Dr. Henri Béland: Nobody's Darling

Abstract

In May 1918, in the middle of a debate on the civil service bill, Rodolphe Lemieux interrupted the proceedings in the House of Commons to announce that Dr. Henri Beland, Member of Parliament for Beauce and a former Laurier cabinet minister, had been freed from detention in Germany. Jacques Bureau, the member for Trois-Rivieres and St. Maurice, called for three cheers for Beland and led the House in a rousing chorus of For He's a Jolly Good Fellow, after which Lemieux praised Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden and his government for having done their utmost to secure Beland's release.(1) Yet despite Lemieux's congratulations, the doctor's imprisonment and the long campaign to secure his release had been a source of some embarrassment to the Borden administration for much of the war. Furthermore, his homecoming occurred at a time when Canada was emerging from one of the most bitter political controversies in its history. The rancor of the conscription debate of 1917-1918 poisoned relations between French and English Canada, setting citizen against citizen and sweeping up even those people who tried hardest to avoid it. One of those unfortunate casualties was Henri Beland. Henri Severin Beland was born in Louiseville in October 1869 and began his schooling at the classical college at Trois-Rivieres before studying medicine at Laval University. He practiced for some years in New Hampshire but returned to Canada to settle in St. Joseph de Beauce, and was soon elected mayor of the community. Beland was successful in a bid to enter the Quebec legislature in 1897, but moved into federal politics in a 1902 by-election to represent Beauce after Aurele Godbout was appointed to the Senate. The doctor was not a conspicuous figure in the House of Commons. A fairly typical backbencher, he rarely took part in the debate, speaking only two or three times each session until he was raised to the cabinet. Nevertheless, he was a popular figure on Parliament Hill, and umpired the occasional baseball game on the parliamentary lawn between the House of Commons and the press gallery. He was also known to be particularly sensitive to the spirit of rural Quebec and soon came to be regarded as a solid, reliable party man; Laurier's biographer called him one of the old Liberal fighters, while the Ottawa Journal declared him to be one of Laurier's three great Quebec lieutenants.(2) Perhaps as a reward for such services, Beland was appointed Postmaster-General under Laurier in 1911, but held the post only until the government fell. He retained his seat in the 1911 election, but left Canada a few years later for an extended tour of Europe with his second wife.(3) When the war broke out, Beland and his Belgian-born wife were in Middelkerke, a resort town on the English Channel, but returned immediately to Madame Beland's birthplace near Antwerp, where the doctor offered his services to the Belgian Army. He was wounded in the defense of the city, but declined to leave Belgium when a German occupation appeared imminent. By April 1915, the Beland family had resolved to depart Antwerp for Holland but the German authorities withheld permission until the doctor paid a tenfold taxation on all properties owned by the family in Belgium. He remained in Antwerp attempting to sort out the matter but the authorities grew more inflexible as the weeks passed and, on 2 June 1915, Beland was informed that he would be interned immediately. Four days later, he was moved to Stadtvogtei prison in Berlin. Conditions in the prison were marginal at best. The doctor was confined in a small, whitewashed cell with three other civilian internees, and lived on a ration of black bread and two helpings of thin soup each day. Some months later, food parcels began arriving from England, so that Beland and his cell-mates had just enough food to keep them in a reasonable state of health. There was little in the way of recreation, though Beland was luckier than his fellow prisoners because he acted as unofficial jail physician, a position which allowed him a certain amount of freedom within Stadtvogtei. …