COMMEMORATING 175 YEARS OF FAIR PLAY AND DAYLIGHT
The life and times of legendary Citizen editor-in-chief Charles Bowman
When the newspaper's founder William Harris crafted this motto, he could hardly have imagined how it would be tested and how it would endure. As the paper celebrates a historic anniversary, we take a look back at how the Citizen has both reflected the city and also tried to imagine what it can be.
This year, the Ottawa Citizen — the capital's oldest continuously operated business — marked its 175th anniversary. The COVID-19 pandemic put our plans to celebrate this remarkable milestone on hold, but we couldn't let the year end without showing why this institution has been an important voice in our community for so long. This article is part of a series of stories celebrating the newspaper's past and looking forward to the future.
Charles Bowman began his long, storied newspaper career at the Ottawa Citizen by getting himself fired from the federal government.
A civil engineer, Bowman was a rising star in the department of railways and canals when he won a national essay competition in October 1912. He was awarded $200 — about $5,000 in today's dollars — for an essay that suggested a board of professional engineers should assess the merits of proposed new infrastructure projects. Canada's system of political patronage, he said, was leading to poor decisions and wasteful spending.
Three days after the prize was announced, Bowman was sacked by Order in Council. His bosses — most of them beneficiaries of political patronage — did not take kindly to his upstart criticism.
Of that moment, Bowman would later write: “I had reason to feel happy about that for the rest of my working lifetime.”
That's because afterwards, acting on what he called a “romantic notion,” Bowman went to the Sparks Street offices of the Ottawa Citizen and introduced himself to publisher Harry Southam. He offered to write columns for the paper while visiting England that winter.
So began his 33 years at the newspaper, most of it as editor-in-chief. Bowman, in fact, remains the longest-serving editor in the Citizen's 175-year history.
That history is, in many ways, the city's history. The newspaper, born as The Packet in 1845, adopted the Ottawa Citizen as its name while the city was still known as Bytown. In the 1850s, it pressed hard for the misfit lumber town to be named the capital of the Province of Canada. The Citizen has covered every important debate about the city ever since.
In that time, Citizen editors have helped shape the city — and sometimes the country — by focusing the paper's journalistic resources on specific issues: political patronage, water pollution, bilingualism, literacy, voter suppression, the LRT.
Arguably, no editor has been more influential than Charles Bowman.
One of Bowman's predecessors, Robert Shannon, said it was a newspaper's job to “hold a reflecting glass” to its community, but Bowman more often employed a telescope: He used the paper's editorial pages to envision a better future for the city and the country.
An energetic, crusading, controversial figure, Bowman opened the editorial pages to liberal, sometimes radical views.
He argued for unemployment insurance, national pensions, proportional representation, a central bank and a trans-Canada air service. He recruited a leading urban planner to write a column for the paper: Noulan Cauchon extolled the virtues of parks, parkways and public spaces. (He later became Ottawa's chief planner.)
Bowman befriended five prime ministers and developed a Zeliglike presence in the nation's capital: He watched the Parliament Buildings burn, was a key figure in the development of the CBC and was tried for subversion in the Second World War.
“Charles Bowman is one of the exceptions to the adage that Canadians are reticent and reserved,” Canadian historian William Rodney once said of him.
Born and raised on England's North Sea coast, in the town of Amble, Charles Arthur Bowman grew up in a family with strong trade union sympathies. Although he loved books — Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare — he trained as an engineer at Rutherford College (now Northumbria University).
Bowman worked as an engineer aboard the Cairnglen, a cargo ship, before immigrating to Canada in 1908. He was 25 years old when he arrived in Ottawa.
Thanks to his impertinent essay and a successful stint as a foreign correspondent, Bowman was hired as a Citizen columnist in 1913.
Tall, bald and brimming with voluble confidence, he had a knack for drawing attention to himself. His very first column helped change the direction of the paper.
In that column, Bowman challenged the Conservative government's public assertion that the Welland Canal would cost $8 million to build. One of Bowman's former government colleagues told him an internal report recommended against the project, which was more likely to cost $50 million. (It ended up costing about $130 million.)
The column angered the government of prime minister Robert Borden so much that officials warned the Citizen it would lose all federal advertising if more such criticism appeared.
Instead of giving in to the threat, however, publishers Harry and Wilson Southam decided to end the paper's long association with the Conservative party.
