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A Short History of the Area

Mayfair is a posh residential and commercial enclave with high-end shops and price tags to match. It is bound by Piccadilly and Oxford Street to the north and south and by Regent Street and Park Lane east and west. It owes its name to an annual spring fair that arrived here around 1686 from nearby Haymarket Street.

What was more or less a respectable rural fête soon acquired a dubious reputation. As early as 1708, officials complained it was a magnet for those who “meet to game and commit lewd and disorderly practices.” The fair persisted until the area’s developers and wealthy suburbanites put a halt to it in what may have been the world’s first — but certainly not last — case of NIMBYism.

Given the area’s location on the edge of town, it was inevitable that rural and urban lifestyles would clash here. Nowhere was London growing more rapidly in the 1700s than in the suburbs. As fairgoers enjoyed their last dances around the maypole, neighbouring fields were being ploughed up for six grand housing estates centred around large garden squares.

Sir Thomas Grosvenor (1655–1700), an aristocrat from Cheshire, controlled the largest of the developments that became known as the Grosvenor Estate. He obtained the property from his marriage to a girl who was only twelve. The rents from tenants on this land would eventually make Grosvenor’s descendents the richest family in Britain and ultimately dukes of Westminster in 1874.

The centrepiece of this new estate was Grosvenor Square, developed in 1725–31. It was here that London’s leading aristocrats lived in an exclusive enclave of style and privilege. In the early 1800s, the average household contained fourteen people, most of them servants. But by the close of the century professional parvenus began moving in, starting with a doctor. It was the beginning of the end for Mayfair’s grand homes and the wealthy families that occupied them.[1] During the Second World War, U.S. general Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969) set up his army headquarters here and the area has been known ever since as Little America.

To be fair, the area wasn’t all about money and might. When the new parish of St. George’s Hanover Square was created in 1711, the churchwardens did give a thought to the less fortunate. They built the Mount Street workhouse in 1735, a proud if somewhat awkward addition to the gentrified neighbourhood of Mayfair.

The Walk

At Green Park Tube Station, walk westward along the north side of Piccadilly. This wealthy stretch of sidewalk was once known as Rothschild Row, owing to the number of wealthy descendants of Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836) who occupied mansions here overlooking Green Park. Rothschild was a phenomenally successful bond trader during the Napoleonic Wars and became founder of the London branch of the world’s one-time largest bank. The imposing mansions of his family members stretched down the street to the home of Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley (1769–1852), 1st Duke of Wellington, at Hyde Park Corner. Some say it was Rothschild’s gold, rather than Wellington’s army, that really defeated Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo.

One cannot understand the Conservatism of Canada without thinking of Disraeli.— Canadian philosopher George Grant

At Half Moon Street turn right into Mayfair. At number 40 lived Robert Baldwin Ross (1869–1918), the devoted friend of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) whom we met on Walk 2.

Turn left and continue along Curzon Street to Tribeck Street. Just across from us, behind a fence and treed garden, is Crew House (1730), one of the original neighbourhood mansions now occupied by an embassy. Parallel to us on our left through an archway is Shepherd Market where the annual May Fairs took place. This charming little area of sidewalk cafés and restaurants retains a cramped village atmosphere and reputedly is still home to the “madams of Mayfair.” Take a minute to discover the area — and by that I mean the shops and restaurants — and then continue along Curzon to South Audley Street.

British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli loved to dress up and had an ugly charm about him. In this he had something in common with Canada’s Sir John A. Macdonald.

At the juncture of South Audley Street is 19 Curzon Street. This was the home of the cultured and dandyish British prime minister Benjamin “Dizzy” Disraeli (1804–81), 1st Earl of Beaconsfield. He was Conservative leader in the British House of Commons during the passage of the British North America Act in 1867. He was also Queen Victoria’s favourite statesman after giving her the title of “Empress of India” in 1876. On his deathbed, mind you, he refused her a final visit. “She would only ask me to take a message to Albert,” he quipped about her dead husband.

As a “Big Englander” and pro-Empire, Dizzy was always cordial with visiting Canadian officials. With one in particular, he even shared a few things in common.

19 Curzon Street: Dizzy’s Double

When Sir John A. Macdonald (1815–91) stepped from his train at Euston Station in 1881, his startled British host thought he had seen a ghost. Six weeks earlier, the legendary Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had died at his home in Mayfair and now it seemed he had returned on the 13:56 train from Liverpool in the ultimate political comeback. Though separated by about ten years in age, the similarities between Macdonald and Disraeli were indeed uncanny.

