Finally, I would like to thank the following: Jonathan Williams who edited some of my preliminary chapters before returning to Ireland; Janet Keith and Peggy Blackstock who took over from where he left off and helped me immeasurably; and Jeanne MacDonald of Dundurn Press, who piloted the manuscript through its final stages. And last, but far from least, I would like to thank my agent, Joanne Kellock. She made valuable suggestions for the manuscript’s improvement and shared many of my agonies in the trip down to the wire.
Valerie Knowles
Ottawa April, 1988
INTRODUCTION
It is timely and appropriate that a biography of Cairine Wilson is now being published.
Timely because the inspiration that may be drawn from the integrity and character shown by Canada’s first woman senator in her persistent and determined efforts to help refugees half a century ago may be relevant today when we are faced once again with the need to act on this question.
Appropriate in that a refreshing revelation of her character as shown in her work in Parliament and her continuing devotion to duty throughout her life will help present-day parliamentarians to summon strength to perform their onerous duties.
It was a pleasure for me both as a private citizen and later as a Member of Parliament to have had the privilege of working with Cairine Wilson in various fields of public endeavour. May the story of her life continue to be an inspiration for all Canadians young and old.
The Honourable George Mcllraith, QC, PC
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
ALL THOSE VOLUNTEERS WHO
HAVE WORKED SO NOBLY
AND TIRELESSLY ON BEHALF OF
REFUGEES, OFTEN WITH LITTLE
OR NO RECOGNITION.
1
A CELEBRATION
Cairine Wilson, Canada’s first woman senator, stood beside the white marble sculpture in the Senate antechamber, a slim, slightly stooped woman with widely spaced, deep blue eyes. With just the hint of a smile on her lips, she gazed shyly into the distance, skirting the towering figures of her two companions: John Diefenbaker, Canada’s, thirteenth prime minister, and Mark Drouin, the Speaker of the Senate, who took up a position slightly to her left and directly across from the beaming Diefenbaker.
It was a warm, soft evening — 10 June 1960 — and immediately in front of her, crowding the small oak-panelled anteroom, was a host of wellwishers and admirers. From Ottawa, across Canada, and the United States, they had come to watch the formal unveiling of this head-and-shoulders likeness of the Senator and to pay tribute to a remarkable seventy-fiveyear-old trailblazer.
Among them the Senator could pick out all of her eight children — Olive, the eldest, and then in order of birth: Janet, Cairine, Ralph, Anna, Angus, Robert, and Norma — old friends like Mrs D.C. Coleman and her sister, Mrs John Labatt; five of the six female senators then sitting in the Senate (Senator Mariana Jodoin was kept away by illness); the sculptor Felix de Weldon; colleagues of every political stripe; and dignitaries such as Keiller Mackay, lieutenant-governor of Ontario. The only notable absence was that of her beloved husband, Norman, who had died four years earlier.
Quiet and unassuming, she had dreaded this event, for even after thirty years as a senator, a lifetime of humanitarian service, and countless public appearances, Cairine Wilson disliked being centre stage. That was best left to a combative courtroom lawyer and politician like John Diefenbaker, who stood on the other side of the sculpture. Still, as she later admitted in a letter to a Montreal friend who had been very active in refugee work, Margaret Wherry, the ceremony “passed off much more easily and pleasantly” than she dared hope.1
This special event honouring Cairine Wilson might never have taken place at all if it had not been for the determination and organizing genius of two old friends, Kathleen Ryan and Isabel Percival, President of Ketchum Manufacturing of Ottawa, and a dedicated member of the Zonta Club of Ottawa, one of the many service organizations to which the Senator belonged. These two had made it all possible.
Unveiling of commemorative bust of Agnes Macphail, Centre Block, Parliament Buildings, 8 March 1955. Left to right: Margaret Aiken, MP, Charlotte Whitton, Mayor of Ottawa, Senator Cairine Wilson and the Hon. Ellen Fairclough, Secretary of State.
The idea for saluting Cairine Wilson in this way originated with Kathleen Ryan, who in 1984 recalled the deep impression that the Senator’s appointment had made on her when she was nineteen. A great admirer of Cairine Wilson, Mrs Ryan was vexed that no tangible monument had been erected to Canada’s first woman senator. Agnes Macphail, Canada’s first woman member of Parliament, was commemorated by a bronze bust outside the House of Commons, but in the Senate precincts there was no tangible reminder of Mrs Wilson’s many achievements. Kathleen Ryan therefore conceived the idea of installing a monument to Cairine Wilson in the Senate antechamber where, on 11 June 1938, Mackenzie King had unveiled a bronze tablet honouring the five Alberta feminists who had gone all the way to the Imperial Privy Council in London to prove that women were “qualified Persons” and therefore eligible for appointment to the Senate.2
As luck would have it, a sculpture that could serve as such a monument already existed. It was a white marble head-and-shoulders study of Cairine Wilson that had been sculpted twenty-one years earlier, in the summer of 1939, by an artist who has since become world famous, Felix de Weldon, (or Felix Weihs, as he called himself before his marriage), the sculptor of the renowned National Marine Memorial near Arlington Cemetery in Washington D.C. The artist, then a young Austrian refugee, had been recommended to the Senator by Miss Macphail, whose own portrait had been executed by the young man (This is the bust that now sits outside the House of Commons.) As Mrs Frazer Punnett, the Senator’s secretary at the time, recalls it, Miss Macphail came to the Senator’s office one day when Mrs Wilson was out and “left the message that perhaps because of [her] concern about refugees, she might want to give some consideration to a young sculptor from Austria.”3
It seems that the Senator was initially reluctant to have her portrait sculpted. For, as she confessed to her good friend, Dr Henry Marshall Tory, the noted educator and scientist, “At the time, a bust was the last thing which I desired but I finally agreed, for I had always regretted not having accepted Tait Mackenzie’s offer.”4 Evidently Agnes Macphail’s example and the Senator’s all too human desire to be recorded for posterity were too powerful to be ignored.
The Vienna-born and European-educated sculptor spent the whole summer at Clibrig, the Wilson summer home at St Andrews, New Brunswick, leaving only in mid-September after the outbreak of World War Two. With him went a clay model, which he later reproduced in white marble obtained from the fragment of an old Greek column that he had picked up in a New York antique store.5 The completed marble version was taken to Ottawa where it was installed in the library of the Manor House, the stately Wilson home in Rockcliffe Park.
Kathleen Ryan, it seems, recalled this impressive sculpture when she began to entertain ideas about honouring her illustrious friend. So did Isabel Percival, who, like Mrs Ryan, was sure that the Wilson family would be glad to donate it for the purpose that they had in mind. The family was approached and after permission was granted, Mrs Ryan and Mrs Percival went to see Ellen Fairclough, Diefenbaker’s minister of citizenship and immigration.6