Winners and Losers; the Ice Age Media Myth the Profumo Affair and Another D-Day Hero.
June 12, 2023 Volume 4 # 6
Where Money Was Made
Dope Stock Axed: Where Money was Lost
Canopy Growth— a marijuana stock— is being booted from Canada’s main stock index, the S&P/TSX Composite as of June 19th. Canopy’s price has sewered. It was listed for C$41 in February of 2021 making the company worth C$25-billion. It closed Friday at 68 cents with a market cap of C$375-million.
Just about the only people who made money were those who owned it before the IPO (Initial Public Offering). It is the type of stock that appeals to the general public. But marijuana companies have a lot of competition, from the likes of the Hell’s Angels who don’t have to file a prospectus with the the Ontario Securities Commission.
Climate Change
This was what the world looked like 20,000 years ago, not that long ago in Earth time. People who looked like us and could think like us were walking around, farming in the warm Fertile Crescent, killing mammoths and each other in the colder parts. Most of what are now prosperous parts of the planet were covered in thick ice. The cause could have been a wobble in the Earth’s axis. It obviously got a lot warmer.
It wasn’t too long ago that people were predicting another Ice age.
When I was a junior writer at CBC Television Montreal we used to get bags of film from a service called Visnews, a co-operative owned by the BBC, the CBC, ABC in Australia and NZBC in New Zealand. It was originally known as the British Commonwealth International Newsfilm Agency and it operated out of London.
It was 1969 to 1974 I guess, and the lineup editor would send the low man, me, to sort out of the stuff and see if there was anything interesting. I remember there being news clips on the possibility of a return to the Ice Age. The phrase Global Warming had never been uttered. It first turned up in 1975 with a publication in the Journal Science (according to History.Com) by Wallace Smith Broecker called: Climatic Change: Are We On the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?
Time Magazine and the BBC in the early 1970s were both on the New Ice Age bandwagon. A website called Skeptical Science says the 1970s Ice Age scare was a “Media myth.” Well, if they send it you in an overnight express bag from London, what are you meant to think?
Work Change
There are worries that artificial intelligence, little more than super fast computers, will put some people out of work. Here is one guess of where AI might prosper
There are a lot of repetitive tasks in banking and insurance as well as things such as trading floors. As it is now, I do all my banking online and I do not even own a cheque. Some computer somewhere does all the thinking.
I remember when I worked as an office boy at the Canadian Pacific Railway there was a huge room of men in white shirts working at tracing freight cars.
They didn't have computers to do the job. In a few years that room was empty and the men, they were all men, were off doing something else. Freight cars had clear numbers and optical readers and computers did the counting.
There are a lot of boring jobs that Artifical Intelligence will replace. Maybe some not so boring, like writers. We’ll see.
An Open and Shut Case
It is a JVC Video Capsule. Beautiful little thing with a 6 inch screen and when closed it’s a radio. Don’t know how well it sold, but it has been on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
It Wasn’t Just a D-Day Anniversary Week
Recognize the man on the left? He is John Profumo and 60 years ago this week the then British Minister of War stood in the House of Commons and said he had lied to the House about having an affair with Christine Keeler. He made the same confession to the woman on the right, his wife, a former actress, Valerie Hobson.
The problem was Christine Keeler was also having an affair with a Soviet diplomat at the peak of the Cold War. I am pinching a lot of this information from a piece in the current Spectaor, to which I have a subscription.
Christine Keeler is on the right, the woman on the left is her friend, Mandy Rice-Davie, also involved in the wild parties at Cliveden, the estate owned by Viscount Aster where Profumo and Keeler met. At the time, she was 19, he was 46.
John Profumo was elected to Parliament as a Tory MP first in 1940 and took part in the vote that defeated Neville Chamberlain and brought in Winston Chuchill. The Spectator had this anecdote about how the new MP was dressed down by the whip.
“Profumo voted against the Chamberlain government. David Margesson, the ferocious chief whip, said: ‘I can tell you this, you utterly contemptible little shit. On every morning that you wake up for the rest of your life, you will be ashamed of what you did last night’ . Unabashed, Profumo later remarked: ‘He couldn’t have been more wrong.’”