Like Macdonald, Disraeli had an “ugly charm” about his face. They shared prominent noses, frizzy dark hair, and piercing eyes surrounded by pale-white skin. Both men were also charming and witty, and shared a fondness for wearing colourful, even theatrical clothes, to catch people’s attention. Moreover, each was married in the same high-society church.

Yet their similarities went beyond just appearances. Macdonald and Disraeli shared a conservative ideology that proved popular with rich and poor voters alike, and won big majorities by adopting political reforms. They also each had despised political rivals: for Disraeli it was William Gladstone and for Macdonald it was George Brown. When the Canadian prime minister frequently accused his adversaries of “veiled treason,” he was actually borrowing a term coined by his doppelganger Dizzy.[2]

On an earlier visit to London in 1879, Macdonald lodged with Disraeli at his country house near High Wycombe. He had came to London in August to obtain financing for another railroad scheme, this time to the Pacific, but most parliamentarians were off hunting grouse and couldn’t meet him. Although Disraeli loved to wear tweed hunting gear, he wasn’t much of a sportsman —“I prefer peacocks to pheasants,” he once joked — so invited Macdonald to his country house where they dined and talked about politics in his Tudor library instead. While Disraeli didn’t agree to fund the Canadian railroad, he certainly took to the younger politician. Maybe it was because he saw a little of himself in Macdonald. He described him as “gentlemanlike, agreeable, and very intelligent: a considerable man with no Yankeeisms except a little sing-song occasionally at the end of a sentence.”

Let’s now turn and walk up South Audley Street. As we pass Tilney Street, look down on our left. This is the art deco Dorchester Hotel built in 1928–31. During the Second World War, the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie described it as a luxury liner with the remnants of London society on board. Canada’s wartime prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874–1950), often stayed here when in town. During his last visit in 1948, he held séances or “sittings” in his suite with local clairvoyants, despite his poor health. During one session, he received messages from his mother and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), both dead at the time. According to King, the U.S. president warned him to watch Asia. “In every way, the best of all the sittings I have had,” he noted in his diary.[3]

Continue along South Audley Street toward the green spire. This is the Grosvenor Chapel, a simple brick church opened in 1731 for the wealthy Grosvenor family. Through the gates alongside it we come to Mount Street Gardens. Here we find a quiet oasis in the heart of Mayfair with a forgotten link to Canada.

As park-like as Mount Street Gardens are today, they were formerly the burial grounds for the local parish church of St. George’s Hanover Square. In 1854, Mount Street and many other burial grounds in central London were closed for health fears and eventually became residential gardens.

Trivia: Colonel Francis Nicholson led an expedition against Port-Royal (Nova Scotia) in 1710 and captured it for the British.

One person of note who was buried in this former parish burial ground was Colonel Francis Nicholson (1655–1728), a soldier and governor of so many North American colonies he was known as the “governor of governors.” Much to his chagrin, the one governorship that eluded him was that of Quebec. In the early 1700s, he led two land assaults against the French citadel to capture it for the English. Each time he was unsuccessful.

Mount Street Gardens: Colonel Nicholson Waits

Francis Nicholson was a soldier from Yorkshire with oodles of energy and a hot temper to boot. In 1687, he sailed to New England and began a career governing an impressive string of Anglo-American colonies, including Nova Scotia and Placentia (Newfoundland).

But when it came to governing French Canada, life had a way of making Nicholson sit and wait. Not once but twice. The first occasion was in 1709, after England agreed to a two-pronged attack on Quebec. One prong would be led by the Royal Navy via the St. Lawrence River and the other would be a diversionary attack on Montreal led by Nicholson up Lake Champlain from New York. But when the ships never arrived, Nicholson was left stranded in the American wilderness with 1,500 colonial soldiers for months. Dysentery broke out, men dropped like flies, and the ragtag army was forced to limp home.

The second time occurred two years later. In 1711, Queen Anne’s new Tory government was emboldened to try once more for the big prize. Nicholson rallied some sceptical colonists and marched to his position on Lake Champlain in support of a massive naval effort led by Sir Hovenden Walker (ca.1656–1728) and General John Hill (ca.1680–1735). This time Nicholson’s land force was even larger.

