THE HERMETIC CODE-CHAPTER 13

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/12/2006 (6888 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The facts and people in this tale are real; the events have been brought to life by writers Carolin Vesely and Buzz Currie.

In this, the 13th chapter of a special two-week series, scandal brings down a government — and Frank Simon’s dreams.

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Chapter 13

FRANK Worthington Simon stepped wearily off the station platform in 1920, carrying his broken dream away from a city of broken dreams. He never looked back.

In his eight years in the Prairie city, both he and Winnipeg had ridden on the thrilling edge where all things are possible. And both he and the city had come crashing down to earth.

It was plain to the most boosterish Winnipegger by 1920 that the city was not destined to be among the largest and richest in the world. Growth had tapered off, real estate prices had ceased to soar and the boomtown spirit had given way to a sullen tug-of-war between labour and capital, each jealous and mistrustful of the other.

Simon, too, had faced a harsh reality. His Hermetic temple was tantalizingly, excruciatingly close to a finished perfection. But perfection was not to be.

* * *

The excavation for the legislature site began in 1913.

No doubt the war delayed the work at first. The war effort had first call on materials, shipping and manpower. But it wasn’t the only factor.

Right from the start, the Roblin government insisted on the provincial architect, Victor Horwood, serving as supervising architect. The usual practice would have been to give that designation to the man who had been awarded the commission, Frank Worthington Simon.

The province claimed it appointed Horwood to save face for Canadian architects, who would have been miffed at the appointment of an Englishman.

To people in the know, Horwood’s appointment took on a more sinister appearance. He was born in England, and came to Manitoba in 1904. Like the premier, Rodmond Roblin, and the minister of public works, Colin Campbell, he was a master Mason.

As project supervisor, Horwood had control of the building’s purse strings. It was he who was in charge of inspecting the construction and then authorizing payment to the contractor, Thomas Kelly, another master Mason.

By early 1915, the cost of the Manitoba Legislative Building was embarrassingly out of line with the cost of the legislatures being built in Edmonton and Regina. The Saskatchewan building had cost $2.3 million. Alberta’s was $2.1 million. Manitoba’s was approaching $6 million, and climbing.

Horwood, Kelly and Roblin had an answer — Simon’s incompetence had forced changes to the building’s plans and delayed the construction. In fact, costs soared in part because Kelly changed some of Simon’s original specifications — reinforced concrete to steel-framed construction, for example.

But it was also becoming clear that a huge amount of money — $1.4 million, in fact — was somehow being diverted from the project.

The conduit was Kelly.

He inflated his bills, forced a wage cut on the project workers and skimped on materials. He split the take with the Conservatives, who used it for campaign expenses or perhaps — as Opposition members whispered — to buy votes.

But they got too greedy.

Roblin’s Conservatives won a majority in 1915, so when the house convened and the Opposition called for an inquiry into the financing of the new building, the legislature voted against it.

But Roblin made a fatal mistake. Though he could dictate events in the legislature, he could not dictate public opinion, and there was scarcely a Manitoban who did not believe the premier was a crook.

Emboldened, Opposition Leader T.C. Norris paid a visit to the lieutenant-governor, a Liberal appointee, Sir Douglas Cameron. Cameron summoned Roblin to Government House and the premier had to agree to a royal commission.

The lieutenant-governor ordered an inquiry. It’s not often in Canadian politics, or anywhere in the British system, that the Crown or its representative overrules the elected government. It is a constitutional crisis. But Sir Douglas Cameron did just that.

Even before the inquiry concluded, Roblin resigned, still claiming innocence, but accepting responsibility for Kelly’s pillaging. Norris’s Liberals won the provincial election. Kelly did a short and comfortable stint in the penitentiary at Stony Mountain — two cells converted into an apartment and no prison uniform for him. The province seized his mansion on Carlton Street.

Roblin was not prosecuted. Horwood lost his job. Simon became supervising architect, as he should have been from the beginning, and he no longer had to defend his reputation against slanderers in the government.

But it was a hollow victory. From 1916 on, the bills from the building site were scrutinized with the utmost frugality.

The sky was no longer the limit in Manitoba.

Almost certainly, Simon did not pocket an unearned penny in his eight years in Winnipeg. And because he was not the signing authority for the project during its first three years, he may not have known the site had become a cash cow for Sir Rodmond Roblin’s government.

But innocent and guilty suffered alike when the scandal broke.

Simon ran out of money and the province would give him no more. His final touches were left undone.

It was a hard landing for a man like Frank Worthington Simon. But there was a pathetic nobility in his defeat. He offered to forgo his $100,000 commission if the province would just allow him to complete the building as he had conceived it.

The province turned him down.

On Sept. 19, 1916, Simon produced a report detailing $1,009,442 in cost-cutting.

Some of the greater savings were, in his mind, trivialities. He had proposed to line the Legislative Chamber in marble. Instead, if you look behind the curtains in the chamber, you’ll find plain plaster. In other rooms, he used wood where he had planned to use marble.

He eliminated one of the central elevators. He made the dome of copper rather than stone.

Other savings were hard for him to swallow. He cancelled the rooftop conservatory, which would have kept the building in plants and flowers the year round. People could not be good and virtuous in Spartan and ugly surroundings, he believed.

And still other deductions must have broken him.

Practically all the carvings that were to be done after 1916 were omitted.

Statues of Zeus and other pagan divinities were among them. The walls had niches where the statues were to sit, and to this day those niches stand empty.

Simon did not practise independently again, though he did some work from time to time for other architects. The Manitoba commission had left him independently wealthy — the province turned down his offer to return his $100,000 fee. He was 58 years old, worn out from a decade of battling to preserve his reputation, and weighed down with the defeat of his grandest vision. By the mid-’20s, he had retired to the south of France.

Intriguingly, he settled in Menton, a French Riviera town almost at the Italian border that was also the last home of William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet and Hermeticist.

It is doubtful their visits overlapped. Simon died in 1933 and is buried in Menton, under a simple stone that reads:

In Loving Memory of

Frank Lewis Worthington Simon

Born 31 March 1862

Died 19 May 1933

Yeats died in Menton in 1939 but was buried there only briefly. When the Second World War ended, his body was returned to Ireland and entombed.

Had they met,which man would have deferred to the other?

Would the honours have gone to the occult poet, winner of the Nobel Prize?

Or would Yeats have bowed to the man who built the world’s largest and most complete temple to Hermes Trismegistus?

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