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Laurier House, Ottawa

December 23, 1947

My dear Marilyn:

Nothing, in many years has touched my heart more deeply than the word that came in your letter. I am, indeed, pained to know just how sad you must feel,… and I feel for you all more deeply than my words can begin to express.

King paused in his dictation and directed his secretary, Handy, to enclose a cheque for twenty dollars. He hoped the amount would make a real difference to the impoverished eight-year-old recipient. He took comfort from the fact that the girl’s poor widowed mother, Mrs. Kilbasco, must be receiving the newly created family allowance benefits.

King visits Woodside, his boyhood home. Now, in September 1947, Woodside is the home of little Marilyn Kilbasco.

King had met young Marilyn and her family in Kitchener in September. The Kilbascos were one of the last families to live in Woodside, the home the Kings had once rented. Louis Breithaupt and a committee of Liberals had heard that Kings old boyhood home had fallen into terrible disrepair and was to be demolished. They thought that a visit might inspire The Chief to support their plans for saving the property as a memorial.

The old man felt great loneliness and sadness at seeing the place where he had felt warm family love now with almost every window broken. However, the little girl who had greeted him and offered him a flower melted his heart.

Upon hearing that Marily’n s father had died, King felt compelled to offer solace – and to hint at the great life he was sure Mr. Kilbasco was experiencing since he had crossed over.

You must try, notwithstanding your great loss, to make Christmas at Woodside just as bright and cheerful as you can… While we cannot see God, we have the story of the life of the little Christmas child to let us know what He is like. So I am perfectly sure that your dear father, while taken away from you, has been taken to Heaven where God Himself is and that, though you cannot see your dear father, he can see you, and that his spirit will be watching over you…

When I was a little boy at Woodside, I found all this very difficult to comprehend, but as I have grown older I have come to believe it more strongly every year, and I might say, almost every day.

So don’t think of your father as gone. When you say your prayers, ask him, as well as God, to watch over you, and you will see, by and by, how, in some remarkable way, some way you now can never think of, your prayers will be and have been answered.

Your Christmas card is a lovely one, and I thank you warmly for it. I am sure you selected that particular card because the little picture looked like Woodside in the winter time… I shall keep it and your little letter always.

I am sending you, with this letter, as a little Christmas gift from me to you, a real photograph of you and me, taken on the day of my visit to Kitchener. I had mine framed and took it with me to France, and Belgium, and Holland, and England, and always had it on my desk, on the boat across the ocean both ways as well as in the hotels… It will help you to remember the happy time we had at Woodside and I hope will add to your happiness at this Christmas and always.

It brings with it lots of love from me to you.

Your very true friend,

Mackenzie King

Woodside had hardly left his mind. Often the spirits of Bella, Father, Mother, and Max recalled with him the good times they had there, the beautiful golden days safe in the nest from which he had flown to begin his career. Mother pointed out that although he was still the hoy she knew at Woodside, so much had happened. In a seance on July 7, 1946, she had told Joan glowingly how Willie began by trying to help children in the hospital and then became a young man living in the slums, trying to help the poor He then tried to fight for Labour’s rights and went into Parliament as the minister of labour. Her spirit recounted how, following Willie’s career all her life, she found he never lost his sympathy with the common people and their needs. He went to England and fought for the rights of Canada as an equal partner in the British government.

King agreed with the spirits that he had avoided Civil War during the conscription crisis. He was glad to have been re-elected and to see new policies bring betterment to the citizens of his country. Despite the war, life had changed greatly for the nearly twelve million people of Canada these last few years: unemployment insurance had been enacted in 1940; quite recently old age pensions were extended to cover more people; and baby bonuses had been paid to families with children since June, 1946. He could be proud that the State guaranteed people a better quality of life than it had when King began as party leader. In fact, their position had now changed in the world. On January 3, 1947 the prime minister was one of twenty-six people to become citizens of Canada when he received certificate number 001. Canadians were no longer defined as citizens of Britain. Lastly, he could be satisfied that the way was prepared for the people of Newfoundland to join Canada as her tenth province. In many ways most of the dreams he had had as a young man were now fulfilled.

You have taken the Liberal Party out of the depth and raised it to the heights, Grandfather Mackenzie told him. Your name will go down in Canadian History, as the one who has done most for Canada. You have done honour to the names you bear.

