Sir Samuel Hughes, (January 8, 1853 – August 23, 1921) was the Canadian Minister of Militia and Defence during World War I. After a stormy tenure in the position, he was dismissed by Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden in 1916.
Early life
Hughes was born January 8, 1853, at Solina near Bowmanville in what was then Canada West. He was a son of John Hughes from County Tyrone, Ireland, and Caroline (Laughlin) Hughes, a Canadian descended from Huguenots and Ulster Scots. He was educated in Durham County, Ontario and later attended the Toronto Normal School and the University of Toronto. In 1866 he joined the 45th West Durham Battalion of Infantry and served during the Fenian raids in the 1860s and 1870s. Throughout his life, Hughes was very involved in the militia, attending all of the drill practice sessions, and taking up shooting with a rifle in his spare time to improve his aim. A superb shot with a rifle, Hughes was active in gun clubs and ultimately became president of the Dominion Rifle Association. Hughes liked to see himself as embodying the Victorian values of hard work, self discipline, strength and manliness. Tall, muscular, and broad-shouldered, Hughes excelled at sports, being especially talented at lacrosse. He later claimed, in the British Who's Who, to have "personally offered to raise" Canadian contingents for service in "the Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns, the Afghan Frontier War, and the Transvaal War".
At the age of 20, he married his first wife, Caroline Preston, who died a year later. Subsequently, he married Mary Burk, and the new couple soon moved to Toronto. He was a teacher from 1875 to 1885 at the Toronto Collegiate Institute (now Jarvis Collegiate), where he was noted for his eccentricities such as his habit of chewing on his chalk when delivering his lectures. Hughes abandoned teaching as he had trouble supporting a wife and three children on his salary while teaching offered little prospect of promotion. In 1885, he moved his family to Lindsay, where he had bought The Victoria Warder, the local newspaper. He was the paper's publisher from 1885 to 1897.
Newspaperman
In his first editorial, Hughes accused the Roman Catholic Church of being behind the smallpox epidemic that was ravaging Montreal at the time and called French-Canadians "little better than brutes". Shortly after he began his proprietorship of the Victoria Warder in July 1885, Hughes joined the local Liberal-Conservative Association. The Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, often commented that Hughes's letters to him were "voluminous" and sometimes "impertinent" as he demanded patronage jobs for local Tories. Macdonald also noted in 1888 that "Sam Hughes is one of our best friends", as the Victoria Warder very strongly supported the Conservatives, making him a useful man for the Tories in the rural Victoria County, where most people got their news from his newspaper.
At the time when Hughes arrived in Victoria County, it was a mostly forested area where lumbering was the chief industry, though agriculture was increasing as the trees were cut down. Most of the towns and villages in Victoria County were isolated settlements located on the lakes and connected only by water and by primitive roads. The population of the county was overwhelmingly of British descent and Protestant. On the masthead of the Victoria Warder, Hughes put the following poem: "A Union of hearts, a Union of hands, A Union no man can sever, A Union of tongues, A Union of lands, And the flag-British Union forever". Hughes had much affection for the rugged landscape of the Victoria County, talking about its forests and lakes in the same manner he praised the Highlands of Scotland and the rolling fields of Ulster. His grandson wrote that for Hughes Victoria County was his "spiritual home". Victoria County in the 19th century was considered to be a "rough" frontier area, and during his tempestuous time as editor, Hughes was sued for libel, there was an arson attempt against the Victoria Warder and was at least one assassination attempt against him when he was shot at while leaving his newspaper office.
In 1885, Hughes tried to volunteer for the expeditionary force sent to put down the North-West Rebellion led by the Metis Louis Riel, but he was refused despite being a very active member of the militia. Hughes's younger brother, James, was part of the force sent to the Northwest Territory (modern Saskatchewan) and to compensate for being not able to fight, he gave the war extensive coverage in The Victoria Warder. Reflecting his life-long belief in the superiority of citizen soldiers over professional soldiers, Hughes presented the Northwest Rebellion as a triumph of the Canadian militia, proudly trumpeting the fact that almost all of the men sent to the Northwest had been civilians only weeks before donning their uniforms to head west. About the Canadian victory in the Battle of Batoche, Hughes wrote in an editorial that "regular troops were all right for police purposes in times of peace and for training schools, but beyond that they are an injury to the nation".
