The Great Depression (57 page)

Meanwhile, he was faced with what was for him a daunting task. With the new king, George VI, on the throne, he would have to compose a message of congratulation. But what was he to say? He didn’t want to employ the conventional clichés, which nobody believed. The material he’d been given by his staff he found sycophantic – not at all the right tone for the prime minister of an independent Commonwealth nation.

Desperate to find a proper opening for the message, he pored over books of prayers until his mind was “so weary I could not think of their words.” Midnight arrived before he finally worked out a cable that satisfied him. He did not give it to a secretary but phoned the telegraph office himself to dictate it and, still unsure of the wording, apparently told the clerk to hold the message.

He prepared for bed, but after he had undressed it occurred to him that the words “Prime Minister” should be appended to his name. It was now 12:30; he picked up the telephone and ordered the change. Then he worried that he perhaps should have also added the phrase “of Canada” after that designation.

He tossed in his bed, unable to sleep. He called for his little dog, Pat, to comfort him. Finally, he concluded that he had used the wrong words to the monarch and padded out to the library, searching in vain for a copy of the original message. But in his secretary’s office he came upon a file of material that had been prepared for him at the time of the old king’s death. That gave him some clues.

Back in bed he continued to worry. He probably should have used the word “respect” instead of “devotion.” And wasn’t
“affection” a little too cosy? Something else would be preferable. He got out a book of synonyms and decided to replace it with “attachment.”

It was now 4:30 a.m. The Prime Minister of Canada had spent more than eight hours trying to write a one-paragraph message of congratulation. He called the telegraph office again and began to work over the contents of the wire with the clerk on duty. He had used the word “Majesty” twice; once was quite enough. He replaced the second “Majesty” with the simple pronoun “you.” He returned to bed and continued to worry. At five, he rose once more to revise the message. He took out “devotion,” which he had applied to the Canadian people, and substituted “respect.” He took out the adjective “loyal,” which had defined “homage.” He thought he had used the word “respectfully” once too often. He cut out the second one.

And thus, having made obeisance to his new sovereign without appearing to grovel, the Prime Minister of His Majesty’s loyal but autonomous dominion toddled off to bed and tried his best to get a little sleep.

Tourist travel in the Depression years was not for the impoverished. Why, then, were so many shabbily dressed men applying for passports and flocking to the steamship offices in suspiciously large numbers? A good many claimed they were going to the Paris Exposition; others said they planned to study art on the Left Bank. Yet they didn’t act like artists and they certainly didn’t look like tourists. Most appeared to be labouring men; many spoke with an accent so thick they were hard to understand; others had trouble finding a bank manager or a clergyman to sign their passport applications.

In fact, these young men were going to war. By mid-January Ottawa awoke to what was happening: an organized effort was under way to recruit volunteers to fight in Spain on the Loyalist side. By that time some six hundred Canadians were on their way or had already arrived.

On a per capita basis, Canada supplied more volunteers to the Spanish cause than any other country except France. The casualties were appalling. Of the 1,488 Canadians who fought on Spanish soil, 721 never returned. A few remained in Europe; the rest were killed.

Although the Spanish Civil War is now seen as the curtain-raiser to the world war that followed and was so viewed by many of those who volunteered, the governments of France, England, the United States, and Canada remained strictly neutral. France had closed the Spanish border the previous fall, which meant that the bulk of the men trying to get to the war were forced to slip surreptitiously over the windswept Pyrenees – a dangerous, nerve-racking, and exhausting journey.

By April, passports issued in Canada were being stamped “not valid for Spain.” Under the provisions of the Foreign Enlistment Act, anybody who volunteered or anybody who helped a volunteer could be sent to prison for two years. It required ingenuity, careful organization, and, above all, money to move hundreds of men from the various cities across the water to France and then over the mountains to assembly points on the Spanish side of the border. This was a task that the Communist party, with its long experience in clandestine organization, was equipped to undertake.

