $426 million.

THE RECKONING 223.

College, who met him at the time, poignantly recalled his "detachment of manner, as if he had already pa.s.sed some boundaries of time and s.p.a.ce beyond his fellows, and while occupied and keenlv interested and ceaselessly concerned with work and duty and service, [he was] really alone with himself."

On June 13, 1913, Labrador Smith presided for the last time over the Hudson's Bay Company's annual Court. Too weak to stand or even to rea~ his own remarks, he sat before a representative gathering of the Company's shareholders like a stuffed effigy of himselfrnute, barely emitting any vital signs, yet still there, the Governor and a Bay man to the end. The news was all good: Y.300,000 had been invested in the building of larger stores in Calgary, Vancouver and Victoria; the year's dividend declaration of Y,5 on each share of El 0 value set a modern record; land was being disposed of at an unprecedented $20.06 an acre, and 4,032,860 acres were still to be sold.*

The High Commissioner's final public function was the giant Dominion Day reception he had given every July 1 at Queen's I lall. He tirelessly shook 2,300 hands, but his voice, never very strong, had given out. "The whole scene was exceedingly beautiful," noted the Reverend J.W Pedley, a visitor from Canada. "The great hall with its brilliant illumination, its fine decorations ... its orchestra discoursing the sweetest music, and crowded with the elite of London's social life ... all arrayed in their best, flashing with jewels and adorned

*A further million acres had been sold by 1923, with most of the balance of the land-bank moved in the following two decades. By 1954, the HBC had only 18,250 acres in its inventory; the last major parcel of fifty acres was donated to the University of Victoria by the Company in 1961 when Richard Murray was Managing Director.

224 LABRADOR SMITH.

with knightly orders, presented a spectacle of light and color and animation, which was not only charming but wonderfully impressive." A month later, Strathcona decided on a lightning visit to Canada to inspect his lat- est investment, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal. His wife, Isabella, herself a frail elighty-nine, had always accompanied him everywhere, but, having suffered several mild strokes, was not feeling healthy enough to go along. When Strathcona gently reminded her that he might not be well enough to return, she insisted on going to Euston Station so she could see him off.

He last saw her there on the platform, lifted by four young men, gazing directly into the window of his private carriage, waving her fond fareA ell.

On the morning of November 7, after walking her Yorkshire terrier in Grosvenor Square, Lady Strathcona collapsed. Her cold developed into pneumonia, and she died five days later. Her husband of sixty years-and four weddings-was devastated. His grief caused him to make a fatal mistake: he stopped working.

'Fen weeks later, on January 21, 1914, in his ninetyfourth year, Lord Strathcona died of "great prostration and heart failure." Incredibly, on his deathbed he was still worrying about the legitimacy of his marriage to Isabella, as if unwilling to carry the burden of that imagined sin to his grave. His two physicians, Sir Thomas Barlow and William Pasteur, signed a legal declaration with a firm of London solicitors testifying to his last words.*

"Lord Strathcona," the affidavit stated, "said he knew he was dying and asked us to (ome close to the bed and listen to what he was going to say...

He said his wife's first marriage was performed by a man who had not the legal power to do it in that district. The man to whom his wife was first married was called Grant. Grant treated tier so badly that life with him became impossible. They separated. Before Lord Strathcona married his wife he consulted several persons including Sir George THE RECKONING 225.

In their tributes, Strathcona's contemporaries attempted to outdo each other with purple praise. "We need not fear exaggeration in speaking of Lord Strathcona," declared Sir Charles Davidson, Chief .justice of the Quebec Superior Court. "In especial degree has he enriched and uplifted Canadian life. May we emulate even if we cannot in the mean while at least reach to the lofty standards of his public and private careers."

Sir William Peterson, the princ.i.p.al of McGill University, had little trouble topping that. "Duty was his guiding star," he said of Strathcona, "duty and conscience. We ought to be glad, too-ought we not?-in our day and generation, that Canada can boast of him as a man of unspotted integrity." Even Sir Wilfrid Laurier seemed overcome by grief. "Since SirJohn Macdonald's time I do not know that there has been any Canadian who, on departing this life, has left behind him such a trail of sorrow as Lord Strathcona.... He came as a simple clerk to the Hudson's Bay Company, and from that station he rose step by step until he became . .

. at first in fact, and afterwards both in fact and name, the governor of that historic company, a position which he held to the last day of his life." The Times summed up his amazing career most succinctly: "With no advantages of birth or fortune, he made himself one of the great outstanding figures of the Empire."

