Unexpectedly, my friend from Winnipeg, Frank Walker,
turned up in Montreal, and stayed with his old friend George Ferguson. He had
quit the Hudson’s Bay Company, and he hung around so long that Ferguson,
desperate to have him off his hands, persuaded the Publisher, John G. McConnell,
son of the original robber-baron, to appoint him Assistant Publisher of the
farming weekly, The Family Herald.
The way I
heard the story from someone who had worked with Walker in the HBC, he had
always had an easy relationship with the head of the company, Philip Chester,
who left him to do his own thing, and supported him in everything. For example,
if there was a Picasso exhibition in New York, he was able to go and check it
out. But when Chester retired in 1959, Walker went into a funk. He began to
turn up every day for work, but he shut himself into his office and never
emerged. This went on for some months before he decided to go to Montreal.
From the
moment he took up his new responsibility, he sought me out, and we had coffee
together almost every morning. Walker was a sardonic man, with a wicked sense
of humour, and in these coffee chats we ran our ruler over most of the senior
members of the Montreal Star staff,
especially the senior staff, and he left no doubt that his opinion of them was
no higher than mine. He immediately began to make vast changes in the Family Herald, enormously improving it,
to such a point that a member of the staff who was familiar with the magazine
said it could not be too long before it went broke and closed up shop. This, in
fact, is what happened to it, at which point Walker moved over to become head
editorial page writer of the Star itself,
under Ferguson, a job for which he was well qualified. By that time I was
working in London as full-time correspondent.
Before I
left Canada to undertake that plum assignment, a couple of interesting things
happened to me. One was that I was assigned to cover the 1959 Royal
tour, picking it up in Montreal, crossing the entire country up to Dawson City
and back to Halifax. I undertook the assignment because it gave me a good look
at a country I had only glimpsed in passing before. I was the most unlikely
person ever selected to cover a Royal tour, because I had always abhorred the
Royal family, and considered myself a convinced republican. Never mind: I had
managed to accommodate myself to the vagaries of the newspaper’s antediluvian
demands before, so I could no doubt do so again. I picked up the Royal
travellers as they entered Montreal. A ceremony at Place d’Armes turned out to
be rather sparsely attended by the public, which I mentioned in my report, but
that came out in the paper as, “Lines of soldiers around the square were needed
to hold back the enthusiastic crowd.” Ho, hum, I thought, here we go again.
The Montreal Star’s owner Mr. McConnell was such a slavish Royalist that every day we published the court
circular detailing the day’s Royal engagements in London. His family had, for
years, held themselves in readiness to greet and entertain and accommodate any
Royals visiting the city, an activity that must have ranked as high for them as
their millions of dollars of gifts given
to McGill university.
It
followed, ipso facto, that any criticism of Royalty remained foreign to our
pages; that even the suggestion of a critical evaluation of McGill would never
see the light of print; just as it was well known that no reference could ever
be made to the soubriquet “Sugar Ray” in writing about the champion black boxer
Ray Robinson, in deference to the owner’s also owning a sugar company. (There
were a lot of these stupidities: a notable one occurred when I was assigned to
interview a man who had just turned 103, with instructions to ask to what he
ascribed his longevity: I handed in some copy with his answer in the first
sentence, that he had never eaten meat.
Our dear old City Editor, Dick Haviland, one of those who seemed to have
been promoted beyond his level of competence, considered the matter gravely
before returning to my desk to ask for that particular jewel to be omitted:
“After all,” he bleated, “We’ve had trouble with Canada Packers before.”)
During
these days I really began to polish my skill at trying to indicate by my tone
something more than I was actually writing on the paper; a subtle form of
self-censorship, I suppose you could call it, but I gloried in it when it
worked. It probably reached its apotheosis when I covered the visit of newly
installed ruler of Cuba, Fidel Castro, who visited the city to pick up some
toys that had been donated as gifts for Cuban children. He was an amazing
figure, fearless it seemed, ebullient, always defying the caution urged upon
him by his --- and our --- security advisers. In his press conference, as was
usual with him --- this was the month of April, four months after he marched
into Havana --- he insisted he had no wish to undertake a position of power,
denied vehemently that he was a Communist, and generally charmed the pants off
everyone who came in contact with him.
My report, I thought, was as favorable as I thought I could get away
with under the not-too observant noses of our sub-editors, but I felt sure
anyone who knew me would understand what I was trying to say. The following day the Managing Editor, Walter
O’Hearn, a long-time Star employee as
a theatre and cultural critic, on which he wrote rather elegantly, another of
those who had been promoted to his level of incompetence when Ken Edey
resigned, said to me in a self-satisfied tone, “I see you didn’t think much of
our friend Castro.” Some of my friends,
on the other hand, said, “How the hell did you ever get that piece on Castro
into the Montreal Star?”
