“I was at the centre of the Empire which is my religion.”
– MATTHEW HALTON in the Lethbridge Herald, October 31, 1929
ON THE LAST DAY OF SEPTEMBER 1929, the Canadian Pacific steamship Melita sailed into the Irish Sea on the final stretch of its passage to Liverpool. Matt, now twenty-five years old, strained for his first sight of the English coast. It was a time of confused emotions for him: hope and anticipation mingling with apprehension. “I was asking myself a few questions,” he later wrote. “Would I find the England of my dreams? I wondered. Would I thrill standing before the shrines of England’s history as I had thrilled in anticipation for years? … Would I be as ardent an Imperialist when I came to know the English at first hand instead of from a distance?”1
Matt had never previously travelled more than twenty kilometres outside Alberta. Now he was landing in the heart of the British Empire, in the port from which his parents had departed for Canada and to which his brother and uncle had come to fight for king and country.
It is tempting to project onto Matt the archetypal literary image of the youth from the provinces seeking his fortune in the imperial capital. A Julien Sorel, for example, the romantic dreamer of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, whose quest for power and status leads him to the sophisticated salons of Paris. Matt’s ambitions for the future seemed equally boundless. While still aboard the Melita, he wrote to Jean, “I hope that future brings education, enlightenment, pleasure, money and honor – if I can couple the last two in the same phrase.”2 Yet Matt hardly fit the mould of a callow, unproven youth. He was already articulate, extraordinarily well read, and better versed in British culture than most Britons. And with some measurable achievements to his credit, he had few of the rough edges of Stendhal’s hero.
Matt’s first months in England were intoxicating. He registered at King’s College, University of London, because it was one of the few institutions at the time that offered a journalism course. The main college building lay between the Thames Embankment and an arched gateway that led to London’s venerable thoroughfare, the Strand. On his first day, Matt walked out of the gate and turned right. Suddenly he heard the chimes of St. Clement Danes, the Wren church a block away down the Strand. The bells were playing “Oranges and Lemons Say the Bells of St. Clement’s,” the nursery tune he remembered so well from his childhood. He walked further east, past the newspaper offices and crowded pubs of Fleet Street where his hero, Sir Philip Gibbs, worked. Turning back in the other direction, he saw men in top hats and women in expensive furs stepping out of their chauffeured Rolls-Royces in front of the Savoy hotel. At the other end of the Strand was Trafalgar Square, where he gazed for the first time at the statue of Nelson and the imposing vista from Whitehall to Westminster. As he described the moment later, it seemed almost an epiphany. “I was at the centre of the Empire which is my religion.”3
There were no signs of imperial grandeur where Matt lodged, a fifth-floor garret in a poorly kept student boarding house north of Hyde Park. It held one pleasant surprise: two English students, both girls, who shared a room on the same floor and became his good friends. Kathleen Gordon and Helen Burgess were intrigued that anyone could come from a place called Pincher Creek. At first they were mildly condescending toward the young colonial. They found his fervour for Empire passé, his unrestrained enthusiasm for things British rather gauche.4 Nor could they understand why he felt his soul-searching about religion to be so daring when atheism was no longer controversial in their circles. Despite those concerns, a long and affectionate relationship developed. Matt would drop by their room for tea to unburden himself of ideas and experiences and to talk (sometimes tediously, they felt) about his love for Jean.5
The two young women became Matt’s companions on excursions in and around London and on frequent visits to the theatre. From cheap seats in the upper gallery, they were lucky enough to see John Gielgud’s Hamlet and Richard II during his brilliant debut season at the Old Vic. Matt was struck by Gielgud’s virtuosity and mellifluous voice. He also attended other productions starring such leading British actors as Cedric Hardwicke, Fay Compton, and Sybil Thorndike. “For the lover of the theatre,” he wrote, “the first few weeks in London are days of almost pure rapture.”6 He also discovered ballet. Kathleen Gordon, who later would become a director of the Royal Academy of Dance, said that she had to drag him to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, considered the most exciting dance company of the era. She said Matt ended up loving the performance and became a classical ballet enthusiast.7 Afterwards, thanks to Gordon’s connections, the two were able to go backstage to meet two of the company’s greatest ballerinas, Tamara Karsavina and Anna Pavlova.
