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Hamilton Southam, the diplomat, founding visionary of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and many other cultural and historical institutions – including the annual celebration of Canada Day on Parliament Hill – died quietly in his own bed Tuesday afternoon in the Rockliffe Park area of Ottawa.
He was 91 and had lived a very long and active life of public service.
Born into the third generation of the Southam newspaper dynasty, he grew up in a gilded world of wealth and privilege, in which winters were spent in Florida and summers in Europe and their family enclave at Big Rideau Lake. Passionate, romantic, a lover of beautiful women, obsessed with culture and the high arts, he was in many ways an 18th- century gentleman, given to quoting poetry, rereading the classic works of literature and history, attending opera, ballet and theatrical performances, and collecting paintings by modern masters.
Until the end of his days, he expressed his faith in the ultimate meaning of life by quoting these lines from Milton's Samson Agonistes: “All is best, though we oft doubt,/What th' unsearchable dispose/Of highest wisdom brings about,/ and ever best found in the close.”/
Hamilton Southam, director-general of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, tours the centre as it nears completion circa March, 1969. With Mr. Southam is Mary Joliffe, the centre's public relations director. (CP file photo)
Fighting for his country for six years in the Second World War stiffened the public service component of his complicated character. After working in journalism, he turned his back on the family business and opted for diplomacy in its Pearsonian heyday, serving as Ambassador to Poland, among other postings. But it was his lengthy tenure in the trenches of the cultural, linguistic and nationalistic battlefields that forged his legacy as the builder and founding general director of the National Arts Centre, a visionary fundraiser and force behind The Canadian War Museum, the Battle of Normandy Foundation and the Valiants Memorial. He was an active contributor to many other cultural institutions.
The 19th-century belonged to the opening up of the country and the building of railroads to connect peoples and communities, but the 20th, he believed, deserved an equal measure of enthusiastic support from private initiative and public largesse for the building of museums and performing arts centres and the fostering of intellectual and artistic connections among Canadians. For decades he waged an often thankless campaign for greater subsidies for opera, ballet and classical music, and while he was quick to voice criticisms of ineptitude and slothfulness, he never wavered in either his personal or financial commitment to his self-appointed cause.
Gordon Hamilton Southam, who was born in Dec. 1916, was named after an uncle who had been killed two months earlier at The Battle of the Somme. His family called him Hamilton because he had an older cousin Gordon who lived next door, in what amounted to a family enclave in the elite Rockliffe Park area of Ottawa. His parents' house, called Lindenelm, later became the Spanish embassy.
Hamilton's father, Wilson Southam, the eldest of six sons of William Southam (1843-1932), the proprietor of The Hamilton Spectator and founder of the Southam newspaper empire, was the publisher of The Ottawa Citizen. Hamilton's mother, Henrietta Cargill, was the daughter of businessman and politician Henry Cargill, who collapsed and died after making a speech in the House of Commons on Oct. 1, 1903.
(William Southam's practise had been to send each of his sons to a different part of the country to run the family owned local newspaper, and Wilson, probably because he was the eldest son, got Ottawa. Conrad Black's former company, Hollinger International bought the Southam family's daily and weekly newspapers in 1996, before he launched The National Post. CanWest Global bought these assets in 2,000).
The youngest of his parents' six children, Hamilton went to Elmwood School for three years. At age eight, he enrolled in Ashbury College, the private boy's school in Ottawa, to which Southams had been sending their sons since 1910. In his 10 years at Ashbury, from 1924-34, Hamilton at first attended school patchily because his parents took him (and a tutor) south with them every winter. French was taught as though it were a dead language, so it was years before he became bilingual. But the school did nurture his abiding love for Latin, the classics, and poetry, which according to the custom of the time, he was required to memorize in great swatches, and which he delighted in declaiming until the end of his life. He also played Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice, “lightly with exactly the right touch of flippancy,” according to drama critic Ted Devlin.
While at Ashbury he also did some classes, probably summer school, at Glebe and Lisgar Collegiates and entered Trinity College at the University of Toronto in 1934. He graduated with a degree in history in 1939, having taken a year out, halfway through, probably because of a mild depression. About this time he was involved in a serious car crash, leaving him with a crooked smile which gave a new distinction to a classically handsome face. After U of T, he sailed to England intending to do a Master's degree in modern history at Christ Church College, Oxford. Almost as soon as he arrived, Britain declared war on Germany and he enlisted in the British Army as an officer cadet in the Royal Artillery.
Simultaneously he renewed his friendship with Jacqueline Lambert-David, the daughter of a sculptor from a land-owning French family. They had met in Canada that summer through family friends. When the hostilities commenced, she managed to make her way back to London via a ship from New York as the United States was still neutral. They married in London on April 15, 1940 while he was in training. (They eventually had four children and were divorced in the late 1960s; she died late in 1998) A month after the wedding, he received his commission as a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery.
