Coal Black Heart (24 page)

Somehow the miners had hung on: but after weeks of struggle, out of desperation, they decided to escalate the strike rather than wait for public sympathy to sway the company. Pickets prevented company officials from entering the Glace Bay collieries. At New Aberdeen the miners dumped coal on the rail tracks, cutting off the delivery of coal to the power station. Then, on June 3, they withdrew the last of their maintenance men and drove off the remaining Besco employees at the Waterford Lake power station which supplied electricity and power to the town of New Waterford and its collieries.

I’m standing where the New Waterford miners started to mass: on a field where a sharp winter wind threatens to shear flesh from bone. My father—who played basketball for Glace Bay in the forties—hated playing the New Waterford Strands. For one thing, they were good enough to once win the Canadian juvenile championship. Even worse, the Waterford crowd was spirit-wiltingly tough; to
dribble too close to the sidelines meant risking being poked with a stick, or even stuck with a hatpin.

The last bit was surely apocryphal. But you get the drift. Hard people, not prone to taking a backward step. When Besco ignored the town’s requests for an emergency pumping station, miners formed a committee to keep the local hospital—according to press reports, filled with sick children—supplied with water from nearby wells. Meantime, vandalism picked up. On June 5 Besco police arrested seven New Waterford miners and jailed them in Sydney. A day later the handcuffs were slapped on eleven miners from Reserve Mines and Caledonia for shutting down the maintenance plant at No. 10 mine. Early on June 11 company police retook the power station at Waterford Lake.

At that point the miners had been out for fourteen weeks. They’d been starved, frozen. Governments had abandoned them. Their employer, Besco, had become the epitome of nineteenth-century corporate villainy. And so, on June 11, the crowd at the Waterford ball field began to swell.

I’m retracing their footsteps now, walking into the wind along what was known as the Old Green Road—a path, really—which runs along the rail line that heads west from New Waterford. Eighty-two years ago, between seven hundred and three thousand people, depending upon which source you consult, made their way through the forest. Today, the path is empty of all humanity. After twenty minutes, I emerge at a mostly-frozen lake ringed with a few institutional-looking buildings. There’s one house in view, a couple of hundred yards away. I make for that, walk around back and knock.

“It’s been twenty years since somebody came asking about Bill Davis,” Lloyd (Muzzy) Hogan, seventy-four, says a moment later, inside his kitchen. Small, wiry and bouncing with energy, he shows little wear after a working life spent in the mines. At one
time seventeen families made their homes on the north shore of Waterford Lake, working in the nearby colleries and keeping the power station going. Now he, his wife and their dog are the lone holdouts at the end of a dirt road down to the water.

He wasn’t even born when the mob emerged from the woods that day in 1925. After all this time, questions remain about whether the horses bolted or the police just charged. Whatever the reason, before the union leadership even had a chance to state their demands, the police opened fire. Since many of the miners were veterans—at that time 5,352 Great War soldiers were on the Besco payroll in Cape Breton Island—they stood their ground as the police rode forward on horseback, brandishing nightsticks and firing their revolvers indiscriminately. Several miners were knocked down by horses. Others caught bullets and fell to the ground wounded. Then, though unarmed, the miners fought back, knocking the police from their saddles and pummelling them when they hit the ground.

Within ten minutes the police, who had fired more than three hundred bullets, were in full retreat. Some of them galloped to New Victoria. The ones knocked off their horses made for the woods. Woe to those who weren’t fast enough to outrun the mob: “One policeman found in the woods was severely mauled… bleeding from half a dozen cuts from his face,” said the
Sydney Post.
“Some of them returned where in New Waterford they were once again visited with the fury of the mob, who… after beating them and manhandling them severely dragged them to the town jail and demanded they be locked up.”

The riot, in the words of the
Sydney Post,
was the “result of five months of government inaction, corporation obstinacy, and the accumulated desperation of hungry men.…” But it was no coal community victory, even if they recaptured the power plant and put thirty policemen in hospital. One miner had broken his back,
another was shot in the arm. Gilbert Watson caught a bullet in the stomach. William Davis, all 5’2
ⁿ
of him, took one through the heart.

