The Last Canadian Knight: The Unintended Business Adventures of Sir Graham Day

by Gordon Pitts

Overview

From a small-town law office in Nova Scotia to the pressure-cooker boardrooms of London, England, where he was Margaret Thatcher's "privatization ace," lawyer and businessman Sir Graham Day has earned an international reputation as a tough-minded but charming negotiator.

After a rocky educational start in Halifax, Day found his motivation at Dalhousie Law School and established the contacts and experiences that would guide him through the world of global business. With an impressive resume including troubleshooting roles for large companies (Canadian Pacific Limited, British Shipbuilders, Cadbury Schweppes) around the world, often during controversial times, Day solidified his position as an internationally sought-after change-maker.

In The Last Canadian Knight, award-winning business journalist Gordon Pitts chronicles Day's meteoric rise and explores the lessons Day gleaned from a lifetime spent in and out of the world's boardrooms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771088695
Publisher:	Nimbus Publishing
Publication date:	10/01/2020
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Gordon Pitts is an author, public speaker, and business journalist with almost forty years of experience in daily newspapers. He is the author of several books, including national bestseller The Codfathers: Lessons from the Atlantic Business Elite and Fire in the Belly: How Purdy Crawford saved Canada and inspired a legacy of leadership, which won the 2015 Dartmouth Book Award for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2015 National Business Book Award. He lives in Toronto.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Beginnings

Graham Day was born on May 3, 1933, in the Grace Hospital in Halifax. His parents, for reasons unknown, believed their first and only child would be a girl. Caught unprepared by this baby boy, they had to come up with a name. The presiding doctor was Judson Vye Graham, so the child would be Judson Graham Day.

The baby, who would have a secure but plain upbringing in North End Halifax, was the son of a Canadian mother and an immigrant father from the East End of London. At the time of Graham's birth, his father Frank worked in a furniture and appliance store owned by an uncle. Growing up in England, Frank Day had suffered from poor health since birth, including a bout of rheumatic fever. His family got him in a private school, giving him a better education than his siblings. When the First World War came, he attempted to join up, but flunked the medical. He found a job in the City of London — the financial district — as a runner, one of the army of messengers who delivered pieces of paper, including securities, among the banks and brokerages. He was in the employ of wealthy brothers, who took an interest in him and, aware of his health problems, offered him a job inside.

They liked Frank and felt he needed a healthier vocation, so they sent him to agricultural college. They saw he was not getting better, however, and in another act of kindness paid his way to Australia, with its lure of a better climate. He worked on a sheep ranch in the middle of the continent, where he encountered snakes. Frank Day hated snakes. Graham remembers a picture of his father on horseback, armed with a pistol and a rifle, on the job at the sheep ranch. He was posing beside a dead snake roped over a branch. This was not Frank Day's kind of life, and so that was the end of Australia for him. In Halifax, however, was this uncle with the furniture store. So Frank Day crossed the Pacific to Vancouver and made his way across the country to Nova Scotia.

Graham's mother, Edythe, came from a Nova Scotia family named Baker. Family lore has it that her grandfather, a young Dutchman named Willem Becker, from an affluent shipping family, had left home rather than accept his parents' career choice of the Catholic priesthood. His granddaughter Edythe (or Edie) was born in Herring Cove, a semi-isolated community south of Halifax that was largely cut off in winter and spring but is now part of the Halifax Regional Municipality. Her father was a harbour pilot who guided ships into the port. A boat would chug out from Herring Cove to put pilots on incoming ships. The pilots would arrange their own shifts, and one day a certain Captain Pelham offered to take Edie's father's shift. Pelham's pilot boat was cut in two by a large vessel and all hands were lost. Edie's father, probably haunted by the tragedy, couldn't go back on the pilot boats again, and found other marine jobs, such as navigating for the Portuguese fishing fleet and toiling for a ship supply company. Graham Day has a faded memory as a young child of accompanying his grandfather on the Bluenose, the famous racing schooner commemorated on the dime.

