The Power of the Pen: The Politics, Nationalism, and Influence of Sir John Willison

Linda.

I

A Hardscrabble Beginning, 1856−1881

Even now, Hills Green is an obscure place to come from. It lies in central Huron County, Ontario, nearly forty miles west of London and eight east from the Lake Huron shore. In mid-1850s Canada West it was a tiny pioneer farming hamlet, a mere post village, at the Corners, where the county road south from Varna met the east-west base road dividing Stanley and Hay Townships. Three-quarters of a mile west of there, just in the northern Township of Stanley, John Stephen Willison was born on November 9, 1856. [1]

His father, Stephen, was thirty-eight and his mother, the former Jane Abram, thirty. Stephen was of Scottish blood, though born in Yorkshire; Jane was English. They had met and married in Oshawa, where he was a foundry foreman. Late in the 1840s or early in the 1850s, farming in the Huron Tract seemed to promise a better life. John was their third child, joining Anne, six, and George, three. The family lived in a rough one-storey log house of three or four rooms set on a few rented acres of mostly uncleared virgin timber and marshland they called Hardscrabble Farm.[2] Stephen Willison never got far on the land. Whether from lack of ambition, insufficient experience, too little capital, three more mouths to feed or some misfortune, he was listed by the census taker in 1871 as a labourer. Probably well before then he had started taking what occasional employment he could find as a blacksmith, stone mason, or woodcutter. He took to drinking too heavily too often, while Jane grew grey and haggard.[3]

The dark-haired Jack Willison grew to sturdy young manhood as a wild country weed. He would remember a happy early childhood. There was something intimate and companionable in the forest, he would write. There were magnificent towering trees to hide behind, birds to watch and listen to, and special places of meadow and brook to delight a small boy. Very near to the family’s clearing was a long tamarack marsh where cranberries could be gobbled. When he was an older boy, there were countless summer hours at the swimming hole or the mill race. How the boy waited for the June sun to blister the face of the river, he would recall. Chores over, he and his pals would dive again and again into the tossing stream, even on Sundays, in defiance of parents and clergy. After all, he would write: … the river in the woods, even the discoloured mill race with its obstructing saw logs and its sawdust bottom had a fascination on a hot day that made it terribly hard to remember that it was Sunday.[4]

Then there were the delightful late winter sugar-bush days with his father and brothers. What true Canadian can ever forget the taste of the first drink of sap from the rough wooden trough on the edge of the woods, he would write, the swift exhilarating flavour of the syrup fresh from the kettle, the first wad of taffy, the first mouthful of sugar served on a maple chip in the early stages of the jubilant sugaring? He would remember accompanying his father into the bush in early March, to apply hammer, gouge, and wooden spike to the first sizeable maple to see if the sap was ready:

Very likely it would run, and it was the boy’s privilege to apply his mouth to the gash in the maple and take the first drink of the new season’s sap welling out from the veins of the kindly tree. And how the boy would glue his mouth to that tree and try to spread it over all the dimensions of the gash, and reach out his tongue and crowd down his lower lip and elevate his upper, and finally run his mouth away down to the edge of the gouge and catch the drippings as they fell from the handle…. It was a great day for the boy….

Towards midnight came the glorious taffy-pulling, as boiling syrup met clean white snow. Taffy is strung all about camp, he would recall, and faces are daubed and hair is glued to heads framed in fantastic bristles, and jackets and trousers are ruined for life.[5]

Such joys were all the sweeter for Jack Willison because of the stern reality of most of his daily experience. As soon as he could be useful, he began the older farm boy’s routine, first on his father’s acres and then as a hired hand. The older the boy, the more wearying the work. The memories that lingered were mostly not pleasant:

I underbrushed, I logged, I chopped, I split rails, I waxed fat in a lumber shanty on pioneer pork and Zurich sausage….