Meanwhile, the 40th battery of the Canadian Army (in which his uncle and namesake, Gordon Southam, had served and died in the First World War) had mobilized for active service under Frank Keen, assistant editor of the Hamilton Spectator, as the 11th Canadian Army Field Regiment, 40th Battalion of Hamilton. As soon as the battalion arrived in England, Lt. Southam applied for a transfer from the British Army so that he could serve with the Canadian Forces. In the autumn of 1943, when the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, which was heavily engaged in Italy, urgently needed replacements, he volunteered to join the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery. He fought in the battle of Ortona in December, 1943 and the final battle of Monte Cassino from April to May, 1944 and was part of the advance of the Canadian Army up through Italy and later from Marseilles northward in France. He was mentioned in dispatches for “gallant and distinguished services” and demobilized with the rank of Captain.
When Germany surrendered in May, 1945, he was on home leave in Ottawa, after six continuous years of service, but his wife and their first child Peter, who had been born in 1943, were still overseas. His father, Wilson Southam, arranged a job for him with The Times of London, so he could rejoin his family and get a journalistic foothold on Fleet Street. While working in London, he also sent a series of articles on post-war Europe to The Citizen in Ottawa. When passenger ships began crossing the Atlantic again, he and his family moved to Ottawa where he began working for The Ottawa Citizen as an editorial writer in 1946.
After about a year, he decided that journalism was not for him (although he would later serve on the board of directors of Southam Inc.) “I couldn't write quickly enough,” he told me in an interview in his home in the Rockliffe area of Ottawa in 2004. “My editor would give me a subject—500 words on such and such a subject by 3 o'clock. My instinct was to go to the parliamentary library for a week and then come back with the 500 words,” he said. “I was wretched.” He went to his Uncle Harry Southam, then the publisher of The Citizen, and said, “I can't manage to do this so I am going to external affairs.”
He wrote the examinations and joined external affairs in 1948 under Lester Pearson at a time when Canada “had a role to play” and when being part of the foreign service was “riding the crest of a wave as far as I was concerned.” It was “a wonderful time” and “I was very happy there,” Mr. Southam said, quoting Wordsworth, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!”
In 1949, Mr. Southam (and his family, which now included a second son, Christopher, who is now called Abdul) was posted to Stockholm, Sweden as third secretary under Ambassador Tommy Stone. After nearly four years, he and his family returned to Ottawa where he worked in the Security and Intelligence Branch of External Affairs for six years, eventually becoming acting head of the Defence Liaison division. He was sent to Warsaw, Poland as chargé d'affaires in March, 1959. By then the Southams had two more children, Jennifer and Michael. This posting was one of the highlights of Mr. Southam's diplomatic career because he solved the “Polish Treasures” problem.
After Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, the curator of Crakow, the historical capital of Poland, removed a number of treasures, including tapestries and the sword of state from Wawel Castle, bundled them into a truck and drove them through Romania and Yugoslavia to Italy hoping to store them in the Vatican for safekeeping. After the curator and his treasures were sent packing by Pope Pius XII, he managed to load them on a ship, which ended up, after a circuitous route, in Canada. Some of the treasures were warehoused in the basement of the old National Gallery in Ottawa, the voluminous tapestries were sent to a museum in Quebec City and other precious artifacts were deposited in the vault of the Bank of Montreal in Montreal and in the Hotel Dieu de Québec Hospital.
After the war, Poland, then behind the Iron Curtain, requested the return of its state treasures. That was fine with the Canadian federal government, but not with Maurice Duplessis, then Premier of Quebec. He refused to hand anything over to a Communist government, arguing that the tapestries were rightfully the property of the Roman Catholic Church. Consequently, there was a diplomatic fracas “and that is why we never sent an ambassador there and they never sent an ambassador here,” explained Mr. Southam in an interview in 2004. “Relations were at a low chargé d'affaires level.”
Mr. Duplessis died in office in September, 1959 and was succeeded as Premier by Paul Sauvé, “a more rational man who said ‘there is no problem, send them back.'” Mr. Southam who had arrived in Warsaw in March, 1959, was thus in situ when the national treasures were returned to their homeland, causing Poland and Canada “to unfreeze their governments and to exchange ambassadors.” And so, Mr. Southam's grateful government promoted him “sur place” to the rank of Ambassador in April, 1960.
In 1962 the Southams returned to Ottawa where he was appointed head of the Information Division of External Affairs. He was at work one day when he received a visit from Faye Loeb (the wife of Jules Loeb, the brother of Bertram Loeb, the Ottawa grocer who founded IGA chain) who wanted him to help spearhead a citizens' move to build a performing arts centre in Ottawa. Rashly, he promised to find an appropriate candidate and, if necessary, to take charge himself.
