Early Life and Family
Black was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to a wealthy family originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba. His father, George Montegu Black, Jr., C.A., was the president of Canadian Breweries Limited, an international brewing conglomerate that had earlier absorbed Winnipeg Breweries (founded by George Black Sr.). Conrad Black's mother was the former Jean Elizabeth Riley, a daughter of Conrad Stephenson Riley, whose father founded the Great-West Life Assurance Company, and a great-granddaughter of an early co-owner of the Daily Telegraph.
Biographer George Toombs said of Black's motivations: "he was born into a very large family of athletic, handsome people. He wasn't particularly athletic or handsome like they were, so he developed a different skill – wordplay, which he practised a lot with his father." Black has written that his father was “cultured humorous” and that his mother was a “natural, convivial, and altogether virtuous person.” Of his older brother George Montegu Black III (Monte), Black has written that he was “one of the greatest natural athletes I have known,” and that though “generally more sociable than I was, he was never a cad or even inconstant, or ever an ungenerous friend or less than a gentleman.”
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