a

Left, organized by the Mothers’ Council,

a coalition of women’s groups which rallied

om te x a é

support for the camp strikers, thousands of women marched to Stanley Park on
Mothers Day, May 12 and formed their ranks into a huge ‘Mothers’ Heart.”

Continued from page 5

such inhuman treatment of human beings
in a civilized country that the men will walk
out on Apr. 4,” they declared.
ae before Apr. 4 the walkout began

gathering momentum. At Half Moon
Bay, the men walked out Apr. 3, to take
advantage of the only boat to Vancouver.
At Squamish, 60 men walked out, also a
day early, to thwart a planned police effort
to prevent the strike.

All around the province, camp commit-
tees were organizing the men to join the
historic action.

Doc Savage was in Moran’s Camp at
Spence’s Bridge when the target date came.
“We held a meeting the night before and
took a vote — there would have been
about 180 of us. Very few voted against the
walkout, maybe six or eight mainly older
men who said they were too old to partici-
pate.

“But the camp was empty after we left.

“At the station, we sat around and waited
and when the way freight came, we piled on
it. Coming into Vancouver, we ran into
others and by the time we got in the freight
was like a hill with ants on it — you
couldn’t have stuck another man on it.”

Many of the blacklisted men, in Van-
couver over the past winter, joined in the
organizational campaign to bring the men
out. Gerry Tellier recalls that he went out to
the camps along the Hope-Princeton high-
way. “We went to the furthest camp out,
pulled the men out there and then we
marched, all of us, to the next camp, until
we got to the airport camp at Flood.

“We'd just go in and say, ‘Okay, boys,
let’s pack it up.” There was a good
response — it had been publicized well in
the paper.”

If there had been a stream of men pour-
ing in to Vancouver during the 1934 strike,
now it was a torrent. It is estimated that
close to 2,000 men walked out of the camps
in B.C., the majority of them converging on
Vancouver (some, from eastern B.C. camps
which were part of the Alberta military dis-
trict, went to Calgary).

They were to take part in one of the most
intense struggles by the unemployed
through the decade of the depression.

As they came in, Arthur (Slim) Evans,
the Workers’ Unity League organizer
assigned to work with the League-affiliated
RCWU, assigned them to one of three div-
isions. Later in Calgary and Regina, a
fourth and fifth division would be created as
hundreds more men joined the trek.

Committees were established — a pub-
licity committee, a maintenance committee
for clean-up, a bumming committee to
solicit donations were only a few — and a
chairman and secretary were elected. Each
division had a headquarters where formal
meetings were conducted virtually every
day throughout the strike. ;

Leading the strike was a strategy commit-
tee “which included Art Evans and leaders
from each of the divisions,” Tellier recalls.
“We used to meet every night to decide
what action to take the following day.”

The program of action was to involve
scores of initiatives reflecting the collective

Hundreds of the photographs were circulated to back the strikers. At right, camp

imagination of the men who had to demon-
strate the justice of their cause in face of
hostile government authorities and a
scarcely less hostile press.

On Apr. 7, several strike leaders sat down
with representatives of more than 40 organ-
izations in a meeting that was to lay the
basis of the 42-member-organization Action
Committee which for two months mobil-
ized public support for the relief camp
workers. -

That same day, more than 3,000 people
gathered in the Cambie Street Grounds for
a mass rally to back the camp strikers and to
echo-their demand for relief from Van-
couver mayor Gerry McGeer.

Gen. Ashton was right at least in saying
“public sympathy is with the men.” From
trade union branches, the longshoremen in
particular, and from citizens came the first
rush of donations that would be used to buy
meal tickets for the strikers.

On Apr. 13, when the Action Committee
organized a tag day — in defiance of city
authorities who had refused a permit — the
collection topped $5,500, the largest in the

; # > % |
workers and supporters rally in the old Cambie Street Grounds May 16 to reiterate the

demand for city relief. Art Evans is speaking (centre, dark suit). The demonstrators
later marched to city hall to back demands for relief. Below, the card used by the camp
strikers as part of the campaign for public support.

coveralls, jackets and other clothing items
to the camps.

The sham that the Commission was had
already been demonstrated 12 days earlier,
when the chairman of the commission Jus-
tice W.A. MacDonald, wrote to Ernie
Cumber to tell him that the six demands of
the camp strikers were not within the
inquiry’s scope.

It was a predictable response from a
Royal Commission; but in a larger sense it
was also a declaration of the refusal of all
three governments to deal with the unem-
oloyed crisis.

Instead, they viewed the strike, as R.B.
Bennett put it Mar. 25, as being “due to the
activities of subversive organizations.” And
as the strike continued, the authorities
sought every opportunity to diminish the
overwhelming public sympathy that was

- with the men — in order to wield the club.

The city was first to act on Apr. 23.

Division Three of the strikers had been
marching in downtown Vancouver when
the division leader noticed that the Seymour
St. door of the Hudson’s Bay store was not

city’s history. barred. The
In an incident { column of men
naman SAVE OUR YOUTH! sige ee!
hilariously re- I, a resident of Vancouver, have furnished a meal and stood, fil-
called, Evans jand/or bed to a Relief Camp Striker (Card Number ling the aisles,
calledtwoVar | ). I protest your deliberate attempt to starve as Malcolm
couver cons- : MacLeod, per-
tables to escort these boys back to the Relief Camps. ched up on
the men with I furthermore demand continuance of Relief and | another man’s
the money — | the opetiing of negotiations. shoulders, ex-
mostly in coins Yours truly, plained the
==fothe banks Se ee as SS oe camp strikers
Written on BB demands.
hie tags thilt oe S52 es ee iaiaiigesge = “And then
“tin canners” we just stood

gave to each donor were the words: “When
do we eat?” Those who didn’t see the tag,
would hear the words echoed and re-echoed
around the city as the divisions of strikers
carried out their almost daily marches.

