The Great Depression (25 page)

The wretched conditions that Withrow had experienced were exacerbated now by overcrowding – a direct result of the Depression. In 1929, twenty-seven hundred convicts were held in federal
penitentiaries. Three years later, a wave of bank robberies, thefts, burglaries, and other acts of violence brought on by poverty and desperation had boosted the population to more than four thousand.

By 1932, Kingston Penitentiary was in a state of tension. In addition to the major complaints – the execrable food, the lack of exercise (only fifteen minutes a day in the “bullpen” and no recreational games), the ban on verbal communication, and the barbarous corporal punishment – there was a host of minor irritants.

It was a misdemeanour, for instance, to be found with a newspaper. Although small quantities of tobacco were issued, cigarette papers were not; the convicts were forced to use toilet paper to roll their own. During their entire prison term, inmates were allowed only one approved visitor. On these occasions a guard was interposed between the two, making private conversation impossible. Correspondence was heavily censored and so were magazines.

If a man made a request to the warden he could be sent to the “Prison of Isolation,” which the inmates called the Hole. Here, in a cell situated halfway below ground with the windows painted over, he existed on porridge, bread, and boiled potatoes and was allowed no exercise. Electric light from a naked bulb was turned on for a brief hour or half-hour at meal times only. One convict, John O’Brien, endured these conditions for a year.

Any inmate who stepped out of line could be sentenced to ten or twenty blows with a hideous instrument known, euphemistically, as the Paddle – so called, no doubt, to convince the general public that the punishment was no worse than a mild slap on the bottom of a recalcitrant child. The reality was that the prison authorities were using physical torture as a means of discipline and brutal revenge.

The offender was laid face down on a table, his arms and legs stretched out tightly – as on a rack – and strapped together. Another strap, cinched around his body, made the slightest movement impossible. He was blindfolded so that, in Withrow’s words, “he must not see his castigator and besides, things are harder to bear in the darkness.”

The Paddle itself was a thick strap, three feet long, with a wooden handle. Diamond-shaped holes were cut in the material,
which was sometimes soaked overnight “the more effectively to mutilate the victim.” When the Paddle was applied to the naked buttocks, the skin was sucked through the holes. Withrow claimed that only a few of the guards were selected to do this brutal work. “We knew them. They were vicious through and through. It was said they enjoyed this cruel pastime.… Oh! The pain and the anguish! Oh! The bruising and the bleeding! Smack! Smack! Smack! Bruises and blood. Ten blows! Fifteen! Twenty! The guard uses all the force of his strong arms.”

Withrow estimated that 10 per cent of the prison population was beaten annually in this way. He recounted stories of prisoners who were tortured every few days, carried from the table limp and unconscious, and thrown on the floor of the Hole to recover as best they might.

His description of these conditions differed markedly from that of justice minister Hugh Guthrie. Guthrie later declared in the House, “… there is nothing brutal about it. What the prisoners resent is the indignity of it; they will tell you so.… They strap children in school. My mother used to strap me at home – yes, and in the same place they strap the prisoners … as far as the records of Canadian penitentiaries disclose there is no record of any injury, any skin broken, or any blood flowing.…” But then, one might ask, would any prison official have put it on the record?

On October 17, matters came to a head at Kingston as a result of a series of “kites” (clandestine messages) circulated among the prisoners. What was later called a riot was really a sit-down strike. At three that afternoon, the inmates decided to walk out of the shops and engage in a peaceful demonstration to impress the officials with the need for redress of their complaints. In particular, they wanted more recreation and a regular issue of cigarette papers. Warden Smith got wind of their plans and locked them in. A group in the mailbag shop threw a hose out the window, climbed down it, and burned the locks off the doors with an acetylene torch.

