Stursberg, Peter, 1913-2014 : Arthur Lewis Peter Stursberg was born 31 August 1913 at Chefoo, China, the son of Walter Arthur Stursberg and Mary Ellen Shaw. Stursberg's parents met in Foochow, China where his maternal grandfather, Captain Samuel Lewis Shaw, was for many years the Marine Surveyor for the British merchant fleet at Pagoda Anchorage. His maternal grandmother was Japanese but known only to her children as "Ellen O'Sea". Stursberg's father, W. Arthur Stursberg, had left London, England in 1906 to work for the Chinese Post Office, an agency run by the Western powers. His parents married in 1912 and lived in China wherever his father's career with the Post Office took them. Peter Stursberg spent his early childhood in the cities of Chefoo, Beijing, and Kaifeng. In 1924, he and his brother Richard were sent for their education to the Bedford School in England. Their mother accompanied them but their father was posted to Chengtu in the Szechwan province. The political crisis in China in 1927 convinced W. Arthur Stursberg to resign his position with the Post Office and move to Canada to work for Canadian Industries in Montreal. He found himself unemployed in the Depression, however, and in 1932 he moved with his family to Victoria, British Columbia.
Peter Stursberg had attended McGill University briefly but went out west to join his family in 1932 and worked at odd jobs before becoming a reporter in 1934 for the Victoria Daily Times. He went to the London Daily Herald in 1938 and then returned to Canada to join the Vancouver Daily Province in 1939. He became a news editor with the CBC in Vancouver in 1941 and then, after a brief enlistment in the Royal Canadian Navy in late 1942, became a war correspondent for the CBC. Stursberg went overseas where he built a national reputation for his coverage of the Canadian troops in action. He published a book in 1944, Journey Into Victory, based on this experience. In 1945 he left the CBC and returned to the Daily Herald as a roving foreign correspondent. From 1950 to 1956 he was the CBC correspondent at the United Nations and wrote a column on the UN for several Canadian newspapers. Stursberg joined the Toronto Star in 1956 as the Ottawa editorial page correspondent but left in 1957 to work briefly as a research officer (with speech writing responsibilities) for Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. He was appointed press officer to the Canadian Trade Mission to the United Kingdom in 1957 and later, in 1958, secretary of the Trade Mission in Ottawa.
About this time, Stursberg joined the ownership group formed by Ernest Bushnell to apply for a television license for the CJOH station in Ottawa. As a result, he became a television newscaster and commentator for CJOH and the CTV network in 1960 and continued with them until his retirement in 1973. Stursberg wrote and published three books during this period: Agreement in Principle (1961), Those Were The Days (1969), and Mister Broadcasting: the Ernie Bushnell Story (1971). After this last project, he began researching and writing two books on the Diefenbaker era: Diefenbaker: Leadership Gained, 1956-62 (1975) and Diefenbaker: Leadership Lost, 1962-67 (1976). He based the books on extensive interviews with leading Canadian political figures of the 1950s and 1960s. Following the same oral history approach, he treated Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson in his next two books: Lester Pearson and the Dream of Unity (1978) and Lester Pearson and the American Dilemma (1980). During the 1970s he also undertook a joint Oral History Project with the National Archives and the Library of Parliament to interview prominent Canadian politicians about their lives in politics.
Stursberg joined the Department of Canadian Studies at Simon Fraser University as an Instructor in 1980 and was an adjunct professor there from 1982 to 1988. During this period he wrote and published four books, often following an interview-based approach: Extra! When the Papers had the only News (1982), Gordon Shrum: An Autobiography (1986, co-authored), The Golden Hope: Christians in China (1987), and Roland Michener: The Last Viceroy (1989). Since 1990, he has written and published two books with academic presses: The Sound of War: Memoirs of a CBC Correspondent (1993), a personal memoir of his wartime service, and No Foreign Bones in China: Memoirs of Imperialism and its Ending, a study of his family's long relationship with China.
Peter Stursberg married Jessamy Robertson in 1946 and they had two children. Stursberg received the Canadian Radio Award in 1950 and was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1996. Jessamy Stursberg died 19 August 2008 at their home in West Vancouver. Peter Stursberg died 31 August 2014 in Vancouver.
