Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 23

But it was Nordon's pointed attacks on the Governor's integrity that finally broke Sale's hold and reputation. Nordon had accused Sale of self-dealing in the 192 0 purchase by the HBC, for S~60,000, of a 15 -percent interest in the Merchant Trading Company, owned mostly by the Sale family. Used during the Great War as a purchasing agency for the shipping operation, the firm had continued in business but returned the fIBC almost no dividends. Although it was never identified as such, the HBC acquisition of Sale's shares had been more in the nature of an interest-free loan to reward the then Deputy Governor for his wartime services. Sale's great mistake was to pretend that it had been a legitimate business transaction, thus trapping himself into defending the indefensible.

At the 19 3 0 annual Court, Nordon asked that an internal committee be set up to investigate the Company's affairs. Its report, tabled five months later, vindicated Sale but suggested the HBCs stores be run by a newly established, Canadian-domiciled IIBC subsidiary. Since Sale had just approved a similar arrangement, or at least granted the Canadian Committee all the authority it

*Four times the British (and once the Canadian) squash champion, Cazalet had attended Eton and Oxford (where he earned four Blues), fought with distinction in the trenches during the Great War, and was later elected a Member of Parliament. He inherited the HBC stake from his father. He was killed with General Wadyslaw Sikorski, the Polish premier in exile, in the crash of a Liberator bomber off Gibraltar in 1943.

386 MERCHANT PRINCES.

could handle, there seemed to be no reason for him to resign. Yet be left the governorship just before publication of the report, leading contemporary observers to believe there had been a secret deal: that Sale would be officially exonerated from the accusations of self-dealing by his peers in return for clearing up all the suspicion surrounding the Company by agreeing to abandon his post.

The resignation took place during an extraordinary Court, held at the City Terminus Hotel on Cannon Street on January 16, 193 1. Company records pointed to a loss of Y,746,334 for the fiscal year, which meant there would be no cash for dividends. With the worth of its a.s.sets reduced by an astonishing.V.2 million in the previous twelve inonths-and facing the prospect of an extended economic downturn-the Company seemed well on its way to technical bankruptcy. Shareholders nearly went berserk, calling for the resignation of the entire board and nominating members of the Nordon committee to take their place. Chaired by Deputy Governor Sir Frederick Richmond, the noisy meeting would not allow Sale to speak. When he rose briefly to rea.s.sert his innocence in the Merchant Trading affair, he was shouted down and could barely be heard, lamenting: "For my shortcomings I ask your forgiveness." Five other directors eventually stepped down, and were replaced by three Nordon nominees, including Cazalet. A new board was elected, led by the redoubtable Edward Peac.o.c.k, but the most important item on the agenda was the appointment of a new governor.

THE MAN PICKED TO RESCUE THE COMPANY at this difficult moment was Patrick Ashley Cooper, and his selection was no accident. In an act of direct, almost brutal intervention unprecedented in the HBCs long history, Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 387.

personally a.s.signed Cooper to the job, then went on to choose Sir Alexander Murray, one of the City's ablest financiers, tobe Cooper's Deputy.* Incase there mightbe any doubt about the weight of authority behind his nominations, Norman sent a letter to C.L. Nordon not only affirming his personal regard for Cooper but placing the Company of Adventurers in its appropriate context. "I alone sefected Mr. Patrick Ashley Cooper and recommended him as suitable for the Governorship of the Hudson's Bay Company," he wrote. I am not concerned with the affairs of the Hudson's Bay Company except as regards the Governorship and that owing to the prestige and imperial importance of the Company." Norman stressed the same historical link during a private briefing with Cooper. "Your task," said the Governor of the Bank of England to the Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, "is to rebuild a bridge of Empire."

A tall, awkward Scot with round tortoise-sh.e.l.l gla.s.ses and a crisp military moustache, Cooper could be kind and approachable, though he never softened his att.i.tude of trying to run the firm like the headmaster of a rowdy boys' school. With the sombre suits he favoured draped over his six-foot-four frame, he commanded instant attentionand got it. Born in middle circ.u.mstances at Aberdeen, C ooper attended Fettes College in Edinburgh (Scotland's Eton), then read law at Aberdeen and went on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where his long arms helped him win an oar. Badly wounded in the back while serving as an infantry major during the Great War, he became a City

*Yet another of those peripatetic Scottish financiers who held the Empire together, Murray had spent three decades in India, occupying most of its important administrative positions, including a five-year stint as Governor of the Imperial Bank of India. He later became a director of Lloyds Bank and the Bank of London and South America, remaining a solid influence on the Hudson's Bay board until 1946.

