As per usual, top of the morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
And today, let us praise famous Canadians.
Or at least one famous Canadian.
Though perhaps famous is stretching it a bit.
Because the man we’re remembering today was once the most powerful politician in Britain. He lived at Number 10 Downing Street. He was Prime Minister. And yet, a century later, he’s almost completely forgotten.he
Which is rather extraordinary.
His name was Andrew Bonar Law.
And 103 years ago today, on October 30th, 1923, he died at his London home, 24 Onslow Gardens, South Kensington.
Now, there’s a nice little transatlantic twist to this story.
In the United States, you have to be a natural-born American citizen to become President. If you’re born in Canada and only become an American citizen later, forget it. The White House is out of bounds.
The British are a little more relaxed about these matters.
Born in Canada? Want to be Prime Minister of Great Britain?
Come on in. Have a seat. We’ll see what we can do.
And that’s more or less what happened to Andrew Bonar Law.
He was born in 1858 in New Brunswick, on Canada’s Atlantic coast. His father was a Presbyterian minister, a Scotsman by descent, an Ulsterman by birth. His mother was Scottish.
So here’s a Canadian-born boy with a thoroughly Scottish family background. And a Canadian accent.
An accent, incidentally, which he never entirely lost.
We know that because recordings of his voice survive.
Which I find rather touching. Here’s a man who went on to spend decades in British politics, battling away in the House of Commons, making speeches, leading his party, running the country.
And all the while, a little bit of New Brunswick was there in his voice.
The Atlantic coast of Canada, echoing through the corridors of the Palace of Westminster.
But his childhood wasn’t especially happy.
His mother died when he was two. His father was a stern, melancholy Calvinist. Money was tight. The household was a sombre place.
And Bonar Law seems to have carried some of that sadness with him throughout his life.
Then, when he was twelve, a remarkable thing happened.
His aunt, who’d come over from Scotland to help look after the children, decided to return home. And she took young Andrew with her.
Back across the Atlantic.
To Glasgow.
And he never returned to New Brunswick.
Never.
He was twelve years old when he left Canada, but Canada never quite left him.
Now the aunt had wealthy relatives in Glasgow. The Kidstons. Bankers. And they could open doors for this clever young fellow.
His formal education ended when he was sixteen.
Sixteen!
No Oxford. No Cambridge. None of the grand educational machinery that produced so many British Prime Ministers.
Instead, he went into banking.
And then into iron.
Not quite as glamorous as it sounds.
Actually, it doesn’t sound glamorous at all.
But it was very profitable.
By the age of 27, Bonar Law was a partner in a substantial iron-merchant business. He was good at it, too. Quick, efficient, hard-working. The business expanded. He became wealthy.
And he did something else rather remarkable.
He educated himself.
He claimed to have read Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire three times by the age of 21.
Three times!
Most people would regard getting through it once as a considerable achievement.
He also acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of Thomas Carlyle.
So here we have our Canadian boy. Left school at sixteen. Made a fortune in iron. Read Gibbon for recreation.
Not your average young man about town.
And that brings us to his pleasures.
Such as they were.
He didn’t drink. He disliked music. Didn’t care for dancing. Regarded eating as a practical necessity rather than a source of enjoyment.
Not, you might think, the life and soul of the party.
But he loved golf. He was a very good chess player. And he was absolutely mad about bridge.
Bridge!
In fact, if his political colleagues wanted him to attend a weekend gathering, the promise of a good bridge game was one of the surest ways of getting him there.
There’s something wonderfully human about that.
The leader of the Conservative Party, dealing with matters of state, being lured to a political gathering with the prospect of a few hands of bridge.
He also smoked. A pipe. Cigars. Lots of cigars.
And we’ll come back to those.
Now, for all his rather austere tastes, Bonar Law was capable of falling deeply in love.
In 1890 he met Annie Robley, a shipbroker’s daughter.
And suddenly this man who didn’t like dancing found himself attending dances and fancy-dress balls.
Ah, the things we do for love.
They married in 1891. It was a wonderfully happy marriage. They had seven children, although the first was stillborn.
And then, in 1909, tragedy.
Annie underwent an operation on her gall bladder. At first everything seemed to have gone well.
Three days later, on October 31st, she collapsed and died.
Bonar Law was devastated.
And here’s another London connection.
That very year the family had moved into Pembroke Lodge in Kensington.
London was becoming the centre of his life. And it was to be the setting for some of his greatest triumphs and deepest sorrows.
By then he’d entered Parliament. First elected in 1900, aged 42.
And this self-educated Canadian businessman turned out to have a formidable political talent.
He knew his figures. He could argue. He could demolish an opponent without so much as a scrap of paper in front of him.
In 1911 he became leader of the Conservative Party.
And the next decade placed him right at the centre of British history.
The First World War. Coalition governments. The struggle over Ireland. The fall of one Prime Minister and the rise of another.
He became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Leader of the House of Commons. The indispensable right-hand man of David Lloyd George.
For a time he even lived at 11 Downing Street.
Not Number 10. Number 11.
And after he’d ceased to be Chancellor he stayed there, much to the annoyance of his successor, because he wanted to be close to Lloyd George.
That’s an intriguing little domestic detail, isn’t it?
A politician hanging on to his Downing Street accommodation.
But behind all this power and influence, the personal tragedies continued.
In April 1917, his son Charles was killed at the Battle of Gaza.
Six months later, another son, James, a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down and killed in France.
Two sons in six months.
His wife gone. Two sons gone.
And still he went on working.