I know all the delights of life in the country. I have gone out on a peaceful Sabbath morning for a quiet walk in the meadow and been run out of the field by the ram with the crumpled horn. On wet days when all nature should rest I have laboured with the churn and the grindstone. I have mended the holes under the fence to keep the hogs out of the potatoes but the hogs got there all the same. I have shut my eyes to the beauty and poetry of the sunrise while, clad in a pair of overalls and one suspender, I have tramped through the wet grass of the pasture field and held out the halter in vain to the horse that had been deceived that way once too often. I have coaxed the young steer with salt in the palm of my hand only to have my advances contemptuously rejected and to be horned in the ribs in the final engagement. I have mowed the grass in the fence corners with a rusty scythe and cut great gashes just under my knee while the farmer sat behind the best team and drove the mower in ease and comfort. I have forked barley until the horns got down my back and I have pulled peas until as Macaulay says I ached for the dark house and the long sleep.[6]

Jack’s formal education was rudimentary and all too brief. Hills Green had a tiny public elementary school which he attended irregularly as chores and employment permitted. During one school year, he could not go until the last six weeks, yet he won the general proficiency award. His younger sister Mary would recall: Jack was always a very studious boy. The teacher did not like him so well sometimes for he always had his lessons done and teacher liked to favor the girls in preference to Brother. The teacher of course was always a man. Jack’s evident aptitude for learning was no doubt encouraged by his father Stephen’s quite respectable knowledge of English literature, the presence in the home of a few classics, and the daily arrival of two Toronto Conservative newspapers, The Leader and The Daily Telegraph. The boy once spent some of his rare money on a set of exciting dime novels, drawing his father’s censure.[7]

School in Hills Green was over for him before he turned fifteen. By 1871, or 1872 at the latest, he was at work full-time. He had little more to learn from any local teacher, and Stephen could not afford to send him away to secondary school. He needed to earn income for himself and the family by hiring out — to neighbours at first, then on more distant farms. For a time he lived and worked with a German family near Hensall, four miles to the south and west of home. Some situations were bitterly disappointing. One of my chopping experiences is memorable, he would recall. In the fall I engaged with an old and very shrewd Scotchman, for whose daughter I had had a distinct liking, to cut stovewood for him during the winter. He was to pay me fifty cents a cord and I was to pay him two dollars and a half a week for board. I chopped for him all winter and in the Spring I owed him $5.00 and a hated rival captured the girl.[8]

In the summer of 1872, still fifteen, he had his first brush with politics. He walked the four miles to Varna to witness an oudoor debate between the Liberal and Conservative candidates for South Huron in the federal general election. He was able to elbow his way to the front of the noisy, boisterous crowd ringing the rough plank hustings set up in front of the village tavern. It seems to me, he would write a half-century later, that I had an instant birth into ‘politics.’ From that hour I saw the way along which I must go. Even now I can recall as many sentences spoken at that meeting as at any other that I ever attended. No other political event is so clear and vivid in my memory.[9]

Standing near a tavern door was likely as close as he got in those years to such an establishment. Perhaps in reaction to his father’s excessive drinking, maybe with his mother’s encouragement, but definitely in company with many of the local teenage boys and girls of his district, he was an enthusiastic participant in temperance lodge meetings. The Willisons were Anglican, but it was more convenient to attend the tiny frame Methodist Church just south of the Hills Green Corners than to find regular rides to the far-off Church of England. In the evangelical atmosphere, it was easy to drink deeply of the elixir of prohibitionism. Happily, moral crusading and social stimulation could go hand in hand, as he would remember affectionately in a newspaper account a few years later:

Did you ever belong to the Temperance lodge in the little frame hall on the second concession? Have you ever got up at four o’clock in the morning and milked four cows and curried and harnessed the horses before breakfast and worked in the harvest field until eight o’clock at night, and then rolled down the sleeves of your flannel shirt, and put on a paper collar and walked two miles to the lodge, recited The Accursed Wine Cup and seconded two motions, and then walked home with Sister Brown three miles away in the other direction from where you live, let down two sets of bars, helped Sister Brown over a couple of fences, debated the right of way with large dogs, and then trudged home across the fields and by way of the side-line just in the neighborhood of midnight, feeling that life was a good time the whole year round, and that lodge night was a weekly picnic? If you say no, then you have never lived on a farm and belonged to a Temperance lodge, and you have missed experiences that have made life richer to many of your fellows, and have been the foundation of many an eminent public reputation.

