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Georges and Pauline Vanier
Georges and Pauline Vanier follows their lives and travels across the world - from Canadian military life to the League of Nations, from the inner circles of British government to their harrowing escape from Nazi-occupied France - detailing their disappointments and triumphs during social and political turbulence. With insight and sympathy, Mary Frances Coady tells their dramatic personal story. Revealing their remarkably vibrant personalities, she details the couple's support of the French resistance as well as Georges Vanier's pleas for the Canadian government to accept refugees fleeing Hitler's horrors and his effort to broaden immigration policy. She also recounts the importance of their religious convictions, their controversial standing among Quebecers, and their early advocacy of official bilingualism. An invigorating and well-told tale of their lasting legacies, Georges and Pauline Vanier is the definitive account of the enduring contributions the Vaniers made to the world and to their country.
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Georges and Pauline Vanier
Few figures have had as lasting an influence on Canadian institutions, history, politics, and culture as Georges and Pauline Vanier. Georges (1888-1967), a decorated military officer, became a professional diplomat, the first Canadian ambassador to France, and the first French-Canadian governor general of Canada. Pauline (1898-1991), a respected humanitarian, Privy Council member, and university chancellor, shared her husband's responsibilities and helped shape his thoughts on foreign and domestic affairs.Georges and Pauline Vanier follows their lives and travels across the world - from Canadian military life to the League of Nations, from the inner circles of British government to their harrowing escape from Nazi-occupied France - detailing their disappointments and triumphs during social and political turbulence. With insight and sympathy, Mary Frances Coady tells their dramatic personal story. Revealing their remarkably vibrant personalities, she details the couple's support of the French resistance as well as Georges Vanier's pleas for the Canadian government to accept refugees fleeing Hitler's horrors and his effort to broaden immigration policy. She also recounts the importance of their religious convictions, their controversial standing among Quebecers, and their early advocacy of official bilingualism.An invigorating and well-told tale of their lasting legacies, Georges and Pauline Vanier is the definitive account of the enduring contributions the Vaniers made to the world and to their country.
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THE END
The former mayor of Ottawa, Charlotte Whitton, led a movement to have Pauline Vanier appointed to be her husband’s successor, but this effort was short-lived. Prime Minister Pearson paid tribute to the important role she had played throughout the previous eight years and considered her briefly as a possible candidate, but because of the uncertainty surrounding his minority government, he decided against it.
Pauline left Rideau Hall a month after her husband’s death, two weeks after her sixty-ninth birthday. Sergeant Chevrier and his brown mongrel “Friday” joined her; together they moved into a brick townhouse at 27 Redpath Place in
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END OF WAR, BEGINNING OF POST-WAR
By the spring of 1945, the Parisianbeau mondewas beginning to make a sparkling comeback, but the Vaniers took little part in the fashionablesoirées.Their social contacts were rather more downscale and prosaic: resistance friends such as Elizabeth de Miribel came regularly to their hotel suite to take baths (the hotel had hot water between certain hours of the day), and for the diplomatic circle they held simplified “cocktail receptions” rather than dinners. They also mingled from time to time with the Allied Command’s “big mukamuks,”¹ as Pauline called the military’s top brass.
Sometimes Pauline found herself a
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ONLY TO SERVE
On the morning of 15 September 1959, a car led by three police motorcycles pulled up slowly to the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. The governor general designate, Georges P. Vanier, stepped out of the car wearing the gold-braided dress uniform of the Royal 22nd. He walked with a cane, his shoulders hunched, a resolute expression covering decades of struggle and pain. When he reached the podium before an assembled guard of honour, he stood to his full height and saluted, as straight and smart as the twentysix- year-old who had donned an army uniform in 1915. The sound of a
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UNFIT FOR SERVICE
War is full of grim irony. In the case of Georges Vanier, the irony was that the wound he received in the thick of the battlefield was relatively minor, the revolver strapped to his side preventing the bullet from entering his abdomen, whereas the wound he received in the relative safety of the medical sidelines changed him permanently.
The Vanier family on Dorchester Street in Montreal received the news from Tremblay by telegram ten days later: GEORGE WOUNDED LEGS HOSPITAL DOING WELL. The basic facts were all there, and the details, more or less, would be filled in as the
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GENTLE AND DEAR SOUL
Four-year-old Georgie Vanier, ringleted and bedecked in lace, gazes out from the brocade chair on which he stands like a little aristocrat, as if his ancestors were of the highest nobility and his own destiny paved with glory.
The year is 1892. The brocade chair belongs to a Montreal studio photographer. The blonde ringlets and frilly attire reflect the waning years of the nineteenth century, the last vestige of the Victorian age. Indeed, Queen Victoria has just entered the final decade of her long reign. The Dominion of Canada is twenty-five years old, and Montreal is celebrating its two hundred
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THE FIGHTING FRENCH
As Britain stood on the brink, facing the enemy ranged on the coast across the Channel, the Canadian minister to France tried to create a small centre of normalcy in the midst of uncertainty and fear. Georges set up a makeshift office in the Sun Life building beside Canada House in London, and with a diplomat’s practical instinct, he sent a cable to Ottawa, asking “that a substantial indemnity be granted without delay to all personnel to purchase clothes and other indispensable articles,”¹ since they had all arrived with few possessions. He and Pauline stayed at the home of their
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SAD COMMAND
Georges knew, of course, that while he rested in the soothing confines of the English convalescent home, the 22nd had moved south from Flanders to the vicinity of the Somme River, near the town of Albert. Fighting had been fierce during the summer and early fall of 1916, with massive killing on both sides. He had heard about the 22nd’s moment of glory in capturing the village of Courcelette, north of Albert. They had advanced upon the village in successive waves, over a welter of shell holes and shattered trenches. They had fought their way house by house, stepping past
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