Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 11

Even if he didn't really say it. The closest Laurier came to coin ing that aphorism was during his Canadian Club speech in Ottawa onjanuary 18, 1904. "Canada has been modest in its his tory, although its history is heroic in many ways," he declared.

"But its history, in my estimation, is onlv commencing. It is com mencing in this centur " y. The nineteenth century was the cen tury of the United States. I think we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century."

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Smith, who as a youth sixty years before had wors.h.i.+pped British royalty from afar, could now partic.i.p.ate in history's grandest festival of Empire, Queen Victoria's Diamond jubilee, celebrated in the s.h.i.+mmering summer of 1897.

The Empire on which the sun dared not set then encompa.s.sed more than a quarter of the earth's land surface occupied by 372 million people, whose representatives came to parade for their Queen. "There were Rajput princes and Dyak headhunters," rhapsodized Jan Morris in her epic Farewell the Trumpets, "there were strapping troopers from Australia. Cypriots wore fezzes, Chinese wore conical straw hats. English gentlemen rode by, with virile moustaches and steel-blue eyes, and Indian lancers jangled past in resplendent crimson jerkins. Here was Lord Roberts of Kandahar. . . . Here was ... Wolseley, liero of Red River, Ashanti and Tel-elKebir. . . . That morning the Queen had telegraphed a Jubilee message to all her subjects....

The occasion was grand. The audience was colossal. The symbolism was deliberate. The Queen's message, however, was simple. 'From niv heart I thank my beloved people', she said. 'May Go~ bless them."'

And He did. The forces that held the British Empire together seemed at times to be more theological than political. True adherents felt little confusion about what to believe or how to behave: G.o.d, Queen, Union Jack and family were the icons that mattered; being patriotic, disciplined, uncomplaining, frugal, chivalrous, stiffupper-lipped and not too expert in any one thing (the cult of the all-rounder reigned supreme)-these were the coveted virtues. "The British as a whole," Jan Morris astutely observed, "

would have been shocked at any notion of wickedness to their imperialism, for theirs was a truly innocent bravado. They really thought their Empire was good ... they meant no harm, except to evil 184 LABRADOR SMITH.

"W, 'k-. 1~ PW.

Lord and Lady Stratbcona in London

enemies, and in principle they wished the poor benighted natives nothing but well." The pa.s.sion in which the Empire was held is difficult to exaggerate. Typical was the story of Warburton Pike, an Englishman who had graduated from Rugby and Oxford but spent most of his adult life trapping, hunting and hiking in the Canadian wilderness. An archetypal imperial adventurer who took many risks exploring the outer edges of the northern tundra, be never forgot his British roots. Fifty-four when he reached home to enlist shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, he was rejected as too old. Pike was so upset he hiked to Bournemouth, walked into the sea, and plunged a knife into his heart.

At this high noon of Empire, the pervasive influences of what O.D.

Skelton, the great Canadian public servant, called "the dervishes ofAi-igio-Saxondom" were in full and glorious flight. The Jubilee was pure light opera, with Edward Elgar writing the score and Rudyard Kipling the libretto. British society had little conception of how to treat the slightly awkward representatives of their newest "self-governing colony."

One London matron who had condescended to include CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 185.

colonials at her garden reception addressed a special request to the Canadians suggesting that Wilfrid Latirier an(] his party kindly appear in their "native costunies." Canadians it home found themselves caught up in the fever of the occasion, with local parades, fireworks, floral arches across main streets and patriotic speeches. "-As a warm darkness fell on the exhausted town that evening," June Callwood wrote of the elaborate jubilee celebrations held in London, Ontario, "fireworks spelling VICTORIA hung for a long, poignant moment in the black skv. People watched it sputter out and were transfixed. It seemed something important had happened to them, to the whole countrv. It felt like a flowering, a future greatness just opening to enfold them all."