“Thus,” Bowman writes in his memoirs, “after about 50 years as a Conservative party organ, my first contribution as a member of the editorial staff precipitated the Citizen's declaration of political independence.”
Bowman would vigorously exercise that editorial freedom as editor-in-chief. He was named to lead the newsroom at the age of 31, and for the next three decades — from 1914 to 1946 — he made the paper required reading in the capital.
In the First World War, he railed against patronage contracts awarded for everything from artillery shells to field dressings. He called the practice “political maggotry,” and denounced factory owners who unduly profited from the sacrifice of Canadian soldiers.
In May 1916, a Liberal MP leaked him a letter in which Gen. Edwin Alderson, commander of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, described how his soldiers were throwing away their Canadian-made Ross Rifles to pick up British-made Lee-Enfields, which were less likely to jam in the field. Alderson said he had given up trying to enforce loyalty to the Ross Rifle.
Bowman published the letter on the Citizen's front page, where it unleashed a political firestorm along with attacks on the editor's patriotism. Public Works Minister Robert Rogers called for Bowman to be jailed for damaging the war effort. Solicitor general Arthur Meighen mused about padlocking the Citizen.
None of the bluster could hide the rifle's failings: Late in 1916, the Ross Rifle was taken out of service and its principal defender, Sir Sam Hughes, removed from cabinet.
Bowman was always an opinionated witness to history.
On the evening of Feb. 3, 1916, he was in a crowd on Wellington Street, watching the Parliament Buildings burn. He recalls the scene in his memoirs, Ottawa Editor: “I stood watching the flames roaring up inside the old clock tower, built entirely of wood. With midnight approaching, in zero weather, streams from the fire hoses turned to ice.”
Seven people died in the fast-moving blaze, including a Yarmouth MP.
Many blamed careless smoking for the fire, but Bowman believed German saboteurs had started it by planting an incendiary device in the reading room. He even reported a suspect to police: a mysterious foreigner who had rented a cottage at Rideau Lakes to conduct chemical experiments and then disappeared.
A royal commission investigated, and, although it declared that it had a “strong suspicion” the fire had been set by German agents, it could offer no proof. (U.S. authorities would later uncover a large, state-sponsored German sabotage campaign against targets in the U.S. and Canada.)
Typically, Bowman had no doubt about the cause: “They (the victims) were all war casualties — although the authorities would never acknowledge it,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Bowman kept a wide circle of friends, encompassing many of the people he wrote about. One of them, John Pearson, was the chief architect of Parliament's rebuilt
Centre Block and Peace Tower. Pearson invited Bowman to choose quotes to be inscribed on the walls of the tower's memorial chamber.
When his selections from Proverbs — “Where there is no vision the people perish” — and Psalm 72 — “He shall have dominion from sea to sea” — were carved into place, Bowman wrote an editorial lauding the choices as timeless “words of truth.” He didn't reveal his role in the project until many years later.
Bowman enjoyed a close relationship with Liberal prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and tipped him off to a surprise confidence vote in 1926.
He sometimes travelled to King's cottage at Kingsmere and once watched in astonishment as the bachelor prime minister raided his neighbour's roast beef for an impromptu dinner.
In October 1926, the prime minister invited Bowman to travel with the Canadian delegation to the Imperial Conference in London. There, Bowman wrote a speech that King delivered on the BBC: the first radio broadcast by a Canadian prime minister.
Bowman, convinced of the power of the new medium, editorialized relentlessly on the need for a Canadian broadcast policy. It earned him a place on the Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting, launched in December 1928.
He took a leave of absence from the paper to join the three-member panel, which came to be known as the Aird Commission. They travelled across Canada and to New York, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, Brussels, Dublin and Belfast to examine broadcast systems. In London, the commissioners were given a demonstration of a fledgling new technology: television.
The commission had to decide between an American-style “free enterprise system” of private radio stations and the BBC model: a publicly funded national service.
The Aird report, issued in 1929, called for a public radio service, arguing that “Canadians want Canadian radio.” That service would evolve into the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
During the Great Depression that followed the 1929 stock market crash, Bowman engaged the pressing issue of the time: How to make the industrial economy work to the benefit of more people.
