The Toronto Press.
The newspapers of that period had a hard time to make ends meet, owing to the cost of production and the rarity of subscribers. The Globe, the Leader and the Colonist were the dailies. George Brown, Gordon Brown, Dan Morrison and Charles Lindsey were the chief writers. George Brown thought more of the Globe than of any other of his life associations, excepting perhaps Bow Park. They say that, returning from Edinburgh with his bride, he jumped out of the train when it reached the Toronto station and made for the Globe office, forgetting for the moment that his fair companion required some attention in the strange city to which she had come.
His assaults upon the other side of politics were printed double-leaded on the front page of the paper. People used to think this was because of their importance. But John A. Ewan, who was a boy in the Globe office at the time, and was assigned the duty of running up to Mr. Brown’s house for the editorial copy, used to say that in nine cases out of ten the articles had to go on the front page because, owing to the labor lavished upon them, they were too late for the page devoted to editorial matter. John A. Ewan began newspaper work on the Globe, and was one of the editors of that paper when he passed away. A staunch Liberal and beloved by all, we were warm friends, for he was a good deal like my other bosom friend, Sam Kydd, of the Montreal Gazette, whose quaint humor gave the editorial columns of that paper a brightness that made them very pleasant reading.
One evening John unceremoniously but unintentionally dropped in on a little dinner party I was giving to several members of the Women’s Press Club at the King Edward, and after having enjoyed a pleasant time, insisted when we were alone and the affair was over upon asking the amount of the bill because he wanted to share the expense. I firmly refused to entertain such a proposition, and told him it was not the custom in the neck of the woods I came from to allow anyone else to pay for one’s guests.
“Very well, George, my boy,” said John. “You’ve been very kind to me and I am going to be equally generous to you. Hanged if I don’t get you the Liberal nomination for East Toronto at the next election.”
Funny, wasn’t it? John had just been snowed under in that constituency by a 3,000 Conservative majority. Poor John—dead and gone—his memory is still kept green by all the old-timers who, knowing his kindness of heart, his geniality and his amiability, loved him all the more.
While the Globe was growing in every way some of the other papers were not doing so well. The Telegraph, the first venture in the daily field of my old friend, John Ross Robertson, with Jimmy Cook as his partner, felt the pinch, and so did the Leader after Charles Belford and George Gregg left to help start the Mail.
The Leader’s last days were marked by some journalistic novelties. If you had subscribed to the paper it kept on coming whether you renewed your subscription or not. If you advertised for a cook the “ad” was placed at the top of the “wanted” column, and appeared daily although your want had been supplied, working its way down to the bottom of the column as fast as new “ads” arrived to take the top place. Ultimately the appeal for a cook reached the bottom of the column and was retired.
The Colonist, then a Tory organ, during the panic of 1857, startled the political world with a sensational article, headed “Whither Are We Drifting?” and laid the blame of the distressing condition of the country on the awful extravagance and culpable incapacity of the Government. As I remember, though only a youth of immature years, the paper was financially in a hole, and John Sheridan Hogan, a brilliant young Irishman, who supported the Conservative party, was its editor. The Colonist’s sensational article brought immediate financial relief, for the Reformers swarmed to its assistance by increasing its advertising patronage and its circulation. Hogan was elected as a Liberal to the Local Legislature for one of the Greys, and was shortly afterwards murdered one night while crossing the Don bridge by the notorious Brooks Bush gang, which camped near the scene of the tragedy, and made the locality a veritable hell on earth.