Coal Black Heart (20 page)

Cape Breton was isolated. The new thinking seeped in anyway, through editorials in the
Maritime Labour Herald with
its overheated language of class struggle, via recruiters from the Communist Party of Canada and organizers for the UMWA. The deplorable working and living conditions and the shrinking Besco pay envelopes made action an easy sell. Between 1920 and 1925 Cape Breton coal miners struck fifty-eight times. Most of those were localized demonstrations of workplace power: a few miners walking off the job at a single pit for a day or two. The long, district-wide strikes, though, were part of a bigger, broader strategy of organized resistance. These
weren’t strikes as we know them today in Canada: nice, safe, rotating picket-line duty, a sympathetic press and a protective social welfare net to ensure nobody goes hungry. Going off the job in the first part of the twentieth century more than likely meant a cracked skull from a strikebreaker’s sap, being denounced from the pulpits and the front page, maybe the kids going without food and even shelter, summer or winter.

Downing tools required grit—or, at the very least, the desperate knowledge that your back was to the wall and only drastic measures would do. Communal purpose required a common enemy. His name was Roy the Wolf, and it was said that he dined on young flesh and groaned in pleasure at the thought of a miner’s family starving in the cold. Thank God, parents whispered to their children, there was one man who was man enough to do battle with this moustache-twirling villain. And they would tell them about J.B.

His office was painted red, my great-aunt Eva told me, the one time I asked her about James Bryson McLachlan. Understandable for a man who went into the Scottish coal mines at the age of ten, found guidance in the writings of his countryman Thomas Carlyle, the great critic of industrial capitalism, and discovered his calling at eighteen, when the newly minted Scottish Miners’ National Federation stood up to the big coal companies of Lanarkshire for the first time. “Out of his own experience in the coal mines and the influence of socialists such as Keir Hardie, he came to support public ownership as the only reasonable way of fairly sharing the wealth of the coal industry,” says his biographer David Frank. “His ‘economic gospel’ looked for practical solutions, which to him meant a transfer of control to the working class, first through better conditions and then through a better world.”

McLachlan’s involvement in the Great Strike of 1894—when tens of thousands of Scottish coal miners went out over a one-shilling reduction in wages—got him blackballed by the bigger coal and iron companies. Consequently, he had to seek work at smaller and smaller independent mines. Then, at thirty-three—tired of being used as dumb-animal labour by the companies, weary of the continual search for work—he headed for Sydney Mines with his wife and four children.

It was 1902, the same year John William Briers arrived from Lancashire, which meant that McLachlan and my great-grandfather entered the Princess Colliery for the first time within months of each other. As an experienced cutter in an industry filled with rookies, McLachlan would have been working at the face. His words, in a newspaper letter to the editor about state-sponsored old age pensions, a fixed minimum wage or an eight-hour workday, carried weight. On the stump—where, to be better heard, he would take out his false teeth, fold them in a handkerchief and place them in his pocket for safekeeping, and where his Scottish brogue thickened the more excited he became—this bantam rooster seemed “a mile high,” in the words of his daughter-in-law Nellie McLachlan. “The greatest political question of this century,” he declared six years after his arrival in Sydney Mines, “is how to distribute the enormous wealth that the ingenuity of the last century enables the world now to produce.” In 1925 he told a Royal Commission, “I believe in education for action. I believe in telling children the truth about the history of the world. That it does not consist in the history of Kings. Or Lords or Cabinets. It consists of the history of the mass of workers. A thing that is not taught in the schools.”

Mount Rundell (photographed circa 1880) was the Stellarton, Nova Scotia, residence where the manager of General Mining Association and his wife entertained visiting dignitaries.

By the 1940s, mining families, like this one from Florence, Cape Breton, still lived in poverty.

This postcard was sent in 1906 by a Mr. Brown to his daughter, “to show you a Colliery Bank Head at No. 2 [Glace Bay] where I worked.”

Thousands of children (as young as four) and women toiled in slave-like conditions in coal mines in Victorian Britain. These drawings are from the Report of the Children’s Employment Commission in 1842.

In Nova Scotia’s mines adolescent boys and pit ponies rarely saw the light of day. This picture is dated 1905.

Boys young enough to still believe in Santa Claus worked in mines like the Caledonia in turn-of-the-century Glace Bay. Allie MacKenzie, off to the left, is nine years old.

Jack Briers took a break from the mines to experience some of the fiercest fighting in World War One.

Clarie Demont, not long before he died, with his grandson and this book’s author (one of the upper-case-M DeMonts).