Willis Shaparla recalls that the strikers
began the tactic of demonstrating in the
food warehouse areas of the city and later
the department store food floors.

“We would go down to the food floors of
Woodward’s, Spencer’s and Hudson’s Bay
and demonstrate there to bring home to
people the idea that we were hungry — and
here was food.”

As they marched through the aisles, Tel-
lier remembers, they would shout in unison:
*“When do we eat?”

The strike gathered momentum quickly.
On Apr. 19 several thousand people filled
the Arena to demonstrate solidarity with
the camp strikers and to hear speakers from
the All-Canadian Congress of Labor, B.C.
Federation of Labor, Workers’ Unity
League, the Communist Party and the
CCF.

On Apr. 16 Art Evans created a sensation
at the hearings conducted by the MacDo-
nald Commission when he held up a pair of
camp overalls manufactured by Gault’s —
of which C.T. McHattie, a commission
member, was company vice-president. He
charged that a commission member was
making profits from the relief camps.
Gault’s was the official contract supplier of

6 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, ON-TO-OTTAWA SUPPLEMENT

there,” Shaparla remembers. “About 20
minutes later, the city police came in and
stood on either side of us, with their backs to
the counters. There was no dialogue —
nothing. This went on for some minutes
until finally some officer in charge came in
and apparently gave orders to remove us.
“Suddenly, one individual ‘cop started
hitting this fellow and then three or four
police jumped in and banged him around a
bit. They smashed him up against the big
outside window panes on Seymour Street.”
In the melee that followed, scores of men
were clubbed out of the store. Outside, they
mustered their division together and
marched to Victory Square where Evans,
CCF MLA Harold Winch and Young
Communist League leader Stan Lowe

joined others in addressing an impromptu

rally.

All of the speakers pointed to the impos-
ing array of police forces surrounding the
square — the RCMP, the city police and
the Provincial Poice, all lined up in forma-
tion, facing the strikers.

A delegation of 12 was dispatched to city
hall to interview McGeer and reiterate their
demand for relief. But instead of 12 men
returning, only Matt Shaw came back — to
announce to the outraged audience that the
delegation had been arrested for vagrancy
imediately after leaving the mayor’s office.
He alone had been released because he was
still on blacklist relief.

Another delegation, of citizens, was sent
to reiterate the demands and to press for
release of the arrested strikers. But as they
arrived, McGeer himself was on his way to
Victory Square.

At the cenotaph, McGeer read the Riot
Act — an action taken only twice pre-
viously in this century — ordering the -
crowd of 5,000 to disperse on pain of life
imprisonment. -

The men met briefly and after an agree- |
ment was reached with McGeer to allow
them to go back to their headquarters in an
orderly way, they marched back, each div-
ision escorted by police.

That night, police raided two strikers’
halls, seizing papers and literature, undoubt-
edly seeking evidence for charges against
strike leaders under Section 98.

But the strikers still had the last word.
Only the day after the incident, several
thousand copies of a cartoon depicting
McGeer as a reptile-winged angel reading
the Riot Act were sold on city streets to raise
money for the strikers. ‘“They went like hot-
cakes,” Tellier recalls.

Three days later, when the 11 men
arrested went to court, the vagrancy charges
were dismissed, the union’s Canadian
Labor Defence League lawyer having suc-
cessfully argued that the men were not
“wandering abroad” but had been dele-
gated to report from city hall.

Still, there was no relief. No government
that would hear, much less act, on their
demands. There was only the support of the
people of Vancouver, particularly those in
the labor movement — and that was
unfailing,

On Apr. 29, the longshoremen, and ship-
yard workers at two yards gave a dramatic
new aspect to that support as they downed
tools for one hour in sympathy with the
camp workers.

Members of five unions, the Longshore-
men’s Union, the Seafarers’ Industrial
Union, the Coastwide Longshoremen’s
Union, the Boilermakers’ Union and the
Export Log Workers’ Association walked
off the job for 24 hours to march in the
massive May Day parade in support of the
camp workers.

Even before that, on Apr. 28, the Arena
was again host to an overflow rally of
16,000 in support of the camp strikers, this
time organized by the CCF. Although CCF
leaders would later cast doubts on the tac-
tics of the relief camp strikers and particu-
larly their Communist leader, Art Evans,
that night there was full support as Matt
Shaw called on citizens to help the camp
strikers carry on.

~ Throughout May, the pitch of the strike
moved quickly toward a crescendo.

A new factor in support, for the relief
camp workers was added mid-way through
the strike with formation of the Mothers’
Council. Founded at a meeting called on
the initiative of women in the Communist
Party, it soon encompassed leading women
from the CCF. Its Mothers’ Day parade to
Stanley Park, when thousands of women
formed themselves into a huge “Mothers’
Heart” in Malkin Memorial Shell for a