As past Prime Minister Stephen J. Harper’s memoir, Here for Canada: Memoirs of the 22nd Prime Minister, will be released next month, it seemed fitting to mark an important anniversary involving a Prime Ministerial autobiography. It was on this date in 1928 that the great Sir Robert Borden starting writing his two-volume memoir.
“During the past eight years since I retired from the Premiership of Canada in July, 1920,” he wrote. “many friends have urged me to give an account of my activities in public life. Some preparation has been made from time to time in the arrangement of very voluminous files, but many labours which I have undertaken in the meantime have hitherto prevented me from giving attention to this task. On this fifteenth day of October 1928, I am making a commencement.”
Borden was only the second Prime Minister (the first being Sir Charles Tupper) to pen a memoir. After that, Canadians had to wait until both John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson in the 1970s to read another PM memoir as Arthur Meighen, Mackenzie King, R.B. Bennett and Louis St.-Laurent chose not to put pen to paper to write their own stories.
As readers of Art’s History know, I have a long-standing interest in the history of Prime Ministerial memoirs having served as the Memoirs’ Assistant for five-years to the Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney from 2003 to 2008.
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.