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1 GENESIS OF THE DREAM

On November 8, 1963, G. Hamilton Southam, president of Ottawa’s National Capital Arts Alliance, drafted a careful letter to Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. It contained a formal request written in the most concise terms: “For consideration by the government … the idea of the creation of a performing arts centre in Ottawa … and complementary to it … a festival of the arts in Ottawa each year.”¹

The genesis of this idea in Ottawa went back decades—indeed, it was partially rooted in the dreams of Southam’s own family. His father and uncle had initiated plans for a similar centre in the 1920s and had even paid to have blueprints drawn to sketch out a proposal. But although major orchestras and theatre troupes continued to tour through Ottawa during the thirties and the war years, no further concrete action on the idea of building a performance hall had occurred until now.

In 1952 Vincent Massey, the first Canadian governor general and a great patron of the arts, gave cultural matters in the city a significant push. In a Canadian Club luncheon speech to Ottawans at the Château Laurier Hotel, he urged “an eminent festival”² for the capital along the lines of the newly created Edinburgh Festival. The idea of artistic festivals was flourishing everywhere in the postwar period, but in Ottawa it was clear that any such festival would need a place in which to perform, and Ottawa still lacked a significant facility. Many prominent citizens at that lunch took note. Now, ten years later and barely a year since Southam had agreed to head a civic committee in search of a performing arts centre, a plan was ready.

His carefully worded letter to Pearson, an old Southam family friend, was a prelude to a formal meeting later that afternoon. His proposal to the prime minister was that the construction of a performing arts centre be Ottawa’s project to mark Canada’s Centennial.³ Pearson was actively looking for something special for the capital, and the idea came at just the right moment. Within days of the meeting, he wrote back to Southam’s group fully embracing the idea and advising them that he had instructed his officials to prepare a memorandum for cabinet approval. It was the culmination of a whirlwind eight months of research and preparation. For Southam personally, it was the first step in what would turn out to be his central focus for the rest of his professional career: a life in, and for, the arts. It was also the prelude to an enterprise that would shift and elevate the performing arts in Canada in a way that would alter its artistic landscape permanently.

G. Hamilton Southam was the privileged son of an Ottawa establishment family. His Scottish great-grandfather had come to Canada as a stonemason and had initiated the family fortune by buying a printing company. In due course, this business expanded into the Southam publishing empire, the source of the family’s wealth. By the time Hamilton Southam was born on December 19, 1916, the youngest of six siblings, the Southams were fully established members of Canada’s gentry class. With that came their sense of leadership and of responsibility to give back to the community—a common attitude among late Victorian families at the top of the social ladder. Throughout his life, Southam ascribed to the noblesse oblige that wealth, good looks, and a privileged upbringing bestow. He also possessed a genuine openness and a love of all things artistic, particularly for opera and music. The arts were a civilizing force, he thought, and they should be acquired, practised, and supported.

This sensibility had been instilled in Southam from childhood, especially by his Aunt Lilias, his Uncle Harry Southam’s wife, who lived next door. They had converted an indoor squash court in their house into a music room, where they installed both a piano and an organ. There he listened to his aunt as well as more famous musicians play. When the concert pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff came to town, he happily accepted an invitation from the Harry Southams. Wilson Southam, Hamilton’s father, had “a wonderful Victrola,” which he allowed his son to wind up for summer concerts on the veranda. Ultimately, Hamilton Southam developed a keen appreciation for music, rather than the ability to play himself, and that led to his unstinting support for music and opera at the newly created National Arts Centre.

In the 1930s, the Southams made frequent visits to London and Paris, where Hamilton discovered opera—“a romantic form of music … I fed on,” he said. They also visited well-connected family and friends in the English shires or the French countryside. There in the summer of 1938 he met Jacqueline Lambert-David, the daughter of a distinguished French family. Hamilton, always chivalrous and with an abiding affection for women, was invited to visit her family home, the beautiful Château de Ferney in the village of Ferney-Voltaire on the Swiss-French border, where Voltaire had lived for nearly thirty years before its purchase by the Lambert-Davids. The following summer Jacqueline and her sister Claude, in the rituals of such families, came to Canada to stay at the Southam summer home in the Rideau Lakes near Ottawa. When they sailed back to England, Hamilton accompanied them, travelling on up to Oxford for the fall term at his chosen college, Christ Church. He had hardly arrived there before war broke out. He immediately enlisted in the army, and was at Aldershot for training by Christmas. He and Jacqueline would marry in London in April 1940.

