bout de papier, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2006) — Spring 2006 // Printemps 2006, pp. 18–20
MACKENZIE KING: FRIENDS AND
LOVERS, by Louise Reynolds, Trafford
Publishing, 2005, 248 pp., $25.95.
Louise Reynolds has written a fascinating account of the personal and private life of Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister. Her earlier book, Agnes: The Biography of Lady Macdonald, was well received by the critics. The present volume is dedicated to the memory of her husband. Ralph Reynolds was a career foreign service officer who had served in a number of European posts, as Ambassador to Ethiopia and as resident Ambassador to Costa Rica with accreditation to adjoining Central American Republics. Louise accompanied her husband on his various postings and yet managed to carve out a career as a researcher and programmer for television during their time in Ottawa.
She covers some of the same ground as C. P. Stacey did in his book A Very Double Life: the Private World of Mackenzie King but with more insight, empathy and balance. Stacey’s dislike of Mackenzie King made his book more an exercise in muckraking or posthumous revenge than a work of history. King is particularly vulnerable because of his extensive diary, which his literary executors kept intact despite his instructions to destroy it. This has been a huge benefit to Canadian history, but, perhaps, not to his reputation.
Louise Reynolds devotes one chapter to each of the three women with whom he became emotionally involved – Mathilde Grossert, Marjorie Herridge and Joan Pattison — as well as one chapter to Violet Markham, who was simply a long-time friend, one chapter each to Bert Harper and John D. Rockefeller, who were his closest male friends, and a separate chapter to his relations with the Governors-General. She provides enough details that we are able to follow his life story, but the book is about King as a person, not about his role in politics. Mackenzie King’s first love was Mathilde Grossert, a German-born nurse, whom he met while a graduate student in Chicago. Members of his family were horrified that he should enter into what they considered to be an unsuitable marriage and without the means to support a wife. His mother, however, would probably have objected to any prospective daughter-in-law stealing away her son. Family pressure broke up the relationship, although in later years, when he learned that she was married, King reestablished contact, met her husband and befriended her children. Mathilde seems to have been a fine and sensitive woman, who would have been an excellent wife for King. He never again came close to marriage despite an occasional search in his younger years for a suitable partner. King had an ability to get on with children and would likely have been an excellent father, though his taste for uplifting little sermons might have caused some irritation.
Once established in Ottawa, King entered into a tumultuous relationship with Marjorie Herridge, the wife of the Pastor of Saint Andrew’s Church. She was 16 years his senior and the mother of four children. An unsatisfactory marriage made her emotionally needy, and Mackenzie King obviously craved female companionship. Whether the relationship involved more than companionship in the summer of 1902 is a matter of conjecture. Regardless, it continued for some years afterwards on a highly emotional, though not physical, plane, to the periodic annoyance of her husband, who seemed more worried by appearances than by his wife’s fidelity. It came as a blow to her when King sought her help in 1912 to find a suitable wife. His lack of insight into her reaction suggests that his love for her had already cooled. He wrote later that he felt little upon hearing of her death in 1924 despite the intensity of their ties during his first ten years in Ottawa.
By then he had found the perfect replacement for Marjorie in Joan Patteson, the wife of a bank manager. The Pattesons occupied a flat close to his own in the Roxborough Apartment Building. As in the case of Marjorie, a short period of high passion, which led him to excise almost one week from his diary, was followed by a close but not physical relationship which lasted until his death. Mr. Patteson was almost wittol-like in his approach to the intense emotional ties between his wife and Mackenzie King. Perhaps he valued the prestige of being a friend of the Prime Minister. Mackenzie King’s mother had died in 1917, so that Joan Patteson substituted in that role as well as giving the support that a wife might have provided to this lonely and overworked bachelor. She helped him to organize Laurier House and even to prepare the hospitality which he offered there, regardless of whether she and her husband were invited. Those who worked with Mackenzie King, like Walter Turnbull, considered her to be an admirable lady.
With Joan Patteson, as had been the case earlier with Marjorie, he would have long intimate conversations, and they would read out loud to each other poetry and passages from worthy books. They would also sing hymns. Joan’s presence at Kingsmere during the summer was of great importance to King, as had earlier been the case with Marjorie. The Pattesons gave Mackenzie King an Irish terrier in 1924, to which he became extraordinarily fond, as is often the case with pet owners who have no children. King thought that the dog had psychic powers and might have been sent by his mother to be a guide and guard for him. When the dog died in 1942, the Pattesons found him another Irish terrier of which he was fond, but to which he apparently did not attribute psychic powers.
Joan Patteson shared in Mackenzie King’s exploration of spiritualism, both in séances and the private use of a rapping table to spell out messages from the departed. Louise Reynolds outlines the facts in a nonjudgmental way, and points out that Lady Aberdeen, the wife of a former Governor- General, brought him up to date on psychic matters in England when they met in Geneva in 1936. Stacey’s account of King’s spiritualism in his book drips with contempt. Stacey forgets how widespread spiritualism was at that time. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, wrote a two-volume history of spiritualism that was published in 1917. It is no more absurd than a belief in astrology. In recent years, according to the New York Times, Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterand, Boris Yeltsin and Ronald Reagan have all consulted astrologers. King was a skilled politician who relied fundamentally on his own judgement. The attitude of this reviewer towards spiritualism, in which I do not personally believe, is coloured by the fact that my grandmother, who was an intelligent, well-read and sophisticated lady, invited Mackenzie King to take part in séances held in our family home in Brockville in the 1930s.
