The Great Depression (46 page)

The men were hungry. They’d had only one meal that day. But as Ron Liversedge, the secretary-treasurer of the division, put it, there was “a spirit of exhilaration that could be felt” the moment they entered the building. A phone in the museum was used to alert and inform as many people as possible about the sit-in.

Now the other divisions started to march toward the library. Willis Shaparla, as chairman of the divisional maintenance committee, was allowed to climb to the roof and from there witnessed a spectacle that was denied the others – a snake parade filling Hastings Street, weaving its way east and stretching back for blocks, the men singing “Hold the Fort for We Are Coming.”

Remarkably, the library stayed open. E.S. Robinson, the librarian, remained on duty until he closed the building at four. One
student, cramming for exams and oblivious to the action around him, emerged bewildered into the arms of the police.

By now, a large and good-humoured crowd had gathered, blocking traffic. The strikers hoisted a banner bearing the slogan they had chanted throughout the strike:
WHEN DO WE EAT
? The division’s food committee began lowering baskets that were quickly filled. Bake shops for blocks around sent pies, pastries, and bread. Delicatessens and cafés swelled the contributions. The nearby White Lunch sent gallons of coffee in big milk cans. People in the crowd sent up cigarettes, candies, and chocolates – so much that some strikers, unused to quantities of food, complained of headaches. Thereupon somebody sent up half a dozen bottles of aspirin.

The object of the sit-in, again, was to secure relief supplies for the camp workers. The accommodating police chief offered to find the mayor. He located him at last at the Vancouver Yacht Club and urged him to work out some sort of settlement. McGeer agreed to feed and house the camp workers over the weekend at a cost to the city of eighteen hundred dollars. At that news, the strikers vacated the museum, to the cheers of the crowd. It was their first clear victory since the walk-out had begun.

McGeer sent another predictable wire to Bennett (who was back from England) demanding federal aid and received the same maddening answer: the responsibility lay with the province. “It was only at the request of the Provinces that the Dominion undertook the care of single homeless men in camps,” Bennett argued. That wasn’t true. It was done at the suggestion of Major-General Andrew McNaughton.

But the impasse in Vancouver could not long continue, and both sides knew it. “We are drifting on here, Mr. Bennett, through no fault of our own, to an explosion,” the
Province
warned. With the longshoremen threatening a waterfront strike in June, a citizens’ league made up of local business leaders and backed by the shipping federation offered to expose “the Communist menace.” Lyle Telford of the CCF had already gone on the air to denounce Evans and the other strike leaders who, he claimed, wanted “to do something dangerous in the name of strike action.”

It was growing more difficult for Evans to hold his hungry band together. Money was running out and, as public opinion began to
change, harder to come by. On May 30, in a mass meeting at the Avenue Theatre, Evans asked the strikers: “Do you want the strike to continue?” The vote was 620 in favour, 270 against. The figures suggest that the strikers’ ranks were thinning. A good many had, in fact, refused to vote, but an estimated two to three hundred had already left town. Obviously a new tactic had to be devised, and quickly.

There are conflicting accounts as to who first got the idea of moving everybody on freight trains to Ottawa to confront the Prime Minister. Evans always insisted that he brought the idea up at the Avenue Theatre, but Ron Liversedge, who was also there, claimed the idea came independently from the floor. However that may be, “the sheer effrontery of the motion startled the meeting.”

It also startled the Communist party, whose leadership in Toronto did their best to stop the trek to Ottawa. Joseph Salsberg, a leading party member, and Tim Buck tried to reach Evans again and again by long-distance phone, without success. Salsberg was certain that Evans was purposely evading him. The British Columbia members of the party were thought of as “leftists,” a whimsical designation for any member of a radical organization. But in the view of the conservatives, the crazy British Columbians were always on the verge of doing something foolish and dangerous. Back east the trek was considered just that – a piece of japery that could do no good and might do a great deal of harm by turning public opinion further against the party. But there was no help for it. The trek could not now be stopped, and the party would have to back it to the limit.

