I have in the past grumbled about the lack or obscurity of Canadian tanker memoirs. (Tanker just because that's where my interest in reading about WW2 started.) I think the same issue is to some degree true for other branches. Charlie Martin's D-day Diary is excellent... There are Strome Galloway's books... Farley Mowat's The Regiment is the earliest I know of, published in 1955. Anyway I am listening to a podcast about the protectionist systems for Canadian content that exist today and were set up in the 70s in the context of the FLQ crisis and so on. It turns out that earlier VERY few Canadian books were being published. I had forgotten just how extreme this was. In 1951, for instance... Only *14* books by Canadian authors were published. Everything else was British or American. So no wonder we didn't get many books on Canadian experiences of the war in the first decades after. The publishing industry just basically wasn't there.
I spent over 10 years working in the book business in Canada during its building years. It's still a fragile business as Canadian cultural industries have always been caught between the impact of the US and UK, which have larger and more established publishers, film/TV producters etc. Given our relative population size it would always be so and without some form of outside government support the chances of a robust cultural industry would have been well nigh impossible The challenge of course is if your country doesn't have the werewithal to record and share its stories, who else will? Which leads to the knock on effect of having a population that's even more unaware of their nation's heritage, both bad and good.
Sure, although a good chunk of it is about how a very important Canadian publisher (McLelland and Stuart) ended up in the control of a foreign company (which should not have happened, according to the rules). End Of The CanLit Hustle Caveats: the host, Jesse Brown, is very critical of the current state of the mechanisms we currently have for CanCon. I understand his concerns and I feel like when things are rotten that ought to fixed. On the other hand, I agree that we do need government support in some shape or form. I don't think it's wrong to say that the stories we tell about ourselves create our identities. I definitely don't want to go back to a situation where Canadian authors can't get published. Orwell, really interesting to learn that you spent time in the industry - was that in the 70s?
My time was just after the first bump, from the early eighties on to the early nineties. I got to know people like Avie Bennett (who just passed) and Jack McClelland, Anna Porter, Harold Fenn, Jack Stoddart etc. Canadian military book junkies may also remember the name Vanwell which ran some great wargaming sessions as well as publishing For those interested in a brief insiders look here's an article written by Anna Porter that gives a good overview of some of the challenges: Time to Lead: The shaky state of Canadian book publishing
Seroster, If you are after battlefield memoirs written by Canadians, please let me know. I have several that I can recommend. Sadly, none by a Canadian tanker. Our Tank Ace is covered here. Sydney Valpy Radley-Walters - Wikipedia:
I'm trying to understand the distinction. Is it a question of Canadians simply not writing about their experiences or being unable to find publishing support? If the latter, then one would assume there are manuscripts to be found.
I remember Vanwell well. They published my book, The Storm Boat Kings, which sold more in the UK than in Canada. I find this to be true with my other books on Canadians in WWII. They sell more in the UK.
A fascinating thread and one that surprises me. Did the UK publishers not have Canadian subsidiaries ? There was a huge appetite for wartime memoirs in Britain during the 1950s and a colossal amount of goodwill towards the Canadian soldiers and airmen who had served here. It's a shame if they had wanted to publish but were unable to.
In a nutshell, the answer is yes. Publishers like Penguin, Bloomsbury , OUP, CUP, from the UK and Random House and others from the US serviced the Canadian market through subsidaries or sometimes agencies that represented smaller publishing houses. However these organizations were sales agencies not production companies. Overall their job was to sell the finished products. No editors, book designers etc etc. This was all done by the parent company and as a result of this the books published and the stories told were the ones the head office wanted and more often than not, those of the country the head office was based in. With the growth of Canadian homegrown publishing, government regulation and other factors, this began to change in the 1960's through the 1980's as 'foreign' publishers saw there was a market for Canadian produced titles and opened up their own production side here.to mimic the smaller Canadian publishers and also take advantage of the government incentives. There is much more to the story but this is the simplified version. As a case study, Canada makes an interesting market case due to its position between the UK and the US and the competition and confusion it could create. Don't even get me going on the issues we ran into determining sales rights in the Canadian market. It could drive a person mad trying to source a title at times.
It's horrendous, isn't it ? The sort of cultural imperialism still practised by Hollywood, but books of course are much more important.
This issue crosses many more industries than just publishing. With a population of 35m sandwiched between 380m Americans and Britons, the economies of scale are not on our side. We have roughly the population of California so being overwhelmed with cultural content from our larger friends is well worn theme. In WW2, we had and still have a very small peacetime army and not nearly the history of a robust professional military. The 100% volunteer force went quickly back to civilian life in 1945 and I have wondered if that dynamic contributed to the lack of written accounts. The story of Brig.-Gen. Jim Roberts of the 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade is often quoted. He was assigned to escort Gen. Eric Von Straube to the surrender ceremony (Hotel De Wereld) and sitting in the back of the Jeep, Von Straube asked what Roberts did before the war. "I replied," Roberts said, "that I was never a professional soldier but that, like most Canadian soldiers, I was a civilian volunteer and that, in my former pre-war life, I had been an ice-cream maker." Roberts was a militia lieutenant in 1939. Education may have been another factor. About two-thirds of the Canadians were between 18 and 25, and the rest weren't much older. One-third had not finished primary school, one-third had only reached Grade 7 and only one out of eight had a high school diploma.
I remember going to Canada when I was a kid in the late 1960s. I was already reading military books like the Ballantine/Purnell series and I liked Canada because you could get British books there. (And also British candy bars--Cadburys!) The bookshelves were full of Pans, Penguins, Corgis, etc., but the only thing about the Canadian Army I ever saw there was Alexander McKee's book about Vimy Ridge, which was a Pan title.
