Edgar Andrew Collard seems to have been a pretty interesting fellow. A Montrealer armed with a M.A. in history from McGill, in 1942 he found to work in the Gazette library – eleven years later he was editor-in-chief. Robertson Davies, once a newspaperman himself, wrote of his tenure: "I follow about 25 Canadian editorial pages day by day, and I see nothing to compare with this work, either in subject or in treatment."
In 1971, Collard stepped down. Youngsters like myself remember him only as a columnist. From August 1944 to August 2000 – the month before his death – Collard's "All Our Yesterdays" appeared each and every weekend. With titles like "When Dominion Square Was a Cemetery", "Was Dr. James Barry a Woman?", "Strange Experiences of Colonel Ham" and "College as the Ruination of Girls", they focussed on the more colourful aspects of Montreal's past. Several hundred were collected in books like Montreal Yesterdays, Montreal: The Days That Are No More, All Our Yesterdays and 100 More Tales from All Our Yesterdays, but this column on the country's first political assassination isn't one of them :
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| Saturday, 16 November 1963 (cliques pour grander) |
Did D'Arcy McGee foresee his sudden death at the age of 42? He did. And he wrote about his fate in a poem entitled "Forewarned.""Forewarned" meant nothing to me; it doesn't figure in the 612-page Poems of Thomas D'Arcy McGee. A quick search reveals that the verse isn't by McGee at all, rather it belongs to Irish novelist, poet and playwright Gerald Griffin (1803-1840). You can find all 64 lines beginning on page 395 of The Life of Gerald Griffin (Dublin: James Duffy, 1872), written by brother Daniel.
I wonder if Collard ever realized his mistake. As far as I can tell, he never issued a correction. Published the following weekend, Collard's next column dealt with the sculptures gracing the Bank of Montreal Head Office.
Here's that day's front page:
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| Saturday, 23 November 1963 |
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