Coal Black Heart (10 page)

Their courtship ritual likely followed a predictable path. After cleaning up after work—in a tin bath in front of the kitchen fire—John William would have joined the other lads and lasses strolling up and down Market Street, near the centre of town, eyeing the talent. In Chorley this was known as the monkey walk. And it was a necessity in a place where it was frowned upon for unmarried people to visit any of the local pubs: the Colliers’ Arms, built in the late Victorian period; the Black Horse, built in 1820, named after the pit ponies that hauled the coal; the Blackamoor, almost certainly named as a pun on the black-faced miners who frequented it. Money for drink was scarce. John William would have handed his wages over to his mother, who, being a grocer’s daughter, would have handed back a small allowance. Somehow, though, romance blossomed.

Number 20 Gillibrand Walks, where the couple set up house
after their wedding, was a brick row house with a bay window and front garden—both considered posh in the day. It was a short walk to the Rigby grocery store in the central part of town. The couple was surrounded by Rigbys—Margaret’s sister May Ann lived next door at number 18, Barbara at number 8, brother John at number 17 and Aunt Elizabeth at number 5.

Chances are that my great-grandfather worked at the nearby Birkacre colliery, opened to supply the local textile works. But that’s only speculation; the huge number of collieries meant that labour was truly mobile in those days. Miners thought nothing of trekking a few miles to another colliery if it paid a couple of pence extra per ton. Heady ideas were in the air in England: for the first time ever, a working-class lad like John William might raise himself up with his own spirit, ambition, energy and good fortune.

I imagine him going to sober talks on serious subjects at the miners’ lecture halls. He may have read Kipling, with his sentimental yarns about the inherent greatness of the Empire. He may have been a member of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, just two years old in 1891 but already boasting over 250,000 members willing to fight and even die for their principles. Or, perhaps it was Margaret, a descendant of a long-established Chorley family, who dreamed of greater things. One fact is undeniable: at some point, for some unknowable reason, in the first years of the twentieth century they had a chat.

The news in the
Chorley Guardian
on May 10, 1902, must have been discouraging. “Some fourteen or fifteen collieries were stopped on Wednesday in South Lancashire owing to scarcity of orders, and 10,000 colliers are idle. … The Lancashire coal trade is now entering upon a spell of severe depression.” A story less than six weeks later brought news that an arbitrator with the august name of Lord James of Hereford had ruled in favour of the mine owners on some
wage question. “Accordingly, there will be a reduction of 10 per cent in the miners’ wages from the first making up day in July.”

Maybe it was that story that led Margaret and John William—beaten down by their Lancashire lives, or bursting with excitement about the future—to talk about the rumour that there was a need for colliery men in Nova Scotia.

Nova Scotia?

Nova Scotia—over there in Canada.

John probably knew someone who had joined the flood of Englishmen heading “across the pond” to work in the booming Nova Scotia mines and steel plants. Maybe he had read advertisements in the
Chorley Guardian
or
Wigan Observer,
placed by “appointed agents,” encouraging immigration to Canada. Chances are that he had even heard about some of the disasters over there, which rivalled British tragedies for sheer carnage: the 73 who had died in the Drummond Colliery in a place called Westville in 1873, the 50 who had died at the explosion at the Foord Pit, in the same general area, seven years later. He would have certainly known about the explosion that had ripped through the Springhill Mine in northern Nova Scotia the same year he and Margaret were wed. On that February day, 125 died—the most in Canadian history to that point. Contributions to the Miners’ Relief Fund had come from across Canada and the British Empire, including from Queen Victoria.

What ensued once the subject was opened I can only imagine: land is more than the ground we live on. Their people could trace centuries of history on that soil: here, some ancient member of the clan was claimed by the plague. There, a Rigby was once pilloried and pelted with rotting fruit for stealing rabbits from a nobleman’s estate. Over behind that building, a Briers with milky skin had to step lively to avoid Jacobite pikemen passing through on the way
back to Scotland. For them, every sad, gorgeous inch of geography was replete with meaning and shot through with memories so deep-rooted as to seem almost genetic.