A recurring theme of Hughes's writing in the Victoria Warder was the fear that industrialization and urbanization might lead to a loss of masculinity, and that the best way to save traditional masculinity was compulsory militia service for all Canadian men. Hughes equated masculinity with toughness, and argued that militia service would toughen up Canadian men who might otherwise go soft living in an urban environment full of labor-saving devices. As one of his arguments for the militia, Hughes played a key role in creating what the Canadian historian Desmond Morton called the "militia myth" around the War of 1812; namely, he misrepresented Upper Canada as being saved from successive American invasions in 1812, 1813 and 1814 by the Upper Canada militia, instead of the British Army regulars, who in fact did most of the fighting.
Another theme of Hughes's coverage of the Northwest Rebellion was the way in which he essentially agreed with Riel that the stream of English-speaking, Protestant settlers from Ontario into the Prairies were indeed threatening the existence of the Catholic religion and French language of the Metis, with the only difference that what Riel saw as a tragedy, Hughes saw as a blessing. Victoria County had as a percentage of the population the largest number of Orangemen in Canada in the late 19th century, and Hughes who sat on the executive board of the local Lodge of the Loyal Orange Order in the county was able to use the Orangemen to provide a reliable group of voters when seeking election to the House of Commons throughout his career. The combative Hughes enjoyed brawling with Irish Catholic immigrants on trips to Toronto. As the editor of the Victoria Warder, Hughes often attacked "Romanists" as he called Catholics. For an example in an editorial on 4 October 1889 he accused the "Romanists" of Lindsay of being "a disloyal murder-planning society". After Wilfrid Laurier, the new Liberal Leader of the Official Opposition, spoke in favour of free trade with the United States, Hughes accused him in an 1888 editorial of being in favour of having Canada annexed by the United States. To counter Laurier's argument that free trade with the United States meant prosperity, Hughes proposed an Imperial Federation with Great Britain as the best way to bring about prosperity, though he also held out the possibility that the United States might one day join to create a union of the English-speaking peoples.
Member of Parliament
In the 1891 election, Hughes ran as a Conservative to represent Victoria North, but was narrowly defeated by only 202 votes by the Liberal incumbent, Jack Barron. Charging electoral fraud, Hughes went to court to challenge the result. Two justices at the Queen's Bench in Toronto ruled that the evidence of electoral fraud presented by Hughes was overwhelming, and ordered a by-election, held on 11 February 1892. During the by-election, Barron twice tried to bribe Hughes to drop out. Hughes was elected to Parliament in the by-election. In January 1894, Hughes was involved in a brawl on Lindsay's main street with a Roman Catholic blacksmith named Richard Kylie, which led him to being convicted of assault and fined $500. Despite expectations that the assault conviction would cause him to lose his seat, in the 1896 election, Hughes kept his seat.
In 1870, when the province of Manitoba was created out of the North-West Territories as part of the political deal to end the Red River Rebellion, Manitoba had a French-speaking Métis majority, and it was declared in the Manitoba Act creating the province that French was one of Manitoba's official languages, and the province was to provide Catholic education in French. By 1890, immigration from Ontario had changed the demographics of Manitoba drastically and in that year the Manitoba government passed a law making all education in English under the grounds that French-language education was costing too much money. This in turn led to demands for the Dominion government to intervene as this law violated the Manitoba Act. The Manitoba Schools Question proved to be one of the most bitterly divisive issues of the 1890s, and Hughes emerged as a spokesman for those who urged the Dominion government not to intervene, arguing that if Manitoba did not wish to provide education in French, that was its right. Hughes justified his views under the grounds of secularism, writing in 1892 "all churches are a simple damned nuisance". Despite his anti-Catholic stance, Hughes supported the claims of the Catholic John Thompson to be prime minister. Hughes's support for Thompson was based upon political expediency, namely that Thompson was the best man to beat the popular Wilfrid Laurier.
