Discovering Montreal’s lush life
Journalists. Heavy drinking.
They do seem to go together, don’t they?
They sure did in the old days. Not so much with younger journalists. Indeed, if my Concordia University journalism students are anything to go by, the young’uns are a bit disapproving of the booze-soaked old days.
But more on that later.
The over-refreshed traditions in journalism go back a long way. Back to the legendary Cheshire Cheese pub on London’s equally legendary Fleet Street.
I remember visiting a friend at London’s Daily Mirror and, when he had shown me around the newsroom, he cheerily told a colleague we were off to “the Stab.”
I was not familiar with this establishment, but there was no doubt we were going to a pub.
Its real name was, I seem to recall, the White Hart. But it was universally known as the Stab in the Back, due to the number of careers ended and characters assassinated there.
My journalism journey started in the late 1960s at a small weekly newspaper in the picturesque English town of Shrewsbury.
It was, in many ways, a sleepy town where the main excitement was the annual agricultural show and a huge flower show. Oh, and the vast choice of pubs.
I quickly learned that the sleepiness may have stemmed from the enormous amount of alcohol consumed by the town’s young and not-so-young.
As a rather callow 17-year-old, this came as a bit of a shock to me. But I came of age as a drinker a few months after I started at the Shrewsbury Chronicle. There were four apprentice reporters (yes, there were still formal apprenticeships in those days) and the most senior (he was two years older than me) approached to inform me that I would be part of the team covering the local carnival.
This grizzled 19-year-old explained that his role in my journalistic development was to show me “how to get totally pissed and do a job of work at the same time.”
I have little recollection of what happened at the carnival. But I did something that gave me a certain status in the paper’s booze-soaked history.
As I was staggering out with a sheaf of near incomprehensible notes detailing who had come second in the white rose category, I came across a raffle stall.
I lurched to the stall to get a few paragraphs for my story and found that there were about 100 bottles of wine to be won and about 1,000 tickets.
I’ve always been quite quick with simple math, so I asked how many tickets were sold. “About 800,” said the stall keeper.
I looked at the remaining bottles. There were about 40.
Hmm, not bad odds, I thought. I bought six tickets and won four bottles.
I drank them that night, helped by a couple of friends.
By this time I was a professional at getting drunk on beer. But I’d never had wine before.
The end result was not pretty. That’s all I’m saying.
I moved to a small biweekly paper in Aldershot, Hampshire, in 1972 and then, in 1973, joined my first daily newspaper, the Oxford Mail.
My drinking moderated there as I met my future ex-wife. Here’s a word of advice: If your liver needs protection, you need a future ex-wife.
In 1977, we moved to Toronto and I joined the Globe and Mail. An awkward overnight shift curtailed drinking there and Toronto was still at the end of the Toronto-the-good era.
There was a basement bar across the road from the Globe office. After three months working there I was dragged across the road on a break to send off an editor who was joining the Toronto Star.
That was an education. Keen to ingratiate myself with my new colleagues I walked up to what I thought was the bar to buy a round. “Sit down, goddamn Brit. There’s a waiter,” a Globe editor growled helpfully.
I was confused. Pubs in England didn’t have waiters. Can I afford this? I thought.
But the waiter came, the beer was cheap and I was pondering the finances of cheap beer served by a waiter when a shocking addition to the economic miracle that is a Canadian bar unfolded.
There was a small dais in the corner with a jukebox. A young woman in a long dress stood on the dais, put a quarter in the jukebox and started dancing. Fair enough, thinks I, and went back to journo-talk which, as we were Globe people, was quite erudite.
A new song started, I glanced over and the young woman had discarded her dress and was dancing in underwear. Fair enough, thinks I. It is hot there.
Despite all the boozing in England, I could hardly be described as a man of the world, and still the penny did not drop. But when I glanced over again, what had dropped was the young woman’s underwear and she was sporting just a G-string.
I was astonished. And I felt sorry for her. Few patrons were actually watching and again I pondered the finances of a bar where a waiter brought drinks, there was a stripper and beer was 50 cents.
What an incredible country I’d come to.
Another thing I learned that night was that in Ontario, the waiter was obligatory in a tavern and drinkers could not even carry a beer to another table.
It seemed very Prohibition-era to me. But the Ontario government must have heard of my arrival because a few months later the rules changed. Actual bars with bar stools were permitted and a string of English-style pubs, called the Duke of Richmond, Duke of Kent, etc., sprang up.
