The great Sir Robert Borden enjoyed a lengthy retirement. He stepped down as PM in 1920 and lived until 1937. Throughout this period Borden kept in touch with many of the friends he had made during his public service. In one letter, dated May 9, 1932, he painted a peaceful picture of his life in retirement from politics. “There is nothing that oppresses me,” he wrote to former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. “Books, some business avocation, my wild garden, the birds and the flowers, a little golf, and a great deal of life in the open – these together make up the fullness of my days.”
A journalist at the Toronto Star, R.E. Knowles, described Borden during this retirement period. “Still the straight spare figure, the patrician bearing, the cultured face on which reserve and kindness are both so evident, the deep set and inscrutable eyes, the whole general air of conscious superiority, bearing himself as one who expects to be accounted worthy, being worthy,” Knowles wrote.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.