The Scotch

In 1908, in Dunwich Township, a patch of rural southern Ontario that was more Scottish than much of Scotland, the renowned economist and public servant John Kenneth Galbraith was born. In 1963, Galbraith wrote The Scotch, a memoir of the tight community in which he was raised. Galbraith tells how the men were distinguished by the amount of land they’d accumulated, how hard they worked, how hard they drank, but mainly by how frugal they were. It was said that Codfish John McKillop was so economical that when he died and was being lowered into his grave, he lifted the cover of his coffin and handed out his clothes. Educated himself first at the one-room Willey School, where team sports were held to be “bad for a youngster,” and later at Dutton High School under the aegis of an incompetent teacher who believed in learning through terror, Galbraith raced through the early grades and left for the Ontario Agricultural College, en route, eventually, to Harvard. He may have left the community, but, it’s clear from this affectionate, if pointed, portrait, it never left him.