You can’t mention anything about organizing without mentioning Hjalmar Bergren. They’d have the police come in and take him to the end of the line … That night he’d show up back in camp.
—PERCIVAL CLEMENTS
THE VILLAGE OF SOUTH WELLINGTON lies in a lush green valley that hides with clumps of maple and fir the dwindling slack heaps and crumbling concrete footings that give evidence of its days as a coal camp.
Back in the 1920s many of the miners who lived there were refugees from the blacklist that followed the Big Coal Strike of 1912-14, when miners from all over the island who believed in unions were sent to jail for rioting. When the strike was over and the jailed men came home, one of the few places they could find work was in a mine belonging to a small company in South Wellington.
Ellen Greenwell lived in one of the miners’ houses there. She and her husband, Thomas, came from two of the most militant families on the entire island. At the age of twenty, Ellen Bowater had stood in the front yard of her family home at Extension in the middle of the night, dressed only in her nightgown, as the militia arrested her father and her sixteen-year-old brother. The experience turned her into an activist, “a true blood both union-wise and political-wise,” as one of her family described her.
Ellen and Thomas got married not long after the strike. Bowater women marrying Greenwell men had become a family tradition. Ellen’s sister Caroline had married Thomas’s brother Archie just before the strike started. Both couples eventually settled in South Wellington where, some years later, Archie died of cancer of the bowel, leaving Caroline pregnant with their fifth child. Six weeks after the baby boy was born, he choked to death on some cod liver oil. Within a year the family home burned to the ground. From that time on, Caroline’s only purpose in life was to support and educate her children. She patched together a meagre income sewing remakes, cleaning other people’s houses and washing other people’s laundry so that her children would become independent and never have to experience the power of the blacklist.
Caroline’s eldest daughter, Lillian, won a scholarship to attend Normal School. When Caroline’s eldest son—his father’s namesake—finished high school, he was planning to study medicine as soon as he could earn enough money for his tuition. Young Archie considered himself especially lucky, therefore, in those early days of the Great Depression, to land a job in the Reserve mine. And Archibald Bowater Greenwell could not ignore the generations of union men reflected in his name. Despite his mother’s efforts to discourage an interest in unions, he joined the fight to bring the union to Vancouver Island coal mines by enlisting in a secret cell of the Communist Party of Canada.
Vancouver Island was simmering with the activities of the far left in those days when hope had vanished for so many. The Communist Party with its strong antifascist message seemed to offer people like Archie the means to make things better. There were many like him, men who wanted unions in the mines and in the forests as well. And any of them who were travelling the length of the island knew they could stop in at Ellen Greenwell’s place whenever they needed a meal and some stimulating conversation.
Archie liked to spend time at his Auntie Ellen’s too. There was an air of secretiveness that was exhilarating; the conversation was often erudite and thought-provoking. One night he met someone who made a particular impression on him. Hjalmar Bergren was tall and muscular. His long narrow face was topped with a short bristle of hair; his eyes revealed a deep intelligence and a burning intensity that his friends knew was tempered with common sense and an appreciation for the absurd. In a strong but quiet voice with just enough of a Norwegian accent to betray his origins, he explained his ideas in sometimes biting language moderated frequently by a laconic “enaway” to lessen the sting.
Hjalmar grew up on a farm near Melfort, Saskatchewan, where his parents belonged to a group that circulated among its members books brought with them from Europe. In 1928, when he was twenty years old, he came to Vancouver with a Swedish friend who took him to a union meeting at the Wobbly Hall on Cordova Street.
Although the Industrial Workers of the World were long past the glory days they had seen before the First World War, the battles fought for unskilled migrant workers were still bright in many memories. And there were loggers on Cordova Street in the late 1920s for whom the memory of the One Big Union (OBU) was even fresher. The improvements in camp life, which were the legacy of the OBU’S brief tenure, made loggers hopeful that, with the right plan of action, they’d get a union that would last.
Hjalmar got a job in the Fraser Valley driving a logging team for a “humdrum little outfit” for fifty cents an hour—not bad pay for a young fellow. On his day off he was back on Cordova Street talking union with a small group of men with some radical ideas.
Nineteen twenty-eight turned out to be an important year in the history of the Communist Party. That was the year the Third Interna-tional declared that since the collapse of world capitalism was imminent, workers should organize for revolution. The Party’s Canadian organization ordered members to leave more conventional trade unions and set up their own. In British Columbia, where there were large numbers of miners and loggers and a tradition of socialism dating back to before the turn of the century, a nucleus of men were ready to go along. The handful of loggers who met on Cordova Street revived the Lumber Workers Industrial Union (LWIU).
With his union card in his back pocket, Hjalmar Bergren headed for Vancouver Island and a job as a faller and bucker at a Cowichan Lake camp that had a reputation for being the best on the coast. One of the owners was an old logger himself, known to be “tough but fair” and well on his way to becoming a legend.
Neil McDonald was fifty-three that year, A husky man, tall, he wore the Stanfields, the muddy denims and the shapeless felt hat of an ordinary logger. Leaving his partner, Hugh Murphy, to look after the business end, Neil supervised the loggers on the scene.
Since his childhood on Manitoulin Island off the northern shore of Lake Huron, Neil had been to the Klondike to dig gold and the Crowsnest Pass to build railroads before he ended up on the British Columbia coast logging at Pender Harbour. That was where Virginia Gonzalves caught his eye. Her father was the legendary Portuguese Joe, and her mother, Susan Harris, an Indian woman from Vancouver.
Neil and Virginia McDonald had been married for some time and living in the Courtenay area of Vancouver Island when Neil went into business with Murphy. By the time Hjalmar Bergren got a job with them at Cowichan Lake, McDonald and Murphy were reestablishing themselves following a fire on their Robertson River holdings that had destroyed much of their timber and some of their equipment. Their new camp was in Block 75, a huge tract of choice timber along the Gordon River across the Pacific watershed and just outside the E&N grant lands. In 1928 they were pushing a railroad financed by money borrowed at high interest rates as fast as they could go into the camp.
The McDonald and Murphy camp was first class: the food was the best and the operators were progressive. The bunkhouses were converted passenger coaches bought when the E&N stopped its passenger service to Lake Cowichan. The same type of coach was used to take the men from the camp to work, too, the cushioned seats an unheard-of luxury at a time when most loggers went to work sitting on the wooden benches of a speeder or even the bare bars of a skeleton car.
