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The Gazette, Montreal, March 21, 1939

Canada at War if U.K. Attacked:

Premier King

At Ottawa members of all parties joined in an attack on German policies. Prime Minister King, defining the Government’s attitude toward the Empire in time of war, declared the Dominion would consider it an act of aggression on the whole Commonwealth if Britain were to be attacked.

Packed galleries and a largely attended House listened to a carefully prepared statement from the Prime Minister who declared that any act of aggression against Britain would bring prompt and determined action from the Dominion; that while this was a time for preparedness it was also a time when every avenue of conciliation should be explored.

The Gazette, Montreal, March 23, 1939

Spirits Advise Medium in Verdun The World

Faces Seven Years Woe

Unless “Lord Kitchener and a man named Gladstone” were blowing sour notes on their spirit trumpets last night the world is scheduled for momentous changes during the next seven years, according to prophecies voiced “through” the Rev. Mary Ellen Goodling, pastor of the Holy Trinity Temple of Light, East Preston Street, Baltimore, Md. at a meeting of the congregation of the Verdun Progressive Spiritualist Church.

Madame Goodling predicted: The return of Edward VIII to the throne he abdicated; the permanent residence of the King and Queen in Canada, which would become the centre of the Empire; “seven more years of Hitler”; and the break up of the British Empire as it is known today.

Her plump figure draped in a flowing gown, her round face hidden by a veil, a gold cross hanging on a chain from her neck, the “prophetess” presented a living picture of the “White Sister” as she began her forecasts at the beginning of a period given over to “messages.”

As though in a trance and speaking in a quick, smooth, lulling voice, Mrs. Goodling told the gathering that she was “moved by some force” to proclaim the prophecies.

Royal York Hotel, Toronto

August 8, 1939

King leafed through the banquet program.

Complimentary Banquet

Tendered to

Rt. Hon. Mackenzie King

By the Liberal Party of Canada

On the Completion of Twenty Years of Continuous

Leadership

1919-1939

Menu Celery Queen Olives Fruit Cocktail Grilled Chicken Maître D’Hotel Green Peas

His eyes stopped. Green Peas. I hate green peas. To King it seemed that everything about the day had been perfect. Despite the storm clouds of war drawing ever nearer, Liberal supporters had made this his day. The whole thing was delightful – except for the peas. If he had been in charge of the details, this oversight would never have occurred.

King read the Toast List. The twenty-first speaker, the Honourable Cairine Wilson, was giving her tribute. Wilson represented one of the important changes since King had become Liberal Leader. She was the first woman appointed to the Canadian Senate and the only one listed on the Roll Call pages of Liberal members in the cabinet, House of Commons, and Senate.

That program section devoted to King’s Significant Record listed the Imperial Conferences attended, the four elections won, and the books authored. The article informed readers that “of political leaders in Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Wilfrid Laurier alone were leaders of their party for over twenty years.”

King thought of some of his happy memories. Such a lovely time he’d had just a short while ago when, during the royal visit, Pat, with his little red bow, had lain at Queen Elizabeth’s feet throughout the luncheon at Laurier House.

The confident response he had prepared to Wilson’s toast recalled some of the many triumphant moments of his leadership. No one must sense that he was beginning to tire. The question squeezing his stomach was How will I hold the nation together if war comes? In March he’d promised the House of Commons “conscription of men for overseas service will not be a necessary or effective step.” If once again, as in the First World War, the French interests were pitted against the English, King was sure the country would be torn asunder.

The spirits informed him God had chosen him for a special mission. He would prevent civil war at all costs.

Prime Minister’s Office

East Block, Parliament Buildings

Ottawa

September 5, 1939

“Mackenzie,” Franklin D. Roosevelt’s voice on the other end of the telephone boomed. F.D.R., the American president, was as friendly as usual, but King sensed a slight nervousness. Earlier in the conversation, King had assured Cordell Hull, the American secretary of state, that Canada would not be at war until Parliament met to make a decision.

