Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

CHAPTER IV

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA

I

The first citizen of Halifax to recognize the Prince of Wales was a little boy: and it was worth a cool twenty cents to him.

The official entry of His Royal Highness into Halifax was fixed for Monday, August 18th. The Dragon and Dauntless, however, arrived on Sunday, and the Prince saw in the free day an opportunity for getting in a few hours' walking.

He landed quietly, and with his camera spent some time walking through and snapping the interesting spots in the city. He climbed the hill to where the massive and slightly melodramatic citadel that his own ancestor, the Duke of Kent, had built on the hill dominates the city, and continued from there his walk through the tree-fringed streets.

At the very toe of the long peninsula upon which Halifax is built he walked through Point Pleasant, a park of great, and untrammelled, natural beauty, thicketed with trees through which he could catch many vivid and beautiful glimpses of the intensely blue harbour water beneath the slope.

It was in this park that the young punter pulled off his coup.

He was one of a number of kiddies occupied in the national sport of Halifax—bathing. He and his friends spotted the Prince and his party before that party saw them. Being a person of acumen the wise kid immediately "placed" His Royal Highness, and saw the opportunity for financial operations.

"Betcher ten cents that's the Prince of Wales," he said, accommodating the whole group, whereupon the inevitable sceptic retorted:

"Naw, that ain't no Prince. Anyhow he doesn't come till tomorrow, see."

"Is the Prince, I tell you," insisted the plunger. "And see here, betcher another ten cents I goes and asks him."

The second as well as the first bet was taken. And both were won.

This is not the only story connected with the Sunday stroll of the Prince. Another, and perhaps a romantic version of the same one, was that it was the Prince who made and lost the bet. He was said to have come upon not boys but girls bathing. Seeing one of them poised skirted and stockinged, for all the world as though she were the authentic bathing girl on the cover of an American magazine, ready to dive, he bet her a cool twenty that she dare not take her plunge from the highest board.

This story may be true or it may be, well, Canadian. I mean by that it may be one of the jolly stories that Canadians from the very beginning began to weave about the personality of His Royal Highness. It is, indeed, an indication of his popularity that he became the centre of a host of yarns, true or apocryphal, that followed him and accumulated until they became almost a saga by the time the tour was finished.

II

In this short stroll the Prince saw much of a town that is certainly worth seeing.

Halifax on the first impact has a drab air that comes as a shock to those who sail through the sharp, green hills of the Narrows and see the hilly peninsula on which the town is built hanging graciously over the sparkling blue waters of one of the finest and greatest harbours in the world.

From the water the multi-coloured massing of the houses is broken up and softened by the vividness of the parks and the green billowing of the trees that line most of the streets. Landing, the newcomer is at once steeped in the depressing air of a seaport town that has not troubled to keep its houses in the brightest condition. As many of those houses are of wood, the youthful sparkle of which vanishes in the maturity of ill-kept paintwork, the first impression of Halifax is actually more melancholy than it deserves to be.

The long drive through Water Street from the docks, moreover, merely lands one into a business centre where the effect of many good buildings is spoilt by the narrowness of the streets. Such a condition of things is no doubt unavoidable in a town that is both commercial and old, but those who only see this side of Halifax had better appreciate the fact that the city is Canadian and new also, and that there are residential districts that are as comely and as up-to-date as anywhere in the Western Continent.

Halifax certainly blends history and business in a way to make it the most English of towns. It is like nothing so much as a seaport in the North of England plus a Canadian accent.

There is the same packed mass movement of a lively polyglot people through the streets. There is the same keen appetite for living that sends people out of doors to walk in contact with their fellows under the light of the many-globed electric standards that line the sidewalk.

There is the same air of bright prosperity in the glowing and vivacious light of the fine and tasteful shops. They are good shops, and their windows are displayed with an artistry that one finds is characteristic throughout Canada. They offer the latest and smartest ideas in blouses and gowns, jewellery and boots and cameras—I should like to find out what percentage of the population of the American Continent does not use a camera—and men's shirtings, shirtings that one views with awe, shirtings of silk with emotional stripes and futuristic designs, and collars to match the shirts, the sort of shirts that Solomon in all his glory seems to have designed for festival days.

At night, certainly, the streets of Halifax are bright and vivid, and the people in them good-humoured, laughing and sturdy, with that contempt of affectation that is characteristic of the English north.

The bustle and vividness as well as the greyness of Halifax lets one into the open secret that it is a great industrial port of Canada, and an all-the-year-round port at that, yet it is the greyness and narrowness of the streets that tells you that Halifax is also history. In the old buildings, and their straggled frontage, is written the fact that the city grew up before modernity set its mark on Canada in the spacious and broad planning of townships.

It was, for years, the garrison of Britain in the Americas. Since the day when Cornwallis landed in 1749 with his group of settlers to secure the key harbour on the Eastern seaboard of America until the Canadians themselves took over its garrisoning, it was the military and naval base of our forces. And in that capacity it has formed part of the stage setting for every phase of the Western historical drama.