The Jubilee rewarded Smith with a royal accolade. Summoned to Windsor Castle, he received a barony frorn Queen Victoria. Becoming a peer of the realin was no trifling matter. So Smith did what he always did on such watershed occasions. He remarried Isabella. The secret ceremony, held according to Anglican rites at the British Emba.s.sy in Paris, reunited the bride and groom (then seventy-seven) for the fourth and final time. That requisite guilt-pacifier out of the way, Smith set about finding a t.i.tle, crest, motto and coat of arms appropriate to his elevated rank. The crest was easy: a beaver gnawing at a maple tree. The motto was one exquisitely apt word: "PERSEVERANCE," the coat of arms a canoe paddled by four HBC traders, and a hammer with nail to symbolize the last spike. But the t.i.tle proved more difficult. Queen Victoria usually referred to him as "Your Labrador Lords.h.i.+p," but Smith finally settled on a characteristically convoluted moniker-in the words of Burke's Peerage, "Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, of Glencoe, co. Argyll, and of Mount Royal, Quebec, Canada"-in tribute to both his Canadian 186 LABRADOR SMITH.

domicile and the large estate he had recently purchased in western Scotland.*

The freshly minted peer's love of Empire knew no bounds. In a speech during the launching ceremony of the steamer Mount Roval at Wallsend in the summer of 1898, Strathcona laid down some new definitions. "I do not," he trumpeted, "care to speak any longer of Canada and the other countries const.i.tuting the Empire, as Colonies. They are const.i.tuents of an Empire, one and indivisible. They are Fnglish quite as much as is Great Britain, and to remain so to all time is the desire of Canada and all other possessions of the Empire."

Strathcona and some of his more imperialist-minded friends conceived the idea of girdling the globe with telegraph wires and a transportation service, to be known as the All-Red Route, that would link railway lines with accelerated British steams.h.i.+p schedules. Telegrams, mail, people and merchandise could then move aboard conveyances inviolably British. Express timetables called for a twenty-knot service across the Atlantic, with sailings from Liverpool to Halifax taking only four days. "The All-Red Line," declared Sir Sandford Fleming, one of the project's enthusiasts, "would, in some respects, resemble the spinal cord in the human body; it would prove to be the cerebro-spinal

*The Strath in Strathcona is the Gaelic equivalent for glen or valley. The difference between being just plain Donald Smith and becoming Lord Strathcona was most visible in the new peer's signature. The Bank ofMontreal at that time issued its own currency, bearing the printed autograph of its president. As Donald A. Smith he had signed his name un.o.btrusively, the neat, tiny letters taking up only thirty-nine millimetres on the banknote; the hold new scrawl, Stratbcona, could not be contained in its alloted s.p.a.ce, spreading over nmet~-five ruillimetres and puting into the bill's margin.

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axis of our political system, and give origin throughout its length to many lateral groups of nerves ... through which would freeiy pa.s.s the sensory impressions and the motor impulses of the British people in every longi- tude." Using a slightly more comprehensible metaphor, Strathcona's doctor once remarked to his patient just before a heart examination, "Now we must attend to the All-Red Route, my Lord." Strathcona tried hard to promote the project, but the fact that it would have required government subsidies of more than $100 million considerably cooled the ardour of its supporters.

'rhe Hudson's Bay Company Governor turned his attention to more practical pursuits.

THE SECOND-STOREY WINDOW of the Canadian High Commission on Victoria Street glowed through London's nocturnal smog into so many long evenings that pa.s.sersby nicknamed it "the Lighthouse." Here Strathcona spent eighteen years, occupied with the business of his life. While he placed the HBCA affairs at the top of his agenda, actively partic.i.p.ating in the Company's daily management and ongoing policy formation, his energies were dispersed in many directions.

He sat in his office, signing cheques, justifying accounts, writing letters (always by hand, because he considered typewritten correspondence a breach of courtesv): to the Queen's Chamberlain, asking for special seats at a royal ceremony for a visiting politician; to an old fur trader at Temiskaming, thanking him for a box of lightly salted deer tongues; to another former FIBC Chief Factor, forty-three years in the service, bitter about having to live out his days with no Company pension; to his cronies at the Bank of Montreal, requesting them to approve a loan to help James J.

Hill "fight 188 LABRADOR SMITH.

off the Harriman forces." His cable messages flew around the world. He bargained for tea and silk s.h.i.+pinents frorn Yokohama ;md sent timber to the Orient; he settled Lewis crofters in northern Saskatchewan and sold Labrador sable to Chinese aristocrats; he tied down a Canadian company that would ,ive him a monopoly on salt production; he s.h.i.+pped flour from Vancouver to Fiji; he arranged for the Bank of Montreal to underwrite the bonds for construction of the New York "El"; and he approved plans to expand the HBC's department store in Vernon, B.C. The work never stopped, and even if being Governor of the HBC was his dominant concern, he seemed frantic to keep expanding his reach, as if he could never have enough money, pom er or prestige.