Roosevelt seemed pleased. It was clear where American sympathies lay, but officially the United States was not supporting any active belligerents in the war. Until Canada’s status was decided, America could hurriedly ship planes and guns north. Canadians would help this war equipment make its way over to Europe.

King did not tell the American president, his grandfather had told him a few days earlier that Hitler does not want to have war. Nor had Mackenzie wanted the Rebellion.

However, five days later Parliament held a Special War Session.

On Sunday, September 10, at the request of his Parliament, King George VI approved the Canadian declaration of war.

Prime Minister’s Office

East Block, Parliament Buildings, Ottawa

December 17, 1939

The lights were still burning in the prime minister’s office, even though the Peace Tower clock was striking midnight. As the last gong faded away, the door to the office opened. Arnold Heeney, Canada’s secretary of the War Committee, rushed in and seized King’s hand. “Let me be the first to congratulate you,” he said cheerily, before the Governor General and the British Commonwealth and Canadians members of the signing party could add their wishes.

King’s “birthday present” was to sign the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. He felt that the long-negotiated document was to be one of Canada’s most important contributions to the war. At Britain’s side, Canada provided the mother country with volunteer soldiers, food, and supplies and helped facilitate communications between Britain and the United States. Significant financial commitment and the building of sixty airfields over the next three years would go a long way to boost the training of Commonwealth pilots.

Volunteer soldiers were sailing to Britain, and Parliament might soon need to enact legislation that would mobilize men to protect Canadian shores. Conscription for overseas, the prime minister predicted, would not be necessary. However, King was aware that there were those who were willing to stake more than their reputations on a different path of action.

Ontario Legislature Building, Toronto

January 18, 1940

“Let me say again,” Premier Hepburn fixed his intense blue-fire gaze on both his fellow Liberals and the Conservatives, “that I stand firm in my statements that Mr. King has not done his duty to his country – never has and never will.” Next, the Ontario premier called for a vote on a resolution “regretting that the Federal Government at Ottawa has made so little effort to prosecute Canada’s duty in the war in the vigorous manner the people of Canada desire to see.”

The surprise was so great that one could have heard a pin drop, despite the new rose-coloured carpet on the floor of the Ontario Legislature. A provincial Liberal leader turning on the leader of his own federal party!

The unpredictable leader of the Ontario Liberals, Mitch Hepburn, had long felt that the federal government was deliberately stunting his provinces growth. He’d already gone on record saying that he was a Liberal, but not a Mackenzie King Liberal. King, he was sure, was personally responsible for blocking the sale of Ontario hydroelectric power to the United States and Canada’s lackadaisical response to the war. This was not a time for fence-sitting on the issue of conscription. It was a time for action.

When the results of the vote were added up, the Ontario War Resolution was passed with forty-four votes to ten! Canada, it seemed, was about to tear herself to bits.

Massey Hall, Toronto

March 14, 1940

King felt his eyes misting. This is the kind of man, he thought, my grandfather must have had around him in the Rebellion days. Men who were prepared to endure all kinds of hardship for the sake of the cause and of personal loyalty.

On stage was Henry Corwin Nixon, the person Hepburn had considered his right-hand man. Not any more. Nixon had arrived at the rally unannounced and told the audience, “My good wife and I just drove down from the farm to be here and to say to you that come what may we are behind Mr. King.” Applause rolled across the room like storm waves breaking. It was the turning point in the evening and, King felt, in the federal election campaign.

King had met the challenge of Hepburn’s War Resolution by calling a federal election. Up to that time the prime minister had refused to enter the boxing ring of provincial politics. Hepburn and Quebec’s premier, Maurice Duplessis, mostly ordered business in their provinces as they saw fit. But the War Resolution was enough to prompt King to order a general election. Winning a strong majority would prove that all across the country the people supported King and the Liberal policies during this time of war.

After a campaign visit to his constituency in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, King travelled to Toronto, the very seat of the provincial government, to attend a rally of Liberal supporters. Many important men and women gave speeches, including Sir William Mulock, King’s longtime friend, who was now aged ninety-six. Ernest Lapointe, the minister of justice and King’s strong ally, drew applause when he described King as a man “who has serenity in his soul; who is free of hatred and jealousy.” But it was Nixon’s declaration of loyalty that brought the house down.

