The Toronto where Matt began working in September 1931 was uninspiring in contrast to cosmopolitan London. The city, overwhelmingly white and Protestant, was smug, self-righteous, and puritanical. Its biggest public event was the annual parade of the Orange Lodge, when as many as 150,000 people would line University Avenue to watch a costumed King Billy celebrate William of Orange’s defeat of the Catholics in 1690. Many jobs at City Hall were reserved for members of the Orange Lodge. Toronto was a city in which men could still be arrested and charged with indecent exposure if they removed the tops of their bathing suits on city beaches. In some respects, “Toronto the Good” was also Toronto the Bigoted. Dance halls and many social clubs were closed to Jews, and hotels unashamedly advertised for “gentiles only.” Signs were posted at several popular beaches saying “No Jews, Niggers, or Dogs.” All this was set against a backdrop of deepening economic and social crisis. In 1931 30 per cent of Toronto’s workforce was on the dole. Soup kitchens and breadlines were proliferating. The Great Depression was getting worse.

(RELATED: An earlier excerpt from Dispatches from the Front. Also, a Star review of David Halton’s memoir of his father.)

Matt faced an unnerving set of personal challenges when he first entered the Toronto Daily Star’s newsroom at 80 King Street West. At that time the Star published seven or eight editions of the paper each day, putting the newsroom under almost constant deadline pressure from noon to six p.m. “It was bedlam,” said Gwyn “Jocko” Thomas, a copy boy who often handled Matt’s reports and later became a legendary Star police reporter.

Desk editors shouted at reporters, competing with reporters yelling “Boy!” to summon one of 20 or so copy boys to deliver the newest paragraphs of their stories to the desk. It all seemed like a parody of a Hollywood B-movie about the news business. Many reporters kept their fedoras on as they typed; almost everyone smoked cheap cigars, and some hid a mickey of rye in their jackets.

The paper’s owners were teetotalers and drinking on the premises was a firing offence. But even some desk editors kept bottles of whisky in their corridor lockers, and one was often seen taking a surreptitious swig from a metal cigar tube tucked into his inside pocket. Wilf Sanders, a fellow reporter of Matt’s, said he could not remember a period when there was so much heavy drinking. “We used to have to prop up some of the guys when they came in drunk for work. We’d sit on either side of the drunk reporter and prop him up so he wouldn’t fall forward and hit his face on the desk.” Women reporters, usually relegated to weddings and social events, worked in a separate room to protect them from blue language and other improprieties in the newsroom.

At first Matt seemed out of place. He never wore a fedora and was often dressed in a tweed suit that made him look like an Oxford undergrad. He was too reserved to shout “Boy!” to the copy handlers, preferring instead to carry his stories to the editors’ desk himself.

The new man aroused some suspicion among other reporters, few of whom had been to university, and some who had not even finished high school. Gordon Sinclair, already emerging as a star at the newspaper, recalled that Matt was a curiosity for a while. “He seemed to be a little effeminate, a little gentle. He wasn’t like the other guys at the time.”

Sinclair said he led the ribbing of Matt for being so proud of coming from a place called Pincher Creek. The newcomer was also quickly tagged as “parlour pink” — someone f flirting with socialism. Not that Matt was an outcast. He joined his colleagues after work at the Piccadilly or Prince George, nearby beer parlours, or at drunken poker games on weekends.

Matt’s debut as a Star journalist was notable for its lack of promise. As a cub reporter with no contacts or knowledge of the city, he was given the most tedious assignments: taking down obituaries and doing the “scalps” – rewriting stories from rival newspapers that the Star had missed. On the few events he covered at the courthouse and City Hall, his reporting was described by Sinclair as slow and “quite inept.”

