Anderson, formerly Montreal Gazette biz editor

Hugh Anderson, the former business columnist and business editor of the Montreal Gazette, died Wednesday from cancer. He was 74.

Jan Ravensbergen of the Gazette writes, “Of British working-class roots, Anderson joined The Gazette in May 1981, after finance-writing stints with the Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. He became The Gazette’s widely read business columnist in 1984 — forthrightly chronicling conservative views without fear or favour – and served as business editor from late 1986 to 1990, when he turned his skills to editorial writing. On retiring from full-time journalism in late 1992, he embarked on a second career as a stockbroker and freelance writer.

“Affectionately dubbed ‘Uncle Hughie’ by his co-workers, Anderson was a man who, to outsiders anyway, for many years epitomized British reserve and sang-froid.

“But, in the words yesterday of his son by his first marriage, Colin Anderson, 46, ‘he was very passionate about everything he did.’

“That passion rose to his surface in recent years, as Anderson transformed his public face — as a hard-driving, dollars-and-cents newsman who authored three books on personal finance and taught financial journalism at Concordia University — into another, larger and quite remarkably personal dimension.”