But the best camp on the coast couldn’t survive the collapse of markets that followed the Big Crash in October 1929. Owing huge amounts of money to their creditors, McDonald and Murphy closed a year later. Their employees had a choice—stay around the lake and hope that a miracle would happen or head back to Vancouver and the reasonable certainty that there wouldn’t be work for anyone there either.
Hjalmar chose Vancouver because that was where the LWIU office was. The Communist Party had just established the Workers’ Unity League to coordinate communist trade union activities across the country. With the strength of the organization behind them, the union’s part-time organizers were ready to take on the coastal camps.
In theory, bad times made the ground fertile for organizing. In reality, it was the beginning for Bergren and his colleagues of many years of living on handouts and sleeping in makeshift accommodation. The union depended on members’ dues to pay the living expenses of the organizers. In order to pay dues, the members had to have jobs, but there were few logging jobs available in the beginning years of the Great Depression. The small number who had work didn’t want to risk being blacklisted by joining a union.
During the next four years, Hjalmar moved around a lot. From Half Moon Bay on the mainland to Elk Bay, from Campbell River up island to Camp Six at the head of Cowichan Lake and from there to Camp Ten at the Foot, he worked when he could and talked union. He became intimately associated with the blacklist and cheated it by adopting his mother’s maiden name on some occasions and by shortening his name to Berg on others. He developed a strange camaraderie with the camp superintendents who hired him and, soon afterward, fired him, and the policemen who escorted him out of a succession of camps. No one took it personally—all of them were just doing their jobs. One memorable winter he and three other loggers with no place to live dismantled an old bunkhouse and rebuilt it on neutral territory, the beach at Honeymoon Bay. They got through the winter shooting game animals for their food, taking turns cooking, and doing the odd job for Charlie March, who lived nearby.
The Depression didn’t last long in the logging industry. By the Christmas shutdown of 1933 there were signs that logging would be opening up and there would be jobs again. That winter the talk on Cordova Street was of new possibilities and old grievances. Now that the employers were going to need all the loggers they could get, loggers didn’t think they should have to tolerate bad conditions. Everyone had their own special grievance, but there were two big issues that got everybody going: safety and the blacklist.
Danger in the woods had increased dramatically in the boom times before the crash. Now that markets were opening up again and technology was keeping pace, a lot of men were dying in the logging business. The biggest problem was speed-up, a subject for complaint since before the days of the OBU. As technology developed, as the bigger companies and their highball operations drove men and machinery faster and faster, more and more loggers were getting hurt in the woods. But the incentives were sometimes hard to resist.
I was one of a crew on a skidder on one side for a month. Every month if we got three million feet… then at the end of the Saturday night when we were working six days a week, there would be a barrel of beer there. That’s twelve cases of beer for everybody.
They had a habit of trying to break records … and I think the first year every time we went out to break a record somebody got killed.
And if we managed to break the record the rest of us got two bottles of beer put on our porch the next morning, but someone got killed pretty near every time.
And if a logger was being honest with himself he had to admit that it wasn’t always the speed-up that made the woods dangerous. There was a lot of bravado among the loggers, a lot of showing they weren’t afraid, that they didn’t need to take the precautions that might prevent an accident.
The accident that caused the most deaths was the least preventable: being struck by a snag or standing dead tree. It happened to experienced loggers; it happened to greenhorns. Inquest juries searched for preventative measures. Loggers told stories of men who took shelter from a falling tree only to walk out afterward into the path of a snag that had been knocked down behind it. A bucker was fatalistic: “You have to take a chance with snags.” A superintendent shrugged, “There’s no satisfactory way of getting rid of them.”
Saplings were another problem. A “sapling” in the coastal forest of the 1930s could be one hundred feet high and a foot thick at the butt. They came down all the time, usually knocked over when a log was being skidded. Since saplings fell towards the machines, the chokerman following behind the turn was usually safe. The sapling landed on somebody else.
And when a man was injured, when he was hit by a snag, when his leg was crushed between two logs, when a broken sky line battered his head, when the butt end of a falling tree caught his clothes and hurled him ten feet into the air, then the problem was to get him out of the woods to medical help.
It was so much simpler if a man died instantly. Work stopped for the day and someone went to look for a stretcher to carry the body out. If a man was only injured, it was more complicated because time was of the essence. The first-aid man had to be found, the locie called for, the crushed limb splinted or the bleeding stanched, and the laborious process of transporting a seriously injured man from the woods to the camp, from the camp to the lake, from the lake to the ambulance would begin. At some point, if the patient was lucky, a doctor would intercept his journey either in the camp or at the Foot, but even with a doctor’s care, the worst was yet to come. There was no hospital at the lake. Time after time, year after year, loggers would survive their injuries only to die from shock a few hours later at the King’s Daughters Hospital in Duncan because it took too long to get them over the meandering collection of potholes and rocks that was the Cowichan Lake road.
The road had always been narrow and rough; the desultory work that was done on it from time to time was never enough to make any lasting improvement. A local theory had it that accident victims were better off in a car than in the ambulance. If an injured person could sit up, so the theory went, and see where he was going, he could ward off further injury by bracing himself for the holes in the road.
So when the misery whistle blew six blasts to announce an injury or seven to announce a death, loggers added another grievance to their list, and union organizers knew they had another thing to talk about the next time they slipped into a camp. And there would be a few more men who would listen to what they had to say, in spite of the threat of the blacklist.
The blacklist was almost as deadly as the speed-up. As Hjalmar said,
The blacklist was very effective. If you couldn’t work, you couldn’t eat and it made no noise. If you starved to death nobody knew anything about it.
And there were lots of ways to get your name onto the blacklist. Jack Atkinson had seen it at work in the mines after the Big Strike; he had seen it in the woods, too, and he knew.
If he was militant, opposing the company on different things, if he opened his mouth about wantin’ more wages—gone, and blacklisted in Vancouver so he couldn’t get a job in another camp on the whole coast.
The blacklist worked efficiently. All employers, except a few like Neil McDonald, employed men through a hiring agency in Vancouver. By the 1930s Black’s was the most famous one.
A man might not know his name was on the blacklist. He might work through the autumn until the Christmas shutdown, collect his time and head for Vancouver. When he went to Black’s to be rehired in January, however, he would be told that no one wanted him. The clerk in his last camp would have sent in a form with instructions that he be blacklisted.
During the Christmas layoff in 1933, LWIU members met in Vancou-ver. They drew up a wage scale and chose the Bloedel camps near Campbell River as a target for their first job action. They chose the Campbell River area because it was the centre of the camps belonging to the British Columbia Loggers’ Association.
