After his separation from Jack Kent Cooke, Roy Thomson kept moving forward. He continued to try to pierce the upper echelons of Canadian society by joining the board of the prestigious Albany Club in Toronto. He bought three more Canadian newspapers and issued $3 million in bonds to finance these and other purchases. He hired a right-hand man with an encyclopedic knowledge of Canadian newspaper statistics who improved his sourcing of newspapers to purchase. He was well on his way to achieving his publicly stated goal of owning 52 papers, one for each week of the year. Everything was trending upward until his wife, Edna, was diagnosed with cancer in 1951 and passed away in 1952. After she passed, Roy regretted working so much and not spending more time at home with her.

As a widower, Roy did what he knew best: he dove into his work and his presidency at Canadian Press, a trade association. As president, Roy preached to publishers that broadcasting wouldn’t kill newspapers, technology was expensive up front but cheap in the long run, and television shouldn’t be feared because television and radio stations could buy news from Canadian Press. Roy also bought seven more Canadian newspapers during his tenure as president and a Florida newspaper while vacationing in the state.

Continuing to try to grow his networks and influence in the upper echelons, Roy ran for Parliament of Canada as a progressive conservative candidate. He was defeated. Undeterred, he refocused on his business and decided to expand into Great Britain. In 1953, he began printing a weekly magazine for Canadians living in Britain. Then The Scotsman, a prestigious newspaper in Scotland, asked Roy if he was still interested in buying it. The newspaper had been mismanaged after the World War II boom and was losing money. To transfer ownership to the next generation, its owner would face a death tax it couldn’t afford. Roy bought The Scotsman and two sister papers. The deal stipulated that he become a resident publisher. At 59, he moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, to build another empire.

Roy transferred management of his North American and Caribbean businesses to his son Kenneth and executives. He focused intensely on turning around The Scotsman, but things didn’t go as planned. Roy cycled through a few editors, and circulation dropped. Edinburgh’s high society, which initially wanted to get to know Roy, shunned him because of his blunt demeanor and changes he made to their local newspapers. Unsure how to turn things around, Roy offered Jack 25% ownership for free if he’d move to Edinburgh to run the newspapers. Jack, successful in his own right, declined.

Things were going well in Canada. His team was steadily buying newspapers in Canada and Florida. They even acquired two television stations in partnership with a local senator. But it would be three years before Roy’s Edinburgh newspapers stopped losing money, which happened in 1955. Even with this significant turnaround complete, Roy was not content; he was back in grow-my-empire mode and considering how to start Scotland’s first independent television station.