Bob Edwards foe died 100 years ago

Calgary Daily Herald, December 12, 1912

One hundred years ago today—on December 11, 1912—former Calgary newspaper publisher Daniel McGillicuddy died in Toronto. McGillicuddy had founded the Calgary Daily News in 1907 and published it until 1910. The paper later morphed into the Calgary News-Telegram and continued as one of the city's three dailies—along with the Herald and the Albertan (which became the Sun in 1980). Finally, a few days after the armistice of November 11, 1918 that ended the First World War, the News-Telegram folded and the Albertan took over its plant.

McGillicuddy started his tenure with an anonymous attack on Robert Chambers (Bob) Edwards, publisher of the Calgary Eye Opener. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography's entry on Edwards summarizes the incident:

Another of the Eye Opener’s opponents was Clifford Sifton, whom Edwards accused of having relations with a married woman in 1905, at the time of negotiations for the formation of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Three years later, Edwards heard a rumour that Sifton was backing the establishment of a Liberal newspaper in Calgary to counteract the influence of the Eye Opener. A short time after, Daniel McGillicuddy launched the Calgary Daily News and immediately prior to the election of 1908 he published a stinging personal attack on Edwards, calling him a “miserable wretch of a depraved existence,” a libeller, character thief, coward, liar, drunkard, drug addict, and degenerate. Edwards sued for criminal libel and won the case, but McGillicuddy was fined only $100.

      Edwards never forgave those involved in the lawsuit. He ridiculed McGillicuddy’s lawyer, Edward Pease Davis, to such an extent that the man initiated a successful libel suit and Edwards was forced to publish an apology. Edwards also accused the judge, Nicholas Du Bois Dominic Beck, of political bias, describing him on one occasion as the “narrow, prejudiced, fanatical Beck.” As for McGillicuddy, Edwards was bitter even after the man was dead. When Edwards was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta 13 years after the suit, he would write, “Isn’t it remarkable, here we are in the legislature and McGillicuddy is in hell?”

The affair temporarily soured Edwards on living in Calgary, and he left in 1909, publishing his newspaper in central Canada and then in Winnipeg before returning to Calgary around 1911.

Calgary Daily Herald, December 12, 1912