George Robson Pattullo

Brother of Mary (Pattullo) Short, and father of T. D. “Duff” Pattullo, Premier of British Columbia from 1933 to 1941, and of the writer George Pattullo (1879-1967), who carried his name. Born at Caledon on 8 April 1845 and raised from the age of ten in Blenheim Township, Oxford County, he went into the newspaper business at Woodstock. In 1870 he took over the management and editorship of the Woodstock Sentinel, the Reform weekly founded in 1854, and in 1875 his brother Andrew joined him as junior partner. He ran the paper until 1880, “when he became chief Liberal organizer for Ontario,” and Andrew bought out his interest (the Oxford County Archives, source; Cochrane, source). He was president of the Canadian Press Association in 1884-85, Registrar of Deeds for Oxford County from 1886 until his death (Wikipedia’s article on Duff, from Fisher, source; “Registrar” in the 1901 census), and in 1904-06 president of the Ontario Historical Society (research/ellingwood/Ellingwood_Wives_Families.md). A Caledon local history remembers him as “Good Roads Pattullo,” “the father of the movement in Ontario” (Trimble, as WikiTree quotes her); the first president of the Ontario Good Roads Association, in 1894, was his brother Andrew.

He married Mary Ann “Minnie” Rounds in Middlesex County on 22 January 1868 (record). The 1881 census found them at Woodstock, George an editor, with Ethelyn [Ethelwyn], James B. R., Thomas D. (Duff, born in 1873), Pearl B. M., Kate A. and George R. Minnie died in 1884, and on 16 January 1888, at Belleville, he married Frances Camilla Biggar (1850-1913). In 1891 the household held Ethel, James B., Dufferin, Pearl, Kate, George R., Mary D. and Andrew, and in 1901 Kate A., Mary D. and William A. (the censuses, as WikiTree cites them; source). His eldest, Ethelwyn Eliza (1868-1965, Mrs. Ballantyne), was very possibly the cousin whose name Mary (Pattullo) Short gave her daughter Ruth Ethelwyn [I].

The family’s house at Woodstock was “Burnside.” There, in 1876, his brother Thomas, home from the Cariboo with gold for the Philadelphia Centennial, threw a handful of $20 gold pieces on the ground for the children to scramble for, and three-year-old Duff caught one (Duff’s recollection, 1941, and Robin Fisher’s life of him, as Bourdon gives them). George’s papers, the George Robson Pattullo fonds, are in the BC Archives (MS-1188); they hold Duff’s letter to him from Bennett of 1 May 1898, on meeting Thomas’s friend Captain Jack Crawford on the way to the Klondike, and Crawford’s poem on Thomas’s death, “Under the Snow” (source).

He was his son’s agent in the Klondike years. He syndicated Duff’s letters from the trail to the Globe and other papers, and ran them in the Sentinel. When Commissioner Ogilvie overrode Duff’s appointment in the Gold Commissioner’s Office and sent him to winter at Fort Selkirk in 1898, Duff appealed to the Minister of the Interior, Clifford Sifton, and “on the very day that Pattullo wrote to the minister, Sifton was visiting Woodstock at George Pattullo’s invitation.” In 1901-02 George and his brother Andrew both wrote to Sifton for Duff’s permanent appointment, and in 1902 for his back pay. Forty years on, when Newton Rowell, once the member for North Oxford, chaired the federal commission on dominion-provincial relations, he was “reminded of Duff’s father and the great interest that Pattullo senior [had] taken in his early public career” (Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia, pp. 37, 51, 63, 67, 322, source).

He died at Woodstock on 23 April 1922, aged 77, and is buried at the Woodstock Presbyterian Cemetery, where his mother lies, under a stone with both his wives: “In loving memory of Mary Rounds, wife of George R. Pattullo, born 1850 - died 1884; George Robson Pattullo, born 1845 - died 1922; Frances Camilla Biggar, his wife, 1850-1913.” His Find a Grave memorial has a studio portrait of him, bearded (source).

Open questions

• His obituary (the Sentinel-Review, April 1922), and the years of his registrarship.
• His presidencies of the Canadian Press Association and the Ontario Historical Society, from their own reports.