The men who fought in Spain – most of them with the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion in the International Brigade – were not all communists, but the great majority were certainly communist sympathizers. As one of them, Ron Liversedge, later wrote, “if there were any pure adventurers, they were a small minority.…” An extraordinary number, perhaps as many as half, were, like Liversedge, veterans of the B.C. relief camps.

Liversedge’s reasons for volunteering were typical of many: “The life that I had led over the past five years as an active member of the unemployed organizations had made the decision for me. I think that the terrible life of the Canadian unemployed during the depression … the boxcars, the flop-houses, the demonstrations … police clubbing men, women, and even children unconscious on the city streets for asking for food, the twenty cents a day slave camps, the ‘On to Ottawa trek,’ all this had conditioned the men who volunteered to go to Spain to make the decision without much soul searching.” Two prominent activists in the trek, Red Walsh and Lucien Tellier (better known as Lou Summers), both fought in Spain.

Bill Beeching joined the Communist party immediately after the Regina riot and volunteered for Spain after reading a pamphlet by Tim Buck predicting a world war if the Loyalist forces lost. Jack Lawson, who spent three days in a Regina jail for rioting and was then given a suspended sentence, set out for Spain as soon as the war began.

The motives of others were mixed. Ross Russell, a twenty-three-year-old assistant manager of a Woolworth’s store in Montreal, began to realize there would be no further promotions for him in the organization because he was Jewish. Spain was in his mind, but it was a ringing address at the Mount Royal Arena by Norman Bethune, just back from the battlefield, that fired him up for action. Bethune’s appeal was, for him, “the cherry on the sundae.”

Mike Hyduk of Edmonton was fed up trying to make a living as cook and dishwasher in his brother’s café, where a meal cost only fifteen cents. He attended a meeting sponsored by the Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, was impressed by what he heard, and with fifteen others volunteered. “I figured I was doing the right thing,” Hyduk said.

It is difficult now to conjure up the wide-eyed idealism of those years. Here were young men, buffeted by circumstances and embittered by neglect, prepared to lay down their lives for a cause. As one early volunteer, Marvin Penn of Winnipeg, put it, “the only thought in everybody’s mind was to do a job. Nobody worried about themselves. Nobody give a darn that they were going to get killed.” Jules Paivio of Sudbury was one of many who didn’t expect to come back. Born into a family of left-wing Finnish immigrants, he went to Spain because “it was an opportunity for a real purpose in life.… I didn’t have any notions it would be easy … that I would return whole.”

The Canadian government and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police completely misunderstood the motivation of these dedicated young men. Both Commissioner MacBrien in Ottawa and Assistant Commissioner Wood in Regina believed that “these youths are being sent to Spain, largely for the sake of gaining experience in practical revolutionary work and will return to this country to form a nucleus of a trained corps.” In fact, many who came back arrived just in time to volunteer to fight for their own country in the war against Hitler.

“Just what the hell are you guys going to get out of all this? That’s what I want to know,” a burly immigration officer said to Lionel Edwards at the U.S. border. Edwards, who had quit a job in Alberta to make the journey, didn’t bother to reply. “Okay – on your way,” said the officer, who seemed to know exactly where Edwards and his friends were going.

This was an odd war, a secret war, a war without recruiting posters or recruiting offices, without marching bands or waving flags, without any public call to arms or patriotic editorials in the press. It was also a devilishly hard war to reach; it was even hard to find out
how
to reach it. Nobody, including officials of the Communist party, was urging young men to enlist; quite the opposite. To volunteer to fight in Spain was rather like trying to locate somebody who knew how to get a bottle of bootleg gin.

Jules Paivio, having left his job at Eaton’s in Sudbury, went to Montreal hoping to look up some Finnish friends who, he heard, knew some other Finns who had managed to enlist. When he got in touch with them, he was told he’d have to go back to Toronto. There the Young Communist League had been deputed to screen
volunteers for Spain. Ross Russell, who lived in Montreal, also found it difficult to join. He approached Fred Rose, a prominent Communist and future M.P., who tried to talk him out of it; but Russell was determined and left, not for Toronto, but for Quebec City, where passage was arranged for him.