“Time ran out and Faye came back,” is the way he described his assumption of the leadership of the National Capital Arts Alliance in 1963. At its height the alliance included about 60 arts organizations in Ottawa. They raised enough money (about $7,000) to commission a feasibility study, which recommended both the building of a performing arts centre and the holding of an annual national festival in Ottawa. In 1964, Mr. Southam took the completed study (with its projected costs of $9 million) to Lester Pearson, his old boss at external affairs who was by then the Prime Minister of Canada, and persuaded him that the proposed building would be an ideal Centennial Project for the federal government.
“He thought about it for a month and then came back and said, ‘We'll do it,'” according to Mr. Southam. “After that it was his project and he never gave up on it.” The Prime Minister arranged for Mr. Southam to be lent from External Affairs to Secretary of State, which appointed him co-ordinator of the National Arts Centre in Feb., 1964. The decision about the architect for the new facility was left up to Mr. Southam. There was no time for a competition, in Mr. Southam's view, so he recommended Fred Lebonsold, who had already built the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver, won the competition for Confederation Centre in Charlottetown, and was in the running (and would later build) Place des Arts in Montreal. Mr. Lebsonsold did a quick estimate of $16- million dollars and signed on as the architect.
When Mr. Southam was appointed inaugural director of the NAC in 1967, he said: “We hope to put Ottawa at last on the cultural map of Canada and, to the extent we can do so, put Canada on the cultural map of the world.” He oversaw the construction of Mr. Lebensold's hexagonal buildings on 2.6 hectares on the banks of the Rideau River, defending vociferous critics along the way. In 1968 he appeared before a hostile House of Commons Committee on Broadcasting, Films and Assistance to the Arts to defend the rising costs (which reached a final tally of more than $46-million) of the still unopened arts centre and promised that the NAC “will establish Ottawa at last as a capital city worthy of a great country.” He continued: “I am not saying that it enables Ottawa at a stroke to match London or Paris…[but it] will be able to look Helsinki, Warsaw or Brussels in the face.”
(By this time, Mr. Southam's first marriage had disintegrated. He married Gro Mortenson of Oslo, Norway in 1968, with whom he had two children, Henrietta and Gordon. He and his second wife were divorced in the late 1970s, but as with all of Mr. Southam's wives, she remained on affectionate terms with him.)
The multi-faceted performance centre, with three halls including the country's first professional opera house, two restaurants, two theatre companies and its own touring symphony orchestra opened in June 1969 with the National Ballet of Canada performing two commissioned ballets – The Queen by Grant Strate to music by Louis Applebaum, and Kraanerg by Roland Petit to music by Iannis Xenakis. The following night the NBC danced John Cranko's Romeo and Juliet and watched aghast in the ballroom scene as something went wrong with the technology in the orchestra pit and conductor George Crum, and some of his musicians, slowly ascended above stage level, leading Mr. Crum to say later that it was “the only time I ever looked down on Celia Franca” who was performing as Lady Capulet. Among other groups and solo performers who appeared in the two-week inaugural festival were the Montreal Symphony Orchestra under Franz-Paul Decker, with Jon Vickers as soloist; the Toronto Symphony in its last concert under the directorship of conductor Seiji Ozawa, in a program which included Harry Freedman's Tangents; the Orford String Quartet; the contralto Maureen Forrester; the soprano Sylvia Saurette; the chanteuse Monique Leyrac; and singer Gordon Lightfoot. After two terms as director-general, Mr. Southam, then 60, stepped down in March 1977.
After a short respite spent sailing his yacht, Mr. Southam was persuaded by Secretary of State John Roberts in March 1978 to become chair of Festival Canada and take charge of the country's annual birthday party celebrations on Canada Day for a generous remuneration of $1 a year. That same month the Broadcasting Committee of the House of Commons required him to appear on short notice to answer its questions about his mandate and budget. Some members of the partisan committee severely criticized the fluently bilingual Mr. Southam for preparing a report only in English – he said later that he hadn't had time to have it translated – he sent a letter resigning from his post in French to the minister. It was rejected and Mr. Southam oversaw celebrations in hundreds of communities across the country and a blow-out televised extravaganza on Parliament Hill on the theme, You and Me — Le Canada, c'est Toi et Moi. “When the minister asked me if I would come back from retirement and look after this, I said yes because I consider myself a public servant,” he said later. “I think there's some advantage to the principle of the main federal representative taking part, as Canadian are doing, on a volunteer basis. It shows that their non-partisan volunteer approach to the celebration of Canada is shared in Ottawa.”
