Mark Bourrie: Canadian politicians were once world-class boozehounds
Although
it’s been more than 30 years, I can still very clearly remember the
first time that I found a drunken Governor General in downtown Toronto.
It was late at night, and the former viceroy was crouched over, leaning on something on Richmond Street, so drunk that he could barely speak. My first instinct was to keep him as a pet, but I’d had enough experience with drunks, so I got him a cab, rolled him into it, and counted on him to settle accounts later.
A few months later, I had an almost identical experience with a former premier of Ontario, and did pretty much the same thing.
I don’t know if highly recognizable former leaders still stagger around downtown Toronto, but if they do, I suppose I’d read about it in the papers. There is no such thing as a private life anymore.
People started wagging the finger at inebriated politicians nearly 20 years ago, when the Parliamentary Press Gallery, spurred on by Jean Chrétien’s hench-thugs, confronted then-Liberal leader John Turner with allegations of heavy drinking. Recently, in his book Elusive Destiny, Carleton University professor Paul Litt described the confrontation and got this quote from Turner: “Do I have a drinking problem? What the hell. Have you ever seen me not perform?”
Until quite recently, the press gallery was in no position to throw stones. We had a beer-filled pop machine in the gallery lounge until the late 1990s. One Senate staffer used to come in at lunchtime and shotgun a half dozen beers before toddling back to his very important work. No one wrote anything about it, probably because he was a former member of the gallery.
The gallery has many booze-soaked skeletons. When the original parliament building went up before Confederation, it was a warren of apartments and blind pigs. There were very few offices. MPs didn’t get them: They did their paperwork at the desks in the House of Commons.
Politicians knew that Confederation itself had floated through on waves of free booze. Christopher Moore, in his book 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal, describes how Ontario and Quebec delegates to the Charlottetown Conference of 1864 showed up with a boatload of hooch and went from one party to another. Small wonder so many of the Fathers of Confederation in Robert Harris’s famous painting are sitting down or appear to be leaning on something.
It’s also no secret that our first prime minister, Sir John A.
Macdonald, was cursed with the unquenchable thirst. But most people
don’t realize that many of his opponents were, too.
The temperance movement, the Parliament Buildings Fire of 1916, and the demand from MPs for offices and staffs squeezed out most of the parliamentary saloons. MPs found it inconvenient and embarrassing to leave the hill to buy booze. So the press gallery stepped in and set up a bootlegging operation that thrived for more than 60 years.
Supposedly, it was run by the gallery’s manager, who was also the bartender in the press lounge. Whisky was sold by the shot or the bottle. Security guards came in for top-ups, while gallery messengers delivered twenty-sixers and forties to MPs who called in their orders. The bootlegging topped up the meager salaries; supposedly, none of the journalists shared in the lolly.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t benefit. Back in the days when the House of Commons had night sittings and MPs actually showed up to debate, the gallery lounge on the third floor of the Centre Block was a watering hole for thirsty MPs. They also joined in the marathon poker games that saw paycheques and secrets change hands.
Everyone, including William Lyon Mackenzie King, knew what was going on, and even though King was a proud honorary member of the gallery, he rarely drank, and certainly didn’t take the risk of loosening up with reporters. But he did complain to them, and to anyone who would listen, about a politician whose lifestyle, only hinted at during the Depression and the war years, was scandalous by any standards.
Mitch Hepburn, an onion farmer from St. Thomas, Ontario, arrived in Ottawa in 1926 as a boy MP and immediately took up serious boozing. One of his drinking buddies was Chubby Power, who later spent much of the war in an alcoholic haze while supervising the Air Ministry. (Power was the grandfather of Lawrence Cannon, a former Tory minister, now Ambassador to France.)
The partying Liberal backbenchers nicknamed their row of seats “Dynamite Abbey” and, in 1928, they took their show on the road. In his book Just Call Me Mitch, historian John Saywell describes how 40 western MPs went on a rolling binge through southern Ontario, chaperoned by Hepburn and his drinking buddy Eddie Odette, an MP from Tilbury, near Chatham, Ont. They rode in elegant private railway cars provided by the Michigan Central Railway. The booze came from Hiram Walker, makers of the ever-popular Canadian Club.
The province had just begun to escape the grip of prohibition, but Parliament Hill has always been exempt from Ontario liquor laws.
Four years later, at the age of 38, Hepburn was premier of Ontario. King couldn’t get enough stories of his drinking and whoring. On one boozy trip to the Bahamas, Hepburn, who’d left his wife on the onion farm, was supposed to have lunch with the governor, but the premier missed the appointment because he’d rushed to a Nassau brothel as a soon as his ship docked.
On board that ship, Hepburn had met a 20-year-old Liberal volunteer who spent two days in the premier’s cabin and, a few weeks after he returned to Queen’s Park, became his mistress and a new member of Ontario’s public service. Like many of his “tarts,” as insiders labeled them, she called him “Chief,” but sometimes she used a special pet name, “Uncle Dudley.”
