The experience of the Scots in Canada has a history dating back nearly four centuries.  That history has received considerable attention, largely because the community has maintained a separate identity and because it has included so many figures of national significance.  Emigration studies, academic analyses of settlements and businesses, the observations of Lady Aberdeen, and the memoirs of John Kenneth Galbraith are all part of a considerable literature that reflects the Scottish experience in Canada.  The most recent addition to this body of work is Chasing the Comet: A Scottish-Canadian Life, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press as part of its Life Writing Series.

The life is that of David Caldow, a post-World War I emigrant from the agricultural county of Kirkcudbrightshire in southeast Scotland.  The writer/biographer is Patricia Koretchuk, who, with a general interest in immigration and as a friend of the Caldow family, was asked by Caldow’s son to record his father’s experiences for family purposes.  A lengthy series of productive interviews with the elderly and articulate David Caldow resulted in a memoir that begins with recollections of his youth in Scotland, sketches his impressions of people and employment in Quebec, Ontario, and Alberta, and focuses upon his forty years of working experience in British Columbia.  

Raised in a politically conservative agricultural region in Scotland, Caldow learned respect for social superiors from both his father and his teachers before leaving school at age thirteen.  In Canada, he did not abandon traditional perspectives, nor did he leave behind the concomitant willingness to criticize sharply those who fail to deserve respect.  His loyalty to his employers is as constant a theme of the memoir as his willingness to tell them bluntly when he felt a policy or action was wrong.  Caldow’s delight in the moments of comeuppance that eventually awaited those who ignored his advice is as palpable in the re-telling as it must have been when the incidents occurred.  At McGill University’s Macdonald College, where he was first employed in Canada in the mid-1920s, he told an agricultural instructor he would be thrown off any real farm due to incompetence.  He must have had a talent for delivering such messages, however bluntly, for he was never thrown out of any of his own jobs for such statements.  A man of remarkable candour, he remained so as he reminisced through the course of interviews that resulted in this book.  In particular, his surprising explanations of why he decided to join the Canadian Armed Forces and why he decided to marry reveal an uncommon intellectual honesty.

When Caldow found himself in supervisory positions (as he did at the provincially run Colony Farm and Tranquille Farm), he took justifiable pride in the achievements of the agricultural operations under his management.  Equally clear is his low opinion of the unionized workers he had to deal with after World War II.  Unhappy at his loss of control of the hiring process and at the restrictions union contracts placed upon the right of management to manage, Caldow’s relationship with his workers, by his own account, seems rarely to have been a happy one.  In contrast, there is considerable evidence of the pleasure he derived from contact with others of Scottish origins.  Wherever Caldow found himself, he also found the support of Scottish organizations and individuals.  The importance of such networks for immigrants in the early twentieth century has long been acknowledged, and this memoir indicates strongly that, for Scots at least, their significance continues.

Patricia Koretchuk has taken great care to allow Caldow his voice and succeeds admirably in her intention to avoid “author intrusion.”  For example, she allows him to locate the Belleville region in northern Ontario, where in memory it has undoubtedly been since his working days at Deloro in the early 1920s.  Generally, she also has avoided the temptation to indulge in “author exclusion.”  She certainly does not shy away from his recollections of prostitutes and sexual mores.  However, her decision to depart from this policy by not questioning Caldow about his knowledge of prostitution in New Westminster during the 1930s stands in contrast to the principles that otherwise guided the writing of the memoir.  

Both writer and publisher deserve congratulations for creating such a worthwhile addition to the Life Writing Series.  Improvements to future volumes, however, could be achieved through minor changes.  As a metaphor for the life under consideration, the title here seems to promise rather more than it delivers, and while the Burns’ poetry and photographs that preface each chapter are appropriately chosen and located, the quality of the photographic reproduction is often surprisingly poor.  The utility of the footnotes especially deserves some attention.  Though sometimes helpful, generally they are used spasmodically and randomly, making many seem unnecessary while a couple are simply confusing.  At several points in the narrative, readers would appreciate either informational footnotes or more detail within the text.  Chapters dealing with Caldow’s work for Gordon Walker (United Farmers MLA for Claresholm in the late 1920s), Vancouver businessman Andrew Houstoun, the Tranquille Sanatorium Farm, and Colony Farm leave us wanting more information about the people who worked there and about the institutions themselves.  Consideration of the range of material that is available, both published and unpublished, would have enriched the text and given the life of David Caldow greater resonance.  The early chapter about his time working for the Deloro Smelting and Refining Company makes effective use of such material and provides welcome additional context for the general reader.

David Caldow retired from Colony Farm in 1968.  However, as the memoir indicates, retirement was not a natural condition for Caldow.  He was soon asked to supervise the livestock at the Pacific National Exhibition, leaving that annual job only when he was invited to apply for an overseas position teaching agriculture through the Canadian International Development Agency.  His experience with incompetent civil servants in Ottawa – the tale of the official who could not find her office would be chilling if it were not so funny – and in Africa would easily have discouraged most hopeful (and younger) overseas volunteers.  Caldow persevered, refused last-minute changes to his assignment, enjoyed two months in Dar Es Salaam at taxpayers’ expense while Canadian officials sorted things out, and then spent two of the most satisfying years of his life as advisor to the manager of a large farm at Arusha in Tanzania. 

The mandate of the Life Writing Series is to publish memoirs of people for whom “philosophical purposes are central to their lives.”  Wilfrid Laurier University Press and Patricia Koretchuk have combined successfully to show how David Caldow’s hard work, blunt honesty, and ironic sense of humour served him well through all the twists and turns of his life.

Wayne Norton
Kamloops, B.C.