The Clissold Lecture commemorates the life and work of Edward Clissold (1833-1915), who retired in 1910 as editor of the London (Ontario) Advertiser after 33 years on its staff.
Born in Gloucester, England, a printer who became a journalist and served his apprenticeship in the United States, “Clis” worked for several years in the late 1860s on the New York Herald under Horace Greeley, the great abolitionist and 1872 presidential candidate. A colleague who remembered him in an obituary essay said that Clissold “could talk with familiarity not only of London of the middle of the century, but of men and places he had seen during his travels about the States as a journeyman printer.”
“With a printer’s stick for a passport and a printer’s rule for transportation,” wrote his colleague in 1915, “he made his way from New York to New Orleans before the Civil War. He was working his way down the Mississippi about the same time Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was getting his experience as a river pilot.
Edward Clissold’s son, Malcolm, later became a journalist on the Buffalo Courier. His great-grandson, Robert Fulford, former editor of Saturday Night who received an honorary degree from the University in 1988, continues the family’s tradition of journalism in Canada.
Edward Clissold also was survived by a daughter, Abbie Blount, whose son was Robert Blount, a New York architect. It was a bequest in 1984 from the estate of Robert Blount and his wife, Rose, that enabled the Graduate School of Journalism to found a series of lectures to commemorate one of London’s most important early editors and journalists.