Another new interest was equally surprising. At school and at the University of Alberta, Matt had shown no interest in team sports of any kind. But within a few weeks of his arrival in London he tried out for the King’s College rowing eight and soon was involved in competitive racing. Rowing for Matt became a fusion of poetry and sport. He loved being in a racing shell and hearing the plash of blades on water as eight men strained in perfect rhythm for speed and power.8 He was judged good enough to win a place in the college first eight that competed in the university championships.
Matt’s romanticism about rowing on the Thames was reflected in a fanciful description of one of his crew’s practice runs from Hammersmith to Tower Bridge. “Then we passed the Parliament Buildings, and I wondered suddenly if it wasn’t a strange dream I was having, instead of actually rowing down the Thames.… Surely this was the Athabaska River and I was alone in a canoe, and these other figures with me were but shadows, and that thin mist was Alberta haze.… Then the idea reversed itself, and it seemed then that the other part was a dream, that I had never lived in Alberta or paddled down the Athabaska, that those places didn’t exist at all.… Then a voice boomed: ‘Wake up there, five!’ and I started in surprise, and Tower Bridge passed over my head, and I caught the odor of fish from Billingsgate fish market, and I knew this was really London River.”9 There was no romanticism, however, during another practice row. The college shell capsized one day in a heavy mist after the cox swung the rudder to avoid colliding with a large boat. Matt and the rest of the crew had to swim to shore in cold, dirty water.10
Long and breathless letters to Jean chronicled Matt’s infatuation with imperial London. In November, he went early to Whitehall to get a good position to watch the Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph. He was thrilled to see royalty: Queen Mary with her head bowed and the Prince of Wales in his Guards uniform. Near them stood Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, Opposition leader Stanley Baldwin, and David Lloyd George, Britain’s World War One leader and a heroic figure for Matt. Opposite the politicians, a line of Victoria Cross winners were “staring ahead with hard, unseeing, remembering eyes.”11 The two-minute silence played on Matt’s imagination. Despite the huge crowd, “I heard not the slightest sound except the sad, measured tolling of the bells.… I know that I heard the beating of wings, and that in the light mist I could see the marching silhouettes of the Legion of the Dead.”12 Later, he wrote: “Lord, Jean, patriotism may not be fashionable, but when you stand here in Whitehall, and realize what a mighty undertaking this little island has set on foot, you cannot help being patriotic.”13
What helped Matt develop a more nuanced view of Britain and its people was a rare experience of the two Englands – the England of the landed gentry and the England of the working class from which his own parents came. He had left Canada with letters of introduction from Senator W.A. Buchanan, the publisher of the Lethbridge Herald who had mentored his early reporting efforts. One of the letters was to Nancy Astor, the first woman to sit in the House of Commons and a controversial figure in British politics. American by birth but married into the British aristocracy, Lady Astor was glamorous, forceful, idealistic, and a fervent advocate of Empire.14 Her interest in Canada began in World War One when she and her husband allowed a hospital to be built for wounded Canadian soldiers at Cliveden, their country estate. The hospital became a passionate involvement for her, and she later turned over another part of the grounds for a cemetery for the forty Canadians and two nursing sisters who died there.
Matt first met Lady Astor in the House of Commons after she got him into the Strangers Gallery to watch a debate. The earnest young man from Alberta was soon invited to tea at the Astors’ London house in St. James Square, then to a weekend at Cliveden, where the Astors would assemble leading politicians, diplomats, and writers to party, hunt, and stroll in their magnificent gardens. The Cliveden mansion was one of England’s great country homes. Overlooking the River Thames in Buckinghamshire, it was built in the style of a seventeenth-century Italian palace; copies of Renaissance sculptures lined the approaches and rose from an artificial lake. A female statue representing Canada, said to resemble Lady Astor herself, watched over the war cemetery.
