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

Dreams often die gradually, fading from vivid aspirations to distant recollections. The forceful imperial dream based on the vision of a united Empire has certainly faded in Canada, much like the legacy of the dreamer that Neville Thompson describes in Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream. In this highly accessible and stimulating book, Thompson assesses the decline of Canada’s imperial connection in the twentieth century by looking at the life of Beverley Baxter, Maclean’s London correspondent between 1936 and 1960. Baxter is a fascinating subject for a biographically centred study, for, in addition to his career as a journalist, he was a British Member of Parliament and a familiar presence in the elite social circles of London. Readers will find colourful descriptions of a wide and familiar cast of characters, including Lord Beaverbrook, Stanley Baldwin, and Winston Churchill. In a thorough examination of Baxter’s six hundred bimonthly columns, Thompson charts a very perceptible change over time, as the journalist’s dream of a united Empire gradually diminished. One senses in his columns the anxiety of Canadian imperialists at a time of momentous transition, and their ambivalence toward the political and social changes produced by the Second World War.

Thompson’s book provides a focused lens on some of the wider changes that José Igartua aptly labelled the “other Quiet Revolution” – a time in the mid-twentieth century when many in English Canada shifted away from their identification with Britain and the Empire. While historians have done much to analyze the changes during this time period in Canada, Thompson’s study provides a useful transatlantic perspective to indicate how the “revolution” of imperial identity manifested on both sides of the Atlantic. This book does not attempt significant historiographical challenges or changes, but aims more modestly to provide greater depth and detail to our understanding of evolving ties between Canada and Britain in the mid-twentieth century.

In its assessment of the life and writings of one person, the book’s approach makes it possible to assess how wider changes and trends are in many cases reflections of evolving attitudes of individuals. The decline of the “imperial dream” in Canada and across the Empire was less the result of particular heated political debates or changing cultural symbols than the sometimes mundane, and often unexceptional observations of people – which, when put together, illustrate changing understandings and impressions of the world. Beverley Baxter did not set out to chronicle the growing distance between Britain and Canada, but the span of his bimonthly letters in Maclean’s provides a vivid description of that unintended story.

The scope of Thompson’s book is somewhat deceiving. Although it initially appears to be about Beverley Baxter’s London letters and their place in Maclean’s, it is in fact more a story about Baxter’s life in London and the politics and politicians around him. Little space is devoted to assessing public reactions to his columns, and it is not clear what impact they had in Canada other than providing readers with snippets of life in London. At many points in the book, the presence of Canada, and Baxter’s communication to Canadians, falls to the background as the focus shifts to political dramas in Britain, especially during the Second World War and the postwar decade. Tellingly, Baxter cancelled annual visits to Canada during the war, and after returning from his first trip back in 1946, he recognized that Britain “was where his identity was fixed” (264). He was by that point more of a Londoner born in Canada than a Canadian correspondent based in London. His increasing distance from Canada seems to mirror the wider change that Thompson traces in the book, indicating the fading prominence of Canada in the eyes of British statesmen. As...