George Parkin

For a farm boy from New Brunswick, George Parkin did pretty well for himself. In his dotage, he once advised a Canadian Rhodes scholar always to travel first class “for the sake of the people one meets.” That’s what Parkin did—always travelled first class, making sure to meet the right people along the way. William Christian, a professor of political science at the University of Guelph, has described George Parkin’s journey in a biography entitled Parkin: Canada’s Most Famous Forgotten Man.

In a conventionally distinguished career, Parkin was, among other things, principal of Upper Canada College and organizing secretary of the Rhodes Trust (which finances and administers Rhodes scholarships). He was a leading and passionate proponent of the virtues of the British Empire. He knew the great and the good the world over. He dined with presidents and prime ministers (Christian records, for example, his lunch with President Theodore Roosevelt on January 5, 1903). Toward the end of his life, he was given a knighthood by a grateful King George V.

The beginnings did not suggest future eminence. George Parkin was born in Salisbury, New Brunswick, in 1846, the last of John and Elizabeth Parkin’s 13 children. He spent his childhood on his parents’ farm on the banks of the Petitcodiac River. At 16, he went to Saint John to study at normal school. A year later, he was teaching on the island of Campobello. A year after that, in 1864, he enrolled at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. In 1867, with a magna cum laude degree in his pocket, he became headmaster of the high school in the northern New Brunswick town of Bathurst. By the time he got to Bathurst, his social conscience and moral urges were on fire. William Christian writes that, for Parkin, “the central mission of public figures … was to make the poor happy by making them better people.” Parkin decided that the poor of Bathurst would be better and happier if they did not drink, and he campaigned for total prohibition. Meanwhile, he found God. He read the bible and went to church regularly.

In 1871, he was back in Fredericton as principal of the high school. “As headmaster of the high school,” writes Christian, “Parkin was eligible for admission to the upper reaches of good society. He was educated, personable, eloquent and hardworking.” Parkin renewed his acquaintance with Fredericton’s Anglican bishop, Bishop Medley. Some time later, Bishop Medley suggested to his protégé that he spend a year at Oxford, Medley’s alma mater, partly at the Bishop’s expense. On September 23, 1873, Parkin set sail from Halifax for England. Oxford was now to be added to God as one of the enduring themes of Parkin’s life.

Parkin studied in England for just a year. He displayed an enormous ability to make friends with people of influence. He cultivated Edward Thring, headmaster of Uppingham School and a famous educator (Parkin later wrote a biography of Thring), and Alfred Milner, who was to become a leading colonial administrator. And it was in those few months at Oxford that Parkin fell in love; the object of his affections was the idea of imperial federation. On May 8, 1874, he rose at the Oxford Union, the university’s debating club, and proposed “that in the opinion of this house a closer union than at present exists between England and her colonies is essential.” William Christian writes, “The difference between Parkin and most other advocates of closer imperial ties was that Parkin made the idea the centre of his life’s work.” The trinity that was to rule Parkin’s life was now complete—God, Oxford and empire.

In September 1874, Parkin returned to Fredericton and resumed his job as a headmaster. In 1878, with his patron Bishop Medley officiating, he married Annie Fisher, a former student twelve years his junior. It was not to be a happy marriage. George Parkin loved God, Oxford and the empire more than he loved Annie. She was, at best, fourth on the list. In the first years of his marriage, he travelled widely, in Canada and abroad, proselytizing for empire, at the financial and emotional expense of his family. Christian writes, “Over the years, though Parkin loved his wife, he regularly put his ambition and his idealism ahead of her needs … Parkin’s greatness was built on Annie’s hardship and suffering.”

In July 1886, Parkin gave a speech to a meeting of the Imperial Federation League in London. “He felt the exultation that comes to an orator who has established an intimate bond with his audience and captivates them with his effortless mastery of his subject.” His speech was a big success, and now he was in demand. By 1888, he had decided to get out of Fredericton’s “rut of accepted mediocrity or inferiority” and seek a new life in England, leaving his family behind, for the moment at least. First, there was to be a speaking trip that would take him around the world preaching “the spiritual unity of the English-speaking peoples as a force for good.” He resigned his Fredericton headmastership, and was surprised that no one seemed upset that he was leaving. “Parkin decided that he had probably overestimated the regard in which he had been held.”

Once in England, Parkin lived on the generosity of rich supporters of imperial federation. He worked on the authorized biography of Thring, wrote newspaper columns, spoke at schools extolling the British Empire and lectured at working men’s clubs. But Parkin’s finances were precarious: “Another day, another debt,” writes Christian of this period. It was his wife, back in New Brunswick, far from the glittering centre of Empire, who suffered most. “Annie’s condition deteriorated … The strain of being left alone for long periods and finding her family chronically in debt was proving too much.”

In 1895, Parkin took the job of principal of Upper Canada College in Toronto. His family joined him there. The college, although demoralized and in financial trouble at this point in its history, offered an influential platform for his ideas: “he taught his charges about the greatness of the empire, the majesty of the Queen, the tales of British daring on land and sea.” After six years, Parkin had become a “major force in Canadian public life.” But, by 1901, Annie had had enough. She took the younger children and walked out, an action “still talked about in hushed tones in the family decades later.” Annie did not go back to New Brunswick; she rented a house in the Kensington district of London.

