Some brief reflections on Gordon Skilling

Samuel Abrahám

A Slovak émigré at the University of Toronto, I was not his student. When we met, in 1984 or 1985, Gordon Skilling was professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. I was immediately struck by the fact that he knew more about my native land than I did and it was fascinating to hear so much about myself from him. He showed me the collections of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library – original copies of works by dissidents from the Bohemian Lands and Slovakia. I was writing an extended essay for my B. A. on the re-establishment of hard-line Communism in Czechoslovakia and was holding original manuscripts by Šimečka, Jablonický, Kusý, and others.

His Roots

At first I did not dare ask, but I kept wondering what his family background was. Did he have Czech or even Slovak roots? No, he didn’t have any roots in central Europe. He had been a Rhodes Scholar in England. Even his famous teacher, R. W. Seton-Watson, who recommended to Skilling that he take a trip to Czechoslovakia in 1936, did not have Slav roots. But Seton-Watson was asked the question so often that he occasionally used the name Sitikovský, even as a pen-name. (It was quite odd then, when at our school a month ago we received an application from a young woman whose address was Sitikovská ulica.)

Gordon and Sally’s Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary in Prague

I always looked forward to Skilling’s reports, gossip, and photos from his travels to Czechoslovakia before the Changes of late 1989. A high point was after his return in 1987. Organized, I believe, by Jiřina Šiklová, the event will surely be discussed this evening. But we had a good chuckle when looking over the photos at the Town Hall of the Old Town, where the city official led the ceremony for the ‘pensioners from Canada who got married in Prague in 1937’. In the background of this scene, standing behind the official and Gordon and Sally, were prominent dissidents – later they formed about half the Czechoslovak government. (The city official, of course, did not recognize any of them.)

Their son Peter

Gordon and Sally Skilling occasionally invited me to dinner at their place. When the conversation came round to their sons, well, David lived happily with his wife Jane in Vancouver, but when I asked about their other son, Sally in particularly remarked quite anxiously that Peter was somewhere amongst the Buddhist monks in Thailand. All the greater the pride of Peter‘s father, a professor and friend of dissidents, that their son had become a world authority on Buddhist texts. And what’s more, the son was now following in his father’s footsteps – both Gordon and Peter had smuggled written material – one into Czechoslovakia, the other into Burma and Laos.

Peter Brock

Skilling introduced me to his old friend, Peter Brock. The two men were quite different from each other, yet still very close. Gordon occasionally complained that Peter had retired too early, was not teaching, and was not passing on his profound knowledge to students, and was only writing and learning new languages and subjects all the time. Skilling was in a way the opposite of Brock. Though he wrote and did research, Skilling actually never stopped being a teacher and a man of action. Academic activity was for him a continuation of learning about people and their lives.

Young people and the living-room seminar

Skilling was retired, but he wrote, travelled, and was in touch with young people. His books about the Masaryks were written after 1989. He travelled, always with one or both sons. But his living-room seminars were fascinating, attended by young, educated women in postgraduate studies. Some of them travelled to Toronto from various parts of Canada. Skilling invited me several times to report on Slovakia. The students clearly felt wonderful in his company and he felt fine in theirs. What more could a wise man want?