Coal Black Heart (27 page)

The sounds of the rescue operations were interpreted by some as the sealing off of the mine, sparking panic. “In some miners, fear changed to resignation during the last few days when the sounds of rescue occasionally stopped for an hour or two at a time as the rescuers in the long, narrow tunnels changed shifts,” the researchers wrote. “These were the periods when most anxiety and pessimism were expressed.”

Over in the group of twelve, the miner known to the researchers as Q12 declared, “The last day [before contacting the rescuers] we
were all saying good-bye to one another as we thought we were dying, we would not see one another again.” Another said, “I really gave up. I thought to myself—after what we had tried, the conditions I had seen, all the walls in—I can’t get out and I am just as good an experienced man, how are they going to get in?” One of the group of six recalled:

And yet, against all reason—their food and water gone, in absolute night, the smell of death everywhere—some of them held on to a scrap of optimism. There were few if any times when there wasn’t at least one miner expressing hope, even if just as a conscious counterweight to the deepening despair. (“I said, ‘They will get us out.’ I never thought they would. I was just telling him that.”) Some of them, despondency simply could not crush. (“And then all at once, oh … F6 said … ‘You still got hopes?’ And I said, ‘Yes I’ve got hopes … I got good hopes and I will until I draw my last breath.’”) Others were pragmatists, displaying a composure that, to a person who has never been underground, seems incomprehensible. (“I couldn’t understand us living though and living that long [unless rescue was to come]. We were in fairly good condition. Nobody went haywire. We were all talking sensible, ordinary conversations.”)

The “miracle miners” who emerged alive were marked by it for the rest of their days. Some, according to Melissa Faye Greene, who wrote a book about the bump of 1958, felt survivor’s guilt, men plummeted into depression, a few experienced an epiphany and tried to alter the course of their lives. Others were swept up by forces beyond their control. The media, desperate for a hero, seized on the story of Maurice Ruddick, a “mulatto” miner whose singing in the long days of darkness kept hope alive, and inflated his role in the drama. A poll in the Toronto
Telegram
chose him as “Canada’s 1958 Citizen of the Year.” Ruddick fantasized about some kind of ambassadorship, but the governor of Georgia showed him his place. The virulently racist Marvin Griffin invited eighteen of the Springhill survivors to be his personal guests at a new luxury resort in his state. Ruddick, his wife and four of their twelve children spent the week in three house trailers on the “negro beach,” three miles from the motels where his white co-workers were staying. Afterwards Ruddick explained that he had been well treated but admitted that he “wasn’t pleased with anything that keeps people apart—it is something out of the past.”

Back at home, where his old co-workers resented his hero status, Ruddick’s fame quickly died. The mines were closed. He couldn’t find work. In time his unemployment insurance ran out. The family allowance and the Springhill Disaster Relief Fund—$88 per month plus $35 per week, to support a family of fifteen—weren’t enough. Ruddick and his children formed a musical troupe, the Harmony Babes, and sang cowboy songs throughout the Maritimes. In the end, he was reduced to gathering loose coal chunks from along the railway tracks and around the pitheads of the abandoned Springhill mines, to keep his family from freezing.

Which is why I like to imagine him and the others when the rescuers arrived—when they realized that, despite everything, the Springhill miners would rise Lazarus-like from the deeps. From the blackness they emerged into the blinding flash of camera bulbs and the sheen of burnished legend. The world had watched transfixed as the tragedy and rescue unfolded: Prince Philip arrived to encourage the survivors. A disaster relief fund swelled to $2 million as contributions poured in from around the globe. The drama lived on in a tune penned by American folksinger Peggy Seeger—and decades later, covered by U2—and a poem written by Richard Brautigan.