The Dean of Westminster had suggested the High Commissioner's rernains be preserved in a sepulchre in

Simpson ... and they all advised that [he] would be justified in marrying her. The domicile of Lord Stratheona being Scotland and he being a Scotchman he had no doubt about the validity of the marriage. The marriage was subsequently repeated in New York...." Oddly, his last Paris marriage, the only one accompanied by fidl religious rites, was not mentioned by the expiring peer.

226 LABRADOR SMITH.

the Abbey among Britain's most distinguished sons, but Strathcona had stipulated that he wished to rest beside his beloved Isabella at Highgate Cemetery in North London.* Still, the Abbey was the scene of his faneral, a state occasion of grand proportions attended by the Empire's n.o.blest citizens. His coffin, carried in to the sombre cadence of Chopin's funeral march, was followed by a single wreath of lilies and heliotrope orchids.

Attached to it was a card from the Dowager Queen Alexandra: "In sorrowful memory of one of the Empire's kindest of men and the greatest of benefactors."

By the time he died, Lord Strathcona had outlived most of the violent animosities he had created as Donald Smith. Yet his carefully drafted will perpetuated many of his earthly quarrels. Although the doc.u.ment was a model of philanthropic generosity, spreading funds across three continents, it never once mentioned Winnipeg. The former fur trader's sn.o.bbery also extended beyond the grave. His legacy establishing a leper colony was conditional on a strict entrance test: only leprous English gentlemen of good standing might apply. More than $25 million-the bulk of his estate having been distributed to family members before his deatb-was dispersed to McGill, Queen's, Yale, Cambridge, and Aberdeen universities, as well as a dozen poor divinity schools and underfunded hospitals. He left small inheritances (11~50) to a number of HBC traders and set up the Strathcona Trust for Physical and Patriotic Education in the Schools, which still operates from Ottawa.

The will's strangest revelation was an obscure paragraph that stated: "I remit and cancel the debts owing to me by (1) the estate of the late Right Hon. Richard Cartwright, (2) the estate of the late Lieut.-Colonel

*'Fhus sharing the graveyard with Karl Marx (1818-83).

THE RECKONING 227.

William "ite, one time Deputy Postmaster-General of Canada, (3) the Hon.

George E. Foster." Cartwright had been the Liberal finance minister who made his reputation denouncing politicians who had sold their souls to the CPR syndicate, yet shortly after formation of the Laurier government he became highly sympathetic to the railway and later authorized huge handouts to Canadian Pacific steamship lines. Foster, a former professor of Cla.s.sics at the University of New Brunswick, who had risen to be minister of finance in five Tory administrations, had similarly helped out the CPR while in office; the favours procured from William White were never revealed, though the CPR received many valuable mail contracts during his tenure. The heirs of the three men could now officially keep Strathcona's bribes-but only at the cost of'sullied family reputations.

ITHAD BEEN A h.e.l.l OF A RUN. The minor HBC clerk who began his career for "Y,20 and found" had during his seven and a half decades with the Company not only preserved it and drastically altered its character but, unlike most of its modern Governors, had also become a pivotal figure in Canadian history. Here was a man of little privilege, unbridled ambition, and the mindset of a conquistador. For a time, he personified his country.

PART II.

QUEST FOR A.

NEW EMPIRE.

CHAPTER9.

ON THE TRAIL OF.

THE ARCTIC FOX.

"Most masters of the Company's posts is lak kings.... Yo kin be birthed and died without Itheir consent but dat's 'bout all.

-Annie Redsky

HAVING LOST ITS EMPIRE in the western Canadian plains, where the influx of railways and settlers had reduced its influence to the kind of commercial compet.i.tion for which the IFIBc had little skill and less stomach, the Company set out to establish a new kingdom on Canada's northern frontier, Man), things about this frigid realm were radically different: the climate and terrain, the pelts the Company traded (Arctic fox, not beaver); the aboriginal people who did the work-Inuit instead of Indians; and the animals that fed and supplied the hunters-seal and northern caribou rather than deer and buffalo. But nearly every other aspect of the Hudson's Bay Company's shift north had an equivalent in its earlier sweep west.

The move into the Arctic took place mostly in the twentieth century, but, as in the plains, the Company had been operating successfully on the fringes of its new spread for most of two hundred years. While the pace of its expansion was at the speed of a funeral slow march,

231.

232 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

the I 113C eventually prospered in the harsh new environment-as it had in the Prairies--but only as long as it could maintain a monopoly. Eventually, the HBC became the dominant retailer in each region, its initial customers being mainly the aboriginals whose way of life its presence had robbed of self-sufficiency.