An estate is an honest document. It lists what a man did rather than what he said he would do.
Three months after George Melrose Bell was buried, a well came in under the foothills southwest of Calgary and made his younger son independent of everything the father had left behind. What the father left behind was a bill. Bell died on 19 March 1936, and the bill was not the Calgary newspaper he owned. In 1929 he had bought the Vancouver Star, and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography states the outcome without decoration. “This acquisition would leave his estate owing over $400,000.” Seven years later the son bought the Calgary paper out of that estate and cleared the debt.
That is a harder story than the one usually told. The usual one hands a young man a failing asset and credits him with turning it around. What happened is narrower. He was handed nothing. A bank held the paper, the estate held the loss, and the loss had been run up on a decision made in another province when he was a schoolboy. Nobody could have made him go near it.
He went near it.
Key facts
- The Dictionary of Canadian Biography records that George Melrose Bell bought the Vancouver Star in 1929 and that the purchase left his estate owing over $400,000 at his death on 19 March 1936.
- University of Calgary Archives records that G. Max Bell purchased the Calgary Albertan from his father’s estate in 1943 and remained its publisher until 1972.
- The Max Bell Foundation states that Max Bell held a 1% stake in the Turner Valley Royalties well, which came in during 1936, and that Bell repaid his father’s debts within two years of the 1943 purchase.
- The Max Bell Foundation was endowed with $17 million in FP Publications stock shortly before Bell’s death on 19 July 1972.
- University of Calgary Archives records that the Calgary Albertan was sold to Toronto Sun Publishing Corporation in June 1980 and renamed, ending a run that began in 1886.
Where the debt on the Calgary Albertan actually came from
George Melrose Bell and Charles Edwin Campbell bought the Albertan and its publishing company in 1926, divided the holdings two years later, and Bell kept the Calgary paper. In 1929 he went into British Columbia, which was a poor year to buy anything. The debt outlived him by nine years.
The figure is disputed and the dispute is worth naming. Popular accounts, including the Max Bell Foundation’s own history, put it at $500,000 and attach it to the Albertan. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography puts it at over $400,000 and attaches it to the estate. The gap between the two is about $100,000 by our subtraction, and the number is the smaller problem. One version makes the Calgary paper a failing business. The other makes it a working business carrying somebody else’s error, which is a different inheritance and a different decision.
What nobody disputes is the timing. A well called Turner Valley Royalties No. 1 came in on 16 June 1936, three months after the funeral. Bell held 1% of it. He was one of three partners, and that stake paid him double his newspaper salary. From the summer of 1936 forward, his living did not depend on the Albertan.
Then he waited seven years. In 1943 he raised money with the help of four friends, bought the paper out of his father’s estate, and repaid the debts within two years of the purchase, which puts the last of it in 1945. University of Calgary Archives records that he stayed publisher until he died. Nine years of oil income sat between the funeral and the purchase. There was no commercial argument for going back.
Why Max Bell bought a paper he had no need of
A stated principle costs nothing to hold, and holding one has never moved a dollar from one column to another. What a man does with money he already has is the only test that produces evidence, because it is the only situation in which he is free to do nothing at all. Bell was free in 1943. He had oil under him. The bank had the paper, the paper carried his father’s name on the masthead, and the name was the whole of what was at stake.
What followed is on the record. He put the Calvan interests together in 1951, held 77 wells at Redwater, and sold the company to Petrofina in 1955 for $40 million. He formed FP Publications with Victor Sifton in 1959 after the two of them took the Ottawa Journal, became chairman in 1961, and added the Vancouver Sun in 1963 and the Globe and Mail in 1965. Whether that made the largest newspaper group in Canada or one of the largest depends on which account you read, and the only circulation figure on the record puts the papers above 820,000 combined by 1972. He kept horses at Okotoks with Frank McMahon, and a colt of theirs named Meadow Court took the Irish Derby in 1965.
None of this makes 1936 a better year to be alive. It was not. The same decade produced the Vancouver purchase that caused all the trouble, and the man who made it was his own father, working in a trade he knew. Business then was less regulated rather than more honourable. The discipline was not in the air. It sat in one person, and a brother stood in the same position with the same claim.
We are careless with this sort of record, and the carelessness is what makes me angry. There is an arena in Calgary carrying his name, an aquatic centre in Lethbridge, a theatre in Banff, and a foundation that has made grants across Canada since 1972 and now funds work on education, health and the environment. The sources still cannot agree on the year the man was born. The Canadian Encyclopedia and University of Calgary Archives say 1912. The Max Bell Foundation and the standard online account say 1911. We can recite what people announce from a podium and we cannot keep straight what they settled and when. That is the contempt I mean, and it does not arrive as an insult. It arrives as a shrug, and it falls hardest on the people whose work was done with their hands on an asset rather than on a microphone, which is most of the people who ever built anything in this province.
He paid what he did not owe.
