It was a tired Canadian Prime Minister who arrived in London on New Year’s Day in 1951 after experiencing a flight over the Atlantic that was anything but smooth. All told it took Louis St.-Laurent and his official party a full 24-hours to get to England as bad weather forced the PM’s RCAF transport plane down on both sides of the Atlantic. The plane had to put down suddenly at a U.S. Air Force base in Newfoundland. If that wasn’t enough, it had to do so again in the UK as poor weather closed the airports in London. Eventually, Uncle Louis had to complete the journey to London by train.
Still, the Prime Minister, then well into his senior years, didn’t seem phased by his unfortunate adventure. He joked about it when greeted by reporters at Waterloo Station.
“We had a very smooth trip,” he said, adding “I hope there will not be any more of these detours… The trip was longer than I anticipated, but it gave me plenty of time for reflection and for food."
And so a New Year began for Canada’s Prime Minister.
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.