The spirits let him know his tasks were not yet completed. They told him that they were working through him still, that he was chosen to do important missions as an international statesman. Hitler, he was informed, was now in lower hell, chained to eternal suffering. But new problems threatened the world. When a young cipher clerk working at the Russian embassy in Ottawa brought forward evidence of a Soviet spy ring in September 1945, the spirits applauded King’s investigation of the Gouzenko Affair. They said King had exposed the treacheries of Russia, but encouraged him to visit Stalin. King was invaluable in dealing with such delicate issues. You must, Sir Wilfrid and others told their champion, stay in office.

He would try to hold on, but at age seventy-three, he knew it could not be for much longer. He worried that the money, books, and the paintings of himself were not all of the legacy he desired to leave. He excitedly discussed with the spirits ideas for turning over Kingsmere, Laurier House, and Woodside to all the people of Canada.

What he really wanted to give the people of Canada were his memoirs. The spirits promised he would be given the strength and the time and urged him again and again to leave the story of his life as an example for others. Only there was so much to tell, and even more to do yet. He worried that he would never complete one more important trip abroad, for the upcoming Imperial Conference.

London, Hotel Dorchester

October 15, 1948

Violet Markham was shocked to see her friend looking so shrivelled, so frail – a “sick” man. However, thinking back to her visit to Kingsmere in July 1939, she realized that even then the cares of office had sucked the vigour from King’s body. “Will-power, not health, carried him through the war,” she’d concluded. King was, in fact, the only leader to stay in office after the war. F.D.R. had died, and Churchill’s party had fallen out of public favour.

This broken man was but a shadow of the person she had met at Rideau Hall, the Governor General’s residence in Ottawa, almost forty-three years ago to the day. She would remember it in her memoirs – October 21, 1905, Trafalgar Day in her native England: Her host, Governor General Lord Grey, strode across the drawing room, and trailing behind him was a “pleasant-looking man of medium build, with a round face and abundant fair hair.”

“You must meet Mackenzie King,” Lord Grey told her, “he will be prime minister of Canada some day.”

After speaking with the confident thirty-one-year-old man, she felt her doubts about the surprising prediction diminish. The young deputy minister of labour, like herself, had many hopes of helping and reforming humankind. “A charming young man with all the right ideas” she wrote in her diary.

Markham soon returned to her well-feathered nest in England. She married, but continued her work as a social activist. Her campaigning letters were written on stationery that bore the names “Mrs. James Carruthers” and “Miss Violet Markham.” King’s activities continued to excite her sense of social justice. She found him intriguing: “his personality might be likened to a set of those Chinese boxes which fit so surprisingly into each other, each box different in size and colour and yet making a perfect whole…” But as their friendship grew over the years, Markham realized that his belief in personal survival after death and the power of communication with those who had passed on was “a line of thought in which I was unable to follow.” Rex’s spiritualism, Markham decided, was a box unto itself, a special interest for his private time.

She regretted that her friend had never married. As late as the early thirties King’s name had been linked romantically with that of his longtime friend, Julia Grant. Grant, Ulysses S. Grant’s granddaughter, had married to become Princess Cantacuzène. She had eventually divorced the Prince for his infidelities, but by that time King’s passions had decidedly cooled. Markham had long ago determined “the mother-cult stood between him and the normal ties of wife and child, which can humanize and soften the often inhuman job of politics.” And the blows rained down. She knew that over the years her friend had suffered. “Few men have been more bitterly attacked or accused of motives more unworthy.”

She and Rex passed their time discussing politics. Russia and other hot spots were on their minds – especially King’s, as illness had forced him to suddenly withdraw from the conference.

“My own feeling,” King told her regarding India or Pakistan becoming part of the Commonwealth, “is that the Commonwealth shall need all the friends they can have in what before long may be a test as to who is to rule the world.” In his mind were the voices of F.D.R. and others cautioning him about events in the East and warning that war was coming within the next two years.

There was so much King wanted to say, but his shortness of breath and influenza, combined with the effects of strain and pressure over the years, prevented him from talking much.

“Why don’t you, for the time being, forget about politics,” Markham suggested. She mentioned the book she was writing and urged him to “dictate a few reminiscences about your home and your childhood.” But, she realized even that small effort was impossible. The sands were running out.

“Come to Wittersham,” she begged. “Stay for a week. Bring your staff,” she offered. When King declined, she tried another tactic. “I’m disposing of my wealth,” she explained. “As a matter of fact, getting rid of some of it will decrease my taxes.” She paused. “You are my oldest friend and it might be helpful at this moment in tiding over the situation if I give you a sum right now.”

