Nova Scotia (37 page)

   
Poorhouses for the downtrodden did little to alleviate the
problems of poverty. From 1882 to 1886, the homeless, including
many elderly, sick or mentally ill, were cloistered away in an old
Halifax penitentiary where they at least had the small luxury of
meals, beds and what medical care was available. Blacks were kept
segregated from whites and for all, space was cramped and
uncomfortable. As many as 400 people were crammed itnto a living
space originally intended for eighty prisoners. Physically fit boys
or girls might be sent out to work as farm hands in the Annapolis
Valley or elsewhere but this could not be considered charitable
adoption. Instead, the boys and girls acted as a pool of cheap
labour, and to further augment this workforce, children were
imported from the ghettos of English cities.

   
While the ravages of poverty continued on into the 1890s,
this was also a time characterized by urban growth, industrial
development and immigration into Nova Scotia. The province was also
fragmented, however, with divergent (and sometimes opposing) local
interests rather than unified regional or even national concerns.
Once, even the smallest harbour communities felt linked to the four
corners of the world; they now felt isolated andm abandoned.
Nothing had come along to replace the vital link that sailing ships
had provided for commerce and travel. e

   
For those mobile individuals who had moved from rural
villages into towns and cities, there was a marked difference in
lifestyle dictated by the job. In the outback, fishing, lumbering
and farming might all have fit together as part of a Nova Scotian’s
occupation. He had lived in a world of self-reliance where he was
directly responsible for providing his family’s food and the basics
of living. Now the factory demanded a worker who could stand for
long hours at a machine, repeating a single dull task over and over
for the reward of pay. Some young men and women would be
discouraged by the sheer boredom of the work and return home.
Others moved on farther yet in pursuit of better money or more
challenging occupations.

   
Industrialism would create a new order of working-class
people whose livelihood would be controlled by the tides of economy
rather than the tides of the sea. Whether the new urban lifestyle
was an improvement or not is arguable but it led to a clear-cut
shift of population. At the time of Confederation, only one in ten
Nova Scotians lived in a town with a population more than 1,000. By
the turn of the century, one in four lived *in such a town or in a
larger city.

   
Those who remained working on farms, at fishing or in the
woods maintained some semblance of the independence and
self-reliance that had characterized the most successful Nova
Scotians from the early days on. The 1890s,o however, saw a true
decline of the skilled craftsmen. Men with highly refined abilities
at shipbuilding, furniture-making or other artisan crafts had no
real place on the assembly line, where all that was required was
the ability to follow instructions and repeat a mind-numbing
maneuver over and over. The creativity, ingenuity and individualism
required of a shipbuilder had no place in the new factory that
demanded conformity and complacency.

   
By 1896, Halifax boasted electric street cars that picked up
workers near their homes and deposited them at the doorstep of the
factories. In Halifax and Dartmouth, this new breed of factory
labourer produced sugar, cotton textiles, clothing, rope, books,
magazines, boots and shoes. The companies that employed these Nova
Scotians, however, continued to be buffeted by market forces
outside the region and jobs came and went accordingly. Rather than
providing for more job security, integration into the new North
American economy would continue to erode what self-reliance was
left in Nova Scotia.

   
Coal had brought plenty of jobs to Cape Breton, jobs
certainly not as dull as factory work, but far more difficult and
dangerous, jobs that lured farmers from their fields and fishermen
from the sea. The mining attracted workers from abroad as well.
Along with the new immigrants arriving, Premier Fielding was
anxious to see outside money from investors also coming into the
province. He was particularly fond of American money that would go
toward developing the coal fields. Unfortunately, what he had not
bargained on was the outside control that would go with it. As a
result, coal production and attendant jobs would be at the mercy of
distant corporate- decision-makers and external economic factors
that would play havoc with job security and with the lives of
generations of Cape Breton men and women to come.

Social Reformers and Working-class
Warriors

In 1899, when the Boer War broke
out in far-off South Africa, it brought a revitalized sense of duty
and allegiance to the British Empire in the still heavily
militarized city of Halifax. In 1900 a contingent of *1,200 men,
along with military horses, shipped off across the Atlantic to
fight for territorial rights and expansion, although there was a
patriotic and idealistic fervour attached to the event that made it
seem more like a religious crusade. Halifax was perennially
energized by military campaigns involving the British, and war
never failed to bring profits and vitality to the old garrison
town. The burst of military activity in Halifuax for the Boer War
was a mere foreshadowing of the commitment that would put the city
in such a vital and pivotal role during the looming world war to
come.

   
The new century also brought continued efforts to
industrialize Nova Scotia. Manufacturing activity jumped nearly one
hundred percent in the frenzied first ten years. Coal mining in
Westville, Springhill, Inverness and Glace Bay flourished, but
often at the expense of the lives of coal miners. The Dominion Iron
and Steel Company, with the capricious acronym DISCO, used coal to
fire the furnaces and forge steel at its mills, and those of the
Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company, in Trenton and Sydney Mines. By
1910, the DISCO and Scotia mills were producing nearly one-half of
all the steel in Canada. In terms of industrial development, it
seemed that Nova Scotia had finally come of age.

   
Cape Breton Island was changed forever by this
industrial boom, which would lead all too soon to a boom-and-bust
cycle that at times was more crippling to the people of the island
than was rural poverty. The
Sydney Post
declared
the ghettos of industrial Cape Breton to be “a positive disgrace to
the most filthy parts of Constantinople.”