Calculation of an individual's private wealth was not a suitable topic for public discussion in Victorian England, but Strathcona arguably ranked as one of the Empire's richest men. His vast holdings of HBC stock returned record dividends; the Bank of Montreal, with himself as its second-largest shareholder, was Canada's most profitable bank; and the CPR shares that he had purchased for $25 or less appreciated to $280 in his lifetime. Besides holding these highly visible directors.h.i.+ps and major stock positions in these companies, he enjoyed similar arrangements with Royal Trust, the Canada North-West Land Company, the Canadian Salt Company, the Commercial Cable Company, the Great Northern Railway, the Minnesota Imperial and Colonial Finance and Agency Corporation, the London & Lancas.h.i.+re Fire a.s.surance Company, the Manitoba South Western Colonization Railway, the

*Although he was offered a thousand dollars a share by E.H. Ilarrinian for his Northern Pacific Railway stock, Strathcona stuck with his old friend Hill, rescuing hirn froni bankruptcy and he didn't even send I lill a bill for use of his proxy.

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New Brunswick Railway Company and the St Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway. fie was also an important shareholder of Barings, the London merchant bank he helped rescue after the 1890 crash. Strathcona continued to use the Bank of Montreal (which during his term as High Commissioner was hired as Canadas chief fiscal agent abroad) as his private cash dispenser and in his first nine years in London did not surrender the bank's presidency. In 1905, on his eighty-fifth birthday, Strathcona decided it might be time to give the young bucks a chance. Fle allowed himself to be named honorary president and was succeeded by Sir George Drummond, who was only seventy-six. Drummond in turn was followed live years later by Richard Angus, then a spry seventy-nine.

The High Commissioner still returned regularly to Montreal (once estimating he had crossed the Atlantic at least a hundred times), but his heart belonged to London. Although he had long ago achieved life's highest social and economic peaks, Strathcona continued to labour like a man possessed, with no detail small enough to escape his fussy attention. More pathetic than admirable, his devotion to duty finally affected his health-though he always remembered the warning of a leading London physician, Sir Andrew Clark, that for him to stop work would be fatal. After one of Strathcona's bouts of illness, Sir Thomas Shaughnessy, then president of the CPR, reported in mock serious tones to an Anglo-Canadian gathering in London that "yielding to the earnest entreaties of his physician ... [Lord Strathcona] has decided to relax his energies. He has succ.u.mbed to the united pressure of his medical man, his family, and his friends, and has been induced to promise to leave his office at 7.30 each evening instead of 7.45." During a holiday in rural England, Strathcona began dictating letters to his newly hired secretary early 190 LABRADOR SMITH.

Sunday morning. The a.s.sistant politely but firmly declared he could not work on the Sabbath. The High Commissioner courteously agreed to indulge the young man, then spent most of the day impatiently pacing his room.

Promptly at midnight he woke the startled clerk with the command: "The Sabbath is over. We must make haste with those letters!"*

His daily office labours done, Strathcona spent most evenings hosting or attending dinners and receptions at the Athenaeum Club, the Imperial Inst.i.tute, and the Savoy or Westminster Palace hotels. As these and other venues proved insufficiently exclusive for the grand scale of the High Commissioners hobn.o.bbing, he eventualtv acquired seven houses and did most of his own entertaining. In Canada he had retained his magnificent dwelling on Dorchester Street in Montreal,t Silver Heights near Winnipeg, with its buffalo pound, and Norway House, his stone mansion at Pictou, Nova

*Such work habits weie not new. Dr Wilfred Grenfell, the Labrador medical missionary, noted how he had been granted an appointment to see Smith at Hudson's Bay House, on Montreal's St Peter Street, one Christmas Day. "I still remember vividly the deserted streets ... the silence and entireabsence ... of any living thing," he later told a friend, "and at last the great, towering portals of the world-fainous Company's offices.

I climbed the steps with no little trepidation, and the bell startled me, when its echoes rang out, as if in some long-deserted haunt of men.

