Coal Black Heart (17 page)

To me that’s a sorrowful story. I feel the same way about those horses, intended by nature to canter across green fields, being forced instead to work underground in the cavernous gloom of the mines. Pit ponies had been hauling coal in British mines since the early 1700s, which made it inevitable that the pattern would repeat itself in the English-dominated Nova Scotian collieries. By 1916 horses cost between $180 and $200 but were still in short supply. Not just any horse would do. The tunnels were low and steep, so the ponies had to be short and sturdy. Size was important because of the heavy loads, but so was sure-footedness, since the roads were rocky, uneven and full of debris. A pit pony also had to be even-tempered; shy ones took too long to break, and ornery ponies were a danger to everyone around.

At one point as many as eighty ponies were at work in the Princess mine, pulling coal to the shaft and equipment from the shaft to the wall. Their masters tried to make life tolerable. It was mandated that the height of the roof in the underground stable had to be seven feet for a five-foot horse—the average size of a pit pony working the Nova Scotia mines in 1917 was between 4’8’ and 5’6’—so it could raise its head and relax its neck muscles after stooping throughout the workday. The stables were meant to be temperate, clean and adequately drained. The horses were supposed to be well shod; if the job was unusually difficult, a ferrier would go into the mine, take the measurements and hammer the shoes into shape on the surface. The ponies were fed ample amounts of hay and grain. In a perfect world each animal would have one
driver, and the roof carefully brushed to rid it of protruding rocks that might injure the horse.

Alas, this world was not perfect. The hauling was hard, the shifts often twice what the men worked and the pony didn’t always keep his head down. “Well he would scruff the top of his head, it would like scalp him,” remembered Patrick McNeil, who assisted the first veterinarian in the Sterling Pit in Glace Bay. “When that horse would come in, that piece of flesh would be hanging like a flap over the top of his head. Well, that would have to be removed. Sometimes that would be scraped right to the bone.”

In those days the horses never came out of the mine. (By McNeil’s reckoning it was the 1940s before the miners started getting vacations, and took the horses up and put them out in big pastures next to the collieries.) Horses caught lockjaw. They broke their legs while pulling the coal boxes on the rails laid on the rock. When that happened they had to be put down. Time was when someone just pounded the animal’s head in with an axe. Eventually a supposedly more humane way was found: slicing a vein inside the pony’s rectum and letting it bleed to death. McNeil remembers times when the crew in his mine lost a horse every second day. No grand burial for these animals, he recalled:

I’m Only a Broken-Down Mucker

A
ccording to his war records, Private 715959 of the Canadian Expeditionary Force was 5’8¾ tall. His chest, when fully expanded, was 38½ inches, his complexion was “fresh,” his eyes were blue, his hair was medium brown and he had a pair of vaccination marks on his left arm. Jack Briers was twenty-three years old on March 7, 1916, when he walked into a recruiting station and volunteered for the CEF. His unit—36 officers and 1,009 soldiers—took ten days to make the crossing from Halifax to Liverpool aboard the
Empress of Britain.
They spent eleven days in Shorncliffe before leaving for France. There they joined the 14
^th
Infantry Battalion, a unit of the 3
^rd
brigade of the 1
^st
Canadian Division.

The 14
^th
Battalion arrived too late for the horrors of the second battle of Ypres. But the action that followed, according to a Department of Defence letter that accompanied my grandfather’s war records, was also “difficult.” The 14
^th
Battalion marched across the corpse-littered muck of the Somme, bolstered the assault on Vimy Ridge, sacrificed themselves at Passchendaele and Hill 70 and
trudged on through the Hundred Days Campaign. By my calculations more than 34,000 Canadian soldiers fell during those engagements, some of the bloodiest and most pivotal of the Great War.

Somehow, John Briers avoided being one of them. When he was discharged in Montreal in April 1919, he discovered that things had changed mightily during the three years he was away. Women had the vote. Spanish flu had killed as many Canadians at home as the war had overseas. Working people, after years of self-sacrifice, had grown angry and resentful at their place in society. In 1919 alone, 150,000 Canadians would hit the bricks, as workers came back from overseas unwilling to accept pre-war working conditions. After years of labour shortages, with factories cranking out arms for the military and Western farmers worked to exhaustion exporting wheat to England, the economy had come to a screeching halt.

The coal industry was hit harder than most. On the eve of the First World War, America produced more coal than any nation on earth. The British industry—which, by 1913 employed 10 percent of the male British workforce and, in the previous five years, had accounted for one-quarter of the earth’s coal production—was, to borrow a phrase, “one of the economic wonders of the world.”