King breathed a sigh of relief. It was an elegant bug-squashing.

On March 26, the Liberals took an overwhelming 184 out of 245 seats. The defeated leader of the federal Conservative Party, Robert Manion, thanked the Leader of the Ontario Liberal Party. “Just a word of appreciation,” Manion wrote to Hepburn, “for all you tried to do in our behalf – or at least against the fat little jelly fish out at Kingsmere, but somehow he seems to come out on top.”

Kingsmere, Quebec

July 15, 1941

MacLeod, King’s personal valet, entered his employer’s bedroom. It was time to inject Pat with the stimulant the veterinarian had prescribed. The poor aged animal wasn’t going to live for much longer.

King sat on the edge of the bed in his pyjamas, clutching his best friend in his arms. Pat vomited, whined, and struggled to breathe. The prime minister stroked the rough fur of his “dear little chap” and prayed. As MacLeod retreated down the hall, he could hear Pat’s master singing:

“Safe in the arms of Jesus, Safe on His gentle breast,

There by his love o’er shaded, Sweetly my soul shall rest.”¹

The drama lasted all night. King was sure that Pat would pass on just after 5 a.m. He’d dropped his watch earlier, and the hands stopped at this time, which Willie felt predicted the time of death. But since dawn MacLeod had not been called. At nearly 8 a.m. he rapped on the door.

“Come in,” was the whispered reply.

King lay on his rumpled bed, his hair tousled, dark circles under his eyes. In his arms was the body of Pat. It appeared that he had been holding Pat this way for some time.

“Shall I summon Mrs. Patteson?” MacLeod asked nervously.

King nodded yes. Joan would know what to do. MacLeod withdrew quickly.

“My little best friend I have had – or man ever had – you’re gone now. You’ve bounded in one long leap across the chasm which men call death,” King whispered to the nearly cold form. “You’ve gone to be with your little dog brudder, Joan’s Deny and the other loved ones. You’ll give them messages of love, won’t you Pat? You’ll let Father, Mother, Bella, Max, Sir Wilfrid and Lady Laurier, Mr. and Mrs. Larkin, and the grandparents know. And we’ll all be together one day soon.”

When Patteson arrived, King was weeping. Who would sit with him as he read the war news, sharing biscuits over a cup of Ovaltine? No one else could offer such quiet camaraderie and love. Who would help him be prime minister in these nightmarish times?

Aldershot, Britain

August 23, 1941

Clutching his umbrella tightly, King strode to the microphone. A sea of thousands of Canadian soldiers of the First Division looked at him expectantly. As the rain poured down, King mumbled weakly into the microphone.

Some men applauded, some men booed. They couldn’t hear, they were wet, they hated politicians. King’s speech rambled on. “Speak up, speak up,” some men called. Others continued booing while still others clapped approvingly. Tory tactics, King thought of the booers and ignored them.

What did they want to hear from a politician, any politician? King sensed that they were tired of waiting around Britain. They’d rather be fighting on the Continent. Inspired, the prime minister shouted into the microphone “I gather from the applause that many of you are impatient and would rather be engaged in more active operations than you are today.”

The men cheered.

The press, however, made a front-page story of the “booing incident.”

Three days after this incident, when Lieutenant-General A.G.L. McNaughton, commander of the Canadian Corps, asked him without warning to address the troops, King was in agony. He sensed what felt like a dart pierce through his bowels, and he felt quite sick and faint.

What could he tell these fine, vigorous, homesick young men? “Offering their lives,” he would tell his diary, “is infinitely greater than anything I myself am called upon to do, except to suffer perpetually from a Tory mob.”

