Andrew Dyas MacLean

Andrew Dyas MacLean (November 20, 1896 – January 22, 1971), Canadian naval officer, journalist, and publisher. His role in a controversy over Canadian naval operations in 1943, near the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, continues to be debated by Canadian naval historians. In 1943 MacLean’s criticisms of the leadership of the Royal Canadian Navy, based on his personal experience and published in one of his magazines, led to questions in the House of Commons about the management of naval operations. Further investigations later that year eroded beyond repair the naval minister’s confidence in Vice-Admiral Percy Nelles, until then chief of the Canadian naval staff, and Nelles was replaced early in 1944.

Andrew MacLean was born in Toronto, the only child of Hugh Cameron MacLean and Elizabeth (‘Bessie’) Emma Matilda (née Dyas) MacLean. His mother died when he was six months old and he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Emma Ball Dyas. His grandfather, Thomas W. Dyas, was the advertising and circulations manager of The Toronto Mail and of the Toronto Empire, and a founder of A. McKim and Company, the first advertising agency in Canada. MacLean was educated at Appleby College, Upper Canada College, and University of Toronto Schools.

In the 1880s and 1890s, MacLean’s father Hugh and uncle John Bayne Maclean — they adopted different spellings of their surname – worked together to build a substantial Canadian publishing enterprise. In 1899 J.B. Maclean bought out his brother and assumed full control of the Maclean Publishing Company, which later became Maclean-Hunter and then Rogers Communications. Hugh MacLean built a separate company, Hugh C. MacLean Publications, later part of Southam Publishing, then Canwest and then Postmedia News.

J.B. Maclean’s son and heir Hector Andrew Fitzroy MacLean died in 1919, and he soon after proposed that Andrew MacLean, his nephew, succeed to a controlling interest in his publishing empire. Andrew MacLean, however, would make his business career with his father at Hugh C. MacLean Publications. Control of Maclean-Hunter eventually passed to Horace T. Hunter and other associates of J.B. Maclean, including Floyd Chalmers.

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