The organization of logging operators had been responsible for establishing the British markets that had given coastal logging renewed life at a time when the Depression still held other sectors of the economy in a tight grip. For the B.C. Loggers’ Association, the only thing worse than having a union interfering with their decisions and decreasing their profits was if that union was “Red.” The full-page newspaper ads paid for by the operators made sure the general public knew that “agents of Moscow” were leading the loggers’ union.
The Campbell River strike lasted from January until May of 1934. The union gained many hundreds of members, most of whom were paying dues; the government had recognized the principle of a mini’ mum wage; but employers had been strengthened in their resolve to oppose unions. And the length of the blacklist had grown.
Although the union men at Cowichan Lake had been involved in the strike in its later stages, their time in the spotlight was still two years away. Hjalmar Bergren had worked at union headquarters in Vancouver for most of the strike. Afterwards, he was directed to get himself hired in one of the big camps in the Campbell River area.
After work and on Sundays he talked union in the camp and distributed mimeographed copies of the union newspaper, the B.C. Lumber Worker. His description of his work gives a strong sense of the man and the task he faced.
They had special fellows around that were lookin’ out to see if there was any union delegate around there. I used to walk around with a B.C. Lumber Worker in my hip pocket and go from bunkhouse to bunkhouse … And they had a fellow there by the name of Smith—sort of a special constable looking out, you know. And I patted him on the back and I said, “Hello there. Beautiful evening. Fine.” Talked about this and that. Gave him a line of baloney and then when he was walking around the lower road, well, I was on the upper one.
Of course every bunkhouse I opened the door wide and hollered, “B.C. Lumber Worker, boys, five cents a copy. Read it and feel yourself grow. The real McCoy.” Then somebody went to the office and squealed that I was the union delegate in camp. So they called Smith and Smith said, “Oh, no, he’s too fine a fellow, that man.”
That fine fellow made many converts. “Fellows were jumping up on their bunks and saying how they needed a union.” It cost fifty cents to join and two bits a month dues. On the Sunday after payday, Hjalmar was so busy signing up new members he didn’t even have time to shave. But even though there was a line-up half a block long of men waiting to join, no one was prepared to stick his neck out far enough to be seen giving Bergren a hand.
Someone finally reported Hjalmar’s activities. The company kept him on until the July shutdown, but when he went to the agency to get rehired, his name was on the blacklist again. By then, however, there was a new option open for blacklisted loggers at Cowichan Lake.
Neil McDonald was back, although he was no longer an owner. Lake Logging, a company owned by Ralph W. Rounds and H. W. Hunter, had purchased McDonald and Murphy’s bankrupt company and hired McDonald as their superintendent. Lake Logging was independent of the B.C. Loggers’ Association. Because of difficulties with their transport system, which required them to unload their logs an extra time, thus rendering the movement of logs to market unusually expensive, they needed an efficient crew and stable working conditions. There was nobody better than Neil McDonald to assemble such a work force. And there were no better men for that work force than the experienced loggers who had worked for McDonald before.
Although many of those loggers were now blacklisted, McDonald didn’t care. His theory was that blacklisted loggers were “invariably very good men … and he knew that by pickin’ these men up he would have one of the best crews on the coast and therefore his production would be high.” Not that there weren’t some troublesome moments. The men who McDonald hired were not the sort to acquiesce when things weren’t to their liking. But McDonald was fair. When the men had a problem he would discuss it and most of the time, between them, they settled it.
There were three hundred men at the big Lake Logging camp, which lay strung out along a company railroad track surrounded by giant stumps in the narrow Gordon River valley. The camp was named Rounds after one of the new owners. Having opened just as the 1934 strike was winding down, it paid the new wage scale. It was a comfortable camp. Even though twenty men shared one large room in each of the bunkhouses, there were steam-heated drying rooms for soggy work clothes and concrete shower baths for work-dirty loggers.
Company speeders connected the camp to the lake. While the majority of the employees lived a bachelor existence, going out on the weekends to see family, attend a dance in the village or go on a spree in Duncan, twenty of the key men lived in the small family quarter. There were enough children to warrant a one-room school and enough musicians for a camp orchestra. When there was a dance in camp, the speeders brought in outsiders of all ages, and when Christmas came there was a party for everyone who worked for “Lake Log.” When there was a forest fire, the speeders worked overtime taking families and their belongings to the safety of Lake Cowichan.
After a day’s work, the speeders made it easy for men like Hjalmar to keep in contact with the resident union organizer at the Foot. Bert Flatt was a full-time union man, setting an example by giving ioo per cent to the union. He lived in a little rented cabin in the village and received no wages. If he collected enough dues, he ate. When a year of eating irregularly made Flatt yearn for a job that paid money, Bergren inherited his penurious lifestyle, his union job and his little cabin in the village.
It was hard to categorize the village of Lake Cowichan. It was still a well-known fishing resort, although past its glory days. A number of wealthy people still spent the summers in their private homes along the river. There were tourist camps, too, where less grand visitors could cook their own meals and rent boats.
In the village proper, most people still lived in floathouses tethered along the shores of the Upper Pool and along the banks of the river as far as the Big Pool in a lively community that included a religious institution called “the Ark.” Established residents of the lake would have recognized the Ark from its former incarnation as the Swan Hall, scene of many raucous dances. When the Reverend T. H. Maynard purchased the floating hall, he had more holy pursuits on his mind. A missionary in India for thirty years with the Plymouth Brethren until acute arthritis forced him into retirement, he had taken up the hobby of beekeeping on his return, and it had cured his disease. In a settlement where the traditional religions were paid only slight attention, Maynard’s visiting missionary lectures and lantern slide shows for children gave those in need of religious succour a welcome refuge.
It had been the practice of the Anglican Church to limit its ministrations for its flock at the lake to the once yearly visit of a clergyman, during which it was the custom to round up the latest crop of Anglican babies and christen them in the schoolhouse en masse. Certain Anglican women had, some years before, taken it upon themselves to write to the church inviting a more constant presence in the village. When the church pleaded a lack of money, the same resourceful group of women wrote to the United Church, which responded by sending a series of lay ministers. These young men, divinity students for the most part, came for the summer and departed in the fall to continue their studies.
An exception to this seasonal parade was one H. E. Gridley, who stayed for two years and left quite an impression. His energy seemed limitless. He started two boys’ clubs and spent many evenings at his residence teaching his charges outdoor lore. His Sunday school services at the schoolhouse attracted overflow crowds. Weekly lantern shows and visiting entertainers raised money for the church fund. In a boat aptly named The Padre, he travelled regularly to Camps Three and Six to hold services and start libraries. On the first anniversary of his arrival, the mission, which Gridley had christened “Kirk of the Woods,” celebrated its good fortune for having found such an excellent man.
