Wilfrid Eggleston

Suffering from boredom in his teenage years, Eggleston advanced his basic English education through a fast-track course at Regina College, which qualified his entrance to Queen's University in 1926.

Joining the civil service through his productive membership of the secretariat in the Rowell-Sirois Commission of 1937, the Canadian government entrusted him with the position of Chief Censor of the nation in 1942 to combat negative coverage of Canada's role in the Second World War at home and overseas.

[1] His father was a former tax collector, his mother, a shop assistant and dressmaking apprentice; they had married in Grantham come 1897 after meeting as choristers in the town's Methodist chapel.

[5][6] However, following a major crop failure in 1917, he became the town's bank clerk after employment in a convenience store, but later left for Kronau, Saskatchewan due to a combination of poor business and boredom; the family ranch was later abandoned in 1923.

[12] After just one year writing in Lethbridge, he became Ottawa correspondent for the Toronto Star in 1929,[13] and witnessed significant political events in this position, including the passing of the Statute of Westminster in 1931 and the British Empire Economic Conference of 1932.

[14][15] He also began writing through the media agency Reuters in the late 1920s by means of a syndicated weekly newspaper column, with a selection of his political pieces featuring in Time Magazine and a plethora of other noted publications.

[10] After gaining the trust of the Canadian government, he became Chief Censor for war-time Canada from 1942 until 1944;[16] Eggleston's predecessor, Major James Haig-Smith, was ordered to ban some 600 published works due to leftist sympathies.

[26][27] Their daughter, classical pianist and composer Anne Eggleston (1934 – 1994),[28] became a distinguished contemporary of Robert Fleming, John Weinzweig, Oskar Morawetz and Godfrey Ridout, through her association with The Royal Conservatory of Music.