George Simpson was apprenticed as a mercantile broker, a period of training usually lasting seven years. Overseas brokering was a hazardous corner of merchandizing, involving the transfer of goods across the seven seas. “A London counting house,” we are told, “was a commercial beehive, active, ordered, and integrated.” Business was being conducted in the partners’ rooms, the clerks besieged with public requests and orders. The training was close to drudgery — “painstaking copying of letters, endless repetition of tables of exchange, and attendance at some of the busiest concourses in London — all could sap the enthusiasm of the keenest apprentice.”
The day ran from 9:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. and from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m., six days per week, with two afternoons off. The typical clerks’ room contained a six-foot-long double desk, a merchant’s bureau, a painted bookcase, and two chairs. On the walls were maps of the world and tables of international currency exchange. The bureau was neatly divided into compartments containing the necessary printed forms — London Dock Accounts, Custom House Duties, Contracts, Remittances, Average Documents, and Bills of Lading. George would have had to master these. The bookcase contained books on the trade, and these were expected to be read and understood. Because he did business with the HBC, Geddes’s library would have been stocked with books on the North American fur trade. Simpson would have been expected to read these.
Great emphasis was placed on neatness. Each document was to be properly filed, and every clerk was expected to clear his own desk at the end of each day’s work. An orderly clerks’ room was an essential of business, and orderliness and efficiency were expected of the new apprentices.
As nothing could be left to chance, guesswork, or interpretation, it was necessary to spell out exactly what had to be done — what to do, when to do it, how to do it, who to do it — and this made necessary the mastering of the competent business letter, the ordinary means of communication between the businesses involved. The handwriting needed to be clear and legible and to the point, and the “spinning out of the long letter” became a required skill.
In all this there was an air of secrecy. In such a cut-throat trade, nothing to do with the business or the private lives of the traders could be divulged to competitors. In 1840, Letitia Hargrave complained, “they are all so wrapt up in mystery that I am afraid to say anything about the Company.”
Communication in the city was immediate and oral, and it would have been George’s duty to run errands, deliver copies, deal with officials in the Custom House, and carry instructions to the sea captains. All this would have taken George out of the counting house, into the streets and onto the docks of the city. Precision and politeness combined with friendliness and good communication skills would have been a necessity.
The warehouses were on the riverfront wharves and West India docks. When a ship arrived, the whole office staff would be there supervising the unlading, comparing the manifests with the actual goods, and seeing to the safe storage of the cargo. This, when he had advanced to the position of managing clerk, would have fallen under the supervisory duties of George Simpson. The men who actually did the labour would be ordinary workmen, those illiterate, rough Londoners who began their day with a pint of bitter and fortified themselves throughout the day with more of the same. It’s more than likely that these men from time to time became cantankerous and insubordinate. Later, in Rupert’s Land, Simpson became notorious for “knocking heads” to gain obedience, and it’s entirely possible that he served his apprenticeship in this activity on the wharves of London.
It is one of the curiosities of this story that almost as soon as he arrived in London, young George Simpson found himself in the company of the three great tacticians who were to influence the fur trade for the next half-century: Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Andrew Wedderburn, and Thomas Douglas, Fifth Earl of Selkirk.
Soon after sixteen-year-old George arrived in London in 1808, he would have met his fourteen-year-old cousin, Geddes Mackenzie, from 12 Great Tower Street. She was the daughter of George Mackenzie, Second Laird Avoch and son of Captain John Mackenzie, First Laird Avoch, half-brother to George’s grandmother, Isobel Mackenzie. This tangled web of family relationships became even stranger in 1812 when the seventeen-year-old Geddes Mackenzie married the fifty-year-old Sir Alexander Mackenzie. In this curious way, the great explorer became the cousin by marriage of the future governor.
Geddes and Alexander socialized extensively, holding Highland balls for London associates and friends from the north, to which Simpson, as cousin, Highlander, relative, and convivial spirit, would have been invited.
If there is one book we can be sure Simpson read, it is Sir Alexander Mackenzie’s Voyages from Montreal: On the River St. Lawrence, Through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans, in the Years 1789 and 1793. With a Preliminary Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Fur Trade in That Country, Illustrated with Maps. Even the title is enough to whet the appetite for adventure, and the likelihood is that Simpson not only read the book, but discussed its contents with the author himself.
Voyages is not only a tale of adventure and discovery. It presents to the world ideas that Mackenzie was to “preach in season and out of season to all who would listen.” He proposed no less than a giant monopoly straddling the land from the Canadas to the Pacific. Mackenzie’s visionary plan was the first that advocated a united British presence from coast to coast, and as such can be considered the first presentation of a concept of nationhood under the British flag straddling the northern half of North America. George Simpson was there to hear it and discuss it with the great explorer.
When George Simpson arrived in London he met Andrew Wedderburn, now Andrew Colvile, a family friend of Geddes Mackenzie. Although Andrew was a half-generation older than George, they developed a friendship that lasted the rest of their lives. He was to become Simpson’s benefactor, and the man chiefly responsible for his promotion to the North American governorship of the HBC.
In 1812, Colvile joined in business with the firm of Simpson and Graham and became George’s employer. He took the energetic and efficient young apprentice under his wing. By 1815, George was Andrew’s personal secretary, assisting him with his HBC duties. So George was not only getting the best business training, but was learning by personal contact the workings of the HBC.
Thomas Douglas was the brother-in-law of Andrew Colvile, and both had begun to buy up HBC stock with the intent of gaining control of the Company. But while Colvile’s motives were profit, Selkirk’s were humanitarian. His purpose was to begin a settlement in Rupert’s Land at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers (modern Winnipeg). That settlement, he felt, could not only feed the settlers, but also provide much-needed supplies for the HBC.
However innocent of purpose, the Nor’westers did not appreciate Selkirk’s plan to establish a food-producing colony on their line of communication from Montreal to the Athabasca. The NWC declared virtual war on the colony. Fields of grain were trampled, men and women were driven from their homes, some were carried off for resettlement in Canada, and in 1816 Governor Semple and twenty of his men were shot to death at Seven Oaks, just north of the settlement. Selkirk’s thoughts of a peaceful outcome were dashed by the conflict between the two companies, which lasted until the union in 1821.
And where was George Simpson in the decade while all this was going on? He was in the clerk’s room at the counting house, at the partner’s table for meals, at the drawing room social events, listening to Andrew Colvile and Thomas Douglas expound on their ideas for transforming Rupert’s Land. At other times he was in the drawing rooms of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, listening to the old adventurer propound his idea for a transcontinental empire of the fur trade. In this strange way the young apprentice was immersed in the ideas of both houses. In time it would be George Simpson’s task to bring together the ideas of these three visionary men, as he sought to bring order out of chaos in the wreckage of the fur trade.
As the teens of the nineteenth century progressed, so did George’s business fortunes. Even his two worst enemies admit as much. His cousin Alexander Simpson tells us that, once in London, “his advance was rapid, for he was clever,