But as we discovered on Walk 2, the attack never came. Walker’s ships foundered on a shoal in the St. Lawrence and the remaining ships and crew turned tail. In Quebec, French Canadians celebrated their survival by naming their old church in the centre of town Notre-Dame-des-Victoires (Our Lady of Victories). Still waiting to attack in the woods, Nicholson lost his temper when he learned of the second failed attempt. “Roguery! Treachery!” he cried out in a rage. He threw his wig to the ground and stamped on it.[4]

Exit Mount Street Gardens at the far end across from the Church of the Immaculate Conception, opened in 1849. It has a colourful altar and interior by the architect of Gothic Revival Augustus Pugin (1812–52) that is worth a peek.

Head up Carlos Place toward Grosvenor Square. The beautiful Connaught Hotel, built in 1894–96, is at the corner with a lovely reflecting pool in front. The hotel was known once as the Prince of Saxe-Coburg Hotel but was, like the German name of the present Royal family (Saxe-Coburg), discreetly changed to something more English (in the case of the royals: Windsor) during the First World War.

It is hoped that Wilde will now be dropped into obscurity. We do not imagine that even silly people will care any longer to take lessons from him in aestheticism.— Halifax Morning Chronicle, after Wilde’s conviction[5]

On the third floor of 9 Carlos Place on Mount Row lived someone we’ve encountered before: the unconventional fin-de-siècle Anglo-Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). He moved here in 1881 as a struggling but ambitious young poet. He had previously shared a home in Chelsea with an Oxford socialite, but his unorthodox poetry had put an end to that arrangement. But buoyed by the success in New York of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience, which parodied the aesthetic movement and the likes of Wilde, he decided to set off on a speaking tour of North America to earn some money from his newfound notoriety.

9 Carlos Place: Canada’s First Green?

In 1882, a twenty-eight-year-old Oscar Wilde embarked on a lecture tour to over one hundred cities across the United States and Canada. In the age before radio and TV this was the popular way to get noticed. His legendary witticisms started at the customs hall. “I have nothing to declare but my genius,” he told the press. He went on to call Niagara Falls, the honeymoon capital of North America, the first disappointment of marriage.

In Canada, Wilde journeyed a 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) by first-class rail and drew small but curious crowds in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Quebec City, and throughout the Maritimes. His aesthetic message amused some but not all. While he dined with Sir John A. Macdonald in Ottawa, he was snubbed by the governor general, John Campbell (1845–1914), Marquis of Lorne, and a patron of the arts himself. Lorne may have found the poet’s manner shameful or perhaps a little too close to home.

Although Wilde spoke mostly on the decorative arts, he regularly ended his talks with an attack on pollution. To Wilde’s aesthetic point of view, a delicate silk embroidery and a pristine Canadian forest were equally beautiful. Like a David Suzuki in velvet knee breeches, he spoke out against industrial destruction sweeping across Canada. In Ottawa, for example, he denounced sawmills disfiguring the Ottawa River, killing fish, and destroying habitat. “This is an outrage,” he said. “No one has the right to pollute the air and water which are the common inheritance of all; we should leave them to our children as we have received them.”[6]

Some took umbrage with Wilde and his pioneering green ideas. But his views about beauty did spark discussions about industrial ugliness disfiguring the Canadian landscape — in particular the telephone poles and overhead wires springing up around the country, which have never gone away.[7]

Continue up Carlos Place into Grosvenor Square. This large development once rivalled St. James’s Square that we discovered on Walk 2 as the most fashionable address in London. It is now mostly offices, embassies and swanky restaurants. Its central garden is the largest in London after Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Trivia: After proroguing Parliament in 1882, Sir John A. Macdonald and his wife, Agnes, dined with Oscar Wilde in Ottawa. The poet called the prime minister a man of the world, able and statesman-like. What Macdonald made of Wilde was never recorded.[8]

Along the west side of the square is the old American Embassy designed by the Michigan architect Eero Saarinen (1910–61), best known for tulip chairs and his archway in St. Louis, Missouri. When the embassy opened in 1959, it was widely criticized for destroying the grand houses that once stood there (including one with a Canadian connection, but we’ll come to that shortly). Over the years, tastes have evidently changed. Now the former embassy is a listed building requiring any future development to respect its modernist design.