Frank and Edie met in the choir of St. Paul's Church, the old Anglican garrison church in Halifax — she was the soprano soloist, he the bass soloist, a predictor of the role music would play in their son's life. Choir practice was held on Saturday nights, but Frank Day had to work late those nights in his uncle's furniture store. (His uncle's inflexibility and skinflint ways helped build his reputation in the Day family as "Uncle Scrooge.") It was the Depression, and Frank was not going to give up the extra money from working late. Eventually, the rector at St. Paul's told him if he couldn't go to choir practice, he couldn't sing in the choir. Frank never went back to St. Paul's, and never sang in church again for the rest of his life. Perhaps the stubborn apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Graham, born in the Depression to a lower-middle-class family, was in many ways a fortunate child, the only one in the extended family for a number of years. He borrowed and inherited clothes from a young uncle, common practice for kids growing up during the Depression and the Second World War. It was a close-to-the-bone existence: many in his family were jobless in the 1930s. A 1994 profile in Financial Post Magazine recounts a family story about how Day's parents would leave Sunday dinner at his grandparents' house with baby Graham tucked into a sled surrounded by turnips and other vegetables, concealed by his grandmother under the blankets to avoid embarrassing his needy parents.

Day grew up in a bungalow on Lawrence Street, a short shady road of tidy houses on the southern edges of Halifax's working-class North End, just before it gave way to the more affluent south. It was an appropriate setting for a family with aspirations. After Frank had laboured for years in Uncle Scrooge's store, the Days would venture out to open their own store, where they complemented the furniture business with sales of china and glassware. It was a small shop background that tended to breed upward strivers like young Margaret Roberts — later Thatcher — whose father was a grocer in the English Midlands.

As an only child, Graham Day was the focus of his parents' life. "He would deny this until he goes to the grave, but there was nothing he could do wrong in their eyes," Graham's son Michael says. Graham's father read to his son constantly, not just children's stories but tales of Arctic and Antarctic expeditions, deep-sea diving and salvage stories, yarns of submarines, and Dickens novels. His English grandparents would send books from the old country, including boys' annuals such as Pip and Squeak and Tiger Tim's, which he and his father would share. "My father had no desire to go back to England to live, but I think he was in part homesick for the rest of his life," Graham Day observes. And so he gave his son a Boy's Own upbringing.

One of Day's great aunts had married a Colonel King of the British Army, who had been an officer in the Gurkha corps and served on the staff of British commander Lord Kitchener in the First World War. (He was transferred off that assignment just before Kitchener put to sea in the ship that would blow up on a mine, killing the British military chief.) Colonel King retired to Herring Cove, where he spent time with young Graham, who passed his summers there. Regaling the boy with stories of derring-do and military life, at one point the colonel announced that his young protegé would go to Sandhurst, the British military college, some day. But then along came the Second World War, and life moved on.

The war was a very big deal in Halifax, a garrison town up close to the North Atlantic physically and emotionally. Halifax's 60,000 residents were haunted by a dark passage in their history. People still had scarcely repressed memories of December 6, 1917, when a French munitions ship collided with a Belgian vessel, triggering a massive explosion that destroyed much of the North End of the city and killed 1,200 people — the greatest man-made disaster in Canadian history. Every time a couple of ships brushed close to each other in the harbour, the city gasped with trepidation.

With renewed hostilities in Europe, Halifax became a vital link in the convoy traffic to Britain. Ships would ease out of the harbour into the open sea, while German U-boats cruised nearby, sometimes picking off errant outliers, leaving their flaming hulks within full view of the port city. From his family's summer haven at Herring Cove, Graham could sometimes see burning ships just beyond the harbour.

The vulnerability of Halifax was underlined in late May 1943 when a German sub slipped undetected into the mouth of the harbour and planted fifty-six mines. As Stephen Kimber relates in Sailors, Slackers and Blind Pigs, his book about Second World War Halifax, "[l]uckily, a convoy escort vessel spotted one of the devices on the water just before a large convoy was scheduled to depart." That set off a mass sweeping of the harbour entrance, clearing a channel to allow the convoy to stream through. There was only one casualty, a merchant ship that strayed outside the channel, hit a mine, and sank.