Although he once subscribed to militant socialism, Bowman had lost faith in the system in the murderous aftermath of the Russian Revolution. He helped launch the Save the Children Fund in Canada to aid Russian children and embraced the philosophy of social credit, a consumer-focused system of economics and politics envisioned by British engineer C.H. Douglas.
In the Citizen, Bowman called on the government to offer direct financial relief to Canadian consumers and argued that the new Bank of Canada — it opened in 1935 — should make money available for national infrastructure projects.
In December 1937, R.B. Bennett, then opposition leader, wrote to Bowman, asking him what legislation he would introduce if given the chance. If he were prime minister, Bowman replied, he would launch a national air service and use debt financing to build public works. (Bowman had great affection for Bennett: “Behind the pose of a Victorian statesman, in morning coat and wing collar, and sometimes pompous bearing, I came to know the real Bennett as a warm-hearted, generous man — with a rare sense of humour.” Those personal sentiments didn't stop Bowman from calling for Bennett's ouster as prime minister in 1935.)
Bowman would later agitate for the government to use debt financing to prepare for war with Germany. It would, he said, have the dual benefit of building a defence against Nazi aggression and employing thousands of desperate young men.
When war broke out, he editorialized in favour of conscription and the need to mobilize the entire nation for “total war.”
Further editorial zeal landed him in front of a judge.
Thus, after about 50 years as a Conservative party organ, my first contribution as a member of the editorial staff precipitated the Citizen's declaration of political independence.
CHARLES BOWMAN, memoirs
On Jan. 11, 1941, Bowman wrote an editorial that lauded C.D. Howe, the minister of munitions and supply, for modifying a patronage-tainted contract for the Bren machine gun. He reminded readers that many of the men using that gun had, for years, been unemployed while Liberal-connected manufacturers reaped windfall profits.
He concluded with an ominous flourish: “When the Canadian lads come home from overseas, after some years of service at the business end of the Bren gun, they will know better where to shoot than the Canadian veterans did in the years of debt and privation after the last war.”
Justice minister Ernest Lapointe deemed the article “subversive;” the Citizen was charged with two offences under the War Measures Act.
At trial, the paper's lawyers said the language was metaphorical and not an incitement to violence. Judge Glen Strike, citing the newspaper's long and reputable history, accepted that argument and concluded that Bowman's editorial was a good-faith — if poorly worded — attempt at criticism.
Bowman maintained a relentless pace. In 1942, he hitched a ride to Scotland on board a Liberator bomber being delivered to the war. He toured munitions factories, met with Canadian officials and visited his son, Robert, the CBC's first war correspondent.
Robert Bowman had sailed to England with the first contingent of Canadian troops in 1939 and reported on The Blitz, the Nazi's nighttime bombing campaign against London and other targets.
In August 1942, Charles Bowman returned home in a British naval convoy where he heard some of his son's scratchy dispatches from the French port of Dieppe, the scene of a disastrous Allied raid that left more than 900 Canadians dead.
Bowman returned to Europe two years later on a government fact-finding mission after hockey star Conn Smythe told reporters that wounded Canadian soldiers were being sent back into action in Belgium. Bowman found such cases were the exception, not the rule.
The end of the war brought his eventful newspaper career to a close: He retired from the Citizen in February 1946, profoundly grateful to the Southams for “opening a new realm” for him.
In Ottawa, Bowman and his wife, Ruth, lived in Rockcliffe, where they raised three children. (Their daughter, Nancy Bell, a B.C. Liberal party director, was appointed to the Senate in 1970. She served in the Red Chamber for 19 years.)
In retirement, the Bowmans moved to Carmel, Calif., but they returned to Canada when U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy began his anti-communist crusades. They eventually settled in Nanaimo, B.C., where Bowman watched the first moon landing in July 1969 with his great-grandson, David Hoffman, then a young boy.
“We watched it on TV: It was something we shared,” remembers Hoffman, a bike mechanic and former journalist who now lives in Smiths Falls. “As a young man, my great-grandfather would have been alive when the Wright brothers first perfected a controllable airplane. He lived to see men land on the moon.”
Bowman gave his last known interview in June 1972 to a Citizen reporter. Asked what he disliked most about modernity, he pointed to the automobile. “I'm a horse and buggy man myself,” he declared.
Charles Bowman died in December 1978 at the age of 95.