388 MERCHANT PRINCES.

accountant and did so well that the Bank of England began asking him to act on its behalf in helping salvage near-defunct British companies around the globe. At forty-three and married to the beautiful Welsh heiress Kathleen Spickett, he became an important figure in London society, having won kudos for successfully liquidating the Banco Italo-Britannica in Milan and rescuing the Primitiva Gas Company of Buenos Aires. He had accepted the difficult job of turning the Hudson's Bay Company around in the bearpit of the Depression on condition that his initial salary of Y,5,000 be raised when the economy improved. Despite his relatively meagre stipend, Cooper brought the July 1931 proprietors' Court to its feet with the offer to reduce his pay by 10percent. "Are we to devote ourselves,"

he demanded, "to searching in the past or building for the future?"

"Both!" cried out an Adventurer.

"No. It cannot be both. You must make up your minds whether you are going to ask us to dig into the past, or go forward into the future, and that is the decision I shall ask you to make. " It was a clever ploy because the Company's proprietors had become so mesmerized by recent troubles they had lost sight of the future. For the next three years that future was grim indeed, with losses totalling E3.6 million. Cooper threw himself into his new job, leaving almost immediately for Canada, eager to meet Philip Chester, the new General Manager.

The omens were not good. just before he left England, Cooper was informed by the Canadian Committee that henceforth communications to London would be dispatched monthly instead of weekly and that, oh yes, P.J. Parker, the Canadian operation's highestranking executive in charge of stores, had just been fired. In reporting these changes to the Governor, Chester- speaking through Canadian Committee Chairman George Allan-lamely apologized for not having first TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 389.

consulted or even notified the London board. "It was purely an oversight,"

Allan explained, caused by very great stress of work at the time."

Cooper arrived in Montreal on September 3, 193 1, and the first entry in his private diary reflected his sour mood: "Went to Ritz-Carlton. General Manager of the HBC in the Hotel and still in bed." His outlook didn't improve at the breakfast he had next morning in the Windsor Hotel. He ordered "a pot of tea. Dry toast, b.u.t.ter on the side. En,~Iisb marmalade and two eggs boiled three minutes ... three minutes precisely." When the waiter arrived, all was as requested, but there was only one eggcup with one egg perched on it. Cooper, according to his breakfast companion, berated the hotel employee mercilessly, calling him a "stupid colonial"

and similar epithets. He stopped only when the waiter, with white-gloved hand and beatific smile, lifted the eggcup to reveal the missing egg, boiled three minutes precisely.

The Governor's mood brightened considerably when he was summoned to Ottawa for a private meeting with the Prime Minister, only to find that the Right Honourable R.B. Bennett was, as Cooper confided to his journal, "cordial and helpful, but most critical of the Company, its higher personnel and policy." Still, he stayedat Rideau Hall, the Governor General's official residence, with the Earl of Bessborough and went swim- ming in the Chateau Laurier pool wearing a bathing suit borrowed from CNR Chairman Sir Henry Thornton that had "room for myself and two others."

In Toronto he met most of the men who mattered-Sir Joseph Flavelle, Sir John Aird, E.R. Wood, WE. Rundle-and was shown around E-aton's (bv R.Y.

Eaton) and Simpsons (by C.L. Burton). He then went off to Winnipeg and a tour of the Company's retail operation, at one point "driving down the main street of Kamloops to examine our compet.i.tors' windows." By the time he left, two months later, Cooper 390 MERCHANT PRINCES.

was not at all pleased with what he had seen. "I was dismayed at what I found," he noted. "As soon as I arrived in Winnipeg, it was perfectly obvious to me that the state of misunderstanding and tension between London and Winnipeg had almost reached an open breach. . . . " Later, Cooper summarized the areas of serious concern he had uncovered. lie had found not one department or subsidiary operation that wasn't losing money; "great and thoughtless extravagance in all directions," he noted in his diary, "a sense of unthinking security throughout the whole staff," and "no general comprehension that the Company was nearing complete collapse.

. . ." As if that diagnosis wasn't gloomy enough, Cooper wisely concluded that his main problem would be learning to live with Chester, the thirty-five-year-old General Manager installed under Sale. Chester, the Governor felt, should have a different att.i.tude towards London, one that would show loyalty to the British board and shareholders.

