OTTAWA – Helen Brimmell, 96, hasn’t just had a front seat to Canada’s history as only the third woman to become a member of the parliamentary press gallery and cover the nation’s war-time 1940s politics.
The former Canadian Press reporter, who was acknowledged Wednesday in the House of Commons along with former CP reporter Bernard Dufresne in tribute to the 150th anniversary of the press gallery, also figures she’s the last person alive who actively worked on the campaign to make women persons under Canadian law.
“I think I can say without fear of being wrong that I am the last living person who actually worked — in a way — on the famous ‘persons’ case, the Famous Five,” Brimmell said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
Her mother, Clara Holland, was an activist campaigning for women’s suffrage in the 1920s, working to get signatures on petitions to send to the government.
Holland would arrange, through women’s groups such as the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, to hold meetings at various Owen Sound churches, where her five-year-old daughter Helen Bannerman would help hand out sign-up sheets and then collect them in 1925.
Bannerman (later Brimmell after marrying) would go on to a half-century-long career as a journalist for a variety of publications, but she started as a 23-year-old wire service reporter in 1943, quickly earning a place among “the boys” covering Parliament Hill.
“I was the only girl in the (press) office, and I think they thought I was sort of cute and thought I was their mascot. They were awfully nice to me,” Bannerman said, adding she looked “about 16.”
“Indeed, I had to carry my birth certificate with me all the time to get served alcohol,” she said with a laugh.
“Many a time — I’m ashamed to say this — I have heard things simply because people thought that I was just the ‘go-fer’ and talked in front of me incautiously. I didn’t complain.”
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the parliamentary press gallery, which actually incorporated a year before Confederation in order to cover the fledgling government. Canada, of course, celebrates its sesquicentennial in 2017, while The Canadian Press will be marking a century as the country’s national news service next year.
Brimmell has witnessed a great deal of it.
Her work covering the House of Commons war assets disposal committee — which was selling off millions of dollars worth of war assets that ranged all the way from canned rations to airfields — led to her eventual parliamentary press gallery membership in 1946.
Bannerman’s beats were “women’s services” and Rideau Hall, but she often covered committee hearings to fill in for other reporters.
By the third day of the 1944 war asset committee hearings that were to go on for the better part of two years, young Bannerman was the only reporter left in attendance.
She recalls being at committee when several competing buyers almost fought as they bid millions on a large Winnipeg airfield. Today it’s the Winnipeg International Airport.
“I thought, ‘Well, well, well, I should be a member of the press gallery.'”
After dropping many hints “into suitable ears,” Bannerman finally won membership in 1946 — while being warned not to try to attend the annual, off-the-record press gallery dinner.
During the war years, Princess Alice, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, was the vice-regal consort at Rideau Hill. The wife of the Earl of Athlone, who was governor general, was a patron to many causes “and I trotted around behind her,” said Brimmell.
She interviewed colonels, cabinet ministers, and covered Supreme Court hearings — frequently drawing shocked reactions to her gender and youth.
Yet despite being a trailblazer in a male-dominated reporting world, Brimmell says she never felt out of place.
“I felt just like one of the crew … one of the boys.”
She left the parliamentary press gallery in 1950, but never stopped reporting.
“I never did anything else but journalism, I was a journalist for 50 years,” said Brimmell, who turned 96 on the weekend. She suffers from arthritis but still laughs long and often straight from the belly.
She still seems to consider herself “one of the boys.”
Without prompting, Brimmell cites the biggest change in political journalism as “the business of women’s place getting so hot and heavy.”
Which brings her back to 1920s Owen Sound and the fight to make women persons under Canadian law.
“I think I can safely say I’m the last living person who worked on (suffrage), so you can see that I have an interest in these things. And I do not like the way the women’s movement has gone because it’s now just got to: ‘we hate men.’ My mother and her colleagues must be whirling in their graves.”
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