The King and I

It is all the foofarah and Oscarization of current star movie The King’s Speech that prompts this memory of my childhood encounters with that King a few months before his 1939 war-declaration speech. And I listened with my family thereafter to his annual Christmas-day radio talks throughout his reign to 1952.

   Not that it has been fully established that my role in the 1939 spring tour of Canada by King George VI exerted any major influence on his war-declaring speech September 3.

   Nor, indeed, has it been firmly confirmed that he adopted any of my seven-years-old style of muttering, fluttering,  slangish speaking which His Majesty may have overheard during our quite-distant encounters in Ottawa—on Parliament Hill, in the entrance way of Rideau Hall and at the towering new war memorial His Majesty formally unveiled in a military ceremony.

   My involvement arose in part by accompanying my World War One veteran father, wearing his war-service medals and beret at the Parliamentary and War Memorial royalty services.

   Also, although I was about a month shy of my 8th birthday—the age normally required to become a uniformed Wolf Cub—adult leaders of our Ottawa Glebe district Wolf Cub Pack permitted me to join early.

   That enabled me to participate in Ottawa events for King George and his Queen Elizabeth during the first-ever visit to Canada by reigning British majesties.

   I was then, for example, able to join a thong of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, Cubs and Brownies, to line the driveway into Rideau Hall, the Governor-General’s residence, and salute in welcome the royal couple to their abode in the Canadian national capital.
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   The only current proof of my encounters is in a photograph of me as an onlooker while King George, geared in a grenadier soldier uniform with an enormous fur hat, marches up Parliament Hill toward the Peace Tower.

   Barely visible on the King’s left side is Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. I stand beyond them in my Cub uniform, to the left of a Mountie who stepped aside so I could see and salute and maybe cheer the King—George, that is, not Mackenzie. Between His Majesty’s raised right hand and his huge head-dress, is my mother Grace’s face under her wide-brimmed hat. My father (pastor of Ottawa’s Fourth Avenue Baptist Church), wearing his army veteran’s beret, is behind me.

HWM's Nov.11s

On Wednesday, October 6, 1915, five weeks short of his 20^th birthday on November 11, Harry Whitfield Mollins, along with some pals, travelled from his home in Moncton,  New Brunswick,  to a Canadian Army recruitment centre at Charlottetown,  Prince Edward Island, and signed on to #2 Siege Battery. He began immediately keeping a diary in tiny pocket-sized notebooks. Here is what he had to say later on his birthday: 

Saturday, November 11, 1916

      (Based in a training camp at Horsham, Sussex, southern England)

   Weather: Fine   This is my twenty-first birthday. Left Horsham at 9:30 A.M. Arrived at London about eleven. Had dinner & caught the 3 o’clock train for Shorncliffe (Kent, southeast coast of England). Arrived about 6 P.M.  Put up at the Fernall Hotel, Folkestone. As it is useless to try and find any of the boys tonight, we went to the Pleasure Gardens Theatre & saw a play called “The Whip.” Enjoyed it very much. 

Sunday, November 11, 1917

 (Northern France battle grounds)

Weather: Showers   Were relieved this morning at 9 A.M. Was never so thankful for anything in my life.  Was wet through and coated with mud from head to foot. Returned to billets & turned in for a sleep. Stayed in bed all day.  We fired 240 rounds during our twenty-four hours duty. This is my twenty-second birthday. I spent my last birthday in England and the one before that in Canada. Where shall I spend the next? I hope in Canada.

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    By November 11, 1918, the day the war ended, Harry Mollins was being treated for an illness from an infection acquired while an aimer in a cannon crew in combat. There’s no diary entry for that birthday—the same day armistice ended the war. But he was soon able to spend his birthdays in Canada. 

   Ten years later, with fellow Monctonian Vera Grace Mollins his wife, he was winding up studies at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University, where—despite his married state—he acquired Bachelor titles in Arts (BA) and Divinity (BD) to become a church pastor. Not to mention receiving a grand reputation as a baritone songster—a powerful talent enriched by singing lessons as a soldier in Horsham, as his diary reports. His singing embellished his role as a Baptist minister in Windsor, N.S., Ottawa, Brantford and Toronto.