Sir Anthony Jenkins, a visiting British journalist, visited Hepburn’s suite in the King Edward Hotel in 1938. He was warmly greeted by the well-lubricated premier and was introduced to his friends: “They were a doctor and a member of his government and two attractive girls who sprawled on a sofa and called the Prime Minister ‘Chief’ and who generally lent an unparliamentary air to the place. A big broad-shouldered fellow with the supple movements of a trained athlete mixed drinks …”
“It was evident that he acted as a sort of bodyguard-cum-gentleman’s servant to the Prime Minister. The latter called him “Eddie,” but the girls called him “Bruiser.”
Almost all the Canadian media ignored Jenkins’s story, but when Saturday Night magazine ran an excerpt, Hepburn threatened to sue. He backed down after his drinking buddies said they wouldn’t perjure themselves.
Little snippets made the papers, like when Hepburn’s brain trust was denounced in the legislature by the Tories as “the besotted Board of Control of the Liberal Party.” But through most of his term, Hepburn faced opposition leaders who themselves were heavy drinkers. Question periods often were boozy messes. Years later, Hepburn died in his sleep at the age of 56, in the same farmhouse bedroom in which he was born.
Elsewhere, politicians’ after-hours (and even on-the-job) boozing was tolerated or ignored by the media. Nazi and French fascist cartoonists labeled Winston Churchill a drunk, but no one in Britain made his drinking a serious issue.
Churchill, according to biographers William Manchester and Paul Reid,
started wartime days with a glass of white wine (because he wouldn’t
drink tea with canned milk). He would spend the morning with a weak
Johnny Walker Red Scotch and soda, replenished from time to time with
soda water. At lunch, there was always Pol Roger champagne, and maybe
some port. (Pol Roger eventually launched a brand of Churchill champagne
because the great man had been such a dedicated customer.)
Lunch ended with one or two brandies (usually a 50-year-old Hine.) After a nap, Churchill started the afternoon with another whiskey. At dinner, there would be more champagne and brandy, and evenings – if there was no party requiring more serious drinking – ended with a few more ports, and perhaps one final whiskey while Churchill worked past midnight in his study.
But these days, fingers wag. Alberta premier Ralph Klein, embarrassed by coverage of his scolding of a homeless man in 2001, went on the wagon soon afterwards. (So did the drunk he berated.) And now Toronto mayor Rob Ford is being tailed by reporters hoping to prove his drinking is out of control.
Two or three generations ago, the lifeblood of Canadian politics had somewhat higher octane because of the alcohol that was mixed with it. But now we’re a country of Carrie Nations, and many of the axe-wielding saloon busters get prime real estate in Canada’s media.
It was late at night, and the former viceroy was crouched over, leaning on something on Richmond Street, so drunk that he could barely speak. My first instinct was to keep him as a pet, but I’d had enough experience with drunks, so I got him a cab, rolled him into it, and counted on him to settle accounts later.
A few months later, I had an almost identical experience with a former premier of Ontario, and did pretty much the same thing.
I don’t know if highly recognizable former leaders still stagger around downtown Toronto, but if they do, I suppose I’d read about it in the papers. There is no such thing as a private life anymore.
People started wagging the finger at inebriated politicians nearly 20 years ago, when the Parliamentary Press Gallery, spurred on by Jean Chrétien’s hench-thugs, confronted then-Liberal leader John Turner with allegations of heavy drinking. Recently, in his book Elusive Destiny, Carleton University professor Paul Litt described the confrontation and got this quote from Turner: “Do I have a drinking problem? What the hell. Have you ever seen me not perform?”
Until quite recently, the press gallery was in no position to throw stones. We had a beer-filled pop machine in the gallery lounge until the late 1990s. One Senate staffer used to come in at lunchtime and shotgun a half dozen beers before toddling back to his very important work. No one wrote anything about it, probably because he was a former member of the gallery.
The gallery has many booze-soaked skeletons. When the original parliament building went up before Confederation, it was a warren of apartments and blind pigs. There were very few offices. MPs didn’t get them: They did their paperwork at the desks in the House of Commons.
Politicians knew that Confederation itself had floated through on waves of free booze. Christopher Moore, in his book 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal, describes how Ontario and Quebec delegates to the Charlottetown Conference of 1864 showed up with a boatload of hooch and went from one party to another. Small wonder so many of the Fathers of Confederation in Robert Harris’s famous painting are sitting down or appear to be leaning on something.
National Archives
The temperance movement, the Parliament Buildings Fire of 1916, and the demand from MPs for offices and staffs squeezed out most of the parliamentary saloons. MPs found it inconvenient and embarrassing to leave the hill to buy booze. So the press gallery stepped in and set up a bootlegging operation that thrived for more than 60 years.