But there were people who thought Mr. Gridley was too good to be true. When he took his departure, he became part of the folklore of the lake for two quite conflicting reasons. The first involved the Padre and a silly prank by a group of men led by Clarence Whittingham. In the absence of Mr. Gridley, they tied the Padre to a floating house of ill fame that shared the Upper Pool with Mr. Maynard’s “Ark” and most of the citizenry. Mr. Gridley being out of town, the boat stayed tied up to its unconventional moorage for an entire week, causing much bawdy speculation about the reverend gentleman’s prowess as a lady’s man. The second story for which Mr. Gridley is remembered rather contradicts the first. He was found to have been too fond of his young male charges and was advised by letter, while on holiday, never to return.
The much more worthy Mr. Maynard replaced his floating church with “Hope Hall,” a permanent home on dry land. The Ark was towed up the lake to become just another house at a logging camp.
Floathouses seldom went empty for long. This was especially true during the few years that Cowichan Lake suffered from the effects of the Depression. So severely had the lake been affected that unemployment relief had been necessary to save much of the population from utter destitution. The lake was the biggest centre of unemployment in the entire district until 1933, when the camps started to open again. Then so many men went back to work that the number of people on relief dropped by 75 per cent. That was the year, as well, when Camp Ten was so close to the village that loggers could sleep in town either at home or in Beech’s or Rundquist’s boardinghouses.
Across the river from the Riverside Hotel and back from the swampy edge of the Upper Pool stood all that constituted the village of Lake Cowichan in those days. Gordon’s Store was there, and the two stores belonging to the Scholey brothers. Each brother had wanted his own business—Ted took over the groceries and meats and Sid took the confectionery, hardware and post office. Every kid in town knew that Sid had holes bored in the wall so he could stay in the living quarters at the back and see who had come into his store. If the customers happened to be kids, he wouldn’t come out until one of them reached for a chocolate bar, and then Sid or his wife would yell.
Treats for adult consumption were available to anyone in the know. Not every adult knew where the blind pigs were in town, but it wasn’t hard to find out. Archibald Tidrington and Oscar Rundquist were always good for a bottle of illicit booze. And Niama Bergman was always having to answer to the judge in Duncan for selling liquor out of her home. She would smile and admit to him that she was a drinker and it was a bad habit, but deny that she was a bootlegger. The judge would find her guilty every time.
Bootlegger booze was bound to become an even more lucrative business as Lake Cowichan boomed. By 1934 the E&N was running seven long trains loaded with logs through town every twenty-four hours. People began to realize that things were changing. The cut-over areas east of the village stretched far and wide across the valley and up the slopes on either side. Closer to Lake Cowichan a thick canopy of forest near the two hotels provided a respite for the eye, but that was soon forgotten in the vista that could be seen from the village. Up towards Bald Mountain there was more logged and burned-over land. It didn’t make the view any better to hear that the reason the logging scars went right down to the lake was because that was where the best logs were. Anybody who stayed along the river, where most of the visitors were anyway, could avoid noticing the havoc that logging had played on the mountains and valleys surrounding the lake.
But it was hard to ignore the fact that big-time logging had taken over. The summer people would have preferred that the lake remain as it had been twenty years before, but magnificent vistas didn’t make nearly as much money as heavily loaded logging trains. The loggers at the lake were glad to be working, and the summer people stayed by the tree-shaded river.
Tall trees sheltered Hjalmar Bergren’s cabin in the village. From there it was just a short walk down a trail to the Browns’ house. Owen Brown was a high rigger for Lake Logging, young, heavily built, dark-haired, who was known for his “communist leanings.” In the early thirties he had campaigned door-to-door to raise funds for the Workers’ Unity League, and when the 1934 strikers had come to the lake to muster support, it was Owen Brown they sought out.
Owen’s wife, Edna, was from a Cobble Hill family, the Dougans, one with a long history of settlement on the island. A woman known for her honesty and intelligence, she had wholeheartedly embraced her husband’s beliefs. Like many women in Lake Cowichan, she was on her own during the week while her husband stayed in the camp at Rounds. With two small children to care for and all the family’s day-to-day decisions to make, she still had a considerable store of energy, which she channelled into an exciting new activity.
Ladies’ auxiliaries were certainly nothing new in the stay-at-home world of most mid-twentieth-century women. But the auxiliary that Edna helped to found with six other women was about as far from the traditional idea as it was possible to be. A casual observer might have been fooled seeing the women meet in each other’s homes to share tea and sandwiches and work on handicrafts for sale at one of their bazaars. That casual observer might not have known that the women were members of the Communist Party and committed to helping their men have a union. The casual observer might not even have noticed the roughly dressed man who ate often at Edna’s and who accompanied her as she visited other loggers’ wives in the community.
Hjalmar Bergren and Edna Brown made a formidable team. The membership of the auxiliary trebled in six months. There was so much for them all to learn. They consulted Roberts Rules frequently to solve thorny procedural questions in their meetings. They set up committees, attended educational sessions and raised money through social events. Auxiliary dances became a fixture at Cowichan Lake, attended by the handful of permanent residents and by large numbers of newcomers who came to the lake because there was work there.
In 1935, Archie Greenwell was one of those men. He and a friend rode the rods of the E&N from South Wellington to Duncan, hoping to hitch a ride from there to the lake. About five miles out of Duncan, at Jordan’s corner, a big chauffeur-driven limousine stopped to pick them up. Archie looked down at his clothes. They weren’t his Sunday best but they were clean, and he figured his mother wouldn’t be too upset. He and his friend accepted a ride to the Lakeside Hotel. After they alighted from the big car, their benefactor, Mr. H. W. Hunter, one of the two owners of Lake Logging, continued on his way by boat to Honeymoon Bay. Hunter’s identity meant nothing to Archie that day, and the clean-cut young men looking for jobs at the lake made no lasting impression on Hunter.
Archie had done what his mother tried so hard to prevent him from doing: he had got himself blacklisted in all the mines in British Columbia. Now he was looking for work wherever he could find it. But two weeks at Camp Six convinced him that he was not meant to be a logger. He returned to South Wellington and resumed his activities with the Communist Party, which was in the process of changing its policy again.