Directly in front of us is 1 Grosvenor Square, once the chancery of the Canadian High Commission in London until it was sold for $530 million in 2013. Previously it was the U.S. embassy from 1938–60. It is to here that the isolationist ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy (1888–1969) was exiled from Washington. He arrived with his family (including his son John, future U.S. president) but eventually resigned in 1940 over differences with his boss Franklin D. Roosevelt. There’s a statue of Roosevelt by the Scottish sculptor Sir William Reid Dick in the square gardens, as well as one of General Dwight Eisenhower, who had his military headquarters here.

What a lovely sight Grosvenor Square is on a day like this, particularly when one has at one’s back the hideous American Embassy. — Canadian High Commissioner Paul Martin Sr., May 1978[9]

As our walks don’t take us into nearby Belgravia, we’ll use this spot to talk about a high-society couple associated with Canada and quite familiar with the aesthetic circle of Wilde and others: John Campbell, Marquis of Lorne, and his bride, Princess Louise Caroline Alberta (1848–1939), sixth child of Queen Victoria.

The artistic Louise (some called her “the rebel princess”) had a studio 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometres) east of here at Kensington Palace and often exhibited her work at the avant-garde Grosvenor Gallery on Bond Street. (Like Wilde, the gallery was spoofed in Patience.) In the 1870s, the young couple, just back from their honeymoon, lodged in Belgravia (coincidentally at 1 Grosvenor Crescent) before Lorne was appointed Canada’s governor general and moved to Ottawa with Princess Louise in 1878. But she wasn’t to stay long.

1 Grosvenor Square: Princess Louise Stays Home

Queen Victoria had reason to smile over the marriage of Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne. It seemed a suitable match. Her unconventional daughter adored the arts and music, liked to paint and sculpt and was, for the times, a thoroughly modern woman. Her son-in-law, too, enjoyed the arts: tall and sensitive, he preferred poetry to making speeches. Even as an MP, he preferred to listen rather than talk.

But theirs turned out to be a loveless marriage. The couple remained childless and it soon became evident to observers like the queen that the princess went out of her way to avoid her husband. She instead spent a good deal of time with others, including a sculptor with whom she had been intimate. Louise liked the company of other men it seemed, and some said that was Lorne’s problem too. Their married lives only diverged further when they were sent to Canada.

The princess didn’t take to Ottawa. Some said she clashed with Agnes Macdonald (1836–1920), the severe wife of Sir John, or that Rideau Hall was not to her liking. Then again, maybe the sleepy capital was too dull and unsophisticated for her tastes. For all, or none, of these reasons, she soon went back to England for a long sojourn. She left Ottawa again for two years following a sleigh accident there.

Lorne, on the other hand, flourished in Canada. He travelled across the country, put in place the foundations for academies and a national art gallery, and even proposed a national anthem he had composed with the help of the great Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900). When his term ended, he told Macdonald with genuine regret: “I should like to stay here all my days.”

In due course, the Lornes even went their separate ways in death. He was buried in Scotland and Louise at Windsor Castle.

Trivia: A statue of Queen Victoria by Princess Louise stands near Kensington Palace along the Broad Walk in Hyde Park. Both mother and daughter attended the unveiling in 1893, but not the Marquis of Lorne.

The marriage of Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne illustrates the strict social norms that bound loveless couples in Victoria’s England.

The loveless Lornes. Princess Louise liked the company of other men and some said that was her husband’s problem too.

Divorce was difficult if not out of the question.

If the queen’s marriage was a model of fidelity and happiness, she expected her subjects to behave the same way. Yet across the square, where the former U.S. Embassy now stands, another family with Canadian connections struggled with the strict marriage code. For this couple, however, it wasn’t so much a question of love as the validity of the marriage act itself that put them at odds with the strict Victorian moral code.

Trivia: In 1900, Donald Smith personally outfitted a Canadian regiment to fight in the Boer War, which he named Lord Strathcona’s Horse. Its members were largely cowboys and officers of the Northwest Mounted Police.

Strathcona House at 28 Grosvenor Square was a large, stately mansion owned by the wealthy businessman and diplomat Donald Smith (1820–1914), 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal. Smith had started out as fur trader with the Hudson’s Bay Company and had climbed the corporate ladder to become the company’s governor. For him, it was never a question of mixing business with pleasure; business was pleasure. Along the way he helped create the Canadian Pacific Railway and Bank of Montreal. In 1896, the elderly but tireless businessman was appointed Canada’s high commissioner to London. Still going strong on his ninety-third birthday, he told a reporter the best way to live to an old age is by not thinking about age but just going on doing your work.[10]

I have breakfast at 9 am and dinner at 9 pm and that gives me 11 hours daily for work.— Donald Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona

Smith entertained lavishly in Grosvenor Square. Yet for all his wealth and popularity, the Grand Old Man was troubled until the day he died by the whispers and innuendos about his “squaw wife,” Bella, and the legitimacy of their only child.

