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ROBERTSON, JOHN ROSS,
journalist, publisher, philanthropist, historian, and sportsman; b. 28
Dec. 1841 in Toronto, son of John Robertson, a dry goods merchant, and
Margaret Sinclair; m. first 20 June 1871 Maria Louisa Gillbee in
Toronto, and they had two sons and one daughter; m. there secondly 30
April 1888 Jessie Elizabeth Holland; there were no children by the
second marriage; d. 31 May 1918 in Toronto.
As a youth, John Ross Robertson revealed a penchant for collecting
pictures and historical memorabilia, an aptitude for swimming, hockey,
and rowing, and a love for parades and decorations. At Upper Canada
College in Toronto, where he was a student in 1850–51 and again after
1854, he showed an early proclivity for printer’s ink. In 1857 he began
the monthly College Times, reputedly the first school paper in Canada,
which he typeset and printed at home. In its first issue he criticized
college authorities for a land deal which deprived students of a
playground. His actions are reported to have saved the playground, but
to avoid expulsion Robertson changed the name of the paper to Monthly
Times; he later published it as Boy’s Times. He left Upper Canada
College in 1860 for the Model Grammar School and started Young Canada, a
better-written version of his first paper.
Robertson had already become a familiar face in Toronto newspaper
offices, where he carried out job-printing contracts. For several years
after he left school in 1861 his career mixed journalism, printing, and
publishing. For a time he worked on the reportorial and advertising
staff of the Leader, edited by Charles Lindsey. In addition, he set up a
job-printing office when he published Young Canada Sporting Life, an
expanded version of his school paper, with more coverage of pastimes and
sports, likely Canada’s first periodical devoted to sport; later in 1861
he changed its name to Sporting Life, and it appeared until 1863. He
also published Robertson’s Canadian railway guide and, from 1863 to
1865, the Grumbler, a satirical weekly started by Erastus Wiman*.
George Brown, publisher of the Globe, hired Robertson in 1865 as city
editor, responsible for court and city hall news. Here Robertson
developed what was to become his foremost journalistic strength, the
ability to ferret out local news, and he easily won a contest among
Globe reporters for bringing in the most news items by garnering 150 in
one day. He is credited with introducing to the paper the practice of
writing crisp, short paragraphs about a multiplicity of local
happenings, rather than sermon-like and wordy essays about outstanding
events. Robertson disliked working at the Globe, however, partly because
it published long political diatribes at the expense of local news, but
even more so because he considered Brown “the most notable charlatan
this country has ever known.”
Robertson jumped at the chance when James Beaty Cook, on the staff of
the Leader, invited him in 1866 to become co-proprietor of Toronto’s
first evening newspaper which was not a separate edition of a morning
newspaper. From its first copy on 21 May, the Daily Telegraph was an
ambitious undertaking. Robertson and Cook quickly established morning
and weekly editions and sought to topple the dominant Globe by mixing
Conservative politics, sensation, and the occasional independent
political comment. The paper trumpeted its intention to pursue politics
“without party spirit” and to expose “unsparingly . . . all abuses and
denounce all corruption no matter who the guilty parties may be.” Its
promise of “today’s news today” heralded the coming to Canada of the
innovative American-style “penny” press for the mass market.
At the Telegraph, Robertson and Cook eschewed lengthy political
editorials for timely scoops; the Telegraph was, for example, the first
paper in Toronto to announce the Fenian raid of 1866 at Ridgeway.
Robertson’s groundbreaking journalism was apparent in his breathless
eyewitness account of the Red River uprising of 1869–70. With Globe
correspondent Robert Cunningham, he travelled to the northwest by rail,
steamer, and, for the last arduous 400 miles, horse-drawn cart. When
Robertson arrived at the Red River settlement (Man.) in January 1870
Louis Riel promptly had him arrested and imprisoned in Upper Fort Garry
(Winnipeg). After an interview with Riel, Robertson was expelled as a
“dangerous character.” Making the most of this exploit by Robertson, the
Telegraph employed the attention-grabbing, self-promotional techniques
of a new style of journalism. In marked contrast to the staid,
impersonal accounts in the Globe, it pulled out all the stops for
“reports of the insurrection [which] will be fuller, more graphic and
more trustworthy than [those in] any other journal.” Under stacked,
descriptive headlines, often 12 lines deep and in single columns,
Robertson wired a highly charged, personal account of the rebellion. His
dramatic reports were reprinted throughout the North American press.