Finally, the great door swung open, and there stood, quite alone, the smiling old gentleman, apologizing for keeping me waiting."

tThe Smith mansion was sold in 1927 to Lord Atholstan, publisher of the Montreal Star, who converted it into a home for elderIv Presbyterian ladies from good but bankrupt Montreal families. In 1Q4l, the contents were auctioned off and the fol]owing year the mansion was demolished to make way for an office building.

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Lord Strathcona's mansion on Dorchester Street, Alontreal

Scotia. In London his first town residence (at No. 53 Cadogan Square) was replaced by the much larger fivestorey Grosvenor Square house (~o. 28). As his country residence, he at first leased Knebworth in Hertfords.h.i.+re, the ancestral home of the Lyttons (of Last Da~ys ofPompeii fame) where Oliver Cromwell had met in solemn conclave with his followers to consider how England could rid itself of a tyrant king and a corrupt parliament. He later purchased Debden Hall in Ess.e.x and the Inner Hebrides islands of Oronsay and Colonsay, which included a beautifully sheltered manor house built from the ruins of a priory. But his most impressive property was the magnificent mansion he built in Black Corries of Glencoe, the rugged 64,000-acre estate he purchased in the west f lighlands of Scotland, near Ballachulish. The place had an orninous background, and d.i.c.kens said that part of Argylls.h.i.+re was "perfectly terrible."

192 LABRADOR SMITH.

Strathcona loved taking friends on grouse shoots in the Highland wilds, but his more serious entertaining was focused on pet causes. "Lord Strathcona presides most afternoons and every evening at some meeting or another," noted Gaspard Farrer, a young London merchant banker who moved in his circle, "and speechifies with greataplomb on art, music, medicine, science, university extension, French Employment, and every other interest that is glad to enlist the dear old gentleman's presence-and purse." Strathcona's most elaborate social function was the reception he threw for the fourhundredth anniversary of Aberdeen University. Named Lord Rector of the university in 1899 and later Chancellor, he realized there was not a hall on campus large enough to seat the 4,500 graduates and dignitaries invited to attend. He had a temporary building erected at his own expense on a three-acre site that could accommodate 2,500 at dinner and 4,740 in rows of chairs for the official ceremonies. Since no Scottish caterer was equipped to handle such a mob, he imported 650 waiters and their equipment (including 25,000 plates and 12,000 gla.s.ses) from London by special train. The actual graduation ceremonies and handing out of honorary degrees proved an anticlimax because by the end of the day the badly ventilated building was so fogged with cigar smoke no one could see which of the platform notables was speaking. When Andrew Carnegie, the American robber baron, couldn't make out the notes for his convocation address, he stopped in mid-sentence and explained, "I have given the eloquent speech which I had prepared, and from which I had hoped to elicit your cheers, to the myriad-mouthed press, and you will read it there in full tomorrow morning." Carnegie never did officially get his doctorate because when he walked up to Chancellor Strathcona, who was presiding, for his "capping," the two elderly CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 193.

men, who had started from nothing to reach this pinnacle, looked into one another's eyes and, moved by the emotions of the moment, shyly hugged one another instead of going through the degree ritual.

As he became ever richer, Strathcona turned himself into one of the Empire's more imaginative philanthropists. On top of the usual donations to hospitals and various finids for the unemployed (it then being cheaper to do good works t.i.tan pay good wages), he also provided seed money for the establishment of Major-(3,eneral Sir Robert Baden-PoNA ell's Boy Scout movement and helped finance Captain Joseph Bernier's explorations of Canada's Arctic coast in the steamerArctic. He purchased the auxiliary barquentine Discoveiy used by Captain Robert Falcon Scott in his Antarctic exploration of 1901- 4, a.s.signed the vessel to the HBC's northern trade for five years, then donated her to the Boy Scouts.* All requests for funds were placed on a silver tray, and every Sunday Strathcona would fish out a dozen or so. Those that satisfied his strict tenets of being "properly deserving" received a donation. One exception to this ritual occurred when an arrogant tramp appeared at his office and ordered the secretary to inform the High Commissioner that he m as the son of the man who had driven young Donald to Aberdeen when he had left home to sail for Canada. Given a Y,5 note, the tramp was back the next day. When he was announced, Strathcona quietly told his secretary, "Give the gentleman another five pounds and tell him he need not return. You may add that his father did not drive me to Aberdeen. I walked."

