Canadian diplomat and future Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson was having a really bad day. It was 1939, the Second World War was only a month old and Pearson – stationed at Canada’s High Commission in London – turned to his diary to complain about his boss, Prime Minister Mackenzie King.
He did so because PM King was continually sending telegrams marked “top secret” to His Majesty the King.
I’ll let him tell the rest of the story directly.
“Is our PM breaking up?” Pearson wrote in his diary. “He sent a super-sealed double-enclosed letter to the High Commission marked ‘Secret-Urgent-Most Immediate.’ We thought it had information on Canada’s war plans, or wheat policy, or something equally important but it turned out to be the copy of a telegram of thanks sent by Prince Felix of Luxembourg to the PM of Canada on his departure from the Dominion. We can’t get letters or cables from Ottawa on important matters but can get that kind of bumph!”
Decades later, in his memoirs, Pearson continued the story.
“I once received a very tactful personal message from (King George’s private secretary) enquiring whether we could not gently put some kind of check on Mr. King’s ‘cable verbosity’ in messages to Buckingham Palace. He said that the King had recently received an eleven-page telegram from Mr. King, in most secret cipher. This meant hours of work to decode it by hand, to say nothing of the risk of prejudicing the cipher by using it for such a long message. After all this work they found there was nothing in the message that could not have been sent in a single page of ordinary code.
I told my friends at the Palace that we had had similar difficulty, but that my diplomacy was not, I feared, equal to the task of drafting a message from Canada House telling a Prime Minister not to be so verbose without offending him. I did, however, try to compose a tactful telegram suggesting that prime ministerial message which did not require a high war-security classification should be sent in ordinary code.
The High Commissioner (Vincent Massey), however, who had to see and sign all messages, decided that this one might better be filed than dispatched. No doubt he was right.”caption id="attachment_530486" align="alignnone" width="280"
Lester B. Pearson/captionArthur 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.
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.