Robertson’s work on the Telegraph demonstrated a strong, even stubborn,
independent streak, and a steadfast determination to speak his mind. In
1870 he denounced the violence carried out by members of the Young
Britons during the Orange parade in Toronto, despite his prominence as
an Orangeman; as a consequence, he was condemned by some of the leaders
in the order and the office of his newspaper was threatened with
destruction.
Sir John Stephen Willison spoke of the “vigour, courage and originality”
of the Telegraph, but the paper was not successful financially, and it
eventually fell victim to the hostility of Prime Minister Sir John A.
Macdonald, who wanted a dependable Tory organ in Toronto to combat
Brown’s Globe. The Conservative party had begun providing support to the
Telegraph in 1869 at the behest of Cook and editor Daniel Morrison*.
However, Macdonald distrusted Robertson because of the Telegraph’s
criticism of his government, especially for its handling of the
rebellion in 1869–70 and its policies on subsidies to railways; once,
Robertson pointedly ignored a call from Ottawa asking the paper to “call
off its dogs.” Convinced of Robertson’s inherent unreliability,
Macdonald withdrew vital Tory patronage from the Telegraph after Cook
left the partnership in May 1871. Faced with ruin, Robertson attempted
to conciliate Macdonald and make the Telegraph the official Tory organ,
but in vain. Unhappy with both the Leader and the Telegraph, which in
November he said was a “mere blackmail sheet, and the sooner it is
crushed the better,” Macdonald was already making plans for not only the
ouster of Robertson from the Telegraph but also the publication of the
new Tory organ, the Toronto Daily Mail. The Telegraph ceased to appear
in May 1872.
Overlooking their political and personal enmity, George Brown hired
Robertson as the Globe’s resident correspondent and business
representative in London, England. Robertson lasted until 1875, when he
returned to Toronto and became the business manager of the weekly
Nation, the Canada First organ founded in the previous year [see William
Alexander Foster]. He acquitted himself well, and so in 1876 was the
logical choice of Goldwin Smith, who was one of the principal
contributors to the Nation, as publisher of a new Toronto daily to
challenge Brown’s Globe. Smith gave Robertson $10,000 to found a paper
“for the masses and not the classes.” On 18 April 1876 the Evening
Telegram appeared for the first time, its name chosen to signal the
immediacy of the news it printed. Robertson promised that it would be an
“independent” newspaper, “not an organ; it will have no patron but the
public.” He soon alienated Smith, however, by refusing to go along with
him on the subject of Canada’s relations with the United States and by
supporting the Conservatives in the 1878 campaign. The first editor,
John Charles Dent, also soon left.
The paper “paid from the start,” according to Robertson. Key to its
success was Robertson’s innovative practice of cutting the rate for want
ads to one cent a word, which was half the going rate. The reduction of
the paper’s price to one penny 14 months after it was launched,
Robertson’s competitive tactic of “a word a cent and a cent a copy,” and
his focus on local news made the Telegram indispensable reading for
Torontonians. Indeed, one of the sights of Toronto was the gathering at
5:00 p.m. of hundreds of men around the Telegram’s office on Melinda
Street to read the “wants” columns on the front page. The Telegram
became the newspaper with the largest circulation in the city by the
early 1880s.
The Telegram also prospered because of Robertson’s success in keeping
labour costs low. A paternalistic employer, he paid for staff funeral
costs and reluctantly granted the occasional raise, but he was
notoriously domineering and tight-fisted. He believed that virtue was
its own reward, and that low pay and long hours kept his employees
virtuous. Anti-union like George Brown, Robertson denied his printers
the right to organize and was able to pay below union-scale wages. His
Telegraph had been a leader in resisting the campaign by printers for a
nine-hour day, and during the 1872 strike Robertson successfully
prosecuted one of his men for deserting his job. In 1882 the Telegram
became the first target among the Toronto dailies of a boycott organized
by the International Typographical Union with the support of the Toronto
Trades and Labor Council. The boycott failed in 1884 and the paper
remained defiantly non-union until 1891. Although it was widely believed
that Robertson then graciously paid union fees for his workers, his
printers paid them. The unionization of the Telegram’s printers was
significant in that it completed the unionization of all Toronto
newspapers and hastened the acceptance of trade unions as a legitimate
part of industrial organization.