It was the rendezvous of Wolfe before Quebec; it played a part in the American War of Independence; it was a refuge for the United Empire Loyalists; British ships used it as a base in the war of 1812; from its anchorage the bold and crafty blockade runners slipped south in the American Civil War, and its citizens grew fat through those adventurous voyages. It has been the host of generations of great seamen from Cook, who navigated Wolfe's fleet up the St. Lawrence, to Nelson. It housed the survivors of the Titanic, and was the refuge of the Mauretania when the beginning of the Great War found her on the high seas. It has had German submarines lying off the Narrows, so close that it saw torpedoed crews return to its quays only an hour or so after their ships had sailed.

III

The Prince of Wales was himself a link in Halifax's history. Not merely had his great-great grandfather, the Duke of Kent, commanded at the Citadel, but when he landed he stepped over the inscribed stone commemorating the landing on that spot of his grandfather on July 30th, 1860, and his father in 1901.

His Royal Highness made his official landing in the Naval Dockyard on the morning of Monday, August 18th. As he landed he was saluted by the guns of three nations, for two French war sloops and the fine Italian battleship Cavour, which had come to Halifax to be present during his visit, joined in when the guns on shore and on the British warship saluted.

At the landing stage the reception was a quiet one, only notabilities and guards of honour occupying the Navy Yard, but this quietness was only the prelude to a day of sheer hustle.

The crowd thickened steadily until he arrived in the heart of the city, when it resolved itself into a jam of people that the narrow streets failed to accommodate. This crowd, as in most towns of Canada, believed in a "close up" view. Even when there is plenty of space the onlookers move up to the centre of the street, allowing a passageway of very little more than the breadth of a motor-car. Policemen of broad and indulgent mind are present to keep the crowd in order, and when policemen give out, war veterans in khaki or "civvies" and boy scouts string the line, but all—policemen, veterans and scouts—so mixing with the crowd that they become an indistinguishable part of it, so that it is all crowd, cheery and friendly and most intimate in its greeting. That was the air of the Halifax crowd.

It always seemed to me that after the roaring greeting of the streets the formal civic addresses of welcome were acts of supererogation. Yet there is no doubt as to the dignity and colour of these functions.

From the packed street the Prince passed into the great chamber of the Provincial Parliament Building, where there seemed an air of soft, red twilight compounded from the colour of the walls and the old pictures, as well as from the robes and uniforms of the dignitaries and the gowns of the many ladies.

As ceremonies these welcomes were always short, though there was always a number of presentations made, and the Prince was soon in the open again. In the open there were war veterans to inspect, for in whatever town he entered, large or small or remote, there was always a good showing of Canadians who had served and won honours in Europe.

Everywhere, in great cities or in a hamlet that was no more than a scattering of homesteads round a prairie's siding, His Royal Highness showed a particular keenness to meet these soldiers. They were his own comrades in arms, as he always called them, and when he said that he meant it, for he never willingly missed an opportunity of getting among them and resuming the comradeship he had learned to value at the Front.

In most towns, as in Halifax, his round of visits always included the hospitals. His car took him through the bright sunshine of the Halifax streets to these big and very efficient buildings, where he went through the wards, chatting here and there to a cot or a convalescent patient, and not forgetting the natty Canadian nurses or the doctors, or even, as in one of the hospitals on this day, a patient lying in a tent in the grounds outside the radius of the visit.

In Halifax, also, there was another grim fact of the war which called for special attention; that was the area devastated by the terrible explosion of a ship in the docks in December, 1917.

The party left the main streets to climb over the shoulder of the peninsula to where the ruined area stood. It is to the north of the town, on the side of the hill that curves largely to the very water's edge. Down off the docks, and an immense distance away it seems from the slope of ruin, a steamer loaded with high explosive collided with another, caught fire and blew up, and on the entire bosom of that slope can be seen what that gigantic detonation accomplished.

The force of the explosion swept up the hill and the wooden houses went down like things of card. In the trail of the explosion followed fire. As the plank houses collapsed the fires within them ignited their frail fabric and the entire hillside became a mass of flames.

The Prince looked upon a hill set with scars in rows, the rock foundations of houses that had been. Houses had, in the main, disappeared, though here and there there was a crazy structure hanging together by nails only. Across the arm of the harbour, on the pretty, wooded Dartmouth side, he could see among the trees the sprawled ugliness of the ruin the explosion had spread even there.

On this bleak slope, where the grass was growing raggedly over the ruins, the old inhabitants were showing little inclination to return. Only a few neat houses were in course of erection where, before, there had been thousands. It was as though the hillside had become evil, and men feared it.

Over the hill, and by roads which are best described as corrugated (outside the main town roads of Canada, faith, hope and strong springs are the best companions on a motor ride), he went to where a new district is being built to house the victims of the disaster.

Modern Canada is having its way in this new area, and broad streets, grass lawns and pretty houses of wood, brick or concrete with characteristic porches give these new homes the atmosphere of the garden city.