The lodge’s attractions did not end there. In winter, sleighing parties were organized to visit neighbouring lodges. Bundled in the back of a bouncing sleigh with lots of opportunities for hand-holding, hugging, and kissing in the darkness, happy couples did not need alcohol to be warm and cozy. Willison would recall these wonderful outings as ruthlessly destroying the notion that Temperance people are long-faced, and narrow-chested , and weak-limbed, and baby-muscled, and creaky-voiced, and watery-minded. On the more intellectual side, there were the many debating evenings:

… there were heroic struggles of contending forces to prove that Wellington was the greatest general the world ever saw, and that Napoleon didn’t know enough about fighting to snow-ball a gate post and retreat in good order … or that single life was a perpetual picnic and that married people kept on living simply because they hadn’t courage enough to go away and commit suicide. And the man who was named for leader or got the first call for the next debate was for the time the king of all that community, and wasted more oratory about the barn than Webster would have found use for in a whole year….[10]

These happy social experiences aside, the brutal daily fact was that his working hours as an adolescent and young man held little enjoyment or fulfillment. From an early age he was obliged to shift pretty much for himself. He took work where he could find it. At sixteen, in the winter of 1872−1873, he left the Hills Green area to pay an extended visit to an uncle, Robert Elleker, who farmed at Salem’s Corners, east of Greenwood in Ontario County, a few miles north of Oshawa. By the summer of 1873 he had hired out as a farm labourer to Lovell Harrison and Judson Gibson, close neighbours of his uncle.

The change of place was followed very soon by a political conversion. Willison had been raised in a Tory household where Sir John A. Macdonald was worshipped. But Lovell Harrison was a staunch Reformer-Liberal who subscribed to his party’s great organ, George Brown’s Toronto Globe. That summer and autumn of 1873 the paper recorded day by painful day the humbling of Macdonald’s Tory federal government in the Pacific Scandal and then its resignation, subsequently confirmed in an overwhelming electoral defeat in January 1874 by Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberals.

Young Willison could not help being impressed by the Globe’s fervour and its dramatic depiction of the unfolding political drama. He would write that he wavered as I found life-long Conservatives falling away from the standard. Bit by bit it came to seem that the Tories could not be the proper party for an idealistic young man, and during the 1874 election campaign the eighteen-year-old was in the cheering crowd for Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie’s debate triumph in nearby Whitby. He soon took his own subscription to the Globe and picked it up with the rest of his mail at the nearby Kinsale post office, where the postmaster, Levi Mackey, would recall years later the long lank country boy with his dark brown hair and luminous dark brown eyes who very soon caught his attention because "it was plain that he was full of ambition and I remember distinctly on one occasion that he picked up a copy of the Globe from my desk and flatly told me that he would be on the staff of that paper some day."[11]

His working life in the mid-1870s was not greatly different, as he moved from farm to farm, hiring out for bed, board, and a little extra. But at least now there were opportunities in this more settled, established region for actually furthering his education and actively pursuing serious reading and political interests. Greenwood had an excellent school with a capable teacher who welcomed him to classes when his work permitted. Postmaster Mackey would remember that the youngster absorbed learning like a sponge and was given the assistant teacher office during the winter of 1874 and was for a time Principal during the teacher’s absence. Greenwood also had a wonderful Mechanics’ Institute with a sizeable library. Soon Willison was wading through literature and poetry of the likes of Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, Pope, Dryden, Goldsmith, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Whittier. He delighted in Samuel Smiles’s Self Help, with its encouragement to believe in the possibility for career success, even for persons without means. Almost every week at the Sons of Temperance Greenwood Star Temple No. 244 and in the Mechanics’ Institute debating club, he won notice for good-humoured lectures and debating performances.[12]

In 1875 or ’76 he was published for the first time. It was a poem in the solemn style of Swinburne for the Whitby Chronicle. He soon had several prose articles printed in the Chronicle and in the Oshawa Reformer. Back in Hills Green in late 1876 to work on Frank Coleman’s farm where his family rented, he sent the Guelph Mercury a stern anonymous prohibitionist letter on an impending liquor referendum in nearby Wellington County.[13]

Wherever he was, he read his Globe faithfully. One day in the early fall of 1877 he spotted an advertisement by a John A. Love, proprietor of a dry goods store in the village of Stanton, near Orangeville, Dufferin County. It wasn’t journalism, but it wasn’t farm work either. Maybe it could be some kind of upward step financially. He apparently wrote an impressive application, with words and phrases uncommon in would-be store clerks, and won the job. He arrived in Stanton in December and stayed for two years, boarding with the Loves. Their small daughter, Jessie, came to worship him and would remember he was tall and very good-looking, with fine pink-and-white skin, and well dressed — she would recall a white merino neckcloth with blue and black spots. He spent much of his spare time reading books and writing unsolicited articles for various dailies and weeklies. When he left Stanton in February 1880, John Love wrote a glowing letter of reference, describing him as clever, honest, and intelligent.[14]