It was particularly galling for Matt — still aggressively opposed to organized religion — to also be assigned Sunday sermons and church meetings that were extensively covered by the Star in the thirties. Obviously dejected, Matt wrote to Jean, who was now teaching in Alberta: “I am just learning how little I know about the newspaper game. I thought because I could write a little I could step into a paper like the Star and get a highly paid writing job right away . . . I was foolish. One has to go through the mill first, learn the ins and outs and tricks of the trade. I am sure I am not exaggerating a single little bit when I say I can write better than the highly paid Star men. But they know the business and I’m only learning it – as I now realize. So I’ll have to resign myself to being content on the salary at which I am being started, which is, I regret to say, only thirty dollars a week . . . I simply couldn’t bear to say that I won’t be able to marry you next summer, my dear one. But I can’t marry you on less than fifty a week — and I just may not be getting that much by summer.”

Yet Matt soon discovered the advantages of working for the largest and most profitable newspaper in Canada. The two men most responsible for the Star’s success were the publisher, Joseph E. Atkinson, and managing editor, Harry C. Hindmarsh. First-rate reporters in their younger days, they were now dictatorial and at times eccentric managers. Both changed the face of the newspaper business in Canada, mostly for the better. And both were of immeasurable help in pushing Matt forward.

Joe Atkinson had taken over the Star in 1899 when it was a failing enterprise with fewer readers than any of its five Toronto competitors. He was known to the staff as “The Chief,” although some preferred to call him “Holy Joe” because of his zealous Methodism. His formula for success seemed contradictory: to practise high-minded journalism while pandering to popular demand for crime and human-interest stories. On the one hand, the Star provided the most serious newspaper coverage of social issues in Canada and sent more correspondents abroad and carried more foreign news than any of its competitors. On the other side of the ledger, it gave prominence to tabloid-style stories about cannibals and man-eating tigers. A typical headline read: “Ghoulish Unprintable Practices Witnessed by Wandering Reporter.”

Atkinson himself was a bundle of contradictions. As the Star’s profits and his own fortune soared, he would prowl the corridors switching off lights to save electricity. He notoriously demanded that newsmen turn in the stubs of their used pencils before they could get new ones. He ordered his editorial writers to champion labour rights but successfully fought to keep unions out of his own paper.

In one important respect the Star was the perfect fit for Matt. It was by far the most left-leaning major newspaper in the country. Atkinson’s social and political views may not have affected his business practices but they had a profound and lasting impact on the paper’s editorial policy. The so-called Atkinson Principles became (and remain) the Star’s guiding philosophy. They stressed the need for economic and social justice, community engagement, protection of civil liberties, and a strong role for government. From the 1920s on, the Star was a crusading voice for social reform. Atkinson pushed his writers to promote old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and a national health care plan. New social programs would be paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy. Public ownership of power, phone, and other utilities would be encouraged. Revolutions in Latin America would be supported. The Chief even confided once to a friend, “I’m a bit of a socialist, you know.”

He was already regarded as a dangerous leftist by many in the business community. On Bay Street and among rival Tory newspapers, the Star was labelled “The King Street Pravda” and “The Red Star.”

In fact, while comparatively open-minded about the Soviet Union, Atkinson was never to the left of the CCFR (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation), the f fledgling socialist party whose reform proposals he often supported. But as an advisor at various times to both prime ministers Wilfrid Laurier and Mackenzie King, he always fell into line behind the Liberals at election time.

If Atkinson was the inspiration for the Star’s success, Harry Comfort Hindmarsh was his indispensable lieutenant. A burly six-footer with close-cropped hair, Hindmarsh combined a ruthless managerial style with shrewd instincts for pulling in readers. Nothing in the newsroom was more feared than a summons to his office, where he would usually be chomping on a cigar or brandishing, almost like a weapon, a twelve-inch-long pen. As managing editor from 1928 on, Hindmarsh authorized reporters to spend freely to get a good story but was quick to fire those who failed to deliver. With dozens sacked in an average year, the standing joke in the newsroom was that “the Star always has three staffs: one arriving, one working, and one being let out.”

Many who weren’t fired simply left of their own accord, unwilling to face Hindmarsh’s austere and bullying presence. Such was the case with Ernest Hemingway, who worked for the Star in the early twenties. He memorably compared life with Hindmarsh to “working in the Prussian army under a bad general.”