His friends said he never really recovered from those losses.
I think it’s worth remembering that when we look at photographs of him. That rather grave, unsmiling face.
There was a great deal of sorrow behind it.
And then came 1922.
A political explosion.
The Conservatives were increasingly fed up with Lloyd George’s coalition government. Bonar Law, who’d retired from the party leadership because of ill health, reappeared on the political stage.
At a famous meeting at the Carlton Club in London, he helped persuade Conservative MPs to break with Lloyd George.
The coalition collapsed.
Lloyd George resigned.
And the King sent for Andrew Bonar Law.
The Canadian boy from New Brunswick had reached Number 10 Downing Street.
Prime Minister of Great Britain.
He was 64.
The man who’d left school at sixteen. Who’d made his fortune selling iron. Who’d read Gibbon three times. Who’d crossed the Atlantic as a boy and never gone back.
He’d made it.
But not for long.
Just 209 days.
That’s how long his premiership lasted.
And what brought it to an end was one of the cruellest possible afflictions for a politician.
He lost his voice.
During the election campaign of 1922 he’d suffered pains in his throat. They subsided. Then they came back.
By the spring of 1923, his speeches in Parliament were sometimes almost inaudible.
Think about that.
Here was a man whose life in politics depended on speaking. A man who’d fought his way to the top with argument, debate, persuasion.
And now he could barely make himself heard.
He went abroad to recuperate. But his condition worsened.
In France, his old friend Rudyard Kipling was so alarmed by his appearance that he contacted Lord Beaverbrook, who alerted Bonar Law’s doctor.
On May 17th, 1923, the doctor examined him in Paris.
The diagnosis was devastating.
Incurable cancer of the throat.
Six months to live.
And those cigars? That pipe?
His biographer says there’s not much question about it – Bonar Law’s one great vice finally caught up with him.
Two days later he returned to London.
He was too ill to go to Buckingham Palace.
So he wrote to the King, resigning as Prime Minister.
A man who’d spent his life making speeches had been reduced to communicating by letter.
There’s something terribly poignant about that.
And that brings us to our Word of the Day.
Aphonia.
A rather beautiful word for a terrible thing.
It means the loss of the voice. Comes from the Ancient Greek. A meaning “without”. Phōnē meaning “voice”.
And that Greek word phōnē is a wonderfully productive little fellow. It gives us telephone. Microphone. Phonograph. Phonetics.
All to do with sound. With the human voice.
And think of Bonar Law.
That Canadian accent he never quite lost. The voice that filled the House of Commons. The speeches that took him all the way to Downing Street.
And then the cancer.
The voice fading. The speeches becoming inaudible. Finally, a Prime Minister so ill he had to resign by letter.
Aphonia.
The loss of the voice.
And for a politician, perhaps the cruellest loss of all.
The voice that had carried him all the way to Downing Street failed him. Was no more. And so, just a few miles from the Palace of Westminster, in a handsome South Kensington terrace, the final chapter of his life was playing out.
Number 24 Onslow Gardens.
A fine London address. One of those handsome nineteenth-century terraces that give South Kensington so much of its character.
That was Bonar Law’s home.
And that was where, in the early hours of October 30th, 1923, he died.
His daughter Isabel had nursed him through his final weeks. His great friend Lord Beaverbrook had virtually abandoned business and politics to be at his side.
He left an estate of just under £36,000.
Getting on for 3 million pounds in today’s money.
He’d come a long way from that modest Presbyterian household in New Brunswick.
But here’s the final twist.
Bonar Law had wanted to be buried beside his beloved Annie in Helensburgh, Scotland.
It was his express wish.
But Westminster Abbey offered him a funeral there. The government liked the idea. His family agreed.
And so, on November 5th, 1923, the former Prime Minister was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.
Not beside Annie.
And this is where the story takes a decidedly sharp turn.
Because one of his old political opponents, the former Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, made an observation that was as memorable as it was unkind.
“We have buried the Unknown Prime Minister by the side of the Unknown Warrior.”
Ouch.
That’s quite a thing to say about a man who’d just died.
And the remark stuck.
The Unknown Prime Minister.
It’s the minor chord that every Canadian visitor who knows the story hears when the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior comes into view in Westminster Abbey.
The Unknown Warrior. The Unknown Prime Minister.
One remembered by an entire nation. The other, a Canadian who rose to the very summit of British political life, almost forgotten.
Indeed, there’s a very fine biography of Bonar Law by Robert Blake with precisely that title.
But I think Asquith was being unfair.
Bonar Law led the Conservative Party for twelve years. He was one of the key figures in Britain’s wartime government. He helped bring down Lloyd George. And he was a major influence in shaping the modern Conservative Party.
And, of course, he became Prime Minister.
Not bad for a boy from New Brunswick.
So next time you’re in South Kensington, perhaps walking along Onslow Gardens, give Number 24 a passing thought.
And if you’re in Westminster Abbey, look out for his resting place in the nave. The inscription is wonderfully understated.
“Andrew Bonar Law 1858–1923 sometime Prime Minister.”
Sometime Prime Minister.
There’s British understatement for you.
As for me, I rather like the thought of that Canadian accent surviving all those years in the House of Commons.
New Brunswick to Glasgow. Glasgow to London. London to Downing Street.
A boy who left Canada at twelve and went on to govern Britain.
And a man whose final tragedy was to lose the very thing that had helped take him there.
His voice.
The Unknown Prime Minister?
Not quite.
Not today, anyway.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
And another London story brought back into the light. Resurrected.
See you tomorrow.