Hughes used his influence with the Orange Order to try to keep them from inflaming the Manitoba Schools Question, and to convince them to accept Thompson as the next Conservative leader to replace the ailing Sir John Abbott. As Thompson represented a more upper-class, urban wing of the Conservative Party, the support of Hughes who represented a more lower-class, rural wing of the Conservatives was instrumental in assuring Thompson became prime minister in November 1892 when Abbott finally resigned. He also tried to persuade the Orangemen to accept a Catholic prime minister. During Thompson's time as prime minister, Hughes supported his efforts to find a compromise to the Manitoba Schools Question, though he notably stopped writing as often to the prime minister after Thompson decided in 1894 to pass a remedial bill to force Manitoba to abide by the Manitoba Act. When Thompson died in December 1894, Hughes supported the candidacy of Sir Charles Tupper against Senator Mackenzie Bowell, but Bowell prevailed and became the next prime minister. As the debate intensified into a crisis in 1895–96 following a ruling by the Privy Council against Manitoba, Hughes took a generally moderate position on the Manitoba Schools Question, asking rhetorically in a letter to the editor of the Ottawa Journal "why should we plunge Canada into a religious war?" In a letter to Nathaniel Clarke Wallace, the Grand Master of the Orange Order, he advised against extremism on the Manitoba Schools Question, saying the issue was tearing the Conservative Party apart. Faced with certain defeat in the 1896 election, Hughes was one of the Conservative MPs who voted in March to depose Bowell in favour of Tupper.
Hughes supported Tupper's "friendly means" compromise of secular education in Manitoba with religious instruction after the school day had officially ended. Wallace disregarded Hughes's advice and in 1896 stated that the Orangemen would only support candidates who stood against the federal remedial bill against Manitoba, which in effect meant supporting the Liberals. Laurier, despite being a French-Canadian Catholic, supported Manitoba under the grounds of provincial rights, and had the Liberals filibuster Tupper's remedial bill. At a national meeting of the Orange Order in Collingwood in May 1896, Hughes spoke in favour of Tupper and was almost expelled from the Order. In the 1896 election, Hughes's main challenger was John Delemere, an independent candidate endorsed by Wallace. Hughes held on to his seat by arguing that the affairs of Manitoba were irrelevant to Victoria County and he understood local issues far better than his opponent. The election of 1896 resulted in a Liberal victory, and in the new, much smaller Conservative caucus, Hughes stood out as the few MPs whose reputation had been enhanced by the Manitoba Schools Question. Hughes's position on the Question was based upon pragmatism, namely the need to keep the Conservatives united to win the next general election in face of the challenge from Laurier, whose "sunny ways" were winning over people all over Canada. Unlike other Conservative MPs like George Foster who argued that the Manitoba Act had guaranteed the right to a Catholic education in French, and it was the duty of the Dominion government to uphold the law, Hughes had no interest in minority rights. Hughes felt that a secular education system was superior to a religious one, and that the language of instruction in Manitoba schools should be English. His moderate stance on the Manitoba Schools Question was motivated entirely by the fear that the issue might cause the Conservatives to lose the next general election, as indeed proved to be the case. Despite the fact that Wallace had campaigned against him, Hughes tried to rebuild the relationship between the Conservatives and the Orange Order, through it was not until Wallace died in 1901 that his efforts bore fruit.
The returned Prime Minister Laurier had declared his support for the British policies in South Africa, but was non-committal about sending Canadian troops if war should break out. In the summer of 1899, the Governor General of Canada, Lord Minto, and the commander of the Canadian Militia, Colonel Edward Hutton, drafted a secret plan for a Canadian contingent of 1,200 men to go to South Africa, and decided that Hughes as one of the most outspokenly imperialist members of Parliament was to be one of the commanders. In September 1899, Minto and Hutton first informed Frederick William Borden, the Minister of Militia and Defence, of the plan that they had drafted, though Laurier remained out of the loop. As Laurier continued to hesitate, Hughes offered to raise a regiment at his own expense to fight in South Africa, an offer which threatened to upset Hutton's plans as Hughes's offer gave Laurier the perfect excuse for doing nothing. When Hutton ordered Hughes as a subordinate militia officer to remain silent, Hughes responded with an angry outburst in public alleging an attempt by a British officer to silence a Canadian MP, creating what the Canadian historian Morton called a clash of "two like-minded, but out-sized egos".
Boer War service
On 3 October 1899, the Transvaal Republic declared war on Great Britain. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, sent Laurier a note thanking him for his offer of Canadian troops to South Africa, which confused the prime minister as he made no such offer. At the same time the October 1899 edition of the Canadian Military Gazette published the details of the plan to send 1,200 men to South Africa. When Laurier denied in the House of Commons having any plans to send troops, Chamberlain's note was leaked to the press, and on 9 October 1899, Laurier received a note from editor of the Toronto Globe (which supported the Liberals) saying the prime minister must "either send troops or get out of office". As the Liberal caucus was badly divided between anti-war French-Canadian MPs and pro-war English-Canadian MPs, Laurier did not dare summon Parliament for a vote as the Liberals might split over the issue, and instead issued an order-in-council on 14 October saying that Canada would provide a force of volunteers for South Africa. Hughes promptly volunteered for the contingent, but was vetoed by Hutton who had neither forgotten nor forgiven Hughes for his insubordination and his abrasive refusal to be silenced; however, perhaps as a form of revenge against Hutton, Laurier insisted that Hughes be allowed to go to South Africa.
