Coal Black Heart (15 page)

One thing the miners somehow found money for was churches. In Sydney Mines the world view was almost exclusively Christian. (The 1901 census counted Roman Catholics (1,716), Presbyterians (905), Anglicans (309), Methodists (161), Baptists (42), Lutherans (72), Salvation Army (44), Adventists (22) and Congregationalists (16).) The novelist Ann-Marie MacDonald was talking about nearby New Waterford when she told Oprah Winfrey that her home was the kind of community where “all the beauty, imagination and aesthetic yearning would be expressed by the church.” That statement, though, applied equally all around the harbour.

A Prince Edward Island architect named William C. Harris was most responsible for brightening the view throughout Cape Breton. He built a gothic revival gem for the Anglican call to worship in Sydney Mines. He also built Anglican churches in the Whitney Pier area of Sydney and in North Sydney. Probably his work on the north side of the harbour brought Harris to the attention of officials of the Cape Breton Coal, Iron and Railway Company. In 1904 they hired him for his most ambitious commission to date: a ten-thousand-person town planned for the middle of the Cape Breton forest.

They called it Broughton, after the English country seat of Horace Mayhew, the company’s president. And all the hope and ambition of that time and place is visible in the original plans for the town, which I one day unfurled at Cape Breton University’s Beaton Institute in Sydney. The drawings were prepared by M.G. Henniger, a local civil engineer, and dated April 20, 1905. The miners’ cottages—all 111 of them, by my count—are arranged
in geometrically straight streets, divided by the rail line into residential areas. The streets are numbered, or bear names such as Lakeside Drive, Main Street or Broad Street. The margins of the plans are adorned with precise drawings of the front and side views of the office building, the assistant manager’s house, the railway station and the Broughton Arms Hotel. Each drawing carries Harris’s unmistakable style, “with hipped roofs and gables, round towers and bartizans, and bargeboards decorated with lines of little holes,” in the words of his biographer Robert C. Tuck.

Technically, the vision was that of another man: Thomas Lancaster, an Englishman with a bit of mining experience who felt certain that the Cape Breton coalfields extended some sixteen kilometres from Sydney. In 1904 he raised some seed capital from a collection of bankers, coal men and members of the venerable Gladstone family back in England. Then he bought the land and won the go-ahead to develop ninety-two square miles of their holdings.

What did he foresee? A modern town hacked out of the wilderness. Progress, yes, but a more humane version than the kind taking root in the nearby coal towns. Early the next year, the Broughton mine was up and working. A rail line connected the pithead with a nearby Dominion Coal rail line so that building materials could be brought in. Soon the foundations for a power plant were laid. Italian labourers arrived and started clearing the site for the town that would follow.

“Architecturally,” Tuck wrote, “Broughton had unity but not uniformity.” The Anglican chapel was furnished with an altar and pews made of birch logs (even the covers of the prayer books were made of birchbark). The Cape Breton Coal, Iron and Railway general office boasted “massive dormers and decorative buttresses on single storey round towers.” Even the assistant manager’s house was decorated with “hipped gables, buttresses and an umbrage at the
front entrance.” The hotels, by all accounts, gave the fullest display of “the abundance” of Harris’s creative imagination. The Crown Hotel, where the workers stayed, was less imposing. The three-storey Broughton Arms, with its “spacious basement and attics, round topped by conical roofs, and encircled by a veranda,” made jaws drop. “Out in the calm hushed solitude of its country fastness,” wrote an anonymous scribbler at the time, “on a remorseful blueberry patch, and near the sacred precinct of an old and venerable swamp is built and equipped a superb hotel—nothing better east of Montreal.”

In 2008, no signs that I could find showed the way to the site of Broughton Mines, which had even managed to fall through the gaps in the ubiquitous MapQuest grid. So I just headed south from Sydney until I hit something called Morrison Road, where I took a right and drove until the blacktop ended. I chugged back and forth on the sparsely populated dirt road and pulled over to ask directions from a skinny guy gathering bottles from the culverts. He’d never heard of Broughton Mines. A farmer a few miles the other way had; he directed me past the swamp Id read about in some of Harris’s letters until I saw a break in the woods, and yellow “no trespassing” tape stuck to the trees.

