Coal Black Heart (14 page)

When I lived in Toronto back in the late eighties, I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario and found myself staring at
Miners’ Houses, Glace Bay,
an oil painting that Harris also completed in 1925. A string of identical steepled houses—dark brown in the shade, ochre in the light—punches the sky. The hard terrain bucks and rolls. A gaping picket fence anchors the frame. Everything is a bit childish, off-kilter. The effect—and when I look at a painting the only thing I know how to do is squint hard and trust my first hazy impression—is stark and sombre but with a little something. The brightening sky leads my eye from right to left across the canvas. Every object seems to yearn for the warming glow in the distance. Up there, it seems to say. Up there is sunlight. Up there is hope.

Everything about coal mining lends itself to the easiest kind of symbolism: iron towers climbing mercilessly into the sky; railway tracks descending into the dark void. Anonymous, soot-faced miners digging their own graves miles below the light and air. Something about their houses, in particular, arrests the artist’s eye and heart. “Between the bridge and the colliery, for a distance of two hundred and fifty yards, crowded so close together they looked like a single down-ward slanting building with a single downward-slanting roof, were the houses of the miners’ row,” is how Glace Bay–born novelist Hugh MacLennan introduces them in
Each Man’s Son.
Half a century later, Ann-Marie MacDonald—father from Sydney and mother from New Waterford—considers the bleak vista in her novel
Fall on Your Knees,
and writes about how “spreading away from the collieries and coal heaps are the peaked roofs of the miners’ houses built row on row by the coal company. Company houses. Company town.”

They’re still worth seeing; in many places, with the old mine workings eroding and disappearing, the company homes are the last
best relic of Nova Scotia’s coal age. Finding somewhere, anywhere, to lay your head was a serious challenge in turn-of-the-century colliery districts. The GMA built the first company homes—rough structures made of logs or brick—in Pictou County soon after its arrival. In the 1830s and 1840s, it started erecting wooden houses, shingled outside and plastered within, in the area. It wasn’t necessarily a humanitarian gesture. As the industry grew, the coal companies erected housing pell-mell as part of their recruitment and retention program. The Sydney Mines experience was emblematic. In the English style, they built a dozen or so connected homes—which somehow acquired names like King William, Cahill’s, Scalping, Blue and Maedon’s rows—near the mine workings. When I went tooling around Sydney Mines one afternoon, the only company-built row houses still visible were so utilitarian-looking that I thought any second a door could open and a member of one of the dozen families living there in 1900—a Cunliff, say, a Westhead, Strickland or Birmingham—could step out, carrying his miner’s lamp and tin lunch box.

Those who didn’t inhabit the miners’ tenements—in 1901 Dominion Coal alone owned a thousand of them—bunked in the boarding houses, or “shacks,” as they were known locally. Each shack held seventy-two men who slept two to a bed. (Cooks were hired by the company to feed the men, although the price of each meal was deducted from their pay envelopes at the end of the week.) Thousands of others squatted in crude homemade board-and-tarpaper shanties, or somehow gained entrance to one of the private homes where as many as twenty boarders lived in a single tiny house.

I’ve seen variations on the Sydney Mines company cottages throughout every colliery town in the province: rough little two-storey,
semi-detached, wood-framed boxes arranged in linear fashion along the road. They were meant to be cheap, not elegant or interesting. If you went to sleep in one on Crescent Street in Sydney Mines and magically awoke in another on Foord Street in Stellarton, it might be a couple of hours before you realized teleportation had taken place. The single one I entered, preserved from
circa
1930 as part of the Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, was a bleak collection of tiny rooms: a parlour, kitchen and pantry downstairs, and a pair of bedrooms—one for the parents, the other where the kids slept several to the bed—up the rickety stairs. Nothing but bare essentials throughout: plain, unpainted floorboards; hard homemade furniture; thin, unforgiving straw beds; a small coal stove as the single source of heat; maybe a photo or painting of some dour ancestor adorning the walls.

The backyard probably once contained a small garden; according to historian Robert McIntosh, the companies encouraged mining families to grow vegetables to avoid famine during the bad years, and also as a way to justify keeping wages low. Bathing took place in a tin tub in the backyard during the summer months, and for the rest of the year, in a tub in the kitchen. A privately published history of Sydney Mines reported that women would sometimes steal a peek at the brawny colliery men. On the other hand, maybe they were just killing time; their baths didn’t happen until late Saturday night, while the men were asleep. When John William Briers happened on the scene, most everyone in Sydney Mines still thought of the toilet as an outhouse in the backyard. According to the same history of the town, that primitive facility was an uninviting prospect in the middle of a cold February night, so the chamber pot was used “to good advantage.” In the case of the men, “a nearby window would also turn the trick.”