“We used to play over at the stump where they found him lying,” Hogan explains as we walk down along the lake, past the town’s new generating station. “There were three or four bullet holes in the wood. That’s how we knew it happened there.” At thirty-seven, Davis left behind nine children and a wife pregnant with a tenth. Also a legacy: from then on, every miner in Nova Scotia has downed tools on June 11 to commemorate Davis’s death.

New Waterford had never seen anything like Davis’s funeral. Some five thousand people—even more than at the burials of the sixty-five miners who had died in the 1917 disaster at the Dominion No. 12 mine—arrived from every colliery district in the area to pay their respects. “All were quiet and subdued and a feeling of tragedy seemed to envelop all,” wrote the
Sydney Post’s
reporter. A clergyman stood on the veranda at the house where Davis’s remains were laid out and counselled restraint and reason. The day after the Battle of Waterford Lake, a crowd of six or seven hundred men, women and children still descended on the Besco company store in Sydney Mines and smashed in the big picture windows. What happened next must have been cathartic, as well as the difference between survival and starvation. “Barrels of sugar, bags of flour, canned goods of every description… and clothing were carried out and carted away,” recounted the next day’s newspaper coverage. “Hardly anything of value was left in the main store or basement. … In many cases thieves took off their old clothing and donned new outfits, thus leaving with full cargoes and attired in brand new clothing.” A police officer tried to interfere but was stoned by the crowd. Besco’s wagons were stolen, loaded with goods and never seen again.

All told, more than $500,000 worth of company equipment and property was taken and destroyed in the days after Davis’s death. More troops were dispatched, this time from Quebec City and Petawawa, Ontario to join those in the Sydney area. Miners pelted them with rocks when they arrived. They also promised swift retribution when Premier Armstrong sent out a telegram to churches in Saskatoon who were raising relief funds for Cape Breton, informing them the labour wars on the island had been exaggerated and no outside aid was needed.

On June 26, the day of the provincial election, the miners wreaked their revenge. The Tories took all but three of forty-three Nova Scotia seats, tossing the Liberals out of power for the first time in forty-seven years. Within weeks, Armstrong’s army was disbanded. Edgar Rhodes, the premier-elect, put together a six-month deal that gave the miners the same wage package as in 1922, and gave Besco a rebate on coal royalties for the rest of the contract.

McLachlan watched the events unfold as if from afar. At fifty-six, he was noticeably aged: his UMWA days were over. His reformist zeal still burned bright through the editorials he wrote for the
Maritime Labour Herald
and on the stump during his repeated unsuccessful campaigns, under a variety of left-wing banners, for a seat in Parliament. But his daughter-in-law remembers him spending more and more time in the screened-in porch built onto the farmhouse as the bronchitis he had contracted in Dorchester deepened into tuberculosis. In time, he resigned from the Communist party over what he called its “sad march to the right.” When he died there, on November 3, 1937, he was sixty-eight years old. Yet, his influence and legacy were still apparent in the enactment of the Nova Scotia Trade Union Act, during the same year as his death, which gave workers the right to union recognition, and three years later with the election of a coal miner,
Clarie Gillis, as the first Co-operative Commonwealth Federation member of Parliament east of Manitoba.

A funeral procession a mile long carried McLachlan from Steele’s Hill through the centre of town, then up the hill to the Greenwood Cemetery. At the graveside stood five hundred miners, the scars on their faces livid from the November cold, their heavy clothes bulking their work-hardened bodies. It’s possible that McLachlan’s old co-worker John William Briers, by then sixty-six, made the sombre trek to the graveside. His son Jack, now living in a Sydney Mines two-storey with Margaret and their three girls, Mora, Norma and Joan, likely did not.

Yet I’m willing to bet real money that somewhere in the Glace Bay streets stood Clarence and Mabel Demont, there to say goodbye to her old boss. It’s not even beyond the realm of possibility that their three offspring were there too: Earl, the youngest; Eric, the middle boy; and Russell, by then fourteen. And that when the procession passed, they walked together back to their two-storey house on York Street, just up the road from the Glace Bay brook.

