50 YEARS AGO —

By SEAN GRIFFIN

For two years the existence of the new
open pit mine had smouldered like anger

beneath their mounting grievances, and:

now, suddenly, on this bitter April day, they
were marching, 250 of them, on the narrow
mountain ledge which led to the mine. Their
wives were with them as they tramped ner-
vously in the snow.

Facing their picket line were more than
60 Provincial Police, some of them recruited
from detachments several hundred miles
away. Behind the police, hanging back,
were a number of scabs. But it was the
sound which dominated everything else: the
ominous rumble of a bulldozer, purport-
edly there to “clear the snow” along the
ledge leading to the mine, but now waiting,
its blade poised, before the picketing miners
and their wives.

The day was Apr. 17, 1935. The town was
Corbin, named after the Spokane coal and
railway magnate who had been given the
rich coal concession as the price for a
Kootenay rail line.

The Corbin Miners Association (CMA),
a local of the militant Mine Workers Union
of Canada (MWUC), had struck Jan. 20 to
protest the discriminatory firing of the
union secretary, John Press. There were
other grievances: the demand fora man-trip
to carry the miners the 2,200 feet down into
the No. 6 mine, and the desperate need for
repairs to company housing.

Ina letter to George Pearson, the provin-
cial labor minister, Press and the president
of the CMA, John Falconer, wrote that the
housing conditions in Corbin “are unbear-
able for anybody to live in.

“Some instances the snow blows in
through the cracks in the walls through the
doors and window-sashes,” he wrote.

Beneath the immediate issues, as even
deputy labor minister Adam Bell was
forced to concede later, was the introduc-
tion in 1933 of open-pit mining. That year,
Corbin Collieries began operating its “Big
Showing” and at the same time began cur-
tailing its underground operations, threat-
ening miners’ jobs.

When in July 1933, Corbin Collieries
shut down its underground operations
completely for 30 days — using a fire in
No. 4 mine as the pretext — the union
responded with an all-out strike to force the
company “to carry on development and
maintenance work underground.”

This time they were successful and min-
ing resumed underground although at a

reduced rate. But the U.S. owners had a-

bargaining lever in the Big Showing and
began to use it.

In 1934, the company called for a four
per cent wage cut — a demand that was
voiced amidst growing rumors of layoffs
and the possibility that the company would
concentrate production at the Big Showing.

Corbin Collieries tactics echoed a general
belligerence among employers in 1934-35
who at once sought to exact greater conces-
sions as the economic crisis continued and
to counter the stepped-up fightback led by
the Workers Unity League unions. The
report of the ministry of labor for 1935
shows the upsurge in strike struggles, show-
ing 140,760 working days lost to strike and
lockouts, nearly double the previous year’s
total.

The provincial government of Liberal
Premier Duff Pattullo, despite its later label
as a “New Deal” government was the
government of business interests and
echoed their campaign.

Several months later, in reference to the
Corbin strike, Pattullo would declare,
“There is a great deal of Communistic prop-
aganda circulating in British Columbia...”

The audacity and courage of the MWUC
and the Workers’ Unity League — to
which the MWUC was affiliated — in cal-
ling strikes in the face of wage cuts, mass
unemployment and police repression was
all the proof he needed.

12 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MAY 1; 1985

The 17 Corbin miners, arrested following the police bulldozer attack on the picket
line Apr. 17, were held for three days in jail cells intended for two. They were later
sentenced in the Fall Assizes to prison terms ranging up to six months.

Virtually any organizer with the WUL
faced arrest under the infamous Section 98
of the Criminal Code, the “seditious conspi-
racy” section originally passed during
World War I but used with a vengeance
until its repeal in’ 1936, particularly against
the Communist Party and anyone asso-
ciated with it. The section declared unlawful
any organization professing to bring about
“governmental, industrial or economic
change by use of force, violence or physical
injury to person or property” and forced
those charged to prove their innocence.

Only the year before, the Provincial
Police had invaded the nearby town of
Michel as the MWUC marked May Day
with a huge picnic. All the time the
hundreds of people celebrated, the police
watched them — along the barrel of a
machine gun hidden in a barn.

For three months, the strike in Corbin

But Corbin Collieries wired back from its

head office the following day to veto the -

agreement.

Its answer was to open the “Big Show-
ing” with scabs.

Moving quickly to accommodate the
company, Attorney-General Gordon Sloan
ordered a special force of Provincial
Police — the Vancouver Province would
later reveal that some came from as far
away as 700 miles — organized and
instructed Inspector John MacDonald to
command them.

And now on this April morning, the min-
ers were facing them, their picket lines
across the ledge that led to the mine.

From their ranks, the women formed
themselves into a line, taking up a position
at the head of the picket.