Only after 1900, when Nova Scotia Steel and Coal took over
the mines, were residents permitted to purchase the homes and begin improving them. Yet there were clear advantages to living in a company house: rent was cheap; tenants often received preference when work was scarce. If production and wages were low, they could continue to live in the house and buy at the company store. “But,” cautioned historian Ralph Ripley, “the rent mounted and such indebtedness effectively tied the tenant to the company.”

And that kind of uneven relationship left the miners open to all kinds of abuse. The coal companies were brutal when it came to quelling outbreaks of independence among their working folk. We’ll hear soon about the goon squads brought in to use fists, sticks and guns to control striking miners, how the miners were ridden down in the streets by mounted provincial constabulary, and gunned down by company police. CBC broadcaster Bill McNeil could have been referring to just about any Cape Breton coal mining family when he described the one in which he grew up:

The coal company’s influence, particularly at the beginning, was all-pervasive. The company not only built and owned the houses in the town, but supplied the coal that heated them and, later, the power plant that lit them. It supplied the water the miners and their families drank and—through its stores—the food
they ate. It wouldn’t be long before independent proprietors arrived and the first co-operative stores appeared. But in the first few decades of the twentieth century, only the company stores could offer credit. And so, when a Princess miner got his weekly pay packet, it would include a long list of deductions already taken: rent, coal, electricity, water and anything bought on credit at the company store. Later the list of deductions known as check-off evolved to include the cost of providing church, hospital, sanitation and physician services.

It was 1888 when Alexander McGillivray, a miner at the Little Glace Bay Mine, testified before a Royal Commission appointed by Sir John A. Macdonald to consider the relationship between labour and capital in Canada. Not much would change in the intervening years.

One day I went looking for the old coal company store—the symbol, as Bill McNeil once put it, “of everything that was wrong in a system where the company had it all and the workers had nothing.” By the early 1900s the miners were at least paid in real money rather than scrip. “I knew week in, week out, fellows who never drew a red cent,” recalled Gordon MacGregor of Glace Bay. “To my mother there was a kind of blight, in a way, for everyone to deal there. She had a fear of it. Lots of women did.” Choice was the issue; the few privately owned stores were small and poorly stocked. When the coal companies doled out a job or a house it was usually with the understanding that the recipients would do all their shopping at the company stores. Duncan MacIntyre, a miner in Glace Bay’s Caledonia Mine, told the 1888 Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital that he didn’t think “there are half a dozen families at the colliery but deal at the store.”

A pizzeria, convenience store and lumberyard now fill the real estate where the Sydney Mines store once stood. So it takes some imagination to picture what an early-twentieth-century coal miner’s wife would have seen when she stopped to peer in the front windows and then, passing underneath the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal sign, entered. Inside, ornate fifteen-foot ceilings, gleaming wooden floors, dark, polished counters and white-coated clerks. And the merchandise… Lord, the merchandise. I defer to John Mellor’s description. “Butter—fine quality creamery butter—was sold in large square wooden boxes. Cheddar cheese in huge rounds was just as delicious,” he wrote. “Bacon, cheese and plug tobacco were sliced, weighed, and wrapped expertly on the countertops by clerks who were well-trained, efficient and for the most part pleasant to deal with.” The flour was kept in big barrels, for loading into cotton bags of such “excellent quality” that, during strikes or slowdowns, the material could be used by miners’ wives for underwear
and daughters for dresses. Hanging in the cool basement were sides of beef and mutton and whole carcasses of pork. “Stacked up to the low ceiling were hundreds of bags of flour, barrels of wet salted cod, turbot, mackerel, and herring, boxes of apples and biscuits, hogsheads of pure molasses, crates of eggs, and a great multitude of foodstuffs.” There were clothes and bolts of cloth, sewing gear, hardware, clay pipes and “a hundred and one knickknacks of every description.” At the back of the store stood a shed containing “bales of hay and foodstuffs for horses, cattle and pigs for those fortunate enough to own livestock.” The upper floor contained “boots and shoes, house furnishings, furniture, bedding, linoleum, cutlery, crockery and hundreds of other household items.”

You can see how it would have been hard to resist. How mining wives would have been reeled in like poor bingo addicts entering a casino for the first time, blowing their available credit on candy and useless doodads until there wasn’t enough for groceries in the end. You don’t have to be able to recite
Das Kapital
by heart to conclude that the “pluck me” stores—so named, legend has it, because a Cape Breton miner, discovering one week that after all the deductions he hadn’t made a cent, turned to his buddies and shouted, “Christ, they’ve plucked me!”—represented one of the worst aspects of industrialization. The credit system kept the miners and their families in perpetual servitude; once a miner was in hock at one colliery, there was an agreement that he couldn’t move to another mine, or even get credit at another company store. Mellor says the situation was perpetuated by the rhythm of the town. During the winter months the mines stopped operation. The workers’ families had to depend upon the largesse of the company stores for food and clothing during those periods, running up large debts that could only be worked off when the mines reopened. In the end the store credit system was simply another weapon the
coal companies could use on the miners, when they needed to battle a union drive or to end a strike.