Hugh Graham, 1st Baron Atholstan

After terminating school, he served his apprenticeship as office boy and later business manager under his uncle, E. H. Parsons, a journalist, who published the Commercial Advertiser, and afterwards the Evening Telegraph in Montreal.

After it gained good circulation among workers, Graham, with some business ability, gradually changed it into a respected, powerful, and lucrative newspaper.

His newspapers' editorials greatly influenced the federal government's decision in 1900 to send troops to participate in the British offensive in the Second Boer War.

In May 1917 he was created Baron Atholstan, of Huntingdon in the Province of Quebec in the Dominion of Canada and of the City of Edinburgh,[2] by King George V. This granting of a peerage title to Graham was the final impetus for the drafting of the Nickle Resolution, which requested the Sovereign to cease granting knighthoods and peerage titles to Canadian subjects.

On August 9, 1917, Lord Atholstan's country residence was dynamited by radicals opposed to Canada's military conscription—an issue that Graham supported.