Suddenly, the bulldozer roared and
lurched forward, crashing into the line,

The Mineworkers Union of Canada
and the Corbin strike of 1935

had continued with only letters to and from
the labor ministry breaking the silence. But
the pressure was beginning to build.

Yvonne Rankin, whose husband, Bill
Carlett was a Corbin miner, recalled that
their two-room shack, the site of a number
of union meetings, was under constant sur-
veillance by police. And at one point, when
her husband tried to return from Bellevue,
Alberta where he had taken her to stay with
her parents, he was stopped by police at the
border and barred form going back to Cor-
bin. He returned later on foot, making his
way through the bush.

From Apr. 15, events moved swiftly. On
that day, Tom Uphill the independent labor
MLA for Fernie, who had intervened to
help achieve a settlement, announced that a
tenative agreement had been worked out
between the MWUC and local mine man-
agement.

pushing the picketers before it. Within
seconds, the legs of several women had been
crushed and one woman was dragged 300
feet before the blade pushed her aside.

Rankin recalled that one of her friends
had to be hospitalized “‘because all the flesh
had been torn from her legs by the bulldozer
blade2? ==:

Another friend, who was pregnant at the
time, was clubbed by a Provincial Police,
first across the shoulders and then across
her abdomen. “She lost the baby,” said
Rankin.

In retaliation for the brutal attack, the
miners seized rocks to force the bulldozer
operator.to a halt. In the pitched battle,
more than 50 people were injured, only 14
of them police. And Inspector Mac-
Donald’s forces moved in in its aftermath
to seize and arrest 17 strikers, including the
president and secretary of the union. For

three days, they were held in a jail intended
to hold two people.

But the mine remained closed.

The effect on workers throughout the
province, for whom the brutal crushing of
strikes and police repression under Section
98 was becoming an ominous pattern, was
immediate — and electric.

The B.C. Workers’ News which had only
begun publishing three months before,
denounced it as “‘a murderous attack by the
police in assisting a gang of Spokane
exploiters.” The Fernie and District Unem-
ployed Association declared, “It is odious_
to us as Canadians...that the Provincial
Police is at the beck and call of a foreign
corporation...”

In Vancouver, the longshoremen who
shut down the port May 1, made support
for the Corbin miners as well as support for
the striking relief camp workers the call of
their militant action. Miners at Cumberland
echoed the protest with their 24-hour strike
May 1.

In Blairmore, Alberta, some 30 kilome-
tres distant and the nerve centre of the
MWUC, the events of Apr. 17 ignited a
spark of anger. Drawn from the miners and
a number of young unemployed, and
headed by MWUC organized Harvey
Murphy, a march of several hundred
covered the 15 kilometres to the Crows Nest
Pass.

At Crows Nest, on the border, the
RCMP barred the way.

With a Lewis gun trained on them, the
marchers negotiated a compromise: the
main body of marchers would return while ~
a ten-member delegation, headed by
Murphy, would be escorted to Corbin.

When they arrived, the reign of terror
had already been dropped like a pall over
the town. The day after the police attack on
the strikers, RCMP reinforcements had
been brought up from Lethbridge. And as
the B.C. Workers’ News reported, ‘“‘Martial
law has been imposd in Corbin. Police have
sealed off the town.”

Harvey Murphy described the scene.

“There was terror in Corbin. ..When we
got there we found the town locked up. The
doctor was out of medicine and all kinds of
people were hurt...there was just this nar-
row roadway and the police had this wired.
That’s why the doctor was out of medicine
for the injured women. They were locked in
and the RCMP was in charge with this bar.
And it was only when we got through that
we got those people of their houses.”

‘Throughout the Crows Nest Pass area,
the government and police tightened the
grip. Newspapers reported Apr. 20 that
John Stokoluk, president of the MWUC,
had been kidnapped in Michel. Several days
later the homes in the town were raided,
with more arrests made under Section 98
and literature seized.

In an effort to end the terror and settle the
strike, Murphy, two Corbin miners, Jim
Dornan and Dan Iyasiuk, and Tom Uphill
went to Victoria Apr. 23 to put the issues
directly before the government. But Sloan
dismissed the charge of police brutality and
abuse of police power as “sheer nonsense.”

In the labor ministry, the response was
only slightly better, as Pearson assigned his
deputy minister Adam Bell, to goto Corbin ~
and meet with the two sides.

His arrival in Corbin coincided with the
departure from Vancouver of a six-member
independent commission, headed by CCF
MLA Jack Price and including three trade
unionists and two other CCF MLAs. They,
too, were headed for Corbin to investigate
on behalf of the labor movement. :

But their reports were very different.

Bell, who went via Spokane to confer first
with the president of Corbin Collieries,
Austin Corbin, reported that the CPR
which bought 60 per cent of Corbin’a pro-
duction, had cancelled its orders but added ~
hastily, “They (Corbin Collieries) expressed
a willingness to try and keep the mine oper-

see CORBIN page |3