Fat chance.

MOST FACES BETRAY THE CHARACTER of their owners, reflecting the balance between their generous natures and n.i.g.g.ardly emotions. But Chester's facial features were smooth and uncommunicative, like those of the masked man in The Phantom o the Opera-not ugly, but If expressionless, designed to evoke in others emotions complementary to his own. His eyes were as blank as gun barrels, tinted pewter-grey, revealing nothing. His threepiece suits were all the same: immaculately tailored (by Lloyd Brothers in Toronto or one of the bespoke shops in Savile Row), but interchangeable; no one ever remembered anything he wore. Even his handshake was bereft of feeling. "Like taking hold of a piece of cold fish," one Bay employee recalled. "There was no squeeze. You let go quickly, because you got no response."

TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 391.

Philip Alfred Chester, Managing Director, HBC

He grew up in a harsh and sterile place-Long Eaton, an industrial town in the working-cla.s.s region of Derbyshire, where his mother (a Rhinelander) worked as a governess and his father as an intermittently employed millhand. In 1914, Philip, who was then barely eighteen, volunteered for the King's Royal Rifle Corps. The day he was set to leave for the Front-already dressed in his uniform and ready to board the troop train-his mother wanted to snap a picture of him with her Brownie. She aimed the camera, but young Philip's grandmother 392 MERCHANT PRINCES.

smashed it out of her hands with the admonition: "Not on the Sabbath!"

Chester won a field commission (to Staff Captain) and was severely wounded, both times on January 10, first in France and later on the Isonzo Front in northern Italy. He saved his gratuities and had just enough money to put himself through accounting school, then joined the Hudson's Bay Company's London office. He grew to love the Company, but his feelings were poisoned by his intense awareness that no matter what he did, no matter how suc- cessful within the HBCs hierarchy he might become, its upper-cla.s.s directors would make him feel he didn't quite measure up, that he was of lowly birth, a man who had emigrated to make his way in a former colony.

"However nice they are to you, they'll never accept you, because they know where you came from by the sound of your voice," Frank Walker, his executive a.s.sistant and later editor of the Montreal Star, had warned Chester after he had been f~ted at a social function by members of the London board. Years later, Lady Cooper, Sir Patrick's widow, confirmed that diagnosis. "Socially," she recalled, "Chester wasn't in the same group as the other people he worked with. They were all on a higher plane in London.

He thought they were always looking down on him, which made him feel mad.

He was absolutely off his head. My husband was being invited to stay at Sandringham ... the King would invite him to go down.Then he was made a director of the Bank of England, and Chester hated him more than ever. He'd never even met the Governor of the Bank of England. My husband was moving in those circles-miles above Philip."

ButChester knewthe rules ofthe game and howitwas played. Confronted by the icy nuances of the British cla.s.s system, he decided to lind a suitable exit. He couldn't change his birthplace, but he could fix his speech, and eventually he did. He invented a new persona for himself TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 393.

to bypa.s.s the upper-cla.s.s English habit of accepting or dismissing individuals on the basis of their accents. His voice, melodious, incongruously rich coming through those pursed lips, marked him as a certified gentleman. "Ile never achieved the'oink'of an old Etonian,"

remembered Charles Loewen, the Bay Street broker who married Chester's daughter, Susanne. "His became an unidentifiable English accent, a sort of Alistair Cooke inflection."

That transformation, as significant as it may have been to his future, had to be put on hold until Chester could deal with the crisis of confidence at the Company's Canadian headquarters and impose discipline on an organization that had spun out of control. Chester began a major reorganization of the fur department under the direction of Ralph Parsons and later Bob Chesshire, while Western Arctic Manager Dudley Copland win- nowed the number of posts from nineteen to fourteen. He had Company engineers experiment with and use insulation materials for the northern posts, masterminded development of a radio medical network and initiated research into permafrost. In charge of retail operations he placed a Ma.s.sachusetts-born merchandising specialist named Francis F. Martin. It was not a popular choice. "He was a rude, ruthless, egoistical despot,"

recalled John Enright, then in charge of the sewing machine department.

"Even dress regulations were laid down, with salesladies expected to wear conservative black or navy and short sleeves permitted only if they were at least four inches below the armpit." Chester and Martin would rea.s.sign the coal-department manager from one store to run the corset department of another.

