Amor De Cosmos launched his British Colonist in a little shop on Wharf Street on Dec. 11, 1858. He guided his creation for a few years, then passed the torch to others.
He started a tradition of political involvement that lasted into the 20th century. Four premiers, two mayors and a senator have owned or edited the Times or the Colonist. In the 1890s, four members of the provincial legislature had either owned or edited the Victoria newspapers.
The name of De Cosmos will always be linked to the Colonist, although he owned the newspaper for less than five years. He sold it in 1863 to a group of five people, including some employees, who went together as Harries and Co.
The group was led by Walford A. Harries and his brother Julian B. Harries. The two men had come here from Wales, where they had worked as ship-commission agents in Pembroke. They were born in South Africa, where their father was a merchant and member of the legislature.
In 1866, Harries and Co. sold the Daily British Colonist to David W. Higgins and Thomas H. Long, who had started a rival newspaper, the Chronicle, in 1862. The Chronicle had already absorbed another newspaper, the Daily Press, which had been launched in 1861.
Higgins and Long sold the Colonist in 1886. Higgins was elected to the provincial legislature, and served as its Speaker from 1890 to 1900. He died in 1917.
Little is known about Higgins’ partner, Thomas Long.
By the time Higgins and Long sold the newspaper, they were facing competition from a new publication, the Victoria Daily Times. The Times was founded on June 9, 1884, by three local businessmen, John Grant, Robert Beaven and Dr. George Lawson Milne.
Grant worked in a variety of jobs, including mining, roadbuilding and general merchandising, before getting involved in the creation of the Times. Soon after the newspaper was launched, he was elected to Victoria city council. In 1888, he was elected mayor, defeating Higgins in the election.
While mayor, he was elected to the provincial legislature along with his two business partners, Beaven and Milne. He was succeeded as mayor by Beaven, which meant that two mayors in a row served simultaneously as members of the legislature. Grant died in Victoria in 1919.
Beaven came to Victoria via Panama and San Francisco, lured by the gold rush of 1858. He became involved in politics when there was talk of British Columbia joining the Canadian Confederation, and was elected to the provincial legislature in 1871.
As commissioner of lands and works, Beaven let the contract for the first drydock in Esquimalt. He served as premier in 1882 and 1883, before getting involved in the Times. He died in 1920.
The third partner was Milne, who came to Victoria in the early 1880s after graduating with his medical degree in Toronto. He served on the school board before being elected to the legislature with Beaven and Grant.
Milne was later named the medical officer and immigration agent for the federal government in Victoria. His duties included, among other things, the collection of the head tax from Chinese immigrants. He retired in 1924 and died in 1933.
William Templeman, who was born in Ontario in 1844, started working in the mechanical department of the Times soon after it was launched, but soon became editor, then a partner, and then took full control. He owned the newspaper for three decades.
When Templeman died in 1914, everyone who had worked with him for at least one year was willed one month’s salary.
Through the Templeman years, the Times was a model of stability. That could not be said for its competitor, the Daily Colonist.
Higgins and Long had sold the newspaper in 1886 to William Ellis, Albert Sargison and Higgins’ son, Ralph. Ralph Higgins left the partnership after a short time.
Ellis had worked for newspapers in Ontario before coming to Victoria in 1884. As a partner in the Colonist, he also ran the newspaper for several years. He later worked as an immigration agent and in real estate, and was considered a key figure in the growth of lacrosse in the city. He died in 1921.
Sargison joined the Colonist at the age of 17, when D.W. Higgins was still the editor, and filled every position from reporter to managing editor to part owner.
In 1910, Sargison served on council, and was behind extensive land purchases that allowed the major streets, such as Pandora, Hillside and North Douglas, to be widened. He died in 1929.
The Dunsmuir family took control of the Colonist in 1892, and turmoil followed. Both Ellis and Sargison had stayed on in management roles, but both left because of squabbling between shareholders. The newspaper also went through several editors before things settled down.
The basic dispute was between James Dunsmuir, who was the premier at the time, and his mother, Joan. The disagreement, as reported in Vancouver newspapers, had to do with the editorial leanings of the Colonist, because James Dunsmuir preferred the Liberal side of things.
The issue was resolved in 1906 when the Dunsmuirs sold their shares to the Matson family, a move that gave the Colonist the same stability that the Times had enjoyed under Templeman.
Templeman’s death in 1914 plunged the Times into several years of instability before the Spencer family took over.
At first, the Spencers put Gerald Grattan (Gerry) McGeer in charge. McGeer, whose wife was a Spencer, later became mayor of Vancouver. (His son, Pat McGeer, was a Social Credit cabinet minister in the 1970s.)
