The notoriously absent-minded Arthur Meighen was in Vancouver on this date in 1952 where he quite literally missed the boat.
Meighen was in town to participate in meetings of the Canadian Bar Association, slated to be held in Victoria. Delegates were being taken to Vancouver Island aboard the ferry Princess Patricia. A few minutes into their journey one of the crew members noticed that an elderly man had been left behind and was still standing on the dock. It turns out the man was the former Prime Minister of Canada.
I’ll let the Vancouver Province tell the rest of the story.
“Somebody radioed the skipper and with a snort of her whistle the Princess boat churned to the pier and the Rt. Hon. Mr. Meighen and his party came aboard. ‘He didn't even look perturbed!’ said a CPR policeman, who watched the elder statesman go up the gangplank,” the Province reported. “Mr. Meighen’s trip with the Canadian Bar Association convention to Victoria will be a little shorter than his second political voyage as Prime Minister but not very much. He lasted only 65 hours in June, 1926, when his government was turned out in a constitutional row.”
Finally, it would seem, Meighen’s ship had come in. Or, Meighen’s ship had finally sailed for good.
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.