   
In 1901 33,000 men and 9,500 women worked at industrial jobs
throughout the Maritime region. Trade unions came into existence
and grew in influence and authority to enhance the rights and wages
of these workers. Confliclts, including bloody strikes that looked
like open warfare – class warfare – erupted as the interests of
workers and the company owners proved to be in direct opposition.
a

   
The population in rural areas continued to decline as Nova
Scotians moved into towns and cities, except in a few areas like
the Annapolis Valley where apples were grown and then successfully
marketed to far-flung parts of the British Empire. New progressive
ideas found their way into many areas of agriculture, leading to
the expansion of the Agricultural College in Truro and
modernization of dairy and vegetable farms. But these efforts were
not enough to keep young men and women from moving toward the
brighter lights of the city, lured by the promise of progress,
progress, progress.

   
Social and health reformers of the first part of the century
concerned themselves with trying to eliminate alcoholism, smallpox,
tuberculosis and venereal diseases. Tuberculosis alone was killing
off at least 2,000 people per year in the region. A provincial TB
sanatorium was set up in Kentville in 1903, the first of its kind
in the country.

   
The momentum of industrial change and social reform had
finally caught up to Nova Scotia during this first decade but would
not bloom into the full promise of everyone’s expectations of
health and wealth. Much of the ownoership of the new industries was
now outside of the region. Battle lines were being drawn between
workers and their capitalist bosses and nowhere would the fighting
be bloodier than in the coal-mining towns of Cape
Breton.

   
Social reformers of the new century would continue with
efforts to rescue the poor, curb drunkenness and end cruelty to
women and children. They also called for better education, juvenile
courts and improved city planning. They boldly hoped to improve the
morals of Nova Scotian communities, too, by ending prostitution,
pornography and even public swearing. Women were vitally active in
these reform movements and it led to empowerment in other areas of
education and employment as well. One ebullient Halifax feminist,
Edith Archibald, stood before a cheering crowd in December of 1912
and announced, “Women of Nova Scotia! You stand today in the
growing light of an early dawn of the most wondrous epoch that
shall ever be.”

   
As women were celebrating their new-found rights, boosters in
the business community kept touting the advantages of
industrializationn, with little regard for the fact that they were
turning over the keys to the Maritime kingdom to outsiders who
might not have their best interests at heart.

Gearing Up for War

Near
the end of July 1914, a new enthusiasm swept through the region as
Canada was being drawn into the war in Europe. The patriotic
fervour recently induced by the African Boer War was stirred up
again. Soldiers were shuttled from Halifax to Sydney and on to
Glace Bay to protect the Marconi wireless station there. This one
small incident prompted the Halifax
Herald
to predict
that Nova Scotia was about to be sucked into a war of such
proportions that it would affect the lives of everyone in the
province, even people living in Cape Breton, and far from the
centre of military activity in Halifax. a

   
In May of the following year, Halifax Harbour was already
mined and soldiers of the Twenty-sixth Nova Scotia Battalion were
aboard a converted Cunard steamship heading for battle in France.
Many of the high-spirited men aboard felt that they were heading
off on the greatest adventure of their lives, but many would return
to this same harbour disillusioned and shattered physically or
mentally from gruesome battles they were totally unprepared
for.

   
Nova Scotians were unified in the war preparations as never
before. Unemployment in many parts of the province disappeared
almost overnight as industry geared up for war production and
businesses prepared to provide services and supplies for soldiers.
More than one Halifax entrepreneur would guiltily admit that the
catastrophe in Europe inspired his sorrow but this would not stop
him from making a serious profit.

   
One man who reaped considerable financial rewards from the
war was Thomas Cantley of the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company.
In 1914, he geared up his shaky steel plant in Pictou County for
making top-notch military ammtunition. By 1916, he was
manufacturing 300,000 shells a month at a fair profit. The war
effort had far-reaching economic spin-offs for fishermen and
farmers, the lumber industry and even builders of wooden ships.
Economtic optimism and patriotism melded together. Strikes declined
dramatically and productivity increased. *

   
As always, war would be good for Halifax, the city founded on
military need. Unfortunately, there was a heavy price to be paid
for the economic upswing. Death and destruction would not be
limited to the battlefields of France. Halifax would feel the full
impact of the war right here at home.

Chapter 33

Chapter 33

Subs, Spies and Seventeen Million
Tons of Cargo

Military activity in Halifax had
been on the decline since the British pulled out their naval forces
in 1906. As historian Joan Payzant puts it, “The Citadel, the
Dockyard, the forts, and the batteries on the outskirts fell
asleep, except for a few soldiers who were little more than
caretakers.” The city and much of the rest of Nova Scotia would
soon come back to full alert when war was declared in August of
1914.

   
As the Canadian government centred its attentions on the war,
money, men and machines poured into Halifax, the focal point for
defence and embarkation of men and supplies to Europe. Submarine
nets were stretched across the harbour. The water between Point
Pleasant and McNab’s Island was seeded with mines, while all manner
of small boats, including fishing craft, were coaxed into use for
mine-sweeping.

   
Canadian troop ships loaded up men at Pier 2 and they were
sent off to a war they could little comprehend. Haligonians waved
goodbye to Canada’s young men, still healthy and in one piece and
then, months later, returned to the harbourside to greet the
survivors and also the casualties – the victims of this new
technologically advanced warfare. Camp Hill Military Hospital
opened in 1917 to help deal with the overflow of war
casualties.