“Matthew Halton, in a way, was our Ed Murrow.”
– KNOWLTON NASH, former CBC anchor, in the History Channel documentary Dispatches from the Front
OF ALL THE HONOURS MATT RECEIVED, none would have pleased him more than the one bestowed on the day after his funeral. On December 7, the Pincher Creek School Board voted to have its new school named after him. A year later, the Matthew Halton High School was formally opened. Ultra-modern for the time, its twenty-one classrooms, library, and auditorium reflected a prospering community far different from the pioneer village where he was born. Words from the concluding paragraph of Ten Years to Alamein are inscribed on a bronze plaque over the school’s main entrance: “Idealism is the only realism.”
Students in social studies at Matthew Halton High are almost the only students in Canada who are taught about Matt’s career. In journalism schools, the correspondent once known as “Canada’s Ed Murrow” rarely gets more than a passing mention. The reporter whom author Pierre Berton described as “Canada’s greatest foreign correspondent”1 has become a largely unknown figure for almost all but a dwindling number of the wartime generation.
With regard to war coverage, Berton’s claim that Matt was the greatest Canadian foreign correspondent is arguable. Ross Munro of the Canadian Press was unmatched for the sheer volume of his battlefield reporting, not to mention his scoops in getting out the first stories from the Dieppe, Sicily, and Normandy landings. But partly because of the immediacy of radio, and partly because of the vividness of Matt’s war reporting, no other Canadian correspondent had the same impact at home or as large a profile internationally. As the war ended, Byng Whittaker, then a noted BBC editor and commentator, had described him as “one of the finest news broadcasters to be heard anywhere.”2 And more than three decades later, Dick Malone, the former army PR chief and later editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail, reflected on the vitality and emotion of Matt’s war reporting. Of his tendency to the sentimental, Malone said, “Today it might sound corny … but it didn’t then”3 – not when emotions were running so high in a nation at war. The citation on Matt’s admission to the News Hall of Fame spoke of his “sensitive, colorful and compassionate style.… He took his listeners beyond the traditional boundaries of the news media.”4
Nor is there any doubt of Matt’s importance in helping to establish the CBC as a strong national institution whose preeminence in Canadian broadcasting lasted for several decades. His wartime broadcasts, along with those of Peter Stursberg and the French network’s Marcel Ouimet, gave a new legitimacy to radio news. They fostered a national pride in the war effort that contributed to the self-confident Canada emerging from the conflict. A new vision was born of a country that could play a role in world affairs disproportionate to the size of its population.
Debate over whether the World War Two correspondents were propagandists for the Allied cause didn’t begin until long after Matt’s death. Ironically, it was his close friend, Charlie Lynch, who helped launch the debate. In The First Casualty, a revisionist history of war reporting, Lynch was quoted as saying, “We were a propaganda arm of our governments. At the start, the censors enforced that, but by the end of the war we were our own censors. We were cheerleaders.”5 In some respects, the charge was demonstrably true – and Matt was no exception. Like other war correspondents, he felt he was part of a crusade against one of history’s most evil regimes. Accepting censorship and easing up on critical scrutiny of some military actions were considered an acceptable price to pay to help win what would later be described as “the last good war.” Journalistic ethics in covering the conflict were simply not an issue at the time. Nor, in Matt’s case, did he face any criticism for becoming a salesman of Victory Bonds at patriotic rallies on the home front.
The only direct attack on Matt’s war reporting came more than thirty years after his death. A CBC docudrama, The Valour and the Horror, judged by war historians and the CBC’S own ombudsman to be flawed and inaccurate in parts,6 took issue with his description of “superb” Canadian soldiers storming the beaches on D-Day. More seriously, the program accused him of lying – falsely attributing to Matt a quote that, in fact, came from a Canadian soldier about German troops surrendering in Normandy.7 Undoubtedly, his broadcasts, like the dispatches of other war correspondents, tended to glorify Allied victories and minimize defeats. Yet recent studies are sharply divided over whether the correspondents were more propagandists than reporters.* My own detailed study of Matt’s broadcasts in Italy and northwest Europe found that, despite delays and omissions, they gave listeners a generally accurate picture of the war that conforms with later histories.