Even if his methods were crude, Chester shook up the stores' bureaucratic lethargy and moved them into the twentieth century. He insisted that the Company be a leader in personnel and wage administration policies; the 394 MERCHANT PRINCES.

IJBC was one of the first national companies to name a woman Uoan Whiting) to an executive post. Chester was responsible for starting a preparatory course in merchandising in the C ompany. Advertising was increased; selec- tion and variety beLme as important as mark-ups; self-service food floors were introduced; executive salaries were raised; training and profit-sharing became part of senior employees' fringe benefits. The unprofitable Lethbridge store was sold, and the costbenefit ratio of each outlet was examined and re-examined. A strict rule against hiring relatives of existing employees was put into effect. Decentralized purchasing and consolidated management techniques allowed individual store managers freedom to match their merchandise selection more closely with their own communities' needs, while the central buying office in Winnipeg handled such staples as HBC blankets, sheets, towels, dried fruit and so on. To collect its bills from hard-pressed customers, the HBC employed its own bailiffs. Fred Herbert, who occupied that office in Vancouver, boasted that he was kindness personified while repossessing unpaid-for articles: "If there's kids in the house, I'll never take a stove, but I'll take a radio or gramophone G.o.dd.a.m.n quick."

Within a year of Chester's appointment, store profits were up 60 percent, and by 193 7, though the Depression had hardly abated, most divisions had beg-un to prosper again.* What Chester achieved was to break the psychol- ogy, widespread among Company executives when he

*Not so lucky was the HBCs oil investment. Chester had tried wisuccessfillly to sell the Company's share in Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas to the Anglo-Ecuadorian Oilfields Company, and further investment funds in oil and gas exploration were cut off after September 193 1. Three years later, HBOG signed a deal with the Northwest Company, a subsidiary of briperial Oil, and eventually renewed it tojune 1951, to allow the Esso subsidiary to explore the Company's holdingsin return fora 50-percent share in the findings.

TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 395.

arrived, that it was their right to demand the trade of the public. The IJBCs monopoly had been dead for more than half a century, but they had yet to react to the news.

Chester's store inspections were legendary. "He was positively vicious,"

recalled Bob Chesshire. "He would raise so much h.e.l.l, you wouldn't know whether you were standing on your head or your feet. He wouldn't miss a thing, find ten things wrong on every floor, had everybody scared out of their wits, because we were all hanging on to our jobs by our eyebrows at the time. He used to place a lot of emphasis on cleanliness of toilets, and one poor store manager got into deep trouble because he hadn't finished having the washrooms painted, so Chester couldn't get in to see if they pa.s.sed muster." Another time, in the Calgary store, Chester happened to pa.s.s a suggestion box. He asked how often it was cleared, and when he was a.s.sured it was at least once a day, demanded it be opened. He read every suggestion, found one two weeks old, and sacked the store supervisor on the spot.

"Why must I be surrounded by b.l.o.o.d.y fools?" he often complained to anyone in range of his wrath. One senior executive who had momentarily displeased Chester was astounded to find the General Manager staring at him for a long moment, then p.r.o.nouncing his verdict: "You know, whenever I look at you, I think we're a man short." George Weightman, who worked at head office at the time, bad been a.s.signed to produce an inventory of HBC blankets. He had trouble collecting the necessary doc.u.mentation and one afternoon found that Chester had quietly stolen up behind him. "He stood looking silently on for a few minutes and then said: 'You know what's the matter with you, Weightman? You've got more records than we have blankets."' Chesshire remembered being summoned into Chester's office (known as the holv of holies) only to find his temper in full flight. "You!'; Chester began, an accusing finger 396 MERCHANT PRINCES.

pointed at Chesshire. "You! I told you what to do and they've b.u.g.g.e.red up the whole thing! Now you're just sitting there, with nothing to say!"

Chesshire, one of the few head-office functionaries not actively terrified of Chester, calmed him (town by investigating the situation and reporting back. "Chester made a lot of preposterous statements to deliberately get under your hide," he observed, "because he felt that it was sometimes the only way to get all the facts."