No such
ambiguity was allowed to occur in relation to the coverage of the Royals. I
figured when it was all over that the sub-editors had chuckled over my amusing
tales of Mayoral daughters and their battles to be presenters of flowers to the
Queen, and then summarily spiked them. I figured about 40 per cent of my pieces
had been used, but in some cases they had used perhaps one line under my
by-line, and substituted the safer agency copy for the rest of the story.
It was on
the Royal tour that I finally came into close contact with what I would call
big-city journalism, that is to say, the London press. I became matey with two fellows, Don Iddon, a
New York columnist for The Daily Mail,
and Graham Stanford, of The News of the
World, old school chums who just sat around the bar on the Royal train,
never venturing out to an actual function, but always on the lookout for that
sensational element that might land their piece on the front page. They were
two of the most cynical veterans of Fleet Street, and although their cynicism
towards the news was utterly deplorable, I have to admit I warmed to them both,
especially to Graham Stanford, and couldn’t help but find their antics amusing.
Their
moment arrived when the Queen begged off the trip up to Dawson City, her
publicists giving some anodyne excuse. A younger Fleet Street guy, Peter
Moorhouse, of The Daily Herald in his
piece speculated that the Queen was really sick, a front pager that left his
competitors at the gate. (The fact was, she was pregnant). At the next press
briefing, Stanford begged the PR man for the tour to come clean. “Our young
colleague has speculated that the Queen is ill,” he thundered. "Rod, what in God’s
name is the situation?” he asked, only
to get the customary muttered response.
That was
enough for Don Iddon: he wrote a sensational piece in which he said the Queen
was the victim of an ambitious Prime Minister, Diefenbaker, and the bungling
Canadian officials running the Tour. He
received immediate congratulations from his office on his great front-page scoop. The next day Diefenbaker, a mere babe-in-arms
compared to these Fleet street hangmen, denied the rumour, giving Iddon a hook
on which to hang yet another denunciation of the Canadian Prime Minister. Iddon
had never moved from the bar, yet he was the star reporter at work on the
story. I couldn’t help laughing…
The
reporter for The Daily Express, Lord Beaverbrook’s right-wing mass circulation
rag in which every news story if possible had to reflect the peculiarities of
the owner’s views, was Tom Stacey, an upper-crust Englishman who had previously
worked for a year or so in Montreal, where he had been thrown off a balcony
when he tried to interfere with the ballot-stuffing that was customary in
municipal elections in Quebec. Like Iddon and Stanford, he was governed by the
need to find that edge that would put him on the front page; without it,
nothing was worth reporting about this dreary tour. For them, if not for us. When the Queen
visited the Woodbine race track in Toronto, Stacey reported that the stables
were sprayed with perfume before the Queen’s inspection of them. Many
congratulations your splendid font-pager, came back the cables from head
office. Of course, he had made it all up, we all knew that. My best friend among the Fleet Streeters was Anne Sharpley, an amusing sob-sister for Beaverbrook's Evening Standard. I remember as we stood at the foot of a plane ramp, awaiting the Royal arrival, her saying, "She's going to be the last, you know. There'll be no more of them after her." A slight misjudgment, I would have thought, on a par with my high school teacher's assurance that "there'll be no millionaires in the future, you know. That's over."
As we flew
out of Whitehorse, the capital of the Northwest Territories, Graham Stanford
came and leaned over the seat to attract my attention. He wanted to tell me
about a gesture he and Iddon had made towards the wife of the man who drove
them everywhere. They had decided to give her a gift of flowers, a rare and
expensive item so far north. “Just one of those acts of gentility that make
life worthwhile, old man,” he said. He
did mention that as they were approaching the front door, they got into a
quarrel, no doubt stimulated by the 40-proof rum they had been drinking, and began beating each other over
the head with the flowers, so that when they got to the dear lady, their gift
was rather the worse for wear. “It’s just
these little gestures that give life some meaning,” Graham said. The dear old
fellow meant it, every word.
I think I
have recorded earlier in these Chronicles how my long hours worked on the Tour
resulted in my being given six weeks off, and a $600 bonus, which we used in a
six-week holiday in the West Indies. We returned from that in the middle of
January, and our first thought was, why the hell are we living in this hellish
climate? We decided then and there to
return to England, with the probable intention of returning, possibly overland,
to New Zealand. Noel Mostert actually booked our steerage passages on the s.s.
Homeric. But as the time approached we began to think the $4,000 we had saved
really wasn’t enough for the plans we had, that we should stay until September.
So Noel cancelled the passage, and two weeks before the ship was due to sail,
Walter O’Hearn called me in and asked if I would like to represent the paper in
London. I could hardly believe my ears. Noel re-booked, but in first class this
time.
A story
that will have to await another day, I guess.
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