The great Scot : a biography of Donald Gordon
This outstanding biography deals with the remarkable career of Donald Gordon, who came to Canada from Scotland as a twelve-year-old immigrant and rose from a first position as bank clerk to be deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, chairman of the Wartime Prices and Trade Board during World War II, president of the Canadian National Railways, and finally chairman and chief executive officer of Brinco, responsible for the financing of the Churchill Falls project in Labrador. It is the story of a big, tough, fearless, hard- driving Scot, who, in Grattan O'Leary's phrase, ‘burst like a joyous firecracker' upon the national scene. Gordon is shown as a great improviser and leader of men, who performed the next-to-impossible task of making price controls work, transformed the CNR into the country's dominant rail system, and brought to completion the financing of what was then the largest hydro-electric power development in North America. In the process he became a source of innumerable stories (the best of which are recalled in this book) and a legend in his own lifetime. Drawing upon interviews with more than sixty relatives, friends, and former adversaries of Donald Gordon, as well as official and private papers, Joseph Schull portrays with notable candour the individual at the heart of the legend, a man of earthy humour and frequently un- governable temper, who made a legion of friends and not a few enemies on the way to some large achievements. The Great Scot is the portrait of a great Canadian, warts and all
Print Book, English, ©1979
McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, ©1979