A member of a well-connected family, young Hamilton Southam was a page to the governor general, the Marquess of Willingdon, in Ottawa. Photo © Southam.

He served first with a British regiment, then transferred into the 40th Battery of Hamilton, a Canadian militia unit that had been raised by his uncle Gordon Southam in the years before 1914. By 1943 he was “becoming bored” in England, so he leapt at the chance of taking part in an exchange of officers which had been arranged with the Canadian army fighting in Italy. Joining the forces just before the Battle of Ortona, he moved up the rest of Italy “liberating opera house after opera house” as they passed through cities and towns and “enjoying the opera—or at least the idea of it—in each of them.” He also found himself working closely with professional soldiers under fire. “The core of the regiment was the non-commissioned officers,” he recalled, and he got along well with them and their troops and learned from their experience—qualities he would exhibit in later years at the NAC where, despite his sometimes lordly manner, he had good relations with the stagehands and the other backstage crews.

Demobilized in 1945, he joined the London Times and did a short stint as an editorial writer before returning to Ottawa with his bride. There he joined the family newspaper, the Ottawa Citizen, again to write editorials. But it was not a task suited to his temperament. Assigned a topic, he would disappear into the library for a week to research a piece, while a quick 200-word comment written in a day was what his editors wanted. In 1947 he wrote the exam for the Department of External Affairs and, two years later, left on his first assignment abroad, to Sweden. His career as a diplomat would take him in and out of Canada over the next few years before his penultimate posting in Poland, where he first served as chargé d’affaires. There he helped to expedite the return of the Polish Treasures from Canada, where they had been stored for safekeeping during the war, and finally became an ambassador. He also began an affair with Marion Tantot, the vivacious and intelligent young French wife of a junior colleague in the embassy, Pierre Charpentier. Their tempestuous relations would continue on two continents for decades before she became his third and last wife nearly forty years later.

In the summer of 1962 Southam was reassigned to Ottawa as director of the Communications Division in the Department of External Affairs. “Not the most prestigious division,” he said, “but the largest and one of the busiest.” He soon reconnected with friends, family, and colleagues in the upper reaches of the capital’s society and settled in to what he thought would be a diplomat’s home posting.

Shortly after starting his new job, on October 4, 1962, Southam received an unusual visitor at his new office in the Langevin Block, a federal government building at the corner of Ottawa’s Wellington Street and Confederation Square. His well-dressed guest was a local society woman, Faye Loeb, the lively wife of a local Jewish grocery tycoon. Mrs. Loeb came as spokesperson for a loose collection of civic interest groups that were determined to do something for culture and the arts in the capital.

The early sixties was a time of rising optimism in Canada. In Ottawa, various citizens, spurred on by the seeds planted by Vincent Massey less than ten years before, had been ruminating on the future of the city’s cultural life. At least two local impresarios were kept busy bringing performances in music, theatre, and ballet to the city, but frustration was growing that the only venues in which to play were either high school gyms or a downtown movie house, the Capitol Theatre. Ottawa by now had an active Philharmonic Orchestra of its own, and both the Montreal and the Toronto Symphony would come to town every year to fill out the concert season. Arts festivals had also become the rage during the booming postwar period, but there was no way Ottawa could contemplate a festival without a performing arts centre. And so it was that several groups went to work, independently of each other. Even the owner of the local football team, Sam Berger, thought it was time to have a place for the arts.⁴

When Faye Loeb called on Southam that October day, she asked him if he would spearhead the quest for a concert hall. At first he demurred, saying he was “far too busy” to take on the task and requesting three weeks to find someone else. However, he was intrigued and, as soon as Mrs. Loeb left his office, he began to consult several of his high-level friends, including Arnold Heeney, a former top diplomat and public servant; I. Norman Smith, editor of the Ottawa Journal; and Louis Audette, a former naval officer who ran the Canadian Club and was president of the Ottawa Philharmonic. Clearly, the idea appealed to Southam enormously from the beginning—the dream that he had inherited from his parents. When no one else agreed to take the project on, he decided he would do it himself.