In Nova Scotia, coal production hit eight million tons by 1913, a fivefold increase over the previous thirty years. There was a perfectly logical explanation, actually several of them, for that rip-roaring expansion. A countrywide railway boom pushed demand for coal to run the locomotives sharply higher. Quebec’s rapidly expanding industries were also big buyers of Nova Scotia coal. With the steel mills of Sydney, Sydney Mines and Trenton turning out 41 percent of all Canada’s pig iron, there was also a large homegrown coal market. But the Nova Scotian heart still swelled to note that by 1913 the coal mines of Cape Breton, Pictou and Cumberland counties accounted for half of Canada’s total coal production.

When the war ended, so did the country’s insatiable need for coal. Suddenly no one was laying rail. The Quebec market found new suppliers. A subsequent federal Royal Commission on the economy of the Maritimes said that Nova Scotia’s steelmakers would have prospered if they had capitalized on the growing demand for structural steel and for lighter materials for new industries like the motor car. They hadn’t, in part because they lacked the capital to change over to completely new equipment. By the end of 1920 the Sydney steel plant’s coal consumption had fallen from a peak of 100,000 tons per month to just 40,000. In the Sydney coal field, production had fallen to 4.5 million tons by 1920, compared to 6.3 million seven years earlier.

Shell-shocked veterans wandered the streets of Sydney Mines and every other Canadian town or city. Yet everything I have heard indicates that my grandfather came out the other end intact; maybe life in the pits was the only real preparation for the trenches, with their knee-high mud and biblical infestations of lice and rats. He was twenty-three, a decorated war veteran who had spent nine years in the pits and another three in the midst of some of the worst carnage the world had ever witnessed. But he did what every dutiful unmarried son did when he returned home, moving back in with his parents, his twenty-six-year-old brother Harold and his sister Amy, now twenty. His old room was waiting for him. So was the Florence mine.

Every now and then, when the spirit seizes me, I grab the handle of a scuffed and beaten rectangular case, lay it down on the kitchen table and unsnap the clasps. Twenty years ago I received the best Christmas present of my life: Jack Briers’s alto saxophone, which my aunt sent up from Sydney Mines and my wife had refurbished.

It’s a Chu Berry model (named after the American saxophone player Leon “Chu” Berry), made in the late 1920s by the legendary C.G. Conn Ltd. of Elkhart, Indiana. I’ve been playing it on and off for more than twenty years now, with, it must be acknowledged, little discernible improvement. Sometimes when I’m doing this my mind stops on one of the nagging mysteries in the Briers family saga. Music is at the centre of the riddle. John William, by all accounts, had a tin ear. His oldest son, Harold, on the other hand, went to study music at McGill University in Montreal, an almost unheard-of leap for a collier’s son in that day and age. In Sydney Mines, where Harold set up shop teaching music, he was known as Professor Briers. Which has always left me wondering: how come he got to make his living sitting in a drawing room, grimacing as little Angus journeyed up and down the piano scale, while my grandfather had to go underground at age eleven?

I’ve asked every living relative I can find for some kind of explanation. They’re as baffled as I am—particularly since Jack Briers surely had a musical aptitude. I used to meet older ladies who would close their eyes in rapture as they recalled my grandfather’s alto at dances at the North Sydney Yacht Club. He also played the clarinet, violin, tuba, French horn and piano. My mother remembers him as a middle-aged man coming home from a day in the mines, taking a short nap, having an old-fashioned English dinner and then retreating to the living room and filling the house with music.

I used to take comfort in that image because so much of his life sounded hard. The fallout from the First World War led to more consolidation in Nova Scotia’s steel and coal industries. In 1921, after a head-snapping series of bids and counterbids, shareholder revolts and boardroom battles, a British syndicate called the British Empire Steel Corporation (Besco) finally took Dominion Steel—which
owned the Sydney steel operations and Dominion Coal, along with Nova Scotia Steel and Coal, which controlled steel mills in New Glasgow and Sydney Mines, where it also owned the GMA’s old coal interests. It was the GMA redux, except that one company now controlled the steel mills along with the collieries. The deal Roy Wolvin and J.W. Norcross, a couple of operators from Montreal, put together to finance the arrangement was so complex it makes my brain hurt nearly a century later. Along the way Besco issued millions’ worth of preferred stock, which not only watered down the value of the existing common shares but also placed immense pressure on them to cover the dividends. (Wolvin had a history of doing that sort of thing. Paul MacEwan, a former Nova Scotia MLA from Cape Breton, writes about how he merged three steamship companies to form Canada Steamship Lines in 1913. Total capitalization was $16.2 million. But Wolvin “turned the water hose into the stock bucket, poured in $16.8-million worth of paper” and, voila, the company’s capitalization stood at a cool $33 million.)