Moore the Magnificent

T
he brook down near the bottom of York Street was maybe ten yards across and froze solid in the winter. During spring breakup, big chunks of ice would float there, suspended. My father, when he was just a kid, would jump from floe to floe, an activity known, for some undetermined reason, as “skooshing the clampers.” The Glace Bay boys had other hobbies. They’d walk down to the harbour and throw a fishing line off the wharf. When snow fell, they’d grab onto the back of one of the town’s few cars—an act known as “hooking a ride”—and let it haul them through the streets. When the ground was clear they’d pitch “glassies,” or marbles—for “keepsies” or just for fun—into holes dug in the soil or off the wall at Central School, across the street from where they lived. They’d play foot’n’ a half, a local version of leapfrog. They’d chew roofing tar still soft and malleable after falling to the street. They’d drink McKinley’s Iron Brew—which looked like cola but tasted like nothing you’d ever encountered before—down at Senator’s Corner, where the town’s three commercial streets met. Occasionally, when the testosterone
was really firing, they’d venture up to Chapel Hill, where the “Prods” would do manly battle with the “Katlicks.” Improbably, no one ever seemed to be seriously maimed, even though some savage snot-nosed battlers strode through the unpaved streets of Glace Bay in their baggy corduroy pants, high-top sneakers and peaked miner’s caps.

Some seventy-five years later, when I asked my father, Russell, to name the most feared of these street urchins he’d reply without hesitation “Donny MacInnis,” who long ago lived on Brookside Street and went by the nickname of “Rugged.” Then he’d invariably turn to one of his favourite subjects—Cape Breton nicknames—and within minutes I’d be laughing right alongside him. Since most of the people who settled Cape Breton came from a few places in a few countries, there was a shortage of names. A single fact, to me, illustrated the problem; at one point the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation, which later took over from Besco, was said to have 650 MacDonalds on the payroll, 150 of whom were named John. A little ingenuity was the only way to keep all those John MacDonalds, those Alexander MacNeils, those James Macleans and Jim MacKinnons separate in a person’s mind. So the DeMonts of York Street grew up near a family known as the Big Pay MacDonalds—so called because an earlier member of the clan had once emptied just two cents out of his pay envelope—and someone known as Horse Shit Dan because at one point he’d had the unenviable task of cleaning up after the pit ponies.

Sometimes the nickname referred to an occupation: the Borehole MacDonalds, or Danny the Bugler. Sometimes it had to do with geography: Art Swamp and his brother, who for some inexplicable reason was called Alec the Pond. Often it denoted a physical characteristic: the Pockmarked Donalds; the Big Archies; Black Angus; Duncan the Nose; Alex the Clock, for a miner with
one arm shorter than the other. Many times, the origins of a name were an out-and-out mystery: the Bullsheep MacNeils, the Weasel MacDonalds, the Red Micks, the Bleeder Campbells. Just as often, names could be traced back to some piece of family history: the Stood the Heat MacNeils, who at some point had done something brave; the Pickle Arse Macleans, who had received that handle not because of a genetic deformity but because a family member had liked to while away the hours sitting on the pickle barrel at the company store.

Once you earned such a handle, it was yours for life—maybe longer. At least, so said Richard MacKinnon, director of the Centre for Cape Breton Studies at Cape Breton University, when I spoke with him one day. To make the point, he talked about a great-uncle living in Glace Bay who stormed the bastions of the company store during the 1925 riot and grabbed a barrel of biscuits during the looting that followed. Though it ended badly—the relative dropped the barrel on his foot, breaking a toe—MacKinnon thought the whole episode was ancient history. Until, that is, the day he arrived at Fredericton’s University of New Brunswick to give a lecture on Highland names. Once the talk was finished, MacKinnon opened the floor for questions. A shaky hand went up in the back of the room.

“Excuse me, Mr. MacKinnon,” said an ancient, quivery, disembodied voice, “but are ye one of the Biscuit Foot MacKinnons?”