With fascism gaining ground in Europe, with Mussolini in control in Italy and Hitler consolidating his power in Germany, the Comintern decreed that a “People’s Front” was necessary to defeat the forces of the extreme right. Accordingly, although the Canadian party was opposed to the decision, the Workers’ Unity League disbanded and Communist Party union organizers broadened their range to include the entire trade union movement.
Whole organizations were handed over to international unions. Archie worked with the coal miners as they switched over to the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). With his family background in socialism and his higher than usual level of education, he attracted more and more attention among the union-minded people of Vancouver Island.
But since Archie had rendered himself permanently unemployable in the mines, he allowed himself to be tempted back to the lake and right into the middle of the strike that really got the union started there.
Early in 1936, the LWIU, in response to the Communist Party’s instruction to join the mainstream union movement, had merged with the Lumber and Sawmill Workers Union (LSWU), an affiliate of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, who, because they were leery of the “red” tinge of their new brothers, relegated the LSWU to second’class status. The disadvantages of this subordinate position were not immediately apparent, however, as local union organizers prepared their supporters for a referendum that would confirm their support of the change in unions. In the meantime, feeling themselves in a stronger bargaining position than ever before, union-minded loggers at the VL&M camps at the lake prepared to strike for a wage increase.
The fact that some loggers were able to live in the village at that time, because of the proximity of two VL&M camps, accentuated the differences between the old-fashioned nomadic bachelor loggers and the more settled married ones. Two months later, having fired two union loggers, one for selling copies of the B.C. Lumber Worker and the other for talking union, the Camp Ten superintendent called a meeting of his employees. Because the meeting took place in the camp during the evening, most of those in attendance were bachelors—men who lived in the camp. They were unanimous in their determination not to return to work. When, in response to complaints from the men not in camp at the time of the vote, the superintendent called a second meeting that included the married men, there were twenty men present who voted against the majority.
A similar situation occurred two weeks later when VL&M Camp Eight joined the strike. In the second meeting, which included both married and single men, the vote was only narrowly in favour of a strike, but since the union required only a simple majority, the decision to walk out prevailed.
For the next two months, only the VL&M men were on strike. But rather than worry about their isolated position, they concentrated on finding living quarters for the displaced bachelor loggers who had been ordered out of the camps. The first man to be fired, Heman Valley, proposed a solution. He and Owen Brown each put up $25 to purchase three bunkhouses belonging to a burned-out shingle mill close to the village. The strikers dismantled the buildings and reassembled them on land owned by Heman, situated up the slope from Owen’s house.
While the men put the buildings of the picket camp back together, the women of the auxiliary billeted strikers in their homes and made mattresses out of cloth and straw. That done, the women organized the first of a series of picket camp dances to raise both spirits and money for the strikers’ fund. During the first weeks of the strike, union headquarters was in the collection of modest buildings that had become a centre of frantic activity.
In April, union local president Mack MacKinnon sent a letter to all employers at the lake, informing them that the union wished to negotiate a package that included a satisfactory wage scale, union recognition and a union agreement. In a bold gesture to match his bold demands, he also informed the press. Then, in a move that proclaimed the union meant business, MacKinnon challenged all logging workers on the rest of the island and the mainland coast—there were virtually no organized lumber workers in the interior of the province—to walk out on May 4.
In those early days of May, Lake Logging, already affected by the closing of the railroad it shared with VL&M, was shut down by its own workers. Mr. Rounds and Mr. Hunter, who were at the meeting when the men voted, refused to consider union recognition, but they were willing to meet the men halfway on wages. When the men voted to strike anyway, it was a personal defeat for Superintendent Neil McDonald, who had been so sympathetic to blacklisted loggers. One hundred and eighty strikers threw their packsacks onto flat cars and climbed into the railway coaches. When they climbed down at the Crossing in Lake Cowichan, the majority of them registered at the community hall, which had become union headquarters as the strike expanded. A lot of them cashed their cheques and contributed a day’s wages to the strike fund. Some of them headed down the road for Duncan, but many moved into the picket camp which was, of necessity, being enlarged.
The realization that most of the sawmills in the area were going to keep working was a blow to the union’s hopes for a quick settlement. Especially bitter were the men in Camps Three and Six, both of which belonged to ITM at Youbou. While most of the men in the camps walked out, most of the Youbou men kept working. Added to that disappointment was the realization that loggers in the rest of the province had failed to walk out as well. As Stan Anderson said in later years,
We were told that we had to go on strike so we went down to the foot of the lake and we went on strike, and we were the only lousy outfit in British Columbia that did.
Stan was a union man through and through, having spent his young manhood in one altercation after another as the unemployed sought to better their lot in the Depression-ridden West. The diminutive man had been part of a farmer-labour group that was gassed on the steps of Calgary city hall in 1933. In Lethbridge he had to defend himself in court against a false accusation of rioting.
I was on the stand for about three bloomin’ days, and they tried to convince me that my name was not Anderson, it was Androvitch. We were all classified as “pinkos.”
He had been in Vancouver’s Victory Square in 1935 when the men from the Bennett camps rioted; during a Vancouver waterfront strike, he had been part of a ragtag group that published a strike bulletin using stolen paper and type. By 1936, the twenty-eight-year-old logger cum musician cum union activist had settled down at Camp Six, where he joined a growing group of union-minded loggers whose sense of fair play was being severely tested by the refusal of the workers at the Youbou mill to support the 1936 strike.
That decision by the mill workers was only one sign of a division among forest workers that would hinder the union movement and leave some bitterness even after the mill workers joined the union. There are many theories to explain the reluctance of the mill hands to climb onto the union bandwagon, but the most logical one was that they had more to lose. Although loggers gradually were starting to marry and raise families, mill workers were even more likely to be married. Recent migrants from the prairies, of which there were many in those Depression years, tended to choose the mill over the woods. In the mill towns they could enjoy more of life’s comforts. Recent immigrants from other countries and from Punjab in particular, who chose the mill over the woods as well because there was a ready-made community of their countrymen working and living there, were afraid to jeopardize their immigration status by striking.
But an appreciation for the reasons a man chose the mill over the forest did nothing to ease the animosity between the two branches of the logging industry. Loggers saw themselves as more independent, less likely to knuckle under to the company. Even after the mill hands joined the union in a gradual process over the next ten years, the animosity continued, as evidenced in these words from some early members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary at Lake Cowichan.
The loggers and the mill men never mixed. I mean, they just didn’t seem to have the same feelings towards each other.
Well, years and years ago they always accused the mill men of hiding behind the sawdust piles. Always done that. ‘Cause they never really supported the loggers. But they were willing to get all the benefits, you know.
They all belong to the same union, but there still is that little bone of contention.
