King Over the Water

Over the teacups at Canada House, off London's Trafalgar Square, William Lyon Mackenzie King last week told 14 Canadian correspondents that he was happy about his trip to the Empire Conference, about the outcome, about everything.

Canada's Prime Minister had every right to be happy: his stand against Big Power politics had prevailed at the Conference (TIME, May 22), and he went home with heightened prestige.

Modern Mr. Pepys. For clam-like Mackenzie King, the trip had been both a success and an exciting adventure. At the palatial Dorchester Hotel, his London day began at 9, when he personally answered his personal mail, ended at 11, when he made his daily entry in the personal diary he has kept faithfully for 25 years. He had much to record. There had been two luncheons at Buckingham Palace: a formal affair during which he sat near Princess Elizabeth, and a private meal with the King & Queen. He spent a weekend with Churchill at Chequers, talked personally with soldiers like Eisenhower and Montgomery, politicians like Foreign Secretary Eden and Dominions

Secretary Viscount Cranborne. He met Australia's bluff John Curtin for the first time.

The supreme moment came in Parliament's gilt-crested Royal Gallery last fortnight, when King addressed members of the Houses of Lords and Commons. He had worked and reworked his speech with the little pencil stub he habitually uses. The address was, for him, an unusually succinct statement of his view that each Dominion must be free to go its own way within a loose Commonwealth framework. But it was no orator's triumph; Mackenzie King's drone had its usual soporific effect on his audience.

The Beautiful Meal. Then King went visiting, first privately to an R.C.A.F. bomber group whose squadrons bear the nostalgic names Snowy Owl, Alouette, Thunderbird and Goose. Later, with Canadian High Commissioner Vincent Massey and a retinue of correspondents in attendance, he ate an open-air lunch at a Canadian army camp. A foresighted quartermaster had sent to London for lobster to perk up the army menu. Cabled the Toronto Daily Star's Fred Griffin: ". . . the most beautiful meal I have eaten since leaving Canada nearly two years ago." The Prime Minister reviewed Canadian troops, made no speeches. In 1941, when the Canadians overseas were edgy and impatient under their long inaction, he addressed them and was roundly booed. This time the troops knew that action could not be long delayed. Cabled the suspicious correspondent of the King-hating Toronto Evening Telegram: "C.O.'s had been primed to caution their men . . . to be on their best behavior. . . ." The only grouse heard from the ranks was the not-so-cryptic remark of a hard-bitten private with no love for dress parades: "I wonder if they can read our thoughts."

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