Reporters and columnists on Parliament Hill extended the rarest of honours to Mackenzie King on this date in 1944. The war-time PM, who himself had served as a newspaper reporter for almost a year when in his early 20s, was named an Honorary Life Member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. King was extremely happy to become the first-ever PM to be honoured this way by the Gallery.
“It was no affectation for me to say that it was with difficulty I found words wherewith to express appreciation of the compliment … which the members of the [Parliamentary] Press Gallery had thus paid me,” he told his faithful diary afterwards. “Referred to the occasion and all it represented as the crowning event of my years in public life and recognition which to me in some ways meant more than any other which I had received in my public life.”

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.