Kimber also describes the tensions between the narrow-minded Halifax old guard and the diverse collection of soldiers and sailors — Norwegians, French, Belgians, Canadians of all stripes — bivouacked in the city. It was an uneasy cohabitation, and a breeding ground for prejudice, including virulent anti-Semitism. One young woman, Marjorie Whitelaw, recalled in Kimber's book that her crowd of young people was very liberal, but a number of their parents had laid down a warning: do not date Jews. In clear defiance, her social group included some young Jewish soldiers, including Len Kitz, an up-and-coming local lawyer. Kitz went overseas, had a distinguished war record, and served as a lawyer in Nazi war crimes tribunals. He would later become a key figure in breaking barriers in municipal politics, and he would play a critical role in the development of Graham Day.

The war would leave a deep impression on the boy, embedding a belief in the British Empire and its history and a feeling that many Maritimers shared — their fate was inextricably linked to the Atlantic. Young Graham was keenly aware of what was happening in the war's various theatres. "There were maps on my bedroom wall, and we listened to This Is London Calling on the North American service of the BBC."

Day was six when war was declared and Quinpool Road School and its principal, Miss Harlow, went on full alert. "We were hauled into an assembly room and told we should not worry about the war because the empire would win," Day recalls. "Miss Harlow would be giving us tasks to help with the war effort — [collecting] pots and pans and foil wrappers from cigarettes. We put war savings stamps in our little books; she was very keen on what she called 'our heritage.'" He remembers the day he and two of his peers, all in short pants — sons of British, Polish, and Greek immigrant families — stood together to deliver a stirring recitation of "Scots Wha Hae."

The Polish-Canadian boy, Irving Nudelman, lived with his family near the Days in Halifax. Now a retired Baltimore urologist, he had come to Halifax as a boy from northern Ontario as his father pursued his work. He remembers young Graham as a tall kid, very bright, and always in the middle of whatever the other children were doing. Frank and Edie were "fine people" in a neighbourhood where everyone knew everyone else.

That was the world of Graham Day in the early 1940s, replete with good friends, a high-quality education, the commitment of teachers, and a curriculum that included history and, eventually in grade eight, Latin. Teachers must have loved having this precocious, well-read boy in their midst. He was smitten with his grade one teacher, Mary McCurdy, fresh out of teachers' college, who had innovative methods of cajoling her charges into finishing exercises. She would sketch a brook on the blackboard and stepping stones across the brook. In spelling, arithmetic, or reading she would encourage each student to cross the brook, stone by stone. As each crossed, his or her name was added to the list of achievers. "She would whisper in our ears, 'Come on, you can do it.'" It was his first experience with a caring non-family adult who encouraged him to achieve.

By the time Graham entered grade eight, Earle Gordon Withrow was the Quinpool Road School's principal and the teacher of that grade. On the first day, Withrow told the class that, for the coming academic year, it would have the highest aggregate mark of all the grade eights in Halifax. He continued to remind them of that goal during the school year, and they were successful — a powerful example of group motivation that Day would appreciate in later years.

Unfortunately, that was the high-water mark of Day's pre-university schooling. He spent grade nine at Chebucto Road School, and moved up to rambling Queen Elizabeth High School for grades ten to twelve. That was when, as he says, "education started to go down the crapper." He had been a golden boy at Quinpool Road, but at Queen Elizabeth he was subject to mass schooling, often with larger classes and indifferent or harried teachers. Once praised, he now felt diminished. It would have been bad enough if the teachers had all been talented, but he found huge gaps in their learning. He once had to write a business letter applying for a hypothetical job, and addressed his missive to "Sun Life Assurance" because he had seen the company name on his father's life insurance bill. "I was told it was insurance, not assurance, and the conversation went downhill from that. The teacher didn't know the meaning of words."