In 1933, Stump, Poo Poo, Pick Handle Tony, Burnt Rory, Pudding Head, Cut Worm, Little Pope and every other Cape Breton man or woman was thinking about soup kitchens, work camps and breadlines. Mostly they wondered what the hell had happened. Before the thirties, Canada had supplied half the world’s wheat and more
than 60 percent of its newsprint. Exports of manufactured goods had boomed. So had shipments of minerals, including coal from Nova Scotia, which was making something of a comeback after the postwar slump. On the eve of the stock market crash, the province’s annual coal output topped seven million tons—nearly 60 percent above what it had been four years earlier.

That turnaround was too late for Roy Wolvin. A careful reader of the financial pages would have watched the Besco saga unfolding with the inevitability of Greek tragedy: how the company suspended dividends in 1924 as losses mounted, and how, two years later, the banks denied it bridge financing. From there, Besco—“mighty in name but feeble in earnings,” according to
Time
magazine—began to unravel. By 1927, unable to service its massive debt and with its once high-flying shares grounded, Besco was in receivership. Wolvin tried to reorganize the mess, but the banks wouldn’t buy in. Enter Sir Herbert Samuel Holt, a Montrealer—president of the Royal Bank of Canada and Canada Power and Paper, among a slew of other companies, and reputedly the richest man in Canada. (Peter Newman wrote that around 1930 Montrealers complained, “We get up in the morning and switch on one of Holt’s lights, cook breakfast on Holt’s gas, smoke one of Holt’s cigarettes, read the morning news printed on Holt’s paper, ride to work on one of Holt’s streetcars, sit in an office heated by Holt’s coal, then at night go to a film in one of Holt’s theatres.”) Holt liked the idea of owning one of the largest industrial complexes in the British Empire. Along with James Gundy—a co-founder of the Toronto-based Wood Gundy brokerage house—and some associates at the Royal Bank, he bought out Wolvin and consolidated control over Besco. In 1928, with the support of some big British investors, they incorporated a new holding and operating company, the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation (Dosco), which took over Besco’s holdings.

Nowhere have I found a record of Holt’s thoughts as he watched markets fail and global trade screech to a standstill. By 1932 stock prices were worth less than one-quarter of what they had been before the crash, and almost one in four Canadians who wanted to work couldn’t find a job. On the Saskatchewan prairie, men and women looked to the dust-darkened sky and cursed the day their parents had left the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine or the fertile plains of Hungary. In the relief camps of Northern Ontario, single unemployed men who had been criss-crossing the country, looking for jobs that didn’t exist, cleared bush, built roads and put up public buildings for pennies a day.

In the Maritimes, which had been in decline throughout the 1920s, misery blanketed the land. In 1933, the average Atlantic Canadian’s per capita personal income of $185 was marginally over the $181 every resident of the devastated Prairies took home. When it came to federal relief programs, Atlantic Canadians—who struggled to come up with the money needed for cost-shared programs with the federal government—received just over a third of the national average on a per capita basis. The upshot, writes historian Ernest Forbes: “elderly and destitute refused assistance, deaf and blind cut off from schools, seriously ill denied hospitalization and moral offenders savagely punished.”

Not everywhere, mind you. The mining towns of Springhill, Glace Bay and New Waterford did a better job than most municipalities when it came to supporting their needy. In part, that was because District 26 of the UMWA co-operated with Dosco to ration shifts in a way that spread the money around, and worked with the municipalities to find and distribute additional relief funds.

Alas, this was but a Band-Ad on a bullet hole. As the Depression deepened, railways and factories began to turn to oil, natural gas and
even electricity as fuel sources, and demand for coal to heat homes plummeted. In Pennsylvania, the production of bituminous coal fell by 50 percent in just three years, sparking bitter strikes and violence. Across the ocean, employment in British coal mines—racked by conflict between the miners and pit owners—slumped by nearly 30 percent in five years.