28 Grosvenor Square: Lord Strathcona’s Shame

On a fine day in November 1913, Lady Strathcona collapsed while walking her dog in Grosvenor Square and died. Following her funeral at nearby St. Mark’s Church on North Audley Street, she was interred in Highgate Cemetery in North London. After some sixty years of marriage, the elderly Lord Strathcona was distraught. “She was my stay and comforter throughout a long life,” he said. Agnes Macdonald called Bella’s death “a bleak, black day.”

If Smith was a successful and rich businessman who moved in the highest circles, his marriage to Bella had always raised a few well-heeled eyebrows. The circumstances of their marriage had always been a lifelong embarrassment to him. He had met Bella soon after going to Labrador with the HBC in 1848. She was of mixed Scottish and Indian blood, and already had a son from a marriage to another fur trader. Bella and Smith fell in love and Bella gave birth to Smith’s daughter, Margaret, in 1854. Because they were not legally wed, Smith solemnized the marriage himself as was customary in remote Canadian areas. Just to make doubly sure, he did it again in front of lawyers before coming to London as high commissioner. But it was never enough to silence whispers and prevent questions about the circumstances of his marriage or his daughter’s legitimacy.

As his own end drew near, the Grand Old Man took to his bed in Grosvenor Square and began to disperse his immense fortune to charities throughout Canada, the United States, and Britain. But he also took extraordinary steps to protect his daughter’s inheritance from opportunists who he feared would rob his daughter of her fortune. He died still working in bed. Rather than be honoured in Westminster Abbey, he chose to be buried next to his much-loved wife.

Leave the square by Grosvenor Street and take Davies Street into Berkeley Square. This is a former village square named for an aristocratic family whose ancestral home was Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. The plane trees in the square are said to be among London’s oldest, planted in 1789.

After the Blacks’ fortunes hit rock bottom, his wife Barbara Amiel told Maclean’s: “I am Lady Black of no-fixed address.”[11]

Berkeley Square has long been associated with the rich and famous. Nicky Clarke (130 Mount Street) near the corner of Berkeley Square was and remains hairdresser to London’s evolving A-list, including the late Diana (1961–97), Princess of Wales. Annabel’s (44 Berkeley Square) is another chic establishment. It’s a private dinner club where Lord Black celebrated his marriage to Barbara Amiel with friends in 1992.

Across the square is Jack Barclay Bentley (18 Berkeley Square). This luxury car showroom stands on the site of a townhouse once owned by Lord and Lady Strathmore (17 Bruton Street). Their daughter Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon married Albert, the king’s second son, the stammering Duke of York, and later King George VI (1895–1952; reigned from 1936). It was in this house that the duchess gave birth to her daughter the future Queen Elizabeth II (b. 1926; reigned from 1952), Canada’s long-reigning monarch and, if republicans one day get their way, maybe its last.

17 Bruton Street: The Last Queen of Canada?

Princess Elizabeth was born at 2:43 a.m. on April 21, 1926, after a difficult delivery ending in what royal code termed “a certain line of treatment” — a risky Caesarean section. She was named Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, after her mother and two living queens.

Her grandparents were among the first to visit the baby. “Such a relief and joy,” wrote Queen Mary in her diary after the birth. She called Elizabeth a little darling with a lovely complexion and pretty, fair hair.[12] Although the king’s first grandchild, no one expected the newborn princess to become queen. She was third in line to the throne after her uncle and father. Only when her uncle abdicated unexpectedly to marry Wallis Simpson in 1936 was the ten-year-old princess from Mayfair thrust into the limelight as the heiress presumptive.

In 1953, following the death of her father, Elizabeth was proclaimed by Canada’s parliament queen of Canada. She became the first monarch to read a speech from the throne. A few years later, she made an official visit to the United States on behalf of Canada. In some twenty royal visits, the queen has crisscrossed the country many times over. She has also had to deftly navigate some tense moments. In 1976 she opened the Montreal Olympics, despite death threats from separatists, and was duped by a French-Canadian radio host pretending to be Jean Chrétien in 1995. In both cases she kept her royal cool.