Louise Reynolds describes King’s friendship with a wealthy English lady, Violet Markham, which was based on shared interests in labour conditions and other social issues. They had met at Rideau Hall in 1905 when she was staying with Governor- General and Lady Grey. While they only met intermittently thereafter, they carried on an extensive correspondence. When she returned to him in 1949 the letters he had written to her, which she thought would assist him in writing his memoirs, the package weighed some seven pounds. The lack of any sexual element in the relationship was understood by Joan Patteson who was happy to take Violet Markham in hand during her visit to Ottawa in the summer of 1939, when the press of official business left Mackenzie King little time to care for his guest. Joan Patteson exhibited immediate jealousy when she thought anyone was stealing King’s affections.
Mackenzie King’s closest male friend was Bert Harper, a friend from university whom he brought in to work with him in editing the Labour Gazette. They shared an apartment and both were marked by an earnest seriousness that in present lights looks somewhat priggish. Bert Harper drowned in December of 1901 when he attempted to rescue a lady who fell in the water of the Ottawa River while participating in a Governor-General’s skating party. Mackenzie King helped organize a collection to install a sculpture of Galahad in commemoration of Harper’s heroism. It can still be seen on Wellington Street in front of the Parliament Buildings. Mackenzie King also wrote The Secret of Heroism: A Memoir of Henry Albert Harper which perhaps not incidentally also reflected well on the author.
Louise Reynolds reports that, while no one took the place of Harper, King developed a close friendship with John D. Rockefeller. King took a position as head of the Department of Industrial Relations with the Rockefeller Foundation in 1914, which allowed him to continue to live in Ottawa and remain active in Canadian politics. Mackenzie King visited the Rockefeller homes frequently over the years. John D. Rockefeller actually sent his son David to consult with Mackenzie King in 1936 on what his son should do after graduation from Harvard. When Mackenzie King was approaching retirement, John D. Rockefeller wrote him that “you have meant everything to me at a time when I needed guidance in many matters and your whole outlook and attitude has helped me tremendously … at every step (you) had known what course to take, and it was the right one.” Rockefeller showed his appreciation by providing financial support, notably a cheque for $100,000 on King’s seventy-fourth birthday and a promise to help finance the administrative support which he would need in preparing his memoirs.
It was, perhaps, a bit of a stretch to include a chapter on Mackenzie King’s relations with the various Governors- General in a book entitled Friends and Lovers but it throws light on Mackenzie King’s character. In the earlier years the Governors-General occupied a central role in the social life of Ottawa. Until 1926, they represented the interests of the British Government as well as representing the Sovereign. Mackenzie King managed to secure invitations to Rideau Hall from the time of his first arrival in Ottawa. Earl Grey reportedly took the initiative in arranging for him to receive the C.M.G. (Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George) from King Edward VII in 1906. Jealous contemporaries sniffed that “Dinners at Rideau Hall … had paid off.”
King had a falling out with the Byngs. Louise Reynolds reminds us that, against the views of Lord Byng, King held on to power after the 1926 election, in which the Conservatives, led by Arthur Meighen, had won more seats, because he could command the support of the Progressives. Six months later, when he lost Progressive support, King recommended dissolution. Dissolution was refused by Lord Byng, who instead called on Meighen to form a government. Byng then granted Meighen’s request for dissolution, though King won the consequent election.
Even earlier, King had been estranged from Lady Byng. At a dinner in Rideau, Mackenzie King was seated between Lady Byng and Eva Sandford, lady-in-waiting to Lady Byng. In the course of the dinner King twice pinched Miss Sandford’s thigh. After the second pinch, she gave a sharp kick with her high heel to Mackenzie King’s leg and she addressed no word to him for the rest of the evening. King’s diary would seem to suggest that uncharacteristically during this period he was drinking to excess. Lady Byng had as little as possible to do with him thereafter. Mackenzie King chafed at the role still played by British Governors-General in Canadian life and had contemplated the appointment of a Canadian. The name of Vincent Massey, who became the first Canadian Governor- General after King’s death, had come up as a possible candidate, but King had dismissed Massey as “a place seeker and time server.”
Oddities such as King’s dabbling in spiritualism, his love for his dog, and his fascination with the place of the hands of clocks at key moments in his life should not be allowed to obscure his considerable talents. He received excellent marks at Harvard and was awarded a travelling fellowship to Europe. He became a Deputy Minister and later Minister of Labour at a young age. When Laurier died, King was considering an offer to be Director of the Carnegie Foundation at an annual salary of $25,000. He also had an offer from the Rockefellers to spend several months abroad to study postwar problems facing industries. Instead, Mackenzie King chose to seek the leadership of the Liberal Party.
Louise Reynolds’ fascinating book brings to life and makes more understandable one of Canada’s strangest and most successful Prime Ministers. Perhaps readers of her book may be inspired to consult for themselves the Mackenzie King Diary, which the Library and Archives of Canada has made available on-line.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2006) — Spring 2006 // Printemps 2006, pp. 18–20. Read the rest of this issue →
