On a cold grey January morning in 1949, my wife, Marcelle, and I had been waiting for many hours in the Mexico City railway station for the arrival of the train from Chicago, where Orme had been vice-consul. It was due in at any time, the station master said, but it turned up about 12 hours late. When it finally arrived around five o’clock in the morning, we met Orme and Sheila Dier with their young son, Lance, for the first time. After the long delay, we were all pretty tired, but a long warm friendship started that morning.
At the Embassy, where Orme was Third Secretary and Vice- Consul, a rank which hardly exists anywhere in the world today, he took on the consular side of the work. I soon found him to be a very well-organized and effective officer. He ran things well. He had a great sense of fairness both in his professional and personal lives. He also had a delightfully dry sense of humour. Their cottage in the Gatineau Hills, situated on a point jutting out into one of the local lakes, was called “Moot Point”
In September 1950, he was posted to Caracas as Second Secretary. At that point, our career paths diverged, except for a few months in 1961 when he replaced me as Head of the Liaison Services Section on the occasion of my posting to Lisbon. The Section dealt almost daily with Basil Robinson in the PMO, where he was the departmental liaison officer with Prime Minister Diefenbaker. Orme replaced his long-time friend, Basil, in 1962 when the latter was posted to Washington. Their friendship went back to UBC in pre-War days and continued in the Canadian Army, where Orme had been a gunner, and later in the Department, which they both joined after the War.
Orme stayed on as departmental liaison officer in the PMO until the fall of the Diefenbaker Government in April 1963 and until the Department was no longer required to provide liaison personnel for the office of incoming Prime Minister Pearson. During approximately a year, when he served two Prime Ministers successively, he played a quiet but effective role in two events of critical importance in Canada-U.S. relations: the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, and the meeting of Prime Minister Pearson with President Kennedy at Hyannisport, Massachusetts, in May 1963. A few years later, another noteworthy episode occurred in his career when, in the aftermath of the events of October 1970 in Quebec, he was designated by the late Under-Secretary Ed Ritchie to accompany some of the kidnappers on their way to asylum in Cuba
Not long before that, we had met Orme and Sheila again. This time it was at the Ottawa Airport in May 1968: a melancholy day. They were returning from Saigon where he had been our Commissioner to the International Control Commission. They had both had an extremely difficult time of it. The war in Indochina was approaching its height, with the United States and North Vietnamese forces intensifying their efforts throughout Vietnam. Apart from the difficult climate and health conditions they faced in Vietnam, daily life there had become very uncertain and worrisome with bombs and sabotage everywhere. In addition, Sheila had become seriously ill. She died not long after their return to Ottawa. They were a closely knit couple and her death shattered him. I saw a great deal of him at this time. He was in the Latin American and Caribbean sectors; I in Historical Division. Both Marcelle and I did our best to cheer him up. It was a depressing period for him, but a happy ending was on the horizon. He had met Jean Russell, who eventually became his wife.
He was appointed High Commissioner to Guyana in 1973 and Ambassador to Peru in 1976. As Permanent Observer to the OAS, I was able to visit them quite often on my way to or from meetings in Latin America. I still have a delightful and very personal reminder of them both: a recipe for a delicious chocolate mousse chocolate perfecto Pascual. Delightful! It was named after its creator: their cook, Pascual.
Subsequent postings again intervened to keep us apart and we saw less and less of each other. In retirement, he returned to his roots in BC. He died in Victoria on September 26 last year.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2002-2003) — Fall/Winter 2002/2003 // Automne/Hiver 2002/2003, pp. 37–39. Read the rest of this issue →
