Coal Black Heart

By John DeMont

Doubleday Canada, $34.95

‘When the mines closed down that winter. He had nothing left to eat. And he starved, he starved, I tell you, On your dirty damned street.”

A rough-hewn alcoholic poet named Dawn Fraser wrote those lines more than 80 years ago — but in evoking the trauma of the Cape Breton miners strike of 1922, his words retain a stark bitter immediacy.

Or as Halifax journalist John DeMont puts it in his new book, Coal Black Heart, published this week, the poems that Fraser produced during that turbulent time “read like fragments of a dark age … ”

Fraser is only one among a gallery of colourful characters — some inspiring, some monstrous — who inhabit DeMont’s elegiac, scrupulously researched but often shocking history of the Nova Scotia coal industry.

And the 53-year-old author does admit to a fondness for some of the more picaresque rogues in that history.

“For example, I love W.P. Hussey,” DeMont says in a phone interview from Halifax.

“He was the guy from Boston who showed up in Inverness in Cape Breton on a white horse with a Stetson and six guns.”

To be sure, Hussey was an out-and-out con artist who persuaded a cautious Swiss investor to buy into his mining interests after painting the side of a cliff black so it looked like a wall of coal from a distance. “But I loved the panache of that guy,” DeMont says.

He is less forgiving towards Roy M. Wolvin, the villainous head of the British Empire Steel Corporation.

“They called him ‘The Wolf’ during the Twenties,” DeMont reports — an apt description for a corporate tyrant whose monopoly control over Nova Scotia’s coal and steel industries was a fact of provincial life.

In his brutal suppression of the 1922 strike, Wolvin revealed tentacles extending into the heart of government, both federal and provincial, as well as into the police, the army and the judiciary. He and his company seemed invincible, despite growing criticism of his tactics.

An angry Ottawa Citizen editorialist, for example, accused BESCO of “having the mentality and soul that looks upon labour as a chattel … as a mere something to be used, and, if necessary, broken, on the wheels of industry.” The Citizen also rebuked Nova Scotia’s complicit government for being “notoriously friendly” to British Empire Steel to the point where “men and women and little children starve.”

Wolvin and his cronies treated the coal and steel industries as their personal fiefdom — aided and abetted by compromised politicians and hack judicial appointees such as the corrupt Supreme Court judge Humphrey Mellish, who was appointed to the bench at a time when he was a defence lawyer representing Dominion Steel (a company that was purchased and merged with BESCO), which had been taken to court following a New Waterford mine disaster that left 65 dead. Once he was wearing his judges’ robes, Mellish continued to safeguard the interests of his old bosses.

DeMont finds many heroes as well — beginning with the ordinary miners — but he shows special admiration for J.B. McLachlan, the firebrand local leader of the United Mine Workers of America during the industrial upheavals of the 1920s.

The letter McLachlan wrote to union locals following a Sunday police assault against striking miners returning from church still has the capacity to shock today: “Neither age, sex, or physical disabilities were proof against these brutes. One old woman over 70 years of age was beaten into insensibility and may die. A boy nine years old was trampled under the horses’ feet and his breast bone crushed. One woman, beaten over the head with a police club, gave premature birth to a child. That child is dead … ”

Two days after writing that letter, McLachlan was arrested.

There is coal dust in John DeMont’s own genes –a heritage stemming from both sides of his family and going back two centuries to Britain’s industrial revolution.

So in a very real sense, he is a product of the very culture examined in his book.

Which is why Coal Black Heart often reads like a personal history — despite the fact that DeMont’s coal saga extends 300 million years into the past, ponders the early explorations of men like Samuel de Champlain and John Cabot, casts light on the unexpected role played by King George III in the development of a Nova Scotia coal industry, examines a 19th-century coal culture where “the rich built palaces and the poor went shoeless,” and is as much an economic chronicle as a social one in examining the late 20th-century collapse of the province’s coal and steel industries and what the miners still see as an act of betrayal by the federal government.

“I realized that I’d been writing about coal forever — since Westray (a Nova Scotian mine where a methane explosion killed 26 miners in 1992),” says DeMont, who served 10 years as Atlantic bureau chief for Maclean’s Magazine.

“I realized coal was a good story journalistically but that it also would give me an opportunity to go back to places like Glace Bay and revisit the Sydney mines and talk to people — my people, really, in so many ways.”

There was also an awareness that coal was an important but neglected part of Canadian history

“More people died in the coal mines than died in the battlefields of World War I. That’s not well known — even here in Nova Scotia. Cape Breton coal fuelled the factories and ran the steel mills and armed the troops for World War I and World War II … It was hugely important to the growth of the country. It’s almost a sidebar and asterisk in Canadian history, yet it was such an important industry — really important to the form that Nova Scotia has taken, in terms of what areas were settled and the kind of people that arrived there and the kind of society that has grown up.”

Coal Black Heart abounds in vivid prose snapshots of the way things were: the “perpetual servitude” imposed on the mining community by the company store; Glace Bay’s infant mortality rate of 306 per 1,000 babies at a time when the national average was 88; the terrors that haunted Joe MacDonald, a miner who slept with a nightlight for the rest of his life after being trapped underground in a mine disaster; the ghastly plight of the ponies that worked in the mines: if they didn’t catch lockjaw, they frequently broke their legs when dragging the coal boxes and had to be put down.

But DeMont also sees something mythological in his saga.

“There are archetypal figures in there — the twirling-moustache villainy of some of the mine owners, but also the swashbuckling elements you find in the promoters and people willing to gamble in the industry.”

And on the other side, there are the miners.

“There is the awfulness of the lives — I was certainly drawn to tell that side of the story — but there was also the stoicism. The heroism on some level has always drawn me to the story. I defy anyone not to see poetry in these lives.

“God knows, life was hard, but there was also this immense endurance, and epic ability to put one foot down in front of the other and kind of soldier on.”