Besides granting him automatic access to the Empire's most distinguished soldiers and statesmen, Strathcona's peerage made him a member of the

She was later docked at theThaines Finbanknient in London as a inernorial to Scott and inoved to Dundee in 1986.

194 LABRADOR SMITH.

Imperial Parliament. Until 1910 the Lords and Comnions exercised equal const.i.tutional powers, and the upper chamber contributed Prime Ministers of the realm into the twentieth century. It was two years before Strathcona made his first speech In these august surroundings, and when he did, it was on a curious subject. On June 2 8, 1898, he introduced a bill to legalize in the United Kingdom colonial marriages with sisters of deceased wives. It was a quirky, rather risky topic for him to champion, and Queen 'Victoria, who resented such excursions into ecclesiastical law, was quick to take offence. "His Labrador Lords.h.i.+p," she pointedly remarked, "should be the last to meddle in these matters." Strathcona was careful to point out that his proposal would leave untouched marriages to brothers' widows and wives' nieces, but even though the Lords pa.s.sed the bill, the government refused to take it up in the Commons.

His slightly strained relations with the royal household improved on Queen Victoria's death in 1901 and the succession of her eldest son, Bertle, the fifiy-nineyear-old Edward V11.* The two men struck up a friends.h.i.+p so close that Edward treated the flBC Governor almost as a member oftbe royal household, referring to Strathcona as "Uncle Donald"

and consulting him on matters of state as well as personal finance.

Edward fondly remembered his 1860 tour of the Canadian provinces as Prince of Wales, particularly the great canoe pageant staged for hint by the HBCs overseas Governor,

*Victoria, who died in the arms of the Kaiser at eighty-one at Osborne House, her beloved country seat on the Isle of Wight, had become a powerful force for perpetuating the status quo in her country's life and exemplified it in her own, having her hushand's shaving water taken to his room every day for four decades after his death.

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Sir George Simpson, at Lachine.* But what had really won the heart of the British Monarch and most of his subjects was Strathcona's magnificent gift of Empire, the regiment of rough-riders he personally donated to help the British fight thc Boer War.

THE APPOINTMENT 01, .10SEP11 CHAMBERLAIN, an impatient Birmingham screw manufacturer, to the Colonial Office in 1895 had hardened the face of British imperialism. A dandy who sported a monocle, Chamberlain didn't Jusi preach white supremacy-he actually believed in it. The main flashpoint for the inevitable counter-thrusts that followed his sabre- rattling was South Africa, a pivotal outpost along the Empire's eastern trade routes. It was occupied by "black pagans" and, among others, intractable Huguenots from Holland, Germany and Belgium known as Boers (and later as Afrikaners) who had graduallywithdrawn inland to the Transvaal and Orange Free State, while in the nineteenth century the British settled in the Cape Colony, Natal and Rhodesia. A major gold strike in the highlands near Johannesburg disturbed the uneasy equi- librium, and a pre-emptive strike by the Boers into British territory on October 11, 1899, served as a declaration of war. British troop commanders, most of whom had not evolved their tactics much beyond the stolid battlesquares of Waterloo, were easily outmatched by South Africa's territory-wise opponents, who did battle in everyday clothing, elected their officers, and knew the contours of every gully in the veld. By winter, the proud British battalions, still rigidly close-advancing into battle to the wail of bagpipes, were in disarray.

*For a description of this unique cereniony, see Caesars of'the Wilderac~s, hardemer, pages 3S7-58.

196 LABRADOR SMITH.

Canada's defence force at the time consisted of a weak militia commanded by British generals, with eight steelclad Royal Navy cruisers patrolling the coasts. Although Laurier had responded to Chamberlain's 1897 plea that the colonies come to the aid of Mother Britain in times of need by declaring "Let the watch fires be lit on the hills and Canada will be the first to respond!" the Canadian Prime Minister now felt much more ambivalent. Henri Boura.s.sa, the Quebec activist who later founded Le De7vir, resigned from the Liberal party to protest Laurier's intention of dispatching Canadian troops to the African killing-ground. "arching his adopted country dither, Strathcona decided to act. On the last day of 1899 he offered the British War Office a mounted Canadian regiment, recruited, armed and pavrolled at his own expense. This grand one-million-dolfar gift, Strathcona's most deliberately spectacular gesture, caught the public imagination on both sides of the Atlantic.

