Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 24

*Cooper was happy to borrow His Ex's rail car but would far rather have had his own. Repeated entreaties to have the Canadian Committee purchase or lease one for hini were manhilly rebuffed by George Allan, who patiently explained that "we are, of necessity, driving our rank and file pretty hard these days of reduced salaries and wages ... and my own hunch is [that you should avoid] a breath of criticism by any member of the staff, no matter how Bolshevistic he might be.... Democracy in Canada has made great advances and Canadians ... are critical of people of importance from Great Britain and other countries visiting Canada ......

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annoyance, confusion and misunderstanding. "One thing that particularly riled Mr. Chester," remembered Winifred Archer, his loyal secretary, "was that when Governor Cooper visited Canada and was with, say, the manager of a large store, he would question the Canadian executive on matters not under the control of London. Mr. Chester I-elt this was not only unfair to him -self, but also unfair to the manager." That didn't stop Cooper, and he always made a special point of inspecting the Winnipeg store. On one such occasion, his wife expressed a desire to view the competing Eaton's store, then managed by Bill Palk. "How do you like it?" Palk politely inquired, after she and Mrs Conrad Riley had spent some time touring several departments.

"Well," Kathleen Cooper replied, equally politely, 94actually, I don't like it at all. We've just been all through the Hudson's Bay Company store and it's nice and quiet. You can do your shopping in peace. But here, the aisles are crowded and everyone is pus.h.i.+ng you around all the time." Palk, who read the riot act to any department manager whose aisles weren't crowded enough to force him and his a.s.sistant to walk through in single file, knew at that moment why Eaton's was outselling the Bay.

The first Governor to undertake northern inspection tours by air, Cooper posed a special problem for his keepers. The Governor insisted that his official flag be fluttering bef~re he arrived at any Company post.* Many stores, especially in the North, didn't have one, or it had been eaten by rats, and often the FIBC Beechcraft kept circling for some time.

Chess.h.i.+re recalled being stuck in just such a situation, trying to land the HBC plane against an incoming low-pressure front, when Cooper exclaimed: "I can't see the Governors flag flying!"

*This was the Company's coat of arnis on a white field, which today flies frorn all FIBC stores.

TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 403.

Patrick Ashley Cooper and others, v?ith thefirst airplane purchased by the Hudson's Bay Company. Left to right: Harold Winny, Pilot; Patrick Ashley Cooper; Duncan McLaren, Mechanic; Paul Davoud, Manager, Transportation; Philip A. Chester, General Manager HBC; Bob Cbess.h.i.+re, Nrzv Manager, Fur Trade Department.

"But Sir," Chess.h.i.+re replied, "they don't have a flag." "Well, they should have."

"What good would it do?"

"The Indians would know the Governor's in town," explained Cooper.

Chess.h.i.+re had no answer for that except to shrug and turn his eyes heavenward.

Cooper inspected not just every store but every warehouse. While at Fort Chipewyan, he once found "numbers of horse collars, horse shoes although I ascertained that there were only two horses in the whole district.

These have been written off the books but it is an obvious weakness that they are not moved somewhere where 404 MERCHANT PRINCES.

they can be sold" [September 16, 1932]. One problem with Cooper's northern sojourns was that he demanded a full press corps reception when he returned to Winnipeg. Local journalists obliged the first time but soon found more interesting copy. Murray Turner, then in charge of public relations, solved the problem by recruiting eight tea and coffee salesmen from the wholesale department, handing them cameras-but not filmfrom the retail store, and telling them to pretend they were photographing the Governor's every limb movement as he descended from the aircraft. That made Cooper very happy, but every year when he returned to London, he would puzzle about it. "Extraordinary," he would say. "I have lots of photographs taken when I'm in Canada-and they never let me see them . .

COOPER'S MOST NOTABLE-and most bizarre-adventure was his 1934 journey into Hudson Bay. " 193 3 was a year of depression and losses," Chester noted when the Governor's decision to go North the following summer was being debated. "Within the Company the prospect of an Arctic pageant was received with misgivings and hopes that nothing would come of it. But as events quickly proved, such hopes were reducing the man and his plan to too simple a simplicity, as in no time at all London and Canada were organizing a voyage that would be the talk of Arctic circles for years to come." The Nascopie was turned over to a s.h.i.+pyard for reconfiguration of her pa.s.senger s.p.a.ce to accommodate the Governor and his retinue. Bronze commemorative medals were struck featuring the profile of Cooper; hundreds of hunting knives were inscribed "From P. Ashley Cooper, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1934" on one side and "Be happy while you hunt" on the other; and an extra stock of Governor's flags was ordered.

TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 405.

On July 7, 1934, Cooper boarded the s.h.i.+p at her home berth in Montreal.

With him were his wife, her inaid, his secretary (G.R. Macdonald), a piper from the Black Watch of Canada (Pipe Sergeant Hannah) and Michael Lubbock, who was to act as Cooper's executive a.s.sistant and speech writer.* Aboard also were Ralph Parsons, the Company's Fur Trade Commissioner, a King's Scout (one a year was awarded the trip by the IiBC), eight Mounties and several new HBC clerks, an archaeologist, an astronomer, an ornithologist and a newsreel production team. A thousand spectators lined the dock as the thirtieth Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company was piped aboard his s.h.i.+p for a six-week voyage into the Company's original territory that none ofhis predecessors had ever bothered to make.

The Nascopie, her pennants flying, steamed along the north sh.o.r.e of the St Lawrence, through the Strait of Belle Isle, then up the rocky coast of Labrador to Cartwright and later Port Burwell. The piper first did a round of the decks, frightening the caged chickens and sheep, then climbed into the bow of the s.h.i.+p's cutter and began playing "Oh where, tell me where, is my Highland laddie gone?" He was followed down the ladder by the Governor and his wife, Captain Smellie of the Nascopie and Parsons. "Sir G eorge Simpson in his 3 0-foot canoe, with his beaver hat, piper and singing voyageurs, made no braver picture than this,"

rhapsodized R.H.H. Macaulay, a Company scribe. "A white motor boat of trim lineamids.h.i.+ps, on a high-backed seat, the Governor and Mrs.

*The highly educated son of a director of the Bank of England and a former director ofthe HBC, Lubbock was not unduly fond ofCooper. "He was almost illiterate," Lubbock claimed, "so that whenever I wanted him to express rather loffier sentiments, I would insert, 'as the seventeenth-century writer said'-and then put in my own words. I even got quoted in a number of papers, and I knew he'd never dare ask me who the writer was."

406 MERCHANT PRINCES.

0~.

Patrick Ashley Cooper and Mrs Cooper posing on the ice during the Hudson Bay tour, 1934

Cooper, by the Governor's side the Commissioner. At the small wheel immediately behind the seat stood the 3rd mate in uniform, and by his side a uniformed seaman to tend the motor. Behind them, standing with arms folded, was the Captain, with his gold ribbon and oak leaves, and aft the Governor's flag. In the bow ... the piper keeping time to his 'Highland Laddie' with one brogued and buckled foot, the ribbons decorating his pipes flying in the breeze." The Coopers inspected the tiny settlement, handed out the inscribed knives to the hunters, and mouth organs, toques, beads and rattles to the children, then officiated at the laying of a cornerstone for a new Bay store.* "It is no exaggeration to say," Macaulay reported with all the paternalism he could muster, "that those Eskimos were overcome by this unprecedented shower of

"Possibly arranged," as Chester later noted, "by the Post manager to express hopes for a new building; but after the Nascopic left, the ceremonial platform and inscribed cornerstone (a wooden crate filled with rocks and covered with concrete) were sadly dismantled."

TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 407.

gifts; never before in their lives had such a thing happened, and, in consequence, they could only sit and look at their presents, touching them gently every now and then to see that they were real, and, finding that they were, giving delighted little laughs."

As he would at all his stops, Cooper then showed his Inuit audience a film of King George reviewing the trooping of the colour, explaining through an interpreter that this was their King too. There is no record of local reactions to the movie-the first they had ever seen-or to the notion that somebody who usually went around on a horse was their King, but everybody's attention was soon distracted by a kayak race, a square dance and fireworks.* Next morning, as the Nascopie struck her anchor and pulled out of Cartwright on the way to Port Burwell, Cooper got ready for the broadcasts he intended to give just before his arrival or just after his departure at each stop. He would rush to the radio room and, sitting in front of a large microphone, drone on about how glad he was to be here, bow the Eskimos should be more diligent in trapping foxes, how it had taken "many moons travelling" to reach them, and how they must always be loyal subjects of the King who was sponsoring this message. Then, straining even his own considerable limits of condescension, the Governor would conclude with the admonition: "We ... leave you with confidence that you

*At Stupart Bay, the Governor gamely climbed into a kayak, got his balance, and paddled around the cove until his legs got cold. One highlight of the journey, recalled by Michael Lubbock, was stepping off at Lake Harbour, where the piper started to wail for a group of elderly Inuit. "I noticed they were in a sort of ring, shuffling around, and it suddenly struck me that they were going through the rudiments of a Scottish reel. It was a most curious spectacle, but of course the Dundee whalers used to come here regularly, and they were doing what they had been taught so many, many years ago."