Matt, like other guests, would have been welcomed by the butler and escorted to his room by one or more of the dozens of service staff. In a letter to Jean, Matt seemed awestruck by his surroundings and self-conscious about the impression he would make. “For the first time in my life, I realize that there were heights of culture which are forever unattainable to me. Thanks to mother’s far-sighted training, and to my own self-training, I have had a poise that has carried me through all ranks of society … without embarrassment. But I must admit that I felt a bit rough before the positively exquisite grace with which Lord Astor and his sons know how to live.”15 Matt was equally fawning toward Lady Astor: “A most remarkable woman. She wants to take all the world to her breast and make it better and happier.”16 In an article for the Lethbridge Herald about her care for Canadian soldiers, he described her as “The Angel of Cliveden.”17 She would prove to be a useful friend and patron over the next decade.
Another invitation brought Matt into an entirely different world – the England of grimy industrial towns, of Bovril and fish and chips and betting on the football pools. He was invited to stay with Uncle Billy Halton and his wife, Ann, in Eccleston, close to the Lancashire town where his parents grew up. First the train took him to Wigan, the mill and coal-mining town whose poverty was later made infamous in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. The town was so dirty and smoky, Matt said, that a heavy rain left blobs of wet soot on his face.18 While waiting two hours for the bus to Eccleston, he wandered through rows of slum housing and concluded that the town was an “industrial hell where great wealth is produced at the cost of the stultification of the human soul.”19 When he got to Eccleston, he was happy to find that his relatives were better off than his parents were when they left England. He got on well with the family and felt comfortable in the cheerful working-class atmosphere that mirrored his own background. There was a sentimental excursion to his parents’ old house in Euxton, a visit to the Preston motorbike races, and walks down winding country lanes. The one irritant was that his strict Methodist family insisted he join them at church. On one occasion, he complained that he had to suffer through the “worst sermon I ever heard in my life, smashing all records for sanctimonious self-satisfaction, querulous smugness and platitudinous nothing.”20 After ten days in Eccleston, he was ready to return to his friends in London and the city’s wealth of sights and experiences. In an optimistic mood, he wrote to his parents: “I have no quarrel with life. It promises to be a very entertaining affair.”21
Matt’s one major disappointment in London was the King’s College journalism course. He found it had little to add to what he had already learned at the Gateway and freelancing for Alberta dailies. He boldly decided he was ready to become an instant foreign correspondent and once again Senator Buchanan gave him a break. Matt was told he could write a weekly column for the Lethbridge Herald under the rubric “Southern Alberta Student’s Impressions in England.” His early reports, largely about explorations in and around London, revealed his liking for poetic description. Walking in the forest around the old village of Burnham Beeches, for example, he described it as “almost the England of the Eighteenth Century, and earlier, where the immemorial winds whisper through dark and quiet woods.”22 His first reports enthusiastically portrayed the British Empire as a civilizing and beneficial influence on its peoples. If Matt was aware that British rule could also exploit and discriminate against its subjects, it was not evident in his writing at the time. He was even mildly critical of Britons who failed to appreciate “the creative genius and the constructive courage that made the Empire possible.”23
After his first six months in England, Matt began to write more about politics and social trends. He sent articles to the Winnipeg Free Press and the Calgary Albertan as well as the Lethbridge Herald. A greater polish and maturity in his writing was rewarded with more frequent bylines. He managed to get accredited to the House of Commons where listening to David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill for the first time “sends thrills up and down the spine.”24
A column about prominent younger MPS hinted at his approach to journalism in later years. It was elegantly written but highly opinionated. James Maxton, the leader of a small group of radical socialists, was described as “too whimsical and careless and good-natured to make full use of the vast political opportunities which lie to his hand.” The Conservative Edward Marjoribanks is “tall and commanding in appearance [as] he sweeps through the House of Commons as though it were created expressly to do him homage.” Another Conservative, Major Walter Elliott, fought in World War One: “And now he seems to sleep as he lounges in the gloomy atmosphere of the House to hear the age-old soporific shibboleths being bandied to and fro by the men who muddled the war and wasted the peace.” And on Megan Lloyd George: “We watch Miss Lloyd George carefully, not because she is the daughter of her father, but because she is almost the only young Liberal with any claim to intelligence and modernity.”25
Matt also wrote a dozen articles about European politics. Several included judgments he would later regret, such as his backing for an economic union between Germany and Austria that Adolph Hitler would achieve eight years later. There were also farsighted glimpses of the future, such as support for the idea of a United States of Europe, “the union that must come if Europe is to be saved from herself.”26