Perched as it is high on the hill, with the sparkling water of the harbour close by, one can easily argue that good has come out of the evil. But as one mutters the platitude the Canadian who drives the car points to the long, tramless hill that connects the place with the heart of the city, and tells you curtly:

"That's called Hungry Hill."

"Why Hungry Hill?"

"It's so long that a man dies of hunger before he can get home from his office."

IV

The social side of the visit followed.

The Prince went from the devastated area, and from his visit to some of the people who were already housed in their new homes, through the attractive residential streets of Halifax to the Waegwoltic Club.

This club is altogether charming, and one of the most perfect places of recreation I have seen. The club-house is a low, white rambling building set among trees and the most perfect of lawns. It has really beautiful suites of rooms, including a dancing hall and a dining-room. From its broad verandah a steep grass slope drops down to the sea water of one of the harbour arms. Many trees shade the slope and the idling paths on it, and through the trees shines the water, which has an astonishing blueness.

At the water's edge is a bathing place, with board rafts and a high skeleton diving platform. Here are boys and girls, looking as though they were posing for Harrison Fisher, diving, or lolling in the vivid sun on the plank rafts.

With its bright sea, on which are canoes and scarlet sailed yachts, the vivid green of its grass slopes under the superb trees, the Waegwoltic Club is idyllic. It is the dream of the perfect holiday place come true.

Quite close to it is another club of individuality. It is a club without club-house that has existed in that state for over sixty years.

This is the Studley Quoit Club, which the Prince visited after he had lunched at the Waegwoltic. Its premises are made up of a quoit field, a fence and some trees, and the good sportsmen, its members, as they showed His Royal Highness round, pointed solemnly to a fir to which a telephone was clamped, and said:

"That is our secretary's office."

A table under a spruce was the dining-room, a book of cuttings concerning the club on a desk was the library, while a bench against a fence was the smoking lounge. It is a club of humour and pride, that has held together with a genial and breezy continuity for generations. And it has two privileges, of which it is justly proud: one is the right to fly the British Navy ensign, gained through one of its first members, an admiral; the other is that its rum punch yet survives in a dry land.

The Prince's visit to such a gathering of sportsmen was, naturally, an affair of delightful informality. There was a certain swopping of reminiscences of the King, who had also visited the club, and a certain dry attitude of awe in the President, who, in speaking of the honours the Prince had accepted just before leaving England, said that though the members of the Studley Club felt competent to entertain His Royal Highness as a Colonel of the Guards, as the Grand Master of Freemasons, or even, at a pinch, as a King's Counsel, they felt while in their earthly flesh some trepidation in offering hospitality to a Brother of the Trinity—a celestial office which, the President understood, the Prince had accepted prior to his journey.

It was a happy little gathering, a relief, perhaps, from set functions, and the Prince entered fully into the spirit of the occasion. He drank the famous punch, and signed the Club roll, showing great amusement when some one asked him if he were signing the pledge.

On leaving this quaint club he came in for a cheery mobbing; men and women crowded round him, flappers stormed his car in the hope of shaking hands, while babies held up by elders won the handclasp without a struggle.

A crowded day was closed by a yet more crowded reception. It was an open reception of the kind which I believe I am right in saying the Prince himself was responsible for initiating on this trip. It was a reception not of privileged people bearing invitations, but of the whole city.

The whole city came.

Citizens of all ages and all occupations rolled up at Government House to meet His Royal Highness. They filled the broad lawn in front of the rather meek stone building, and overflowed into the street. They waited wedged tightly together in hot and sunny weather until they could take their turn in the endless file that was pushing into the house where the Prince was waiting to shake hands with them.

It was a gathering of every conceivable type of citizen. Silks and New York frocks had no advantage over gingham and "ready to wear." Judge's wife and general's took their turn with the girl clerk from the drug store and their char lady's daughter. Workers still in their overalls, boys in their shirtsleeves, soldiers and dockside workers and teamsters all joined in the crowd that passed for hours before the Prince.

At St. John he had shaken hands with some 2,000 people in such a reception as this, at Halifax the figure could not have been less, and it was probably more. He shook hands with all who came, and had a word with most, even with those admirable but embarrassing old ladies (one of whom at least appeared at each of these functions) who declared that, having lived long enough to see the children of two British rulers, they were anxious that he should lose no time in giving them the chance of seeing the children of a third.

It was an astonishing spectacle of affable democracy, and in effect it was perhaps the happiest idea in the tour. The popularity of these "open to all the town" meetings was astonishing. "The Everyday People" whom the Prince had expressed so eager a desire to see and meet came to these receptions in such overwhelming numbers that in large cities such as Toronto, Ottawa and the like it was manifestly impossible for him to meet even a fraction of the numbers.

Yet this fact did not mar the receptions. The people of Canada understood that he was making a real attempt at meeting as many of them as was humanly possible, and even those who did not get close enough to shake his hand were able to recognize that his desire was genuine as his happiness in meeting them was unaffected and friendly.

The public receptions were the result of an unstudied democratic impulse, and the Canadian people were of all people those able to appreciate that impulse most.