(2 Aug. 1871-19 Nov. 1962), businessman. (Sir Edward Peacock, E.R. Peacock) Born at St. Elmo, GC, at the manse of the Congregationalist Church. The novelist Ralph Connor (C.W. Gordon) had been born at St. Elmo eleven years earlier. St. Elmo, it should be added, did not get its name till the 1880s, and the nearby village of Maxville came into existence and got its name only at the beginning of the 1880s. Parents: Rev. William Peacock and his wife Jane MacDougall. Jane MacDougall was the sister of Alexander Peter and Duncan Peter MacDougall, and was the aunt of Peter and Wilfred Kennedy and of Ada Johnston, Violet Pollard and Prof. Frank MacDougall.

     When Edward was about four years old, he moved with his family to Kingston, Ont. After the health of the Rev. William Peacock broke down, the family left Kingston, and after a short stay at Almonte, Ont., they resettled in Glengarry in 1879. The family lived for the first winter with an aunt and uncle (Mr and Mrs Donald William Kennedy) in the 8th of Kenyon, while their house was being built in Maxville on a location next to the present United Church. From the description of the house in Sir Edward’s autobiography, it appears to have been little more than a shack divided into several rooms. The Peacock family was at this time in considerable poverty. Sir Edward later remembered having watched during his Maxville period the “whole construction” of the Congregationalist Church in Maxville. (Maxville (1991) 204) Young Edward had been kept from school on account of a childhood illness, and as he neared the age of 10 he was still unable to read.

     After the death of the Rev. William Peacock in 1883, the family moved to Almonte, to be near the grandfather Peacock and to take advantage of the good Almonte schools. Edward Peacock attended Almonte High School and Queen’s University (graduated M.A., 1894, the M.A. being at this time at Queen’s a special version of the B.A. rather than a graduate degree in its own right). It was the custom in the Glengarry concessions at this time that relatives could come to stay freely for extended periods but that they were expected to help with the hard work of the farm as much as anybody else in the family. Sir Edward Peacock mentions in his autobiography that during his student years he would go with his mother and the family to live with relatives in GC in the summer and that while there he shared as unpaid help in the farm work.

     From 1895 to 1902, he taught at Upper Canada College, Toronto, where he became a friend of Stephen Leacock, who at this time was also a teacher at Upper Canada College. Peacock left Upper Canada College in 1902, a little past the age of 30, but in effect starting anew in life, to begin a business career as secretary to a leading businessman, E.R. Wood. Thereafter followed one of the most brilliant careers of any Canadian of his time. From 1907 he managed the affairs in England of Dominion Securities. In 1909 he settled permanently in England . There he became deeply entrenched in the structures of business and power. Peacock was a director of the Bank of England (1921-1924, 1929-1946), a director of Barings Bank (1924-1954), receiver general of the Duchy of Cornwall (1929-1961), chairman of the finance committee and treasurer of the King Edward’s Hospital Fund for London, a Rhodes trustee, and chairman of trustees of the Imperial War Graves Commission, and a director of many companies including Brazilian Traction, the CPR and the Hudson’s Bay Co. He was chairman of a committee (1929-1930) which investigated the economic implications of an English Channel tunnel and issued a report as one of the government Blue Books.

     Peacock was intimately involved in the financial side of the operations that led to the formation of the 1931 Coalition government in Britain. After an audience and dinner with King George V, “Peacock drove the Prime Minister [Ramsay MacDonald–for him, see also C. W. Gordon ] back to Downing Street, entering by the back gate in order to avoid the Press, and encouraged acceptance of the King’s wish as the opposition leaders arrived for preliminary discussions.” (Orbell) Peacock was again intimately involved in the abdication of Edward VIII in 1937. He was one of the small group of people associated with Edward VIII who attended the famous dinner at Fort Belvedere, the king’s home, two days before the abdication. It was on this occasion that Edward VIII gave Peacock the delicate assignment, as described in the ex-king’s autobiography, A King’s Story, of telling Prime Minister Baldwin that the king did not wish the prime minister to stay the night at Fort Belvedere. Peacock was one of the people who accompanied Edward VIII when he signed the abdication documents. Peacock was active in the early years of World War II in helping the British government dispose of capital assets in the United States to help finance the war effort.

     He was knighted (GCVO) in 1934. (GCVO means Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order.) In 1912 he married Katherine Coates (d. 1948) of Ottawa. (two adopted daughters) Sir Edward Peacock died in a London hospital. In the later years of his life, he was living during the weekdays in a suite at the Savoy Hotel, London, while using his house as Ascot on the weekends. He was noted to be a man of fine bearing and impressive appearance. The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) describes him as having “a first-class brain” but other sources emphasize his clarity of mind and his wisdom rather than his cleverness. (Orbell) In his Upper Canada College years he wrote Canada: a Descriptive Textbook (1900) and several articles published in the Queen’s Quarterly. His biographer in the Dictionary of Business Biography notes that after leaving teaching “he did not publish.” He is described (DNB) as a Presbyterian and Mason. It is remarkable that two men born at the tiny crossroads settlement of St. Elmo, Peacock and Ralph Connor, achieved the distinction of lives in the British DNB and its successor the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. And they both had London Times obituaries.

