IR CHARLES TUPPER died in 1915, in his ninety-fifth year. In his final years, he made periodic excursions to the Vancouver home of his son Charles Hibbert Tupper, but his residence at the end was an English country estate with the Wodehousian name of Bexleyheath. It is an enormous leap – almost too much for one life to contain – from the young political scrapper who entered Nova Scotia’s colonial assembly in 1855 to this ancient baronet of Bexley. It seems odd to us, now, how so many Canadian nation-builders, even those born and raised in Canada, took themselves off to Britain in retirement, preferring to die in the “old country,” even if, like Tupper, they had never been young there. The last Canadian political leader to choose a British deathbed was R. B. Bennett, child of Hopewell Hill, New Brunswick, who in 1938 removed himself to an English village called Mickleham, wangled himself a viscountcy, and died impersonating an English gentleman. Today, of course, Tupper and Bennett would be more apt to die in Palm Beach or Lyford Cay, which at least have weather to commend them. As the natural refuge of superannuated Canadian leaders, Britain has become unimaginable.
So Tupper at the end of his life cuts an incomprehensible figure. The last of the thirty-six fathers of confederation, all his contemporaries long dead, sits, a huge old ruin in a fur collar with a blanket over his knees, chauffeured about the damp English countryside in some clanking black motor car, doubtless trying to comprehend the horribly modern slaughter of young Canadians at Ypres and Festhubert, gradually letting it go.
That unedifying twilight makes it hard to recapture the energetic nation-building young Tupper of the 1860s. And Tupper himself does not help us. He left two volumes of memoirs and an authorized
Life and Letters –
all so bland, superficial, and sanitized that they tell us little of his achievements and almost nothing about him. His personal papers were, in historian Peter Waite’s phrase, “not so much laundered as starched.” The destruction of most of what was worthwhile in them has made it almost impossible to flesh out the stiff cardboard of his public image with anything human and tangible.
He had his admirers. There are many reports of the Tupper who always overflowed with energy and enthusiasm, who kept his black medical bag under his parliamentary desk and would offer medical help at any time. Those who liked him said he was bluff and four-square and immovable in his determination. He was full of “a characteristic which may be defined in a favourable sense as audacity,” as one journalist put it. “In repose, even, he looked as if he had a blizzard secreted somewhere about his person,” said a fellow MP . With the wives of his friends and colleagues, he was said to be gallant and flirtatious, never too busy to hear some medical confidence, organize an outing, or simply present a flower from the garden. 1
Those who liked him said he was dogged in adversity. Actually he was a bully. When he had power, he was constantly eager not merely to defeat but to humiliate his rivals. Historian Waite, who made a wonderful biography from the well-preserved papers of Tupper’s fellow Nova Scotian John Thompson, notes in it the legend that “Tupper” arose from the French
tu perds
, “you lose.” For the weak or dependent, Tupper was hardly the trusted companion hismore secure friends imagined. He was married for sixty-five years, and friends insisted the marriage was happy and close, but letters – vanished from Tupper’s papers but preserved in Thompson’s – suggest a Tupper who was aggressively sexual. Waite reports how Tupper, a Baptist and a minister’s son, once bullied Thompson into taking him to mass, simply to pursue a young Catholic woman he was attracted to. That and a hundred other incidents might have been simply flirtatious, but Waite also cites the Washington typist who alleged in a legal action
So Tupper at the end of his life cuts an incomprehensible figure. The last of the thirty-six fathers of confederation, all his contemporaries long dead, sits, a huge old ruin in a fur collar with a blanket over his knees, chauffeured about the damp English countryside in some clanking black motor car, doubtless trying to comprehend the horribly modern slaughter of young Canadians at Ypres and Festhubert, gradually letting it go.
That unedifying twilight makes it hard to recapture the energetic nation-building young Tupper of the 1860s. And Tupper himself does not help us. He left two volumes of memoirs and an authorized
Life and Letters –
all so bland, superficial, and sanitized that they tell us little of his achievements and almost nothing about him. His personal papers were, in historian Peter Waite’s phrase, “not so much laundered as starched.” The destruction of most of what was worthwhile in them has made it almost impossible to flesh out the stiff cardboard of his public image with anything human and tangible.
He had his admirers. There are many reports of the Tupper who always overflowed with energy and enthusiasm, who kept his black medical bag under his parliamentary desk and would offer medical help at any time. Those who liked him said he was bluff and four-square and immovable in his determination. He was full of “a characteristic which may be defined in a favourable sense as audacity,” as one journalist put it. “In repose, even, he looked as if he had a blizzard secreted somewhere about his person,” said a fellow MP . With the wives of his friends and colleagues, he was said to be gallant and flirtatious, never too busy to hear some medical confidence, organize an outing, or simply present a flower from the garden. 1
Those who liked him said he was dogged in adversity. Actually he was a bully. When he had power, he was constantly eager not merely to defeat but to humiliate his rivals. Historian Waite, who made a wonderful biography from the well-preserved papers of Tupper’s fellow Nova Scotian John Thompson, notes in it the legend that “Tupper” arose from the French
tu perds
, “you lose.” For the weak or dependent, Tupper was hardly the trusted companion hismore secure friends imagined. He was married for sixty-five years, and friends insisted the marriage was happy and close, but letters – vanished from Tupper’s papers but preserved in Thompson’s – suggest a Tupper who was aggressively sexual. Waite reports how Tupper, a Baptist and a minister’s son, once bullied Thompson into taking him to mass, simply to pursue a young Catholic woman he was attracted to. That and a hundred other incidents might have been simply flirtatious, but Waite also cites the Washington typist who alleged in a legal action
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