Hon. Frank Oliver and Yours Truly.
According to a report of one of the press gallery banquets Hon. Frank Oliver, M.P., shortly after I had delivered what I was pleased to think was a speech, was called upon. The former Minister of the Interior according to the report said he had always felt a personal interest and some pride in Mr. Ham, because he had been the means of giving him his first job in the West. In 1875 he (Mr. Oliver) was the foreman in the Winnipeg Free Press printing office, when a young fellow just up from Ontario blew in, told a joke or two and asked for a job at the case. Mr. Oliver said he liked the jokes and also his style, and engaged him then and there, giving him some good advice as to how he might get on if he minded himself. The ex-minister continued: “George took the advice all right, for before many months were over he was writing the editorials for the Free Press and was an alderman of the city of Winnipeg, while I was driving bulls across the prairie.”
That’s all right for Mr. Frank, but it isn’t the whole story. That was 46 years ago, and the reportorial room and the composing room consisted of one and the same room, and we couldn’t even boast of a proof press—we used a mallet and planer—think, you publishers of to-day, a daily paper without a proof press, and the telegraph dispatches were frequently unintelligible. Frank Oliver was foreman and I was a comp. Then I got ahead of him and became city editor, and he pounded a bull train 900 miles across the plains to Edmonton, where he started the Bulletin, a model paper, and got ahead of me. Then I evened up and started the Winnipeg Tribune—not R. L.’s sheet, but, you know, modesty prevents my saying anything further about the two Tribunes. Comparisons are odious. Then Frank forged ahead and was elected to the Northwest Council, and I caught up to him by electing myself alderman of Winnipeg. Hanged, if he didn’t go me one better and Edmonton sent him down to Ottawa as an M.P. In desperation I collared a school trusteeship and a license commissionership under the McCarthy Act, which was declared ultra vires the next week. He wouldn’t stand for that, so he became a Minister in Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s cabinet. Then Sir Sam Hughes came to my rescue, and appointed me an honorary lieutenant-colonel. This was the apex of our greatness. Bad luck set in for us both. Frank was beaten in the Federal elections, and Sir Sam wouldn’t let me go to the war, because he was of the decided and fixed opinion that I would be more useless over there where the bombs and bullets were flying than in Montreal where the prices of everything one consumed or wore were soaring. So no rivalry exists between Frank and me now, and we have agreed to call it a draw.