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will work with our post manager as one large happy family, you following his advice as if he were your father, for he does the things which I tell him and I want you to do the things which he tells you."

There were three problems with the Governor's broadcasts:

I . Each settlement had only one radio receiver, usually in the store manager's staff house, so that the chances of an Inuk's actually hearing Cooper were remote.

2. He spoke in English, so that any Inuit who did listen would not understand a word Cooper was saying.

3. When Ottawa objected to an HBC official's speaking to Canadian subjects on behalf of the King, the plug was pulled on Cooper's microphone amplifier.

As a result, his carefully rehea.r.s.ed speeches were never heard outside the little s.h.i.+pboard studio. "They kind of went up in the air and never came down," Captain Smellie later confessed with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

Cooper was not aware of any of this-then or laterand earnestly continued to perform his daily stint. The post managers had meanwhile been careftilly briefed to praise him for his non-existent broadcasts wherever he appeared.

The voyage's most h istoric event was commemoration of Henry Hudson's voyage of discovery into the Bay, 324 years earlier. Cooper had been charged by Lord Jellicoe of the Royal Empire Society in London to cast a specially prepared wreath (which had been preserved in a huge block of ice) upon the waters near the spot where Hudson was thought to have been abandoned in a lifeboat by his mutinous crew. The previous evening the Captain had asked Arthur Reed, his Chief Steward, to prepare the wreath for launching. It could not be found, and Reed finally concluded it had mistakenly been left behind. "Make a wreath," ordered the skipper, adding, "by tomorrow morning." 'Ib create a circle of flowers held together by red ribbon on a supply s.h.i.+p in the middle of Hudson Bay might have daunted a lesser man, but Reed TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 409.

produced a realistic facsimile within twelve hours. It had been fas.h.i.+oned out of artificial blooms painted on and cut out of toilet paper by one of the pa.s.sengers, mounted in moss that had been brought aboard by one of the scientists. Cooper delivered one of his windier speeches, then solemnly heaved the contraption into the sea, while his piper appropriately played "Flowers of the Forest."

"On his triumphant return to Winnipeg the Governor gave a dinner for the C anadian Committee," Chester noted, barely able to rein in his sarcasm.

"And after speaking about the great value which the Company, the C.C., and the Fur Trade Department would reap from his efforts, he called up each member to be pinned with one of his medals. To climax the subsequent silence ... G.W. Allan remarked: 'Governor, by G.o.d, never before in my long life have I received a medal and I shall always treasure this memorable occasion."'

INDRA,Mxric CONTRASTto Cooper's chivalrous if extravagant approach, Chester's life in Winnipeg was remarkably routine. He lived on River Avenue, had an account with Bradley's Taxi, but usually walked to work and taxied home. 1-1 e spent most of his limited spare time at the Manitoba Club, either playing bridge or trading gossip with members of the Sanhedrin. They were an informal group of thoughtful Winnipeggers led by John W. Dafoe, the great editor of the Free Presswho customarily huddled in a corner of the club lounge (which always seemed redolent of ox blood), to dissect world events, talk up free trade, and spread the gospel of Manchester Liberalism. They resented the restraints placed on western development by the Mon treal-O ttawa-Toronto axis and fervently believed that a prosperous West, exercising its financial independence, would strengthen Confederation. They were also an insular and extremely conservative bunch; having weathered the Depression, they vowed not to owe anybody anything ever again, encouraging Chester in his 410 MERCHANT PRINCES.

determination that the HBC should not borrow money to finance a move into Eastern Canada. When Owen Funnell, the ambitious and capable manager of the Calgary store, formulated plans for the Company to open a branch at the head of the Great Lakes in the grain-export town of Port Arthur, Chester cut off the discussion by proclaiming the community would not grow because the St Lawrence Seaway would never be built.