However, it was in social comment that Matt’s weekly columns were at their best. By his second year in London, he was less in awe of the British way of life and more inclined to criticize the country’s rigid class system. One article confessed that he had fallen into the British habit of judging people on the social scale as soon as they opened their mouths. “From the cockney of Bethnal Green to the titillating sounds of the Mayfair plutocracy … accent is the difference in England.”27 Unlike Canadians, he noted, the British feel quite comfortable pigeonholing people by accent. “Even for my ear, there are at least a dozen inflections of the London voice alone. You get so you can tell, for example, whether a voice is lower middle, a little better than lower middle, middle, or upper class with two or three degrees of the latter.”28
A Herald essay entitled “Peculiarly Un-British” was prompted by a report that a magistrate, condemning a foreign resident for robbery with assault, had opined: “This is a peculiarly un-British crime.” Matt noted four other occasions when magistrates, judges, or the press had used the words “peculiarly un-British” to describe a crime or misdemeanour. With mock amazement, he took aim at British hypocrisy:
Since crimes are occasionally committed, faults occasionally indulged in by the English, I must take it for granted, apparently, that all such unworthy proclivities are borrowed from less fortunate and less enlightened peoples.
The fact is, of course, that anything this people dislikes it calls “peculiarly un-British.” It is a label applied by the great and powerful middle class bourgeoisie to everything, in crime, in conduct, in ethics or in social convention that does not emanate from British conservation of action and tradition.…
No one loves and admires the British more than I do. And perhaps you may say that for me thus to belabor them even as I partake of their hospitality is peculiarly un-British! They are a people, to borrow a phrase applied to the French by a German writer … a people “magnifique et insupportable.”29
Matt was also exasperated by British ignorance about Canada and condescension toward its people. He resented being called a colonial, even when the term was used by those who meant no disrespect. On several occasions, asked if Canada would like to move toward self-government, he would politely explain that the BNA Act had largely achieved that. His time in Britain confirmed his pride in being Canadian but prompted some critical thoughts about Canada’s identity. Canadians were described as energetic and enterprising – qualities, Matt said, that “will take us far in the world’s race for wealth but will never build us the laborious edifice of a soul – and we still have our soul to build.”30 A touch of snobbery, of the kind that surfaced later in his life, crept into some of his writing. One article deplored the “low-brow” interests of the younger generation in North America: “Talk about sports models and jazz tunes, but don’t, for your life, mention Ibsen or Strindberg or Bergson.”31
In the summer of 1930, after winning a one-year extension of his IODE scholarship, Matt decided to abandon his journalism course at King’s and enrol in the London School of Economics (LSE). It was already the Age of Laski at the LSE, when the school’s reputation was increasingly tied to a small, bespectacled, and brilliant professor named Harold Laski. For more than twenty years, Laski championed a form of libertarian socialism that combined public ownership with maximum individual freedoms. Seemingly contradictory at times, Laski argued that state power should be limited but sufficient to guarantee equality of opportunity and everyone’s right to work, education, leisure, and health – none of which, he claimed, could be secured in a capitalist system. Laski’s lectures on the history of political ideas were the hottest ticket at the school. His wit and passion made even the driest subjects vivid and relevant. As the sociologist Ralph Miliband wrote, “His lectures taught much more than political science. They taught a faith that ideas mattered, that knowledge was important and its pursuit exciting.”32
Matt was as spellbound by Laski as any of the thousands of students (including future presidents and prime ministers such as Pierre Trudeau) who later attended the LSE. At twenty-six, Matt was already leaning toward socialism, motivated in part by his childhood poverty and bitterness over his father’s experience as a child labourer in Lancashire. Laski’s teachings gave his emotional leanings a reasoned framework. Laski believed that only systemic reform could level inequality, not revolutionary violence or Soviet-style communism.33 Matt came to share Laski’s skepticism about free enterprise and its potential to spread wealth beyond the privileged classes. For him, Laski became something of an idol and socialism an unshakable lifelong commitment. As Jean said much later, “Laski simply changed Matt’s thinking.”34
Despite being separated by an ocean, Jean remained central to Matt’s life. Every week throughout his two years in London, he would write at least three long letters to her. He said he thought of her constantly as if she was the music in the background of all his activities. There were outpourings of love, many of them cloying or insipid to an outside reader but no doubt deeply meaningful to the couple involved. Matt revelled in memories of their sexual encounters but was rarely more explicit than to say, “I can remember you gently, ever so gently, suddenly yielding …”35 As she had in Alberta, Jean continued to be the mother confessor for Matt’s anxieties and shortcomings. He told her of his occasional bouts of heavy drinking and his frustration at being unable to fulfil an ambition to write good poetry. The verses he sent her often lurched into clumsy lines that rarely scanned.
