Wild Colonial Boy: A Memoir

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University, the
author of

Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable Kingdom, and the
co-author of The Border at Sault Ste. Marie.

These are the memoirs of a talented athlete, scholar, musician, soldier,
public relations officer, and diplomat, from his childhood and youth in
County Donegal and Northern Ireland through his experiences in the
British army to an assortment of roles performed in Ottawa and
Vancouver.

Writing with humor and insight, Reid describes the sectarian strife in
the land of his birth that caused him to lose whatever religious faith
(Protestant) he had ever had. He re-creates the Italian campaign during
World War II, complete with songs and profanity. Sent by the British
army to southeast Asia immediately after the war, he had to witness the
hangings of Japanese war criminals and deal with Lord Mountbatten, whom
he considered an arrogant, insensitive, well-connected hypocrite. Good
luck rather than good management helped Mountbatten avoid a fate worse
than Dieppe in Malaya, says Reid, but he “was quick to blame others,
as he had blamed Canadians for the Dieppe disaster he himself had
persisted in perpetrating.”

In 1955, Reid returned to civilian life and migrated to Canada, where
he met and worked with a wide range of people in his various jobs. He
had a very high regard for Jean-Luc Pepin, but difficulties with Judy
LaMarsh, Arthur Laing, and Jean Chrétien. There are hilarious accounts
of meetings with Princess Margaret in Oslo, John Diefenbaker and Pierre
Trudeau at Expo ’70 in Osaka, and the Prince and Princess of Wales in
Vancouver. During Joe Clark’s tenure as Secretary of State for
External Affairs, Reid became Canada’s consul-general in San
Francisco.

Lacking an introduction, a table of contents, and chapter titles, the
book is like a pleasure cruise to nowhere in particular—until one has
read from cover to cover, there is little indication as to what lies
ahead.