In the confused accounts of what happened next, several points stand out. Tim Buck, who had originally opposed the sit-down strike as unproductive, continually urged caution, and warned the strikers against violence. He advised them to stay out of the yard and go instead to the South Dome. When the warden refused to
negotiate and brought in a detachment of soldiers, who began shooting, Buck was asked by the strikers to reason with Smith. “No agreement! No agreement!” Smith told him. “These men have committed a crime and you’re the one who’s responsible, Buck.” To which Buck replied, “Well, we can also discuss that later but in the meantime it seems to me the most important thing is to get the soldiers to stop shooting before panic sets in among these men.” To that, Smith grudgingly agreed.

That, in effect, ended the “riot” before it became a riot. The men returned peacefully to their cells. Smith promised to recommend a public investigation, adding a pledge that no one would be punished until he received a fair hearing and that the men could return to work the following day. Smith was not allowed to keep his pledge.

Over the next two days, the penitentiary was relatively quiet. But a spirit of revolt was simmering. It was thoughtlessly encouraged by Major-General D.M. Ormond, the superintendent of penitentiaries, who arrived from Ottawa on the morning of October 20 to conduct an inquiry into the disturbance. The Archambault Royal Commission later described Ormond as “arrogant … deceitful [and] dictatorial,” and on this occasion he certainly lived up to those adjectives. He refused to listen to any delegation of prisoners, insisting on the old army rule that complaints must be made individually. He refused to allow cigarette papers to be distributed. He banned the periods of daily exercise that Smith had promised. He called out the militia to back up the prison guards, who were issued rifles, revolvers, and shotguns. Acting Warden Gilbert Smith would be relieved of his duties two days later.

Work became impossible. Confined to their cells without supper, the men began rattling their tin cups against the cell bars and shouting until the din in Cell Blocks C and E was overpowering. Cell Block D, where Tim Buck was held, was relatively quiet.

Around five in the afternoon, Buck heard more shouting, apparently coming from E and C blocks and the Prison of Isolation. It was later revealed that officers or guards were firing through the peepholes into cells occupied by prisoners, even though there was no danger that these men could escape or cause injury. In the Prison of Isolation, a convict named Price, hit in the shoulder by
a bullet, was left in his cell without medical attention or food for twenty-two hours. An inquiry later reported there was no justification for this neglect.

D Block remained quiet. About eight in the evening, Buck could hear more shots being fired. Suddenly, somebody at the north end of the block shouted that the guards were coming over to D.

“Duck, boys, they’re going to shoot here.”

Buck was making up his bed. Somebody else shouted, “They won’t shoot in here, we’re not trying to escape.”

At that moment, Tim Buck felt a sharp rush of air in his hair and the crack of a bullet overhead. He looked out of the window of his cell and saw, through the drizzling rain, a group of men in penitentiary oilskins on the lawn below. He caught a gleam of light on rifle barrels and immediately ducked for cover. Someone shouted that the guards were only firing blanks, but Buck warned: “Blanks nothing. You should see the inside of my cell.”

Even as he spoke, a bullet whizzed past his left ear. Another struck a bar of his cell with a resounding
wang
. A third hit the wall between his cell and the doorway of the adjoining cell. A shotgun charge spattered the back of the cell.

Political murder, officially condoned, had up to that time been unknown in Canada. But there isn’t the shadow of a doubt that a deliberate attempt was made on the night of October 20, 1932, to kill Tim Buck and that it was tacitly approved by the prison authorities and, at the very least, condoned by higher-ups in Ottawa. There had been no disturbance in his cell block, no damage to property, no hurling of trays or other objects as had happened elsewhere in the penitentiary. The shooting was not the work of a single, deranged individual but of a group of several guards who knew exactly what they were doing. As Woodsworth was to say many months later in the House, “There are nearly nine hundred prisoners in the penitentiary. How was it that the cell selected for the shooting was the one in which there was a Communist?”

At the time of the shooting, Woodsworth had no knowledge of the incident, nor did the general public or the press. The authorities covered it up. Buck asked Ormond for an investigation; there was none. Ormond was convinced that the October 17 “riot” was a Communist plot. Only Buck was charged with inciting to riot.
His comrades were charged either as participants or with conspiracy. All of them were put in the Hole and kept there until they were tried.