He began to skip school, and was constantly disciplined. It was an old-school sanction that students would have to write out lines of poetry for being late. By grade twelve, Day could recite the entire Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He devoured literature and history at home, but barely squeaked by at school. If someone wanted to talk about ancient Egyptian monotheism or the temples at Luxor, he was ready to participate. But then he would go to school: "A lot of the things that interested me had nothing to do with things I was exposed to in school." And so he became a Shithouse Rat. For boys kicked out of class, there was no other place to go, so he would drift down to the boys' room and play cards with the rest of the outcasts. The principal was a stern Second World War veteran, which meant Day had plenty of company.

His refuge was his life out of school — in music and, surprisingly, shoes. Graham Day became an ace shoe salesman. It started in the summer between grades eleven and twelve, when he secured part-time weekend and full-time summer employment with the Halifax branch of Simpson's, then a big national department store chain. He worked for the shoe department manager, Horace Campbell, for five years; in a struggling family, it meant he could make enough money to attend university.

Simpson's was his introduction to business. He was given courses in basic stock control, how shoes and shoe lasts were made, and when it was appropriate to sell off remainders of a line. Campbell knew he needed the job and found him other work. During the post-Christmas period, he worked every day on stock-taking in various departments. During his last year, he was paid extra if he met sales targets. "It was my first experience of working for a boss who actually managed," Day says, "who showed what and how he wanted things done and consistently trained and encouraged me." Day was a good shoe salesman, maintaining a log of customers' names, phone numbers, and shoe sizes so that, when a sale came up, he would contact the people on his list. He would continue in the shoe department until the summer after his second year of law school.

There was also the redeeming nature of music and, from his teenage years on, Graham was blessed with a powerful baritone voice. But, once again, this was a story of personal pleasure laced with the frustration of authority. The teenaged Day heard that an opera was being produced by the Halifax schools and, as an enthusiastic yet raw singer, he was keen to audition. In the end, there were no auditions: the director of music had decided in advance who was going to sing, and Day was not among the chosen. It angered him, but, as with most setbacks, it gave him a renewed purpose. He saved money from his newspaper routes to pay for voice lessons. One day, he skipped school in the afternoon, did his paper route early, walked down Spring Garden Road to the conservatory of music, and persuaded Audrey Farnell — considered the best soprano in Canada — to take him on as a pupil. His voice lessons with her continued through high school. Later, when Farnell left Nova Scotia, he continued the lessons with Teodor Brilts, formerly the leading baritone of the Riga Opera Company in Latvia. Day's mother insisted he also learn piano and the basics of harmony and counterpoint, which gave him a broad grounding in music. He was not as proficient on the piano as in singing, but it was all therapy in an otherwise unhappy life.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Last Canadian Knight"
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Copyright © 2017 Dalhousie University.
Excerpted by permission of Nimbus Publishing Limited.
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Table of Contents

Foreword Lydia Bugden vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Beginnings 7

Chapter 2 Turning Point 20

Chapter 3 Of Courts and Courtship 29

Chapter 4 The Singalong Redemption 37

Chapter 5 Troubleshooter 46

Chapter 6 A Hard Day's Night 63

Chapter 7 Miracle on the Mersey 73

Chapter 8 Best of Times, Worst of Times 87

Chapter 9 The Interregnum 99

Chapter 10 The Privatizer 110

Chapter 11 Rover Unleashed 127

Chapter 12 Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Day 140

Chapter 13 A Knight in the Boardroom 151

Chapter 14 The Chocolate Chairman 163

Chapter 15 Homecoming 177

Chapter 16 The Bank Job 190

Chapter 17 Payback Time 204

Chapter 18 Family Man 217

Chapter 19 Power Play 234

Chapter 20 Knee-Deep in the Rubicon 251

Chapter 21 One Man, Four Acts 265

Acknowledgements 271

Dalhousie University Acknowledgements 275

Appendix 277

Index 279

Editorial Reviews

"It's always fun to pick up a book and have trouble putting it down because the story grips you. A new biography called The Last Canadian Knight: The Unintended Business Adventures of Sir Graham Day by Gorden Pitts did just that"— Catholic Register (Cdn)

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