A Balliol man
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
The death on 16 July of Norman Robertson removes one of the most original diplomats of modern times; and also removes from this world one of my closest friends. He and I entered Balliol on the same day, and became friends on that same day, beginning our friend- ship characteristically by a debate on the ques- tion whether it was sensible for Norman Robertson, who had never been in Europe before, to go up to London on his first Sunday to hear Dean Inge preach. I thought not, and still think not, but Norman Robertson went.
Norman was the most remarkable of the group of Rhodes scholars I knew at Balliol in my time, and remarkable in many ways. His great height did not mark him out in Balliol, for that ancient house was full of tall young men, the tallest being the future headmaster of Eton, Sir Robert Birley, but Darsie Giffie was another of the host of the sons of Anak. Nor- man, none of whose kin or ancesters had ever come back to Europe since they left Scotland in the eighteenth century, seemed like someone out of the western world. He was not only physically but in other ways a good deal of a 'playboy of the western world.'
Among his fellow Rhodes scholars he stood out by his irony and scepticism. A Canadian born in British Columbia, where his father, from Prince Edward Island, was professor of Latin at the university, he had none of the `United Empire Loyalism' which marked some of his fellow Canadians. He did not dislike `Americans,' but did not take them as seriously as some professional deep thinkers did. He was lacking in imperial enthusiasm, but it was never safe to assume that he swallowed uncritically the ideas of the orthodox left. Norman was not a Hampstead type. His highly developed sense of humour sometimes got him into trouble, as when he was sitting having a drink outside the Renault plant in Paris. As the men came out on their bicycles, he shouted 'Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.' This frivolous quota- tion of the sacred text was not well received by the proletaiies.
But Norman Robertson was certainly a man of the left. He was involved, though not the actual leader, in the great conspiracy to bring Emma Goldman, the anarchist, down to the Balliol barge on which the red flag was then hoisted. Some of his best friends were Com- munists—from time to time—and he was in many ways a representative specimen of A. D. Lindsay's Balliol. In other ways he was not. He had none of the Master's higher credulity, and he had too high a justifiable opinion of his own native abilities to believe that all that mattered was nurture, not nature.
He got a second in Modern Greats (not in Greats, as The Times said), and this annoyed
him and continued to annoy him. It annoyed a good many other people, too, for the examiners in PPE that year (1925) were thought by the bright young men with whom I associated to be a lot less bright than the people they were examining. Certainly the results of PPE that year were startling if you look at the later careers of some of the people who got seconds.
At that moment Norman Robertson can have had no idea of what his own career was to be. He went first to Brookings Institution in Washington (where he met his charming and extremely intelligent Dutch wife), and then to Harvard. This knowledge of the United States stood him in very good stead in Ottawa, in London during the war and during the brief period he was ambassador in Washington. He left Harvard for the Department of External Affairs after a good deal of hesitation. But he may have thought that the academic world did not fully meet his demands or wholly suit his personality. He always regarded professors, including myself I fear, with a certain amount of irony and could be very effective in snubbing too dogmatic expressions of academic judgment.
His rise in Ottawa was rapid and deserved. For most of that career he was associated with Mackenzie King. When I was staying with the Robertsons at their country house near Vancouver in 1926, his father, Professor Lemuel Robertson, told me of the anguish he had gone through in deciding not to vote for Sir Wilfrid Laurier in the 'conscription election' of 1917, and how he had always felt guilty because he had done so. This sound liberal background served as a bond between Norman Robertson and Mackenzie King since Mackenzie King was one of the few younger liberal leaders who stood by the great Quebec statesman.
But Norman Robertson could be highly facetious about Canadian politics and had no great illusions about the calibre of some of the politicians he met in Ottawa. He had another link with Mackenzie King: they were both deaf. A note in the Peterborough column of the Daily Telegraph recounted that Norman had explained his rapid rise by the fact that he was prematurely bald, which made people think he was older than he was, and his deafness got him the preferential place at conferences, which made spectators think he was more important than he was. But the deafness was a handicap, and I have always thought that he would have entered Canadian politics through the House of Commons, if his deafness had not barred effective work in parliament.
I can remember crossing the Atlantic at the end of the war on the 'Queen Elizabeth.' On board, among many other eminent persons on the way to Nuremberg etc, were Mackenzie King and Norman Robertson. Each was deaf, but in a different ear. I used to walk around the deck between them telling the Prime Minister what his Under-Secretary for External Affairs was saying and telling Norman what the Prime Minister was saying. I well remember one day when the loudspeaker went on and President Truman announced that he, the Prime Minister of Great Britain (Mr Attlee) and the Prime Minister of Canada had called a conference on the problem of the atomic bomb. When I gave this news to Mackenzie King, he exploded, 'This is the first I have heard of it.' As a result, Norman had to go straight back to Canada and Mackenzie King, after a weekend at Win,dsor, had to follow him. There was no conference. The message was an example of President Truman's alarming habit of shooting from the hip.
From one point of view, Mackenzie King was an admirable chief for Norman Robertson. Although Mackenzie King was technically also Minister for External Affairs, Norman told me that the Prime Minister had never set foot in the office of the department. This gave the Permanent Under-Secretary more liberty than was usual in the Foreign Office. Fortunately, also, Norman was on excellent terms with Lester Pearson. I was always glad to go and see them in London since they were remarkably candid by British or even by American standards.
But he could be an extremely effective refuter of ill-considered opinions. I can remember giving a lunch in a London restaurant to a group of my friends, one of whom was Norman Robertson and another a distinguished British correspondent back on leave from Moscow. I asked this correspondent to give us the real dope from Moscow, not the anodyne stuff he wrote for his paper. He replied that the Russians were very much amazed at the fuss the Canadians were making about the Gouzenko disaffection. 'All the Canadians have got, if they have got anything, is copies of alleged documents showing Soviet espionage.' The speaker had no idea that Norman Robertson had been in charge of the whole investigation of the Gouzenko case. Norman replied, 'You are quite wrong. I kept the originals. I sent copies to Moscow.'
I could give other examples of his irony over some of the silly illusions of the left which he seemed to think that from time to time I shared. He was, for example, an admirer of Mr Robert Murphy, a much-attacked and possibly maligned American diplomat in Vichy and in Algiers at the time of the Darlan affair. I heard him once in Washington crush a talkative 'liberal' American critic of the State Department, making a much better defence of the department than it could make for itself.
There were other sides of Norman Robert- son's character which I think should be private. He was a man of the greatest kindness and would go to very great lengths to help friends, in one instance even getting some imperial 'commonwealth' general legislation altered when a case of its harshness of application was brought to his notice. He had a uniform—a black hat and black coat—which he never seemed to change. No one less like diplomats of the type of M Couve de Murville and Sir Alec Cadogan could possibly be imagined. Canada and the western world has lost a great public servant. In other words he was a Balliol man. He thought there was 'nothing worth the wear of winning But laughter and the love of friends.'
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