Mark Bourrie has written a simply splendid book about George McCullagh, founding owner of The Globe and Mail, who dominated the worlds of politics and journalism in Ontario during the 1930s and 40s, but who has virtually been lost to memory. The editor and essayist Robert Fulford once said that a biography of McCullagh was “one of the great unwritten books in Canadian history.” WithGeorge McCullagh, born in 1905, was a poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks in London, Ont.
Under the ownership of the prudish Jaffray family, The Globe had been losing readers and money as it continued to champion the lost cause of Prohibition while refusing advertising for everything from sanitary napkins to horseracing. The Mail and Empire had more readers and money. McCullagh and The Globe backed the Hepburn government’s efforts to break the strike, which included hiring university students as goons to prowl the streets of Oshawa looking for skulls to crack. Hepburn’s Hussars, they were called, and Sons of Mitches, though in the end there was little or no violence. But despite the best efforts of Hepburn and McCullagh, the workers prevailed. Big Labour had come to Ontario.
Bourrie handles with great empathy the complex issue of McCullagh’s mental health. He suffered from depression and bipolar disorder, and in down periods, which steadily become longer and more pronounced as the years went by, would flee to Manhattan. There, a prominent psychiatrist subjected him to electro-shock therapy.
... That's a giant noggin
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