By Gregory Clark, August 12, 1950.
When Gregory Clark’s father, the late Joe Clark, was demon bowler of the Parkdale Cricket Club, Toronto, the team went to Berlin, Ont., for a match in the early nineties. When the train palled into Berlin, a chunky youth jumped aboard the coach and asked Clark if he might carry the cricket bag.
“Certainly, my boy,” said Clark, “and what’s your name?”
“William Lyon Mackenzie King,” said the youth. And that began a friendship that resulted in two generations of Clarks carrying the King bag.
Gregory Clark knew Mackenzie King from his own boyhood, interviewed him on countless occasions, visited Laurier House and Kingsmere, both on and off the record; and when the wartime Prime Minister flew by bomber to Britain in 1942, Gregory Clark, was one of the three newspapermen chosen to accompany him.
“It was the only time in his life,” says Greg, “that the old gentleman had both feet off the ground at the same time.”
The chances are better than good that Mackenzie King will be perceived by history as a figure of romance.
This suggestion may appear preposterous, even to those who saw in him most of the elements of greatness.
But history has an ironic way of brushing off the contemporaries of those whom history loves. And in Mackenzie King were those baffling elements of personality and performance which keep historians digging far deeper than the documents.
What they come up with in the next few years may be as romantic a story as can be found anywhere. It is this: that with his flesh and bones, and with his hours and days and months and years, he erected a monument dedicated to his rebel grandfather.
Right by the little elevator in Laurier House, up which he took you to the attic tower of his den, there is small framed handbill or poster. It is yellow with age. It offers a thousand pounds for the capture of the rebel, William Lyon Mackenzie.
Mackenzie King used to lead you to the elevator in such a way as to make it impossible to fail to see this curious memento. When you exclaimed upon it, he would give that awkward little twisted smile and wave you into the elevator.
Emerging into the tower room, you saw instantly, and to the exclusion of everything else, a lighted portrait. It glowed, as shrines glow. It was the well-known profile portrait of his mother, with an aura of misty white hair as she sits gazing with serenity into an unseen hearth, a book on her lap. The portrait was always lighted. It is probably lighted now.
When you had paid your respects to the portrait, you turned to find Mackenzie King at the desk shuffling papers; and when he raised his eyes, they had tempestuous expression characteristic of them at all times, save when he was meeting strangers or having his picture taken.
Thus you could not get into that attic den, in that old house that was more like a Madame Tussaud setting than a man’s home, without an impression of the past, and some ritual dedication to it.
Now, the stories a child hears in its awakening years sometimes shape its destiny. The stories Mackenzie King heard at his mother’s knee, he, bearing the name he did, must have been of a more gripping quality than most.
Here is one he heard – and it is on the record:
One hundred and thirteen years ago next December, William Lyon Mackenzie, the rebel leader, escaped over the border and immediately set about rousing American and refugee Canadian sympathizers to attempt raid back into Canada, with him at the head of it.
The Americans charged him with an offence against the peace and he was sent to prison for 18 months in Rochester. By the time he got out of jail, the enthusiasm of his friends had subsided, the little newspaper he was attempting to publish while in prison slowly perished and William Lyon Mackenzie faced his future a broken and penniless man.
His wife, children and 90-year-old Scottish mother were with him in Rochester. They lived in an anxious house, with doors barred with scantlings; and Mackenzie walked the streets cautiously. For there was still some thousands of dollars reward on his head, to which his Canadian political enemies from time to time added larger sums. And gangsters from Buffalo and adventurers from Canada were well aware of that handsome prize.
Amid all these desperations, a new baby was expected in the Mackenzie home. There were days, so the record stands, that they had not a scrap of food in the house.
The baby arrived.
“Mr. Mackenzie,” said the doctor, when he came out of the room, it is a girl, but I fear that, due to the privations and anxieties to which your wife has been subjected, it will not survive.”
“It will be God’s mercy,” said the broken rebel, “if she does not.”
But she did live. And she became the mother of a man who, in the time of the breaking of nations, throughout a period of earthquakes in the politics of the world, ruled the land his grandfather fled for 21 years as Prime Minister, headed his political party for close to 30 years, sat in the councils of nations as a statesman, laid as much as any man the foundations of the British Commonwealth, steadied the helm of his country through storms of unparalleled violence while its public opinion slowly and rationally accepted social and industrial reforms that place it amongst the most happily situated nations on earth.
From the earliest records of him, he was a dedicated man. He employed scholarship as the means to the end he had in view: and he ran up an impressive string of degrees at the universities of Toronto, Chicago and Harvard. He created and leaped into the first opening in public life when he became the youthful deputy minister of labor. Soon after, he ran for the House of Commons and was elected. When politics closed down on him for a few years, with the defeat of Laurier in 1911, he chose the field likeliest to increase his experience and powerful connections the Rockefeller Foundation. When he returned to politics, in 1919, it was as chosen leader of his party.
In all this time, he wanted nothing of life but employment leading towards his goal. They say he had not many friends. He had hosts: but the friendship was formal and did not intrude upon the dedication.
They say he was iron-handed with his cabinet colleagues and his secretaries: no more iron-handed than with himself.
It may well be that Mackenzie King belonged to history before he was born.
There are too many strange coincidences for it to be otherwise. In 1838, William Lyon Mackenzie called a secret congress in Rochester, NY “to be composed of Canadians, or persons connected with Canada, who are favorable to the attainment of its political independence, and the entire separation of its government from the political power of Great Britain.”
In 1926, that man’s grandson, the Prime Minister of Canada, went to the Imperial Conference at Westminster and threw into it the challenge of the Byng controversy1. He returned to Canada to inform his Parliament:
“I think it can be said there is no longer any possibility of doubt that the Governor-General is the representative of His Majesty the King and is in no way representative of the government of Great Britain or any department of that government.”
We cannot make history out of a couple of stories and a few instances. But the stories of dedication may now be told; and the instances, even in the short time since his death, are already coming to mind in the press all over the country.
In the process of serving his country with tireless devotion, many a great man has contrived to make himself into something of a monument.
Mackenzie King, with the light burning always over the lady born in exile and committed to God’s mercy by an irascible and broken old treasonist, did a job of sculpture with his life for somebody other than himself. That is evident in the way he downed mallet and chisel on his retirement from office and waited in utter silence for the end.
He was a romantic. His life was dedicated, probably from boyhood. That makes him easier to understand, more exciting to contemplate, now that he is safe in the clasp of history.
Editor’s Notes: William Lyon Mackenzie King died on July 22, 1950.
- The King-Byng Affair was a Canadian constitutional crisis that occurred in 1926, when the governor general of Canada, Lord Byng of Vimy, refused a request by the prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to dissolve parliament and call a general election. King’s government then sought at an imperial conference to redefine the role of the governor general as a personal representative of the sovereign in his Canadian council and not of the British government. The change was agreed to at the Imperial Conference of 1926. ↩︎