Southam knew exactly what to do. By early December, he had established the Preparatory Committee for an Arts Alliance,⁵ seconding his colleague Pierre Charpentier, who had also returned from Poland, to be his volunteer secretary. His small but heavyweight working group was filled with his friends—deputy ministers, prominent socialites, and well-connected individuals on the Ottawa scene. The immediate order of business was to develop a feasibility study. With Southam at the helm, and the times encouraging, all the portents were right for what happened next. Southam knew everyone worth knowing, including Prime Minister Lester Pearson, who, as a young man, had courted one of Southam’s sisters and frequently visited the family home. Charming and fluently bilingual, Southam’s work was beginning at the very moment when the idea of bilingualism and biculturalism was blossoming in Canada. Centennial Year was looming on the horizon, a scant four years away, and Canadians were starting to prepare for a celebratory mood. The fast-approaching anniversary would unleash funds and creativity on a scale never before seen in the country. The arts were burgeoning and were clearly accepted as a sign of any maturing society.

In the postwar period, Canada had modelled its cultural agencies on their British counterparts. The Canada Council had been created by the Liberal government of Louis St. Laurent some eight years before, and its grants to artists and arts groups were already beginning to bear fruit. Above all, Ottawa’s leading citizens wanted to take advantage of this mood and were increasingly eager to put their city, the capital of the country, on the map.

From the moment Southam agreed to lead the campaign, it took off. Working from his home at 267 Buena Vista Road in Ottawa’s upper-crust Rockcliffe Park, he threw himself into the task with passion and advanced on a vast range of fronts. He used every social occasion, from lunches at the prestigious Rideau Club to small dinners and other social gatherings, to press the case. He also undertook a vast letter-writing campaign to every interested arts party in the city.

On February 14, 1963, scarcely two months after setting up his first committee, Southam announced the creation of a new organization: the National Capital Arts Alliance.⁶ It was made up of fifty-five local arts groups ranging from the fully professional and established Ottawa Philharmonic to the amateur but long-standing theatre company, the Ottawa Little Theatre. His diplomat’s approach—charming, interested, flattering, and positive—worked magic and, with a politician’s instincts, he made sure no group was neglected. Besides the Jewish faction in the city, he enlisted prominent local French Canadians, among them member of Parliament Oswald Parent, the Queen’s printer Roger Duhamel, the powerful developer Robert Campeau (who was already changing the face of Ottawa with his high-rise office buildings), and other more modest figures such as Jean-Paul Desjardins, the city’s leading pharmacist among the francophone community. By May there were few in the city with whom Southam and his team had not made contact, with one significant exception. That holdout was Ottawa’s mayor, the fractious Charlotte Whitton, who had not responded to any of his letters and made it clear she was “not yet ready to receive the Alliance.”⁷

Nevertheless, by the first week in May, the Arts Alliance was ready to put the feasibility study to tender, and donors were sought to pay for its estimated $12,000 to $20,000 cost. Supporters for what would become known as the Brown Book reflected Ottawa society of the day. Among Southam’s friends was his cousin-in-law, lawyer (later Senator) Duncan MacTavish, who was not only active in politics as president of the federal Liberal Party, but had strong connections with the city’s banks and trust companies. MacTavish had no hesitation in rustling money from them and also using them to network through the important local business community, including industrial interests such as the E.B. Eddy Company. Southam drew on his high-placed diplomatic contacts, asking the French ambassador to obtain details about similar complexes that were being built in Le Havre and in Caen. And he made sure that Sam Berger, who had his own Development Committee for a Performing Arts Centre, and Lawrence Freiman, another prominent Jewish businessman who was working towards a Centennial Festival, merged their interests with those of the Arts Alliance. He even wrote to Vincent Massey, who was summering at his country retreat, Batterwood, near Port Hope. Although the former governor general declined to make a donation, he sent moral support and advice: the committee should be sure to choose a good name for the new complex, he said, “something that will be hard to get rid of.”⁸ Naming would be a perplexing and much-discussed issue in the years to come.