     Sir Edward Peacock continued to have at least limited Glengarry contacts throughout his life, and appears to have had more than a merely polite interest in the activities of his MacDougall relatives. Though he admits he learned little of the language (the implication is that he learned something), he could remember when Gaelic was more in use than English among his Glengarry connections, and he noted that his mother would revert to Gaelic when she wanted to say something the children should not know. (autobiog.) A writer in the Cornwall newspaper, reporting in 1934 on Peacock’s knighthood, noted that he had many friends and relatives in northern GC. “For here, in the membership of the MacDougall, Kennedy, Munro and MacEwan clans, he numbers his cousins by the dozen.” (Standard Freeholder 15 June 1934) Herbert McKILLICAN says that Peacock had 62 first cousins on his mother’s side. Peacock did not attend his mother’s burial at Maxville, but she died in wartime. The Cornwall newspapers followed the high points of his career over the years, noting, for example, his DCL from Oxford. (Cornwall Freeholder 2 Dec. 1931, 30 Jan. 1932) When Dorothy Dumbrille’s Up and Down the Glens (1954) was published, Sir Edward received no less than four copies as Christmas gifts. He exchanged letters with Dorothy Dumbrille and with Herbert McKillican, and McKillican has left an interesting account of his meeting with him in the Savoy in London in 1961.

     A number of the writings on Peacock emphasize the relevance of the phrase “Man from Glengarry” as applied to him. (Howard, Brockington, Senior) In 1989, the Ontario Heritage Foundation and the Glengarry Historical Society established a plaque in his honour at St. Elmo. There is a marker on Highway 43 south of Maxville drawing attention to this plaque. He maintained a long association with Queen’s University, and there are two Peacock endowed chairs in his honour at Queen’s. He was offered, but declined, a position at Queen’s during his Upper Canada College days. The position then went to O.D. Skelton, who was later the Canadian under-secretary of state for foreign affairs and had Cornwall, Ont. connections. (Senior) There were rumours in 1935 that Peacock would soon be principal of Queen’s University. (Standard Freeholder 23 Oct. 1935, Vankleek Hill Review 31 Oct. 1935)

Life by John Orbell (Archivist of Barings) in Dictionary of Business Biography, Vol. 4 (1985, ed. David J. Jeremy and Christine Shaw) 559-567, portrait * life in DNB Supplement 1961-1970, and ODict * obituaries, London Times (portrait), Montreal Gazette, Globe and Mail (“Ex-Motorman Rose to World Financier”), Montreal Star, all 20 Nov. 1962, Glengarry News 22 Nov. 1962 * report on estate, GN 28 March 1963 * obituary of his wife, Standard Freeholder 17 March 1948; funeral, memorial service for her, London Times 17 & 23 March 1948 * Campbell (1990), 499-505, 560, 577-582 * Morgan (1912) 892 * Harkness 569 * MDict * Maxville (1991) 204, 627, 630 * Sir Edward Peacock’s untitled autobiography, 55 pp. typescript, in copy loaned to the present author in 1978 by Prof. Gerald Graham of the University of London * four letters 1956-1962 from Sir Edward Peacock to Herbert McKillican (photocopies in pr author’s collection) * private information from Herbert McKillican * leaflet on unveiling of Peacock plaque, St. Elmo, 10 Sept. 1989, with typescript of Herbert McKillican’s address at the unveiling (address pr Glengarry Life 1990) * Duke of Windsor, A King’s Story: the Memoirs of the Duke of Windsor (1951), 399-400, 405 * C.S. Howard, “Another Man from Glengarry,” The Canadian Banker (Summer 1960) 35-59 * L.W. Brockington, “The Quiet Man from Glengarry,” Globe and Mail, 21 Nov. 1962 * Donald Jones, “Toronto Schoolmaster Became One of World’s Financial Giants,” Toronto Star 16 Oct. 1982 * Elinor Kyte Senior, “A Canadian at Court: Sir Edward Peacock–The Man from Glengarry,” Monarchy Canada (Spring/Summer 1987), with good portrait * see also Bibliography of Glengarry: index for Peacock * Neatby: index * A. MacDermaid and George F. Henderson, A Guide to the Holdings of Queen’s University Archives, Vols. I (2nd edn. 1986) and 2 (1987) * various notices in GC-area press over the years about his career, e.g., Cornwall Standard 28 March 1929 & Glengarry News 29 March 1929 on Channel tunnel, and Cornwall Freeholder 17 Oct. 1931 on role in forming 1931 National Gov’t in U. K.* with wife and daughters, visits Mr and Mrs G. H. McDougall in Maxville, Standard Freeholder 31 Aug. 1938 (p. 1 & Maxville column)