This is a statue in Ottawa. The inscription on it reads “If I lose myself. I save myself.” A line spoken by Sir Galahad in The Holy Grail, the seventh narrative poem of twelve in the cycle Idylls of the King by Tennyson. I’ve always liked it because I’m a sucker for Arthurian legend, but I finally looked up the story behind it and it is worth re-telling.

Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was Canada’s longest-serving prime minister and steered Canada through industrialization, much of the Great Depression, and the Second World War. Although he was never ‘out’ in the sense that people mean today, he never married and it is understood that he was homosexual. His partner was Henry Harper, a journalist whom he met as a student at the University of Toronto. In 1906, King described him in his book The Secret of Heroism as “the man I loved as I have loved no other man.” In the winter of 1901 Henry died saving the life of a little girl named Bessie Blair who was drowning after falling through the ice. He was quoted as saying “What else can I do?” before diving into the freezing Ottawa river. The brave chap was twenty seven years old.

Because personal bereavements cannot have memorials on government land, King had the statue placed just outside the boundaries of parliament, facing outwards. It is the only statue that is not of a politician or a monarch, and King had inscribed on it Henry’s favourite line from his favourite poem.

Bloody. Good. Stuff.