Harking on the theme of the centre’s national importance in the capital, Southam sent requests to Dr. Albert Trueman, the director at the Canada Council, and to Dennis Coolican, the chair of the National Capital Commission, soliciting $5,000 from each of them to help pay for the study. Clearly he was confident of success: on May 24 the contract was let to Dominion Consultants for a projected cost of $20,000. Within a few short months this group would produce the Brown Book, the tool that went on to secure federal government approval and became the conceptual blueprint for the National Arts Centre itself—the basis for the architectural drawings and other planning on which the centre would be built.

All through that summer of 1963, the lobbying process and the discussions surrounding the project continued. Peter Dwyer, the assistant director of the Canada Council and a former British intelligence agent, played devil’s advocate at informal dinners and drinks with Southam. Erudite and deeply intelligent, Dwyer, although a keen supporter of the new centre, felt compelled in a personal letter to Southam to set out his concerns that Canada should perhaps focus on assisting artists to develop their work before constructing a massive emporium in which to house them.⁹ Despite this questioning, however, the growing momentum behind the project mounted. In late August, Southam had a “sympathetic” meeting with Maurice Lamontagne, the federal minister in charge of culture. Lamontagne, a suave and courtly French Canadian, had broad political influence as the Quebec lieutenant in Pearson’s cabinet. Also at the meeting was John Fisher, a former broadcaster known for his boosterism as “Mr. Canada” and the man assigned to run Canada’s Centennial Commission. By the end of the month, so much enthusiasm had been generated that Southam and Heeney were already contemplating possible appointments for the new centre’s board of directors.

Word of the proposed centre quickly spread through the small Canadian arts community. The enterprising Toronto-based conductor and musician Niki Goldschmidt heard the gossip and checked in by letter from Europe. Southam responded by asking him to collect some material at the Edinburgh Festival while he was there and to pay a call on its director, Lord Harewood, an old Southam friend who was also the Queen’s cousin. Meanwhile, the networking through the social salons of Ottawa continued. Yousuf Karsh, the international society photographer who would live with his second wife in a residential suite at the Château Laurier, was among those who entertained guests in order to support the idea.

In early September, Mayor Charlotte Whitton telephoned at last. She mischievously told Southam that she favoured the old Union Station as a site for the new centre because “it has an exact replica of ‘the Baths of Caracalla’ in it and would be perfect for staging Greek dramas.”¹⁰ More seriously, she warned Southam off the Nepean Point location that was being considered because “there are caves under part of the land which could collapse and the rest is solid rock which would be very expensive to excavate.” She related to him “the shocking cost” to the city of having to run a sewer pipe under similar conditions into the French Embassy just down the street. What Whitton really wanted was to choose the site—and she had one in mind. Eventually she offered him a parcel of land at the heart of the city on Confederation Square, just diagonally across from Southam’s own office in the Langevin Block. He was delighted.

The volunteer activities of these senior diplomats, Southam and Charpentier, had been noticed by their political boss, External Affairs Minister Paul Martin. When he nervously queried his deputy minister Norman Robertson about what these two were up to, Robertson replied in a wry memo that yes, they were busy outside office hours “in the cause of the arts,” but, he added, “I am sure they will not embarrass us.”¹¹

The site selected for the centre was at the heart of the capital. Photo © NAC.

On October 24 the Brown Book, the feasibility study put together by Dominion Consultants, was delivered to the National Capital Arts Alliance. Southam made sure that copies were swiftly circulated to all the key figures who could influence the final decision. Pearson and George McIlraith, the minister of public works and so-called Ottawa minister in cabinet, received copies, as did civil servant Robert Bryce, the deputy-secretary to the Treasury Board, and John MacDonald, the deputy minister of public works. C.M. “Bud” Drury, now head of the National Capital Commission, was on the list, along with Governor General Georges Vanier. A copy was deposited at the Ottawa Public Library for the benefit of the local citizenry, but the frugal organizers insisted that anyone else wanting copies had to pay $4.50 each for them.¹² Five days later, the Arts Alliance organized a lunch in the Parliamentary Restaurant for all the region’s parliamentarians.