Having convinced Laurier to send Canadian troops, Hughes embarked to serve in the Second Boer War. Upon boarding the ship , which left Quebec City for Cape Town on 31 October 1899, carrying 1,061 Canadian volunteers, Hughes announced that he was "free of all military authority" and would take no orders from any officer. Upon arriving in South Africa, Hughes told the press that the Boers "on their old plugs of horses" would out-ride the British on the , a remark that marked the beginning of Hughes's stormy service in South Africa as ironically the ultra-imperialist Hughes constantly clashed with the British Army. Hughes developed a strong contempt for the British military while in South Africa and came away with the idea that frontier living had made the Canadians tougher and hardier soldiers than the British. The Canadian historian Pierre Berton wrote that Hughes "hated the British Army". Hughes always believed the part-time citizen soldiers of the Canadian militia were far better soldiers than the full-time professionals of the British Army, a viewpoint that did much to influence his later decisions in World War I. In this regard, the performance of the Boer (commandos) was used by Hughes to prove his point, as he argued that the citizen militias of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State had out-fought the British Army for much of the war, though he ignored the fact that in the end it was the British Army that won the war. Hughes also used the performance of irregular cavalry units from Canada and Australia to support his theory, noting that the "cowboy" units recruited from the Australian Outback and the Canadian Prairies were the ones most effective at hunting down the . Hughes's biographer, Ronald Haycock noted that he naively assumed that all future wars would be like the Boer War, even right down to being fought in a place like the . Haycock also noted that Hughes seemed to have no interest in understanding why the commandos had been defeated, instead presenting the war as almost a Boer victory. It was also during the Boer war that Hughes become convinced of the thesis that the Ross rifle developed by a Scottish sportsman, Sir Charles Ross, and manufactured in Canada was the ideal weapon for infantrymen. The more that the British Army rejected the Ross rifle as unsuitable, the more it persuaded Hughes of its superiority, though Morton noted that the British objections to the Ross rifle were sound as it was a hunting rifle that overheated after rapid firing and was too easily jammed by dirt.
However, despite his frequent clashes with British Army officers, Sir Alfred Milner, the British High Commissioner for South Africa, praised Hughes for his willingness to by-pass bureaucracy and to get things done. Two men who were later prominent in Milner's Kindergarten, William Hitchens and Lionel Curtis both served under Hughes's command from March 1900 onward as they advanced across the from the Cape Colony into the Orange Free State. Outside of Hughes's own accounts of his Boer War service, most of what is known about his time in South Africa comes from the accounts written by Hitchens, and Curtis and their mutual friend, Leo Amery, the war correspondent of The Times of London, who first met Hughes in Cape Town in December 1899 together with another mutual friend, Max Balfour. Amery, Balfour, Curtis and Hitchens all described Hughes as a populist leader who was not aloof from the common soldiers, impatient with bureaucracy, forthright about expressing his opinions about everything, and who shared the hardships on war on the . Balfour wrote that Hughes was chivalrous towards Boer civilians, apologizing to the wife of a man he arrested as a guerrilla for taking away her husband while Curtis stated that Hughes always paid for the food he had taken from farms out on the , saying he was no thief. Amery described Hughes as a hard-driving, aggressive commander whose cavalry covered vast distances across the , saying he was relentless in his pursuit of the enemy. In a promotion, in May 1900, Milner had Hughes made the intelligence officer and assistant adjutant general to Warren's Scouts commanded by Sir Charles Warren, which had the task of advancing over the Orange River to neutralize a Transvaal force under the command of Commandant-General Piet de Villers. During the advance, de Villers attacked the British camp at the Faber Pass outside of Campbell on 27 May 1900, and a half-dressed Hughes who sprung into action after waking up at the sound of the shooting, was involved in leading the counterattack that drove the Transvaalers back at the cost of 23 dead and 33 wounded. Afterwards, Hughes attacked Warren for "absolutely untrue" statements in his official report about the action at the Faber Pass such as his claim that he was not taken by surprise and the camp was well situated, criticism which Haycock described as very well merited.