Yet her most significant moment as queen of Canada came on April 17, 1982, when she proclaimed Canada’s new constitution and severed Canada’s last ties to her own Parliament in Britain.

Should she survive republican calls for her head in Canada and reign on her throne beyond September 9, 2015, Elizabeth will surpass the sixty-three-year-and-two-hundred-seventeen-day reign of her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, and become by the grace of God Canada’s — and Britain’s — longest-serving monarch.

At the bottom of the square, take Hay Street and then Grafton Street to reach Albemarle Street. This is named after Christopher Monk (1653–88), 2nd Duke of Albemarle and the man behind the country’s first official boxing match. Albemarle didn’t actually fight himself but, like a typical aristocrat, put his butler and his butcher into the ring. The butcher won.

Trivia: Since the sixteenth century, some thirty-two British and French kings and queens have reigned over Canada.

Albemarle Street has some interesting associations. For instance, number 13 was once the Albemarle Club, where Oscar Wilde’s troubles began in 1895 after the receipt of a badly spelled note addressed “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite (sic).” This provoked him to sue unsuccessfully for libel and ultimately led to his downfall.

I do not hope that our children’s children will ever see Niagara’s cataract.— Lord Kelvin on the industrialization of Niagara, 1897

Brown’s Hotel is also here. Dating from 1837, it is one of the city’s oldest. Overlooking the street on the second floor is the Niagara Room in honour of the International Niagara Commission that met here in 1890. The commission was headed by the world’s most famous physicist of the age, William Thomson (1824–1907), Baron Kelvin. He once said: “In science there is only physics. The rest is stamp collecting.”

Kelvin’s job was to find a way to harness the electrical power of Niagara Falls. Electricity was the way of the future, even for stamp collectors, but how to develop it was the problem. After holding an international competition, Kelvin’s commission failed to find anyone who could not only develop electrical power but distribute it across long distances. The answer to Kelvin’s dilemma finally emerged following a battle between two American household names: Thomas Edison (1847–1931) and George Westinghouse (1846–1914).

Brown’s Hotel: AC-DC Slept Here

For American entrepreneurs, Niagara Falls was not so much a wonder of the natural world as it was an untapped opportunity to make money. Although settlers had operated various types of mills at the falls since 1725, large-scale development had proven dangerous and expensive. Added to these difficulties was the problem of how to transmit the power from the falls to urban areas where consumers demanded it.

Thomas Edison and Lord Kelvin were leading proponents of the system called Direct Current (DC) in which electricity flows in one direction. It was a simple system but problematic. Electricity could only travel short distances this way and required thick and expensive copper cables. Westinghouse and a little-known Serbian inventor named Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) favoured a different method called Alternating Current (AC). This system overcame DC’s problems by changing the direction of electricity at regular intervals. The two systems battled it out until Kelvin attended the Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago. When the great physicist saw the light powered by Westinghouse’s AC generators, he switched his allegiance and the matter was settled. In 1896, the first electric generator at Niagara Falls was put into action and over the next few years grew to ten, providing electric power to places as far away as New York City. Canada was less quick off the mark but at least benefited from the delay. Its first publicly owned generator at the falls was the largest constructed and went into operation in 1921 — well after the great AC-DC debate had been won.[13]

Continuing on we reach Bond Street, a fashionable shopping thoroughfare that takes its name from Sir Thomas Bond, another seventeenth-century property developer.

Spare me that nonsense. It’s dangerous. We’re set up for direct current in America. People like it, and it’s all I’ll ever fool with. — Thomas Edison on alternating current[14]

Where Old Bond Street becomes New Bond Street is a bronze statue of two idle codgers swapping stories on a bench like they’re waiting for their wives to finish shopping. But looks can be deceiving. In this expensive part of town, they are too relaxed for that.

I always think of W.C. Fields when I think of Mackenzie King.— Hugh Hood, The Swing in the Garden

In fact, the work by Lawrence Holofcener is called “Allies” and depicts wartime leaders U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965). Someone who is amusingly absent from the scene is Canada’s prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874–1950). King took delight in being photographed with these wartime giants, since it made him look like the lynchpin that held together the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States. But it was all political sleight of hand to fool voters. He may have had his photos snapped with them at the Quebec Conferences in 1943 and 1944, but then he quietly disappeared into the background while Roosevelt and Churchill got down to the business of running the war.

