True Patriot Love (8 page)

W
illiam Grant was at his father’s bedside in those final days. He heard the old man whisper, “Give me a chance; Oh my God, give me a chance.” Then later, the son heard the father, his eyes shut, imploring, “Get it done, get it done quickly.” After days of growing weaker, he whispered “Jessie”—his wife’s name—and then slipped into unconsciousness.

On May 13, 1902, there was a funeral service at Convocation Hall at Queen’s, and afterward a procession of the coffin through the streets of Kingston. William followed the coffin to its final resting place, noting that the crowd lining the streets was as large as the one that had come out for the funeral of Kingston’s other favourite son, Sir John A. Macdonald. Late that afternoon, George Monro Grant was laid to rest in Cataraqui Cemetery, next to his wife and his son Geordie.

The death of parents always unleashes paradoxical emotions: grief, guilt, relief and liberation all at once. We can only infer which of these was strongest. The son could step out of his father’s shadow, yet the shadow had given his life shape and meaning. Moreover, he was now alone. He was a schoolmaster at Upper Canada College and, as he looked to the future, he saw before him a solitary life of teaching and scholarship. As for marriage, he did not think himself much of a catch: small in stature, wiry and balding, a sedentary and unadventurous bachelor approaching middle age. It is not that women had not caught his eye. From afar, he had admired Maude Parkin, the daughter of his principal at Upper Canada, George Parkin. In 1902 Parkin left for England to set up the Rhodes Scholarships and Maude left with her family. After the Parkins departed, William left UCC too, taking up another job as a schoolmaster at St. Andrew’s College near Toronto.

For the next two years, he wrote a scholarly biography of his father, Victorian in length and in piety.
Principal Grant
registers admiration, love and astonishment at the energy, briskness and drive of his father. He had truly been a “steam engine in trousers,” as one of the old man’s friends used to say. Poring over his father’s diaries and letters gave the son a last chance to stay close, but once the biography was published, we can imagine the silence that flowed into his life.

Fifteen years later, he admitted that he continued to see his father “so vividly that I am not yet fully sure in my own mind whether it was dream or vision, or resurrection if you call it so.”

His father was gone but his father’s causes remained his own. He believed his vocation now was to teach bright young men to lead lives devoted to public service in Canada and the empire. One of these young men at St. Andrew’s College was Vincent Massey, heir to the Massey-Harris tractor fortune. Truth was, Grant was soon restless at St. Andrew’s College, teaching worthy sentiments to the rich young sons of the Ontario business elite.

After his biography of his father appeared in 1904, he took himself off to France and lived in Paris for two years. There he researched and wrote the life of Samuel de Champlain, founder of Quebec and New France, and mastered French and took classes at the Sorbonne. He loved Paris and even a decade later could still remember the names of the tastiest dishes in his favourite
brasseries
. He remained a committed francophile for the rest of his life. Living in France seems to have changed his view of the country back home, for among historians of his generation, he was unusual in his interest in the contribution of France to the making of his country. He spent several years editing Lescarbot’s
Histoire de la Nouvelle France
for publication in English. When he wrote his
History of Canada
for the secondary schools of Ontario, many English-speaking
Canadians found it strange that he should attach equal importance to the French fact in the making of Canadian distinctiveness. British Columbia school districts refused to use the book because of its francophile bias.

He was ambitious and hoped, for a time, he would become famous. For a Canadian of his generation, fame meant success in England, and when a chance for academic advancement offered itself, he took it. Alfred Beit, a business partner of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, endowed a lectureship at Oxford and Grant put his name forward. He had reason to be hopeful. In 1894, he had been the first Canadian to win a first-class degree in classics at Oxford. In 1906, he was named the first Beit Lecturer in Colonial History and quickly settled back into life in his old college, Balliol. He proved to be a productive scholar, completing worthy tomes on Canadian constitutional development and an edited volume of the
Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial Series
. Scholarly pursuits had some appeal to him. He was a shy man by nature, convivial in company, but never happier than when reading. He was also shrewd enough to realize that while he might lack his father’s self-confidence, he surpassed him in scholarship.

He would make his own mark as a scholar, but he was too full of life to be satisfied with the musty joys of the Colonial Office archives. He once said there were few sights more joyless than a library full of scholars buried in forgotten tomes. Boring academic papers could rouse him
to scathing acts of mimicry. He was a scholar all right, but a restless one.

At Oxford, an unusual experiment in education was just then starting—the Workers’ Educational Association, or WEA, an alliance between labour and the universities to provide tutorial classes for working-class adults. Grant went to the meetings at Ruskin College and became an enthusiastic tutor for the WEA. Later in life, he was to become a founder of the WEA in Canada, as well as a supporter of Frontier College, a pioneering initiative to take university education to the logging camps and mining sites of northern Ontario. There was a certain
noblesse oblige
in this idea of university men teaching the working classes, but there was something admirable in the idea, too. He really did believe the class divisions of an industrial country could be healed by good teaching.