Hughes would continually campaign, unsuccessfully, to be awarded a Victoria Cross (VC) for actions that he had supposedly taken in the fighting. The Canadian historian René Chartrand wrote that "...Hughes's character may be read from the fact that he had actually for the VC for his services in South Africa". Hughes's recommendation of himself for a VC was most unorthodox as normally one had to be recommended for the award. Hughes published most of his own accounts of the war, often saying that when he left, the British commander was "sobbing like a child." In fact, Hughes was dismissed from Boer War service in the summer of 1900 for military indiscipline, and sent back to Canada. Letters in which Hughes charged the British military with incompetence had been published in Canada and South Africa. Hughes had also flagrantly disobeyed orders in a key operation by granting favourable terms to an enemy force which surrendered to him. Although Hughes had proved a competent, and sometimes exceptional, front-line officer, boastfulness and impatience told strongly against him. Hughes's demand for a VC was refused, but as a consolation prize, his demand to be knighted for his Boer War services was granted, albeit only belatedly in 1915, and therefore Hughes was proud to be known as "Sir Sam". By this time, Hughes had become convinced that he deserved not one, but two VCs for his service in South Africa, a demand that exasperated the War Office in London, who patiently told Hughes one could not recommend oneself for the VC, and his requests for a VC bar could not be considered.
Shadow defence minister
As the defence critic in the Conservative shadow cabinet, Hughes who was widely read on military history, current military trends, and issues in the Canadian militia proved a vigorous and effective shadow defence minister, accusing the defence minister, Sir Frederick Borden, of being ineffectual in handling his portfolio. Hughes was also well known for his attacks upon the immigration policy of the Laurier government, charging that Canada needed more immigrants of "good British stock". The subject of settling the Prairies much interested Hughes as he served as an agent between 1902 and 1905 for the Canadian Northern Railway headed by his friend, William Mackenzie, travelling twice to the Prairies to select the route for the CNR. Amery, having first met Hughes in the Boer War, followed him on his second trip across the Prairies, writing about how he talked with great passion about his plans to build the "finest city" on the Prairies. In the 1904 election, the Liberals triumphed in a landslide, and even Hughes held on to his seat in Victoria County by a narrow margin. The Conservative leader, Robert Borden, lost his own seat in Halifax, and Hughes offered to resign to allow Borden to represent Victoria County. Though Borden chose another safe Conservative seat in Ontario to represent, he thanked Hughes for his "kindness" in offering up his own seat.
Hughes was also active in the Imperial Federation movement, regularly corresponding with both Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Milner on the issue, and every year from 1905 onward, introduced a resolution in the House of Commons calling for an "equal partnership union" of the Dominions with the United Kingdom. In this, Hughes often confounded Milner and Chamberlain, who thought he was the foremost Canadian champion of the Imperial Federation concept, as what Hughes wanted was for Canada to become an equal partner in running the British empire, instead of playing the more subordinate role that Milner and Chamberlain had envisioned. Hughes favoured a protectionist policy of Imperial Preference, but unlike Chamberlain, he insisted that Imperial Preference be tied to "equal partnership" with an Imperial cabinet of all the Dominion prime ministers plus the British prime minister to decide policy for the entire empire. Hughes repeatedly objected to Chamberlain's concept of the British prime minister and cabinet deciding questions for the Dominions, and Haycock wrote what Hughes wanted sounds very similar to the British Commonwealth that emerged after 1931.
In 1906, after repeatedly hammering the immigration minister, Clifford Sifton in debate, Hughes's motion calling for the Canadian government to give preference in handing out land in the Prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba to veterans of the British Army was accepted as policy. Like other English-Canadians at the time, Hughes believed that too many immigrants from Eastern Europe were being allowed to settle on the Prairies, and instead the Prairies should be settled by immigrants from Britain, with veterans in particular encouraged to settle. In 1907 Hughes told the House of Commons that Catholic immigrants from Europe were "a curse upon Canada". Despite being publicly censured by the Conservative leader Robert Borden for his "curse upon Canada" remark with Borden insisting that the Conservative Party was not a sectarian party, two months later in June 1907 at the Orange Order's national convention in Vancouver, Hughes repeated his thesis that Catholic immigrants were a "curse upon Canada", which was followed up with the warning that the Orangemen would never vote Conservative again if Borden expelled Hughes. Hughes's ability to bring out the votes of the Orange Order for the Conservatives ensured that Borden did not expel him despite the way in which he kept sabotaging Borden's efforts to reach out to Catholic voters.
