Professor Hillmer told the The Samara Blog that he first encountered Skelton as an undergraduate, but the real challenge came in getting to know the man himself:
” It was easy enough to read his writings, and to understand them, because he was the most wonderful prose stylist. The many memoranda he wrote as a public servant could be found in the National Archives. I could go, as I did, to archives around the world to discover what was being thought and said about him in other countries. But what emerged from all of this was very little that helped me explain Skelton as something more than a grey man of ideas who became a grey civil servant. That was his reputation at the time and it persisted long after his death.
The breakthrough came when Sheila Menzies, Skelton’s daughter, and her husband, Arthur, himself a distinguished diplomat, generously gave a collection of Skelton’s papers to the National Archives and his wife Isabel’s papers to the Queen’s University Archives. Up until then, it was not known that these documents existed. In the Oscar Skelton files there were dozens of letters that he wrote to his wife over their long marriage. There was also a Skelton diary. It was very intermittent, and there were often entries only for a few days a year, but I began to find the man and his inner life. I saw the ambition that lies at the heart of my book – an ambition for his country, and also the ambition of a middle-class boy determined to become a man of distinction.”