[HR: a biography of HR MacMillan]

This biography is an illuminating chronicle of an extraordinary life. It may surprise many to find that it is a rags to riches story. Harvey Reginald MacMillan was "born and raised in obscure poverty on a small farm north of Toronto." His father died when he was two and he and his mother were forced to live apart with relatives. Deliverance came at the age of 15; he was hoeing potatoes one day when a man driving by stopped and told him that scholarships were available at the Ontario Agricultural College (now the University of Guelph). MacMillan hated agriculture, but the scholarship took him off the land, and summer jobs kept him safely away from it It was at Guelph that he first encountered forestry, and in particular the ideas brought to North America some years before by Bernard Fernow, a German forester. The objective was a permanent industry based on sustained yield, instead of the smash-and-grab tactics that brought quick profits but left the forests devastated. A Forestry Branch had been established in Ottawa, and MacMillan secured summer employment with the survey parties it sent to the West After graduating from OAC, MacMillian decided to pursue graduate studies at Yale's forestry school. It was a two-year course and in the intervening summer MacMillian joined a party that was to limber cruise in British Columbia -- his first introduction to the province that was to make his name and fortune. When he graduated in 1908, all seemed set fair for a successful career, but disaster struck in the form of advanced tuberculosis the disease that had killed his father. To many it would have been a mortal blow, but H.R. faced it with the determination characteristic of him. The battle lasted thirty months, but he emerged cured and ready to resume his career. The Forestry Branch was again his employer until 1912, when the organization of a forest service in British Columbia offered a new opportunity. In May 1912 he was appointed its first Chief Forester. MacMillan assembled a staff (no small task as trained foresters were still few in number) and launched a forestry management programme. All seemed set fair until 1914 and the outbreak of war. The impact on the British Columbia lumbering industry was severe. It had depended heavily on American brokers for orders and on sea transport; the war diverted the interests of one and disrupted the other. The B.C. Government decided that some first-hand knowledge of world markets was essential and sent MacMillan on a tour that took him to Britain, South Africa, India and Australia. Home again, H.R. was restless. He felt that the B.C. Forest Service was "in for some lean years" and he had no lack of opportunities for alternative employment Four universities wanted him to head their forestry schools; one invitation came from Bernard Fernow, who had become Dean of the school at Toronto, and wanted MacMillan to succeed him. But H.R. decided to enter business instead and became assistant manager of a lumber company based at Chemainus. His experience there was not happy, and only a year later he moved to a new and much more exciting assignment British airplane losses in the war were mounting; one of the vital needs for building replacements was Sitka spruce, the largest available supply of which was in British Columbia, much of it in the Queen Charlottes. The British Imperial Munitions Board set up a subsidiary in Vancouver to tackle the spruce supply problem, and late in 1917 MacMillan became its assistant director. His task was to secure vast quantities of airplane quality spruce as quickly as possible, and to do this he had to "organize from scratch" what Drushka describes as "the biggest logging show anyone ever attempted to put together." A tentative objective of three million board feet per month was reached in July 1918, and this had been tripled by the end of the war. MacMillan was to perform a comparable feat in the Second World War. He had been called to Ottawa by the redoubtable C.D. Howe to serve as Timber Controller, but within months the heavy toll being taken by U-boats made it clear that an emergency shipbuilding programme to produce replacement ships was essential. Late in March 1941 MacMillan became head of a new agency, Wartime Merchant Shipping, with headquarters in Montreal. He tackled the assignment with his usual speed and efficiency. By early April he had placed orders for a hundred standard cargo ships with Canadian yards; the first of them was launched in October and went to sea on her first voyage on December 7 -- Pearl Harbor Day. As Eastern yards were heavily engaged in repairing damaged ships, the bulk of the orders were placed with western yards, with the Burrard yard in North Vancouver at the top of the list MacMillan had vastly increased his activities in the inter-war years. He had acquired sawmills and had become one of the major lumber producers in the province. He had experienced firsthand the difficulties of securing orders for lumber from distant customers and of securing space in cargo ships to fill them. In 1919, in association with Montague Meyer of London, who had been British timber controller during the war, he organized the H.R. MacMillan Export Company: Meyer would secure orders in Europe; MacMillan would fill them. Except for the odd lean year, the Export Company expanded rapidly. Securing space in cargo ships continued to be a problem, and in 1921 MacMillan founded the Canadian Transport Company to solve it At times it had as many as forty or fifty ships on long-term charters. In 1930 he had become involved in another industry -- fisheries. B.C. Packers, "the largest fish processing company on the West Coast" was in financial difficulties. H.R. was invited to join a new board of directors, whose first task was to avoid bankruptcy. MacMillan was new to the industry, but Drushka remarks upon his "capacity for taking on a diverse variety of tasks, without losing track of the details in any one of them." The fishing industry intrigued him; he visited canneries strong along the West Coast to become familiar with details. In 1933 he became President of B.C. Packers; three years later, despite the depression, it returned a small dividend; and, within a few years, through the Export Company, he had gained control of it. In 1958 MacMillan decided to resign as Chairman of MacMillan & Bloedel, as his company had become. As a successor he chose J.V. Clyne, a justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia. Drushka remarks that why he did so "is one of the great mysteries of Canadian business" as Clyne had had no business experience. Certainly the consequences were not what MacMillan had anticipated. He had always endeavoured to raise capital within Canada; Clyne looked to other markets, notably the United States. MacMillan had kept the operations of his companies largely confined to Canada; under Clyne they became involved in operations in such diverse locations as the Netherlands, Alabama and Australia. All this was accompanied by a steady effort to push MacMillan into the background. Drushka throws considerable light on MacMillan's philanthropic activities. He gave many millions to causes that interested him, with UBC at the top of the list The Vancouver Foundation, the Vancouver Aquarium and the MacMillan Planetarium were all supported liberally. In 1965 he gave the UBC Library $3,000,000 for the purchase of books -- the largest grant of the kind ever given to a Canadian library. Conditions were often attached to his gifts; in this instance he specified that the money was to be spent on books and on books only -- UBC was to meet the very substantial cost of cataloguing them. Every gift or grant was followed promptly by a letter or telegram confirming the gift and recalling any conditions that had been attached to it The book is rich in detail, but one wishes that a little more had been said about MacMillan's close associates, notably W.J. VanDusen. Fernow introduced him to MacMillan at a meeting in Montreal as early as 1908 and H.R. recruited him for the B.C. Forest Service in 1913. A decade later he persuaded him to leave the Service and join the Export Company. They were close associates thereafter, and he prospered with the company. As a philanthropist he rivalled MacMillan; he was virtual founder of the Vancouver Foundation; and to it and the related Van Dusen Foundation he gave in all more than a hundred million dollars.