The Inside Story - Anthony Westell

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meant in those days what sort of work I would like to do for the rest of my life. Actually, I was hoping the war would last long enough for me to join the navy and play a part in the great adventure, but that was a couple of years away, so I said I would like to be a newspaper reporter. Looking back, I’m not sure why. I was a great reader and had swallowed whole a couple of books about the exciting lives of reporters in Fleet Street, in London, then the world capital of journalism, and at school a pal and I played at drawing front pages in which we wrote insulting stories about our teachers. One story concerned a teacher we called Sprouts because hair sprouted from his nose in bunches, and when that edition went missing we lived for several days in terror that it would be found. It retrospect, this seems a slim basis on which to start a career, but my father asked no questions and soon secured me a position as an apprentice reporter on our local daily paper.

      This book is intended to be mainly the story of my life in journalism, and I had planned to begin at that point in my life when I first got a whiff of the legendary printer’s ink that used to saturate newspaper offices and addict aspiring reporters. But then I realized that I ought to start further back, with the nature, nurture, and experiences that made me the person I am and shaped the journalist I became. When reporting was essentially a matter of recording facts in the order prescribed by the conventions of journalism, objectivity seemed possible. The opinions and prejudices of the reporter hardly entered into the matter. But the nature of journalism has changed, and, as I shall explain later, I had something to do with introducing those changes in Canada. News used to be about events: political speeches, accidents, cases in courts, the public working of governments, and the like. Now, those humdrum events of everyday democracy, lamentably, often go unreported, and journalists cover instead developing situations: the state of the environment, poverty, economic issues, and so on. This requires the journalist to use judgment, first about which situations to cover and which to ignore, next about which of a million facts are significant and should be highlighted, and finally on what conclusions to draw from the facts.

      So journalists don’t talk much about objectivity anymore. But neither do they like to be accused of being subjective in covering the news, so they claim instead to be fair, accurate, and balanced. But there are no hard and fast rules to decide what is and what is not fair, accurate, and balanced, and on any given piece of political journalism, for example, a liberal and a conservative would probably disagree. So we are back to subjectivity, or bias, if you prefer. In any event, I spent many years as a columnist with a licence to express opinions, and the reader deserves to know from whence those opinions sprang.

      The first section of this book, therefore, I have entitled “The Making of a Journalist.” Chapter 1, “Surfacing in the Gene Pool,” discusses my ancestors, the notorious along with the virtuous, an executioner along with innkeepers and labourers, the legitimate with the illegitimate, gamblers who lost what might have been my wealth, and enough eccentrics to help me explain away some of the decisions I have made. The second chapter, “Growing Up in the Old World,” explores my childhood in a motherless family in Britain before the war, now almost a forgotten world. Chapter 3, “Going to War,” is about the impact of the Second World War on my youth, and my experiences in the Royal Navy in the last two years of the war. Wholly undistinguished, my service nevertheless sailed me right around the world and had a powerful influence on the political values I have carried through life.

      The second section of this book, “A Working Journalist,” is an account of my career, from apprenticeship in Britain to reporter, editorial writer, and national affairs columnist in Canada. While I don’t want to intrude on the privacy of my wife or my children, I have discussed developments in my personal life for what they say about me and about how they influenced my career. Journalists are storytellers and I can’t resist a good tale, so much of this book is anecdotal. I have described, for example, my $2.00 wedding, the way we lived and began to raise a family in ruined and rationed London, the difficulties of starting again in Canada, and our happy days in Ottawa. I hope the personal background helps to explain my journalism — and that it makes an entertaining read.

      The third section, which I have called “A.k.a. an Academic,” takes me from full-time journalism into life as a university teacher. Somehow, I floated to the giddy rank of associate dean of arts without ever having been a student. More importantly, I had the time to work out my ideas on journalism which seemed to me to be suffering an identity crisis, with unfortunate results for our political democracy. I developed also my ideas on social democracy and what is now called globalism. In fact, Chapter 13 is about my role in helping to move Canadian public opinion from nationalism to free trade, probably my most significant journalism. If there appears to be a contradiction between being a social democrat and a free trader, the fault is not mine, as I shall explain.

      I have now to answer the difficult question of why anyone should care about my story. To write an autobiography or memoir must surely be vain unless one has played a great role in the world or is a gifted diarist, and I make neither claim. So why write? There is Socrates and his oft-quoted but little-understood, at least by me, remark that “the life which is unexamined is not worth living.” I reread the story and it’s not encouraging. He had been convicted of corrupting the minds of young Athenians, and addressed the jury of citizens on what penalty he might suffer. It was no good banishing him, he said, because he would be bound to go on discussing the very ideas that had already got him into trouble. But why could he not just keep quiet? Because “… the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others…,” there is need to examine one’s life. He suggested a stiff fine, with the cheerful proviso that Plato and other friends would have to pay because he had no money. But the jury voted for death by drinking hemlock, which is of course what happened. I’m no expert on Socrates, but as I read the story he was convicted in part for examining his life in public, which is what I am about to do in this book.

      So I must justify my vanity by claiming my story may be interesting and that some public good may come of it. I have tales to tell of politics not only in Ottawa but also inside the editorial offices of our great newspapers, insights to offer on political leaders from John Diefenbaker to Pierre Trudeau, and controversial issues to debate. These are footnotes to the history of our times. But a cautionary notice: I had the good fortune in 1974 to be invited to join two eminent Canadians, Davidson Dunton and David Lewis, in teaching the core seminar in the Institute of Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. Lewis had just lost his seat in the House of Commons and was preparing to write his memoirs, and sometimes after our weekly seminar I would invite him to join me for lunch in the faculty club. I knew he was unwell because he grumbled about his diet, but I had no idea that he was seriously ill — few people did — and would press him to have an appetite-enhancing dry martini. Then, in a relaxed mood, he would grumble that he had made a mistake in accepting the research assistants offered by the university. They kept turning up awkward facts he had forgotten, questioning the way he remembered other things, and even spoiling the anecdotes he had polished over the years. They had even had the poor taste, one told me later, to find a letter which he had signed “Yours in Marx,” long before he began an epic battle against Marxists in his party and the trade unions. He should, he said, have followed John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson by telling his story to writers who could check the facts where necessary and draft a book for him to revise.

      In writing this book, I have checked the facts where I was doubtful, but memory can play us false. When my wife read my account of what should have been shared memories it was rather like that song from the movie Gigi in which Maurice Chevalier, recalling a long-ago romance, sings, “Ah yes, I remember it well,” and Hermione Gingold, as his old flame, quietly corrects every detail. In what follows, there is nothing that I know to be wrong, but I would not vouch for every dot and comma. Happily, David Lewis persisted with the more rigorous method because his political memoir, The Good Fight, covering the years 1909-58, and published in 1981 (MacMillan of Canada), proved to be a work of historical importance. Unhappily, he died that year without writing the second volume he had intended.

      There will be no second volume for me.

      THE MAKING OF A JOURNALIST

      ~ Chapter 1 ~

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