I went in anyway, and walked around piles of dirt, rock and rubble and over a couple of small craters. About a hundred yards in, I stopped by a mossy concrete foundation, probably twenty feet by thirty in the process of being reclaimed by the undergrowth. I have to confess: I’ve always had a soft spot for ruins. I know I’m not alone in this regard; the Japanese have a whole aesthetic—known as
wabi sabi
—that cherishes the weathered and transient. Which is certainly one way of thinking about what’s left of Broughton. The money ran out. The company, it turned out, didn’t even have clear title to all of the land. Out of the blue, Lancaster quit. Mayhew visited the premier and asked for subsidies to finance the construction of a rail
line to carry the coal to Sydney. When that didn’t work, he sailed for England on May 17, 1906, leaving his son, Horace Jr.—a melancholy-looking fellow, from the one photo I’ve seen—in charge of Broughton. Mayhew promised to be back in six weeks, but never set foot in Cape Breton again. One Sunday morning that summer, Horace Jr. took his life in the Broughton Arms Hotel.

Some new managers tried to reboot the enterprise. In 1915 the mine closed, more or less for good. The Broughton Arms, which had claimed to be the location of North America’s first set of revolving doors, burned down a year later, not long after being taken over by the officers and men of the 185
^th
Battalion Cape Breton Highlanders as they assembled to head overseas. After the First World War, the remaining buildings fell into neglect and decay. Some of the miners’ cottages were hauled away to Sydney or Glace Bay to be turned into private homes. Eventually, a few foundations were all that was left. Nothing lasts. Not even the most expansive of dreams. The coalmining communities were already discovering that.

He Was That Young

Y
outh, you will recall, lasts a very long time. Minutes meander, hours creep, days expand. My grandfather—earnest, blue-eyed, sandy-haired—never said a word about the eternal dark, the dust coating his throat, the rats dancing across his boots. But when you are eleven years old, time unspools at a sluggish pace. On a summer afternoon at a beach that slowed-down, dreamy state is a gift. Alone in a hole in the ground—listening to the eerie creak of the roof, the incessant drip of the water—it had to be agony pure.

He didn’t have a choice, not really. When you came from coalmining stock, when your father was a coal miner and his father before him—all the way back to the days before false teeth, the photograph and shampoo—your path in the early twentieth century was as clear in Sydney Mines as it would have been back in Britain. John Briers Jr., who went by Jack, had at least completed grade five, which made him an intellectual compared to the boys of nine or ten whose parents said the hell with the rules and sentenced them to Nova Scotia’s Victorian coal mines. In 1906, when my grandfather
entered the Florence colliery, another nine hundred or so boys already toiled in Nova Scotia coal mines. In Sydney Mines—according to the 1901 census—60 percent of families with working-age boys had sent one of their children off to the pit.

We blanch in horror now at the thought of it: the youngest boys—so small they could only make the long trek to the pithead in their fathers’ arms, so scared they cried on the way to work each day, so young they still believed in Santa Claus—working as trappers, opening and closing the doors that ventilated the mine. Yet by 1906 people were just starting to see these children as victims. Historian Robert McIntosh points out that a tour of the colliery was a must for any visiting journalist or travel writer in the late 1800s. The scribes thought the mines were exotic, macabre and scary. Nobody batted an eye at the soot-faced children in the workforce. “The youngest ‘imps’ were ‘cheerful,’” he wrote, summarizing the coverage. “Older boys were ‘happy’ ‘bright,’ ‘interesting’ and ‘animated.’ Mine visitors agreed that the colliery boy was colourful; he was content with his work. His place was in the mine.”

I don’t have any pictures of Jack Briers from around this time. I doubt that he’d look much different from the other pit boys captured on the photographic page during that period. Playful adjectives really aren’t the ones that come to mind. A smile flickers at the occasional angelic face. A few of them look perplexed. Posed in their peaked miner’s caps, dark, thick coats and beat-up boots, they mostly look cocky, hard and weary—trying with an insolent stare or a nonchalant posture to make the photographer believe they are tough enough for some task which, in a better world, they wouldn’t need to perform.