That little bone of contention was certainly present in the 1936 strike, when the majority of the men in the woods walked out and the majority of the men in the mills stayed at work. The Youbou mill, with enough logs stored in the lake to keep it going for several weeks, became a target for the strikers.
Ralph Godfrey remembered the time in May of 1936 “when they came over the mountain to pull the mill out.” One hundred and fifty strikers took up positions along the railroad track at Youbou just after seven o’clock on the morning of May 7. The picket line they formed was an attempt to prevent the men in the bunkhouses from getting to the mill.
Standing on the wrong side of the picket line was twenty-four-year-old Douglas Price, a timber sider in the Youbou mill.
What happened was, a big group of men came down the track and into the bunkhouse and said, “No work today, boys, no work today,” and they all had sticks about two feet long, seems to me, and anyway we were all standing around the potbellied stove in a state of flux, you know, and most of us wanted our job. We didn’t belong to any union and we didn’t know anything about their troubles. They were going to shut us down just like that.
The company had hired two provincial policemen to maintain order. Their presence was enough to ensure that the mill hands got to work that morning. When someone warned the strikers that they were trespassing, they withdrew to the east boundary of the company town-site, where they were able to entice some of the men who had just come off the night shift to come to a meeting.
An outsider viewing the proceedings said that the speakers at that meeting addressed each other as “comrade” and the leader as “comrade chairman.” In those days, people were always quick to pick up on any evidence that the “Reds” were manipulating events. Whatever was said at that meeting, it was enough to convince several men on the night shift not to appear for work again. The company dealt with that turn of events by cancelling the night shift for the duration.
Before noon on May 7, three more policemen had arrived in Youbou, giving the law officers sufficient authority to confront the strikers when they moved in a body back onto the mill property. Facing the strikers across a line in the dirt of the road just outside the new cookhouse where the mill hands were eating, the police stopped the march. The men in the union ranks crowded in behind their leaders to hear what was said.
Management invited two strikers inside for what proved to be an inconclusive conference. As the mill hands emerged from the cook’ house after their noon meal, the strikers called them over to talk. The mill hands were not swayed. As one recalled later, “We told ‘em, ‘We have no trouble with you guys. We don’t wanta have any rows. We gotta work with you fellows for the rest of our lives.’” When no one changed his mind, the strikers withdrew to the east boundary once again.
At a meeting of non-union mill hands that evening in the cook-house, the question of whether or not to join the strikers was put to a vote after a heated discussion. Clarence Whittingham watched them vote in favour of continuing to work.
The company said, “Okay, we’ll have a vote. If the men want to join the union, so be it.” So all the men go through [the dining room] and they gave them a little piece of paper. They put “yes” or “no” on it. They come in that door, drop it in the ballot box and out the other door at the back. They’d come in one door, out the other, come around, grab another ticket and vote again. They must have known.
For the next four days, from Friday to Monday, things were fairly peaceful in Youbou. Mill hands crossed the picket line without molestation. The mill continued to operate, albeit without a night shift. Then on Monday, May 11, the three Carmichael brothers from Pourier’s Bay ran into trouble when they tried to cross the picket line. They were just teen-agers. A striker pushed one boy down; another striker grabbed the other two and knocked their heads together. Then the jostling and kicking began, as the crowd sent the boys back the way they had come.
The strike leaders were on their way to the “Hindu” bunkhouse on the western side of the mill when the police stopped them and escorted them off company property once again. In the hours that followed, strikers reappeared to stand in groups of two or three along the mountainside overlooking the mill. Then more police reinforcements arrived. It looked like a standoff.
Police and company guards were everywhere. They patrolled the mill, the streets and the access to the water. Before the strike, union organizers had come into Cottonwood Creek by boat. Now, denied entry to company property, they came ashore at Whittingham’s place. Clarence was no longer a company employee, and he was keeping track of the activities of both sides. All of them were his customers at his weekly movies, and their welfare was his concern.
Some of the women in Youbou were beginnin’ to get a little worried about their husbands going to work, walkin’ up the track from the houses to the mill around the lower part there; they thought maybe they’d get mobbed with the strikers. But they were peaceful fellows; there was no problem. They had a little shelter right there at Coon Creek … and they’d just stay there.
Until five years before, there had been no road to Youbou. Everyone had had to come in by boat or by CN gas car. As soon as there was a road, however, several people bought cars. Anyone coming into Youbou by land in 1936 had to cross the Coon Creek bridge on the outskirts of town. The union had taken a stand on the east side of the bridge and the police were on the Youbou side, where they had erected a guard room of sorts. All traffic entering town had to pass the two checkpoints.
Legally, the police could not prevent anyone from going to the post office, but they would not let any striker go there alone. Consequently, they had to provide an escort up to the post office and back to Coon Creek for any striker who had business with His Majesty’s postmaster. The strikers saw a chance for some mischief. They chose to go up to the post office one at a time, keeping the policemen at the checkpoint perpetually occupied. As Clarence said, “So the cops were earning their money and their shoe leather too. They was peaceful. There was no problems.”
It was too peaceful at Youbou, in fact. Nothing was happening. The time had come for the union to do some stocktaking. Back in Lake Cowichan, a four-hour meeting in the community hall ended with a vote on whether or not to continue the strike. Ballots were marked “Strike” or “Work without discrimination.” Voting also took place at Duncan, Ladysmith, Nanaimo, Youbou and in the camps. The tally was 451 in favour of continuing the strike and 301 opposed.
Reinvigorated by the vote, union leaders faced an audience in Duncan of men and women who asked some tough questions. There were loggers who felt they were being intimidated by both the boss and the union. There were citizens who said, “Weak-kneed government is the problem.” The people who asked if American organizers were involved received a negative, if somewhat equivocal, response.
The union executive answered questions about union dues, union membership and intimidation of workers by employers. They answered a charge that they were not thinking of women and children with the comment, “It is too bad for us if we can not suffer a little hardship in a fight for our rights” and the reminder that the union relief scale was higher than anything the government had ever paid.
Mr. J. W. Auchinachie stood and asked the Duncan audience for a kindlier feeling towards the logger: “He is a good citizen and not a drunken man and he puts into circulation as much money … as some other residents.” His statement summed up the problem for many who were there that night. Loggers on strike did not have very much money to spend. Business was suffering both in Duncan and in Lake Cowichan.