Situations like that just never pan out for the guys actually doing the work. The problem was a straightforward one. In the early 1920s—before the downturn really took hold—the coal company was more profitable than the steel arm, but virtually every red cent of profits was going out the door in the form of dividends. That left little money for reinvestment; economist David Schwartzman has calculated that from 1920 to 1924 Besco spent a stingy $2 million on upgrade and upkeep in the collieries and steel plant, at a time when both dearly needed both. There was also understandable consternation in early 1922 when Besco announced that workers’ pay packets would be slashed by one-third—a sizable reduction, considering that the Dominion Bureau of Statistics estimated at that point that it cost a miner 90 percent of his earnings just to pay rent and feed his family.

Wolvin had to know how the miners would react. From 1901 to 1914 there were twenty strikes in the Glace Bay mines, another nineteen in Springhill and eighteen more in the Joggins area. Coal miners accounted for about three-quarters of the strike days in the Maritime provinces during that period.

Miners were pushing back in other ways, too. They elected labour-sympathetic men to town council, the mayor’s office and even the provincial legislature—in the 1920 provincial election, Farmer-Labour candidates swept the four seats in Cape Breton county—to cancel out the immense political clout of the coal company officials. The mining communities were even starting to assert their independence from the loathed company store. Soon after arriving from England, John William Briers had joined a group of British émigrés to form the British Canadian Co-operative Society In the years that followed, co-op stores, owned by working people, had opened in Dominion, Glace Bay, Sydney and Sydney Mines. Every member family got a co-op number. John William had number 7, which he later passed on to his son.

By then, Jack Briers’s life was rolling along in other ways. For one thing, Margaret Brown had made her entrance. Her family were Scots who had arrived in British Columbia in the last years of the nineteenth century, hoping to make their fortune in the Klondike gold rush. When that failed to happen, James, the coal miner patriarch, moved his family to Sydney Mines, where they took up residence in a wooden house on Cranberry Head, a spit of land riddled with collieries that juts into the Atlantic Ocean. Somehow she and Jack met. Margaret was stunning and full of life; he was taciturn, but solid and starting to move up the ladder at the Florence colliery. When they married in 1924, they first moved into the Clyde Avenue residence. Then they relocated a couple of blocks away, to Brighton Avenue, to a brown
two-storey house with a sun porch, comfortable parlour and immaculate lawns.

Naturally, the immigrants stuck together. Distinct neighbourhoods—in some places little more than ghettos—began to emerge, and gave towns their own taste, smell and feel, along with a cosmopolitan sheen that seemed way out of whack with their small size and bottom-rung economic status. The French and Irish flocked to Reserve Mines and New Waterford, named after Waterford, Ireland, from which many of the immigrants hailed. In places like Dominion, Italians played bocce and
scopa
and sang lugubrious old-country songs. In Glace Bay, the smells of West Indian food wafted out of open windows over the heads of yarmulke-wearing Jews piously making their way down the streets to the island’s oldest synagogue.

The waves of arrivals rubbed up against each other. Black furnacemen recruited from the United States to work in the Sydney steel mills experienced the same sort of racism and inequality they felt in their old country. Italian immigrants were beaten and robbed routinely enough by Sydney toughs that they began to travel in packs for protection. Eventually, they had had enough. One Saturday morning they marched to the front of their church carrying guns, pitchforks and “anything else suitable to serve as a weapon,” Esperanza Maria Razzolini Crook recalled. The priest defused the situation and things got better for a time, but the tensions between nationalities boiled over when Mussolini joined Hitler in the Second World War, making Italy an enemy of Canada. A few Italians from Cape Breton were sent to internment camps. For those allowed to stay, the hassles increased.

The earliest Jewish settlers came after spying advertisements offering free passage—and a chance to escape the European
pogroms—in return for labour in a coal mine. Instead, most became peddlers, moving on to open retail businesses in competition with the company stores. David Epstein, whose existence I discovered in an old issue of a local historical newsletter, was one of them. He arrived in 1907, at age sixteen, unable to speak a word of English and without a cent in his pocket. He began to “peddle” for his Uncle Morris, who owned a general store in the Whitney Pier area of Sydney. Epstein’s turf was all of Victoria County. “I had a 75 pound pack on my back and fifty pound pack in front,” he recalled years later. “I walked house to house from [Cape] Smokey to Bay St. Lawrence.” That’s a good half-day drive in 2008; a century earlier, on foot, it must have taken weeks.

Sydney was a particular magnet. That’s why I want to take a minute to consider the three-square-mile, triangle-shaped area around the steel mill known as Whitney (as in Henry Melville) Pier when it was in its prime. Once it was an all but empty expanse of scrub land with a few scattered homes housing folk who lived off the ocean and subsistence farms. With the coming of the steelworks and the coal-shipping piers, the area filled up. What emerged was a community of communities: the Poles and Ukrainians settling in Bryan, Ferris and Roberts streets, an area known as Hunkytown; the Italians in “Shackville”; the black immigrants trying to escape the poverty of the West Indies in the “Coke Ovens.”