Brad Spurgeon's Blog

Before I arrived at the International Herald Tribune, I had spent three years working in the library of The Globe and Mail in Toronto, where my father had worked for more than two decades a decade before I arrived. We both worked under the same top editor, Richard J. “Dic” Doyle. So when his memoir was published I read it with excitement and decided to try to review it for the IHT. It was yet another in a long line of rejecdted efforts. It took me seven years of rejected submissions to the IHT before I had my first article published in 1990, not long after I wrote this ill-fated one. Having rediscovered it in my computer archives recently, I decided – as with a few other of my rejected works – to put it on my blog, because, in this case, it occurred to me that in the world we now live in, even a book review from nearly 35 years ago is something that can have a purpose today. Dic Doyle’s memoir about his life at The Globe and Mail in Toronto is still available for purchase online, and it may even be read for free at the Internet Archive. So why not get this article out there!? Re-reading it now, decades later, and after a long career in journalism, I feel that the review had some merit. Perhaps an editor would have had to tone down my unrestrained enthusiasm for the book, but not a bad effort. As to the rejection, it is true that at the IHT, this review was perhaps a little too Canada-centric, and we had only one book review published per day at most – or was it per week?! So perhaps it is no surprise that it was rejected. But I think it could have had its place. In any case, again without having touched or changed a single word in this article – except filling out the title of John Fraser’s book – I post the review as I wrote it as a copiously rejected, but still ambitious, writer in 1990:

Early one morning in 1985 Richard J. “Dic” Doyle was awoken by a telephone call from Canada’s Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney.

“Would you come to the Senate?” asked the PM.

Dic Doyle turned to his wife Flo and asked, “Would you like to go to Ottawa?”

Flo nodded and Doyle said yes to the PM. It was not only his wife’s response that counted for the man who had spent some forty years in Canadian journalism, twenty of them as THE editor of Canada’s National Newspaper, The Globe and Mail. It was also, as he thought in that split second before responding:

“An unexpected opportunity to look back at the press and assess the fourth estate from the vantage point of another estate not totally involved in the hand-to-hand combat of electoral politics.” (In Canada Senators are appointed by the Prime Minister for a term that lasts to age 75.)

And so Dic Doyle became the first journalist to be called to the Senate since George Brown in 1873. Was it pure coincidence that Brown was the founding publisher and editor of the same newspaper that Doyle was leaving?

In any case, the result of the look at the fourth estate has come five years later in the form of “Hurly-Burly,” a book that might well turn out to be of as much service in the future to Canadian journalism as Doyle’s career at the Globe was in the past.

“Hurly Burly” is the kind of book that might inspire generations of young people to take up the
calling in the way of such classics of the genre as Henri Stephan De Blowitz’s memoir of his time as a foreign correspondent for the London Times to Al Laney’s memoir of his experience at the Paris Herald.

“Hurly-Burly” is a massive book that reads with the ease of a romance. But there’s no self-indulgent sentiment here.

What we have is not only a history of The Globe and Mail, and Doyle’s time there, but an informal history of Canada from the point of view of behind the scenes of the fourth estate.

As a “junkie” of Canadian politics Doyle recreates the elections and tells the story of the growing country through his recollections and the archives of The Globe and Mail. The meetings between the editorial board, of which Doyle was head, and the politicians are described in detail.

In the late 1960’s editorial writer Jean Howarth asked one of her pointed questions to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau on his first visit to the board and the PM responded, “Could you do better, Madame?”

After Trudeau left, Howarth said, “The man’s arrogant.”

The publisher, Jim Cooper, said, “He just doesn’t abide uppity women.”

But as Doyle writes, “It was soon clear that he didn’t abide uppity newspaper people of either sex.”

Doyle tells the story of the growth of the paper from its birth as a weekly four page Toronto newspaper in 1844 to its current status as Canada’s daily newspaper of record, copies of which are printed in six cities across Canada beamed by satellite from its Toronto offices.

This is the inside story as told by a manager. He started his career at the Chatham Daily News in 1940 as a sports writer, went to The Globe in 1951, and worked his way up to the position of managing editor before taking over as the editor in 1963. He writes:

“Good managing editors should be seen to be at war with the system whatever the system may be. It is their job to be more daring, more innovative, more expansive than any of their colleagues. They cannot be buddies to their reporters, but they must be their advocates. They should have horses of their own to ride.”

And Doyle lived by his creed. He was the guy who sent the paper’s young dance critic to China as the chief political correspondent there. John Fraser came back from that assignment to write his bestselling book “The Chinese: Portrait of a People” and to distinguish himself as one of Canada’s finest journalists.

Doyle’s tenure at the top of Globe editorial management survived through six different publishers. When the current publisher took over in 1978 and two of Doyle’s right-hand men were sent off to postings in other newspapers that belonged to the same chain that owned the Globe the new publisher, A. Roy Megarry, called Doyle into his office and asked him: “And what do you want to do?”

Doyle said, “I want to continue as editor.”

Megarry then more or less put Doyle on a three month probation. Doyle remembered something Clement Atlee had written to the effect of “a man who was afraid of losing his job didn’t deserve to have the job.” He wrote Atlee’s words on a piece of notepaper, “stuffed them in an envelope, and gave them a permanent place in the back of the centre drawer of my desk at The Globe.” And kept his job another five years before turning to column writing and taking the title Editor-in-Chief Emeritus in 1983.

HURLY-BURLY: A Time at The Globe
By Richard J. Doyle
528 pages.
Macmillan of Canada

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