Authors: John Demont
When the latest union contract expired in January 1925, Besco demanded another wage reduction. “Coal must be produced cheaper in Cape Breton,” Besco vice-president J.E. McLurg explained, “poor market conditions and increasing competition make this an absolute necessity.” The company was already taking its share from the workers; in 1924, according to the report of Cronyn’s Royal Commission, it deducted $176,055.59 from workers’ pay for supplies, $228,548.07 for rent for company homes and $348,396.58 for coal. The company doctor cost workers $222,100.15, hospitals $118,126.68 and churches another $75,883.64. A grand total of $1,199,293.78 went to the hated company stores. (By comparison, $247,130.47 went to union dues and another $145,657.97 to the employees’ benefit society.)
The miners—who were taking home a whopping $3.65 on the rare occasion they worked an entire day—had no more to give. Reports started appearing in the newspapers of housewives using flour bags for children’s clothing and cement and feed bags for bedding. A Glace Bay health official sent a report to the prime minister stating that two thousand idle Cape Breton miners and their families were “on the verge of starvation.” Prophetic words, it turned out, for it was about then that Dominion Coal posted notices at the Besco company stores in New Aberdeen, Caledonia and Dominion No. 6—known union hotbeds—announcing that all credit had been cut off to the unemployed miners.
It was, even viewed dispassionately eighty years later, an unconscionable act. Most of the miners and steelworkers had been living hand to mouth for the past six months. The company stores were the only source of food for many people. There was no strike fund. The March 7 front page of the
Sydney Post
explains what happened next:
At the appointed hour last night—11 o’clock—every miner in the employ of the British Empire Steel Corp in Cape Breton
and on the mainland, “downed tools” and left the pits, as ordered by the executive of the United Mine Workers of District 26. … Rapidly the men were hoisted from the deeps and in little knots of from three to a dozen wended their way homeward without the slightest display in token of satisfaction or disapproval of the tragedy that had encompassed the country. By midnight not a wheel was turning below or above ground and a silence, profound, deep and sinister settled over those collieries, where previously there had been continuous din and bustle. Six thousand men came out of the pits and to these must be added a like number who were unemployed, making a total in all of 12,000 miners out of work today.
The “100 percent strike”—so called because even the maintenance men at the mines had walked—was a desperate measure; unless Besco decided to sit down and negotiate, the mines would fill with water until they were unusable. Could the miners outwait Besco? Even before the men walked off the job, relief committees were distributing supplies, and the hungry were lining up in food depots that had sprung up in church basements and the soup kitchens that opened in the offices of the British Canadian Co-operative Society. They hacked off coal from bootleg mines to heat their homes. They went fishing and ran rum to put bread on the table.
The destitution was just so overwhelming. Within days of the strike’s start the mayor of Sydney Mines wrote to the prime minister that conditions were “very grave” and local resources “about exhausted.” A clergyman told the
Sydney Post
about meeting entire families living on little more than black tea, molasses and soup bones. Agnes Macphail, the trailblazing reformer MP from Ontario, paid a visit in late March and seemed unprepared for what she encountered. “I called in homes that were homes only in the sense
that shelter from the elements may be called a home,” she told a reporter for the same paper. “Awful rooms, exquisitely ugly and barren of even the ordinary comforts of life. … In one an expectant mother with several other children, had had no bedding until a relief station gave one blanket and one quilt. Their only food comes from the relief and the rations reclaimed by this family… consisted of bread, milk and potatoes.”
Archbishop Worrell, the head of the Anglican Church in Nova Scotia, also arrived to have a look-see. “There are many families, at least some 3,000 souls, mutely crying for food and clothing,” he told people back in Halifax.
Many of these mining family had had no coal for several weeks and no food for days at a time…. Many of the workers were earning such a small sum for weeks before the strike that they were compelled to spend all on necessary food and so had nothing for clothes. … The straits in which these people have found themselves are as desperate as those of shipwrecked men on a desert island and yet … they have restrained themselves and have kept law and order, notwithstanding the provocation of hunger and want.
