The Guardian

Obituary: Pierre Berton

Cathryn Atkinson Dec 7 2004

One morning in the late 1950s, the author and journalist Pierre Berton, who has died of complications of diabetes and heart disease aged 84, was invited on a two-day fishing trip. He told his hosts that he had to write two 1,500-word comment pieces for his newspaper, the Toronto Star, to cover his absence. So his friends expected to wait for hours. Thirty minutes later, Berton came out of his office and said, "Done. Let's go."

Berton spoke of having 200,000 words a year in him, either for journalism or one of his detailed, masterful histories. He once produced 60,000 words in five days for a memoir. As a populariser of Canadian history he has no current equal; he also wrote children's books, anthologies, picture books and even a dubious volume of erotic short stories under the nom-de-plume Lisa Kroniuk.

Berton completed 50 books in 50 years. The last, Prisoners Of The North, published this autumn, was an account of adventurers in Canada's arctic region - an apt coda for its author, as it covers the world in which his life began.

Burton was born in Whitehorse, Yukon. He spent his teenage years working in Klondike mining camps, finally going south for a four-year stint at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario. The journalism bug bit hard at university and Berton became, at 21, the youngest news editor of a Canadian daily paper, the Vancouver Sun, in 1942.

He later joined the staff of Canada's national news and comment magazine, Maclean's, in Toronto, where his nationalism took off. He had hoped to work in New York. "My idea was always to go to the States and work for Life magazine or the Saturday Evening Post," he said later. But he had no regrets. "I became a big frog in a little puddle."

He joined the Toronto Star in 1958 and was pushed on to the national stage through television around the same time, joining the current affairs game show, Front Page Challenge. He stayed with it for 38 years. He also fronted the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's public affairs flagship, Close-up.

Through journalism Berton embraced liberal social mores as they arrived in the 1960s; in fact, in many instances he acted as their midwife. He was fired by Maclean's in 1963 for a column he wrote with the headline "Let's Stop Hoaxing The Kids About Sex".

Berton's book, The Comfortable Pew, in which as a lifelong atheist he attacked status quo religiosity, outraged churchgoers. But the wider public came to expect to be challenged by Berton's views.

It was his knowledge of Canadian history that finally won him a popular fan-base and challenged the idea that Canada's past is dull.The affable approachability of his books was criticised by exponents of a more joyless prose, but he held the national interest with his bestsellers.

He won one of his three Governor General's awards for literature for the two-volume epic The National Dream (1970) and The Last Spike (1971), which described the painful creation of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s that had turned Canada into a viable, unified nation extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Berton was a workhorse, even in his last weeks; shy on the surface but symphonic on the page; a hater of small talk and of Quebec separatism. He didn't suffer fools, or bad writing, gladly: "I once told a columnist working for me that I had to rewrite his column just so I could throw it out."

Berton had a keen sense of humour. As a marijuana smoker since the 1960s, he agreed to appear on the CBC satire show, The Monday Report, this October, in support of recent steps towards liberalising marijuana laws. He offered a masterclass on how to roll and light a joint without burning a bow tie (he was famous for his bow ties). He recommended his heavy railway history books as excellent "rolling surfaces".

Berton was part of the liberal-left intelligentsia that could be said to have established Canada's identity as a tolerant and inclusive country in the second half of the 20th century.

He is survived by Janet, his wife of almost 60 years, their eight children and 14 grandchildren.

Pierre Berton, journalist, historian, author and broadcaster, born July 12 1920; died November 30 2004