They must have talked about the decision for days, even weeks. He was thirty, she twenty-nine—and the mines made people old before their time. They had to look toward the future, not the past. They had three children to consider: Amy, a one-year-old; the boys, Harold, now eight, and John, six. Did they dream of escape, of wide-open spaces and clean air where their children could grow up straight and strong and scrub the grime of generations from their faces? At a certain point, did they see life in this new land all spread out before them radiant with hope?

This, for certain, is all we know: at some point, a ship came.

Greed and the Gilded Age

K
now this about Henry Melville Whitney: he was stout, slouchy and partly deaf. An underachiever about whom, at thirty-three, it was written that his means “don’t amount to much” and his first public utterances were characterized by “the Whitney reticence with short, vague and imprecise responses.” Yet who possessed that most American gift of reinventing himself: three years later he was an “honourable, capable businessman” worth an estimated $500,000. A spellbinding orator. A man who, according to a contemporary, ran a business organization so adept at controlling the Massachusetts state legislature that by comparison “an average Tammany Gang,” a “Chicago Combine” or a “St. Louis Syndicate” would look like a “hay-covered snowplough in August.” Who, though his business endeavours usually carried the whiff of scandal, still managed to cultivate an image of public benevolence.

Maybe there’s no direction other than forward when your brother is made undersecretary of the U.S. Navy and your family tree—yeah,
those
Boston Whitneys—is veined with the guy who came up with
both the cotton gin and the general principle for the assembly line, and the owners of horses that have won every major thoroughbred race in the United States. What brought Whitney down in the end seems to have been the same fatal flaw as got his father, a merchant and manufacturer known as the General. Both had energy and vision, could start new things, but had trouble staying focused, hanging in for the long run. With time the son’s early successes started to fade, his financial losses to accumulate. Whitney, who in his latter years, looked like a cross between Emperor Hirohito and Teddy Roosevelt, twice mounted unsuccessful runs for the Massachusetts State House. When Whitney died from pneumonia in 1925, the
New York Times
declared “that no American ever did more for Canada.” When Whitney’s estate was probated, it was discovered that he was almost a pauper.

Is a mental image starting to form? One of those freewheeling, Gatsbyesque characters of the Gilded Age? I forgot to mention one thing: Whitney brought my people here. Not directly, mind you. I’m not even sure if any member of my family ever actually eyeballed him. Yet had Whitney never strode the earth, John William Briers might never have ended up in Cape Breton. Ned Demont, whom you will soon meet, would have stayed in Windsor, Nova Scotia. And I’d be spinning a different yarn right now, instead of asking you to cast your mind back to where the Nova Scotia thread of the story left off—to the General Mining Association and its monopoly over coal-mining in the province.

The year 1837 is a good place to start. The GMA had been busy in the past decade. As historian Daniel Samson has written, its £200,000 investment represented an astounding sum for any British colonial mining operation, and would stand as the greatest investment in the history of Nova Scotia until Confederation in 1867. By 1833 some nine hundred men worked at its foundries and mines,
a staggering workforce in a province where, as Samson put it, “a new grist mill was worthy of note.” By then the GMA had doubled the province’s coal production to 50,000 tonnes; by 1858 it would approach 300,000. For those smitten by the transformations then occurring in Great Britain and the northeastern United States in the mid-nineteenth century, it must have seemed like divine intervention that this miracle of progress had arrived in a place that seemed so mired in the eighteenth century.

Alas, there was another body of opinion about the GMA. I’m not talking of mild dislike. This was loathing—made all the more startling by the delight with which the company’s arrival was greeted, still vividly evident in two-hundred-year-old newspapers. Can you really blame people? The arbitrary manner in which the Crown had handed over the mines to far-off developers smacked of the divine right of kings. The sweetheart nature of the GMA’s deal—for most of the lease period it paid a magisterial
£1
a year, plus a penny on each ton of coal—left people apoplectic.