Chester's wife, Isabel, was an Ivey, the youngest child of a wealthy family from London, Ontario, who had made their fortune in Empire Bra.s.s and later branched out into life insurance and packaging. She had been planning to spend a season in Paris when she met Chester during a Great Lakes steamboat excursion, and they decided to marry. Their honeymoon at Beaver Point, the Ivey family summer compound on Ahmic Lake, near Burk's Falls, northwest of Huntsville, was an appropriate portent of things to come. The happy couple arrived in style and were met by the bride's two maids, but within two days Chester had decided they were not good enough and fired them both. Chester eventually bought the place and spent six weeks every summer there. "Beaver Point had a magnificent main house with six bedrooms, an enormous stone fireplace, and its own electricity generating plant," recalled son-in-law Charles Loewen. "Chester kept pretending it was just a little country cottage and got very cross when some Boy Scouts, who had paddled the lake in a canoe, came to borrow a can opener and asked: 'Sir, what's the name of this hotel?' He did things with reasonable style, so that at breakfast, for example, there were always ten pots of different jams and you had to go through the ceremony of choosing one. I remember particularly one day having lunch with him on the clock. He was sipping champagne and offered me some. When I told him I'd rather have beer, he looked at me and exclaimed, 'Helot!' Now, that was interesting, because he was calling me a peasant but TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 411.

granting me the recognition that I was an educated one, and would know the Helots had been Spartan serfs. He had a fairly sophisticated sense of humour."

Life at the Chesters' was not always that placid. They had adopted a son in England named David Andrew, a sensitive, artistic child. He was sent to Trinity College School at Port Hope, was a good student in art, literature and jazz piano, but worked only intermittently as a journalist. So displeased was the father with his intellectual son that Chester kept him at an emotional distance. David's attractive wife, from whom he would later become estranged, was a trained speech therapist but had to take jobs as a cleaning lady to pay the grocery bills. Young David's recurring nightmare was his memory of the time his father forced him to eat some jelly dessert that he was allergic to. When he got so upset he threw up, Chester insisted he eat everything on his plate, including the vomit-but his mother intervened.

Despite his frustrations with the British overlords, Chester loved his visits to London. He would arrive on the Queen Mary, stay in a suite at the Dorchester, lunch at the Savoy Grill, and be the dinner guest at various functions hosted by resident directors. The trips tapered off during the Second World War, as nearly everyone was pressed into service.

Chester himself served briefly as Acting Master General of Ordnance in Canada's suddenly mobilized defence department but left Ottawa two months later, frustrated by the impenetrable maze of regulations. When he returned to Winnipeg, his wife gave a celebratory dinner party for their friends. As the guests sat down to eat, they found each serving tied up in red tape, and they had to fill out forms in triplicate before they could begin the meal.

Cooper also sen,ed his country, as Director-General of Finance in the Ministry of Supply, and in 1944 was knighted for his efforts. The Company's London office was never hit by German bombs, but they came close. More 412 MERCHANT PRINCES.

than one directors' meeting was concluded with the directors crouching under the boardroom table, and the annual Court in 1944 was disrupted three times by buzz-bombs landing nearby. A spice warehouse just behind Beaver House was. .h.i.t and burned for a week, giving off a terrible smell.

Several fire bombs landed on the frontsteps and roof of the Company building, but they didn't go off.*

The staff spent most nights huddled in the building's underground fur-storage vaults, occasionally relieving the tension by chuckling through one of the least authentic Hollywood films ever madeJ Although there was a wartime embargo on importing fur, the HBC maintained the continuity of its operations by auctioning the pelts of British wild rabbits, used in the hat trade. On February 2 5, 1946, regular sales resumed, with E200,000 in turnover the first day alone. The HBC was back in business.

*A typical wartime incident was the near escape of a Company employee named AJ. Pullen, who woke up in his southeast London house one Sat.u.r.day evening just as a hundred-pound bomb penetrated his roof and buried itself in an upstairs floor. He borrowed a saw, removed enough floor boards to free it, attached it to a wire cable, and dragged it over his garden rail- ings into the street. lie then hoisted the bomb-still ticking loudly in his ear-on his shoulder and carried it towards a bomb disposal dump. He was accompanied in this perilous journey by his seventeen-year-old son, Harry, who explained to neighbours that he was along in case his father dropped it. When Pullen finally reached the dump, he was arrested and fined three pounds (which the Company paid) for "removing and tampering with a bomb dropped from enemy aircraft."

t Hudson ~ Bay, a clinker produced in 1940 by Twentieth Century Fox, starrej Gene Tierney (as a beautiful Indian princess), Vincent Price (as Charles 11), Virginia Field (as Nell Gwyn), Paul Muni (as Pierre Radisson) and a 309-pound Laird Cregar (as M6dard Chouart, Sieur Des Groseilliers).

The movie's grasp of Canadian geography "as as real as the canvas canoes, painted to resemble birchbark, in which most of the action took place.

TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 413.

