The Tuesday Club: Writer Jackie Webster gives up gavel at long-running Wednesday lunch

It's a lunch date Jackie Webster has kept for 32 years.

Now she wears a lanyard around her neck with a nitroglycerin pack because of a heart condition, and she needs help getting to the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel in Fredericton every Wednesday.

But she wouldn't miss lunch with her friends.

Today they gather in the Webster Room, a private room in the restaurant with Jackie Webster's last name etched on the door.

Webster has been a fixture in the political arena in New Brunswick since the 1960s, working as a writer and journalist.

She and a good friend, the well-known political analyst and commentator Dalton Camp, started a Tuesday lunch club after Frank McKenna's Liberals swept to power in 1987.

"After McKenna took over ... there were all those politicians sort of out of jobs, and we figured there should be something, and we should do something with them," Webster says.

Civil servants, lawyers, politicians and the occasional journalist gathered on Tuesdays to discuss and debate the news and current events of the day and perhaps to share gossip.

Then they had to change the lunch day because Camp couldn't make it on Tuesdays.

"So we changed the name to the Tuesday Club That Meets on Wednesday, and that's the way it's been ever since," Webster says.

She and former deputy justice minister Gordon Gregory are the only surviving members of the original group. At the table today are three journalists, three lawyers and an accountant.

They share food and conversation and an affection for Webster.

Lawyer Gary Miller, who served on Dennis Oland's defence team at his first murder trial, says he first met Webster at former premier Richard Hatfield's marijuana trial. A few years later, he had dinner with Webster and Gregory and his wife and got an invitation to join the club.

It was an honour, Miller says.

"I hadn't been involved in a group since boy scouts in Grade 7 for one year," he says, making his lunch companions laugh.

Miller is one of the few non-retirees in the group now, and if he is in Fredericton and available on Wednesday, he goes to lunch.

"It's a good bunch and I get to think about all kinds of stuff, that I often don't think about."

'In love' with journalism

As a young woman, Webster caught the eye of Lord Beaverbrook, when the newspaper baron was visiting New Brunswick. The next year, they danced together at the University of New Brunswick Law Ball in Saint John, and Beaverbrook pressed her on why she wasn't at university herself. 

Then he helped her attend UNB. 

"I always felt I had to make him proud," she says.

Webster knew journalism would be her life after going to work for the Telegraph-Journal.

"My first day in the newsroom, I just fell in love with the whole place. It was that simple."

She went on to write for Maclean's magazine and the Globe and Mail and as a columnist for the Telegraph-Journal.

Along the way, the one-time heavy smoker learned hypnosis to help smokers who wanted to quit, reported for a newspaper that friends started in Bathurst, and travelled to far-flung places, often with one of her three daughters.

She also wrote speeches for Hatfield, who became part of the lunch club.

"I liked the way he spoke, I liked what he says," Webster says of the Progressive Conservative premier whose party was shut out by McKenna in 1987. "I liked his values, and so I was able to write in his voice.

"So it worked beautifully for both of us … he wrote me a letter the day after he was ousted and said, 'Thank you for the hundreds and thousands of words you have given me.'"

Wide-ranging conversations

Hatfield is one of many recognizable names who have been part of the Tuesday Club. You have to be invited by a member to join and are considered a member until you die or move away.

This week, the current affairs conversation topics include U.S. politics and developments in the Trump administration, the SNC-Lavalin affair in Canada, and Dennis Oland's second murder trial.

Webster sits quietly through most of it, her framed picture on the wall behind her and a wooden gavel on the table in front.

"That's what I use to keep order with this rowdy bunch of men," she says.

Often Webster, has been the only woman at the table, and though some would consider her a pioneer in political journalism, she doesn't like that description.

"I hate all that stuff, you know. First of all, to me, it puts women down. I would rather be part of a thing. I don't like the sound of it. I never saw myself as a first."

Chris Morris, who spent much of her own long journalism career working out of the legislative building for The Canadian Press, was invited into the club about a year ago but has known Webster for years.

She calls Webster a mentor.

"She's truly an inspiration," Morris says. "I arrived in New Brunswick in '79 as a young journalist and there was Jackie, and she just knew everybody and everything.

"It's just great to know somebody who knows so much, who's seen so much and has so many great connections, knows all the stories, knows where a lot of the skeletons are, you know? She's been a wonderful, wonderful inspiration for me over all these years."

Club member Alex MacFarlane, a retired lawyer, picks Webster up every week to take her to the lunch even though she lives less than a block from the hotel.

"I adore her," MacFarlane says.

Passing the gavel

But Webster is giving up the lunch-club gavel.

"I have a few mobility issues, and so I think I will have to cut down my appearances, and I'm turning it over officially to Chris Morris," Webster says.

"And she's now in this classless society of ours. She's the new voice."

Webster maintains her tradition of not telling questioning journalists how old she is. Her age has become something of a joke.

Here we are now, this many years later, still close. I think that's quite remarkable.- Jackie Webster, writer and journalist

"It's a cage, and people judge your age, for God's sake," she says. "So I got around it by never saying, but then that took on a life of its own, so everybody wants to know how old I am."

After the passionate and articulate conversation shared over soup, salad and sandwiches, Webster taps her gavel until the talk has quieted and she has everyone's attention,

"I have never been able to get anyone to shut up in all the time I've had it, so Chris may have better luck than I," she says as she passes over the gavel.

Webster says her friends around the table have been supportive during her health challenges, and she still plans to attend the Tuesday Club every Wednesday that she can.

"We thought we could very easily have all drifted apart. Here we are now, this many years later, still close. I think that's quite remarkable now that I think about it."