The imperious way the Englishmen wielded their power rankled too. Technically, the duke’s grant allowed mines to open under certain circumstances; if the GMA knew about a coal deposit and didn’t, within a twelve-month period, open a mine at the site, the government was empowered to lease the deposit to a rival. In reality, as economist Marilyn Gerriets has pointed out, not one competing lease was ever granted. The GMA earned more enemies by wiping out the time-honoured common-law practice of treating coal and mineral deposits as public resources. Going after old Angus for hacking off a few bucketfuls of coal from an outcropping on his own land to heat his hovel was out of the question. But the GMA prosecuted with immense zeal anything that vaguely resembled a commercial mine. John Archibald, writing from Salmon River, Colchester County, in 1845, summed up the situation:

Cunard, by the way, was the same Halifax-born Samuel Cunard who went on to establish the world’s first and greatest steamship line. Before the GMA took over, he had made his own proposal to lease and develop the Cape Breton coalfield. We know how that turned out. Cunard, though, wasn’t one to let an opportunity pass by. While busy making money in the timber and tea trades and investing in everything from banking and iron to steamships, he became a GMA director. His unprecedented access to Nova Scotia’s business and political elites made him the GMA’s chief fixer in the province.

The Englishmen, you see, were relentless. They hired ships to chase down vessels carrying coal from “smuggling mines.” In retaliation, at one point, someone set fire to the GMA’s Albion Mines. So the province passed laws making it a felony to set fire to a coal mine or to place “obstacles” across railroads. In 1845, in direct response to the complaints of the GMA, the province brought in new anti-smuggling laws. So browbeaten was the colonial government around then that it appointed four GMA agents as customs agents for Sydney and Pictou. In 1849 the GMA paid a spy named Matthew Roach to come up with a list of people illegally digging
coal in Cape Breton. His report advised the GMA that these people were “in poor circumstances, and that they are unable to pay even a moderate penalty, and would be ruined by the infliction of a fine of £20,” and that they “use no caution to prevent his witnessing their operations, because the persuasion is universal among them that the taking away of coal is not illegal.”

Slowly, almost undetectably, resentment grew. How could it not? One day, these Englishmen show up and inform the locals that they now own one of the few valuable resources in the colony. Oh, by the way—since you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, we’ll operate the mines. We’ll bring in people from the old country—England, Wales, Scotland—to run things properly. Everybody seemed overjoyed when the GMA—which was injecting £66,000 per annum into the Nova Scotia economy by the late 1830s—was spending. Once the association tried to actually take some profits from the mines… well, you can imagine.

The clamour of complaints against the royal monopoly grew louder as more and more potential operators applied to open up coal deposits only to have their requests repeatedly come back stamped “denied.” The immense wealth some expected to accompany the GMA’s arrival simply failed to materialize. Maybe it wasn’t possible when an investor had to build everything from scratch in a place with no manufacturing facilities or skilled workforce. Whatever the reason, up until the 1860s, most of the GMA’s manufacturing equipment—along with its men—came from England.

Mount Rundell, as much as any one thing, symbolized the GMA’s public relations problem. The high-ceilinged Georgian building with its acres of groomed land loomed large over an eighteenth-century boondocks settlement. James Cameron wrote that the balls,
dinners and parties there “did not go unnoticed in Halifax where Lieutenant Governors were expected to keep up a socially stylish front on a stipend never generous, and by repute, considerably less” than Mount Rundell’s budget. In truth, the acrimony stemmed more from the power emanating from the place than from the grand grounds and expensive fixtures. Meanwhile, Mount Rundell’s lord, the overbearing, pompous Richard Smith, seemed to rub everyone the wrong way. Joseph Howe’s newspaper,
The Novascotian,
said that Smith left behind “some enemies as well as some friends” when he finally retired to England. Years later, his memory still evoked such vitriol that one of his successors quietly removed Smith’s name from a GMA steamship and rechristened
it Albion.