After McGeer, William Banks Monteith was named managing director of the Times. An accountant by training, Monteith remained in charge of the newspaper for a quarter of a century. He died in Vancouver in 1958.
At the Colonist, John S.H. (Sam) Matson was in firm control from 1906 until his death in 1931. He set up a small chain of newspapers that included the Vancouver News Advertiser and the Nanaimo Herald.
Matson was one of the people responsible for building the Royal Theatre, which was opened in 1913. He established Vancouver Island Coach Lines, as well as ferry service to the Gulf Islands.
After Matson died, control passed to his wife Ada and his sons, Jack and Tim. They hired people to run the newspaper on their behalf.
The first was James L. Tait, who had joined the Colonist staff in 1898. He rose through the ranks to become the managing director in 1931, and held the position until he died in 1943.
Tait was succeeded by Harold Husband, who had worked with Matson in setting up the bus line. Husband ran the Colonist and was a director of CJVI Radio and the Canadian Press. In his spare time he ran freight and ferry businesses.
Husband left the Colonist in 1947 after he acquired Victoria Machinery Depot. Over the next 34 years, he made the company one of the industrial powerhouses on the coast, employing up to 1,000 people at a time. VMD built 11 of the first 14 B.C. Ferries.
The end of the 1940s marked the end of local ownership of Victoria’s newspapers. Both the Colonist and the Times were sold to Calgary businessman Max Bell, who merged many business and production functions but left the newsrooms as separate operations.
Bell also created the position of publisher, the person at the top of the local pecking order.
The first publisher at the Times was Stuart Keate, who had been Time magazine’s bureau chief in Montreal. Under Keate’s leadership, the Times sponsored community events such as the erection of a totem pole in Beacon Hill Park and the first swims across Juan de Fuca Strait. Keate went on to serve as publisher of the Vancouver Sun from 1964 to 1979. He died in 1987.
Keate was succeeded at the Times by Arthur Irwin, who had been editor of Maclean’s from 1925 to 1950. He remained at the Times until he retired in 1971. Irwin died in Victoria in 1999 at the age of 101.
Next came Stuart Underhill, the Times publisher from 1971 to 1978. Underhill had worked for news services around the world, including a 20-year stint in New York as the head of the North American operations of the Reuters news agency. He died in Victoria in 2003.
At the Colonist, the first publisher of the new era was Seth Halton, who had joined the newspaper as news editor in 1945. As publisher, he started many community events, including the newspaper’s annual Christmas fund — a tradition that continues to this day. He left in 1960 to accept a job with the provincial government. He died in 1983 at 65.
After Halton, the boss at the Colonist was Richard Bower. He was editor-in-chief from 1960 to 1964, with the title of publisher in addition from 1964 to 1980. Bower died in 1990 in New Zealand, where he had moved in 1984.
The two newspapers were merged in 1980, after they were acquired by Thomson Newspapers.
The first publisher of the Times Colonist was Colin McCullough, who came to Victoria in 1978 after a quarter-century at the Globe and Mail in Toronto.
McCullough retired in 1993, and died in Victoria in 2008.
The next publisher was Paul Willcocks, who had previously been publisher of daily newspapers in Peterborough, Ont., and Saint John, N.B. Willcocks left the position in 1996 and became a legislature columnist for newspapers around British Columbia.
Willcocks was succeeded by Peter Baillie, who had previously worked at the Calgary Herald. After four years at the helm, Baillie left the paper and managed a high-tech company in Saanich. He has returned to the Times Colonist, running the advertising department.
In 2000, Alan Allnutt became publisher. He had spent 20 years at The Gazette in Montreal in a variety of roles, including managing editor, vice-president of marketing and editor-in-chief. Before that, he was an editor and reporter at the Ottawa Journal and Montreal Star.
Bob McKenzie, who had been publisher of the National Post in Toronto, took over the Times Colonist in 2004. McKenzie’s career started in Oakville, Ont., in 1967, and included time on Vancouver Island; he was publisher of the Nanaimo Daily News from 1999 to 2001 and the director of reader sales and service at the Times Colonist from 1985 to 1988.
Today, the publisher is Dave Obee, who has been at the newspaper for almost a quarter of a century. Obee has worked at newspapers in the Okanagan Valley and Alberta, and wrote the 2008 book Making the News, about the history of the Times Colonist.
We have come a long way from the shack on Wharf Street. But we are close to our roots, as well.
Portraits of Amor De Cosmos and Sam Matson are on the wall above the publisher’s desk, a constant reminder of the ideals of the newspaper’s founder and its longtime owner.