And so the On-to-Ottawa trek was born, with the starting day set for June 3. As Willis Shaparla said, “There wasn’t a man who didn’t think we could do it. After all, we were all experienced in riding the boxcars. Suddenly there was a new level of struggle. It was as if everything we had done up to that point, was preparing for the Trek.”

What followed was truly remarkable – one of those historic incidents that illuminate the times and serve as a symbol for future generations. The march on Ottawa was the high point of the
Depression, and for many it was the high point of their lives. One of these was Shaparla, whose long career encompassed a series of adventures including the D-Day landing and the buzz-bombing of Amsterdam. But nothing in Shaparla’s life matched the excitement, the
élan
, the heady exhilaration of the great trek. Half a century later, he had his own personal business cards made to mark its fiftieth anniversary. They carried the slogan “On to Ottawa.”

From Evans’s point of view, the trek did not begin a moment too soon. The men were beginning to stagnate. Two meals a day were scarcely enough for active youths in their twenties. Hundreds had roamed the streets of Vancouver far into the night so that they might sleep through breakfast time and spend their fifteen-cent meal tickets on lunch and dinner. They were hungry men, but hungrier for action; and now they had found it. They had a goal – Ottawa. Few believed they would reach it, but all were certain they would accomplish
something
. They were taking their cause beyond the mountains. They were going national.

The authorities were glad to see them go. The last thing Gerry McGeer wanted was the presence of a thousand bitter and angry men when the longshoremen struck, as they did on June 4, the day after most of the trekkers left town. There would be no police clashes before the trains pulled out. Evans and his committee had worked hard to organize the move, cutting the four divisions to three and dropping many of the committees. While Evans led an advance party of twenty men to prepare the way, a final picnic was held in Vancouver’s great forested park, where the citizens, sprawling on the grass, shared family hampers with the men who were about to bid the city goodbye.

Just after ten on the night of June 3, the three divisions marched to the waterfront where the eastbound freight was waiting. A crowd of two thousand was on hand to see them off, many bringing parcels of food (the Mothers’ Council had prepared hundreds of sandwiches). The men lined up beside the cars, waiting for Jack Cosgrove, a lanky Great War veteran, to give the signal to board.

They swung up almost as one man – after all, they’d all done it before – twenty-four to a car, their captains on the alert for unfamiliar faces. Once again the sound of “Hold the Fort” echoed through the night as the train lurched and got under way.
The crowd cheered. A small knot of police lined the right of way, making notes. As the train gathered speed the onlookers waved flashlights and blankets. A second contingent would leave on June 4 to join the vanguard at Kamloops. The On-to-Ottawa trek had begun.

The strikers clung to the tops of the boxcars, bracing themselves as the train swung around the bends. At Port Coquitlam, a few miles from Vancouver, the provincial police opened up four empty cars and allowed one hundred and fifty trekkers to climb down and jam inside.

When the freight pulled into Kamloops, every man held his place until Cosgrove, as marshal, gave the order to detrain. There was a rush to the North Thompson River to clean the grime from hands and faces. Although the mayor had refused to allow a tag day, the trekkers canvassed every house and business for food, then bedded down in empty boxcars on the sidings or under the trees at Riverdale Park, three or four to a blanket. They were joined by two young sisters, Yvonne O’Brien, aged nineteen, and Catherine, twenty-two, clad in mackinaws and slacks.

On to Revelstoke, fourteen hundred strong, for a one-hour wait. A few trekkers rushed to nearby restaurants for coffee and sandwiches, and here two drunks broke some crockery. They were expelled immediately and a money order for five dollars was sent to the café to pay for the damage.

On to Golden, where the trekkers got a pleasant surprise. In an auto park a mile from the tracks, long trestle tables loaded with dishes and piles of bread had been laid out. Washboilers bubbling with stew hung suspended over a dozen fires. An elderly woman, standing over a bathtub and stirring its contents with a long ladle, shouted a cheery “Good morning, boys!” The trekkers could see dumplings as big as footballs floating in the lamb stew. “Line up the boys, there,” she cried, “and give them a hot meal!”