The Beaton Institute possesses one photo taken in 1900 at Glace Bay’s Caledonia Mine. Shift’s over. A few of the boys have been dragooned to sit for a shot. The ones seated in the front row—among
them Fred Wadden, a hulking guy with a clay pipe in his mouth, and Tius Tutty, who I discover is twenty and has already put in six years at the Bridgeport and Dominion mines—look older, tougher and worldlier. The eye, though, is drawn to the left of the picture. There Allie MacKenzie—who later became a legend on the rugby field and baseball diamond, before dying during a mustard-gas attack in the First World War—stands uncertainly. He’s shorter than the other miners, even though they’re seated. Which, I suppose, isn’t overly surprising. MacKenzie was nine years old. At that point he had already worked three months as a trapper boy in the Caledonia colliery.

School, to many of them, seemed boring and pointless, in part thanks to the poorly trained teachers the colliery towns tended to attract at the turn of the century. To malinger too long in the classroom was viewed as downright effeminate in a place where manliness was the ultimate aim. The very air felt different when the colliers—role models, heroes, elders, all in one—strode down the streets. Songs were written about men like these. Who could cut the most coal? Who was the strongest? Who could stand the gaff—endure whatever the company threw at them—when the animosity between the miners and their employers boiled over? Legends were born in these young places searching for their own unifying stories.

When I started to sift through the words of the miners, I discovered that tradition was part of what drew them. “My father was here as a blacksmith,” said Edgar Bonnar, who started working in the Princess mine in 1925 at the age of sixteen. His story is typical. “My brother was here, all the family worked here.” When George Dooley, who rose to become the manager of the fabled Drummond Mine in Westville, tried to figure out what to do with his life, the fact that his grandfather had worked there for forty years and his
father for fifty-eight heavily influenced his decision-making. Lybison MacKay who worked a number of Cape Breton mines, felt the same weight of precedent: “My father worked 50 years in the Inverness Mines…. I kind of graduated into coal mining myself. He took me underground when I was just seven. It was quite an experience. Yes, I think that had quite a bit to do with it.”

That and the fact that they didn’t really have a say anyway. “It was every young lad’s ambition to get into the mines. That was the only thing here in this area,” recalled Ray MacNeil, who went into No. 12 colliery in Scotchtown in 1925. “I had an old suit—dear God there were 1,000 patches on it—and after the seventeenth visit to the mine office in my suit, I got hired.” Bob Hachey who spent forty-four years in the mines around Joggins and River Hebert, was just thirteen when he entered the Bayview Mine: “I had no choice and neither did my brother.” Springhill miner Joe E. Tabor also quit school at a young age: “My father said, ‘If you’re going to quit school you’ll have to come work with me in the coal mines.’ So that’s what I did.” And Jimmy Johnson, who started working at the Allan Shaft in Stellarton in 1930, experienced the same kind of familial pressure: “My mother said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’” he remembered years later. “At the time I couldn’t get a job nowhere. So there was no other place to go but the coalmines. She said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do, we ain’t got nothing to eat.’”

Childhood was hard. Yet it’s a mistake to think of the boy colliers as simply underaged casualties of industrialization. Queen’s University historian Ian MacKay writes that going into the pit “was a declaration of independence” for the juvenile miners. So they put on extra overcoats and lied about their age. Or one day they just signed up without their parents knowing. Suddenly, bewilderingly they were
men. At home, their status changed; they received adult-sized portions of food and got a place at the table along with the men, while their sisters and even their mothers stood so the breadwinners could dine. “It was a big day when I went to the mine,” recalled Archie MacDonald, who was fourteen when he started working in the Scotia Colliery in Sydney Mines. “It was the first job in which I made money. In other words, it meant I had my foot in the threshold of being a man—I would be somebody. I would be something on my own.”

There they did real men’s work. When their rights were being trampled, they revelled in the adults’ ability to shut down the entire coal mine by walking off the job over job security, wages and safety. Back in the light and fresh air—where they earned a reputation as underaged drinkers and rowdies with a liking for scrapping with their sworn enemies the “school boys”—there was a new swagger to their gait. Being a coal miner meant you were more than pure sinew and animal labour. Other people, even other workingmen, might look down on you, with your sooty face and your work that meant going into a dark hole in the ground. You knew, though, that going into the pit meant being part of something bigger than yourself—part of a community brothers in arms with your own distinctive skill set, worries and joys, even your own distinctive language. It was more than just shared pain. It was sharing an intense experience that only the wise could understand. Going into the pit was no place for someone hell-bent on the twentieth-century be-all and end-all of bettering yourself. Tell you this, though: you knew you were alive, every second of the way.

