Mike

I am grateful for this opportunity to record a few impressions of Mike Pearson. The original request suggested a focus on some specific incident. My memory is not equal to dealing with a single matter in depth; but I can at least claim an acquaintance of some length, since I first met Mike Pearson at an informal dinner party given by Malcolm MacDonald in 1936 and I met him last at the end of October 1972 at a private dinner with friends in Ottawa, little more than a month before he died. Though in the intervening years I was to see so much of Mike across an office desk or round a conference table, it is somehow fitting that my first and last meetings should both have been such gay and friendly occasions. Before I met him, Pearson had already learned to know Britain with two very different but equally formative experiences in training with the Medical Corps, infantry, Flying Corps and later at St John's College, Oxford. While Pearson was at Canada House, I was far too junior to have any regular contact with him; nevertheless even at that time he created an unusual impression and, in retrospect, he stands out as the symbol of a new era in Commonwealth relations. In the previous decade the relationship of Britain and the dominions had been revolutionized almost overnight equality of status had been proclaimed in the Balfour Report at the 1926 Imperial Con

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