Having changed the drinking culture of Toronto in 1978 I moved to the Montreal Gazette. Then officially called The Gazette, Montreal.
Montreal was like a finishing school for drinkers.
The bars were open to 3 a.m. And that was just the legal closing time. Many establishments, such as the Montreal Press Club/Cercle des Journalistes, closed when the last patron lurched out. There are so, so many stories. (Ed: Cut it there, Cooney, and get on with it).
I was familiar with the newspaper drinking culture when I arrived in Montreal. But I was not used to the very lofty standards of imbibing, on and off the job, that I encountered when I stepped through the door of the Gazette on 1000 St. Antoine St.
When we really felt like a long session, which seemed to be most nights, we would repair to the Montreal Press Club in the old Mount Royal Hotel. But we would usually start the serious business of getting wasted in Mother Martin’s, a bar-restaurant just east of the Gazette building.
It was a strange establishment. It had pretensions to being a place where food might be served. Wood panelled, with oil paintings of indeterminate provenance lining the walls.
At night, any hope of a quiet or romantic dinner there would disappear around 8 p.m. as the Gazette newsroom would start to go off shift.
Then the bar would be in the capable hands of the world-weary Korean barman who smiled readily but would stand for no nonsense.
Odd things would happen there. The usual office politics, of course. The frantic calls from the office for some poor soul to drop his/her drink and rush back to fix some error. Or incidents like the time affable editor Alan Marshall casually set the newspaper I was reading on fire. An open broadsheet newspaper can create quite a spectacular flame. I was determined to appear nonchalant and read on through the inferno, but as the flames licked the ceiling, the barman uttered a strangled cry and helped me stamp out the flames.
The carpet remained charred until a year or so later, when we drank our last ale at Mother Martin’s.
Rarely could a farewell drinking session have ended in such spectacular fashion.
Nineteen Seventy-Nine was a turbulent year in Canadian newspapers. All over the country, newspapers closed, and many cities became one-newspaper towns. The Ottawa Journal and the once mighty Montreal Star were among the victims, the Journal closing, along with the Winnipeg Tribune, Aug. 27, 1980. There were accusations of collusion between chains and there was a royal commission to examine what went on.
But two large English papers in Montreal had not made sense for a while as anglophones, spooked by the separatist Parti Québécois taking power in 1976, headed west.
Despite the shakedown, the good times for newspapers rolled on for a while.
In 1989, I needed a break from it all and I did a six-week contract at Express Newspapers in London. It was just a few weeks after the Express joined the exodus from Fleet Street, abandoning its famous, if forbidding old home, known as the Black Lubyanka, to spanking new quarters in a high rise on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge.
The building was clean, new and the washrooms did not smell funky. Everything a newspaper office should not be.
But there was a nod to tradition. On the ground floor there was a pub. Somehow, in these gleaming new surroundings, it managed to seem old and a little tired. The mahogany bar was scratched and well worn. The beer was warm and the conversation flowed almost as readily.
The regulars told me that it took a month for them to feel at home in their new surroundings. What broke the ice was that the first drunken firing had occurred there. A young reporter, unhappy with a decision by the editor, made her feelings known, possibly a little too forcefully. The editor offered to meet the reporter the next day. But drink is a terrible thing, as we all know.
The reporter would not back off, and stormed out drunk and jobless, in that order.
Back in Montreal, the good times, both in the newsroom and the bars, continued apace. The Gazette had trouble simply processing the flood of advertising in these good times and, at one point, the editorial staff hit over 220.
But tougher times lay ahead. The 1990s saw a steady decline that only accelerated at the turn of the millennium as the Web started eating away at advertising and changing the way people bought stuff.
The Gazette had needed bigger production capacity back in 1979 and bought the old Star building at 250 St. Antoine West, complete with presses, moving in during the summer of 1980.
Joining the Star in the list of victims was Mother Martin’s. It stayed open for a while after the Gazette moved on, but the loss of revenue must have been fearsome.
The repair bill after that legendary last night couldn’t have helped.
The evening started fairly sedately. A talented editor was leaving the Gazette to join a paper in the U.S.
We gave him farewell gifts, one of which, presented with a flourish by me, dressed as a waiter, was a vibrator.
Unfortunately, there is photographic evidence of this, removing any hope of deniability.
It got worse.