Allies Statue: Two’s Company, Three’s a Crowd

Churchill and Roosevelt met for the first time aboard the HMS Prince of Wales off the coast of Newfoundland in 1941. Although this was ostensibly in Canadian waters, no one had bothered to invite Canada to the party. Churchill and Roosevelt wouldn’t make the same mistake again — at least on the surface. During the war, they held two conferences in Quebec City and Prime Minister King played host. He told Canadians: “It will be looked upon in years to come as one of the great events in our national history.” But he still didn’t get invited to any important meetings.

Yet as every politician knows, a picture is worth a thousand words — and maybe even a few votes. Whenever Roosevelt and Churchill posed for the press, King was right there beside them chatting like the kingmaker he wasn’t.

So effective was his publicity trick that some fifty years later his role at the wartime Quebec Conferences was still a matter of debate. In 1998, a furore erupted when Quebec erected memorial busts to the British and American leaders to mark the conferences but King was left out (again). While historians agreed it was entirely appropriate, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien (b. 1934) was incensed. “To deny the presence of Prime Minister Mackenzie King in a homage to this conference in Quebec City is absolutely unacceptable, in bad taste and should never have been accepted,” he said in his own charming way.[15] Hovering somewhere over a Ouija board, King probably grinned.

Just north of us across Oxford Street, Bond Street becomes Vere Street. Here can be found the old Marylebone Chapel, or St. Peter’s Vere Street, designed by the architect James Gibbs (1682–1754) and built in 1724. The oldest protestant church in Canada, St. Paul’s Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is modelled after this one. St. Paul’s, however, has one notable difference. The upper gallery there was known as the slave gallery until the arrival of the Black Loyalists in 1783. After that, it was known as the Negro gallery.

The 1796 cartoon “The caneing in Conduit Street” depicts an unhappy ship hand attacking Captain George Vancouver. With its publication, Vancouver’s reputation was bruised as much as his skin.

Cross over Bond Street and proceed up Conduit Street. In 1796, this was the scene of a violent altercation between the explorer Captain George Vancouver (1757–98) and an unstable aristocrat with a nasty grudge.

Conduit Street: Captain Vancouver Gets Caned

In September 1796, George Vancouver and his brother Charles were leisurely walking up Conduit Street when a young man crossed the street and set upon them viciously with a cane. The attacker was Thomas Pitt (1775–1804), 2nd Baron Camelford, a violent and unstable aristocrat who had served as midshipman under Vancouver during his landmark voyage up the coast of British Columbia several years earlier.

As if the attack wasn’t injury enough, an embarrassing cartoon of the incident appeared in the press a few weeks later. It depicted a quivering Vancouver shouting “Murder! Murder! Watch! Constable!” as two street urchins laugh nearby. The frail and exhausted Vancouver’s reputation was bruised as much as his skin.

Pitt was the troubled member of a wealthy and connected family. When he joined Vancouver’s expedition in 1791, his father was only too happy to see him go. But on the long sea voyage, Pitt proved equally hard to manage. He disobeyed Vancouver’s orders not to have contact with women in Tahiti and was lashed twenty-four times — harsh discipline for sure but not overly for the period. Nevertheless, a grudge was born. After several more infractions and several more floggings, Vancouver finally abandoned Pitt in Australia and told him to make his own way home.

Word of Vancouver’s harsh discipline on the voyage reached London and tarnished his achievements on the west coast of Canada. Things only got worse when Pitt arrived back the following year and continually harangued him. Vancouver retired to the country to finish his journals but died just a few pages short of completing them. The unstable Pitt would go on to be nicknamed “the half-mad lord.” He died in a duel, finally abandoned by everyone.[16]

From Conduit Street, look up St. George’s Street to Hanover Square. This area was named by an astute property developer who wanted to win the good graces of the unpopular George Ludwig, the Elector of Hanover, who had recently become Britain’s King George I (1660–1727; reigned from 1714). On the right is the high society church of St. George’s Hanover Square designed by John James (ca.1673–1746), an apprentice to Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723).

Besides being the church where the composer Frederick Handel (1685–1759) worshipped, guidebooks say St. George’s Hanover Square is also notable for having the first covered church portico in London. If not particularly elegant, it at least kept guests dry at weddings, including Canadian ones.

Agnes Bernard met John A. Macdonald while shopping on Bond Street in 1866 and married him in nearby Hanover Square. He broke his marriage vow to stop drinking.

