Tuesday, January 11, 2011

A few weeks ago I received a gracious phone message from a gracious woman with an infectious smile. It was from Martha Lou Henley (Louie if you know her). It seems that she had been awarded the Order of Canada and she needed a portrait to send to the folks in Ottawa. “When I knew I needed a picture you were the first person I thought of,” she said in the message. This is quite a compliment from a woman who has made it part of her life to always have a camera in hand to record the history of her noted family. Louie is known and appreciated as one of our city’s foremost philanthropists of the arts and in particular opera. Opera, classic opera is her real love. She keeps a record of every opera she has attended and notes who all the performers have been. She fondly remembers having seen American soprano Kathleen Battle in one of her first “bit” roles.

As I prepared today to take her picture I decided to explore my photo files. Under Southam I found some portraits that I must have taken around 1983/84 just about when Equity Magazine was started in the premises of Ronald Stern (publisher) and Malcolm Parry’s Vancouver Magazine on the corner of Davie and Richards. Equity, the new city business magazine was the brainchild of Editor Harvey Southam who was the son of Gordon Southam owner of the Vancouver Sun and other newspapera and media across Canada.

Martha Lou Henley

In the file I found some colour and b+w portraits of Harvey Southam’s mother Jean MacMillan Southam who was a noted philanthropist from whom her daughter Martha Lou Henley inherited her generosity towards the arts.

All I remember is that Harvey Southam, with whom I had a special relationship as his main photographer for his magazine had told me, “Alex I want you to photograph my mother at our home on Angus Drive. At the house I remember his mother’s presence and the fact that Harvey asked me to take a quick snap with his first baby daughter, Sydney from his second wife Pia.

Upon opening the file I found inside the envelope with negative of grandmother and granddaughter a 6x7 cm transparency. It was a group photograph of Vancouver Art Gallery director Luke Rombout and his staff. I had forgotten I had taken this picture but the date on the envelope, just December must mean that I must have either taken it in December 1983 (by then the VAG had moved to that location from an old one on West Georgia) or about a year later. This checks with the fact that Equity began in 1983. How that one slide (where are the rest?) managed to be in the envelope I will never know. But it does provide me with the opportunity to show here a bit of our city’s history. Below is the Vancouver Sun obituary on Jean MacMillan Southam which contains so much of that history that we should not forget.

Jean MacMillan Southam

Philanthropist Jean Southam dies
VANCOUVER - If any British Columbian epitomized home-grown blue-blood nobility, it was Jean MacMillan Southam, daughter of the province's most important industrialist and wife of a scion of the famous newspaper family.

By The Vancouver Sun October 26, 2007

VANCOUVER - If any British Columbian epitomized home-grown blue-blood nobility, it was Jean MacMillan Southam, daughter of the province's most important industrialist and wife of a scion of the famous newspaper family.

Southam, a gregarious woman who made her mark as a philanthropist, died Tuesday after a lengthy illness, three days before her 92nd birthday.

"Jeannie," as she was known to her friends, was the doyenne of old-money Vancouver. She grew up as the child of  H.R. MacMillan, the timber baron who arguably had more influence on the development of the province than any other businessman.

MacMillan founded MacMillan Bloedel, which became B.C.'s most prominent company in the decades after the Second World War.

Her place in Vancouver's social hierarchy was further cemented with her 1941 marriage to Gordon Southam, grandson of the founder of what became the Southam newspaper chain.

It was said of the family she came from and the family she married into that "one manufactured the newsprint that the other wrote stories on."

Former B.C. lieutenant-governor Garde Gardom said Southam "was really a great soul. She was very grand, courageous and strong-willed. She knew her stuff and spoke her mind.

"If she liked you, you knew it. And if she didn't like you, you knew that too."

Southam's daughter, Stephanie Carlson, said her mother had a phrase that summed up her philanthropic attitude: "Freely you have received, freely give."

She was born in Victoria but spent most of her youth in the MacMillan family home in Vancouver's Shaughnessy neighbourhood. Summers were always spent at Qualicum Beach, a tradition she maintained with her children.

She met her future husband, a good-looking easterner, at a party in Vancouver just before embarking in 1938 on a trip around the world.

The journey was a gift from her father for graduating from Stanford University. When H.R. MacMillan asked who she would like to accompany her, she replied, "You."

Her relationship with her father was "immensely close," said Nancy Southam, her daughter.

Gardom said Jean Southam "worshipped her father, without question. I think she was his favourite child and he would talk to her about business. She understood the timber industry."

She married Gordon Southam in 1941. The couple lived in Vancouver throughout their adult lives. He died in 1998.

While her life was in many ways a charmed one, it was not without tragedy.

One son, Gordon Southam Jr., died at age 25 in 1976 after a sports car he was driving went out of control and slammed into a gateway on Point Grey Road the day after H.R. MacMillan's funeral.

Another son, Harvey Southam, a Vancouver journalist, died in Toronto in 1991. He was 45.

Jean Southam attended the final meeting of MacMillan Bloedel in 1999 and watched with a tear in her eye as her father's company was folded into the arms of Weyerhaeuser, a U.S. company.

"This wouldn't have happened in Daddy's heyday," she was quoted as saying.

Jean Southam retained throughout her life an enthusiasm for people and conversation, said daughter Nancy Southam.

"She loved to party, loved sitting up till four in the morning, telling stories, drinking champagne and martinis.

"I stayed up with her on Monday night, her last night. And after Mom died, I thought, gosh, here I'd done another all-nighter with Mom.

"But it was very holy thing to go through because it was our last all-nighter."

A memorial service will be held Thursday Nov. 1 at Christ Church Cathedral at 3 p.m.

Luke Rombout and staff

MacMillan Bloedel