In 1902, Cecil Rhodes died. Rhodes had been a major political and business figure in colonial South Africa, amassing a fortune. His famous will established the Rhodes scholarships, designed to bring young men from America and the British colonies to study together at Oxford University “in the hope that friendships made at Oxford would foster greater understanding between the future leaders of the English-speaking world.” Parkin, famously committed to the supremacy of the English-speaking world, was hired to implement the scholarship plan. Once more, he left teaching and Canada in haste, and moved to England. “For the next eighteen years,” writes Christian, “… Parkin would have his perfect job, one where he didn’t have to keep God, the empire, and Oxford separate.” He was indefatigable. He cajoled Oxford colleges into receiving the new scholars. He promoted the notion of Oxford as “the great Imperial University,” although “that was not every Oxonian’s understanding of the university’s mission.” He travelled the world, negotiating suitable local selection procedures. “No one could have done more than Parkin to set the scholarships going. He had dedication, energy, tact, charm, contacts, skill at bringing people together,” writes Christian. All the while, Parkin continued to proselytize for imperial federation.

In England, George resumed married life with Annie. In 1911, his favourite daughter, Maude, married William Grant, whom she had met when he was teaching at Upper Canada College (and who later, following in his father-in-law’s footsteps, became principal of the college). “With you beside me,” wrote Grant in the letter to Maude proposing marriage, “I know that we can do ten times as much for Canada.” Maude was to be the mother of the illustrious philosopher George Parkin Grant (also the subject of a biography by William Christian) and grandmother of Michael Ignatieff. In 1915, Alice, another of Parkin’s daughters, married Vincent Massey, a future governor general. In 1920, George Parkin was knighted, and retired from the Rhodes Trust. In 1922, he died, at the age of 76. Annie, now Lady Parkin, moved back to Toronto. There, no doubt with a satisfaction long-deferred, “she enjoyed considerable social prominence … and knew most of the important families.”

Who was George Parkin? He was a dreamer, a Victorian romantic, a striver. He was a man born in a backwater of New Brunswick who, near the end of his life, was handed a knighthood in Buckingham Palace. That’s a journey! Was he a great Canadian, someone of large achievement to be admired, an important part of Canadian history, a man whose story is worth telling in detail? William Christian certainly thinks so. But Christian’s biography, perhaps without intending to do so, shows Parkin to be self-righteous, pompous, narrow-minded, excessively ambitious, an arriviste, a professional protégé, a manipulator of persons. It shows him to be a particularly poor husband, always placing himself and his career ahead of his wife, and that is no trivial indictment. And it shows Parkin to be a racist, celebrating the white race at the expense of others, although Christian passes over that matter very quickly. In 1912, in a speech to the Royal Geographical Society upon becoming president, Parkin said that Canada should take comfort from its cold climate because it discouraged blacks from settling there. “You cannot get a Negro population permanently to stand thirty-five degrees below zero.” (To be fair, Parkin worked hard to make sure that American blacks were not excluded from the Rhodes scholar selection process.)

Christian’s biography, mostly admiring, breathlessly so in some places, faithfully chronicles Parkin’s life in detail. It will take its rightful place on the bookshelves of university libraries, but will not appeal to the general reader. It would have been more interesting had it explored the contradictions in Parkin’s character and life and their significance. Parkin was a New Brunswick farm boy who became a member of the world English-speaking establishment. He ignored his wife, but became the patriarch of one of Canada’s great families. His great personal ambition was cloaked in fine rhetoric about the general good. What do these dissonances tell us about the man and his time, about any man and any time?

At the end of his biography, Christian asks: “Why, today, is Parkin unknown and why are the values he held so passionately so out of favour?” The answer, Christian suggests, can be found in his grandson’s famous book, Lament for a Nation, in which George Grant “celebrated the noble but failed vision of his grandfather.” That vision was of “a Canada that was qualitatively different from the individualism and materialism of the United States, … part of an empire that was a spiritual force for good in the world.” But perhaps Parkin is unknown because he was only an unattractive bit player in history, and perhaps his values are out of favour because we now know that empire, rather than being “a spiritual force for good in the world,” is exploitative, oppressive and racist. These are possibilities not acknowledged by Christian. The subtitle of Christian’s book about Parkin is Canada’s Most Famous Forgotten Man. Famous? In his time, so it seems. Forgotten? In our time, without a doubt, perhaps for good reason.

A few years ago, I was raising money in Canada for Oxford as part of an international fundraising campaign. We eventually came up with enough to endow the Lester Pearson Chair in International Relations (Pearson attended Oxford from 1920 to 1923), but it was not easy. On one occasion, I visited the chief executive officer of one of Canada’s great public companies and asked for a contribution. “Why would we give to Oxford?” he said. “Oxford’s a foreign university.” Parkin would have found this comment incomprehensible.

Times have changed.