Southam and his group were determined to lay the groundwork carefully for the moment when the plan would come before the government: they not only worked directly with the politicians but also solicited letters from high-powered individuals in banking, industry, and the arts world. In addition, a small nucleus of brilliant senior civil servants who knew the ways of government assisted Southam in preparing for his government dealings. They included Jack Harrison at Forestry and David Golden at Defence, who, after moving on to be the first head of Telesat Canada, would later become a feisty NAC trustee. Their arguments were persuasive: “The building will complete the Capital in a spiritual as well as physical sense,” they said. “It will help recruitment to the public service in both languages.” And, they added naively, “the initial price tag seems nominal at a mere $9 million.”¹³

Peter Dwyer was the lone naysayer. Although he supported Southam, he continued to think, as someone associated with the Canada Council, that a massive subsidy of the arts should precede a costly building. He accurately pinpointed the fact that, in his opinion, “Ottawa has nothing of quality to offer” and that “the future would better lie in touring companies and attracting ballet, opera and orchestras from Toronto and Montreal where pre-paid expenses would assist costs.”¹⁴ Southam ignored the advice and continued to work with Golden and others towards the design of future operations, which would “include a small board … to protect the government from artistic matters.” He kept up a persistent and thorough correspondence with anyone who could affect the final decision, and he collected a dossier of courteous and optimistic replies, including letters from the opposition party leaders—John Diefenbaker of the Progressive Conservatives, Tommy Douglas of the NDP, and Robert Thompson of the Social Credit—as well as from prominent figures in Canada’s arts world.

The preparation was impeccable, and when the invitation came from the Prime Minister’s Office to meet with the Arts Alliance group in early November, Southam wrote an enthusiastic note to its secretary, Jack Harrison, that “a ground swell of public opinion should carry us irresistibly through the Prime Minister’s door.” That moment came on November 8, 1963, when Southam and a small delegation were asked to make their way up to Parliament Hill late in the afternoon to meet with Mr. Pearson in his office.

National Capital Arts Alliance members David Golden, Hamilton Southam, and Louis Audette after their November 1963 meeting with Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, which had the “happy result”of his full support for the arts centre project. Photo © Ottawa Citizen/UPI. Reprinted by permission.

Less than a week later, the members of the National Capital Arts Alliance were informed that the meeting had gone well. Pearson wrote back to Southam confirming his support and advising that the matter would go before Cabinet within days. In the Prime Minister’s Office, Gordon Robertson, clerk of the Privy Council and secretary to the cabinet, prepared the minute for Pearson to present to Cabinet, and, over at External Affairs, Deputy Minister Norman Robertson briefed his minister, Paul Martin, suggesting that he be supportive in Cabinet when the matter came up.¹⁵ From the Senate, the Conservative Gratton O’Leary sent Southam a handwritten note assuring him that he had taken care of the matter with Diefenbaker. A momentary flurry in the preparations occurred when the Canadian Legion confused the Ottawa plan with a similar project intended as a war memorial that was under construction in San Francisco. Once Southam replied to their letter, politely disabusing them of this notion, they too came firmly on side.

Word of the project ignited interest everywhere, and letters started to trickle in to Southam’s office from theatre and arts professionals who were interested in a future at the new complex. One of the first résumés received was from David Haber, who was then engaged, along with several other future NAC staffers, in planning the six-month artistic extravaganza that would run at Expo 67 in Centennial Year. Haber would join the NAC as soon as his Expo duties were over and become its brilliant one-man programming department during its first several years.

Southam was at a social reception at the National Gallery on December 11 when he picked up gossip that the proposal for the National Arts Centre had been approved by Cabinet a few days before. On December 23 the Ottawa project was formally announced. The plan had gone from enthusiastic suggestion to formal approval in just nine months, and Southam recorded this “most excellent” Christmas gift in his diary. Immediately, he was inundated with congratulatory messages, but there was no time to lose and, on December 30, the first meeting of a government-sponsored Interdepartmental Committee convened to start work on the future complex. Southam handed over a variety of letters he had received from architects and others interested in working on the project. With Gordon Robertson in the chair, the new arts centre was now officially designated a “work in progress.”