When MLA Hugh Savage got his turn to speak, he put into words what many in Duncan had been thinking. The union was “communistic” in origin. A small minority had succeeded in getting the majority to quit work, he charged. He agreed with the minister of labour, who professed to believe in trade unionism but drew the line at unions in which 25 per cent of the members told the other 75 per cent what to do. Both sides were guilty of greed and selfishness, and the present situation was aggravated by a legacy of past mistakes. He warned employers to make conditions better, because the failure of this strike would mean there would be worse to come.
The concerns of the citizens of Duncan made little impact on employers or strikers. Duncan had showed little enough concern for the people at the lake in the past. But something had to be done. In a desperate move, the union decided to make a direct appeal to forest workers on the rest of the island.
Archie Greenwell had been back at the lake for only a few weeks, but he was right in the thick of things. He was one of the hundred men who climbed into the backs of open trucks, carrying their blanket rolls, ready for the trip up island. They visited camps at Port Alberni, Courtenay and Campbell River, sleeping on the ground and on beaches. They had good meetings in some of the places, Archie recalled in later years, but none of the big camps whose owners belonged to the B.C. Loggers’ Association came out in support.
The 1936 strike foundered on that inability to take the strike to the rest of the island and onto the mainland. It was time for the strikers to cut their losses. Loggers in various camps sent delegations to their employers, but although work resumed, the union had not admitted defeat. At an end-of-strike meeting in the Lake Cowichan community hall, five hundred union members demonstrated their desire to continue the fight by electing Hjalmar Bergren president of their local, which had been formed during the strike. The size of that local was evidence of the importance of Lake Cowichan in those early days of organizing the loggers, but it also reflected how thinly the union was spread over the province. Centred at Lake Cowichan, the local covered territory from Nanaimo to Victoria, all the Gulf Islands, and the West Coast of the island from Victoria to Port Renfrew. There were only two other locals in the province: one with headquarters at Port Alberni and one centred in Vancouver.
Some gains had been made. Lake Logging increased wages by fifty cents a day. The union, realizing the important social role played by the picket camp, raised money to convert it to a permanent club for loggers with a reading room, a place to play cards and a small dance floor.
And there were some debts to be paid. When the loggers went back to work, they were able to start reimbursing Stanley Gordon for all the food and supplies he had allowed them to buy on credit. Gordon’s Store had continued to supply the community all through the strike. Mr. Gordon downplayed his generosity. “When you’re not eating I’ll have to go out of business anyway,” he said. But the loggers at Camp Three and Camp Six weren’t able to start paying anybody anything for a while yet. There were six weeks’ worth of logs still in the lake beside the Youbou mill. Loggers in the two camps did not go back to work until all those logs were used up.
Nineteen thirty-six was an eventful year. The old king, George V, had died in January and been succeeded by his son, who became Edward VIII. The Spanish Civil War began just after the strike ended. The large audience that gathered at Lake Logging to watch the film Heart of Spain was so inspired that they collected $248 to help Dr. Norman Bethune set up the first battlefield blood-transfusion service the world had ever seen. On one December night, avid listeners clumped around every radio set in town to listen through the static to the king, who had chosen to abdicate rather than give up Mrs. Simp-son. During that same week the LSWU and the Ladies Auxiliary held a masquerade dance. First prize for costumes went to seven people who dressed as the Dionne quintuplets, their nurse and their doctor. Even though she was probably too short for the part, the honour of dressing as Dr. Dafoe went to the woman who had made the pink frilled dresses and the big bows worn by the “quints.”
The village had always been a sociable place. Its occupants were dependent on one another for their entertainment, and they had always done it in fine style. The presence of more and more logging families added a new dimension to the dances, whist drives, badminton tournaments and charity bazaars. The increased number of married loggers reflected a change in the type of man who earned his living in logging and had important implications for the men interested in union organizing.
Hjalmar Bergren could see that a split was developing amongst the union-minded as the men debated about how to progress from where they were at the end of the strike to where they wanted to be. It was a case of the old guard versus the home guard: the camp inspectors versus the stump ranchers. In the old days of logging, when most of the men were single, they shouldered their blanket rolls and headed for “the other side of the mountain” whenever conditions in one camp got too bad to stand. Gordon Dods called it “camp inspecting.” He had been able to see a lot of British Columbia that way. There were many people in the union who thought that the camp inspectors were right. Stress the grievances and organize around them—that was how the union should continue its fight.
Hjalmar and the Lake Cowichan executive saw it differently. They recognized that the home guard—the men who preferred to stay in one location—were a growing factor in camp life. Originally the home guard consisted of single men who didn’t like to move from camp to camp, but lately their numbers had been augmented by married men who had established their families close by and didn’t want to leave the area. Some of these men were “stump ranchers”—men who logged to support their families while they cleared and developed a piece of land.
The home guard weren’t interested in moving on; they wanted to stay where they were and make things better there. They agreed with Bergren, who knew that moving on did nothing to change conditions. Bergren had a lot of friends in the home guard. When he slipped into camp to talk union, they were the people who fed him and risked their jobs to give him a place to sleep.
Employers were beginning to appreciate the value of a stable work force, one that would be close by at the end of regular shutdowns and also more vulnerable to blacklisting. In 1937, the provincial govern’ ment announced a plan in which men who were genuine residents of a logging community could register for work near home. A list of local residents would be compiled and sent to Black’s in Vancouver. The end to the tradition of transient loggers was at hand.
But the government was not quite ready to recognize unions. And the loggers’ union still had a long way to go before it attracted the majority of B.C. loggers. The membership acquired during the 1936 strike had begun to fall away. Employers seemed more determined than ever to keep organizers out of the camps. It was back to the secret life for Hjalmar Bergren.
The only way into most of the camps was by water or by company railroad. An organizer walking the rails into a camp might hope for a sympathetic speeder man to come along, but those men knew that their jobs were on the line if they were caught giving a union organizer a lift. No company boat operator would ever do such a thing either, but no one could stop Hjalmar Bergren from rowing the length of the lake in a small boat, usually in the dark and often in rough weather when the legends about the size of waves on Cowichan Lake turned out to be true after all.
To make his life a little easier when he was organizing at the head of the lake, Bergren salvaged a shack that had been damaged in a flood on the Shaw Creek flats. Old’timers tell stories about that shack near Camp Three—how it was covered with handmade shakes; how it was furnished with beds and cooking utensils gathered from all over; how fellow organizer George Grafton used to stay there with Bergren; how some of the men from Camp Six would row across on a Sunday for a meeting; and how Bergren bought a free-miner’s licence so he would have an alibi when the company sent the police after him. Because the licence said that he was a prospector and was free to go where he wanted in search of possible mining claims, the police had to leave him alone, no matter how sure the company was that Bergren had been in camp the night before talking union.