More people turned up, including a political writer who contributed a large vat that he proceeded to fill with an evil concoction of cheap rum, cheap vodka, cheap … well, you get the picture. It was enhanced with a helping of Kool-Aid. This was shortly after the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana when members of a cult committed suicide by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid.
I’m not sure this would pass the Gazette’s PC taste junta now, but things were different in 1980. This was certainly not a safe space.
It got worse.
People drank the evil concoction. I danced in it, losing a sock. Did I lose the sock or did it dissolve in the toxic mix? The answer is lost in the mists of time.
Undeterred, people drank more of it.
It got worse.
One editor decided to show his party trick. It’s the one where you grasp the edge of a tablecloth, and with a skilful yank, you remove it, but leave the table setting intact.
It didn’t work out.
At this point my reporting skills are getting a little hazy, but around the same time, the Kool-Aid brew ended up on the floor. I think many lives were saved by this.
But, you guessed it, it got worse.
Much worse.
Someone, it’s not clear who, decided to fulfill a lifelong ambition to set off a fire extinguisher. Naturally, they lost control of it and sprayed the foam around. This caused some of the oil paintings to join the party, and, like the revellers, they looked much the worse for it. I thought of the effect when I first saw the weird photo tricks you can do on an Apple computer. Distorted, sagging faces. Or maybe I was thinking of newsroom faces at the end of a long day.
It took the Titanic less then three hours to sink. About the same time it took to trash Mother Martin’s.
At least it was pretty much all over when the Titanic disappeared beneath the waves. But at Mother Martin’s it got worse.
The party was just getting going and the jolly band of drinkers poured out of Mother Martin’s as the traditional cry of “Uptown!” rang out. This was good news for the cash registers at bars on Crescent and Bishop Streets and the Press Club, which is where I ended up that night with Alan Marshall.
Then, disaster. Alan found he was missing his expensive new contact lens kit, probably mislaid in the Mother Martin’s mayhem.
I was somewhat reluctant to return, but he invoked the Good Buddy rule, so we took a taxi back.
The night air brought some clarity back to us. The scene that greeted us in Mother Martin’s was extraordinary.
Some of the paintings were not in good shape, but otherwise no real damage. But what a mess! The carpet did a fair imitation of a sodden beach when the tide has just gone out, and liquid pooled around our shoes as we walked over it.
The barman and the restaurant manager were gazing at the scene in awe. The manager allowed as how the Gazette folks had spent a fortune there over the years, and he was in philosophical mood. Even more so when I bought them a farewell scotch.
As he put on his coat to go home, he turned to the unfortunate barman with a cheery: “Do what you can with the clean-up!”
That was the only time I saw the barman lost for words. As I remember, they sent a repair bill to the editor. I’m not sure it was ever paid.
It was all very memorable, and almost everyone who was there has a story about that night. The drinking culture was not all good, clean fun, of course.
There were casualties. They say that if you remember the 1960s, you weren’t really there. And if you experienced hard-drinking days of newspapers and don’t remember them, that may be because you didn’t survive therm.
Quite a few of the people at Mother Martin’s that night are long gone and it’s fair to surmise that alcohol hastened their end.
So when one of my Concordia University students rather sniffily remarked that many of the stories about journalism in the old days seemed to revolve around booze, I had to agree.
Some old-timers shake their heads at younger journalists who tend to spend as much time in indie coffee shops as we used to spend in bars.
The old days produced great memories and colourful stories. But there’s no doubt that today’s scribes will live longer.
Not that all young journalists are teetotalers. Last year, one student suggested that, for our end-of-term refreshments, which are usually at an inexpensive bar near Loyola, we go downtown to Grumpy’s.
I hadn’t been there for many years, As I surveyed the scene, thinking how little it had changed over the years, I saw a picture of Nick Auf der Maur, with his daughter Melissa, who was a guitarist for Hole and Smashing Pumpkins.
Older Gazette readers will remember Nick as a city columnist, city councillor and skilled raconteur, boulevardier and general man about town. He was a legend.
Not one of the students knew his name. But why should they? Nick died in 1998, around the time when most of them were born.
I pointed out that there was a street nearby named after Nick.
Only one student had noticed it.
For an old-timer like me, it was very sobering.
Which is not a bad thing.
PETER COONEY is a partly retired journalist who toiled for 49 years in newspapers. He’s only partly retired because, like most journalists, he can’t afford to be fully retired.