Sir Winston Churchill was in his final period as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in December 1951. He had returned to power in late October and would serve as PM until his final retirement from politics in 1955.
In December of 1951, learning that Canada’s Secretary of State for External Affairs, Lester Pearson, was in England, the great man invited the Canadian to lunch at Chequers, the famous country home of Britain’s PMs.
Little did Pearson know that when he arrived for lunch that historic day that the song Rule Britannia would be discussed. I’ll let Mr. Pearson, through his memoirs, tell the rest of the story.
Winston reminded Mike to pass on to Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent that our country should continue to embrace its historic connections to Britain. “In this connection,” Mike recalled, “he was very disappointed by a recent move in Canadian policy. I wondered what it could be….to discover that it was merely an order by the Minister of National Defence that the official anthem of the Royal Canadian Navy was to be ‘Vive la Canadienne’ and not ‘Rule Britannia.’ I attached no particularly significance to this gesture, whether national or sexual, to Canadian unity. But Sir Winston was quite distressed by the demotion of ‘Rule Britannia,’ whose verses he then recited.”
Winston asked Mike to carry his musical concerns directly to PM St. Laurent. Pearson said he would, and then diplomatically forgot about the whole thing.
Until Prime Minister Churchill arrived in Ottawa three years later, that is.
In a panic, Mike remembered his conversation with him about ‘Rule Britannia', and feared Canada’s distinguished visitor might raise the issue with his boss. So, Mike got to work. He contacted his friend, the Minister of Defence, and arranged for ‘Rule Britannia’ to be played as Winston entered the hall for a dinner in his honour.
“The band,” Mike wrote, “to the surprise of everyone, but amid great applause, struck up ‘Rule Britannia,’ Our famous guest was delighted. It may have been my imagination but I will swear he winked at me as I stood applauding below him.”
And, no, ‘Rule Britannia’ wasn’t reinstated as Canada’s official naval song, but Winston never knew.
It represented Pearsonian diplomacy at its best.[caption id="attachment_1604503" align="alignleft" width="253"]
(L-R): Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, UK Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, UK Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Lester Pearson, Rockcliffe Airport, Ottawa, June 29, 1954.[/caption]Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.