Armed with that, he tried unsuccessfully to secure employment with several Toronto commercial establishments and then boldly nerved himself to try to catch on with the Globe. The late George Brown’s brother Gordon was the proprietor, and Willison sent him several of his clippings. Brown raised his hopes and spirits to dizzy heights with the note: I believe you can do newspaper work. Come and see me. I think good will come of it. But a personal interview revealed that there were no vacancies just then. A few months later, Brown actually tried to hire him, but was vetoed by the city editor.[15] Another reporter, especially an inexperienced one, could not be afforded. The depressed Canadian economy of the early 1880s seemed to have no place for him beyond a farm labourer’s or store clerk’s jobs. He was twenty-three, without prospects, connections, or money.

At this point, he may have remained in Canada mostly because he could not afford to leave. He would later tell his wife that he once walked twenty miles from Toronto to Woodbridge to apply for a store job, because he had no money for the train fare. There were probably several short-term positions, none with anything but subsistence wages. He was in Barrie for a time, then back to Hills Green.

Finally, in 1880 or early 1881, he landed a store post in Tiverton, Bruce County. He worked long hours for low wages, but the town had its attractions. Local literati and the politically interested staged occasional debating evenings, and he went along whenever he could get time off work. It may have been at one of these that he met Rachel Wood Turner, one of five daughters of a pillar of local society, Mrs. Margaret Turner. Rachel — or Rae as he soon called her — was a tall, strikingly attractive girl with blue eyes and light brown hair. Acquaintance very soon turned into affection. In hours not taken up by the store and Rachel, he wrote articles for the Tiverton Watchman and the Kincardine Reporter. As for what his daily working life was like, he would write a few years later a charming recollection titled Behind the Counter: Glimpses of the Country Merchant and his Customers for the Toronto Globe. In it he claimed that a country store clerk was in the right place to find out just about everything concerning the families and foibles in his district. He experienced a wonderful education in human nature as he fought shrewd and insulting ladies for proper profit on their purchases while under the jesting scrutiny of lounging local youths. He would remember a type of woman he must have feared immensely:

… I have known her drag the grossest profanity from the lips of the mildest Christian; I have known the merchant driven out of the shop by her shadow at the doorway, and the clerk weep that he could not follow; I have known her buy a yard of factory at seven cents and create a half-hour’s disturbance because she could not have buttons and a five-cent spool of thread thrown in. I have known her to occupy an hour in buying:

A cent’s worth of soda.

A cent’s worth of salts.

A cent’s worth of pins.

A darning needle, one cent.

And pay for the lot with a three-cent postage stamp and with two eggs when eggs were twelve cents a dozen, and demand a cent back in change. Every country storekeeper ten or twenty years ago knew and dreaded this woman as the supreme affliction of the business and I would not be surprised to learn that she still exists, a rare curiosity, in some of the not too remote sections of Ontario. She very rarely dies.

AN EX-CLERK[16]

He would not give up his dream of a career in journalism, and he kept on besieging Liberal papers, especially. In May 1881 he sent some of his clippings to John Cameron, owner and editor of the London Advertiser. The extracts are very good, replied Cameron, but hardly decisive, as it takes more than ability to write what may be called a smooth composition to make a journalist. He counselled that the sole way for a young man to prove his aptitude for newspaper work was by plunging in at the lower levels of the business — as a typesetter, for example — at little pay, or none for a while. Valuable experience would come from occasional reporting assignments. Willison formally applied for a reporting job, but was offered only a typesetting position at three dollars a week, on three months’ probation.[17]

The offer, he would write, held no immediate prospect of affluence and since I was twenty-five years of age was not alluring. With no savings, he faced the grim prospect of living for some time on the paltry wage offered. For some months he delayed his decision, hoping for better terms and probably canvassing other papers. He wrote Cameron again in October and managed to win a promise of a raise by one dollar weekly after the third month of satisfactory employment. The editor also commented, after receiving some fresh examples of Willison’s writings, that I think you have good stuff in you. The future would have to tell whether or not I have judged rightly. We are by no means empty on our staff but I am disposed to do what I can to allow you an opportunity.

