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MARLER, Sir HERBERT MEREDITH, notary, businessman, politician, and diplomat; b. 7 March 1876 in Montreal, eldest son of Josephine Charlotte Howard and William de Montmollin Marler; m. there 9 April 1902 Beatrice Isabel Allan, and they had two sons and one daughter; d. there 31 Jan. 1940.

Herbert Marler, whose father was a successful notary and a professor of civil law at McGill University, was born into Montreal’s English-speaking Protestant mercantile elite. The Marlers treasured their ties to Huguenot David-François de Montmollin*, one of the first Church of England clergymen to immigrate to post-conquest Quebec. Herbert attended the High School of Montreal, the Montreal Collegiate School, and McGill, graduating with a bcl in 1898 and then joining his father in establishing a firm of public notaries, W. de M. and H. M. Marler. In 1902 he married local socialite Beatrice Isabel Allan, a granddaughter of Andrew Allan*, co-founder of the Allan steamship line, and of Mathew Hamilton Gault*, founder of the Sun Life Assurance Company. Herbert thereby cemented his place in Montreal’s anglophone establishment. The Marlers maintained widely admired properties in the city’s Square Mile and in Senneville, near Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue. Herbert’s younger son, Howard Meredith, would later write: “Although he was always a loving and forgiving father and husband, he had a quick and volatile temper. His wife was in great awe of him, and his two sons were terrified of their father.”

A prudent notary with a gift for handling money, Marler speculated in Montreal real estate and the stock market, though never on margin. He was highly successful: in 1921 he would claim that his annual income ranged between $50,000 and $70,000. In October 1914, shortly after the First World War began, Marler joined the 1st Regiment (Canadian Grenadier Guards) of the active militia. He enlisted for duty overseas with the 245th Infantry Battalion in July 1916 and was promoted major three months later, but he was discharged as surplus the following May, never having gone abroad. He spent the rest of the war serving as fuel administrator for Quebec.

Public service appealed to Marler. In May 1919 he joined the province’s Council of Public Instruction, and two years later he offered to run as the Liberal candidate in the tough Montreal riding of St Lawrence-St George, which was held by Charles Colquhoun Ballantyne, a cabinet minister in Arthur Meighen*’s National Liberal and Conservative government. Liberal leader William Lyon Mackenzie King* welcomed his candidacy. Like many others, he found Marler humourless and overly formal, but he liked him and appreciated his virtues: in his diary entry of 10 July 1921, King describes the notary as ambitious, kind, agreeable, and “a man of high character.” He expected Marler, whose high-tariff views were well known, to ease worries in Montreal’s protectionist business community about the low-tariff Liberals. King was not wrong: on 6 December, a day that saw the Liberals squeak through with a nationwide victory, Marler easily defeated Ballantyne with 7,386 votes, which constituted over 57 per cent of the popular vote.

Marler, who had set his sights on becoming minister of finance, began his parliamentary career on the back benches. He chaired the house’s special committee on pensions, insurance, and re-establishment of returned soldiers in 1922, and he was a member of the standing committees on banking and commerce, industrial and international relations, marine and fisheries, mines and minerals, and railways, canals, and telegraph lines. Though a dull and laboured speaker, Marler earned a reputation as an expert in tariffs, finance, and railways. His hard work impressed the prime minister, who by January 1924 had begun to consider bringing him into cabinet. The two men fell out, however, before an invitation was issued. On 29 April, expressing the sentiments of Montreal manufacturers, Marler spoke out in the house against the government’s tariff-cutting budget, which, he charged, offended the tradition of tariff stability that had been established by former Liberal prime minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier* and his minister of finance, William Stevens Fielding*. That day King wrote in his diary, “He has spoiled his future as a Liberal.” By August relations between the two men had become so cool that Marler refused to attend a Montreal rally in King’s honour.

Both politicians had good reasons to heal this breach. King was clearly crucial to Marler’s frustrated cabinet ambitions, and the prime minister needed Marler to maintain Liberal support in Montreal’s anglophone business community in the next general election. (Marler demonstrated his solid grasp of eastern Canadian business interests in the early summer of 1925 when he played a significant role in negotiating a trade agreement between Canada and the British West Indies.) Equally important, King wanted Marler’s help in preparing the Liberals for the election that would be held in October. On 14 August they reconciled at Marler’s country home in Senneville. In his diary the prime minister noted, “I spoke of the need for party organization – he said he would get here 50,000 for the purpose & could guarantee 100,000.” King promised that Marler’s entry into the cabinet was just a matter of time, and on 5 September he was sworn in as a minister without portfolio.

His cabinet career was short and undistinguished. Opposed by the influential Montreal Gazette, Marler was defeated in the general election of 29 October, which reduced the Liberal government to a shaky minority. Though he did not run in 1926, when King won a majority, the following year Marler secured the nomination to run in Stanstead, a safe seat in the Eastern Townships. The next election was still years away, however, and meanwhile he lingered at the fringes of politics with, in King’s eyes, a legitimate but increasingly awkward claim for political preferment.

