a = ne of the penal- ties imposed by great age is that, having outlived one’s own gener- ation, almost no one remains to recall the memo- ries of a distant past which to succeeding generations is already part of history. The greater tragedy is when physical impairment silences a once eloquent voice, reducing to frustration the delight of seeing familiar faces within the narrow confines of a hospital room. Tom McEwen, who died on May 11 at. the age of 97, bore these penalties in his twilight years, but for those of us who worked with him over the decades the enduring memories are of events -inter- woven with his life and ours. I first met him in 1936 when he came to B.C. to assume the post of provincial secre- tary of the Communist Party. At that time he was accompanied by Beckie Buhay, her- self a founding member of the Communist Party. She had headed the Canadian Labour Defence League’s campaign for his release as one of the eight Communist lead- ers jailed in 1931 by the Conservative government of R.B. “Iron Heel” Bennett on charges of “seditious conspiracy,” and would again campaign to free him and other interned under Section 21 of the War Measures Act in the early years of World War II. He was already in the mid-forties then, a warm, outgoing man with a ready smile whose record in the labour movement bes- poke his many talents. From joining the Socialist Party in 1919, he had broken with it two years later to join the Workers Party, which became the Communist Party in 1924, as a member of its Saskatoon branch. There he was soon immersed in-trade union activities, organizing a local of the Interna- tional Brotherhood of Blacksmiths, Drop Forgers and Helpers, which elected him as a delegate to the Saskatoon Trades and Labour council, a post from which he was removed when the international had him expelled as a “Bolshevik.” His wide knowledge of prairie farmers’ problems, an outgrowth of his trade as a blacksmith, had its beginnings when he was pressed into serving as temporary editor of The Furrow, a militant farm journal founded in 1924. The temporary job lasted two years during which time he put the journal together at night after completing his nine-hour shift as a blacksmith. In 1927, he was appointed Communist organizer for Manitoba and Saskatchewan, which necessitated his moving from Saska- toon to Winnipeg, and two years later he moved again, this time to Toronto as his party’s national industrial director. Then, in 1930, the Workers Unity League was formed, with McEwen as its national secretary, a post to which he was re-elected in absentia — he was in prison — at the first national convention the following year. As McEwen wrote later, as Workers Unity League affiliates were being urged to join the AFL-TLC through their appropriate industry counterparts, the WUL organized and led about 90 per cent of all strike strug- gles during the year 1933-36, winning sub- stantial gains and “proving to the leadership of the Trades and Labour Congress and the All-Canadian Congress of Labour that, contrary to their contentions, wage gains could be won in periods of capitalist depres- sion and crisis.” This was the man I met on a late August night at the old Empress Theatre on Hast- ings Street where every seat was taken and as many more were lined up outside to hear Willie Gallacher, the internationally known British Communist MP for West Fife. Obviously feeling the heat of the packed theatre, the short, stocky Scotsman pro- ceeded to take off his jacket and loosen his tie, first asking permission of his audience to do so, before launching into an impassioned denunciation of British Conservative poli- ‘cies of appeasing fascism and making his 2 e Pacific Tribune, May 25, 1988 tribute. }_ A memorial meeting from Tom McEwen ¥} has been set for June 4, 2 p.m. in the Russian Hall, 600 Campbell Ave. William Kashtan, chair of the Communist Party, and McEw- en’s grandson, Tom Kozar, will be paying Tom McEwen with former business manager Rita Tanche at the Tribune’s 30th anniversary celebration in the Queen Elizabeth Playhouse in 1965. — Tom McEwen: 1891-1988 His life was set on a socialist future By Hal Griffin urgent appeal for anti-fascist unity to halt the march to war. The first audience loved it and so did the second, for the long lines outside the theatre had waited patiently and were not to be denied their opportunity to hear the renowned speaker. It seemed that every Scottish-born worker in the Lower Main- land had turned out for the meeting. Vancouver in those years bore. the imprint of an earlier generation of Scottish immigrants in almost every walk of life, and nowhere more sharply than in the trade union movement. Charles Stewart, an executive member of the Trades and Labour Council, and Pete Munro led the Street Railwaymen’s Union; William (Bill) Stewart was secretary of the Hotel and Res- taurant Workers Union; George Miller was secretary of the Salmon Purse Seiners Union; Malcolm McLeod was a spokesman for shipyard workers. In the People’s Advo- cate, William (Ol’ Bill) Bennett’s ‘Short Jabs”. column was read weekly by thou- sands. And now, another Scottish-born -Canadian was provincial secretary of the Communist Party. Among the memories I