Archie Greenwell had a more secure base of operations at Lake Logging, where he worked for the company during the day and spent his evenings collecting dues and writing reports as the union secretary. He liked to tell how he often sat across a negotiating table from Mr. Hunter, and how Hunter didn’t remember having given him a ride in his limousine when Archie first came to the lake. Archie chose to put the best possible interpretation on the remark Hunter often made at those meetings: “Greenwell, you’re a real sea lawyer.”
On Archie’s days off, he did what Hjalmar did, slipped into other camps and talked up the need for a union. He was single and totally committed to what he was doing. During the weeks of winter shut’ down, when the snow in Block 75 was too deep for logging, Archie went home to his mother’s house in South Wellington and worked for the miners’ union. He was given the honour of carrying the United Mine Workers of America charter from Vancouver to Nanaimo when the union was recognized in 1937.
But the loggers still had a long way to go before they achieved recognition. The most useful weapon they had in the fight was a thin leaflet that provided inspiration to the organizers and to the men they were trying to convince. It was Hjalmar who said the B.C. Lumber Worker shouldn’t have too many pages. He knew that no one was going to carry a big wad of paper around in his pocket when the boss could fire him just for having it. He knew that no one who read his leaflet at night in the beam of a flashlight hidden under the bedclothes was interested in reading a long-winded tract.
There were all sorts of ways to smuggle the B.C. Lumber Worker into the camps. A bundle might come up on the logging train and be dumped behind a stump outside camp in the hope that someone would pick it up before the rain ruined it. Another bundle might arrive by boat. A parcel from Spencer’s addressed in a feminine hand might hold more than the new shirt or box of chocolates it appeared to contain.
During that year of 1937, a dispute had disrupted organized labour all over North America as the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) broke away from the American Federation of Labor (AF of L). The loggers’ union, never happy with its secondary status in the AF of L, switched loyalties to the CIO on the understanding that the parent union would allow what the AF of L had denied them: financial assistance to complete the organization of the logging industry and permission to have their own international organization. The International Woodworkers of America (IWA) held its first convention in Portland later that year under its first president, a Canadian named Harold Pritchett who was rumoured to be a member of the Communist Party.
Given the hard work and enthusiasm of the small core of organizers on the British Columbia coast, it was not surprising that the first district charter granted by the IWA was to District One, British Columbia. And given the fact that the only logging company in District One to have any sort of an agreement with its employees was Lake Logging, it was not surprising that the local that encompassed this camp, Local 1-80, should have its headquarters at Lake Cowichan.
That situation did not last long. In a logical move, considering the need for a central location, headquarters shifted to Duncan. But many of the key men in the district continued to be men who came from the Lake Cowichan sublocal.
The most successful sublocai in the IWA was not very successful at all as the end of the decade approached. In the summer of 1938 there was no money in the treasury. Only the most devoted members attended meetings, and the first district convention was so small it wasn’t really a convention at all. Hjalmar acknowledged this when he asked later for a second vote to confirm his election as the first district president. There would have been little cause for optimism among union loggers if it hadn’t been for the unintentional boost given to organizers late in 1937 by the Industrial Disputes and Conciliation Act.
The province’s minister of labour was aware of the heightened union activity in the province as the CIO and the AF of L vied for members. The new legislation was designed to avoid strikes by providing for compulsory conciliation and arbitration. Such activity required a registration process for unions, a requirement that gave them legitimacy for the first time.
It was starting to look as if a loggers’ union might be inevitable. Organizers still had to sneak into camp and superintendents still called in the police to escort them out, but the meetings in Lake Cowichan were not secret, and the Vancouver newspapers covered the first real convention of District One in January of 1939. People were starting to call Hjalmar “Mr. IWA.” The situation was hard for employers to ignore.
What was even harder for bosses and loggers to ignore were the persistent rumours that most of the leaders of District One were members of the Communist Party of Canada. The rumours were true. Hjalmar Bergren remained a Communist all his life. Harold Pritchett’s identification with the Communist Party would cost him his international presidency of the IWA in 1940. Archie Greenwell officially joined the party in 1937, although he would later become disenchanted with their methods.
Archie made no apologies for his political affiliations, though he always thought of himself as a union man first. There was a large Communist Party Club in Lake Cowichan village, made up of equal numbers of men and women. It was only after the beginning of World War II that they had to go underground.
When Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland in September of 1939, he had already ensured that the Soviet Union would not come to the aid of the Poles. The Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact may have made things easier for Germany, but it made things very difficult for members of the Communist Party of Canada. The Communists in Lake Cowichan continued their activities after the Canadian government outlawed the party in 1940—they mimeographed pamphlets and distributed them just as they had done before. They followed the party line and relied upon the party to provide them with an explanation for their antiwar stand at a time when the rest of the country was gearing up for what would be called the last just war.
The Soviet Union demonstrated its loyalty to its German ally by invading Poland from the east, so it was not safe for Canadian Communists to show themselves until Stalin changed sides once again in 1941 following Hitler’s surprise invasion of his country. By then the Canadian Communist Party had changed its name to the Labour Progressive Party. The change fooled no one, but from that time until the end of the war it was acceptable, on the surface at least, to be a Canadian Communist fighting side by side with other Canadians to defeat Hitler.
Not long after the war began, Archie Greenwell and Hjalmar Bergren were among a group of six IWA organizers who made a foray on the Malahat Logging Company at Port Renfrew. In a brown shingled road house so small it barely deserved to be called the Port Renfrew Hotel, Archie met Mary Ward, a divorcee from Victoria who supported her two young daughters by working as a maid in this outpost of civilization at road’s end in Snuggery Cove.
Mary’s father was the superintendent of Swedish Cooperage, a Victoria firm, and he didn’t believe in unions. Mr. Ward had kicked Archie out of his mill two years before when he was there trying to give out leaflets to the employees. The Ward family was devoutly Catholic, and some of its members were active in right-wing politics. The last person they would have chosen to marry into their family was a Communist union organizer who was the son of a blacklisted coal miner.
The way Archie tells it,
They got to like me, and I guess the wife did a lot of the work. I guess I’m not that bad looking, either a bad-looking guy or a bad guy when you get to know me.
Archie and Mary were married for forty-six years and raised five children. Archie became a respectable community leader: chairman of the school board, manager of the co-op. When Lake Cowichan was incorporated in 1944, he became the village administrator. A school was named in his honour. Such a man would have no fear of the blacklist. That would have pleased his mother.