Along with Hugh Graham’s Montreal Daily Star, Robertson’s Telegram
became the embodiment of the new people’s press in Canada, which focused
on a sensationalist and massive coverage of local news instead of
partisan editorials on national politics. Their founders were among the
first Canadian press barons. In Toronto Robertson pioneered the
successful news formula, which satisfied the need of the increasingly
literate urban population for easily understandable and entertaining
information. The Telegram specialized in presenting news in the form of
a pot-pourri of titbit items, trivia, maverick politics, and vigorous
local political crusades, one of the first being against a proposal for
a bonus of $250,000 from the city to the promoters of the Credit Valley
Railway. It was the first to emphasize municipal events by reporting on
the city council, the water commission, police courts, hospitals,
sports, and crime. The newspaper’s innovative practice of using
interviews to canvass public opinion helped its circulation to rise
spectacularly.
By the 1880s Robertson’s Telegram was already considered by Charles
Pelham Mulvany “par excellence, the family newspaper” in Toronto and it
was an “institution . . . read by every one from the fashionable belle
in her boudoir to Biddy in the basement!” Robertson had accomplished
this feat by employing the self-advertising techniques of the American
penny press. Rather than simply reporting the news, the Telegram began
to make the news. In addition to mounting heavily publicized
investigations of the “financial folly enacted . . . by our elected
representatives,” Robertson and the Telegram also promoted and paid for
a number of public projects such as providing band music in parks and
importing an ambulance from Britain. The newspaper constantly kept its
name before the public; for example, starting with the federal election
in 1878, it projected returns by means of an oxyhydrogen lamp in front
of the Telegram’s office before crowds that reached 10,000. By 1880 the
Telegram was also considered the best advertising vehicle in the city
because of its pre-eminence in Toronto homes, and it attracted the
business of the expanding department stores of Timothy Eaton and Robert
Simpson, as well as of the emerging manufacturers of brand name
products.
Robertson was fortunate in obtaining the services of highly effective
editors to succeed Dent, first Alexander Fraser Pirie, and then in 1888
John Robinson Robinson. According to historian Jesse Edgar Middleton,
the opinionated and blunt “Black Jack” Robinson made the Telegram a
terror to those aldermen and civic officials “who showed signs of
‘wobbling’ or seemed unduly eager for self-aggrandisement.” Robinson’s
editorial tirades mirrored Robertson’s strident support of the Orange
order, the British empire, and Canadian nationalism, and his
anti-American, anti-Quebec, and anticlerical biases. The newspaper in
turn reflected and reinforced the sentiments of much of
late-19th-century Protestant Tory Toronto.
In 1877 Robertson had also begun a career characterized by literary
scholar Douglas Grant Lochhead as that of “a successful and seemingly
shameless pirate-publisher” when he reprinted in paperback a work by
Dwight Lyman Moody, first published in the United States, without
authorization or payment of royalties. In the absence of effective
copyright legislation, Robertson was able to sell the works of popular
foreign authors, in his “Robertson Cheap Editions,” at 3 to 50 cents a
copy, a fraction of their list price. It is estimated that he may have
sold up to two million copies of about 350 pirated titles from 1877 to
the early 1890s. He also frequently serialized in the Telegram works he
published in separate editions.
By the mid 1880s Robertson was wealthy and powerful. His influence in
municipal affairs had become legendary, and the Telegram had the
reputation of being able to make and unmake civic politicians. Robert
Lorne Richardson, founder of the Winnipeg Daily Tribune, would observe
in 1918 that “it was practically a death-knell to the aspirations of any
public man in Toronto to have Mr. Robertson and his newspaper opposed to
him.” The energetic support of the Telegram was credited by some with
the success of William Holmes Howland in his election as mayor in 1886.
Robertson’s successful endorsement of Robert John Fleming in the 1892
and subsequent mayoral elections led to the belief that the Telegram’s
support ensured victory. Later, Thomas Langton Church* was known as the
Telegram’s candidate, and the paper’s aldermanic slates were also often
successful.
Robertson’s influence spread beyond the municipal stage in the 1890s.
Encouraged in 1896 by D’Alton McCarthy* and Nathaniel Clarke Wallace to
run for the House of Commons as an independent Conservative in
opposition to the proposed remedial legislation for Manitoba schools
[see Sir Mackenzie Bowell] and in support of the National Policy,
Robertson won the Toronto East riding by one of the largest majorities
in Ontario. In parliament he generally supported the Conservative
opposition but occasionally took independent positions. As he had all
his life, he often served as a watch-dog against government waste and
denounced subsidies to railways; he opposed aid to both the Canadian
Pacific and the William Mackenzie* and Donald Mann* interests.
Parliamentary life did not suit him, however, and he declined to stand
for re-election in 1900, believing that he could have more influence on
public affairs through the pages of his newspaper.