The praise and encouragement made up the young man’s mind. He was in London before month’s end to sign a contract, determined to be away from the type and firmly established on the reporting staff by the time those three months were up. Before he left Tiverton he was tendered a farewell banquet at Mrs. Turner’s house, at which one of his older friends gave him some rather sobering advice about journalism: Remember, young man, that there are more devils [lowly assistants] than rich men in this business.[18] Still, the London opportunity and his developing love for young Rachel gave him reason to begin to look optimistically towards future prospects. Even as all his brothers and sisters joined his parents in the early 1880s in migrating south and west into the U.S. in search of better life prospects, his new job challenge and his relationship with Rachel Turner gave him reasons to try to build life success and happiness in Canada.[19]

II

Apprenticeship in Journalism and Liberalism, 1881−1890

For a few weeks in the autumn and early winter of 1881−82, John Willison struggled half-heartedly at the Advertiser ’s printing case to learn the rudiments of a trade he despised. He also kept showering John Cameron with unsolicited articles, and a few were published. In his second week he was sent to cover a temperance lecture at Victoria Hall. After a few more such assignments, he was given the London East beat in the mornings. Two or three weeks later he graduated to the full-time reporting staff for the morning edition and served as a proofreader on the afternoon edition. By the end of 1882 he was earning a princely ten dollars weekly. [1]

He had much to learn, not just about reporting. The Advertiser’s partisanship ran deep, and staffers were expected to understand that there were proper Liberal limits to objectivity. It was hard for a man of character to be partisan enough for some London Liberals. Willison once defended a Conservative ward official charged with dishonesty and even dared on another occasion to give a purely factual report on a Conservative nominating convention. It did not help when the Tories voted a motion of thanks.[2] But mostly he was reliably loyal to his party and his editor.

He soon had a wonderful new opportunity in Liberal journalism. In December 1882, John Cameron moved to Toronto to take over the direction of the Globe as editor and general manager. In August 1883 he asked Willison to join him. The dreams of a post with the greatest Liberal paper in Canada were to be realized. When the invitation came Willison was ecstatic. Within two hours he secured his release from the Advertiser and headed north to Tiverton to tell Rachel Turner the good news. She had not yet succumbed to other suitors, and over the past two years he had taken the trip as often as his slender funds and few days off allowed. Now there was time for several days to celebrate his great news with her in a delightful Bruce County holiday setting of sunshine, swimming, and picnics. When he left for Toronto soon after Labour Day, he and Rachel were closer than ever, at least as far as Mrs. Turner would allow. And marriage was beginning to seem a delightful and none too distant likelihood.[3]

He arrived at the Globe’s busy building at 26−28 King Street East bright and early on the morning of September 10, 1883. Cameron’s office was found, introductions made, and a desk assigned. For the first few weeks he served as the editor’s private secretary. But before the year was out he was making fifteen dollars weekly as assistant night editor commenting on the exchanges — notes and quotes from other newspapers, local, national, and foreign. After hours he had a lonely time at first in a big strange city of 120,000. He boarded a dozen blocks east and north of the office, on Mutual Street. His landlady mothered him, and he was touched that she tried to make his room homelike and was so cheery. As his first Christmas approached, he bought her roses, even though shocked at the price, because he was determined to show that he appreciated her kindness.[4]

He knew well that he worked for more than a mere newspaper. The Globe had been founded and developed to a towering eminence by George Brown and his brother Gordon before Confederation. George had been the dominant political figure in pre-Confederation Canada West. After 1867, he had been a key supporter of Alexander Mackenzie as federal party leader and then prime minister after 1873. Mackenzie was defeated in 1878, with the federal leadership soon passing to Edward Blake. When George Brown died in 1880, brother Gordon, with the support of other members of the family, had attempted to carry on George’s plans for the modernization of the business. In the unhealthy economic climate of the early 1880s, the Browns had been forced to sell more and more stock to outsiders. In December 1882 they had lost control to a syndicate organized by Robert Jaffray, a wealthy Toronto Liberal whose fortune had been founded on a thriving grocery business and in railways. The new president was James MacLennan, a law partner of Ontario Premier Oliver Mowat and a close associate of the new federal party leader, Edward Blake. Other members of the board included Jaffray; John F. Taylor, a prominent paper manufacturer; H.H. Cook, a Liberal MP; and J.D. Edgar, a former Liberal MP. It was this new board that had turned to John Cameron, a close friend of Blake’s, to run the Globe.[5]

In the early 1880s the Globe was the only uncompromisingly Liberal daily in the bitterly competitive crowded newspaper market in Toronto and its large Ontario hinterland. It had the highest average daily circulation in 1883, with its morning and afternoon editions combined at close to 24,000. The weekly edition averaged 41,000. Its chief rival since 1872 had been the morning Mail, the acknowledged Conservative mouthpiece in the city. Once puny in comparison to the Globe, its role and reputation had soared under the brilliant T.C. Patteson, in company with the recovery of Sir John A. Macdonald’s federal Tories from their humiliation in the Pacific Scandal. Macdonald returned to power in 1878 on a platform of protective tariffs — the so-called National Policy. The victory was confirmed in 1882. Manufacturers and businessmen generally were enthusiastic supporters of the new government, and the Toronto city core was becoming far more Tory.