Chester was always testing people. Almost every conversation became an interrogation. But anyone brave enough to face him down usually won. "He was sitting in my office when I accused him of not having told me the truth about something," recalled Frank Walker. "'Are you calling me a liar?' he demanded. I calmly replied that to be a liar, he would have had to make a habit of not telling me the truth. Well, he marched out of there, and I didn't see him again until next morning, when he came in to apologize. I said there was no need to apologize; all he had to say was that he hadn't told me the truth. That got him fired up all over again, and he stormed out. He had been willing to be decent, but I was being a son of a b.i.t.c.h and had brought the issue up again. Finally, he came in just before lunch and mumbled, 'Thats all you want me to say, that I didn't tell you the truth?' I told him that he didn't really have to say anything, so he shot back: 'All right, I didn't tell the truth'-and marched out of my office in high dudgeon, for the third time."

"There's no question that Chester used his outbursts to get precisely what he wanted, especially from the British board," musedJohn de B.

Payne, the HBC official who had hired Walker as one of Chester's executive a.s.sistants. "His temper was never vindictive, never personal, just temper really, as in,'I've got an idea and this is the way I'm going to fight for it.' He was driven by an obsession for excellence and in seeking it was as harsh on himself as TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 397.

with others." Chester himself, looking back on his stewardship, wrote to E.F. Newlands, secretary of the Canadian Committee: "While I was a tough bird-perhaps too tough on many occasions-it was because of my constant urge to keep a first-cla.s.s office and to be an example for the rest of the old Company. I had seen and lived in the sad Winnipeg H [ead] 0 [ffice]

of the late twenties, which was a disgrace and a big contributor to the mess in which the Company found itself in those years."

While most Hi3c employees (who made up a new translation for the Company's initials as "Here Before Chester") viewed him as "living on Mount Olympus, occasionally hurling a thunderbolt," they were fairly often exposed to his exquisite political tactics. "He used to brief a group of us before each Canadian Committee meeting," recalled Pete Buckley, who worked with Chester at the time, "and we'd have to rehea.r.s.e everything he wanted us to say, so that by the time we presented our case the Committee members could only agree. It kind of shocked me."

THF MAIN VICTIM of Chester's temper tantrums was Patrick Ashley Cooper, a target so perfect that if he hadn't existed he would have to have been made up. The Governor and the HBCs Canadian General Manager understood that, like two scorpions in a bottle, only one would ernerge the victor.

Once the Company had been turned around, the blood feud between Chester and Cooper over corporate territoriality took on the extra dimension of competing to get the credit for its hardwon return to profitability. For Chester, the great advantage of having Cooper to shoot at was that the British Governor had little sense of humour and never really understood his opponent. He genuinely believed that Chester's mood swings were physiological rather than 398 MERCHANT PRINCES.

tactical and could never fig-ure out any way of controlling or silencing his Canadian colleague-apart, perhaps, from somehow court-martialling him or challenging him to a duel. The British Governor and the Canadian Manager both became obsessed with keeping one another at bay, studying every nuance of every letter thev exchanged-the slant of the signature, the way the paper was folded-as though it were written in hieroglyphics signalling a wealth of hidden motives and meanings. Each was convinced that only his way of doing things was correct and that anyone who strayed one inch fron-i his particular path to righteousness was a write-off.

"They just didn't get along," recalled Cooper's widow. "They disagreed about everything, and each p.r.i.c.kled when the other was near. Chester set out to run the Company from Canada, and my husband, from the moment he heard that, put his foot down, saying, 'Never. Over my dead body. It was founded by Prince Rupert. It has always been in London and will always be in London!'They were poles apart."

"Chester is so changeable," Cooper bitterly complained to his diary (August 2, 1934). "When he is in control of himself, a pleasure and anxious to do what he can for us ... but then again, swept by brain storms, he takes a ridiculous att.i.tude almost amounting to open opposi- tion to London, fighting over every detail." The diary bristles with complaints about Chester's behaviour. November 27, 1936: "Long talk with Chester. If the English language means anything, he was entirely rea- sonable and satisfactory. I fancy it was all eyewash." January 7, 1943: "Chester's behaviour abominable. He sat with a face black as thunder and contributed nothing except one or two outbursts ... he was very narrow minded and difficult. I was glad however that his ill temper and bad manners were exposed to the board." On his first trip to London as General Manager for Canada, TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 399.

Chester expressed his contempt for the annual Court proceedings. "I was given a seat on the rostrum so that I could look over a selection of our proprietors," he wrote to Allan, "and to me, the gathering resembled that of the representatives of a Diocese a.s.sembled together for the induction of a ne,% Archbishop, rather than a bunch of intelligent and disturbed shareholders."

