‘A trailblazer for a new kind of journalism’
Late writer Anthony Westell was peerless on politics beat
Anthony Westell, the Ottawa reporter and columnist who levelled politicians with a mix of hard facts and witty words, died on April 1at the age of 91.
He began his long career at the Exeter Express and Echo as an apprentice reporter during the Second World War, and ended it as associate dean of the Faculty of Arts at Carleton University before he retired in the early 1990s.
He is survived by his wife, Jeannie; daughter Tracy; son Dan; daughterin-law Kimberley Noble, and two grandchildren.
“He was a trailblazer for a new kind of journalism,” said Robert Lewis, who was a parliamentary correspondent with the Montreal Star when Westell was at the Globe and Mail’s Ottawa bureau in the mid-60s.
Westell graduated from high school in Exeter in southwest England at the age of 15, as the Second World War raged. He served in the Royal Navy as a supply clerk, and went on to apprentice for the Exeter Express and Echo and other newspapers before moving to Canada to work at the Globe and Mail in the mid 1950s. He went on to become the Toronto Star’s Ottawa columnist from1969 to 1986.
A winner of three National Newspaper Awards, he is said to have been “shocked” at his win for spot news for reporting John Diefenbaker’s speech to the 1967 Tory leadership convention.
According to a 2002 report in the Star, “Westell literally phoned in most of the story while watching the speech on closed-circuit television in a nearby pressroom,” a skill he acquired from apprenticing on Fleet Street in the 1950s.
Geoff Stevens, a colleague of Westell’s at the Globe and Mail Ottawa Bureau, said the 1960s was a great decade to be a political reporter.
Westell and Stevens covered the downfall of Diefenbaker, the rise of Pierre Trudeau and Trudeaumania in1968 and the adoption of the Canadian flag. He also covered the Gerda Munsinger scandal, an attempt to blow up the House of Commons, the building of the modern welfare state with the introduction of Medicare, the Canada Pension Plan and Canada Assistance Plan, the Centennial festivities on Parliament Hill, and the opening of Expo ‘67.
“He was the best political reporter in Ottawa in his era,” Stevens said. “I couldn’t help but learn from him.”
Westell confronted the simpler notion that one wrote down what politicians said and put it in the newspaper, Lewis said.
“There are ways in which you can write stories,” he said. “You can be clear and honest and objective and you don’t have to be a mouthpiece for politicians.”
Westell did enormous amounts of research, and used facts and analysis to tell a story, Lewis said.
Not only did Westell believe in stirring the political cauldron, but he defied the dusty norms of Ottawa’s press gallery.
Women were not allowed to go to the press gallery dinner, which was an annual black tie affair there, Lewis said.
“Tony was one of those who opposed this Neanderthal custom,” he said. “He invited Conservative MP Flora MacDonald to be his guest at dinner.”
Westell’s son, Dan Westell, a teacher at Ryerson School of Journalism, described his father as a “classic small ‘l’ liberal” who was open to many things and thought fairness was important.
For Dan, the memory of his father that is most embedded is of him sitting quietly on the deck of Dan’s sister’s Nova Scotia home, looking out over the ocean, perhaps reading or talking quietly, with a drink in his hand.
“He really liked to do that.” With files from Star archives
Westell defied the simpler notion that one wrote what politicians said and put it in the newspaper