First Person. Valerie Knowles
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Cairine Wilson’s portrait bust. Sculpted by Felix de Weldon in 1939, it now sits in the Senate ante chamber.
As a close friend of Isabel Percival and the first woman to be appointed to a federal cabinet, Ellen Fairclough was the logical link with the Conservative government of the day. She was also a fortunate choice because she embraced the idea with enthusiasm, approaching the Prime Minister and the Speaker of the Senate, whose permission was required before the bust could be placed in the Senate antechamber.7
The interview with the vivacious, spirited Mrs Fairclough was not without its amusing overtones, because at some point Mrs Ryan raised the question of the bust’s low neckline. It appears that the generous expanse of exposed flesh that the sculpture depicted gave her cause for concern. Would it not invite ribald comments from some male observers? When Mrs Fairclough learned of these fears, she burst out laughing, but then rallied with the reply that “certainly everything should be done to make the Senator acceptable to the gentlemen of the Senate.”8
Eventually everything possible was done to rectify the situation. Felix de Weldon was consulted, and because he weighed much less than the sculpture, it was decided that he would come to Ottawa to make the necessary adjustments to the piece rather than have it delivered to his studio in Washington.9 In the late winter of 1959-60, therefore, he journeyed to Ottawa where he spent several days modifying the bust by carving the neckline of a dress and giving it some texture. Years later Mrs Ryan would express the view that the sculptor had done “a good job of hoisting Cairine Wilson’s dress.”
Since 1959-60 was World Refugee Year and because the Senator had long been deeply involved with the refugee cause, her two friends also included a couple of imaginative money-raising projects for the World Refugee Fund in their plans: a Senator Wilson Testimonial Fund and a garden party. A prestigious committee, composed of the two organizers; Senator Olive Irvine; Beatrice Belcourt, a longtime friend; Colonel George Cavey, the former manager of Birks Jewellers and a member of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church; Mrs Farrar Cochrane, a family friend; Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson, a colleague and good friend from New Brunswick; Constance Hayward, a close friend who had served as the executive secretary of the Canadian National Committee on Refugees; Mrs A.K. Hugessen, a prominent member of that organization; and Yetty Robertson, wife of the distinguished Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Norman Robertson, solicited contributions for the testimonial fund, and the Local Council of Women staged a mammoth garden party in the spacious grounds of the Manor House. Thanks to superb organization and beautiful weather, the garden party was pronounced a huge success, raising $1,600 for the World Refugee Fund.
It had indeed been a memorable week — and an exhausting one. On Monday the Senator had returned from Washington, where she had received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Gaudet College, the only institution in the world for the higher education of the deaf, another cause with which Cairine Wilson had long been identified. Then, on Wednesday, there had been the garden party. Now, here she was in the precincts of the Red Chamber to watch John Diefenbaker, the wild-eyed populist shunned by the eastern establishment, unveil a twenty-one-year-old portrait of her, a leading member of that establishment. Ellen Fairclough opened the proceedings, then presented Mr Diefenbaker, who said in his tribute:
...I think of her as one who in the field of social and humanitarian service made a contribution as comprehensive as the numberless organizations in that field. I could name them. To do so would simply mean to name practically all those voluntary organizations which bring about the translation of the concept of brotherhood to those lesser privileged. In that field too Senator Wilson has made a contribution that is recognized throughout the world.10
After the Prime Minister had unveiled the portrait, the Senator gave a brief address, concluding her remarks with the observation:
It has been a great joy and satisfaction to me to know, and to be assured by my colleagues of my own sex that I made the way more easy for them. My husband lived in constant dread that I should do something which would bring the family and my sex into disrepute.
All I can say is, I know that I am unworthy of the tribute you have paid me today.11
It was then the turn of Mark Drouin, Speaker of the Senate, to make a few remarks, and he said in part:
The Honourable Cairine Reay Mackay Wilson completed recently thirty years in the public service of our country. Throughout this long and fruitful career she has won the esteem and admiration of all Canadians for her devotion to the common weal, the maturity of judgment and wisdom of counsel she has constantly displayed in the discussion of affairs of state, her successful initiatives for the relief of suffering and the redress of existing evils at home and abroad, her effectiveness as an advocate of social justice and security, and her personal qualities of charm, friendliness and dignity. We are grateful to her for her admirable contribution not only to the work of this house but to its reputation and prestige.12
John Keiller Mackay, Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario, was caught quite unprepared when asked to bring the proceedings to a close with a few words. Nevertheless, he managed to rise to the occasion with some fulsome praise for his friend and clanswoman, observing, “Her head is crowned not only with silver, but respect, admiration, esteem and love.”13
It would have been next to impossible for a stranger watching the proceedings to reconcile the subject of all these tributes with the tributes themselves, for Cairine Wilson was not, to use today’s overworked expression, a “charismatic” figure — far from it. Nevertheless, she had many qualities that more than made up for this: monumental compassion and loyalty, charm, political acumen, iron determination, an infinite capacity for hard work, a finely tooled feeling for style and propriety, and a certain magic authority. These played an invaluable role in her remarkable career. But so did certain traits that she inherited from her Scots-Canadian forebears. And it was her family’s position in Montreal society that allowed the Senator to move freely within the eastern Canadian establishment and to use it to pursue many of her goals.
2
THE MACKAYS
Cairine Wilson was born into a family of wealth. Perhaps even more important, she was born into a Scots-Canadian family that figured prominently in Montreal’s English-Scots establishment, an insular society that flourished in Montreal’s famous Square Mile, those several blocks in central Montreal where the rich built their mansions in the last half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. Until World War 1 thinned the ranks of their youth, they held undisputed sway — a colonial gentry slavishly imitating British social manners and mores and marrying within their own exclusive social circle.
When the future senator was born, in 1885, the British Empire was approaching its zenith and privileged Victorians everywhere basked in opulence and smugness. It was an epochal year for the young dominion of Canada. The financier and politician, Donald Smith, in an act charged with symbolism, drove a plain iron spike into a railway tie at Craigellachie, British Columbia, thereby completing the celebrated Canadian Pacific Railway and welding East to West. In a quite different sequence of events, the messianic Métis leader, Louis Riel, met his end on a jail gallows in Regina after leading his people in the North West Rebellion against the government at Ottawa. With his death he opened up a great rift between French and English-speaking Canadians, because while the former regarded him as a hero and a martyr, English-speaking Canadians denounced him as a rebel and a traitor who richly deserved his fate.
Closely associated with all these developments was Montreal, the metropolis of Canada, a rapidly growing city with an English-French population of approximately 145,000 and a thriving commercial-manufacturing sector dominated by English-speaking Canadians. It was a beautiful city with a plethora of gleaming church spires and a tree-covered mountain that sloped gently down to an elegant residential artery, Sherbrooke Street. Before it was expropriated for a public park in 1875, the mountain had been the preserve of private property owners who had dotted it with farms, orchards, gardens and villas. Now, a decade later, its largely unspoilt beauty was enjoyed year-round by all kinds of people,