Series 7 - Diaries and travel journals

1.33 m of textual records

Gordon Skilling began keeping diaries when he was a boy; the earliest includes accounts of trips to New York City and Montreal respectively in February and October 1921. These diaries, which described later trips to the United States and to Muskoka, continued until 1932, the entries between 1928 and 1932 being intermittent.

There is a gap of 36 years before the next journal begins. Between 1958 and the end of his life, Professor Skilling kept travel journals, relating especially to Czechoslovakia and other destinations in Eastern Europe. These are arranged chronologically, are often accompanied by supporting correspondence, programs and other items picked up along the way, and by photographs (see Series XI). The journals are usually described as ‘notebooks’, though many are in diary format. Professor Skilling often combined the diary format, with dated entries, with notes on what he had seen and with whom he had met, either in the same notebook or separately. These journals should be consulted in conjunction with the relevant chapters in his autobiography, The education of a Canadian, which helps put them in perspective.

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