Stories of the tragedy taking place in Cape Breton spread across the country, mobilizing do-gooders of every description. “This morning I saw 60 or 70 people picking over the garbage in the city dump getting a meager supply of half-spoiled food,” wrote Randolph Paiton, special correspondent for the
Winnipeg Tribune,
in a particularly moving piece.
One of the noticeable things throughout this mining district is the fact that both boys and girls of six and seven were selling
papers—and there were literally swarms of them. The way they beg one to buy a paper is so piteous that it is cruel torture to walk down the street. They don’t make very much noise, they don’t shout; they troop along with you for blocks even if you have a paper in your hand, quietly but desperately trying to persuade you to buy another.
Sara M. Gold, a research worker for the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Employees, also made a trip to Glace Bay to see for herself. Even allowing for the pro-labour bias, her account, reprinted in a journal called
Social Welfare,
makes hard reading:
A Scottish miner who had served for eighteen years in the coal pit, and for four years at the front, I found living with his family of wife and 8 children in the usual half of a company “double” house. Two rooms upstairs could not be used because of bad disrepair.… The plaster from the kitchen walls and half of the ceiling was crumbling, the floor humpy, but covered bravely with a home-made ragmat; the woodwork dirty, and for years unpainted. The cesspool has over-flown, and refuse flows into the street. There are, of course, no sanitary conveniences, but there is a wire cord for an electric light.… There is absolutely no bedding outside of two small pillows and a thin rag coverlet, and the mattresses are sagging and shedding cotton. For warmth the family go to bed in their clothing.
Not one of them have other clothing but what they wear. There is no change of underwear for anyone, and the children wear none at all; I found them in bed trying to keep warm, with thin cotton dresses against their little bare bodies. They had that winter not been to school or outdoors,
for they had no boots or stockings. The miner his wife and older children have bad teeth and red defective eyes. The children have diseased throats and breathe badly. They all look undernourished; the children especially are wan, puny with dark rings under their eyes. One little girl, three years of age, cannot yet walk—she still has rickets, and none for years have tasted cow’s milk. It costs ten cents a pint in Glace Bay! The youngest boy, of 15, sells papers in the village in lieu of work in the mines. He has no boots; he was given that week a huge pair of lumberman’s rubbers by the Relief Committee, together with an old coat.
It wasn’t just the bleeding hearts who found the conditions wanting. The 1925 provincial Royal Commission, made up of Cronyn, a British coal expert and a clergyman from Antigonish, Nova Scotia, was equally appalled.
We have formed the very definite view… that so far as houses rented from the operators are concerned, the accommodation and state of their repair generally fall short of reasonable requirements.… Many of these houses are old—some of them being erected by the General Mining Association more than fifty years ago. Others were built for the purpose of housing men engaged on the erection of portions of the operators’ plant or in opening up new mines; the latter are little better than temporary shelters and are known and properly described as “shacks.…” The houses generally have no kitchen or cellar, and in certain districts, in default of waterworks, water is either delivered by the operators or in carts or has to be carried from a distance. Where water is piped into the house, there is an almost total absence of bathrooms
or waterclosets, due, we are informed, to the lack of sewers. … The badly rutted streets, the straggling fences, and the outside privies add to the unattractiveness of the general picture.… We find that the average total deducted in 1924 was between one-quarter and one-third of the average total earnings. In cases of men having irregular employment the deductions in a given week were sometimes 50% or even up to 100% of their earnings for the week.
So many were starving before the lockout. Now thousands were dependent upon relief agencies for even the barest sort of subsistence. An urgent appeal from the Citizens Relief Committee of Springhill, which appeared in the April 4
Sydney Post,
underlined the depth of the woe: “At present, 170 families, about one-seventh of the town’s entire population, have been forced to apply for food. … We are allowing for each person in these families only one dollar per week. This means about five cents a meal for each person… there is nothing between them and starvation save our generosity.”
Relief poured in. The Red Cross sent money and supplies; so did town councils, individuals, churches and labour organizations across the country. The Legislative Assembly of Manitoba passed a resolution imploring the federal government to grant immediate relief to Cape Bretoners. A committee of men from Peterborough, Ontario, sent a train carload of food—flour, bags of potatoes, other vegetables and canned goods—to Nova Scotia. After much delay, John L. Lewis arrived on the scene, surveyed the conditions and authorized $10,000 from UMWA headquarters for the rest of the strike. Even Moscow—in the form of the All-Russian Miners’ Union and the Red International of Labour Unions—offered to contribute $5,000. According to a newspaper story, a four-year-old
boy walked into a bank branch in Quebec City and handed over sixty cents in pennies that he had saved in his bank, “for the little boys and girls down there,” he said, waving his hand in what he considered the general direction of Cape Breton.
The outrage swelled higher after Besco cut off the sale of coal to the miners’ homes and mounted a public relations campaign that, incredibly, tried to blame the miners for their own predicament. W.G. McQuarrie, a Conservative MP from New Westminster, B.C., stood up in the House of Commons and called federal Labour minister James Murdock “the most unpopular man in Canada” for his unwillingness to intervene in the Cape Breton trouble. The
Halifax Herald,
which raised $20,000 to aid the miners and their families, thundered from the front page,
Immediate action must be taken by the responsible authorities to rush without further delay, clothing, food and other necessities of life to the wives and children of the men who have been unable to secure employment for months and who are now slowly starving to death in many sections of our province. IT PASSES UNDERSTANDING THAT THOSE IN AUTHORITY SHOULD ALLOW THIS SITUATION TO CONTINUE ANOTHER DAY.
The
Ottawa Citizen
accused Besco of having “the mentality and soul that looks upon labor as a chattel to be bartered for profit, as a mere something to be used, and, if necessary, broken, on the wheels of industry, for dividends,” and described the Nova Scotia government as “notoriously friendly to the British Empire Steel” to the point where “men and women and little children starve” because the provincial government was either too weak or too much a Besco puppet to grapple with the situation.
Miners’ families, labour groups, clergymen and all stripes of politicians urged the prime minister to act. King knew his way around a negotiating table; as a young deputy minister of Labour he had proved an adroit hand at reaching compromises in touchy negotiations, including one that settled the 1906 Lethbridge coal strike. Later, during a lull in his political life before becoming prime minister, he was called in by oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller after militia fired on strikers at a Rockefeller-controlled coal company in Colorado, resulting in seventeen deaths—an event known thereafter as the Ludlow Massacre. At the oilman’s behest, King set up a plan that gave workers—who failed to win union recognition during the strike—representation on committees dealing with safety and working conditions. He also wrote a study on industrial relations for Rockefeller’s foundation, which posited that labour, management and capital were partners. And that industrial peace could be restored only if the partners recognized their common interests. Apparently that wasn’t the case in Nova Scotia—where the prime minister pleaded that he could only intervene at the request of the provincial government.
His plea had a decidedly hollow ring. In late May, as historian Donald MacGillivray points out, Ottawa was sending aid to help the Leeward Islands recover from a hurricane. Not a cent in federal aid, though, was sent to the Cape Breton miners, who by then were reduced to travelling around the island to take handouts of food—perhaps a bit of fish, some flour or a few potatoes—gathered by truck from farmers in a ritual called the Bag Parade. On April 3 the province of Nova Scotia finally acted, issuing a onetime grant of $20,000 to the Canadian Red Cross to maintain health standards in the area. Otherwise, Premier Armstrong stayed out of the strike except for threatening to call in the troops to protect Besco’s property “should the union’s policy of picketing the
mines and alleged interference with maintenance men endanger the people’s interests.”
Besco’s pockets, though, were deep, and its resolve infinite. Shortly after the walkout began, a Canadian Press reporter visited J.E. McLurg, Wolvin’s Besco lieutenant. During the interview McLurg demonstrated an unexpected gift for metaphor by comparing the negotiations to a poker game. “We have all the cards. … Let them stay out two months or six months, it matters not; eventually they will have to come to us.” Then, in a single phrase that seemed to sum up all the company’s arrogance, greed and malice, he uttered five words that would echo through time as a war whoop for Cape Breton’s coal miners: “They can’t stand the gaff,” he gloated, by which he meant that they lacked the guts to endure what Besco was about to do next.