Stitches in Time: The Commonwealth in World Politics

J.V. Rahilly was an engineering librarian in Ontario.

Smith has spent 25 years as a Canadian diplomat, including being Ambassador in Cairo in the post-Suez period of the late 1950s and Ambassador in Moscow during the Khrushchev period of the 1960s. He was thus no stranger to the world’s hot spots when he was appointed first Secretary-General of the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1965. His appointment lasted ten years, and he resigned after having a heart attack. The informal association of the British Commonwealth of Nations was codified by this Secretariat, and with Smith as chief administrator, it began to handle a series of petty and not-so-petty squabbles. Such crises included Rhodesian politics, the creation of Bangladesh and the exit of Pakistan from the Commonwealth, civil war in Nigeria, disorganization in Uganda, and so forth. This book is based on Smith’s diaries and, of course, many of his papers. There are now 44 countries in the Commonwealth, and this administrative history and personal narrative covers also the routines of the office and aid to underdeveloped members as well as the behind-the-scenes accounts of the crises. Two added useful features here are the chronology of events from July 1964 through June 1975 (which serves as a bare-bones outline of what Smith had to deal with) and a map of the Commonwealth, with country names, on the end papers.