Andrew Pattullo

Brother of Mary (Pattullo) Short, the youngest of the brothers, and a witness at her wedding at Woodstock in 1879 (record). Born at Caledon, he was taught at the public school of Blenheim Township, where the family moved in 1855, then at Dundas High School and the St. Catharines Collegiate Institute, and, after winning the Gilchrist scholarship, at the University of London. He began to read law in London but gave it up for his health, and in 1875 entered the Sentinel office at Woodstock as junior partner to his brother George. In 1880 he bought George out, and soon joined the paper to the Review as the Sentinel-Review; by 1892 the business had grown fourfold, and the firm was himself and his nephew Andrew Laidlaw, the son of his sister Isabella. William Cochrane’s Canadian Album (1892) called him “one of the most able editors west of Toronto … an able platform speaker, and … a power for the Reform party during campaigns”; he was a Presbyterian, and president of the Canadian Press Association in 1890, 1891 and 1892 (source). On 16 October 1889, at Brantford, he married Isabel, fourth daughter of R. Balmer of Oakville; the registration names his father, “Halkett Pattrello” (record).

In 1894 he became the first president of the Ontario Good Roads Association (source). In September 1896, when Oliver Mowat left provincial politics, he won Oxford North for the Liberals at a by-election, and held the seat through three parliaments until his death; in 1899 he sat on the committee on the bill to incorporate the Ontario Historical Society, of which his brother George was later president (source). In 1901 a joint stock company took over the Sentinel-Review.

He used his nephew Duff’s letters from the Klondike in 1897-98 “to score some good political hits in editorials,” and he fought Duff’s battles with Ottawa. In 1901-02 he and George wrote to Clifford Sifton, the Minister of the Interior, for Duff’s permanent appointment as assistant gold commissioner at Dawson, and when Duff resigned in 1902 he pressed Sifton for his back pay “without delicacy”: in the early days Duff “would have been a ‘rare bird’ indeed had he not cut loose once in a while, but when warned by both the minister and his family he had stopped his drinking binges,” and his work alone in the department had been criticized by no one, “from the Minister down.” If that were not enough, he told Sifton, he meant to come “running down to Ottawa to see you personally.” Sifton relented, and Duff got his back pay (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia, pp. 37, 63, 67, source).

His brother Thomas named him executor for his estate in Ontario and the United States in the will of 1876 that left Andrew and their sister Mary $2,000 each. A loose photograph of Andrew, of about 1890, in Thomas’s memorial album suggests that the album stayed in the family (source). He died in London in December 1903, while on a visit, and is buried at Highgate Cemetery. A bequest of his bought the fountain in Museum Square, Woodstock, before the Woodstock Museum: the Pattullo Fountain, tested on 4 December 1916 and formally opened on 29 May 1917 (source).

Open questions

• His death date: 29 Dec 1903 (the Legislative Assembly, Wikipedia) or 28 Nov 1903 (WikiTree). His death notice and his will.
• Whether he and Isabel had children.