bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1995-1996) — Winter 1995–96 // Hiver 1995-1996, pp. 3–4
Émile Martel
Le Comité éditorial exprime ses félicitations les plus chaleureuses à Émile Martel qui vient de recevoir le prix du Gouverneur général pour la poésie de langue française pour son recueil «Pour orchestre et poète seul» publié aux Écrits des Forges. Émile Martel, présentement Ministre (affaires culturelles) à l’ambassade du Canada à Paris, s’inscrit ainsi dans la lignée des écrivains, philosophes, poètes et autres créateurs qui ont illustré la Carrière. bout de papier publiera une entrevue et un extrait de son oeuvre dans le prochain numéro.
Dear Editor:
Colin Robertson’s memorial to Charles Ritchie (Volume 12, number 3) prompted a rush of personal recollections.
I remember Charles’s last words to me on the telephone: “When you get back, come in for drinks. We’ll have an orgy!” This was an injunction that he issued to many. The Bacchanalian reference simply reflected his feelings about one of the great pleasures of his life — convivial company gathered together over drinks, gossiping, telling stories, and talking about books, films and the issues of the day.
He had the singular knack of drawing all sorts of people to him. They loved to be in his company because around him life quickened. This was certainly true for foreign service officers. They angled for the chance to serve with him. His reputation as a head of mission of wit and distinction went well ahead of him. I was fortunate to serve with him twice, in Bonn on my first posting, and, much later, in London on his last.
Long before he attained celebrity status and literary success with the publication of his diaries, he was a well-known and professionally respected figure in the upper echelons of the public service in Ottawa and in the wider reaches of international diplomacy. It was in this world that he made his first reputation as a diplomat and obtained the materials with which he achieved his second as a diarist.
He was not an originator of foreign policy ideas on the scale of, say, his peer Escott Reid. His talent ran in a different but equally important direction. His forte was the diagnostic and the reportorial. With clarity and precision, he could describe the mood and atmosphere of an international meeting, expose the interplay of personalities, shrewdly estimate their importance in relation to the probable outcome, and sum up and assess the often concealed issues of any diplomatic confrontation. He was an astute observer and judge of people and problems. He also had an acute sense of where the Canadian interest lay in any situation. It was gifts of this order that made him the superb diarist that he was.
He presided over rather than managed a diplomatic mission. He belonged to a foreign service in which the house style and the standards of performance had been set by a small group of elite practitioners who were not by nature didactic. The new entrant was expected to absorb the essentials of his or her craft from the atmosphere and the daily routines of the Department and from the example of his or her betters. The closest that the Department ever came to anything as obvious as training was the informal academy called “The University of the East Block”.. Given this conditioning, it is not surprising that Charles simply assumed a level of performance from his officers that conformed to Departmental standards without recourse to much explicit direction on his part. Yet one was always conscious of the need to keep up to the mark even though it was set with a seemingly light hand. As for the mechanics of administration, he mercifully left that to others temperamentally better equipped to cope. Certainly, the mantras of the management gurus never entered Charles’s professional vocabulary.
Among foreign service officers of my generation, the talk at any gathering would, at some point, turn to the latest of Charles Ritchie’s stories. These were hilarious accounts, of which he was often the butt, told by the man himself, of his bizarre collisions with the mundane conditions of every-day living. He was famously non-mechanical and many of his stories attest to that fact. He wisely never learned to drive a car but even this self-denial was not sufficient to shield him from the vituperation that is visited upon the driver who is in the wrong. One day in Paris, the driver of the Embassy car in which Charles was riding was working his way through heavy traffic and in doing so was edging a workman on his bicycle closer and closer to the curb. Finally, the workman was forced over the curb and off his bicycle. At that moment, Charles, reclining in the back seat, looked out to see the workman shaking his fist at him and shouting “cochon de luxe!”
In London, his range of contacts from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall was formidable. A Foreign Office colleague, seconded to the Cabinet Office, once told me that the staff had standing instructions from Burke Trend, the Secretary to Cabinet, that any call from the Canadian High Commissioner was to be put through to him straight away. His connections with the Palace were close and members of the High Commission were often the beneficiaries. In my own case, my wife and I received privileged seats at Trooping the Colour and had the rare experience of attending an installation ceremony of the Order of the Garter in the royal chapel at Windsor Castle. These contacts, however stellar, were never paraded for the greater glory of their possessor. One learned of them, as I did, as the recipient of a favour or a piece of information from a third party.
