Canada’s High Commissioner to India, Escott Reid, sent a detailed confidential report on this date in 1954 about Prime Minister Louis St.-Laurent’s recently concluded visit to India. The trip by the 12th Prime Minister marked the first-time a Canadian head of government had visited India.
“As I said in my personal telegram, the Prime Minister's visit to India was an immense success and a personal triumph for him,” Reid wrote to Foreign Affairs Minister Lester Pearson. “His dignity, sincerity and obvious pleasure at being in India were all factors in making his visit memorable... The visit has certainly deepened the understanding and friendship between the two Prime Ministers. It has also, I think, strengthened Mr. (Jawaharlal )Nehru's friendly feelings towards Canada and Canadians generally. I am sure you will find that it has had a reciprocal effect on Mr. St. Laurent...”
“I hope that when I am seventy-two, I shall have one-half of Mr. St. Laurent's ability to receive new impressions,” Reid added. “In speaking separately the day before he left India to his daughter, to Charles Ritchie and to myself, he used the same words: ‘I have received more impressions in the past week than in the whole of my previous life.’"
You can report this fascinating report in full at this link: https://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/206/301/faitc-aecic/history/2013-05-03/www.international.gc.ca/department/history-histoire/dcer/details-en.asp@intRefid=613
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.