Marler was not King’s first choice to head Canada’s new diplomatic mission in Japan, where sensitive immigration restrictions, promising trade prospects, and Asia’s growing global importance made Tokyo an obvious location for Canada’s expanding foreign service to set up its first legation in Asia. When Quebec businessman George Washington Stephens turned King down, however, Marler became a logical second option. King trusted his former cabinet colleague and valued his intelligence and work ethic. On 5 Jan. 1929, after learning of Marler’s acceptance of the position, the prime minister wrote in his diary: “He will make a splendid minister, and is just the person to inaugurate the Legation in the Orient. It is quite clear that it is the social significance of the position which appeals to him and his wife, as well as the opportunity for public service.… It is a great achievement securing Marler & it relieves us at the same time of a political situation which is distinctly embarrassing.” King was also pleased that Marler would personally subsidize the legation, an expectation that was placed upon many of Canada’s early diplomatic heads of post. On 11 January the cabinet appointed Marler minister to the legation in Tokyo; he arrived there in September. Hugh Llewellyn Keenleyside* and Kenneth Porter Kirkwood*, both of whom had diplomatic experience, were to assist him.

Marler’s tenure was not perfect. His young staff resented the heavy stress he and his wife placed on formal pomp and dress, and many Canadian observers, including King, were embarrassed by his failure to get along with diplomats from Great Britain, Canada’s closest ally. Marler’s critics were also uneasy with his strong pro-Japanese outlook and his willingness to accept Japan’s seizure of Manchuria (People’s Republic of China) in 1931. Yet King and his Conservative successor as prime minister, Richard Bedford Bennett*, judged Marler to have done well in Tokyo. The former businessman’s emphasis on bilateral trade with Japan and China during the Great Depression of the early 1930s was closely attuned to Bennett’s own economic priorities. More significant, Marler won widespread acclaim for erecting a magnificent legation and official residence in central Tokyo. He contributed $25,000 of his own money to the project, supervised its construction, and oversaw its furnishing, with exquisite taste. In recognition of Marler’s efforts King George V made him a kcmg on 3 June 1935.

Despite his success in Tokyo, Sir Herbert’s future was unclear. In early 1934 he had sought appointment as Canadian minister in Washington, D.C., but had received little encouragement from the undersecretary of state for external affairs, Oscar Douglas Skelton*. After King returned to power in October 1935, he first offered the position to John Wesley Dafoe*, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, but Dafoe preferred to maintain his outspoken independence. The experienced Marler again seemed an acceptable second choice to King. The appointment, which he announced in the house on 23 June 1936, met with some opposition. On 24 July King recorded in his diary that the cabinet was “not keen about it,” that Department of State officials feared Marler’s stiff manners would not suit casual American society, and that the legation’s senior officer, Humphrey Hume Wrong*, did not want to serve under him. (Privately, Wrong informed Hugh Keenleyside that Marler was “dumb.”) King pressed on, telling Marler that “he would ‘measure up’ & do well” but to be his “‘natural self.’”

The prime minister soon regretted the appointment. He was irked by Marler’s inability to work with British embassy staff in Washington and by his preoccupation with status, which became more pronounced as he aged. On 1 December King bristled at what he called the minister’s repeated “fool suggestion” to elevate the legation to the status of a full embassy. “Their lives are full of dignity, prestige, form,” King had written of Sir Herbert and Lady Marler on 24 July, “– all the gild on the frame – with the reality burning out.”

Other factors hindered Marler’s effectiveness and ability to direct the legation’s work. First, King’s close relationship with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reduced the need for a diplomatic intermediary: on 26 July 1937, after Marler had intervened in top-priority bilateral trade talks, King hinted that he should “keep his hands off.” Secondly, poor relations between Marler and Wrong eroded morale at the legation, where the minister was apparently not well respected. Charles Stewart Almon Ritchie*, who functioned as Marler’s private secretary, wrote in his diary: “He looks like a painstakingly pompous portrait of himself painted to hang in a boardroom. He is not a quick-minded man – indeed one of my fellow secretaries at the Legation says that he is ‘ivory from the neck up.’”

Finally, Marler suffered setbacks in his personal life. He had endured a serious bout of pneumonia in 1933 and undergone prostate surgery in 1936, and the steady decline of his health afterwards left him increasingly bitter and unhappy. He also became embroiled in the affairs of his alcoholic elder son, George Leonard, who scandalized the Canadian establishment by suing his father for committing him to a psychiatric hospital for treatment in 1938. Tired and worn down by this turmoil and the stress of planning the American leg of the royal tour undertaken by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, Marler suffered two heart attacks in April 1939. While recuperating, he collapsed with pleurisy in June and was rushed home to Montreal to recover. After the outbreak of the Second World War, it became necessary for the King government to have an able-bodied minister in Washington, and on 5 September Lady Marler tendered her ailing husband’s resignation without his knowledge. Sir Herbert Marler died on 31 Jan. 1940.

Greg Donaghy