Future Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s early career in journalism received an important boost on this date in 1895. The recent University of Toronto graduate had landed his first full-time reporting job at the Toronto News. As it turns out, however, he would only work there one week before the rival Toronto Globe came calling on this date in 1895. He had first caught the journalism bug while an undergraduate and had served as one of the editors and contributors of his school’s paper.
I’ll let King himself, via his famous private diary, describe what happened.
“I received a note … to see Mr. (John) Willison (editor) at the Globe,” King wrote in his diary on November 1, 1895. “I went down immediately and was offered a position on the staff by him for $7 a week. I then made arrangements to leave the News. [Walter] Wilkinson whom I was under told me he was sorry to have me go and was well pleased with my work, but personally he thought I ought not to miss the offer. Billy Douglas offered to raise me higher than the Globe amount, but I told him I did not care so much for the money as the paper, and thought that work on the Globe would suite me better, not being sensational.”
King would spend the next 10 months as a full-time courts, crime and general assignment reporter before heading off to graduate school in Chicago.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.