July 2004

THE MILITANT MINERS OF CUMBERLAND AND CORBIN

(From the keynote speech by veteran labour activist Betty Griffin at the 19th Annual Miners' Memorial Day, June 20, 2004, in Cumberland, BC.)

Good evening - it's great to be back in Cumberland again to celebrate and honour the heroic coal miners and their families who faced privation in Dunsmuir's Union Camp, Cumberland's original name - an apt one at that. Known as the most dangerous coal mnes on Vancouver Island, 295 miners met death underground and hundreds more were maimed and faced an early death with blackened lungs. Their solidarity in the two-year strike of 1912-14 is unbelievable. When the war of 1914 broke out, the blacklisted miners were cynically told "your king and country need you - we don't".

Deep in the hearts of thousands of workers the opposition to the war grew and found expression in the militant campaign against conscription led by the Socialist Party, which had won three of the twenty seats they contested with the backing of the B.C. Federation of Labour. As you know, the event that ignited all the opposition to conscription and the war was the murder of Ginger Goodwin, a former vice-president of the B.C Federation of Labour, union organizer, and a member of the Socialist Party. As the whole town of Cumberland followed the funeral procession, Vancouver was brought to a standstill in Canada's first general strike.

I want to look at Corbin, another little coal mining town in the Kootenays, a company town in the early 1930s, now a ghost town. The day was April 17, 1935. Two hundred and fifty miners and their wived were lined up on a narrow mountain ledge leading to the mine. Facing theeir picket line were more than 60 provincial police. Behind the police were a number of scabs. But it was the sound that dominated everything else - the ominous rumble of a bulldozer, its blade poised in the air before the picketing miners and their wives.

Corbin was a wretched little place with "... housing conditions unbearable for anyone to live in. Some instances the show blows in through the cracks in the walls, through the doors and window sashes. ... Hardly one of the shacks was fit for human habitation. In one case a workers, his wife and six children lived in a singel room, nine by twelce feet with cracks in the walls and ceiling through which snow and rain entered." In response to an official committee of investigation, the government and the American mine owner did nothing.

In 1934 the company called for a four perent wage cut amid rumours of layoffs. The miners struck on January 20 to protest the firing of their union secretary, John Press, as well as demands for better housing and living conditons. On April 15, Tom Uphill, the well-respected Labour MLA for Fernie, who had intervened to help get a settlement, announced that a tentative agreement had been reached. But the mine owner vetoed it the next day, and sent in scabs to re-open the mine. The Attorney-General ordered in a special provincial police force immediately.

And now on this lovely April spring day, the miners faced the police. From the ranks, the women formed themselves into a line, taking a position at the head of the picket.

Suddenly, the bulldozers roared and lurched forward, crashing into the line, pushing the screaming women before it. Within seconds, the legs of several women had been crushed. One woman was dragged 300 feet before the blade pushed her aside. One of the women had to be hospitalized because the flesh had been torn from her legs. Another, who was pregnant at the time, was clubbed by the police, first across the shoulders and then the abdomen. She lost the baby.

In retaliation for the brutal attack, the miners seized rocks to force the bulldozer operator tohalt. In the pitched battle, more than fifty were injured, only fourteen of them police. Seventeen strikers, including the presidnet and secretary of the union, were arrested. But the mine remained closed...

© 2004 Communist Party of Canada