Smith’s sole foray into electoral politics didn’t help one bit. Only the supremely deluded would think they could spend five years in Sydney—where Smith was busy getting the GMA’s Cape Breton operations up and running—and honestly suppose that he could win a by-election for a new legislative riding encompassing the entire island. My guess is that Smith saw the contest as a cake-walk for someone with the GMA’s financial clout behind him. A single image demonstrates how badly he misread his audience: Smith parading into the open houses he threw throughout the Sydney area accompanied by his 40-man band, each member resplendent in a green scarf and white apron. Smith’s opponent, William Young, was a showy, well-connected Halifax lawyer advocating responsible government for the colony. The pair were virtually deadlocked late in the race. Historian Brian Cuthbertson recounts what happened next: how Smith brought his Sydney miners to the Acadian community of Cheticamp for the final poll. There they were met by 150 of Young’s supporters, Cape Breton Highlanders still grateful to Young for helping them find decent land when they arrived from Scotland. Armed with cudgels,
Young’s supporters surrounded him as he seized the hustings. Smith’s miners tried to fight their way onto the platform, then gave up. The sheriff, “in connivance with Young,” closed the poll and declared Young the victor.

The story wasn’t quite finished; Smith’s men waited in a bog to ambush Young’s victory party. Only a last-minute plea by a clergyman stopped them from opening fire. From Halifax, the honourable members of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly watched the events unfold in horror. Then, believing that Young had at the very least sanctioned the chaos, they overturned the result and gave the seat to the GMA head. They needn’t have bothered. Smith headed back to England after a single session in the House.

By then, the ground was surely shifting. The push for responsible government in Canada began in Nova Scotia. Within that context, Samson writes, the GMA was increasingly viewed as an enemy of competition, an adversary of individual freedom and the other liberal virtues then catching fire in the province. At this point the GMA had other troubles. In the United States the Reading Railroad had been completed, connecting Pennsylvania’s anthracite coalfields with the eastern seaboard. The cost of shipping a ton of American coal east therefore fell at the same time as Congress placed a duty of $1.75 per ton on imported coal. For Nova Scotia the impact was immediate: shipments of Cape Breton coal to the United States plummeted by nearly 50 percent between 1841 and 1842. All of this left the GMA managers scrambling to reduce costs. One way was to cut wages—but when the GMA tried that in 1840, the Albion miners struck and the company quickly relented.

Two years later the company tried again, this time cutting miners’ pay by fourpence per cubic yard of coal. What happened a few days later is noteworthy in that it set the tone for labour relations in the coal industry well into the next century. The mine’s
general manager, Henry Poole—a humourless-looking burgher with judgmental eyes and a chanterelle mushroom beard—cut off the mining families’ coal and supplies. At that point a crowd of a hundred women and children descended upon Mount Rundell, where they smashed the kitchen windows and heaped abuse on Poole. He took it for a while, then agreed to start up the coal supplies again. The catch was that the price of their coal would be 400 percent higher than the pre-strike level. The miners stood fast. There were no more threats against Poole, James Cameron wrote, although a small riot broke out in an Albion Mines grog shop. It took another three months before the company agreed to the employees’ compromise terms—ten shillings a day—and the men returned to work.

Another way to boost profits was to put a gun to the head of the provincial government. The argument made in December 1842 by Samuel Cunard, who had emerged as the GMA’s main agent in Nova Scotia, was simple: despite what everyone might think, “no interest or return” had been paid to the GMA on its huge investments in the province. On the contrary, all those capital expenditures had been made in expectation of almost unlimited demand for coal in the United States, now being flooded with American anthracite. The GMA needed an immediate break on its royalties. “Without this aid,” Cunard declared, “the Association will be compelled to close the Pictou Mines and to dismiss the Colliers, and others employed there.” The message got through. Royalties were immediately reduced, and the annual rent of £3,000 waived. Did anyone notice two years later, when the GMA opened a new mine nearby Cumberland County—a decision that seemed to undercut its entire economic argument? Hard to say. But the threat of extortion would be a common one during the remainder of the GMA regime.