The upstart Tory Mail now averaged 22,000 sales daily and the semi-independent but Tory-leaning World, owned and edited since 1880 by W.F. Maclean, was at 17,000. The generally pro-Conservative Telegram, set up in 1876 by John Ross Robertson, was at around 15,000, and the Evening News, founded in 1881 as an afternoon edition of the Mail but in 1883 striking out on its own under E.E. Sheppard on a broad platform of radical political and social reform, averaged about 17,000.[6] While the Mail and the Globe sold for two cents a copy, the others were one-centers, answering what the Dominion Annual Register and Review, 1883 termed the steadily growing demand for cheap newspaper literature for the masses.[7] In both political and journalistic terms, the Globe was in a bitter fight for survival amid the shifting tastes of its volatile market.

It was a young man’s game. John Cameron was only forty; Martin Griffin of the Mail, thirty-six; Sheppard of the News, twenty-eight; Maclean of the World, twenty-nine; and Robertson of the Telegram, forty-two.[8] John Willison was twenty-seven, eager and intelligent, but he had to be aware as well of all the other young feet on the ladder rungs of his city’s journalism above and below him. He would have to be quick or be left behind, never to reach the top. Too many years had been wasted already.

He served three successive sessions in the press gallery of the old Legislative Buildings on Front Street. He would remember his work as petty and trivial and partisan…. It was of the atmosphere of the Legislature and in those days one worshipped his political idols, blasphemed the enemy and rejoiced.

Premier Mowat, though a Liberal, was a status-quo incumbent, and the Conservative leader of the opposition, W.R. Meredith, often took the more progressive social positions. Apparently Willison was impressed by this. He would record years later that he often was in complete sympathy with Meredith’s legislative proposals.[9] But he kept that sympathy well hidden at the time, never allowing it to be reflected in his By Our Own Correspondent reports in the Globe, instead giving that column a reliably venomous anti-Conservative tone. In an early comment on the 1884 session he described Meredith as overwhelmed with confusion and blasted the docility of the dull-witted mob of Opposition members.[10] It was all in keeping with the Globe’s editorial shrillness, culminating later in the session with its denunciation of what it claimed was an undercover plot of provincial Conservatives and the Mail to bribe Mowat Liberals in the Legislature to change sides and overturn the government. The Globe even accused Prime Minister Macdonald of foul complicity, claiming that Macdonald had never shunned in the past any political crime necessary to maintain his power.[11]

Not surprisingly, the Globe worshipped Premier Oliver Mowat. Never was this more evident than later in 1884, when the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the Empire’s highest court, upheld Ontario’s case in a boundary dispute against Manitoba, which had been supported by the Tory federal government. Mowat himself had argued the case in London and the Globe crowed: Ontario as now definitely bounded possesses within herself all the necessaries and potentialities of a great nation. And that she was not deprived of a large part of her property is due to the courage, the shrewdness and the tenacity with which Oliver Mowat fought her battle.[12]

When Mowat returned in triumph to Toronto in September, the Globe enthused about his welcome home by a large cheering crowd, including some 1,500 self-styled representatives of The Young Men of Ontario, organized by an ad hoc committee of young Toronto Liberals. W.F. Creelman, chairman of the committee, saw in the demonstration an impetus to the young men of the Province which would awaken in them a more lively interest in its affairs. The next step was the organization of the Young Men’s Liberal Club of Toronto on September 18. A.C. Hamilton told the inaugural meeting that the new club would make it easy to get at the young men who are anxious to serve the Liberal party, and he enthused about the good to be accomplished by bringing together a lot of young men for the discussion of political questions.[13]

During its initial season the club rapidly expanded its membership, with two hundred and fifty on the rolls by the end of February 1885 and sixty or more attending the Monday evening meetings. Debate subjects ranged from municipal taxation, electoral reform, and immigration, to the future status of Canada in the world. Among the club’s leaders that first year were: Lyman Duff, future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada; T.C. Robinette, later a distinguished lawyer; H.H. Dewart, who became leader of the Ontario Liberal Party; and W.D. Gregory, who went on to be editor of the Canada Farmer’s Sun. Gregory would later write, with pardonable partiality: There has never been a political organization in Toronto which has had so many young men of first-rate ability as that organization had.[14] John Willison was not listed officially as a member that first year. His reporting duties may have conflicted, or perhaps he was a little shy about mixing with wealthier, better educated longtime Toronto men.