Matt’s desire to write poetry remained a curious obsession throughout his life. In one of his bleaker moods in London, he wrote that “mostly likely I shall go my way to the grave with my songs unsung, and I shall have written only vain nothings and journalese, pandering soullessly to the gods of the market-place.”36
His letters to Jean also provided clues to his relations with other women. He wrote that he was frequently torn between hedonism (“le vin est versé; il faut le boire!”)37 and a sterner philosophy of striving to improve himself and society. Before his departure for England, Matt and Jean had agreed that they should both be free to date others during their long separation.38 Occasionally wearing plus fours, and with his blond hair fashionably parted in the middle, Matt appears to have been an attractive figure to his women classmates. He was remarkably frank in telling Jean about his feelings toward many of them. Among his girlfriends was Mara, an aspiring novelist who “has the most colossal bosom I ever saw, and a perpetual grin”;39 Diana Marsden, “a refined and charming girl” from a wealthy family “who introduces me to many interesting people”;40 and Margaret, an actress with whom he “drank a little and danced a little” and felt “the first sharp stirring of longings which my peculiar morality bids me suppress.”41 There are suggestions that his relations may have gone beyond friendship with Louise “Lulu” Samuel, an attractive student with big sparkling eyes and a husky Tallulah Bankhead voice. There was also an evening “carousing, drinking and dancing” with Simone St. Cyr, after which Matt wrote cryptically: “Life became irresistible, and I prefer to leave the subject there.”42
In August 1930, Matt crossed the Channel to Zeebrugge in Belgium to begin a poor man’s version of the Grand Tour of Europe. Despite being in his habitual state of near bankruptcy, he figured he wouldn’t need more than five pounds for two weeks if he stayed in youth hostels and travelled third class. Accompanied by John Corner, a rowing friend from King’s, Matt went first to the battlefields of Flanders. He arrived at Ypres in time for the nightly memorial ceremony. Buglers emerged at eight p.m. to sound the Last Post at the Menin Gate, the huge monument looking down the blood-washed Menin Road. Along that road tens of thousands of Canadians lost their lives in battles that Matt had followed avidly as a boy: Hooge, Sanctuary Wood, St. Julien, Hill 61, Hellfire Corner. It was here in the Ypres Salient that Canadians held the line after French troops retreated.
A letter home to Pincher Creek reflected both revulsion against the scale of the sacrifice and a fierce pride in Canadian achievement. “After the last war,” he wrote, “one should probably be ashamed of patriotism, but these Belgians still speak of the Canadians with reverence.”43 A day later, in driving rain, Matt sloshed through the mud along the ridge at Passchendaele, where his uncle Seth had been killed. He then went to the Commonwealth war cemetery, where “the white marble headstones stretch away and away it seems, forever.”44 He found what he was looking for – Row A, Plot 11, Grave 20. He scattered poppies there beside Seth’s grave.45
From Flanders Matt backpacked to the Rhine Valley – to the country that would puzzle and obsess him for more than two decades. Germany was then at a turning point. The liberal Weimar Republic was beginning to founder, its legitimacy challenged by both the Nazis and the Communists. Millions were unemployed. In elections less than three weeks after Matt’s arrival, the Nazis surprised the world by becoming the second-largest party in the Reichstag.