Being Beit Lecturer offered Grant a further means of escape into a wider and more influential world, since it brought him into contact with the leading British imperial figures of his day. The colonial governor of South Africa, Lord Milner, was now back in Britain, assembling around him a group of bright young imperialists known as the Milner Kindergarten. Grant delivered academic papers with Milner in the chair and befriended Milner’s intense acolyte Lionel Curtis, a Boer War veteran turned imperialist intellectual.

The Boer Wars left unclear what duties the dominions owed the mother country in a European conflict. Lionel Curtis pressed this issue especially hard. Were the dominions—South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—sovereign over issues of peace and war? If they were truly sovereign, would they come to the aid of the mother country if she were attacked by Germany? If they were not sovereign, would they be automatically at war if Germany attacked? Curtis and Milner created the Round Table, an informal circle of bright young men from around the empire, to hammer out an answer. Grant took part in these debates but refused to be drawn in too far, arguing that Canada couldn’t make commitments until the threat from Germany and other states materialized.

One of the places where these questions were discussed was an imposing three-storey brick house modestly called the Cottage, in Goring-on-Thames, near Oxford. This was the home of George R. Parkin, now secretary of the Rhodes Trust. An elegant, handsome, supremely self-confident, pious Victorian always photographed in a wing collar and frock coat, Parkin was the most influential living exponent of imperial federation and was such a devoted admirer of William Grant’s father that he kept a photograph of George Monro Grant hanging on the wall of his study. Despite their mutual admiration, the contrast between Parkin and Grant was interesting. Grant remained the doughty, persevering Scottish Canadian,
while Parkin had passed himself off as more British than the British. William took a respectful but ironic view of Parkin, once remarking that “I don’t think he got God and Oxford and the British Empire wholly separated.”

The Grants’ vision of empire was less romantic than Parkin’s. While the Grants thought Cecil Rhodes was a rascal, George Parkin was carrying out the old rascal’s dying wish to create a scholarship that would create a new English-speaking elite among the empires of the day.

Nobody meeting the very British Parkin could have guessed that he had begun life amidst the farms and lumber mill towns of New Brunswick’s St. John River valley. He had started out as a rural schoolmaster and had managed, by sheer force of personality, to get himself to Oxford in the early 1870s. There he astonished audiences at Union Debates with his vision of the British Empire as the bearer of Christian civilization to the lesser breeds. Alfred Milner attributed his dedication to the imperialist cause to the impact of the young Parkin. After his miraculous year at Oxford, Parkin returned to schoolmastering in New Brunswick, but he had made such a vivid impression that when the Imperial Federation League was looking for a spokesman, they sought out the tall and impressive young man from New Brunswick. Through the late 1880s and early 1890s, he became the movement’s chief representative, travelling to Australia and New Zealand and across Canada preaching that the dominions should seek
representation in the imperial parliament in London. In this way, they could affirm their national identity and their imperial destiny.

Parkin was a master of the podium, but he did not convince every audience. Imperial federation proved controversial in the Antipodes. Most Australians and New Zealanders didn’t like the idea that their citizens might be taxed and sent to die in imperial wars. Imperial federation drew a warmer hearing in Canada because of the threatening proximity of the United States. Parkin, like Grant, felt certain that Canada could not survive unless the British connection was paramount in Canadian national life.

For William Grant the Cottage at Goring-on-Thames would have felt like the old family house in Kingston, if on a grander scale: carpeted with Afghan and Persian rugs, the shelves of the study library crammed with history, philosophy and theology, the drawing rooms filled with the sounds of piano, all available surfaces crowded with the African knickknacks the
paterfamilias
had brought back from his travels. On becoming secretary of the Rhodes Trust, Parkin had journeyed to southern Africa to visit Rhodes’s grave. At some dusty roadside stand, he brought as presents for his daughters, Maude, Alice and Marjorie, and his son, Raleigh, a set of wooden carvings of a wildebeest, an ostrich, a leopard, a hippo and a giraffe. These endearing carvings were to follow the Parkin children and their descendants through every twist and turn of their lives.

In 1909 and 1910, William returned again and again to Goring to enjoy the company of the Parkin girls, especially Maude. She was six years his junior, a vivacious and accomplished blue-stocking. She had graduated from McGill, still a relatively rare achievement for a woman of her time, and, after following her father to England, was serving as a warden at a woman’s residence at the University of Manchester. In the photographs of her as a young woman, with hair piled up on top of her head and prim white blouse buttoned up to the neck, the striking features are her thin pursed lips and the set jaw. She was a thoughtful, earnest young woman, but also stylish, refined and full of life. At Manchester, she impressed many with her organizational abilities and skill with undergraduates. One of her friendships was with a young chemist, Chaim Weizmann, just then beginning his career as a leader of British Zionism. Maude Parkin made a sufficiently vivid impression on Weizmann that, forty years later, when he was president of Israel, he still remembered his old Manchester colleague.

At the end of each Manchester term, Maude would return to Goring, and there, as often as not, she would find herself sometimes alone in the salon, sometimes in the gardens, with William Grant. She would have noted that her father, on whom she doted, thought him a clever and coming man. But she would have had little idea of William’s feelings for her, for they were all bottled up inside.