The House of Commons chamber and press gallery, 1897.

Library and Archives Canada, PA-12285

Or, just maybe, he had better things to do with the little spare time he could arrange. Back and forth to Tiverton on the weekend overnight coach sure could wear a fellow down, making Monday night no time for after-work debating. Also, the Tiverton travel offered more immediate and important rewards. Jack asked the lovely Rae to marry him, and the wedding was scheduled to take place June 3, 1885 in the Turners’ home, followed by a festive wedding breakfast. That morning, however, began in consternation at the Turner home. The issuer of marriage licenses, a rejected rival suitor of Rachel’s, refused to approve one, on the grounds that the groom was not a local resident. However, he would lift his ban if Rachel asked him personally. Willison had no idea what should be done, but Rachel firmly ruled out any request. They would have their wedding breakfast and then take the train to Toronto to be married there! They were in the midst of their party when the chastened official showed up, license in hand. Mrs. J.S. Willison was a lady of spirit as well as beauty.[15]

They made their first home together at 386 Ontario Street, not far below Wellesley and about a mile north of the Globe.[16] He could easily walk to and from work, which was fortunate because quitting time for a reporter on a morning paper all too often was well after midnight and streetcars. However, it usually was possible now for him to get time off on Monday nights to go to the Yonge Street Arcade, just around the corner from the office, for meetings of the Toronto Young Men’s Liberal Club, which he joined on October 5.[17]

The YMLC now had more than three hundred members of a very vigorous organization. Some senior Liberals were beginning to worry about their radicalism and even some expressions at meetings about disloyalty to the Empire. The provincial Young Liberals’ convention had taken place in September, and the Toronto club had presented most of the more radical resolutions and amendments — most notably for abolition of the Senate, liquor prohibition, and Canadian independence. But the more conservative non-Toronto delegates had heeded the promptings of senior party leaders to block the Torontonians’ initiatives.[18]

John Willison had reported that convention for the Globe. Now he became one of the most active YMLC members. He may have been spurred to join because of the very radicalism the party elders decried. He would later describe his political views at this time as those of a democrat, a free trader and a moderate social radical.[19] Certainly an article he wrote four years later on the 1885 provincial convention was highly critical of the older Liberals and of the young delegates who had been frightened into orthodoxy by them.[20] At a late November meeting he spoke in favour of party politics at the municipal level. In December he argued for Senate abolition, although warning that it should be treated as an ideal, not to be pushed until the smaller provinces agreed. That must have sounded like trimming to the majority, who voted solidly for abolition. Then, at a January 1886 meeting, true to his Good Templars’ training, he argued fervently for prohibition — but the drinkers in the group had their blood up, and he lost.[21]

In late March 1886 his involvement in the club was cut short by his appointment to the Globe staff covering Parliament in Ottawa. This was everything his ambition could have asked for. National politics, for all the Mowat Ontario fanaticism of the Globe, meant the big time for political reporters. When Rachel said goodbye to him at the old Union Station on Front Street before he took the Grand Trunk to Ottawa, she had to know this was a critical career opportunity for him.[22] The parting may have been eased by the fact that he would be back soon enough when the session ended in the spring.

The Russell Hotel, corner of Elgin and Sparks Streets, 1898 (from William H. Carre, Art Work on Ottawa, Canada, 1898)

City of Ottawa Archives/2011.0102.1/CA-000162

The parliamentarians had gathered a month before, and sittings continued until the second day of June. Already, before his arrival, the chief fireworks of the session had been touched off — in a bitter debate on Edward Blake’s motion condemning the execution the previous November of the Métis leader Louis Riel for his leadership of the Northwest Rebellion earlier that year. Blake had argued that Riel should have been pardoned as insane, and his French-Canadian colleague Wilfrid Laurier had pleaded eloquently for justice to the Métis people. Their position was largely in accord with that of Honoré Mercier’s semi-separatist parti national in Quebec. The Globe loyally supported the Blake–Laurier stand, commenting: The Métis cause was a just one. It is not possible to maintain that the leader of a just cause should have been sent to the gallows….[23]

