Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream: Beverley Baxter’s Reports from London through War and Peace, 1936-1960 by Neville Thompson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream: Beverley Baxter’s Reports from London through War and Peace, 1936-1960 by Neville Thompson Daniel Gorman Thompson, Neville – Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream: Beverley Baxter’s Reports from London through War and Peace, 1936-1960. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 394. In a 1931 BBC radio broadcast entitled “That Commonwealth Feeling,” the British diplomat, politician, and writer Harold Nicolson declared that the dominions had recently “began to emerge above our horizon as something unaccountable, as something forlorn and strange and powerful; as something mysterious, compelling, imminent”(Harold Nicolson, People and Things: Wireless Talks, London, 1931, pp. 145-6). The same year as Nicolson’s wireless talk, the Statute of Westminster gave the dominions legislative equality with the United Kingdom by granting them autonomy in foreign affairs, a symbolic “end” to the imperial relationship. Yet imperialism, or more accurately an attachment to Britons, British affairs, and things British, remained centrally important for many English-speaking Canadians for another generation. Indeed, as Neville Thompson demonstrates in this wide-ranging and elegantly written book, the “imperial dream” of a shared Anglo-Canadian identity and purpose survived, if in a diminished form and for fewer and fewer people, into the early 1960s. Thompson’s medium for tracking this development is the bi-weekly London Letters column written by the Canadian journalist and British Member of Parliament Beverley Baxter for Maclean’s magazine between 1936 and 1960. [End Page 837] Beverley Baxter had a Methodist upbringing in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Toronto. The British Empire exerted a strong imaginative pull for the young Baxter. After work selling pianos and service in Europe during the First World War, Baxter stayed on in London and successfully lobbied the most famous Canadian expatriate in Britain, Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aiken), for a job in journalism. He went on to make his fortune, and never again returned full-time to live in Canada. Baxter even published an autobiography in 1935, telling the story of how he had ascended to a position of influence in the imperial metropole. Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream is a hybrid, part biography of Baxter, part analysis of the high British political history which Baxter observed from the margins as a Conservative Member of Parliament from 1935 until his death in 1964. The books’ central themes are symbolized by the two figures represented in the cover photograph, neither of whom is Baxter. Instead, we see Beaverbrook, then British Minister of Supply, and Winston Churchill standing on the deck of HMS Prince of Wales in 1941 during the Allied conference off the coast of Newfoundland which resulted in the Atlantic Charter. Far from a case of false advertising, the cover depicts the two figures whose imperial visions Baxter spent his career advancing. Beaverbrook was the more direct influence, giving Baxter his start in journalism at the Daily Express. As Baxter wrote of himself and Beaverbrook when looking back on his career in his final London Letter in 1960, they had “beat the Empire drum on all possible and even impossible occasions” (p. 355). While they sometimes fell out over other political questions, Baxter and Beaverbrook always remained simpatico over the importance for Canada of the imperial tie. It was only the debacle of the Suez Crisis and the subsequent promise of entering the European Community that finally persuaded Baxter that the imperial dream was over. In his politics, Baxter was a journalistic weathervane. Always a conservative, he variously supported and opposed the successive grandees of the British Conservative party, from fellow Canadian Andrew Bonar Law through Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Churchill, Anthony Eden, and Harold Macmillan. The central message he propagated throughout the period, however, was that of closer imperial union. This meant the old Joseph Chamberlain vision of imperial preference, as well as during the Second World War an imperial war cabinet and overseas conscription for Canadians. Beyond such formal manifestations of imperialism, even then somewhat dated, what Baxter really wished to convey to Canadians was the allure of English sophistication and culture. It is tempting to see Baxter’s imperial arias as simple chauvinism...