“I am deeply touched, Violet,” King said, looking into her bird-bright eyes and thinking how little she had changed since that Trafalgar Day so many years ago. It was not the first time the person whom the spirits called a friend to us all and a remarkable woman had come to his aid financially. In the period prior to the First World War, when he was out of power and before he had gone to work for the Rockefellers, she had insisted he take a monthly income from her.

“I’ll give at once,” Markham responded cheerfully. “Ah, Rex, this will give me such pleasure. I am so worried and I think this is the time to arrange things.” Markham feared greatly she would never see her friend again.

King sensed this and told her, “My dear Violet, I have no fears about the future.”

Markham was not the only person discussing matters with the ailing Canadian leader. King George, Nehru of India, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Fraser, and Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan, were some of the distinguished statesmen who visited.

On Saturday, October 23 King had visits at his hotel from Nehru’s sister, Madame Pandit, and Eric Louw, the South African minister of external affairs. Two invited guests, Geraldine Cummins and her assistant Miss E.B. Gibbes, almost did not come. Cummins telephoned to warn the Canadian prime minister that she was suffering from a cold. King encouraged her to come regardless. He wanted to talk to the spirits.

Geraldine Cummins was one of the London spiritualists with whom King consulted in his pursuit of psychical research. He had contacted some of them through an influential woman and friend he had met his university days. The founder of the Victorian Order of Nurses, Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, had sought solace after the death of her husband, a former Governor General of Canada. The mediums she found employed automatic writing – going into a trance and writing down what they believed was dictated to them from the spirit world. Thrilled with this new proof of spiritual survival, King met with some of the London contacts whenever he could during the war and after.

Cummins had met King when he had come to England for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth in 1947. At the sitting, Cummins had gone into a trance, her left hand covering her closed eyes while her right hand wrote on the paper her secretary, Miss Gibbes, put in front of her. The words were dictated from her control, called “Astor.” Later, Cummins was surprised to find out that King was not a clergyman as she had thought but the prime minister of Canada. She told her assistant that he was the “greatest statesmen of our time. A man with such a record is no credulous fool.”

This year, Cummins found her client much altered, although his attractive smile, captivating charm, and spiritual integrity remained. His good-humoured face wore the cares of the invalid that she had foreseen at the previous sitting. With a serious expression in her dark brown eyes and thin face, she had warned him then, “You ought to take a holiday – at least six months.” But he only laughed, “I haven’t taken a holiday in years.” Now it was too late.

“Nowadays,” their host complained of his fatigue once his guests were comfortably seated, “statesmen have to fly about the world instead of staying at home doing constructive work directing affairs.”

Once Cummins began, she wrote what Astor said for fifty minutes. F.D.R. again urged attention be given to the Far East, warning of war in two years’ time. F.D.R. and then Sir Wilfrid encouraged him to stay in office as long as he could. You alone can manage the numerous conflicting interests in the world, he told his once young, now aged protégé.

Prime Minister King found the talks as reassuring as usual. “Remarkable,” he told Cummins, “just what I wanted.”

To himself he wondered how he would find the strength to go on. In April 1948 he would exceed twenty-one years in office and break the record set in the 1700s by Britain’s Sir Robert Walpole. Once past 7,619 days King would have held power longer than any other elected statesman in the English-speaking world. Perhaps he would plan to announce his retirement soon after, and perhaps even steer the party toward selecting St. Laurent as leader.

Laurier House, Ottawa

May 19, 1950

Father: Let Grandfather speak.

Grandfather: The doctor will show you what to do. Mother is here. Let her speak

Mother: Dear Willie it is a long time since we had a talk. Joan, I thank you for coming to see Willie each night. I want him not to be concerned about his health. He will be strong again in a short time. Let Max speak.

Max: Don’t be concerned about the morphine, you will be rid of it in a short time. Let Bella speak.

Bella: You are going to be strong again. Good night from all.

This is the last recorded seance of Rex, Joan, and friends.

July 21, 1948

Telegram to:

Mrs. James Carruthers

Moon Green

Wittersham

Kent (England)

Our friend’s condition has taken serious turn

will keep you informed.

Joan

The Farm, Kingsmere, Quebec

July 22, 1950

“Thank you,” King whispered to the nurse. He closed his eyes and one last time, went to dream.

W.L.M. King named all his dogs “Pat.” The first Pat – King’s “best little friend” – lived for 17 years and died on 14 July 1941. Pat the second was acquired in 1941 but died only 6 years later in 1947. Pat the third was acquired in the mid-40s.