Above ground big-finned Oldsmobiles, Chevys and Pontiacs, skippered by men with hair pomaded to a brilliantine flourish accompanied by women in poodle skirts and stiff saddle shoes, tooled across Nova Scotia’s roads. The car radio crackled with news of a war in Korea, a Russian satellite winking as it circled the earth and the faraway voice of a hound dog named Elvis. Cold War angst—thoughts of bomb shelters, spies and mutant giant insects—hung in the air. But this was also the age of big ambitions. The St. Lawrence Seaway allowed ocean-going vessels to travel inland to the Great Lakes, the TransCanada pipeline brought Alberta’s natural gas as far east as Quebec, the Trans-Canada Highway joined all ten provinces.

The Maritimes, like so much of booming postwar Canada, seemed to be in transition in the 1950s. Pre-industrial jobs—farming, fishing, forestry, mining—were disappearing. New enterprises were slowly emerging: a New Brunswick university dropout named Kenneth Colin Irving now owned 1,500 service stations through the Maritimes and Quebec, and was buying forests, newspapers, oil tankers and cargo vessels. Grocery stores owned by a butcher from Stellarton named Frank Sobey seemed to materialize overnight throughout the province. After supper, Nova Scotians sat
down in front of their boxy RCAs, tuned in to one of their two TV stations and seemed equally happy watching shows about American gunslingers or fiddlers from Prince Edward Island.

Increasingly, even in the most rural area in the land, people began to long for the big city. During the 1950s, 82,000 Maritimers left the region altogether. Russell DeMont—who, after a brief stint as an electrician’s helper, had decided that wasn’t for him—joined the exodus. The time in the TB ward meant that he got a late start at tiny, perfect Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where he became the first DeMont to enter a post-secondary classroom. But he made up for the lost time at the little Baptist school where he covered tuition and living expenses by waiting on tables in the cafeteria and coaching basketball. Russey also played rugby, ran track and headed up the yearbook committee. He took particular pride in the boater-and-cane soft-shoe routine he developed with Bill “Shaky” Stewart, which became a fixture at campus social events. Among other things they were known for their humorous “odes,” one being done in the manner of Clement Moore’s “’Twas the night before Christmas” and including the verse: “Down the chimney came Santa nice and fat/ I hit him with my baseball bat.”

After graduation—a BA in economics and history, class of 1948—Russ headed for Toronto, where he set up house in an attic in the Bloor West area of town with a couple of other Nova Scotia boys. He found a job filling mail orders for the Simpsons department store chain. Gordon MacNeill, one of his roomies, said he never quite took to Toronto. By 1951 Russ was back in Nova Scotia, living in Halifax a couple of blocks from where I write these words, selling stocks and bonds door to door. On weekends he headed back to Cape Breton. There, at a dance, he met a woman—pretty, lively, dark-haired, barely into her twenties. Russ ended up giving Jack
Briers’s youngest daughter, Joan, a drive back to her parents’ house. The next day they met again on the ferry back to the mainland. (The causeway connecting Cape Breton to the mainland didn’t open until 1955.) In Halifax, Joan, who worked as a secretary at Dalhousie University, lived in a big old Victorian house a few blocks away from where Russ boarded. They started dating—going to dances and drive-in movies in his Ford sedan.

Russ might not have realized it, but every time he got behind the wheel he was part of something big. It was the rise of oil. Cars ran on it. Trucks, which had replaced trains as the dominant form of industrial transportation, did too. Railroads—which even back in 1950 took 15 percent of Nova Scotia coal—were also converting to oil. So, increasingly, were home and commercial heating furnaces, another market once dominated by coal.

The Second World War brought an end to the relentless poverty of the Great Depression; shipyards boomed, as did railcar works like the one in Trenton, Nova Scotia, and the Dosco steel plant at Sydney, which made wire fencing for the battlefields and produced more than one-third of Canada’s output of regular ship plate used to make or fix warships. For a moment the war effort had breathed life into the coal industry. In 1940, the first full year that Canada was at war, the province’s coal production had hit 7.84 million tons, the industry’s second-biggest year on record.