   And, of course, there was his assistance in Grace’s bearing two wonderful daughters in the 1920s. And then—as immodest as this truthfulness may seem—the two stupendous sons of the 1930s.                 

–Carl Mollins  Nov. 9, 2010  

Picture taken at a war memorial at Canary Wharf, London, in September 2010

The art of the dying general at 250 years old

Originally published on The Great Debate, Reuters, September 9, 2009.

- Carl Mollins is a Toronto-based journalist who has worked at the Toronto Daily Telegram, The Toronto Star (in Ottawa),  Reuters (in London), The Canadian Press news service (in Toronto, London, Ottawa, Washington, D.C.) and Maclean’s magazine (in Toronto and Washington, D.C.). This blog post was originally published on Reuters' The Great Debate on September 9, 2009. -

It was long ago, in 1761, when Pennsylvanian portrait artist Benjamin West moved east—across the Atlantic. Nine years later in England, he looked back west to produce a controversial but renowned portrayal of the death of British General James Wolfe during England’s seizure of Quebec from France 250 years ago, on September 13, 1759.

Attention to the picture persists nowadays, so long since the British soldiers set up what rapidly became complete English control of the Canadian colony. Perennial prints and publication of West’s art and comparable materials are reminders of what launched Canada as a country divided linguistically, in culture and politically, the situation that remains today.

West devised that picture as the hired “history artist” of King George III, who was already ensnarled in England’s imminent loss of its other North American colonies as the independent United States of America.

That heightened the popularity of West’s picture, despite some criticism of its then-modernistic appearance. Painting Wolfe and the cluster of soldiers around him in battle dress strides away from the traditional portrayal of military heroes draped in capes and god-like postures. West did four paintings, differing in size, and they were repeated in hundreds of prints in the 1870s, more and more ever since.

West’s picture, titled “The Death of General Wolfe”, portrays the situation by guesswork and by adding veterans who paid for their inclusion. In the foreground is a half-naked, barefoot, head-feathered person, an apparent tribal warrior of First-Nation Canadians, although the record indicates none were involved.

Even more factually fanciful is a similar picture showing the death in the same battle of the French commander, Marquis Louis-Joseph de Montcalm de Saint-Veran. In fact, the record indicates that Montcalm dies the following morning. Not only does the Montcalm army include First-Nations soldiers, but a tropical palm tree rises above the distraught soldiers.

Reinforcing the West painting’s provision of Wolfe’s heroism are poetic and musical tributes composed over the centuries.Barely six weeks after the Quebec clash, the early English publication “Busy Body” published in its issue of October 22, 1759, a poem of Oliver Goldsmith, including the lines:

“. . . . O Wolfe! to thee a streaming flood of woe,

Sighing we pay, and think e’en conquest dear;

Quebec in vain shall teach our breast to glow,

Whilst thy sad fate extorts the heart-wrung tear . . . .

Yet they shall know thou conquerest, though dead!”

More than a century later in Canada, the poetic and musical Toronto schoolmaster Alexander Muir (Principal of Leslie and later Gladstone schools), composed during the 1867 formation of the Canadian Confederation what became a virtual national anthem in many schools for most of the following 100 years.

The lyrics of his stirring song, “The Maple Leaf Forever“, proclaim that, “from Britain’s shore Wolfe, the dauntless hero, came and planted firm Britannia’s flag on Canada’s fair domain.”His nationalist chorus reaches beyond that divisive history. 

Muir altered a line in which original lyrics referring to Canada’s commitment to the British floral emblems—Scottish thistle, Irish shamrock, English rose—to add the French fleur de lis, or lily.

The song goes on in the chorus to applaud “the maple leaf our emblem dear, the maple leaf forever”—an outlook fulfilled a century after Confederation with Canada’s replacement of its red ensign of the Union Jack with adoption of the Maple Leaf flag in 1965.

Yet still, two and a half centuries after the English took over Canada from the French, the country’s national attitudes created 250 years ago divisibly, day-by-day persist.

Working in London