Harry Bruce died on Aug. 18, in Halifax. He was 90.Annabel Bruce/Annabel Bruce
As a boy, Harry Bruce would watch his father scribbling away with a big black pencil on a cheap pad of newsprint while reclined on the living room Chesterfield at their home in Toronto. After toiling all day for The Canadian Press, the older man would kick back and let words flow – words that became celebrated poems and a novel.
Bright, young Harry also had words in his veins, and he came by his own success as a journalist and nonfiction writer by this same method – albeit by putting ball-point pen to paper. It started out as a way to get the top of the story down amid the intimidating clack of typewriters in local and national newsrooms. Later, it was his preferred method to unravel long-form magazine pieces onto the page. Even long after he belatedly embraced word processing, Mr. Bruce still reached for a ball-point pen whenever he was stumped, describing the mode as “some mysterious force of creativity to flow from my brain down through my neck, shoulder, arm, hand and into the fingers.”
A journalist and nonfiction writer for seven decades, Mr. Bruce was prolific. He wrote a shelf-load of books, published award-winning magazine stories and newspaper columns and changed the way the Toronto-based magazine publishing industry viewed writers from “out East.”
Mr. Bruce died on Aug. 18, in Halifax. He was 90. He leaves his wife, Penny Bruce (née Meadows), who typed and edited much of his work; sons, Alec and Max Bruce; daughter, Annabel Bruce; and three grandchildren.
“He was to my mind a brilliant writer,” said Stephen Kimber, a Halifax-based journalist, editor and University of King’s College professor. “You read his stuff and were like ‘Oh I wish I could write like that.’
“He became a regional treasure in many ways.”
William Harry Bruce was born in Toronto on July 8, 1934, to Charles Bruce and Agnes (née King) Bruce. He attended Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., the London School of Economics, and later Massey College at the University of Toronto.
His first reporting gig was covering community affairs at the Ottawa Journal. After several years on the political beat, he took a job at The Globe and Mail. Magazines proved to be more of his forte, however, with more capacity for storytelling, and he soon landed at Maclean’s where he worked as assistant editor among the likes of Pierre Berton and Peter Gzowski, eventually carving out a niche for his own wry voice and conversational style of writing. During the 1960s, he moved up the ranks of Canadian journalism, as managing editor of Saturday Night, founding editor of The Canadian and columnist for the Star Weekly and the Toronto Daily Star.
But soon Mr. Bruce hankered for his Maritime roots. His father came from a long line of Scotsmen in rural Nova Scotia. Mr. Bruce and his young family took up residence on a quiet tree-lined street in south-end Halifax. On the East Coast he embraced freelance writing, penning stories about Atlantic-Canadian subjects for local and national audiences – and in doing so inspired a generation of young writers like Mr. Kimber who modelled his career after that of Mr. Bruce.
“When he first came here, at first he was this Toronto writer who was accorded all sorts of respect by politicians and others. But then as he began to write, they really didn’t like what he wrote. He was not afraid to say what he thought or to quote people,” Mr. Kimber said.
Mr. Kimber recalled how the provincial government tried to have Mr. Bruce fired for his acerbic columns when he worked for the provincial power utility, then called Nova Scotia Light and Power, a private electric and gas utility that at the time was being nationalized by then-premier Gerald Regan. “It was never nasty, but it obviously tweaked their anger. He just did his own thing,” Mr. Kimber said.
Mr. Bruce was also founding editor of Atlantic Insights, named Canada’s magazine of the year by the National Magazine Awards in 1979, and which Mr. Kimber said he believes is still the best – and certainly the most popular – magazine ever to have come from this region. Mr. Bruce also holds a lifetime achievement award of the Atlantic Journalism Awards Association. In the Concise Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature he is referred to as “an essayist of great charm and perception.”
One of his columns that stood out for Mr. Kimber was one where Mr. Bruce wrote about running into a man begging for small change while on his way to the train station and feeling forced to confront his privilege.
“This is at a time when privilege was not something we would have ascribed that to,” Mr. Kimber said, ”but he was confronting who he was with who this other person had been and not feeling very good about himself in a place where he wanted to feel good about himself, which was in this wonderful little luxurious compartment on the train.”
Julia Swan, who edited Mr. Bruce’s last three books, says she was struck by his joy in life, in friendships, in family. She pointed out that in his 2020 memoir, Halifax and Me, he describes one fall day waiting for his grandson to get out of school. He considers himself “the old man and the sea,” among “a sea of mothers,” and thinks: “We’re Canadians and, my God, we’re just the luckiest people on Earth.”
Although he had grown up in Toronto, she said, he knew later in life that he was no longer a big-city person but a man of small cities and towns.
“He brought his keen observation and great verve for life to the East Coast. He knew its people. They were, I’d venture to guess, kindred spirits,” Ms. Swan added.
Through the last several decades of his life, much of Mr. Bruce’s work centred around the identity of the Atlantic region, said Lesley Choyce publisher of Pottersfield Press, which published his last three books.
Mr. Bruce wrote more than 20 nonfiction books – many of them award-winning – on everything from the history of Nova Scotia, to a roundup of famous writers’ habits, and the life and times of Prince Edward Island author Lucy Maud Montgomery.
Known for celebrating the culture and eccentrics of the East Coast, he emulated them, too, in his writing, through his use of humour, recognition of understatements and self-sufficiency.
In his last book, Characters Along the Road, Mr. Bruce reflected on his many years as a journalist interviewing iconic people of Canada including John Diefenbaker, Joey Smallwood, K.C. Irving, R.A. Jodrey, Frank Sobey, Lord Beaverbrook, among others, where in one chapter he chronicles the maddeningly frugal ways of the richest business titans of the Maritimes.
“I could always tell in most of the things he was writing he was having fun as well as telling a good story,” Mr. Choyce said.
As he does with all authors, Mr. Choyce planned to hand deliver the first copy of the book, hot off the press, to Mr. Bruce this summer, but he didn’t get the chance. The book, Mr. Bruce’s 21st, was at the printer when he died.
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