But coal’s comeback was oh, so short. Oil increasingly was replacing it. New processes were also displacing coal from the metal-smelting industry, and although coke was still required in iron-making, improved technology decreased the amount of it needed to produce a ton of iron.

Poisonous labour relations were another part of the problem. The miners were as patriotic as the next man. Dosco, on the other hand, made much of its pride in being “Canada’s Largest Industry”
and the “Only Producer of Steel and Steel Products in Canada Wholly Self-Sustained within the Empire” while selling products that were “more nearly 100% Canadian than any similar products available anywhere.” Alas, that nationalistic pride failed to translate into a willingness to let its workforce share in the wage increases experienced by most wartime industries. That meant inevitable conflict with the coal miners, with their avowed goal of recovering the wage reductions imposed on them during the 1920s and early years of the Depression. (In January 1942 the average miner’s basic adjusted pay rate was $3.90 daily, against $5.00 in 1920.) During 1939 and 1940, ninety-four “outlaw” strikes occurred in Nova Scotia, accounting for half the strike activity in Canada. Most of them occurred in the coalfields. So in many circles, patience was running thin when most of the coal miners in Cape Breton—in a moment of questionable judgment and timing—began a slowdown on May 11, 1941, in defiance of the provincial and federal governments and their own union leadership.

The Toronto papers accused them of a “crystal clear case of deliberate sabotage of the national war effort” and urged Ottawa to “send in the troops” to “end the grotesque and indefensible situation at the Cape Breton coal mines.” Partially, it was an issue of manpower; in the first few years of the war nearly 2,000 skilled and able Mari timers left the lousy pay, tedium and danger of the pits for active duty in the armed forces. By the end of 1941, Ottawa declared the decline in coal production a national emergency. Britain, facing the same problem, simply conscripted 48,000 Bevin Boys—named after Ernest Bevin, wartime minister of Labour and former leader of the Transport and General Workers Union—directly into the mines. The Canadian approach was different; the military stopped accepting coal miners and the government made it illegal for coal miners to work in any other job. Getting miners back into the pit wasn’t a
smooth process. Historian Michael Stevenson writes that of the 2,200 miners who had been authorized for release from the army by the fall of 1943, only 970 went to mines across the country. Even after the government agreed to across-the-board wage increases, the men’s hearts weren’t in it. Absenteeism increased; productivity slumped further. During 1944 Nova Scotia’s production sank to 5.7 million tons, 1.6 million less than production from the mines of Alberta, Canada’s ascendant coal province.

Perhaps that made the benign neglect by the federal government in the years that followed understandable. CD. Howe, Canada’s “minister of everything,” saw to it that some industries and companies got direct grants, others tax incentives, during the war years; almost none of them were in Atlantic Canada. Historian Ernest Forbes has written that Ottawa virtually abandoned Maritime economic interests during the war. Pleas for capital equipment grants and depreciation allowances to fund new manufacturing capability fell on deaf ears in Ottawa. Transportation subsidies for Nova Scotia coal were discontinued, allowing American coal to flood the central Canadian market.

Dosco’s experience, in particular, is worth considering. Howe gave $4 million in tax money to help two of Canada’s “big three” steelmakers—the Steel Company of Canada in Hamilton and Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie—modernize and increase capacity during the war years. Arthur Cross—the president of Dosco, the third company in the trio—wrote to Howe that his unwillingness to provide any government assistance to the Nova Scotia company would make inevitable the conclusion that Ottawa was intending “to discriminate against the post-war future of this corporation and in favour of its Central Canadian competitors.” Howe seemed untroubled by the perception; in 1944 he advised Ottawa’s steel controllers to use Dosco “to the minimum extent possible even
if we have to buy the steel from the United States.” The upshot: an enterprise that should have emerged from the war as a powerhouse was left weakened as its central Canadian competitors continued their unprecedented growth.