The mine companies liked the pit boys because they worked for a lot less than adults. (In 1880, the average boy working in a Nova Scotia colliery made just half of what an adult labourer took home; by 1920 a Sydney Mines mineworker classified as a boy still made
only 60 to 70 percent of a man’s pay.) They also liked the boys because they had a pulse, they could do a day’s work. Canada’s rapid industrialization powered a fourfold increase in production from Nova Scotia’s collieries from 1880 to 1910, which translated into an unlimited appetite for cheap, skilled boy miners, particularly those who would take on jobs that older men couldn’t do.

With time their pay envelopes grew. So did their value to the rest of the family. In Sydney Mines and the rest of Nova Scotia’s mining towns, most men and women lived with their families until they were married. As a result, a household’s peak earning years were that brief period when the unattached sons were living at home and the father was still working. The extra income, McIntosh points out, likely made the difference between mere subsistence and a level of comfort. All the more reason for miners to push their children into the pit rather than see them choose a line of work that might require them to leave home in quest of a job.

By 1908, owing to the industry’s tremendous expansion, 36 percent of Nova Scotia mineworkers were under the age of twenty and fully 67 percent were under the age of thirty. John William was thirty-seven, and no cushy retirement with a pension plan awaited. The Sydney Mines Friendly Society—whose chief object was to raise funds “by the subscriptions from the members, contributions from the Nova Scotia Steel & Coal Co., Ltd., and the Local Government, and by donations from parties who are not members, to make provision for the support of ordinary members, their widows, children or other relatives in the case of sickness or other accidental injury, of old age, or of sickness or injury”—didn’t come into being until 1909. The “friendlies” were dirt poor, but they were the miners’ only safeguard against infirmity, illness and disease. Nova Scotia’s Workmen’s Compensation Act came along in 1915 but, as a report for the federal Department of Mines
pointed out a year later, it made “no provision for loss of earning power due to sickness, except in the rather obscure and debatable field of occupational diseases.”

The year before Jack Briers went underground, twenty-two people lost their lives in Nova Scotia mines. In 1906, thirty-four males—twenty-one of them in Cape Breton—died from rockfalls and explosions, from being crushed by runaway trolleys, jammed by boxes and flattened by hoppers. As the pace quickened in the coalfields, the collateral damage continued to mount in Nova Scotia mines: thirty-six dead in 1907; another fifty in 1908. “In those days, if the head of the household died there was no such thing as widow’s allowance. No such thing as relief,” Gordon McGregor, a retired miner, told
Cape Breton’s Magazine.
Often it fell on the shoulders of the oldest boy no matter what his age, to go to work.

Jack Briers was compact and sturdy in old age So let’s assume he was the same way as a preteen. Imagine him arising in the dark—awakened by the colliery steam whistle—and gulping down some breakfast before donning his pit clothes, described by a newspaper of the day as “a pair of indifferent-fitting duck trousers, generously patched, an old coat, and with a lighted tin lamp on the front of his cap, his tea and dinner can securely fastened on his back.” At the mine he wouldn’t see much as he moved down the narrow passageways.
But he’d taste the smoke and dust, hear the dripping water and feel the cold rush of air when the doors opened.

The job of a trapper boy wasn’t strenuous: open the doors when carts or miners approached, then close them afterwards. The stress of waiting for hour after hour alone in the dark, listening for the sounds of the coal cars, was what got you. That and the rats. Sydney Mines–born Johnny Miles, who stunned the sporting world when he won the Boston Marathon as a complete unknown in 1926, started as a trapper in the Princess Mine a few years after my grandfather. After his death in 2003, the
Boston Globe
reported that he had depended upon the sounds of rats to know that no poisonous gases had accumulated in his compartment before opening the door.

New Waterford miner Sid Timmons was ten and a half when he went underground.