The two men had little in common except that they happened to have been born on the same island. Winnipeg was such a long way from London in those days, and the Governor seemed untouchable. He led a charmed life.

Hexton Manor, his country seat near Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, dates back to 1030, is mentioned in the Domesday Book and has been occupied by only sixteen different families since. If, as Noel Coward once pointed out, the stately homes of England existed to prove that the upper cla.s.ses still had the upper hand, Cooper's home was a grand example of the genre.

Set on a private lake in a 4,000-acre estate, it had twenty-eight rooms and that feeling of elegance-as-a-throwawaygesture that marks the British gentry~ The Coopers were invited to dine with the Prince of Wales at St James's Palace ("Another milestone!" he triumphantly noted in his diary on February 21, 1934); he was named a director of the Bank of England ("From now onwards I enter the Bank as of right, and have a peg on which to hang my hat with my name over it! "-April 6, 193 2); and on January 16, 1935, he and Kathleen went to Sandringham-the first HBC Governor to be invited to a royal residence since Sir Bibye Lake in 1713. ("Down to dinner where I met ... Sir Herbert and Lady Fetherstonhaugh. Lady Meade-Fetherstonhaugh's first husband was Hesketh Pritchard who was at Fettes 7 years before me. I sat on the Queen's left. . . . When the ladies left the room the King called me around to sit by him and was full of questions about the Eskimos.") 400 MERCHANT PRINCES.

Into the early 1950s, the HBC_ was still reckoned as something of a viceregal presence among Canadian companies, and the Governor's tours resembled a royal procession, with the Coopers treated like visiting heads of state, accompanied by flag-bearers and trailed by a retinue of fl.u.s.tered flun&s.* They would cross the Atlantic aboard one of the great liners, occupying a suite of two bedrooms, sitting room and bathroom on A deck, being seated nightly at the Captain's table. In Montreal, Cooper called on the greatest capitalists of the day, including Sir Herbert Holt, Sir Charles Gordon, Sir Edward Beatty and Arthur Purvis, the head of Canadian Industries Limited, the first Canadian executive to have a private airplane, who won the admiration of his peers for having chaired meetings in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto on the same day.t Then on to Ottawa. "We were received by the Prime Minister, provincial premiers,

*One of the stranger legacies of Cooper's stewardship was his insistence that The Beaver publish photographs ofhim on safari. The magazine regularly featured candid shots of the Governor 11 shooting crocodile from the roofofa launch on the Kafue River in Northern Rhodesia" or the Governor "setting out on a duck expedition in the swamps of the Zambesi at Lealui village, ruled by Kng Yeta Ill." Exactly how this was supposed to raise the morale of the fur traders freezing their b.u.t.ts off at Baker Lake wasn't clear.

tOn his 1939 visit, Cooper took a detour to meet Maurice Duplessis, the Union Nationale premier, in Quebec Citv. "The whole performance and atmosphere of his office was very like a provincial government office in the Argentine," he disdainfully noted in his diary [July 18, 1939].

"Unshaven secretaries sitting about and smoking innumerable cigarettes ...

I went in and found the typical young Latin politician. Ile made it evident that he had no time to waste on me, for he kept one of the members ofparliament with him.... During our short talk he made a few of his facetious remarks accompanied by winks, for which he is so famous."

TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 401.

and, of course, staved at Government House-with the Bessboroughs, Tweedsmuirs, Athlones and Alexanders," recalled Lady Cooper. "They would lend us their private railway cars to travel in, and my husband had nicknames for all the young aides who worked at Rideau Hall. It was charming."

After a triumphal stopover in Toronto (lunch at the Toronto Club with Princ.i.p.al WL. Grant of Upper Canada College and calls, as always, on the heads of Simpsons and Eaton's), the caravan would roll into Winnipeg. The usual sparring with Chester and the Canadian Committee was followed by a visit to the Manitoba Club, where he gave a yearly address. "There were 63 present including the lieutenant governor, the premier, and almost everyone in Winnipeg of any importance," he noted of his visit on October 7, 1932. "George Allan introduced me with a speech of 35 minutes which was of unnecessary length, the first 25 minutes being taken up with sheer irrelevancies and before the end of his speech people were getting fairly restive. I rose in this atmosphere but was fortunate to find that I was able instantly to claim their attention and I thought that I held it without a break to the end." While in Canada, Cooper believed that he had the right to communicate directly with any Company official, which often caused