While his battle dispatches brought him fame, Matt’s most significant achievement as a journalist was his reporting on Nazi Germany for the Toronto Star. The thirty-part German Series he wrote in 1933 was one of the most comprehensive and outspoken early accounts of Nazi tyranny. The Pulitzer Prize–winning American reporter Leland Stowe praised Matt for his “marked moral courage in recognizing the menace of totalitarian dictatorship and reporting it without a moment’s hesitation.”8 Matt was also lauded for his clairvoyance in predicting Hitler’s next moves throughout the 1930s. University of Toronto professor Harold Troper noted “the prescience of his warnings of the catastrophic consequences posed the world by Nazi militarism and racism.”9 Equally farsighted was Matt’s conviction that a Second World War could be avoided if the Allies were prepared to use force against Nazi Germany at the time of the Munich crisis or earlier. At the Nuremberg trials, field marshals Erich von Manstein and Wilhelm Keitel testified that the German army could never have won a war on two fronts in 1938 against the combined French, British, and Czech forces (not to mention the Red Army).11
Matt’s style of writing is out of fashion now. Where today the emphasis is on cool, detached reporting, he was passionately involved in the news he considered important. Quick to wield a sword against what he felt was injustice or stupidity, Matt was often heavily editorial. He looked at the facts then made judgments about who was right or wrong on controversial subjects. It was only in the post-war period, under the constraints of CBC policy, that his reporting became more conventional and less editorial. Before then, he was rarely neutral, subscribing to the mantra of his New York Times colleague Herbert Matthews that “a newspaperman should work with his heart as well as his mind.”12
Matt’s death left a void in Jean’s life. She had devoted her life to the man whom, in the words of a friend, had “placed her just a little above the angels.”13 She had calmed his anxieties, put up with his weaknesses, and always been his steadfast supporter. For a while after his death, she wrote that she was living in “an awful nightmare.… I still cannot believe Matt has really gone but I think he is just away on another assignment abroad.”14 The sight of his portable typewriter on his desk and his worn old briefcase told her otherwise. Never as sentimental as Matt, Jean nevertheless kept two mementoes in her purse for the forty-five years that remained of her life. One was the University of Alberta dance card where she had scrawled Je t’aime over his name. The other was a crumpled piece of paper on which Matt had copied a poem by Christina Rossetti that he sent her before landing with Canadian troops in Italy. Its last two lines read,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
In fact, Jean had little time to dwell on her sadness. With his usual carelessness about money, Matt left her with little to pay for hospital costs, income taxes, and outstanding bills. Because he was on contract rather than staff at the CBC, he wasn’t eligible for a pension. His old friend Charles Jennings, now a corporation executive, had to fight to squeeze out a special grant from the Board of Directors of two thousand dollars. Jean found it a “pitifully small” recognition of someone who had done so much to enhance the CBC’S reputation.15 She began taking in lodgers at the Hampstead home and was soon engaged as the social secretary at Canada House, where she worked for six high commissioners from George Drew to Paul Martin Sr. She retired to Canada in 1978 and died twenty-three years later at the age of ninety-four.
My sister and I followed Matt into journalism. Both of us had observed at close hand our father’s intense enthusiasm for his work and seen our home enlivened so often by scintillating characters from the press and politics. After finishing at Oxford, Kathleen worked successively for Newsweek, the London Sunday Times, and the Observer before writing several novels and a biography of her husband, the drama critic Kenneth Tynan.
I worked briefly for the Calgary Herald and Ottawa Citizen in an era when you still typed your stories on old Underwoods and finished the day at the nearest tavern. After a stint with the Canadian edition of Time magazine, I joined the CBC and spent most of the next forty years as a foreign correspondent, privileged to have that “front seat at the peep show of life” once celebrated by Matt’s boyhood hero, Sir Philip Gibbs.
On June 6, 1994, I was in Normandy for a CBC fiftieth anniversary special on the D-Day landings. It was a damp day, the sun only occasionally breaking through an overcast sky. At low tide, I took a long walk across the beach near Courseulles where my father had come ashore on that most dramatic of days. Canadian veterans, alone or in small groups, were wandering along the sand. Some would pause to stare out at the grey-green Channel as if transfixed by memories. At one moment I found myself remembering a line from Ten Years to Alamein where Matt described a moment of high danger during an attack. “I realized intensely,” he wrote, “the truth of the saying that some men live twice as long as others in the same span of years.”16 Suddenly, there were tears in my eyes, not so much of sorrow over a journey cut absurdly short but more in marvel at my father’s extraordinary life.
* In The Fog of War, Mark Bourrie concludes that despite censorship “these reporters did give the Canadian public a very vivid and accurate account of the war.” A contrary view by Timothy John Balzer in The Information Front claims that censorship turned the media watchdog into “a blind and partly deaf animal.”10