St. George’s Hanover Square: The Second Mrs. Mac

In December 1866, Sir John A. Macdonald took a break from the wrangling of the London Conference to do some retail therapy. Then, as now, Bond Street was a favourite place to stroll up and down, shop, or just peer through store windows at expensive luxury goods. By chance, he came upon Agnes Bernard (1836–1920) doing the same. She was the sister of Macdonald’s private secretary, and lived in Mayfair. Macdonald remembered Agnes from years before, in Canada. Having by then been a widower for ten years, he craved a wife and the Victorian respectability that came with one. The two courted briefly in London and Macdonald asked for her hand in marriage.

Agnes was a tall, strong woman with a sharp wit but little charm. At thirty years old, she was much younger than Macdonald’s fifty-two. But it was not the difference in age as much as Macdonald’s legendary drinking that concerned her family. Macdonald assured them he would mend his ways and they took him at his word. The couple were married in Agnes’s parish church of St. George’s Hanover Square.

The wedding took place early on the morning of February 16, 1867, and was the social occasion of the London Conference. The church was so full it seemed to Agnes there was an avenue of people from the door to the altar. Francis Fulford (1803–68), a Montreal bishop, officiated, and the daughters of the London delegates served as bridesmaids. After the nuptials, the guests breakfasted at the Westminster Palace Hotel, where Macdonald joked he had come to affect a political union but felt bound to try the idea out himself.

Agnes returned with Macdonald to Canada where married life often proved difficult. Conversation in the house was always political and she wondered sometimes if even the flies in the kitchen were holding parliament. Moreover Macdonald’s vow to stop drinking was soon abandoned and Agnes dealt with it by becoming harder and less approachable as the years went by. She outlived her husband by some thirty years and died in 1920 in Hove, East Sussex.[17]

Continue up Conduit Street into Regent’s Street on the edge of Mayfair. A broad, gently curving avenue, it extends from Regent’s Park in Marylebone to Waterloo Place and was designed by the architect and master urban planner John Nash (1752–1835).

Trivia: In 1889, Lord Stanley was the first governor general of Canada to visit British Columbia. In naming Stanley Park, he dedicated its use and enjoyment to “peoples of all colours, creeds and customs, for all time.”

Regent Street has always been a place to buy china and silver. At 130 Regent Street we find a green plaque that commemorates the purchase of one such trinket. It reads: “Lord Stanley of Preston purchased the original Stanley Cup from a silversmith at this site in 1892 for the people of Canada to commemorate amateur and professional hockey. The Cup is now in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.”

130 Regent Street: Lord Stanley’s Mug

After an absence of 114 years, professional ice hockey’s greatest trophy — the Stanley Cup — returned to London in 2006 with all the hoopla fans in a city indifferent to the sport on ice could give it. And like any excited visitor to the capital, the Cup rode a double-decker bus, visited the Tower of London, and took a turn on the London Eye. It ended its city tour at the unveiling of a plaque to mark where it was purchased in 1892. Little did its vice-regal owner then imagine the bright future it would have.

In 1888, Sir Frederick Arthur Stanley (1841–1908), 16th Earl of Derby, took up his post in Canada as governor general. With his trimmed beard streaked with grey, a stocky frame, and broad forehead, people said he resembled the future King Edward VII, only fitter. He not only liked Canada and impressed everyone with his French, but took to hockey like a schoolboy. His son Arthur took to it even more. He and some players donned red flannel shirts and called themselves the Rideau Hall Rebels. They went on to establish the Ontario Hockey Association.

No doubt Arthur’s enthusiasm for the game rubbed off on his father. Stanley instructed an aide-de-camp, Captain Charles Colville, to purchase a suitable trophy for an ice hockey championship for about $50 while he was visiting London. Colville strolled up and down Regent’s Street before settling on a silver-plated punchbowl with gold gilt interior measuring 18.5 centimetres high and 29 centimetres wide offered by the silversmiths G.R. Collis & Company. On it he had engraved “Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup From Stanley of Preston.” It was presented for the first time to the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association in 1893.[18]

If Stanley was pleased with Colville’s purchase, he didn’t actually show it. “It looks like any other trophy, I suppose,” he once told a reporter who asked about it.

Now follow Regent’s Street down to Piccadilly Circus, where our walk concludes.

Mayfair’s high-society church: St. George’s Hanover Square. Both Macdonald and Disraeli were married here. Macdonald said he had come to London to affect a political union, but felt bound to try it out himself.

Walk 6: