— Mary Clark, Janet Anderson and J. Alice Gingras —plus three chaperones, Cairine sailed from New York on 25 May on the “S.S. Ryndam,” bound for Rotterdam. After four whirlwind months on the Continent and in Britain, they sailed from Naples for Boston and the final leg of the trip to Montreal.
The diary that she kept of the trip reveals a keen appreciation of art and old world architecture, both of which are described in loving detail. Noticeably lacking, however, is any enthusiasm for the International Congress of Women that was held that June in Berlin. For Miss Hill, a tour chaperone, this Congress was the tour’s raison d' être, but for Cairine Mackay it was a boring event whose social functions and working sessions were to be avoided if at all possible. In diary entries that hint at a latent contempt for aggressive feminism, she wrote:
June 8: “Much to our disgust we were taken after breakfast to the Congress of Women from all parts of the world. Routine business was discussed and after a short time we left, Miss Hill having been elected President’s Proxy for Canada.” June 9: “Reception in honour of the delegates to the Congress of Women.” June 11: In the evening the others went to a reception given by Mrs May Wright Sewell President of the International Congress of Women, but I escaped.”40
A meeting in Berlin with Susan Brownell Anthony, the pioneer leader of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, failed to rate a mention in the diary. Not until she had become a reluctant trailblazer herself would Cairine Mackay refer to the encounter.41
At the Old Ship Hotel, in the seaside resort of Brighton, Cairine just missed seeing Rudyard Kipling, who had left minutes earlier in his car and, in Scotland, she found herself captivated by the beauty of Sir Walter Scott’s country and intoxicated with joy, riding in a horse-drawn coach:
We reached Aberfoyle about 11:45 and after we had eaten our bread on the gallery above the entrance, where our party must have presented an amusing spectacle, we went for a short walk until the coach started. We stood for a few minutes on the bridge mentioned in Rob Roy as the one over which the Baillie and Frank Osbaldestone went. We then got on the coach and had a fine drive from Aberfoyle to Loch Katrine. The scenery was magnificent particularly near the Trossachs and I felt as if I could spend my life driving, indeed to wear a red coat and handle 4 horses was the height of my ambition. The boat Sir Walter Scott was waiting for us so as soon as the passengers were on it started across the lake, which looked beautiful shut in by the mountains, although there was no sun to lighten it. Until I saw the country, however, I had never realized the beauty of Scott’s descriptions.42
Before her marriage, Cairine Mackay made at least two trips to Europe and travelled extensively in Quebec. She also came to know St Andrewsby-the-Sea, New Brunswick, where her father built a summer home, Clibrig, in 1905, after sending his family to various watering spots on the lower St Lawrence River in previous summers. But, with one exception, the rest of Canada was by and large foreign to her. That one exception was Ottawa.
Cairine Mackay’s introduction to this raw, parochial capital came through her father, a Liberal Party stalwart and a friend of its leader, Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Robert Mackay, in fact, had been one of four affluent Liberals—the others were Newell Bate and William Hutchison of Ottawa and William Cameron Edwards of Rockland, Ontario and later Ottawa — who signed an agreement calling for the Liberal Party to purchase an Ottawa residence for its chief and then to vest the property in the names of the cosignatories as joint tenants.43 Lady Laurier later bequeathed the residence to William Lyon Mackenzie King, stating in her will, “The house having been given us by political friends of my husband, I am of the opinion that it should revert to the Liberal Party represented by its chief WLM King for the purpose of being his official residence.”44
Robert Mackay did not confine himself to supporting the party financially and to assisting in the purchase of a house for its somewhat impecunious leader. He also lobbied vigorously on behalf of defeated election candidates and operated as a de facto riding worker in Montreal, sniffing out developments of possible interest to his fellow Liberals and firing off letters bristling with wise counsel. After the election of 1896, for instance, he reported to Laurier:
I had the pleasure of meeting today Dr Innes (whom I knew before) who was the member for S. Wellington for so many years & one of your most earnest admirers and supporters while you were both in the cold shades of opposition. He was signally unfortunate in losing his reelection at this particular time, & his friends feel it would be a gracefull [sic] recognition of his services to the Liberal Party for over 40 years if the Government could see its way to present him with the Senatorship now vacant for Ontario. I make this suggestion with all due regard to the many considerations which must enter into the giving of this appointment.
I am sorry to have to trouble you so much, but I feel I would be neglectfull [sic] of my duties to our Party did I not warn you of a growing feeling of discontent among your English speaking Protestant supporters in this district. They are being threatened with the filling of any vacancies that may arise in positions now held by their class by our French Canadian friends. Needless to state that these reports come principally from our opponents, $ it will be, if justified by events, made the most of to the detriment of the Government, & I have therefore felt it right (not sharing in the feeling myself) to send you a friendly word of warning regarding any appointment to such vacancies.45
That same election of 1896 also saw Cairine’s father enter the political fray for the first time. After “accepting the call of the leading representatives of the mercantile, manufacturing, and industrial classes of Montreal,” he contested St Antoine division for the Liberals, but lost to his Conservative opponent. He did succeed, however, in reducing the adverse majority in this long-held Tory riding from 3,706 to 157.46
Four years later, he again tried his luck in St Antoine division, but once more he went down to defeat. The following year, on 21 January, just as the old Queen’s life was ebbing away, he was appointed a Liberal senator for the division of Alma in the province of Quebec. His commission as senator was the last one signed under Victoria’s reign.
Once appointed to the Senate, the family patriarch began making regular trips to Ottawa to attend sessions of parliament. He was frequently accompanied by Cairine, who, alone of the Mackay children, appears to have taken an interest in politics at an early age. Perhaps it was the long passages that her father read from the works of Gladstone, Fox, Morley and Bright to his assembled family that fired her imagination, or maybe it was the heated political discussions that, along with the comings and goings of politicians, were so much a feature of life at Kildonan. But more likely it was the magnetic presence of the tall, graceful Sir Wilfrid himself, who with his high starched collar and shock of grey-tinged chestnut hair epitomized a late Victorian prime minister. A frequent visitor to Kildonan, Sir Wilfrid would pat young Cairine’s black head and tell her that one day she would be the wife of a great politician.47 Like so many other admirers, she quickly succumbed to the prime minister’s charm and one day when she was brushing the hair of eight-year-old Edward she groaned, “ You will never make a Sir Wilfrid Laurier!”
In Ottawa, Cairine often stayed at the Laurier home, the large brick house in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill area that is now known as Laurier House. Long would she remember the happy mornings that she spent there: breakfasting with Sir Wilfrid, who taught her how to eat oatmeal in true Scottish fashion — with salt — and later watching her idol depart for his office, wearing impeccably creased striped trousers and a dignified Prince Albert coat with, no doubt, the horseshoe stickpin that was his signature in the lapel.48
Still later in the day there might be visits to the Senate Chamber, then, as now, found at the east end of the “House of Commons Building,” and to the Commons Chamber itself, a square-shaped room, located not in the extreme west of the Centre Block, as today, but in the middle of the building. Then, in the evening, there might be a social
