Allan Fotheringnham column on Bruce Hutchison

Vancouver Sun

September 25, 1976

Always, in affairs great or petty, in Canada or in distant lands, among un-likely persons, I would watch from the far side of the street, the safe side, as spectator merely, while other men fought the fire.—Bruce Hutchison

IT IS THE MOST COMMON ACCUSATION tossed at journalists, the test thrown in our teeth all the time. I get it myself nine times a week. If you're so smart, why aren't you Prime Minister? Bruce Hutchison, in the tale of his life published yesterday, entitled The Far Side of the Street, gives the answer in his own oblique way.

He is too indirect and discreet to answer the question face on, but the solution is the one mother taught you: work to your strength, not your weakness. There is not a first-class journalist that I know who has ever equalled his standard by attempting the transition into politics. The two crafts are antagonistic.

Two colleagues that I know on this paper attempted the transition with, in my opinion, the greater loss to journalism: Paul St. Pierre for a short time, and Barry Mather, who surely moved more people’s minds through his terse whimsy on the front-page than he did in open politics. Penny Wise tried politics briefly and Simma Holt is still wrestling with the transmogrification.

Bruce Hutchison successfully — although he disguises it as a gigantic struggle — shucked off all the attempts to make him into something he was not and never could be. A fey soul, with a professional forelock-tugging manner, he has attempted to convince us in his memoirs that he has used journalism as a sort of honourable whore so that he could squirrel away the resources to indulge in his true love, the chopping of wood and tending of nature in his celebrated retreat at Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island!

That's his story and he tells it eloquently — enough to ensure that Macmillan has been correct in its massive first printing — but it’s for others to make the true judgment. The reason Hutchison, the stylist of our newspaper age, resisted (thankfully for those of us who can read) the blandishments of blind publishers and blinder politicians is that either his mother, or his inner ear, convinced him to work to his strength.

HE SAYS, OF THE MANY ATTEMPTS to make him a working editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, or the Victoria Times, or the Vancouver Sun, ‘‘In truth | was not too wise but too selfish, too fond of my privacy, to be a good editor or a reliable partisan."

”Instead, he has maintained the buffer of his own Walden Pond in the fastness of his retreat on Vancouver Island where, one day, ‘I was at the bottom of a deep hole that I was digging for a privy when Donald Cromie wandered up the trail and,looking into the hole, invited me to become editor of his Vancouver Sun. Hardly pausing in my work, I declined with thanks . . . in my demented scale of values, a good privy, symbol of the outdoor life, stood far ahead of any office job on the mainland.

”Bruce Hutchison, it must be understood, is either one of the great actors or great creations of naivete of our time, for any such talent to even pause in the contemplation of a choice between moulding words and pushing memos would be a waste of a blink. We know, gazing over 413 pages that encompasses 58 years in journalism, what the answer always had to be. Surely, we shudder in horror, the memos did not present a challenge?

MY ONLY DISPUTE WITH HUTCHISON the author, as all young journalists too old (I'm 27), is that he has, kept his secrets too long. I startle, as you will, with the description — never printed before — of Mackenzie King gravely ill on his last visit to London and realizing that he was dying, asking Churchill to his bedside. As the two men were parting forever, King asked Churchill, his old comrade of war and peace, to kiss him. Churchill obliged.

I'd never read before how in a Vancouver criminal court, a certain celebrated supreme court judge, J. V. Clyne. was outraged, when a certain famous court-room lawyer, John Diefenbaker “clutching his own throat and gasping dropped to the floor to illustrate how his client, accused of murder, had been assaulted by the real murderer.

”I am shocked, which I never could have been before this volume, that Bruce Hutchison once committed the greatest sin of all, literary cannibalism, by basing early columns on his own children, a crime that has been somewhat ameliorated by the personal knowledge that his son, who too often left me in the dust on his way to Olympic sprint trials, has survived this grievous burden intact, breaths untainted air and laughs a lot.

As mentioned, Bruce Hutchison has never managed, wisely, to detach himself from this annoying umbilical cord connected to a typewriter and so advises “With experience and a trained slipperiness one can lead a double life quite successfully, provided that the boss is half a continent away.

The key: “Keep away from the office as much as possible is my counsel to young journalists.” The true death of journalism (this is A, F. speaking, not B.H.) began with the invention of the telephone.

I'LL TELL YOU WHAT MY FRIEND Bruce Hutchison does to you. We were leaving the Hotel Vancouver last night and ran into Michael Meighen, current president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. I introduced the two and they stood for a moment, both rather stunned at the confrontation — Bruce, searching in the young man’s face for recollections of his grandfather's image (“His voice was calm and metallic . . . his arguments marshalled clause by clause in neat syllogism, his irony corrosive, his loathing of King naked, contemptuous, and self- destructive.”), young Meighen aware that Hutchison knew his family his prime minister grandfather and his Canada better than he. I watched, intrigued.  A dumb spectator gets a free lesson in history.

Hutchison of course ranges from Woodrow Wilson to Wendell Wilkie to the Kennedys through King and St. Laurent and Dief and Pearson and Trudeau but what I like best is his description of the bakery boy in Merritt delivering cakes to the painted tarts of the red-light district. Even better, his father, proprietor of a bankrupt opera company, paying $27 for a swayback cayuse, owned by an Indian named Chief Blood, that a small boy craved.

Crammed with oats and hay, and named Dock, its matted coat was curry-combed until it shone, “With my latest friend, a dark, silent Indian boy named Jesus, who owned a lively buckskin, I rode across the frozen range and into the hills. Sometimes we galloped breakneck through the town, thinking ourselves desperadoes or United States cavalry.

”This was the boy later confidant to six prime ministers, On returning to Victoria from Washington private briefings in 1941, “on the morning of Dec. 7, I was pruning an apple tree in my garden when Dot shouted from the kitchen door that the Japanese had bombed Pear! Harbour. I heard the news and went on pruning, What else was there to do?”

Work to your strength, kids.,