In parliament Robertson had been active in an ongoing campaign to
pressure the government to pass a Canadian copyright act. His efforts
may appear strange, given his earlier career, but he later protested
that he had pirated foreign works precisely to bring about a Canadian
copyright act and also to provide Canadians with accessible reading.
Robertson and other Canadian publishers feared the consequences of the
Berne Convention, which Britain adhered to in 1886, because it legalized
the flood into Canada of cheap American reprints of British authors,
thus threatening the existence of Canadian book publishing. In January
1889, after becoming president of the Canadian Copyright Association,
which he had helped establish, Robertson led a delegation to meet with
the minister of justice, Sir John Sparrow David Thompson, and demanded a
“national policy” for the Canadian book trade. In response, Thompson
steered a bill through parliament in 1889 that would allow the
publication in Canada of British authors after a short period of time.
The act was still-born: the Colonial Office refused its assent, in part
because it considered the Canadian act to be in conflict with such
imperial legislation as the Literary Copyright Act of 1842 and the
Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865, but also in order to be able to
bargain away the Canadian market in return for copyright protection for
British authors in American legislation.
The British government’s continued intransigence on copyright soured
relations between Ottawa and London and raised the more significant
issue of Canadian independence. Thompson wrote to Robertson in 1892 that
the copyright question had become for him a “question of principle,” and
as prime minister, he sent him to London in 1894 to “straighten out the
Copyright tangle.” Robertson reported that his unofficial mission had
failed because of British sentiment that “when the day comes that Canada
has a right to ride roughshod over the Imperial Act the connecting link
between England and Canada will be severed.” Yet, Robertson persevered
and in 1895 he participated on behalf of the Canadian Copyright
Association in a meeting with representatives of the Canadian government
and the British Copyright Association to settle the affair. A tentative
agreement was reached, but Canada did not achieve autonomy in copyright
matters until 1911. In that year the imperial parliament approved
legislation allowing self-governing colonies to pass their own copyright
legislation, which Ottawa finally did in 1921.
Like other businessmen in the late 19th century, Robertson was an
enthusiastic advocate of the movement for civic reform and public
ownership of services and utilities. The Telegram was regarded as an
important and “uncompromising” campaigner in the fight for public
ownership of hydroelectric power in the early 1900s, a policy advocated
by Adam Beck and his fellow Tory mlas under James Pliny Whitney.
Robertson kept special watch over hydro matters in Toronto, and Edward
Montague Ashworth, who later became general manager of the Toronto
Electric Commissioners, would reflect in his memoirs that Robertson was
“more important to us than the Mayor, or even than Adam Beck.” Robertson
occasionally went so far as to dictate policy to hydro authorities; once
when an engineer argued that a proposal by Robertson would ruin the
utility, the latter rejoined: “Well, I made it, didn’t I?” Beck himself
valued the Telegram, using it for controlled leaks; a rate increase was
announced in the Telegram before the Toronto hydro commission even got
wind of it.
Robertson’s strongly held imperialist views were evident in the
Telegram’s strident support of Canadian participation in the South
African War. Combined with his nationalist convictions, they led to his
sowing the seeds for the formation of the Canadian Press agency.
Dissatisfied with the anti-British bias in the cable reports of the
Associated Press and aided by a grant from the federal government,
Robertson and Hugh Graham in 1902 set up the Canadian Associated Press,
the first wire service to transmit news directly from London. However,
its limited nature pointed to the need for a wider news service. In 1910
the Western Associated Press, a cooperative newsgathering agency formed
in western Canada in 1907, mounted a campaign against the discriminatory
rates charged by Canadian Pacific Telegraphs, which held the rights to
transmit the Associated Press news service. As a result, these rights
were transferred to newspaper publishers and the formation of a Canadian
service became a pressing matter. Robertson led publishers from eastern
Canada in negotiations with the Western Associated Press to form
Canadian Press Limited in 1910 and he sat on its first board.
Highly respected by his colleagues in journalism, Robertson served as
president of the Toronto Press Club and honorary president of the
Canadian Press Association. When he warned daily newspaper publishers
they would be swamped in the Canadian Publishers’ Association, they
formed a separate section in 1912, a forerunner of the Canadian Daily
Newspapers Association, created in 1919.
Robertson’s boundless energy and widespread interests manifested
themselves in other fields, and in the 1880s he devoted himself
increasingly to masonic affairs, historical research and collecting,
amateur sports, and philanthropy. He had joined the masonic order in
1867 and became its most celebrated member in Canada. Elected grand
master of the Grand Lodge of Canada in 1890, he read the masonic rite of
the dead at the funeral the next year of fellow mason Sir John A.