He loved big cities, cosmopolitan capitals with their ceaseless buzz of professional and social activity, and their rich and varied cultural scenes. He once told a colleague that he yearned for the concrete of New York, faced as he was at the time with what was, for him, the sylvan scene of Washington. He was especially fond of London and hated the thought of leaving when retirement approached. I can see him now, his spectral figure clad in dark, pin-striped English suiting, sauntering along a London street on his way to a bookshop, a cinema, or a picture gallery or perhaps lunch at The Travellers’ with friends.
Although his professional life was centred on distant cities, he never lost touch with his roots in Nova Scotia. He and Sylvia summered in their beloved Chester as often as they could, and in their final days they strove mightily to continue doing so despite the ever-increasing odds of physical frailty. Summers in Chester fortified them against the rigours of winters in Ottawa. The last paragraph of his last book, “My Grandfather’s House” reads: “One sunny day last summer I was standing on the wharf in Chester, Nova Scotia, gazing out to sea, thinking about the dead people of whom I had been writing and of the changing scenes of my own life. I was shaken out of these Proustion musings by a hand grabbing my arm. It was an old fisherman whom I had often encountered on the wharf. Today he seemed slightly the worse for drink.
“How are you doing, old stick?” he inquired
“Fine”, I replied.
I went on my way in a more cheerful mood. The encounter had brought me down to earth, the earth of my native Nova Scotia, where it had all begun.”
Charles Stewart Almon Ritchie was an ornament to his profession and a joy to all who knew him.
A. Douglas Small
Editor:
I appreciate that space limitations required editing of my contribution to the “Day in the Life” issue (p. 82). The result did introduce some distortion into my article, but in particular, the title you assigned it “Drafting a NATO Minister Statement” is somewhat misleading. The draft statement that is the main focus of the article was not in fact for the 16 NATO Foreign Ministers but for the 38 North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) Foreign Ministers.
Achieving consensus in the latter group is more complex than among the 16, particularly on controversial issues such as mentioned in the article where some NACC Ministers were in direct dispute. It would be extraordinary for the 16 NATO Foreign Ministers to debate the text of their communiqué at one of their regular meetings for four hours. The four hour debate in Istanbul took place at the NACC over the text of its statement.
Such a marathon debate on the NACC statement was in fact unusual even in the NACC; nonetheless, the Istanbul experience did result in abandoning the negotiation of a lengthy comprehensive consensus statement at the subsequent NACC Ministerial meeting last December in Brussels. R.P. Kirby c/o BNATO
Editor:
The fall 1995 issue of bout de papier contained a fascinating collection of articles on Canada’s immigration policy and on the people who implement it and promote migration to Canada at posts abroad. The references by Raphael Girard and Carol Turner-Trusca to the establishment of a rotational Immigration Foreign Service caught my attention particularly, because of my early involvement in it.
Ms. Turner-Trusca slips over precisely when this branch of the Foreign Service was first set up, but Mr. Girard believes it started in 1963 when twelve university graduates (including himself) were hired. Not quite so — recruitment, as he has described it, began at universities some five years previously. I, for one, was appointed fresh out of Queen’s University in 1960 into the Foreign Service of the old Department of Citizenship and Immigration on the basis of the standard FS selection process, along with half a dozen other young people. Still wet behind the ears, we all thought we knew best what Canada’s immigration policy should be and how it should be administered and promoted — or so we were often told somewhat unflatteringly by the old-time Immigration Officers who had graduated from the School of Hard Knocks.
To my knowledge, none of those who entered the Immigration Foreign Service when I did could hack it — for the time being for some of us. I left after a year for graduate school, another saw the light and transferred to TCS, a third resigned and set up his own lucrative immigration consulting business, and a fourth entered the academic world and went on to become an award-winning Canadian novelist.
Let’s just say that the Immigration Foreign Service, as it now exists, must have learned from our sobering experiences, as, I think, have we.
David J. McJanet, Deputy Director Special Trade Policy Division/EPM Export and Import Controls Bureau
View the original scanned pages / Voir les pages numérisées →
Originally published in / Publié à l’origine dans bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1995-1996) — Winter 1995–96 // Hiver 1995-1996, pp. 3–4. Read the rest of this issue / Lire le reste de ce numéro →