Twenty-four Ontario Liberal MPs dared to share publicly the general Ontario revulsion at the Blake position, by opposing his motion in condemnation of the execution. In the Liberal party, as in the country at large, the fires of sectional and ethnic discord burned brightly. The Liberals just might be on the way to winning new acceptability in Quebec, hitherto the Conservatives’ most reliable power base. However, with a general election inevitable in a few months, not a few in the party must have wondered if their voting strength in Ontario could be at severe risk.

Top Left: John Willison, 1888.

William Topley Collection, Library and Archives Canada

Top Right: The Honourable Edward Blake, 1886.

Library and Archives Canada, PA-003833

Bottom Left: The Honourable Sir Richard Cartwright, circa 1890.

Library and Archives Canada, PA-025546

Bottom Right: The Honourable Wilfrid Laurier, 1882.

Library and Archives Canada, C-001967.

During his brief first session in Ottawa, Willison was a subordinate member of the Globe’s team there. He sent off only the occasional article, as he was under John Cameron’s instructions to concentrate on familiarizing himself with the parliamentary scene and establishing personal rapport with the chief Liberal leaders. That list was long, chiefly Ontarians like Blake, Sir Richard Cartwright, the former finance minister, and David Mills, the former minister of the interior. Willison soon learned, however, from other reporters in Ottawa about the bright new star rising on Parliament Hill, and not from Ontario. John Dafoe, then of the Ottawa Evening Journal, would record that the speech on Riel in English by Quebec’s Wilfrid Laurier had made an extraordinary impression on all who had heard it, that all the big guns in the House of Commons had been thrown into complete eclipse by Laurier’s performance.[24] After the speech Edward Blake spoke for many of the politicians of both parties when he said that it was the finest parliamentary speech ever pronounced in the Parliament of Canada since Confederation.[25]

Willison had to be fascinated as he watched the tall, slim, elegant, chestnut-haired French Canadian from his seat immediately above and behind the Speaker’s chair in the low-slung press gallery. He had spent all his life to date in English-speaking Ontario and had never before had a chance to meet any one remotely like Laurier. Yet here was a French-Canadian Quebec Roman Catholic who quoted Byron and regularly haunted the English-language literary and history shelves of the Parliamentary Library![26] For his part, Laurier was happy to linger in chats with the tall, obviously intelligent, dark-haired, bearded new reporter from his party’s premier English-language paper. They soon understood that they were very alike in their intense love for the drama of politics and the romance of great history and literature.

Willison refused to be outraged, as many an Ontario Protestant was, by Laurier’s position on Riel’s execution. Instead, with a federal election looming in December that year, he helped to arrange an invitation for Laurier to speak at a mass public meeting organized by the Toronto Young Men’s Liberal Club. There were many predictions of a negative, even unruly, reception. As the large crowd surged from the snowy Toronto night into the vast Horticultural Pavilion, there were understandable fears among leading senior Liberals that the evening could be a disaster.

In his speech Laurier identified himself as an English liberal … the principles which I profess … did not come to me from the land of my ancestors. They came to me from England. He reached beyond the divisive Riel controversy to voice a moving image of Canada’s dualistic but united future: Below the island of Montreal the water that comes from the north, from the Ottawa, unites with the waters that come from the western lakes, but united they do not mix. There they run, parallel, separate, and distinguishable, and yet are one stream, flowing within the same banks, the mighty St. Lawrence rolling on toward the sea … a perfect image of our nation.[27] Willison would write years later of that night that it had been hard to resist the courtesy, the patience, the manly bearing and resolute temper of the eloquent leader of the French Liberals.[28]

Willison was mostly back in Toronto as 1886 gave way to 1887, reinforcing the Globe’s coverage of Oliver Mowat’s triumphant provincial re-election in December 1886 and then the difficult federal campaign across Ontario in February 1887, when Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservatives held on to office with a reduced majority. Frustratingly for the Liberals, the Riel affair seemed to have gained them little in Quebec. The party now had been trounced in three successive general elections by the prime minister they thought they had destroyed fourteen years before in the Pacific Scandal. As Willison would write, a long day of adversity continued for the Liberals.[29] When the new Parliament opened in mid-April, Willison returned