have of Tom McEwen in those pre-war years, one stands out vividly. On the night of Jan. 2, 1938, Tom and I walked through the downtown streets to Pier B-C with Dr. Norman Bethune and Tom’s daughter, Jean. Bethune, I remember, seemed indrawn, say- ing little, and most of the talking was done by Tom and Jean, a nursing graduate of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Winnipeg, who had served from 1931 to 1935 asa field hospital worker in China for the Order of Francis- can Fathers. Now Bethune and Jean Ewen were on their way to China to begin the medical mission from which he would never return, his body buried in Chinese soil, his memory forever revered by the Chinese people. We said goodbye to them at the dock as they boarded the Empress of Japan for the voyage to Hong Kong. But if their depar- ture was later to prove historic, it went unheralded on that night. Beyond an announcement that a Medical Aid to China Committee had been formed in Vancouver to work with the Canadian League for Peace and Democracy, no mention was made of Bethune’s mission and the announcement was withheld by the China Aid Council of the American League for Peace and Democracy in New York until its members arrived safely in Hankow. There was, however, an amusing post- script. Some time later, Bethune and Jean Ewen were reported missing and Stanley Blight of the Vancouver Sun phoned me for more information. There was little more I could tell him because the People’s Advo- cate budget did not allow for press wires, but the next day’s Sun carried the stOry- Assuming Jean was Chinese, it had spell the name Yuen. : McEwen’s dedication to the Communist . Party of Canada, whose representative on the Communist International he became after he left B.C. at the end of 1938, Was equalled only by his devotion to his family. To appreciate this, one has to read his ae biography, The Forge Glows Red, Pub lished by Progress Books in 1974, and his poignant tribute to his younger daughter Isobel, who died suddenly in 1950. A most readable account of his growing up in Scotland and his early years in Hie labour and farm movements on the Cana dian prairies, it falls short only in 1ts fi chapter which deals with his 25 yeals #8 editor of the Pacific Tribune in a brief nine ages. : He always insisted that “Ewen was the name under which I entered Canada — * was the RCMP that.decided my name Was McEwen.” In fact, as the autobiography reveals, he took Ewen, the name of Me father he never knew, who was killed 10 the Transvaal during the Boer War, a few years after the death of his mother, Agnes McEwen. Reared as an orphan, first by foster Pat ents in Luthermuir and then by an uncle and aunt in Catterline, young Tom had @ stern upbringing. His formal education ended at age 13 when he left home to ship out of Aberdeen aboard a North Sea trawler and after several jobs as varied as train baggageman and stable hand, he began his apprenticeship at what was to become his blacksmith’s trade. These WeTe also the years in which, by extensive reading, he steeped himself in Scottish history and culture, deepened his love of Robert Bu work and, as a member of the territor reserve of the Gordon Highlanders 7th Bat-— talion, learned to play the bagpipes. Married at’age 19, he immigrated to Canada in 1912 when he was 20 and was joined by his wife, Isobel, and his infant daughter Jean in Morden, Manitoba, 2 Year later. : His wife died in the post-war “flu ¢pl- demic” in 1920, leaving him to raise a family now grown to two daughters and two SONS. And for all the problems posed by his actlVi- ties in the labour movement and _particl= larly the two years he spent in Kingston Penitentiary, all the family as they grew UP ms’ took their places in the progressive MOV& — ment. 4 The two sons, Bruce and Jim — he died earlier this year — both served with the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, for which their father in B.C. and a World War I veteran, Jack Chivers, were recruiting the 600 B.C. volunteers who fought the fascists in Spain. i His daughter Jean, who worked with Bethune in China, died in Victoria last yeat- And Isobel, Touche as the family called her, followed her father into the Communist | Party, accompanying him to the Yukon during the 1945 federal election campaign in — which he came close to winning the tradi- — tionally Conservative seat. > In his wife, Rose, for many years a dele- gate to the Vancouver and District Labour Council, and her sister, Anne Belenkaya, who died in 1985, both lifelong workers in the garment industry, he found two women who shared his Communist principles. Without their utter devotion to his welfare, he might never have lived to his great age. His son Bruce, as well as two sons by his second marriage, Norman and Sean, Sur- vive him, together with three generations of — grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. For all of them, Tom McEwen, the Communist who enlarged and gave a new, socialist dimension to the Scottish contribu- tion to the shaping of Canada, has set a proud example. Hal Griffin, a former associate editor and editor of the Tribune and its predecessors from 1936, worked with McEwen on the Pacific Tribune from 1946 to 1958. :