In March 1980 Mr. Southam joined a group including Arthur Gelber, chair of the Ontario Arts Centre, musician and impresario Louis Applebaum and Ed Cowan, a former publisher of Saturday Night Magazine, to form the Lively Arts Market Builders (LAMB). The scheme, in which Mr. Southam invested heavily, was to create a television channel devoted to producing and broadcasting plays, concerts, films and programs on the arts. The group received a cable television license from the Canadian Radio Television Commission and launched the pay-TV C Channel in January 1983 with Mr. Southam as chair of its board and Mr. Cowan as president, but it failed to attract enough subscribers and went into receivership six months later. Rogers Cablesystems Inc. bought its pay-TV licence in December, 1983, for $12,500.
(The following year Mr. Southam married for the third and final time. Marion Tanton, a French woman he had known and loved for many years, was the wife of the late Pierre Charpentier, a former Canadian ambassador, and the mother of his three children. She died of cancer in the Southams' home in Ottawa in May, 2005.)
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney appointed Mr. Southam chair of the Official Residences Council in Jan., 1985, a civilian oversee group that he had established amidst mounting criticism of the cost of renovating, refurbishing and maintaining official residences. Mr. Southam's tenure was not an easy one, requiring him to manoeuvre between spending public money to enable Canadian diplomats and politicians to entertain dignitaries and preside over ceremonial events and the stigma that lavish living conditions were “mere perquisites of high office – fringe benefits, as it were, that go with the job.” During his years on the Council, there were political brawls about work done on the Speaker's House in Kingsmere, Stornoway, the residence of the opposition leader, and both official residences of the prime minister.
His beloved NAC went through a long period of turmoil beginning in the mid-1980s, involving funding crises, a revolving series of chairs and artistic directors and a strike by the NAC orchestra, before it began to stabilize more than a decade later with the appointment of David Leighton as chair of the board and arts administrator Peter Herrndorf as president and chief executive in the late 1990s.
“During all those dreary years, the government had appointed people to the board for political reasons,” said Mr. Southam in 2004. “As soon as those two [Leighten and Herrndorf] were in place [thanks in no small part to his behind the scenes lobbying] there were no more problems. They know how to do their jobs.” Early in 2,000 a grateful NAC re-named its opera auditorium, Southam Hall, in his honour.
After attending the rededication of the tomb of the unknown soldier on Sept. 17, 1999, Mr. Southam met some friends for lunch at the Rideau Club. He had been “moved” by the ceremony and by Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson's “wonderful” speech and he began thinking that the fallen soldier “should have some company on Confederation Square,” rather like the “great cloud of witnesses,” described by St. Paul in his epistles. Those lunchtime musings led to his final public campaign, which was finally realized seven years later when Governor-General Michael Jean unveiled the $1.1-million Valiants Memorial. Consisting of five bronze statues, nine busts and a bronze wall commemorating 12 heroes (including Joseph Brant, Sir Isaac Brock and Pilot Officer Andrew Mynarksi V.C.) and two heroines (Laura Secord and nurse Georgina Pope) the Valiants, which were sculpted by John McEwen and Marlene Moore, are located in Confederation Square, adjacent to the National War Memorial, around the Sappers Stairway leading down to the Rideau Canal.
He considered the Valiants his second great project after the NAC. “I have started foundations [including the NAC, the Battle of Normandy and the military museum task force] but I don't count those,” he told me, pointing out that he always tried to serve his country as a soldier, a diplomat and a mandarin, but his campaign for the Valiants was different. “This is serving an idea. It is reminding Canadians of the great deeds done by great people for them ... Parliament Hill is full of statues of prime ministers and politicians, some of them good, some of them not good. But in Ottawa there shouldn't just be statues of politicians. It is the capital of the country and there should be statues of the men and women who have made this country.”
Aside from building monuments to others, Mr. Southam, as he entered his ninth decade, was sitting in the study of his Ottawa home, a well proportioned light-filled room, lined with bookcases, rereading the complete works of Anthony Trollope and “contemplating three generations of reading.” He had his grandfather's books on the top shelf, his father's Everyman editions on the second and his own books on the third shelf. As well, he was examining his own soul. “I have lived my life, and that which I have done may God himself make pure,” he said. I meditate and I don't compare today with yesterday. I have more important comparisons, concerning my inner life, and I have much to think about. He was an Anglican, but he “was thinking the same thoughts as a Catholic or a Jew or a Muslim. “The soul is a more important part of our being than character,” he said. “It is essential.” And so he spent his last years in contemplation and in visiting with close friends and family, enjoying life and engaged with the world around him well into extreme old age.
Yesterday afternoon, on Canada Day, he was about to go for a drive with his valet when he suddenly felt tired. He lay down for a rest and quietly died.
Gordon Hamilton Southam was born in Ottawa on Dec. 19, 1916. He died at his home in Ottawa on July 1, 2008 of complications from cancer and a broken hip. He was 91. Survived by his second wife Gro Mortenson, six children and his extended family. Funeral arrangements are pending.