Overall, King felt that, as the spirits of Lord Grey, Gladstone, Theodore Roosevelt, and the family had predicted, the trip was a success. It had begun with the wonderful flight over the ocean on a Liberator bomber. When he was a boy Willie had daydreamed while looking at the sky through the branches of the trees at Woodside. At nearly seventy years of age it was a tremendous feeling for him to be near those clouds, knowing his dreams of being prime minister were fulfilled. As night fell, he lay on a comfortable cot covered with the Mackenzie tartan and awaited sleep. He was flying – quite a feat!

When King arrived in Britain, Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, had updated him on war happenings. He spoke about his recent communications with Roosevelt off the shores of the British colony of Newfoundland. Then Churchill had assured his colleague that, although he was glad to have Canadian troops guarding the shores of Britain, overseas conscription hardly seemed necessary. Canada was doing her part as a British dominion.

King knew that in Canada, a mood of conflict threatened to split the nation open. The issue – not one he addressed in his speeches to the Canadian soldiers – was conscription.

The Farm, Kingsmere, Quebec

April 17, 1942

King found solace in one regular ritual. At least once a month during the war he consulted the spirits with Joan. They told him what his dreams meant. They let him know how the war would go. They confirmed he was on the right path with his policies and let him know that they would help.

Father: Good evening. Love to all.

As usual Father was the first to greet them. The rest of the King family, Sir Wilfrid, Gladstone, and others were also regular speakers. And there were new guardians in Heaven.

Pat is leaping wildly with delight, Mother told him, whenever he hears your name.

Other voices, recently added, had been familiar ones to King as political colleagues before they had been called to the Other Side. Norman Rogers, the minister of defence, had been killed in a plane crash while en route to a speaking engagement in Toronto on June 10, 1940. King had been breaking the news to Mrs. Rogers when the announcement was made that Italy had joined Germany in the war.

The increasing worry and burden of war had directly contributed to the deaths of some of King’s nearest advisers. His chief adviser of foreign affairs, the head of the Department of External Affairs, O.D. Skelton, had died at the wheel of his car, as he suffered a fatal heart attack from a condition worsened by the large amount of work he carried out with the civil service. And the stress of all these announcements had finally made Lapointe succumb to heart problems. On November 29, 1941, a parade of mourners with their heads bowed shuffled silently down the snowy streets of Quebec City. They followed the horse-drawn hearse that carried the body of the big bear of a man who had been King’s staunchest supporter in French Canada.

King felt these losses deeply.

What most Canadians did not know was that his personal research gave him hope. It not only confirmed the Christian precept that there is life after death – it proved to him that the human personality survived after death.

After Father opened the seance, Sir Wilfrid came to speak: I have been doing all I can to get an appreciative vote in Quebec. The clergy are helping in the campaign today.

King had been forced to take action on the conscription issue. The new minister of defence, James Layton Ralston, had spent considerable time since his appointment on June 5, 1940 campaigning for this end. In fact, he had threatened to resign over what he felt was an unreasonable delay in conscripting for overseas service. King had merely held onto his resignation and as a compromise, arranged for a plebiscite, which was to occur the next day, April 27, 1942. The nation was to vote on whether or not it would release the government from its promise of no conscription. The vote would not mean the automatic adoption of the measure.

King worried what the results would be.

Lapointe informed King, Quebec will be true to you. They will give you a majority in the vote.

King: “I don’t believe that.”

Lapointe: You will see that I am right

Rogers: The vote tomorrow will be 80% over the entire nation.

King: “I don’t believe that.”

The ghosts promised he would be stronger than ever. King thought the government might win the vote, but not in Quebec.

How could he go on, he wondered, if only Quebec voted against the plebiscite and Parliament eventually found it necessary to enact such legislation?

Before the spirits said goodnight, they bade him remember that God loved him and had a special mission for him. King knew he must go on.

The next day, although French Canada remained solidly against conscription, the overall results of the plebiscite were in favour of releasing the government from its anti-conscription promise. That night King had another dream. Two stones – like pillars – were in his hands, and he was trying to hold them together. It was up to him to join the French and the English parts in one solid country, and what he was doing seemed to be working.

1. “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” words by Frances Jane (Fanny) Crosby, 1868.