Macdonald, whom he succeeded as grand representative in Canada of the
Grand Lodge of England. At his coronation in 1902, King Edward VII
conferred upon Robertson the honorary rank of past grand warden of
England. Robertson also devised the “Robertson ballot” method of voting
in the order. His published works include the two-volume, 2,000-page
History of freemasonry in Canada, from its introduction in 1749 . . .
(1899).
All his life, Robertson was a passionate student of history and
collector of historical memorabilia. As a boy of 12, he had started a
historical picture collection. He began compiling materials on masonic
history as soon as he joined the order, and this activity spurred a
wider interest in early Canadian history. It would lead Robertson to
amass the largest collection of Canadiana in his time. His enthusiasm
also manifested itself in the pages of the Telegram, where he assigned
Thomas Edward Champion and other reporters to write on early Toronto
history; the weekly articles were republished at Robertson’s expense in
a massive six-volume series. Robertson’s landmarks of Toronto
constitutes a detailed record of Toronto from 1792 to 1914, a “goldmine
of information,” though the work contains many errors.
Robertson’s passion for collecting historical materials, pictures, maps,
books, and other documents increased as he grew older, and his face
became familiar to antiquarian shopkeepers all over North America and
Europe. Following his discovery in the British Museum of the water-colours
of Elizabeth Posthuma Gwillim, wife of Upper Canada’s first lieutenant
governor, he edited The diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe, published in
1911. Between 1912 and 1917, when his collection had grown larger than
his ability to house it, he donated thousands of historical paintings,
reproductions, original maps, and documents, as well as ornithological
illustrations by William Pope, to the Toronto Public Library. Despite
the indiscriminate nature of the collection, its value cannot be
questioned.
Robertson’s philanthropy became well known, and his benefactions to
Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children especially impressed
contemporaries. From 1883, the year after his only daughter succumbed to
scarlet fever, to his death, Robertson gave some $500,000, and he made
frequent appeals in the Telegram for public donations. He oversaw the
establishment of a convalescent retreat, the Lakeside Home for Little
Children, on Toronto Island in 1883, the construction on College Street
of a new building in 1889, the addition of a five-storey nurses’
residence and college in 1905, and the establishment of a special milk
pasteurization plant in 1909, and he also served as trustee from 1885
and as chairman of the board from 1891. He visited the hospital every
day and was its Santa Claus. At his death, his will stipulated a special
endowment fund for the hospital based on profits from the Telegram.
The world of sport was also a focus for Robertson’s public-spiritedness.
A fervent advocate of amateur sport, he became president of the Ontario
Hockey Association in 1899, at a critical moment in the history of the
sport. His battle to protect hockey from the influence of
professionalism caused him to be called the “father of Amateur Hockey in
Ontario.” According to Alan Metcalfe, Robertson’s legacy was mixed: the
OHA was able to set rules defining professionalism in hockey but
professionalism increased enormously after 1910, with the result that
participation in organized amateur hockey in central Canada was limited
to a middle-class élite. When he retired as president in 1905, he was
made a life member of the association, and he continued to run its
affairs as one of its “Three White Czars.” He worked especially hard to
rid hockey of increasing violence both on and off the ice. Robertson’s
donation of silver trophies to hockey, cricket, and bowling further
encouraged amateur competition. He was named to the Hockey Hall of Fame
in 1945.
Robertson’s public presence did not go unnoticed. He was made a fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada in 1914. On 31 Dec. 1916 he refused Prime
Minister Sir Robert Laird Borden*’s offer of a senatorship and a
knighthood, becoming the only man in Canada to reject both honours in
one day.
For some, Robertson was a paradox; his gruff, dour exterior and his
bullying nature belied his numerous acts of private and public charity.
Yet, his detractors described his charity as self-aggrandizing and
suggested that he profited from it. Opinion was also divided about his
achievements as a newspaperman. At his death many called him Canada’s
leading journalist. In 1893, however, Edmund Ernest Sheppard had
denounced him in Saturday Night (Toronto) as a “newspaper brawler” and
wondered if Robertson himself would withstand the character
assassination and scrutiny he liked to dish out to others.
When Robertson died in 1918 he left an estate estimated at about
$1,750,000. But he was not interested in wealth for its own sake. He
sought instead what it brought in its wake: prestige, power, and
influence, which the Telegram’s success allowed him to possess in
abundance. As one of the first very wealthy publishers, Robertson, in
his career, signalled the transition of Canada’s newspaper publishers
from the world of journalism to that of business, and of their
newspapers from 19th-century political vehicles to 20th-century
profit-making corporations.
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