The Loner: Three Sketches of the Personal Life and Ideas of RB Bennett, 1870-1947

D.M.L. Farr is a professor emeritus of history at Carleton University in
Ottawa.

This book, consisting of the three Joanne Goodman Lectures given at the
University of Western Ontario in 1991, is, it is hoped, a foretaste of
scholarship to come. Peter Waite, professor of history at Dalhousie
University, has been examining the career of R.B. Bennett for some time;
the lectures reproduced here provide his early reflections on the man
and his attitudes. The first deals with Bennett’s childhood, as well
as his teaching career and education in the Miramichi valley and at
Dalhousie Law School from 1870 to 1897. In the latter year, he went west
to Calgary to practice law with Peter Lougheed’s father. Waite
emphasizes the importance of Bennett’s mother in shaping her son’s
outlook, especially his commitment to hard work, sobriety, and honesty.

The next sketch in the collection deals with Bennett’s career in
frontier Calgary as a successful lawyer and businessman and as a member
of the Northwest Territories legislature, the Alberta legislature, and,
finally, the House of Commons. Waite sees Bennett as a Red Tory,
sympathetic to the labor movement and to progressive social legislation.
His stands during this period on worker’s compensation and state
pensions, for example, disprove the contention that as prime minister
during the Great Depression he was a last-minute convert to Franklin
Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The final lecture depicts Bennett in power (1930–35) and in exile in
England. Here Waite brings out the intriguing subject of Bennett’s
relations with women: his beloved younger sister, Mildred, who lived
with him for many years, and his short but intense attachment to the
wealthy Montreal widow Hazel Kemp Colville. There is some “what might
have been” in his discussion of the latter affair, but Waite, as
always, is a shrewd and discerning observer of personality.

Elegantly written and soundly supported by documentary references, The
Loner is a major biography of a controversial prime minister who has
been too long caricatured as the stereotypical insensitive capitalist
unwilling to relate to the needs of Canadians at a dark hour in their
history.