The Toronto office of the YCL, through which most of the volunteers received instructions and transportation, had its unofficial headquarters at the Seamen’s Hall at 441 Queen Street West. It was run by Peter Hunter, just back from the University of Moscow, and Paul Phillips, a fluent linguist born in Bessarabia. They provided the new arrivals with a cover story, a second-hand suitcase and a new suit, if necessary (both from the Salvation Army), and a dollar a day for expenses while in the city. The party also set up a travel agency to arrange for steamship reservations and tickets to France. Once the volunteers had been screened to weed out any Trotskyites or police informers, they were shipped off to New York.

Money was always short. Many waited for months before funds could be found to move them out. Bill Beeching applied in Regina in January but did not receive money for a third-class ticket east until June. “The idea of leaving home to go to Toronto was a big deal, let alone going across the ocean,” he was to recall. Beeching ate cheaply at the way points where you could buy a fried sausage for a nickel, a scoop of mashed potatoes for another nickel, and have the whole thing smothered with gravy for an extra penny.

In Toronto Beeching was introduced to a giant of a man who called himself Orton Wade – the same Orton Wade who had once saved himself from deportation by proving he was a Canadian citizen. Wade, whose real name was Herman Anderson, had been appointed leader of a small group that would take the train to Halifax to board a Cunard liner for France. Wade told his charges that discipline would be strict, all liquor would be banned, and they were to tell nobody where they were going.

Ron Liversedge, in Vancouver, had no difficulty finding someone who would help him get to Spain. He had been a prominent activist in the On-to-Ottawa trek and was already a member of the party. He knew that Tom Ewen, one of the eight men jailed in 1931 for communist activity, was in charge of screening volunteers. Ewen warned him that not all applicants would be accepted,
but Liversedge passed with ease. It was only when he tried to apply for a passport that he ran into trouble. He needed somebody to sign the application – a clergyman, doctor, politician, or other professional who had known him for at least two years. One minister of the gospel who had been loud in his public protestation against fascism backed away, explaining that he didn’t know him and it was against his principles to lie. “How about Dr. Telford?” he suggested.

Lyle Telford, a prominent member of the CCF, had signed so many applications that Liversedge was reluctant to approach him. Nonetheless, he had no choice.

“My God, not another one!” exclaimed Telford, a benign surgeon with rimless glasses and a shock of well-barbered white hair. “I’ve signed enough to get me locked up already.”

“Oh, come on, Doc,” said Liversedge. “In for a penny …” Telford signed.

Tom Ewen told Liversedge to pack his suitcase and wait for a call, which might come at any time. It came on May Day – a day of parades and celebration for the organized Left. Huge demonstrations called once again for work and wages, for better standards of relief, and now for aid to the Spanish Republic and an end to the non-intervention pact – the hands-off policy of the European democracies that made it difficult for their citizens to fight against Franco.

Liversedge marched in the parade to Stanley Park and was listening to band music when Ewen’s son, Jim, tapped him on the shoulder and told him it was time to go. As the pair left the park they could hear the elder Ewen’s voice, booming over the loud-speaker, exclaiming that “right at this moment [there] is a man leaving this rally on his way to Spain.…”

With the cheers of the crowd ringing in his ears, Liversedge headed for the nearest streetcar. Jim Ewen stopped him. “That would be fourteen cents for both of us,” he explained. “There isn’t any money for non-essentials.” They walked three miles into town, ate a fifteen-cent meal at a Chinese restaurant, and then entered the CPR depot where Liversedge was given a day-coach ticket to Toronto and five dollars for expenses.

In Toronto, Paul Phillips told Liversedge that three dozen men were in town waiting to be organized into groups. Liversedge was put in charge of a group of fifteen, assigned to a boarding
house, and told to report daily to Phillips. When the time came to leave, Phillips gave Liversedge three hundred dollars in cash and a small silk flag with which to identify himself when he met his anonymous contact in New York.