For all his faults “HCH,” as he was known, was widely respected. Pierre Berton wrote that Hindmarsh “was considered the greatest newspaperman in Canada by almost everybody who worked for him, and hosts of other journalist who didn’t.” His many innovations at the Star helped it overtake the Tory, Empire-boosting Toronto Evening Telegram and to leave the circulation of the Globe and the Mail and Empire far behind. Among other innovations, Hindmarsh pioneered the use of large photos on the front page, imported American comic strips for the first time in Canada, and brightened and revamped the Star Weekly, a syndicated weekend supplement that was read at its peak by almost a million Canadians.

But it was Hindmarsh’s fiercely competitive quest for “scoops” that gave the Star its edge in the newspaper wars of the period. Joe Atkinson had given Hindmarsh and the newsroom four golden rules for newsgathering: “Get it first; sew it up so the opposition cannot get it; leave no crumbs uncollected; play it big.”

The rules were implemented by Hindmarsh with near-manic intensity. Reporters were turned loose in large numbers on big stories and given lavish resources and expense accounts to beat the competition. Planes, trains, boats were chartered to track down a big crime or disaster story and publish it first. All angles were covered, and all means — fair or foul — were used to prevent the opposition from matching the Star.

The Atkinson-Hindmarsh tactics were dramatically displayed in one of the greatest scoops in North American newspaper history. In April 1928, the German airplane Bremen crash-landed on Greenly Island between Quebec and Labrador. It was the first east-west flight over the Atlantic since Lindbergh’s historic flight in the other direction. With North American newspapers vying to provide blanket coverage of the event, the Hearst chain and the New York Times had purchased rights to the first photographs and the pilots’ story. Or so they thought.

Shortly after the crash was announced, the Star arranged to pay $7,000 to Duke Schiller, a top bush pilot, to fly to the crash site to get photos and an exclusive report on the survivors. When Schiller flew back to Murray Bay on the north shore of the St. Lawrence with one of the surviving pilots, the Star’s Fred Griffin and his team were able to secure the first interview about the crash. They also paid the local telegraph operator to tie up the wire by filing an entire issue of the New Republic magazine to the Star. Dozens of furious competitors were thus prevented for hours from filing any remaining crumbs of the story. Meanwhile, the Star chartered an aircraft to fly the photographs of the downed Bremen to Montreal. When bad weather forced it to land in Quebec City, the Star promptly chartered a special train to rush the photos to Montreal where the paper had a taxi ready to bring them to Toronto. Thus did the Star trounce all North American newspapers on a story of compelling interest.

The late twenties and the thirties were the razzle-dazzle era of Toronto Star journalism. Jocko Thomas, moving from copy boy to esteemed reporter, was in the thick of it. He recalled that, despite the frequent scoops, despite the upward spiralling circulation and ad revenue, there was a darker side to the paper’s success. “If you had to lie, cheat, or steal to get the story,” he said only half-jokingly, “you lied, cheated, and stole.”

Matt learned all aspects of the craft, the good and bad, by watching and sometimes working with the paper’s top reporters. His apprenticeship included an assignment to help Gordon Sinclair cover a prison riot that rocked Kingston Penitentiary in October 1932. The circumstances surrounding the riot were uncertain. More than a year earlier, Prime Minister R. B. Bennett had ordered the arrest of Tim Buck, the leader of the Canadian Communist Party, and seven others. They were imprisoned in Kingston under the controversial Section 98 of the Criminal Code, which allowed police to jail any Canadian merely for attending a rally or reading a pamphlet of an organization considered subversive. It was widely suspected that the riot was deliberately provoked by the authorities to stage what followed: the shooting and wounding by guards of an apparently defenceless Tim Buck in his cell.

