The Life and Times of G Cecil Morrison: The Happy Baker of Ottawa

Peter Martin is a senior projects editor at the University of Ottawa
Press.

Morrison was a turn-of-the-century farm boy who moved to Ottawa to make
his fortune, and did, twice.

In partnership with Dick Lamothe, Morrison built a one-room, one-wagon
bakery into Standard Bread, the industry’s national giant in the
1920s. Came the crash and Standard Bread went down. The partners started
again. Morrison Lamothe prospered in Ottawa as long as people bought
their baked goods from route salesmen. When that business disappeared,
the company moved into frozen bakery products. And there it remains,
moderately prosperous.

So far, so dull. But wait, there’s more. As this narrative has it,
Morrison was a hard-drinking, high-living predator in the Standard Bread
years. Then, a ruined man, he met Frank Buchman, founder of the Oxford
Group (later Moral Rearmament). He embraced Buchman’s principles—a
headily simplistic distortion of Christian ethics with unattractive
authoritarian overtones—reformed himself and went on to do good works
(and get rich again).

Or so he says, in this first-person narrative. But the title page
reveals that the autobiography is “as told to his daughter and
son-in-law, Grete and Reg Hale.” The considerable felicity of the
prose suggests that Reg, a published author (he has produced two books
on Scottish Dark Ages history), wrote it.

At least five years elapsed between completion of the manuscript and
publication. The delay was caused by family disagreements. Morrison had
three strong-willed daughters. Gay Cook is a food maven and entrepreneur
who is married to an influential Bill Davis-era Ontario Tory. Grete Hale
rebuilt the family business. And Jean Piggott is (currently) head of the
National Capital Commission. One suspects the delay in publication was
due to the role Moral Rearmament plays in the story. Grete and Reg are
still followers; Grete’s sisters are not.

A curious book, gracefully written and very well illustrated.
Practitioners of Moral Rearmament are enjoined to embrace four absolute
principles. One of them is honesty. People who knew Cecil Morrison may
therefore be puzzled by his “autobiography.”