Item 43 - Letter, December 22, 1916

Sir George Halsey Perley was born on September 12, 1857, in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

He was a Canadian businessman, philanthropist, politician, and diplomat. He graduated from Harvard University (B.A., 1878). He joined the Ottawa lumber firm Perley & Pattee, owned by his father and Gordon Burleigh Pattee. Starting as a clerk, he became the company’s manager five years later. After Perley & Pattee dissolved in 1893, Perley became head of G.H. Perley & Co, which had mills at Pointe-Calumet, Quebec and vice president of the Hull Lumber Company, Ltd., operating on the upper Ottawa. Perley’s reputation as a philanthropist had been established in 1897 when he and his siblings donated their father’s house for what would become the Perley Home for Incurables. In 1912, he and his second wife would present Ottawa with a building for a tuberculosis hospital, and in 1920, they would give the May Court Club a building for its convalescent home. In 1900, he was chairman of the Ottawa and Hull Fire Relief Fund and distributed about $1,000,000 among the sufferers by the 1900 Hull–Ottawa fire. He was first elected to the House of Commons of Canada as the Conservative MP for Argenteuil in 1904. For many years, Perley was vice president of the Canada Atlantic Railway Co., president of the Rideau Club (1896–1897), president of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club (1900–1904), and the Royal Canadian Golf Association (1905–1906). Perley served as High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and Minister of the Overseas Military Forces in the World War I. He returned to the House of Commons in the 1925 federal election. He served as Secretary of State for Canada in the short-lived 1926 government of Arthur Meighen and then as Minister without Portfolio in the government of R. B. Bennett following the 1930 federal election. He was re-elected in the 1935 federal election and remained an MP until his death in 1938.

In 1884, he married Annie Hespeler Bowlby (1862–1910), and in 1913, he remarried Emily Colby White (1866-1948). He died on January 4, 1938, in Ottawa, Ontario.