bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1989), p. 12
by Sidney Freifeld
Working in the Canadian Foreign Service may be occasionally enlivened by some crisis over clothing — more frequently over the clothing of your visiting Minister or Prime Minister than over your own. Clothing crises, of course, can overtake anyone, in any walk of life. But somehow they take on a more comical aspect if, for example, the locale is Buckingham Palace and the occasion is an Annual Reception given by Their Majesties for the Diplomatic Corps, when the wife of an External aide to High Commissioner George Drew, finding that her long dress was being trampled as the line of diplomats moved forward to be presented, gathered up what she thought was her hem only to find that she held in her hand the tails of the glowering Libyan Ambassador; or if the locale is Lutyens Palace, former residence of British Viceroys in New Delhi, and the occasion is the “White Tie and Decorations” dinner about to be offered by Prime Minister Nehru in honour of Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, who was making an around-the-world official tour in 1954.
One of our Assistant Under-Secretaries, Charles Ritchie, who was accompanying Mr. St. Laurent, was called to the Prime Minister’s bedroom and found him standing in full white tie regalia, but no trousers; they had been left on the plane. The State Dinner was to begin in less than one hour. As Ritchie relates in his wonderful Diaries: “Everyone else had his trousers, but the Prime Minister was trouserless. Like Sir Walter Raleigh throwing down his cloak for Queen Elizabeth to walk upon, I said “Take mine, Prime Minister, but a second look at his girth and mine showed that this was a physical impossibility.” The crisis was resolved, in a manner of speaking, by sending a servant to the nearest bazaar. He returned with “an extremely greasy pair of second or thirdhand trousers of such circumference that they had to be fastened around the Prime Minister’s waist with safety pins.”
When I was serving at our Embassy in Dublin, we had a little Prime Ministerial clothing crisis of our own — involving nothing so crucial as Liberal trousers, but a Conservative wing collar. This was during Mr. Diefenbaker’s official visit to the Irish capital when our Ambassador, Alfred Rive, contrived to have the first function attended by our teetotalling P.M. a tea for the Canadian community at the Embassy Residence, out in the Dublin suburbs. This affair was proceeding swimmingly when Mr. Rive received an urgent telephone call from the P.M.’s Special Assistant, Basil Robinson, who had remained in town at the Hotel Shelbourne to work on telegrams. Also at the hotel, the Prime Minister’s Confidential Messenger, Gilbert Champagne, was laying out Mr. Diefenbaker’s clothing for the “White Tie and Decorations” dinner that Irish Prime Minister Sean Lemass would be giving in his honour in a couple of hours.
To Basil’s and Champagne’s horror — no wing collars; they had been left behind in Belfast, and finding a haberdashery open in Dublin on a Sunday afternoon in 1959 was as improbable as finding one open in Toronto on a Sunday in the thirties.
Calling from the Shelbourne Hotel on the telephone, Basil asked Mr. Rive whether his collar size was the same as Mr. Diefenbaker’s. It was not, nor was mine. At that moment Forman, the somewhat ancient waiter used at many functions in Dublin’s small diplomatic community, hovered into view bearing a tray loaded with tea and sandwiches — and a slightly soiled wing collar around his neck! Mr. Rive, to Forman’s astonishment, asked his collar size. Glory be — the same as Mr. Diefenbaker’s. Mr. Rive asked Forman for the urgent loan of his collar and said he could stop serving immediately and go home. When Mr. Rive explained, in a whisper, the nature of the emergency, Forman coolly took a collar out of his pocket and handed it to the Ambassador. “I always carry a spare. My compliments to the Prime Minister of Canada.” At the gala dinner that evening Crenia and I noted that Forman’s wing collar reposed comfortably on the Prime Ministerial neck — and Mr. Diefenbaker was none the wiser.
Less critical, perhaps, was what befell Jim Elliot, our Commercial Counsellor Bogota, who was serving as Charge d’Affaires while I was absent from the country. In the middle of the morning, he suddenly received a call from Colombian Protocol saying the Diplomatic Corps was being invited to attend a Requiem Mass at the Cathedral that noon. Jim used to rent formal clothing and for this occasion he sent our driver to pick up morning coat and striped trousers, of which his size was kept in the renting store’s file along with the size of all other regular diplomatic clients. Making a last-minute change of clothes at the office before being driven to the Cathedral, Jim, a burly fellow, was shaken to discover that the sleeves of his morning coat came down barely to his elbows.
But there was no time to go to the store and change. Descending from his car at the Cathedral, Jim saw the miniscule Chinese Ambassador getting out of his car, with the sleeves of his jacket nearly reaching the ground. They laughed at what must have happened back in the store, quickly changed morning coats and, impeccably garbed, strode with appropriately sad mien to their seats for the Requiem Mass in Bogota’s Cathedral.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1989), p. 12. Read the rest of this issue →