Four Star men were already staking out the prison when Sinclair and Matt arrived. Sinclair confided that he had a forged prison pass and would try to use it on the pretence of needing to see the warden. If successful, he said, Matt should ensure huge play for the story by sending three messages to the desk in Toronto at intervals of about 20 minutes: “Think Sinclair got behind lines,” “Sinclair definitely behind lines!” and finally “Sinclair inside!” Sinclair chose a moment when the guards were changing to show his pass and brazenly succeeded in getting escorted to the warden’s office. Matt’s alerts reached the desk, “and, oh boy,” said Sinclair years later, “did it ever get a helluva play when I sent it in.”19

Matt’s breakthrough at the Star was not the result of sensational reporting but because of his love of language and vivid imagination. Six months after he joined the paper, the desk assigned him to a series promoting the spring fashion show at the city’s Sunnyside boardwalk. The Star had no ethical qualms about such promotions, which usually turned into a few forgettable paragraphs. Instead, Matt wrote a series of light, whimsical essays punctuated with both real interviews and imaginary conversations. Hindmarsh was impressed and assigned him to several feature interviews with Toronto bachelors. Roy Greenaway had tried writing the first one — an interview with Tommy Church, an MP and former mayor of Toronto. Greenaway’s article was rejected and, in the harsh editorial habit of the Star, turned over to another writer — in this case, Matt. His version was superficial but amusing, and the bosses liked it. The next day, Hindmarsh told him his salary had been raised by ten dollars a week.

Almost as important was his first byline in a paper notoriously stingy about giving credit to any but its big-name performers. Matt was assigned to interview the Viscountess Violette de Sibour, daughter of Gordon Selfridge, the millionaire London store owner. De Sibour was a glamorous aviator who had flown around the world with her husband in a tiny Gipsy Moth plane and was nearly shot down in China. After the interview, Matt returned to the Star with only a half-hour to write the story and the additional pressure of having Hindmarsh peer over his shoulder to read the first page.

The article was framed in the fanciful and personalized style that was a hallmark of his early writing. Questions, sometimes self-deprecatory and often tongue in cheek, were included: “‘It must be pretty horrible to be interviewed everywhere you go, and asked foolish questions, isn’t it, m’lady?’ And then came the supreme moment of a lifetime . . . ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Violette, Lady de Sibour, ‘right now I think it is lovely.’ ”

A week later, Hindmarsh summoned Matt to his office to say the Star wanted more of his humorous interviews. He told Matt to spend a week or two in New York digging for feature stories and gave him a list of possible ideas and a generous advance for his expenses.

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“So here I am, and I can’t believe it yet!” Matt wrote breathlessly to Jean after settling into the then-luxurious Hotel Astor near Times Square. From his window he gazed out at this “mad and amazing colossus of serried and castellated buildings hurling themselves at the sky.” His nine days in New York were a time of prodigious work and prodigious drinking. The International News Service (INS), a wire agency to which the Star belonged, provided Matt with a temporary office and secretary. At lunch he would join other INS reporters at one of the hundreds of speakeasies that illegally sold alcohol in defiance of Prohibition. “We drink two or three strong cocktails . . . starting with a Scotch and soda. With lunch we drink a bottle of wine. After we sit for an hour drinking more Scotch and cognacs, and a demitasse . . . and that is their regular schedule!” In the evening there would be more drinking and several parties and visits to cabarets.

Drinking and socializing did not prevent Matt from sending a story to the Star nearly every day he was in New York. Several required extensive research. The paper, prompted by Ottawa’s decision to consider establishing a state-subsidized broadcasting system, wanted an analysis of American radio. Matt interviewed William Paley and Milton Aylesworth, presidents respectively of CBS and NBC, who were predictably in favour of commercial radio and opposed to a government-financed broadcasting network. Others were quoted as favouring a commercial-free channel that would offer more than Amos ’n’ Andy–style entertainment. Matt wrote that he had no brief for either option but correctly predicted that “Canada is determined to seize some measure of control over the infant colossus of radio.”