Supposedly, it was run by the gallery’s manager, who was also the bartender in the press lounge. Whisky was sold by the shot or the bottle. Security guards came in for top-ups, while gallery messengers delivered twenty-sixers and forties to MPs who called in their orders. The bootlegging topped up the meager salaries; supposedly, none of the journalists shared in the lolly.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t benefit. Back in the days when the House of Commons had night sittings and MPs actually showed up to debate, the gallery lounge on the third floor of the Centre Block was a watering hole for thirsty MPs. They also joined in the marathon poker games that saw paycheques and secrets change hands.
Everyone, including William Lyon Mackenzie King, knew what was going on, and even though King was a proud honorary member of the gallery, he rarely drank, and certainly didn’t take the risk of loosening up with reporters. But he did complain to them, and to anyone who would listen, about a politician whose lifestyle, only hinted at during the Depression and the war years, was scandalous by any standards.
Mitch Hepburn, an onion farmer from St. Thomas, Ontario, arrived in Ottawa in 1926 as a boy MP and immediately took up serious boozing. One of his drinking buddies was Chubby Power, who later spent much of the war in an alcoholic haze while supervising the Air Ministry. (Power was the grandfather of Lawrence Cannon, a former Tory minister, now Ambassador to France.)
The partying Liberal backbenchers nicknamed their row of seats “Dynamite Abbey” and, in 1928, they took their show on the road. In his book Just Call Me Mitch, historian John Saywell describes how 40 western MPs went on a rolling binge through southern Ontario, chaperoned by Hepburn and his drinking buddy Eddie Odette, an MP from Tilbury, near Chatham, Ont. They rode in elegant private railway cars provided by the Michigan Central Railway. The booze came from Hiram Walker, makers of the ever-popular Canadian Club.
The province had just begun to escape the grip of prohibition, but Parliament Hill has always been exempt from Ontario liquor laws.
Like many of his ‘tarts,’ as insiders labeled them, she called him ‘Chief,’ but sometimes she used a special pet name, ‘Uncle Dudley’By the election of 1930, some of Hepburn’s friends were already worried about his health. Mackenzie King noted in his dairy that he was disgusted by Hepburn’s “danger of drinking & getting mixed up with women.”
Four years later, at the age of 38, Hepburn was premier of Ontario. King couldn’t get enough stories of his drinking and whoring. On one boozy trip to the Bahamas, Hepburn, who’d left his wife on the onion farm, was supposed to have lunch with the governor, but the premier missed the appointment because he’d rushed to a Nassau brothel as a soon as his ship docked.
On board that ship, Hepburn had met a 20-year-old Liberal volunteer who spent two days in the premier’s cabin and, a few weeks after he returned to Queen’s Park, became his mistress and a new member of Ontario’s public service. Like many of his “tarts,” as insiders labeled them, she called him “Chief,” but sometimes she used a special pet name, “Uncle Dudley.”
Sir Anthony Jenkins, a visiting British journalist, visited Hepburn’s suite in the King Edward Hotel in 1938. He was warmly greeted by the well-lubricated premier and was introduced to his friends: “They were a doctor and a member of his government and two attractive girls who sprawled on a sofa and called the Prime Minister ‘Chief’ and who generally lent an unparliamentary air to the place. A big broad-shouldered fellow with the supple movements of a trained athlete mixed drinks …”
“It was evident that he acted as a sort of bodyguard-cum-gentleman’s servant to the Prime Minister. The latter called him “Eddie,” but the girls called him “Bruiser.”
Almost all the Canadian media ignored Jenkins’s story, but when Saturday Night magazine ran an excerpt, Hepburn threatened to sue. He backed down after his drinking buddies said they wouldn’t perjure themselves.
Little snippets made the papers, like when Hepburn’s brain trust was denounced in the legislature by the Tories as “the besotted Board of Control of the Liberal Party.” But through most of his term, Hepburn faced opposition leaders who themselves were heavy drinkers. Question periods often were boozy messes. Years later, Hepburn died in his sleep at the age of 56, in the same farmhouse bedroom in which he was born.
Elsewhere, politicians’ after-hours (and even on-the-job) boozing was tolerated or ignored by the media. Nazi and French fascist cartoonists labeled Winston Churchill a drunk, but no one in Britain made his drinking a serious issue.
Canwest News ServiceWinston Churchill
Lunch ended with one or two brandies (usually a 50-year-old Hine.) After a nap, Churchill started the afternoon with another whiskey. At dinner, there would be more champagne and brandy, and evenings – if there was no party requiring more serious drinking – ended with a few more ports, and perhaps one final whiskey while Churchill worked past midnight in his study.
But these days, fingers wag. Alberta premier Ralph Klein, embarrassed by coverage of his scolding of a homeless man in 2001, went on the wagon soon afterwards. (So did the drunk he berated.) And now Toronto mayor Rob Ford is being tailed by reporters hoping to prove his drinking is out of control.
Two or three generations ago, the lifeblood of Canadian politics had somewhat higher octane because of the alcohol that was mixed with it. But now we’re a country of Carrie Nations, and many of the axe-wielding saloon busters get prime real estate in Canada’s media.
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