Profumo was a war hero, and retired from the Army in 1950 as a Brigadier with the military OBE (Order of the British Empire). He was a rising star in Harold Macmillan’s government. From this week on in 1963 he was a ruined man. The Tabloids lived off his disgrace. He wife stayed with him. He led an honourable life working for charitable causes. He was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for his charity work in 1975 and was once again socially, if not politically, acceptable. Margaret Thatcher invited him to her 70th birthday and he sat next to the Queen. He died in 2006 at the age of 91.
The Profumo Affair helped bring down Harold Macmillan and within a year Labour was elected under Harold Wilson. The Spectator’s take is that the affair was the beginning of the end of `deference’ when an old Etonian like Macmillan and Harrow and Oxford edited Profumo could be brought so low. In his obituary the Guardian that Profumo has an Italian title, the 5th Baron Profumo of Italy. I will put a link to the Spectator piece but you might have to be a subscriber to read it.
Spectator on Profumo and deference
Alas, they only made three of these.
It is an Aston Martin DB2/4 with the body made by Bertone. One of them, maybe the only one, sold a few years ago for $1-million. It is parked on a double yellow line. Hope it didn’t get clamped.
74 Days After D-Day
Major David V. Currie (to the left with pistol in his hand) accepting the surrender of German troops at St. Lambert-sur-Dives, France, August 19, 1944. Photo courtesy of the Department of National Defence. Not the sergeant at the edge of picture using what looks like a film camera. He is carrying a sidearm.
Essay of the Week
HMCS Huron was a Tribal Class Destroyer and a young officer on that ship, Lieutenant Geoffrey Hughson, is the subject of the second D-Day obituary.
Here is part of the Canadian Government’s history of HMCS Huron: “In February 1944, she joined the 10th Flotilla at Plymouth, United Kingdom, for invasion duties, serving in the Channel and the Bay of Biscay. She was present on D-Day on June 6, 1944. She assisted in sinking torpedo boat T 29 and destroyer Z 32.”
***
Just two days before his 20th birthday, Geoffrey Hughson was in the thick of naval operations on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He was a junior officer on HMCS Huron, part of the flotilla protecting the armada of invaders heading to France.
It was the culmination of a busy war for the Huron, one of the powerful Tribal Class destroyers, much larger and more formidable than the corvettes which did the bulk of convoy duty. And Mr. Hughson spent his entire war aboard.
In the months leading up to the invasion of Normandy, the Huron was on non-stop patrols in the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay.
Sub-Lieutenant Hughson, just a year removed from being head prefect at his Ottawa private school, helped guide the ship's anti-submarine warfare team, electronically hunting for German U-boats.
As one of 14 officers on the destroyer he was on the bridge during the running battles with German ships in the English Channel and Bay of Biscay that marked Operation Neptune during the pre-invasion period.
About six weeks before D-Day, a skirmish with three Elbings (medium sized destroyers designated as torpedo boats) left one German vessel sunk, and one damaged, said Steve Harris, chief historian at the Department of National Defence in Ottawa.
"The threats [Huron] protected against on June 6 were German destroyers in the Bay of Biscay and [off] Cherbourg. Indeed, they had running fights with German destroyers on June 9 and, with Haida, another Tribal Class destroyer, the Huron was credited with driving at least one German warship ashore and sinking another."
Before Operation Neptune, the Huron was an escort on the Murmansk run, the challenging convoy route that delivered war supplies to the Soviet Union at Arctic ports. The convoys had to run a gauntlet of German U-boats in frigid weather.
HMCS Huron spent Christmas of 1943 and New Year's in a port near Murmansk, a place so cold it made Sub-Lieutenant Hughson's native Ottawa look balmy by comparison.
It didn't lower standards aboard the Huron. A photograph shows a 19-year-old Geoffrey Hughson and his fellow officers in formal dress for a holiday dinner.
But the most dramatic and heart-breaking part of the war for Mr. Hughson took place on land, and not at sea.