Hughes, who claimed to have been offered but declined the post of Deputy Minister of Militia in 1891,
A Regimental and King's Colours display and plaque at Knox Presbyterian Church (Ottawa) is dedicated to the memory of those who served in the 207th (Ottawa-Carleton) Battalion, CEF during the First World War. The Regimental Colours were donated by the American Bank Note Company and presented by Hughes to the battalion on Parliament Hill on November 18, 1916.
In spite of mounting criticism from 1915 onward at the way in which Hughes ran the Defence Department in wartime, the politically indebted Borden kept Hughes on.To Borden, events seemed to prove that many of Hughes's opinions were right, as the prime minister visited the Western Front in the summer of 1915 and became convinced that much of what Hughes had to say about the inefficiency of the British Army was correct. Hughes's methods were unorthodox and chaotic, but Hughes argued he was merely cutting through the red-tape to help "the boys" in the field. Finally, Borden in his dealings with British officials often found them patronising and condescending, which led him to side with his nationalist defence minister who argued that Canadians were the equals of the "mother country" in imperial affairs, and should not be talked down to.
The same summer, it emerged that the Shell Committee had $170 million worth in orders to fulfill while it delivered only $5.5 million of its orders, with accusations being made that Hughes's friends were engaging in war profiting. With the support of Borden, the British Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George stopped all orders until Canada created the Imperial Munitions Board headed by the industrialist Sir Joseph Flavelle. Flavelle ended the corruption and increased efficiency in the munitions industry, reaching the point that by 1917 Canadian factories were turning out some $2 million worth of shells per day. Hughes was enraged at the way that Flavelle had taken over an important function from his department, and even more that the Imperial Munitions Board was far more efficient and honest than the Defence Department had been. Despite the scandal caused by the Shell Committee, which led Borden to face very embarrassing questions in the House of Commons and to hopes on the part of Laurier that he might become prime minister again, Hughes was not sacked.
Between October 1914 – September 1915, 71 battalions had been raised for the CEF by the existing militia regiments, but the losses in the war required even more men. In August 1915, Hughes announced that any individual or group could form a "chum's battalion" (also known as a "pal's battalion") for the CEF, leading to the formation of various units such as Highland battalions for Scots-Canadians, Irish battalions for Irish-Canadians, "sports" battalions based upon men interested in common sport like hockey, American battalions for American volunteers, Orange battalions for Orangemen, "bantam" battalions for men shorter than 5′2″, and so forth. The "pal's battalion" campaign was based upon the "chum's battalion" campaign launched in Britain in 1914. Though Hughes's "pal's battalions" campaign raised 170 new battalions by 1916, only 40 reached full strength, and many of the men who joined during the "pal's" campaign were underage, unfit, or too old, as recruiting colonels were more concerned about the quantity of volunteers than the quality. Of only those Canadians who saw combat in the war, 60% had joined by the end of 1915, and by the beginning of 1916 the number of volunteers fell off drastically with only 2,810 men volunteering between July 1916 – October 1917. In March 1916, a 3rd Division was formed by amalgamating Princess Patricia's Light Infantry, the Royal Canadian Regiment (a Permanent Force regiment, which previously guarded Bermuda against the unlikely threat of German invasion), and various mounted rifle units that had been stationed in England since the spring of 1915. The 3rd Division first saw action on 1 June 1916 in the Battle of Mount Sorrel, which was lost to the Germans and then taken back by 13 June. In September 1916, the Canadian Corps entered the Battle of the Somme, fighting on until the end of the battle in November, and suffered 24,029 casualties. The "chum's battalions" raised in 1915 were formed into the 4th Division, which first saw action on the Somme on 10 October 1916. The 4th Division was commanded by David Watson, the owner of the Quebec Chronicle newspaper, who been personally chosen by Hughes, who thought highly of him.
Hughes, an Orangeman prone to anti-Catholic sentiments and not well liked among French Canadians, increased tensions by sending Anglocentrics to recruit French Canadians, and by forcing French volunteers to speak English in training. He reluctantly accepted Japanese-Canadians and Chinese-Canadians for the CEF and assigned black Canadians to construction units. However, some black Canadians did manage to enlist as infantrymen, as Chartrand noted that in a painting by Eric Kennington of the 16th Canadian Scottish Battalion marching through the ruins of a French village, one of the soldiers wearing kilts in the painting is a black man. In marked contrast to his attitudes towards black Canadian and Asian Canadian volunteers, Hughes encouraged the enlistment of First Nations volunteers into the CEF as it was believed that Indians would make for ferocious soldiers. The First Nations volunteers were generally assigned as snipers out of the belief that Indians were expert marksmen, and the most deadly sniper of the war with 378 kills was the Ojibwa Francis Pegahmagabow.