At first, Matt and his friend John Corner were largely oblivious to the tensions. They stayed in a youth hostel beside the ruins of Schloss Reinfels, the second-oldest castle on the Rhine. The hostel was crowded with Wandervogel, members of the popular German youth movement that the Hitler Youth absorbed three years later. For four days, Matt ate, drank beer, and hiked with the young Germans in the valleys above the Rhine. As they marched they sang folk and patriotic songs such as “Die Wacht am Rhein” (“The Watch on the Rhine”) with its haunting refrain “The Rhine, the Rhine, the German Rhine,” and its call to avenge Germany’s enemies.46 Matt saw little that was alarming in the Wandervogel. He found them idealistic, tinged with melancholy, and “resolved to create a new Heaven and a new Earth” from the humiliating aftermath of World War One.47 He understood their anger over the 1919 Versailles Treaty that had stripped Germany of territory and imposed crippling reparations. “Who can blame the German people,” he wrote, “for hating a ‘peace’ treaty which viciously saddled one people with the disgrace and punishment for a war which was the fault of all people?”48 He had no idea where that hatred might lead until a few weeks later when the Nazi party made dramatic gains in the Reichstag election in September. Back in London, he wrote that “a fateful sense of brooding, like the sultry stillness before a storm, hangs over Germany … and I think it is fraught with significance for the nation’s future and for Europe’s.”49
Matt’s acute sense of history shadowed him as he travelled on to Alsace-Lorraine, the border region fought over by France and Germany for centuries. The French press at the time gave lurid headlines to a rally of twenty thousand German war veterans in Munich. Addressing the rally, Crown Prince Rupprecht pointed his sword toward France and declared, “Our enemy lies there.” Matt noted that there was a café de la revanche in some French towns after Alsace-Lorraine was occupied by the Germans in 1871. Now, he predicted, it would be Germany’s turn to try to recover the two provinces. “Anyone who thinks that Germany does not want revenge is sadly mistaken. Poor France, poor Germany!”50 However, European politics faded from his mind when he began a walking tour in the Swiss Alps. He revelled in being in the mountains again and climbed part way up the Jungfrau.
The tour ended in Paris, where Matt’s love affair with France began. A visit to Notre Dame made his childhood reading of Victor Hugo come alive. A visit to Versailles and a stroll through the Place de la Concorde brought back the excitement of reading about the Scarlet Pimpernel and, later, Carlyle’s epic The French Revolution. He found the Winged Victory in the Louvre to be “splendid and irresistible” and gazed in wonder at “the world-weary eyes of the Mona Lisa.”51 He found the outdoor cafés so much pleasanter than grimy London pubs and spent hours watching smart and pretty women pass by – more of them, he wrote Jean, than he’d ever seen before. He was pleased that his French was good enough to allow him to have real conversations and marvelled at the charm of the French language. What other language, he asked himself, would call a brassiere a “soutien-gorge,” literally a bosom-support? After only a few days in Paris, Matt embraced some of the clichés about the French: their “extraordinary Gallic vitality,” their frankness about sex, and their civilized appreciation of good food.52 He returned to London, broke, but full of ideas for his newspaper columns.
His last months in London were consumed by LSE studies, freelancing, and a busy social life. He was beginning to find the long separation from Jean unbearable and, despite the sophisticated pleasures of Europe, to feel nostalgic for Pincher Creek. Ever the sentimentalist, he wrote his younger brother, Seth, about childhood pursuits that they shared. “I’d like to go sleigh-riding on Kettle’s Hill, or skating at the Beaver Dam; or I’d like to be sitting with my feet dangling out of the back of Dad’s rig as it rattled up Main Street with only a few more parcels to deliver before going home to supper and Mother, and the good fire, and books, and dreams.”53
Again, it was his mentor, Senator Buchanan, who helped propel Matt’s career forward. Buchanan sent a sheaf of Matt’s best columns to his old friend Harry Hindmarsh, managing editor of the Toronto Daily Star. Hindmarsh was impressed; a job would be waiting for Matt upon his return to Canada.