Coal Black Heart (21 page)

Eric and Russell DeMont and Earl Demont on a bridge on the Mira River in Cape Breton.

Clarie “Flash” Demont was once the fastest Canadian to run the 100-yard dash.

Russ DeMont and Bill “Shaky” Stewart entertaining the students at Acadia University with a little soft shoe.

Mabel Demont, in the kitchen at York Street in Glace Bay, has a rare quiet moment

Army officers stationed at Glace Bay during the 1909 coal strike.

In the morgue, a victim of the 1991 Springhill colliery explosion awaits identification.

Nurses tend to a survivor of the 1956 Springhill disaster. Eighty-eight miners were rescued after the explosion, which killed 39 men.

The fabled union leader J.B. McLachlan fought for miners’ rights in Cape Breton.

Richard Smith, the General Mining Association’s imperious manager, helped bring the industrial revolution to Nova Scotia.

In between, he had other things to say. Often they were about the deficiencies of the existing miners’ union, the Provincial
Workmen’s Association. The PWA had been spawned by adversity: the Springhill Mining Company’s 1879 bid to cut miners’ wages at a time when it was showering handsome dividends on shareholders. One man saw the move for what it was: Robert Drummond, a grocer’s son who had immigrated from Scotland in 1865 and spent the next few years shuttling back and forth from one dangerous, poorly paid Cape Breton pit to another. Eventually Drummond moved to Pictou County and took a management job at the fast-growing Springhill mine in Cumberland County. That left him in an enviable position to examine the merits of the company’s case for demanding the 1879 wage cut. His decision to publish his discoveries under a
nom de plume
in a Halifax newspaper led to his sudden termination as an employee of Springhill Mining. Instead, Drummond had a new job—salaried grand secretary of the newly formed Provincial Miners’ Association, the precursor to the PWA—and a new purpose: to be the miners’ voice in a perilous, backwards industry. “Drummond upheld the values of a classical liberal individualism,” historian Ian MacKay wrote in his entry on Drummond in the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
“‘None cease to rise but those who cease to climb’ was both the association’s motto and his own cherished belief.”

Under Drummond’s leadership the PWA fought historic battles for better mine safety legislation and improved training for miners and managers. It also gained recognition of trade unions as a legitimate social and economic force. The seventy or so strikes that occurred while Drummond was grand secretary show that the PWA acted when it had to. But throughout his long reign he preached the importance of harmony between labour and capital—a view that was anathema to the more militant trade unionism of the UMWA, which mounted an unrelenting war for supremacy in the coalfields of Nova Scotia during the early 1900s.

This wasn’t just some elevated battle for miners’ hearts and minds. By 1909 it was a grinding war of attrition, fought against a backdrop of soaring profits by the colliery and steel plant owners. UMWA members were discriminated against in the pit, harassed by company police at lodge gatherings and unable to set up even cursory meetings with company officials. The mainstream newspapers assiduously printed the company line—the miners were thugs willing to murder, maim and sow disorder to reach their goals, the police were “heroic,” the mine company officials and replacement workers “loyal” and “stoic”—no matter how far removed from reality. The facts, though, are clear: Dominion Coal, which had strung electrified barbed wire around its collieries and the bunkhouses erected for strikebreakers, was ready when a strike was called over its unwillingness to accept the union as legitimately representing the miners. “We’re going to fight them,” vice-president F.L. Wanklyn announced. “We have the right of the matter and we’re not going to give in to a bunch of American agitators.”

Within days, special trains with troops bearing machine guns and light artillery pulled out of the garrison in Halifax. As the strike dragged on, UMWA members filled the jails, their credit was cut off at the company stores, they were evicted from company houses and their property was confiscated for back rent. The UMWA threw up tents and built ramshackle buildings to house the homeless families. In a show of solidarity an estimated three thousand UMWA members one afternoon marched through Glace Bay toward Dominion, only to be turned back by a military machine-gun nest set up along the road. Through it all the PWA members, under military protection, remained on the job, along with scabs brought in from Newfoundland, Europe and Montreal, to keep the mine going.

The UMWA spent $1 million in Nova Scotia during the ten months. The strikes in Glace Bay, Inverness and Springhill failed anyway. Union president Dan McDougall was dragged out of bed and charged with publishing a criminal libel against Dominion Coal. As the case dragged on, McLachlan retaliated by charging a list of Dominion Coal executives with fixing coal prices. McDougall was eventually found not guilty. Still, McLachlan paid a price: he never worked in a colliery again. Which, given the events that followed, was probably just as well.