Two other stories won him the kind of compliments that most reporters crave. Matt decided to write a feature on New York harbour, then bustling with ocean liners in the era before airline flight. The passenger list of one incoming ship included the name Carla Jenssen, a baroness and former spy whom he remembered reading about in London as a “British Mata Hari.” Matt talked to her as she emerged from customs, and the two apparently established an immediate rapport. The baroness agreed to give him a long interview in which she undoubtedly inflated the importance of her achievements as a spy. “Here is a woman,” Matt wrote, “only 28 years old now, remarkably beautiful, cultured, intelligent to a degree that is said to have fooled some of Britain’s cleverest enemies, who says that in ten years she has uncovered, single-handed, a sensational plot to foment a native uprising in Africa; rouged her lips with dope for the undoing of men who made the fatal blunder of being enemies of England and lovers of Carla Jenssen at one and the same time; . . . un the gauntlet of life and death in the heart of Russia; danced her way into the hearts —and secret papers —of men in high places. . . .” t was a perfect story for the Star – and it was Matt’s first scoop. The New York newspapers picked up the story 24 hours later and splashed it on their front pages. Matt wrote to Jean that he was captivated by the baroness, who later invited him to dine and dance with her at the fashionable Roosevelt Grill.

Another interview from New York was less noticed but appreciated for its fine writing. Hindmarsh had suggested that Matt interview Alice Liddell Hargreaves who, as a 10-year-old girl, was the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s brilliant fantasy Alice in Wonderland. Hargreaves was visiting New York to mark the centenary of the birth of Charles Dodgson, who wrote Alice under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. Dodgson had been rowing the real Alice and her two sisters on the Thames one languorous summer day when Alice asked him to tell “a story with nonsense in it.” That was when he told the girls about Alice falling down a well and about the white rabbit with the magic golden key — the outline of the story that would captivate generations.

For Matt, interviewing Alice Hargreaves was a dream assignment. As a child, he had delighted in the fantastic world of Carroll’s weird creatures and their absurd conversations, and as an adult he continued to reread both Alice and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. By coincidence, it was Hargreaves’s 80th birthday when Matt visited her in her Manhattan hotel. His poignant account of the meeting mixed her quotes with lines from Lewis Carroll and some of his own invention:

New York, May 4 — “Do they build their buildings here from the inside or from the outside?” asked Alice in Wonderland of the Star, as we stood at a window in the tower of the Waldorf-Astoria gazing across the night at the magnificent tumult which is New York. . . .

This Alice wasn’t the wide-eyed youngster, dressed in short frock and pinafore, with straight hair hanging over her shoulder and pink flamingo in her arms. It was Alice grown up — old but undaunted as she gazed out across this newer wonderland of New York . . .

Alice was a little weary. “Do you know,” she said, “this is the 39th floor of the hotel. I have never been this high before. It reminds me of when I fell down a rabbit hole under the hedge 70 years ago.”

The excitement of the mad hatters’ world of New York had been a little too much for this old lady with the dark eyes and soft skin and polka-dotted dress, and with her two canes. All day she had been too tired to see us and only in the cool of the evening were we invited to come up . . .

“Such tall buildings!” exclaimed Alice in Wonderland. “Do they grow overnight?” “No, not these days,” said the dodo.

“Then what’s the point in building them?” demanded Alice. “That’s just the point,” burst in the mad hatter . . . .

The old lady continued to recall passages from the most delightful of all mad books. Sometimes she actually spoke as if she believed she were Alice:

“What is your favorite passage in the book?” the Star asked. And she answered: “‘Will you walk a little faster, said a whiting to a snail, there’s a porpoise close behind me and he’s treading on my tail.’ What was it the Cheshire cat said? – ‘What’s the porpoise of all this?’ ‘Don’t you mean purpose?’ asked Alice. ‘No,’ said the mock turtle crossly. ‘If I had meant purpose I would have said purpose.’ ”

And the Star went on with: “ ‘But the snail replied, “too far, too far,” and gave a look askance, said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance.’ ”

The old lady smiled, and sat down. “Yes,” she said, “the dance is nearly over.”

What Matt didn’t know at the time was that within three and a half months his affection for Alice in Wonderland would help catapult him into the top ranks of Canadian journalists . . .

Barely nine months after arriving in the newroom of the Toronto Daily Star, Matthew Halton, at age 28, was appointed the paper’s London correspondent.