Future Prime Minister Mackenzie King had been serving as a Toronto Globe reporter for about eight months when he paused and described a typical day on the job in an entry in his diary.
“I was kept busy this morning 10-10:45. I wrote an account of police court proceedings, highway robbery etc. 10:45-11:30 an account of a terrible death, woman mangled to pieces by a trolley. 11:30-12:15 account of an accident almost fatal in Queen’s Park. 12:30-1 an account of the ante-mortem evidence of Mrs. Rowatt given at the General Hospital against her husband Samuel who shot her twice…. Then from 7-9 … hurried off to a Coroner’s Inquest near Parkdale – saw the body of the mangled woman by lamplight, heard the evidence in an undertaker’s establishment with coffins on all sides, there till 10:30.”
All told, King would work full-time as a reporter for about 10 months before he headed 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.