Despite orders from the Governor General not to, Hughes used Defence Department funds to buy newspaper ads in the neutral United States recruiting for the American Legion that he planned to form within the CEF. Borden was unaware until early 1916 that Hughes had recruited a battalion of American volunteers, which he first learned of after receiving American complaints about Canadian violations of American neutrality. Borden was even astonished to learn that an American Unitarian clergyman living in Toronto, the Reverend C.S. Bullock, whom Hughes had appointed his chief recruiter for the American Legion, had also received from Hughes a colonel's commission in the CEF despite having no military experience.
Between 1914 and 1916, Hughes raised in total about half million volunteers for the CEF, of whom only about 13,000 were French-Canadians. Hughes's hostility towards French Canada together with his decision not to call out the militia in 1914 contributed at least in part to the failure of recruiting in Quebec, despite the Defence Department spending $30,000 in Quebec in a campaign headed by Colonel Arthur Mignault in 1916 to recruit more volunteers. After the battle of Courcelette in 1916, two of the CEF's battalions from Quebec, the 163rd Poil-aux-pattes commanded by Olivar Asselin and the 189th, a group of hard-fighting Gaspésiens who included two winners of the Victoria Cross, had to be broken up owing to a lack of replacements for their losses. The remaining men from the 163rd and 189th went into the 22nd Battalion, the future "Van Doos", whose men won more decorations for valor than any of the other battalions of the CEF by the end of the war. However, the failure of the recruiting efforts were also due to an attempt by the Ontario government in 1916 to ban schools for the French-Canadian minority in Ontario, which caused much resentment in Quebec, being seen as an attempt by the Orange Order, which was powerful in Ontario, to stamp out the French culture and language. Recruiting efforts in la belle province also failed due to Quebec's status as the most industrialised province as Montreal at the time was Canada's largest and wealthiest city. During the war, munitions and textile plants in Montreal offered higher wages than anything the CEF could offer, and many French-Canadian men preferred to support the war effort by working in a factory in Montreal rather than enlisting in the CEF. Granatstein noted that French-Canadians made up 30% of Canada's population, but only 4% of the CEF, and that French-Canadians living outside of Quebec, as the Acadians in New Brunswick, were more likely to enlist than those in Quebec.
Over the course of the war, the policies carried out by the Ministry of Defence and Militia were much marked by inefficiency and waste, largely caused by Hughes as Morton wrote: "Hughes's perennial contempt for military professionals, shared by his overseas agent, Max Aitken, became an excuse for chaos and influence-peddling in militia administration". As scandals continued from the exposure of wasteful purchasing in 1915 to the "munitions scandal" of 1916 which exposed Hughes's flunky J. Wesley Allison as corrupt, Borden took away various functions from Defence Ministry to be handled by an independent board or commission headed by men who were not cronies of Hughes. Hughes was widely resented and disliked by the men of the CEF and when Hughes visited Camp Borden in July 1916, "his boys" loudly booed him, blaming the minister for the shortages of water at Camp Borden.
thumb|left|Hughes visiting the Front in August 1916
Hughes's policy of raising new battalions instead of sending the reinforcements to the existing battalions led to much administrative waste and ultimately led to most of the new battalions being broken up to provide manpower for the older battalions. To manage the Canadian Expeditionary Force in London, Hughes created a confusing system of overlapping authorities run by three senior officers, in order to make himself the ultimate arbiter of every issue. The most important of the officers in England was Major General John Wallace Carson, a mining magnate from Montreal and a friend of Hughes, who proved himself a skillful intriguer. While the officers in London feuded for Hughes's favour, what Morton called a "...burgeoning, wasteful, array of camps, offices, depots, hospitals, and commands spread out across England." Twice, Borden sent Hughes to England to impose order and efficiency, and twice the prime minister was gravely disappointed. In September 1916, Hughes acting on his own and without informing Borden, announced in London the formation of the "Acting Overseas Sub-Militia Council" to be chaired by Carson with Hughes's son-in-law to serve as the chief secretary.