The patriotic troop of 540 mobile scouts was placed under the coinmand of Colonel Sam Steele, the most impressive of the young North West Mounted Police officers who had helped establish lam, and order during construction of the CPR and the Klondike Gold Rush. Recruiting quotas for Strathcona's Horse were oversubscribed several times in five days, some 600-odd Arizona cowboys willing to supply their own g-uns and horses having been turned down. The final roster included many a renegade British aristocrat along with former army officers glad to serve as privates (known as "gentleman-rankers"), at least one fugitive from the law of the United States, as well as cowpunchers, bushwhackers, whisky-priests and the toughest frontiersmen Steele could find. When this motley a.s.sembly was inspected at an Ottawa march-past by Governor General Lord Minto, he complained to his diary of "the useless ruffians, the halt, the lame and the blind." The regiment CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 197.

Colonel Sam Steele and a detachment of Nortb ffiest Mounted Police t.i.t Beaz,ermouth, British Columbia, 188~

may not have pleased Minto's fastidious Sandhurst standards, but other Ottawans, especially the young girls, loved these wild-eyed soldiers of fortune, colourfully clad in stetsons, high yellow boots, and charcoal-hued greatcoats. As the troops journeyed by train to Halifax they were cheered at every stop before embarking for the long journey to the front.

Never at a loss to capitalize even on his patriotism, on the very day his soldiers sailed for Cape Town, Strathcona began to apply pressure on Chamberlain to make an important change in his barony, which, according to accepted custom, would have descended to his eldest son. Since he and Isabella had only a daughter (Margaret Charlotte, who had married Dr Robert Howard of McGill), he wanted to have a change made so the t.i.tle would remain perpetually in the family. The adjustment required proclamation of a royal decree, and Chamberlain replied, through a letter to Sir Charles 198 LABRADOR SMITH.

Tupper, that "there were great difficulties in the way of such an unusual grant." These problems were magically resolved by the intervention of Sir John McNeill, a Victoria Cross winner in the Maori War of 1864 and a friend of Strathcona's (they first met when the Scots officer was on Wolseley's staff at Red River), who now served as an equerry to the royal household and arranged for the required patent to be issued in the summer of 1900. It must have been a happy coincidence that shortly afterwards Strathcona purchased his Hebridean islands (Colonsay and Oronsay) from Sir John for Y,30,000.

In South Africa, the Canadian irregulars quickly gained a well-deserved reputation for matching the Boers' own guerrilla tactics with commando raiding parties and daring thrusts to sever the enemy's supply routes.

Steele's contingent looked hopeless on the parade square, but in the field, where mobility, courage and innovation counted, no one could match the Canadians. Originally hardened by their ability to survive on their home turf, they had been toughened by their commanding officer's brutal approach to discipline. When half a dozen of his soldiers complained they were suffering from piles, for example, Steele ordered them to gallop bareback for five miles to burst the source of their complaints. "Of all the regiments, British or Colonial," reported London's Daily Express, "...

Strathcona's Horse among the Boers were the most dreaded, and, strange to say, the most respected." Strange indeed, because Steele's men were reported to have lynched some Boer prisoners, and when a British officer remonstrated, they threatened to lynch him, too.

On the way back to Canada, Strathcona invited his regiment to London, where King Edward presented its battle colours, pinned each man with a medal, and rewarded Steele with the Victorian Order. Strathcona CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 199.

later dined the entire unit at an elaborate banquet. "The occasion of his own toast being drunk," trumpeted The Times, "produced the wildest enthusiasm, the officers and men springing to their feet, making the roof echo with their ardent cheering." At a special reception for officers in the great drawing room of the Savoy Hotel, attended by the Empire's leading dignitaries, Strathcona launched into yet mother laudatory address, but Steele would have none of it. "He arrived a bit tight and grew tighter," recalled Agar Adamson, one of Steele's subalterns, "insisting on making a speech in the middle of which Lord S. pulled him up and said that they would have speeches on other occasions. He insisted upon continuing, in the middle of which [Steele] wanted to pump s.h.i.+p. He left the table ... lost his way, and found himself in a kitchen, on the stove of which he relaxed nature. He then returned, and wound up being sick on the carpet." Despite such lapses, Steele was given important Canadian army commands and Lord Strathcona's Horse fought with distinction in both world wars and Korea.*