The Great Depression (75 page)

McNaughton had his headquarters on the same ship. Through the accident of war, men who had once lived under quasi-military conditions in McNaughton’s relief camps found themselves again under his command. The government had once paid them twenty cents a day and treated them as bums. Now it was paying six and a half times as much and treating them as heroes.

When Robert Humphrey from Scarborough, Ontario, another First Division volunteer, got his first army cheque, he couldn’t believe his eyes. He would, he said later, have liked to frame it, but he needed the money for his family. His father had been out of work for the whole of the Depression. His mother and one of his sisters were in hospital. He himself had worked only intermittently; as an office clerk, he was paid six dollars a week. Now he discovered that by joining the army – again as a clerk – he’d been handed a 50-per-cent raise by a government that once insisted it could pay for no more than subsistence.

Bob Humphrey was one of fifty-eight thousand Canadians who rushed to the colours in the month of September, 1939. Some joined for reasons of patriotism or duty, others to escape the boredom and despair of those days. Large numbers had no choice: relief officials were loath to give “handouts” to able-bodied men of military age. But many were attracted by the money and the security.

In addition to their daily $1.30, Humphrey, LeBlanc, and the others got free food and shelter, clothing, and medical and dental service (including free spectacles and false teeth if they needed them). The wives of their married friends received a separate sixty dollars a month and twelve dollars additional for each child. Nation-wide medicare and family allowances – the heritage of the Depression – were still in the future, but the armed services already had them.

The country found it
could
bear the strain. At the peak of the war effort, more than two million men and women were being supported by public money, as many as had been publicly supported at the height of the Depression.

But shipyard and munitions workers, and even office staff in the public service, were dealt with far more generously than those who had eked out their existence on relief. In Montreal, in 1933, a family of four received a weekly relief voucher worth just $4.58. In 1943, a single female junior in a government weather office was paid more than four times that amount.

King and Bennett had been convinced that Canada did not have the resources to initiate either a more generous policy of relief or pump-priming through a program of public works. Bennett had specifically told Arthur Evans, during their acrimonious encounter in 1935, that a policy of “work and wages” was beyond the capacity of the country. Wartime spending underscored the hollowness of that faint-hearted attitude. The country had had the resources and the capacity to harness them. What had been lacking was the kind of commitment that wartime conditions made more attractive politically.

The sudden infusion of public funds solved the unemployment problem. In the fall of 1939, the jobless rate had still exceeded 10 per cent. By the next fall it had dropped to the rock bottom figure of 4 per cent. The bidding for labour became so intense that the government was forced to put a ban on help-wanted ads.

Four hundred million dollars had seemed a terrifying amount to Bennett. But in 1943, when the men of the first contingent finally went into action, the Canadian government spent four and a half
billion
dollars on the war; and everybody was better off.

Once war had come, Ottawa could no longer maintain the hands-off policies that were part of its Depression philosophy. The new Ministry of Munitions and Supply under C.D. Howe was about to make the government itself Big Business. Of the seventy-five hundred men who climbed the gangplanks of the troopships that December day at Halifax, singing “Roll Out the Barrel,” at least half were raw recruits. Their equipment was shoddy, worn out, obsolete. The Lee-Enfield rifles had seen service in the last war; the old Lewis light machine-gun had yet to be replaced by the more efficient Bren. Some recruits were lucky enough to be issued with the new battledress. Others wore First War uniforms or their own trousers. Successive governments had been as niggardly with the armed forces as they had been with the unemployed.

Now the penny-pinching was at an end. That very Monday, December 11, the press announced that federal revenues were soaring because of the increase in wartime business. The turnaround had occurred in just three months. In that period the government itself had spent forty-eight million dollars on war supplies.

For the embarkees, the new attitude was symbolized by the gleaming silver and fresh linen on the tables in the cabin-class dining rooms where the ordinary soldiers ate. Here the meals and service were identical with those enjoyed by the privileged few who had been able to afford crossing the Atlantic in pre-war days. This time, however, the government was footing the bill and paying full fare. Young men who had never seen a fish knife now found themselves sitting down to seven-course meals served beneath crystal chandeliers.

When Leon LeBlanc took his seat in the
Aquitania’s
dining room and saw the menu, he felt like a millionaire. Fish for breakfast! Duck for dinner! “Oh boy,” he thought, as white-jacketed waiters with napkins on their arms scurried to serve him, “this war’s all right.” Some of the men insisted on tipping their stewards, like old transatlantic hands.

There was no crowd on hand to see them off; no reporters gushed over the leavetaking. The convoy left under a blanket of wartime secrecy. On the morning of the tenth, a small ceremony took place in the
Aquitania’s
lounge. McNaughton spoke briefly. A farewell telegram from the Prime Minister declared: “The
hearts of the people of Canada are with you.” Prayers were murmured, McNaughton’s official flag (a white ensign with red maple leaves and gold fleurs-de-lis) was dedicated. Then, at noon, the leading liner,
Duchess of Bedford
, moved off from the jetty and the convoy got under way.

The week’s voyage across the Atlantic cost the Canadian government more than two million dollars in fares alone. (The second convoy a week later would rack up a similar cost.) The big liners, steaming out of Halifax harbour at half-hour intervals into the calm Atlantic, were encircled by their escorts: four Canadian destroyers (two-thirds of the country’s pitiful fleet of six) and four British warships, the battleship
Resolution
, aircraft carrier
Furious
, battle cruiser
Repulse
, and cruiser
Emerald
.