Controversy
His historical reputation was sullied further by poor decisions on procurements for the force. Insisting on the utilization of Canadian manufactured equipment, Hughes presided over the deployment of equipment that was often inappropriate for the Western Front, or of dubious quality. Previous to 1917, this negatively affected the operational performance of the CEF. The Ross rifle, MacAdam Shield Shovel, boots and webbing (developed for use in the South African War), and the Colt machine gun were all Canadian items which were eventually replaced or abandoned due to quality or severe functionality issues. The management of spending for supplies was eventually taken away from Hughes and assigned to the newly formed War Purchasing Commission in 1915. It was not until Hughes' resignation in November 1916 that the Ross rifle was fully abandoned by the CEF in favour of the British standard Lee–Enfield rifle.
250px|thumb|Ross Rifle
250px|thumb|Colonel Sam Hughes watching Sergeant Hawkins demonstrating the [[MacAdam Shield Shovel]]
Canadian staff officers possessed an extremely limited level of experience and competence at the start of the war, having been discouraged from passing through the British Staff College for many years prior. Compounding the issue was Hughes' regular attempts to promote and appoint officers based upon patronage and Canadian nativism instead of ability, an act which not only created tension and jealousy between units but ultimately negatively affected the operating performance of the CEF as well. Lieutenant General Julian Byng, who replaced Alderson as commander of the CEF from May 1916, eventually became so incensed with the continuous interference on the part of Hughes that he threatened to resign. Byng, an aristocrat and a career British Army officer who was modest in his tastes and known for his care for his men, was very popular with the rank and file of the Canadian Corps, who called themselves "the Byng boys". This in turn sparked Hughes's jealousy. On 17 August 1916, Byng and Hughes had dinner where Hughes announced in his typical bombastic way that he never made a mistake and would hold the power of promotion within the Canadian Corps; Byng in reply stated that as a corps commander he had the power of promotion, that he would inform Hughes before any making promotions as a courtesy, and would resign if Hughes continued his interference with his command in the same way he had with Alderson. When Hughes claimed "I am never wrong", Byng replied "What a damn dull life you must have had, Minister!" Byng wanted to give command of the 2nd Division to Henry Burstall, who had greatly distinguished himself, over the objections of Hughes, who wanted to give command of the 2nd Division to his son Garnet, whom Byng regarded as a mediocrity unfit to command anything. Byng diplomatically told Hughes he had not appointed his son because the "Canadians deserved and expected the best leaders available". Byng wrote to Borden to say that he would not tolerate political interference in his corps, and he would resign if the younger Hughes was given the command of the 2nd Division rather than Burstall, who did indeed receive the appointment.
Criticism from Field Marshal Douglas Haig, King George V and from within his own party gradually forced Canadian Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden to tighten control over Hughes. The Toronto Globe in an editorial on 22 June 1916 attacked Hughes for his "swashbuckling" speeches that were damaging relations with Britain. Borden, becoming assertive as the war continued on, began to tire of Hughes's tirades before the cabinet, and hinted more than once he was thinking about sacking him. However, it was not until Hughes' political isolation, with the creation of the Ministry of the Overseas Military Forces of Canada, overseen by George Halsey Perley, and subsequent forced resignation in November 1916, that the CEF was able to concentrate on the task of the spring offensive without persistent staffing interference. The creation of the Ministry of Overseas Military Forces to run the CEF was a major reduction in Hughes's power, causing him to rage and threaten Borden. After Hughes sent Borden an extremely insulting letter on 1 November 1916, the prime minister vacillated for the next nine days before making his decision. Borden's patience with Hughes finally broke, and he dismissed him from the cabinet on 9 November 1916. In his letter dismissing him, Borden stated that he was fired because of his "strong tendency to assume powers which [he did] not possess", and because the prime minister no longer had the "time or energy" to keeping solving all of the problems he had created.
thumb|Sir Sam Hughes inspects [[207th Battalion, CEF, and presents colours, 18 November 1916.]]
Hughes later claimed in Who's Who to have served "in France, 1914–15" </blockquote>
Sir Sam Hughes is also listed on the WW1 Memorial Cenotaph in front of the Lindsay Public Library.
Archives
There is a Sir Sam Hughes and Family collection at Library and Archives Canada.
Electoral record
|-
|Liberal-Conservative
|HUGHES, Samuel
|align="right"|elected
|Liberal
| BARRON, John Augustus
|align="right"|
|}
See also
- Canadian Aviation Corps
- Nickle Resolution – a policy in place since 1917 that occurred after Hughes' knighthood