His older brother Ward Hughson, was an officer fighting with the Royal Canadian Engineers in Normandy. He was wounded and captured by the Germans in late August of 1944. He was then executed in cold blood, as described in the unit's war diary.
"He was ordered, in English, apparently by the Germans, to stand up and come over to them. When he stood up they fired on him with automatic weapons, as a result of which he died."
The murder haunted Mr. Hughson all his life. He named his only son Ward after his brother.
Geoffrey Hughson was born in Ottawa. His grandfather was in the lumber business and was one of the owners of Gilmour and Hughson, which had a mill on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. Geoffrey started high school at Lisgar Collegiate and then won a scholarship to Ashbury College, a private school, where he became captain of the school.
He was in his first year of chemical engineering at McGill when he joined the navy. He was sent to the Royal Canadian Naval College and then joined the Huron. He served on the ship from 1943 to 1945. In February of 1945, he was promoted to lieutenant.
At the end of the war, Mr. Hughson returned to McGill to study chemical engineering.
Later he admitted he would probably have failed his first year if it hadn't left for the navy. But by this time he was more serious and many of his classmates were also veterans.
Some people who claimed to be veterans were not. While sitting with a young woman at the bar of the Berkeley Hotel on Sherbrooke Street, Mr. Hughson listened while a man boasted of his exploits on the Huron.
Mr. Hughson knew everyone on the ship but didn't recognize the man and could tell from his conversation he was a fraud. He said later that rather than challenge him he just decided to ignore him.
After graduating he went to work for Canadian International Paper, a subsidiary of International Paper, at the time the largest pulp and paper company in the world.
Mr. Hughson worked in research and was soon director of an engineering research section. In 1957, at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, he was part of a trade delegation to Russia. He was the only member on the Canadian side who had been to Russia before. He recalled that he was told to be careful of conversations in hotel rooms since they were certainly bugged.
He also said Canadian government officials approached him about doing some intelligence work. Though he certainly had the good looks of a spy in the movies, he declined.
In the 1960s Mr. Hughson worked for several years as director of research for the parent company, International Paper, in Glens Falls, N.Y. He became president of CIP research at Hawkesbury, Ont., in 1967 and later became vice-president of planning and technology at CIP, which involved a sizable staff and a budget of $400-million a year.
Mr. Hughson retired in 1986 and moved to Knowlton in Quebec's Eastern Townships. He was an example of what demographers now call the "long retirement" people who spend 20 years or more in active retirement. He was in good health until late last year
.He had many of the same pastimes before and after retirement. He was a keen skier and tennis player. He had a court behind his house in Knowlton. He also had a family cottage at Blue Sea Lake north of Ottawa. He showed his talent for fixing things as a boy at the cottage. He earned money from the age of 10 fixing motors for neighbours.
"My father loved that place so much that one summer someone offered him good seats at Wimbledon, but he refused to travel in the middle of cottage season," said his daughter Janet. His wife Joan, a keen tennis player and sports fan, was quite disappointed in losing out of a trip to Wimbledon.
The cottage was also where he kept his survivalist hoard of food and water from the Cuban missile crisis to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He kept busy at an amazing number of projects. He installed a special wood furnace in his house, with an elevator to bring the wood to the basement and an auger to feed it. He also got into personal computers early, in part because the IT department at work had kept the workings of computers a secret.
"He retired and became a computer nerd," said his daughter Sally.
Geoffrey Hughson was a Conservative and lived in one of the few Quebec ridings that sometimes sends a Conservative MP to Ottawa. Brome-Missisquoi was represented by Heward Grafftey and the late Gabrielle Bertrand.
His political views made for lively discussions with his son in law, Terry Mosher, the political cartoonist Aislin, who is married to his daughter, Mary.
Geoffrey Drummond Hughson was born on June 8, 1924, in Ottawa. He died on July 3, 2009, in Cowansville Que., after two bouts of C.difficile in the past few months. He leaves his wife Joan, and his children from his first marriage, Janet, Mary, Ward and Sally.