Art and Politics - Sarah Jennings

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Hamilton Southam was the privileged son of an Ottawa establishment family. His Scottish great-grandfather had come to Canada as a stonemason and had initiated the family fortune by buying a printing company. In due course, this business expanded into the Southam publishing empire, the source of the family’s wealth. By the time Hamilton Southam was born on December 19, 1916, the youngest of six siblings, the Southams were fully established members of Canada’s gentry class. With that came their sense of leadership and of responsibility to give back to the community—a common attitude among late Victorian families at the top of the social ladder. Throughout his life, Southam ascribed to the noblesse oblige that wealth, good looks, and a privileged upbringing bestow. He also possessed a genuine openness and a love of all things artistic, particularly for opera and music. The arts were a civilizing force, he thought, and they should be acquired, practised, and supported.

      This sensibility had been instilled in Southam from childhood, especially by his Aunt Lilias, his Uncle Harry Southam’s wife, who lived next door. They had converted an indoor squash court in their house into a music room, where they installed both a piano and an organ. There he listened to his aunt as well as more famous musicians play. When the concert pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff came to town, he happily accepted an invitation from the Harry Southams. Wilson Southam, Hamilton’s father, had “a wonderful Victrola,” which he allowed his son to wind up for summer concerts on the veranda. Ultimately, Hamilton Southam developed a keen appreciation for music, rather than the ability to play himself, and that led to his unstinting support for music and opera at the newly created National Arts Centre.

      In the 1930s, the Southams made frequent visits to London and Paris, where Hamilton discovered opera—“a romantic form of music … I fed on,” he said. They also visited well-connected family and friends in the English shires or the French countryside. There in the summer of 1938 he met Jacqueline Lambert-David, the daughter of a distinguished French family. Hamilton, always chivalrous and with an abiding affection for women, was invited to visit her family home, the beautiful Château de Ferney in the village of Ferney-Voltaire on the Swiss-French border, where Voltaire had lived for nearly thirty years before its purchase by the Lambert-Davids. The following summer Jacqueline and her sister Claude, in the rituals of such families, came to Canada to stay at the Southam summer home in the Rideau Lakes near Ottawa. When they sailed back to England, Hamilton accompanied them, travelling on up to Oxford for the fall term at his chosen college, Christ Church. He had hardly arrived there before war broke out. He immediately enlisted in the army, and was at Aldershot for training by Christmas. He and Jacqueline would marry in London in April 1940.

       A member of a well-connected family, young Hamilton Southam was a page to the governor general, the Marquess of Willingdon, in Ottawa. Photo © Southam.

      He served first with a British regiment, then transferred into the 40th Battery of Hamilton, a Canadian militia unit that had been raised by his uncle Gordon Southam in the years before 1914. By 1943 he was “becoming bored” in England, so he leapt at the chance of taking part in an exchange of officers which had been arranged with the Canadian army fighting in Italy. Joining the forces just before the Battle of Ortona, he moved up the rest of Italy “liberating opera house after opera house” as they passed through cities and towns and “enjoying the opera—or at least the idea of it—in each of them.” He also found himself working closely with professional soldiers under fire. “The core of the regiment was the non-commissioned officers,” he recalled, and he got along well with them and their troops and learned from their experience—qualities he would exhibit in later years at the NAC where, despite his sometimes lordly manner, he had good relations with the stagehands and the other backstage crews.

      Demobilized in 1945, he joined the London Times and did a short stint as an editorial writer before returning to Ottawa with his bride. There he joined the family newspaper, the Ottawa Citizen, again to write editorials. But it was not a task suited to his temperament. Assigned a topic, he would disappear into the library for a week to research a piece, while a quick 200-word comment written in a day was what his editors wanted. In 1947 he wrote the exam for the Department of External Affairs and, two years later, left on his first assignment abroad, to Sweden. His career as a diplomat would take him in and out of Canada over the next few years before his penultimate posting in Poland, where he first served as chargé d’affaires. There he helped to expedite the return of the Polish Treasures from Canada, where they had been stored for safekeeping during the war, and finally became an ambassador. He also began an affair with Marion Tantot, the vivacious and intelligent young French wife of a junior colleague in the embassy, Pierre Charpentier. Their tempestuous relations would continue on two continents for decades before she became his third and last wife nearly forty years later.

      In the summer of 1962 Southam was reassigned to Ottawa as director of the Communications Division in the Department of External Affairs. “Not the most prestigious division,” he said, “but the largest and one of the busiest.” He soon reconnected with friends, family, and colleagues in the upper reaches of the capital’s society and settled in to what he thought would be a diplomat’s home posting.

      Shortly after starting his new job, on October 4, 1962, Southam received an unusual visitor at his new office in the Langevin Block, a federal government building at the corner of Ottawa’s Wellington Street and Confederation Square. His well-dressed guest was a local society woman, Faye Loeb, the lively wife of a local Jewish grocery tycoon. Mrs. Loeb came as spokesperson for a loose collection of civic interest groups that were determined to do something for culture and the arts in the capital.

      The early sixties was a time of rising optimism in Canada. In Ottawa, various citizens, spurred on by the seeds planted by Vincent Massey less than ten years before, had been ruminating on the future of the city’s cultural life. At least two local impresarios were kept busy bringing performances in music, theatre, and ballet to the city, but frustration was growing that the only venues in which to play were either high school gyms or a downtown movie house, the Capitol Theatre. Ottawa by now had an active Philharmonic Orchestra of its own, and both the Montreal and the Toronto Symphony would come to town every year to fill out the concert season. Arts festivals had also become the rage during the booming postwar period, but there was no way Ottawa could contemplate a festival without a performing arts centre. And so it was that several groups went to work, independently of each other. Even the owner of the local football team, Sam Berger, thought it was time to have a place for the arts.4

      When Faye Loeb called on Southam that October day, she asked him if he would spearhead the quest for a concert hall. At first he demurred, saying he was “far too busy” to take on the task and requesting three weeks to find someone else. However, he was intrigued and, as soon as Mrs. Loeb left his office, he began to consult several of his high-level friends, including Arnold Heeney, a former top diplomat and public servant; I. Norman Smith, editor of the Ottawa Journal; and Louis Audette, a former naval officer who ran the Canadian Club and was president of the Ottawa Philharmonic. Clearly, the idea appealed to Southam enormously from the beginning—the dream that he had inherited from his parents. When no one else agreed to take the project on, he decided he would do it himself.

      Southam knew exactly what to do. By early December, he had established the Preparatory Committee for an Arts Alliance,5 seconding his colleague Pierre Charpentier, who had also returned from Poland, to be his volunteer secretary. His small but heavyweight working group was filled with his friends—deputy ministers, prominent socialites, and well-connected individuals on the Ottawa scene. The immediate order of business was to develop a feasibility study. With Southam at the helm, and the times encouraging, all the portents were right for what happened next. Southam knew everyone worth knowing, including Prime Minister Lester Pearson, who, as a young man, had courted one of Southam’s sisters and frequently visited the family home. Charming and fluently bilingual, Southam’s work was beginning at the very moment when the idea of bilingualism and biculturalism was blossoming in Canada. Centennial Year was looming on the horizon, a scant four years away, and Canadians were starting to prepare

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