Nova Scotia—where coal output, which had peaked at 8 million tons in 1913, averaged just 5.2 million tons annually from 1930 to 1932—was also stricken. In the towns grown up around the collieries, it was as if a sacred trust had been broken; by 1931 the average miner worked just 140 days, compared to 230 five years earlier. Men still flocked to the industry; 11,000 on average toiled in the Nova Scotia pits that year, compared to 9,800 in 1926. The latest Royal Commission on coal mining, struck in 1932, estimated that some 2,000 young people living in those coal-mining communities had never worked—and, the way things were going, never would—as colliers.

Dorothy Duncan met her future husband—who had yet to ascend to CanLit godhood—in 1932, aboard a ship sailing from Europe to North America. Glace Bay–born Hugh MacLennan, it’s clear from his writing, had mixed feelings about the mining folk of Cape Breton. It was a view that his American wife, who must have made her first visit to the island in the years after the Great Depression, seemed to share. Cape Breton’s industrial centre, she wrote in
Here’s to Canada,
was a “Scranton of Canada.” Duncan deemed the view from Sydney harbour fine once the Atlantic winds dispersed the smoke, “but everywhere, for miles in the vicinity of the mines and the huge steel works, is the cast of coal dust and the smell of collieries and mills.” The people, she sniffed, were Scotch émigrés who had abandoned
the island’s idyllic countryside for the mines—work which “took no more than one generation to lower the stature of those men who continued to earn their living this way.” The men became “scrappy and combative because they are by nature courageous.” After the Irish arrived, she wrote, things got even worse, as “Glace Bay became known as one of the toughest towns on the continent.”

Yet somehow the Demont boys—Russell fourteen by 1937, Eric ten and Earl eight—survived. Clarie, their father, still had his production supervisor’s job at the
Gazette,
and moonlighted looking after the hall at Knox United Church down on Commercial Street. The cruel winds of the Great Depression seldom seemed to enter the front door at 31 York Street, located right across the road from Central School, which all three boys attended before moving on to Glace Bay High. From their house it was possible to stand in the screened-in porch and see the transmitters that Guglielmo Marconi had used to send the world’s first complete transatlantic radio signal, in 1902, and to hear the colliery whistle indicating that there would be work in No. 2 mine the next day.

Nostalgia ignores the banal and magnifies the notable. So my father seldom reminisced about walking out the front door and meeting the same church choir members, masons and store clerks who populated any Depression-era Canadian town. Instead, he recalled Glace Bay as a place with music, best considered, sometimes ruefully, often ironically, with eyes and ears wide open. The way he told it, when you stepped into the street, within a few blocks you’d meet an engineer on the Sydney and Louisbourg Railway, the local fire chief, a future member of Parliament, one of J.B. McLachlan’s sons, the owner of the Russell movie theatre and a colliery man who walked out in the street at midnight every New Year’s Eve and fired his rifle into the air. One minute you’d be waving to a young woman who would soon drown in the Mira River,
the next you’d be nodding to a star athlete who one day, for no obvious reason, just went out into the woods and stayed there. You might meet a Great War veteran who would sidle up behind unsuspecting citizens and startle them with the news that they were “too tall for the trenches.” Or a man lugging a sack of bootleg coal—a practice that thrived during the Depression years, when employment was scarce and heating the house took precedence over the nuances of resource ownership. You’d glimpse the halt and blind, victims of the moonshine from Reserve Mines, making their damaged way.

Maybe you’d see my grandfather, who would walk the six blocks from Senator’s Corner without once looking up from the
Boston Globe.
His job at the newspaper made Clarie Demont something of a rarity in a town where most adult males still worked in the mines, or at some other job that depended upon the collieries. Consequently, my people may have been a shade better off than some of their neighbours; dinner was bologna, sausage or fish—usually cod from the fishmonger who went door to door. Since it was a teetotalling house, everything was washed down with milk delivered in glass quart bottles by a man in a horse-drawn carriage. There wasn’t much in the way of ice cream or store-bought sweets, but Mabel was a prodigious baker. Date squares, dinner rolls and something known as Cape Breton sugar pie, a sort of fudge in pastry that was so sweet it would make your teeth ache, would come steaming from the kitchen.