Cooper celebrated the end of hostilities by revamping his board. Much to everyone's surprise, but prompted by his directors, he named Chester a British director (replacing Victor Cazalet) and upgraded his t.i.tle from General Manager to Managing Director for Canada. The Governor also recruited as new board members some of the war's most distinguished graduates. They included Field Marshal the Right I Ionourable the Viscount Alanbrooke, who had served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff and, according to the American general Douglas MacArthur, was "the greatest soldier that England has produced since Wellington"; Sirjohn Anderson, later Lord Waverley, one of Britain's most distinguished public servants, who had served as Governor of Bengal (where he earned the reputation of being the most shot-at man in the world) and wartime Chancellor of the Exchequer;*

Alanbrooke's honours and decorations: Knight of the Garter, Knight Grand Cross of the Bath, Order of Merit, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, Distinguished Service Order (he was twice a DSO-m 1917 and 1918). He also held the French, Belgian and Czechoslovak Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Medal from the United States, and his wife was from an old f IBC family: a great-granddaughter of Sir John Henry Pelly, Deputy Governor 1812-22 and Governor 1822-52. Waverley's honours: Privy Councillor, Knight Grand Cross of the Bath, Order of Merit, Knight Grand Commander of the Star of India, Knight Grand Commander of the Indian Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society. He attended the universities of Edinburgh and Leipzig, and held an MA and a BSc. He was Home Secretary in the early years of the 1939-45 war, and the little air-raid shelters that dotted British gardens were known as Andersons after him. After the war he became chairman of the Port of London Authority and a director of the CPR.

The Order of Merit is limited in number to twenty-four members, with provision for honorary foreign members. General Dwight Eisenhower was made an honorary OM in 1945. The Bath is a much larger order, with many degrees, including several of knighthood.

414 MERCHANT PRINCES.

and William "Tony" Keswick, a brigadier on the staff of General Montgomery's planning group for the Normandy invasion, whose family controlled Jardine, Matheson & Company, a Far Eastern trading company.

The most interesting new post-war recruit was Joe Links, the bead of his own firm of furriers that had been chosen by Royal Appointment Furrier to the Royal Household. A spritely and cultured gentleman with all the social graces and a novelist's eye for detail, he had written authoritative studies of Venice, Ca.n.a.letto and the fur trade. Links made light of the fact that he was the firstjew to be invited on the board, and when asked whether he had encountered any prejudice, replied, "Of course not, neither then nor at any other time in my life. It's not so much that I was the only Jewish director, I was the English one-the only Englishman among six Scots or sons of Scots. So, perhaps I cannot acquit my colleagues altogether of prejudice." Described by a later Governor as "the most useful board member, his mind worked like lightning and he would always ask the kind of awkward questions that made us wonder why we had never thought of what he had just brought up," Links served on the board for twenty-eight years, an invaluable source of wisdom, burnout and plain good sense.

The Canadian Committee also underwent drastic changes. In 1940, Charles Dunning, who had become Premier of Saskatchewan at thirty-six and later served as federal minister of finance, was invited to join. Chancellor of Queen's University, chairman of Ogilvie Flour Mills and a director of eleven other major companies, he was one of the few distinguished non- Winnipeggers to join the HBC Committee. In Winnipeg itself, the Company's corporate traditions carried on through the appointment of Perley Banbury (Beaver Lumber), Stewart Augustus Searle (Searle Grain, and a director of Monarch Life), Colonel Hugh F. Osler (head TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 415.

of Osler, Hammond & Nanton and a director of GreatWest Life) and Joe Harris (Canada Packers, Great-West Life and a director of Beaver Lumber).*

Originally an executive in his father's meat packing-house (later merged into Canada Packers), Harris was a candid character who had the disconcerting habit of ending most lunches by pus.h.i.+ng back his chair and, as he was turning to leave, informing his fellow diners: "Got to get back to the abattoir and stick a piggy."

After George Allan's death in 1940, the Canadian Committee chairmans.h.i.+p went to Conrad Stephenson Riley, an una.s.suming but effective financier who could divert most of Cooper's aggressive ploys with the simple: "Yes, Patrick, I'm sure that would be very nice. But no." A noted oarsman who became a member of Canada's Sports Hall of Fame, he succeeded his father as president of Northern Trusts and was a director of such Winnipeg touchstone companies as Great-West Life and Beaver Lumber. Under Riley, the Cooper-Chester feud quieted down a bit, with the Winnipeg Managing Director temporarily becalmed because of his new t.i.tle and London appointment, while the British Governor, savouring his new knighthood, felt vindicated and slightly more immune to the Canadian's little plots.t Within a decade, Riley was succeeded by J. Elmer Woods, who would run the Canadian Committee from 1950 to 1964. While he was cut from the same pattern