Buck was brought to court in Kingston, a diminutive figure only five feet six inches tall, his wrists shackled to those of two burly guards and his ankles shackled to their ankles. This enforced lock step was clearly staged for the benefit of photographers to make the mild-mannered Buck look like a dangerous criminal, bent on escape. He had come to court before without shackles, and the judge, G.E. De Roche, quickly ordered them removed.

De Roche didn’t believe the strike of October 17 amounted to very much. He referred to it as a peaceful disturbance that had developed into a riot and “as riots go I would say this was a very mild riot.” Nor did he believe that Buck was the instigator – quite the opposite. “I believe,” he told the prisoner, “that you had an honest desire that no harm should come to either person or property.” Nonetheless, because Buck had taken part in an unlawful assembly, the judge reluctantly sentenced him to an additional nine months. Under the harsh laws of the time, he might have given him seven years.

Until this time, ten months after the disturbance at Kingston, no member of the public was aware that an attempt had been made to murder Buck. For all of that period, the authorities had managed to keep a lid on the affair. The story broke wide open, however, when Buck was subpoenaed to testify at the trial of another of the rioters, the notorious Mickey McDonald. “Sure they fired at me,” Buck stated in answer to a defence question. The Toronto Trades and Labour Council immediately demanded an explanation from the Minister of Justice. Guthrie in turn asked for an explanation from Superintendent Ormond, who replied that there was no substantial evidence to bear out Buck’s statement.

A further investigation, later described by the Archambault Commission as “neither comprehensive nor thorough,” followed. Guthrie used that flawed and misleading report to tell the House that “Buck is one of those who were encouraging the disorder. At the door of his cell he was making speeches and encouraging the rioters, and for the purpose of frightening him, I suppose, or cowing him, certain guards fired into the ceiling of his cell.”

None of that was true, and Guthrie must have known it. Certainly he knew that the shooting incident occurred on October 20, three days
after
the so-called riot of October 17. At that point there was no riot. Buck was not haranguing his fellow prisoners (secure in their cells). He wasn’t standing at the door of his cell; he was making his bed. The shots weren’t fired into the ceiling, as an investigation of the bullet holes made clear; they were fired at Tim Buck. “Certain guards,” as Guthrie called them, were not acting independently, as his remarks in the House suggested; they were acting as a team. They pumped at least three bullets and ten shotgun pellets into Buck’s cell.

Very little of these revelations filtered down to the general public, who could be pardoned for believing that all the shooting had taken place in the course of a wild mêlée of which Buck was the instigator, “
TIM BUCK DESIGNATED PRISON RIOT LEADER
,” one headline had read, just before Buck’s preliminary hearing. “
TIM BUCK IS CONVICTED OF RIOTING AT PENITENTIARY
” read another, six months later.

The impression left on the public’s mind was that the “fiery little orator,” as the press called him, had masterminded and personally led an all-out prison riot and escape attempt. It wasn’t until the end of the decade when the Archambault Commission made its report that Buck was cleared. After an exhaustive examination of all the evidence the commission declared him innocent of all the charges levelled against him. His only crime had been to leave his prison workbench when the others did because, understandably, he didn’t want to be called a “rat.”

R.B. Bennett’s credibility was running out. He had promised to “blast a way into the closed markets of the world,” but that promise had fizzled out with the Imperial Economic Conference. He had pledged that no government of which he was leader would introduce the dole, but the dole had been a fact for more than six months. He had said repeatedly that the Depression was over when it was quite clearly continuing. Now, in March of 1933, he said it again in the House of Commons. Canada, the Prime Minister declared (carefully employing the past tense), had weathered the Depression better than any other country in the world. The truth was just the opposite. With the possible exception of the United States, Canada had taken the hardest blow. Bennett’s remarkable statement scarcely squared with the figures his Minister of Labour would shortly release, which showed that 1,357,262 Canadians were now accepting direct relief. That was more than all who had enlisted for service in the Great War.