This was Mrs. M.E. Sorley, a Communist party organizer who had received Evans’s telegram to be prepared to feed a thousand men. With the help of the ladies’ auxiliary of the Unemployed Workers’ Association and the local CCF, she had canvassed farms for miles around, while Evans had sent for eight hundred loaves of bread, four cords of wood, and every washboiler in town. The stew, in Evans’s words, “would go down in [the] history of Golden and Canada.”

Reluctantly, Evans returned to Vancouver on orders from the Workers’ Unity League. His place was taken by George Black, a member of the action committee. The Glasgow-born Black had been in Canada for ten years and had worked for various power and construction companies in Saskatchewan before coming to British Columbia. He had been on relief since 1932 but was medically unfit for the relief camps. His service in the Brigade of Scots Guards had given him a commanding presence, a level head, and a strong sense of organization.

After sweeping the park clean, the trekkers boarded the 7 a.m. freight heading for the dreaded spiral tunnels. At Field, two RCMP constables warned the men to put wet handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths to protect themselves from the smoke in the tunnels. For the next half-hour, as the train lumbered through the bowels of the mountains, some were close to panic. They’d been used to travelling in warm empty boxcars; now, clinging unprotected to the roofs, they entered a dark, ice-cold world filled with stifling smoke – yellow, acrid, and gritty. One youth collapsed, and it took the Red Cross contingent attached to his division several minutes to bring him round. At last, the train emerged into the clear, clean air of the Rockies, and the trekkers breathed freely once more. At the Alberta border, twenty-four British Columbia provincial policemen waved and cheered them on.

At Calgary, the leadership realized, the trekkers would need time off to rest and wash clothes. Finding food was not the only problem; bandages, iodine, aspirin, soap, and other essentials were also needed. The trekkers leaped from the boxcars at the west end of the city and marched to the Exhibition Grounds as Calgarians crowded their housetops to cheer and wave. The mayor, however, refused any relief. He passed the buck to the province, which passed it right back. When the city refused to permit a tag day, the trekkers held one anyway and raised fourteen hundred dollars.

Meanwhile, the leadership decided to take direct action. Five hundred men snake-paraded through the centre of town and encircled the city hall while sympathetic onlookers tossed down coins from upper-storey windows. “Relief! Relief! Relief!” the trekkers chanted, and the citizens, now jamming the streets, took up the cry. Eighty men, led by George Black and Gerry Winters, entered the city relief office and held the chairman of the Alberta
Relief Commission, A.A. MacKenzie, prisoner. A two-hour wrangle followed. MacKenzie, who considered that he was facing “a dangerous revolutionary army,” tried to insist that relief was for Albertans only. In the end he was forced to knuckle under and in a telegram to Edmonton, dictated by the strikers, asked the provincial government’s approval for temporary aid. Edmonton authorized him to issue two fifteen-cent meal tickets a day to each man until the trek left Calgary after the weekend.

Meanwhile, Gerry Winters’s brother, Lou Summers, had wired from Edmonton that three hundred more relief camp workers were on their way to join the trek. A fourth division had to be created to handle the newcomers from the north. A sprinkling of old-timers gave lectures on the history and purpose of the trek while the usual snake parades, band concerts, and picnics kept the town in a state of excitement. The Calgarians, who were clearly on the side of the men, donated canned goods, clothing, loaves of bread, and even sides of beef in response to Matt Shaw’s appeal for supplies.

Ottawa had no intention of stopping the trek in R.B. Bennett’s constituency, but the movement had to be halted before it could mushroom further. Bennett had argued that complaints from camp workers had come from only one province – British Columbia – and had resulted from the work of a handful of unscrupulous agitators. Now, however, with relief workers from Winnipeg, the Lakehead, and Toronto clamouring to join the cause, a halt would have to be ordered before Manitoba was reached. The obvious place was Regina, the headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Bennett’s plan to bring the trek to an end would need the co-operation of both railway companies.

In Calgary, however, the CPR was co-operating with the trekkers. The company told George Black the exact time the morning freight would leave town. The superintendent of traffic explained the best way to load the men to escape injury and detailed some of his employees to lend a hand. He assured Black that there would be plenty of time to board everybody and “a few minutes here and there would not be missed.” The city police were equally accommodating, guiding the men to their positions in the yard at six o’clock Monday morning.