There was only one untoward incident. On the final night at sea, an American vessel,
Samaria
, blundered into the zigzagging convoy, striking
Furious
on her starboard side and
Aquitania
on her port. The only serious damage was done to McNaughton’s spanking-new Buick staff car. Lashed to the forward deck, it was pierced by a flying davit from a smashed lifeboat.

The following morning, the troops crowding the decks could see the low, snow-covered hills of the Clydeside looming through a fine mist. The Canadian destroyer escort had long since returned to Halifax. Now a welcoming fleet of twelve British warships, including
Hood
and
Warspite
, took over.

A crowd of thousands rushed to the shore as the convoy approached. No one was sure what the ships were carrying (wartime censorship was thorough), but the spectators sensed it was something important. It was generally believed that there were British soldiers aboard, returning from France for Christmas leave. Dimly, in the distance, the spectators began to see hundreds of khaki-clad figures cramming the decks of the leading liner,
Aquitania
. The sound of voices carried above the cry of the gulls, but it wasn’t until the vessel came near the quayside at Greenock that the people on shore realized what was happening.

The first voice heard was distinctly Canadian. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” somebody called. “What the hell do we care now?”

With secrecy blown, a reporter for the
Daily Express
wrote that “a burst of laughter sent the inquisitive gulls shrieking and circling high. Then more solemnly, and with no false modesty, the voices invoked their anthem: ‘O Canada! We stand on guard for thee.’ ”

It would be almost six years before the survivors of that first contingent returned to their home and native land. Like everybody else in the division, Leon LeBlanc didn’t see action until the summer of 1943; then, as a medical orderly, he saw too much. When his transport was torpedoed off the coast of Africa, he suffered burns to the chest and legs before taking part in the campaigns in Sicily and Italy (including the famous Christmas attack on Ortona) and later in the Netherlands during the 1944 Continental campaign.

He returned home in the summer of 1945 to a different kind of country. In spite of Mackenzie King’s assurance, Big Government and the Welfare State had arrived. Everybody was working. Unemployment insurance was in place. A massive amount of public money was being spent on the kind of projects that Bennett and King had dismissed as impracticable and extravagant. Leon LeBlanc’s eyes widened at the number of cars on the street. The people, he noted, “looked a lot more cheerful – not desperate like they were before.”

Leon LeBlanc went to night school, learned the plumber’s trade, and got a job without any trouble. When he married in 1946, he was earning twenty-five dollars a week. By then Wilfrid Laurier’s words were again being invoked. To a new generation, this was indeed Canada’s Century. The Bennett buggy was an artifact from the past, the soup kitchen a folk memory, the hobo jungle as obsolete as the village smithy. Instead of existing on the dole, Canadians were about to enjoy family allowances, workmen’s compensation, and old age security – all legacies from that
dark and dismal decade when compassion was a luxury and deliverance an impossible dream.

It was over and done with – the Great Depression that had brought so much heartache and despair but had changed the political face of the nation. It had scarred an entire generation. Now it was history.

A great many books have been published covering various aspects of the Great Depression in Canada. We have had scholarly studies; economic, political, social, and oral histories; statistical analyses; personal memoirs and reminiscences; biographies; reports, theses, and learned papers. In addition, most of the more dramatic moments of the decade, ranging from the On-to-Ottawa trek to the adventures of volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, have been recounted by the participants.

Yet there has not been a narrative history of the Depression in all its manifestations, arranged chronologically from the summer of 1929 to the autumn of 1939. This I have attempted to provide, for it seems to me that the cumulative effect of a continuing narrative is devastating. In order to keep the story within the limits of a single volume, I have had to condense, or, in some cases, omit, certain incidents that some readers will miss. That was inevitable. And if I have enlarged on certain aspects of that dismal decade and neglected others, it is because this is a personal book to which I have brought my own enthusiasms and prejudices.

Wherever possible, I have gone to standard primary sources for the main thread of the narrative. These include reports of royal commissions and other public documents (some obtained under the Access to Information Act), personal papers, unpublished manuscripts, the daily press, and some fifty personal interviews.

In a task of this complexity, it has also been necessary to lean on the spadework of others. These are identified in the Bibliography, but I should like also to name a few of those whose researches I found especially rewarding. They are Irving Abella, William Beeching, Lita-Rose Betcherman, Michael Bliss, Lorne Brown, David R. Elliott, Doug Fetherling, James Gray, Victor Hoar, Michiel Horn, John Irving, Ron Liversedge, Tom MacDonnell, Neil McKenty, Iris Miller, Blair Neatby, Barbara Roberts, James Struthers, Harold Troper, and J.H. Wilbur.

Two major sources were the files of the Winnipeg
Free Press
for the whole of the decade and the Mackenzie King Diaries from 1926 to 1939.

Few books of this kind can be the work of one man. I again want to thank the team of dedicated people who strove behind the scenes to keep me on the rails. Most of the research material was ferreted out by my wonderfully perceptive research assistant, Barbara Sears, who has worked on so many of my previous books. My editor, Janice Tyrwhitt, a hard taskmistress, forced me to rewrite certain sections over and over again; to her I am eternally grateful. My copy editor, Janet Craig, caught scores – nay hundreds – of errors of fact, grammar, spelling, and common sense, saving me from future embarrassment. I am also grateful to my wife, Janet, for her careful reading of the proofs, and my agent, Elsa Franklin, especially for her sage advice on recasting the Afterword.

Ms. Sears and I also wish to thank all the people who were kind enough to share their memories with us (their names are in the Bibliography) for the efforts they went to in bringing this decade to life for us. In addition, we should like to thank the following: