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Boxing Rings and Grease Paint

June 21, 1919 – “Bloody Saturday.” A front page photo in the paper this evening shows vividly a climactic moment in the violence that marks the end of the Winnipeg General Strike.

It’s a panoramic view of Main Street in the throes of a riot. The famous streetcar the strikers overturned and set ablaze is over there, and there, at the left, lies the body of a man gunned down by police. Crowds mill in the background and on the sides.

The photo is dominated by a troop of uniformed RCMP officers, charging down the street on their horses and brandishing clubs.

And over there, slightly above the centre, you can just make out the shapes of two figures on a rooftop, watching the horrific scene, never to be forgotten, unfold before them.

The two are fourteen-year-old Tommy Douglas and a friend.

“We were too stupid to be scared up there,” Tommy remembered. “We were just excited by it all.”

Tommy and his mother and two sisters had arrived back in Winnipeg early in the year and rented a house on Gordon Street, not far from where they’d lived a few years earlier. Tom Douglas, still not mustered out of the army, would follow in a few months. Anne Douglas got a job at the Singer sewing machine factory. Tommy had every intention of honouring his father’s wishes and returning to school, but, for the moment, money was tight, and he too went to work.

So it was that he and another boy, Mark Talnicoff – who would later marry Tommy’s sister Annie – were delivering copies of a newspaper in the Market Square near city hall on that Saturday afternoon when they heard the commotion. The two boys shimmied up a pole and made it to the roof of a two-story building on Main Street near the corner of Williams Street, right in the heart of the tumult, just as shots started to ring out. Police fired in the air at first, and several bullets whizzed by the boys’ heads. They ducked, scared and exhilarated, but they didn’t turn and run.

From their vantage point, they could see everything: the streetcar tipped over, the fighting, the charge of the Mounties, the shootings and clubbings that left two men dead and many others wounded. It was the culmination of the city’s – and country’s – first ever general strike, then in its thirty-eighth day, and would break the strike’s back. Scores of strike leaders were rounded up over the next few days, including the Douglas family’s pastor, James Woodsworth, and several of them were tried and sent to prison.

Tommy remembered the scene this way: “We saw the mounted police and the men who had been taken in as sort of vigilantes riding from North Main straight down toward the corner of Portage and Main, then reforming on Portage Avenue and coming back down again, riding the strikers down and breaking up the meetings, breaking up their parade.

“There was quite a good deal of shooting. Most of the mounted policemen were shooting into the air, but some of them shot into the crowd.”

Although Tommy wasn’t directly involved in the strike, he retained vivid memories of the fist-waving speeches given by strike leaders like Fred Dixon, John Queen, and the gaunt, bearded Woodsworth, who had become a sort of role model for the boy.

Woodsworth, usually known by his initials, J.S., was a Methodist minister and head of the All People’s Mission, a combination social centre and school where Anne Douglas was a volunteer and Tommy often used the library and sports facilities. He was a soft-spoken man who suddenly turned into a lion when he stepped on a soapbox. A strong advocate of the concept of “practical Christianity,” or the social gospel, “in the part of society that we moved in, he was a little god,” Tommy said. He would be elected to Parliament as a Labour candidate in two years and would become a colleague of Tommy’s fifteen years later. Now, it was shocking news to hear that Woodsworth had been arrested.

“It’s an awful disgrace when your minister goes to jail,” Tommy said.

The Winnipeg strike left an indelible impression on Tommy Douglas, who became increasingly interested in politics and began to work in local campaigns, handing out leaflets and doing other small chores. It wasn’t just the jailing of Woodsworth and the violence he witnessed on Bloody Saturday that effected him.

“Not until after the Estevan riot (which Tommy also witnessed, a dozen years later) and later the Regina riot (in 1934) did I realize that this was all part of a pattern,” he would recall. “Whenever the powers that be can’t get what they want, they’re always prepared to resort to violence or any kind of hooliganism to break the back of organized opposition.”

Three years later, another fight. The scene is an old arena on Main Street across from the Union Station by the Fort Garry Hotel. A Saturday night in spring, and there’s a big crowd. The smells of beer and sweat are in the air, and there’s an all-but-palpable sense of excitement. The main event is about to begin, and this time, Tommy isn’t watching – he’s in the thick of it.

In the sixth and final round of their championship fight, defending champ Cecil Matthews and the challenger, seventeen-year-old Tommy Douglas, are tied on points. Tommy is small and, by his own admission, “not a particularly outstanding boxer. I was too short in the arm to be a good boxer, but I was fast on my feet and could hit fairly hard.”

But this day in 1922, Tommy gets a lucky break. With the clock ticking down, Matthews gets careless. He tries to come in fast and go under Tommy’s guard; in the process, he drops his own guard and leaves himself wide open. Wham! Tommy connects. It’s not a knockout but it’s enough to win the round for Tommy, and the fight, and with it the amateur lightweight championship of Manitoba.

You’d think a boy’s parents would be proud of this kind of achievement. Not Tommy’s – they were disgusted. Anne Douglas’s religious scruples were too strict to see boxing as anything less than the devil’s work, and Tom had seen enough violence in two wars to last a life-time. On the trail to the championship, their son had collected a broken nose, a couple of lost teeth, a strained hand, and a sprained thumb. Now they looked him over, his face red and puffy, his hand throbbing with pain, and they shook their heads sadly. “It serves you right,” Tom declared. “If you’re fool enough to get into this sort of thing, don’t ask for any sympathy.”

Nor did Tommy get any.

Tommy had begun boxing when he was fifteen and weighed in at 135 pounds (61 kg). He used to go to the gym operated by the One Big Union, a labour organization that had sprung up during the General Strike, and was attracted by the lure of the ring. After all those years tied to a crutch, Tommy was now remarkably fast on his feet. He found himself cast as a sparring partner for Lloyd Peppen, who became Canadian lightweight champion, and Charlie Balongey, who went on to be a heavyweight champ. He continued to fight through his teenage years, and his boxing culminated in the championship, which he successfully defended the following year, when he was eighteen.

Tommy Douglas the boxer! That was something the doctors who worked on the skinny boy’s infected leg a few years earlier would never have expected. But the Tommy Douglas who returned to Winnipeg in 1919 was a far different boy than the one who had left it four years earlier.

Until Tom Douglas rejoined them that spring, Tommy assumed many of the responsibilities in the family, and the fourteen-year-old boy grew up in a hurry. Indeed, from the time Tommy returned to Canada, as the Bible says, he pretty much put aside childish things and began to speak like a man.

“I was the man of the family,” he’d recall, “and had to look after things: see that the storm windows were put up, and that my sisters would start school – I went with them and got them placed – and this sort of thing. And this isn’t bad for a boy.”

Even after his father came home, Tommy continued to play more of an adult’s role than that of a boy. Tom Douglas was weakened, both physically, from exposure to gas in the trenches, and emotionally. For his service to king and country, he was awarded a bonus, which the family used as a down payment for a house on McPhail Street, near the Elmwood Cemetery. He also received a military pension of about twelve dollars a month, not nearly enough to live on, and he soon returned to the iron works. It was dangerous work and twice Tom narrowly escaped serious injury when he was splashed with molten metal. For the rest of his life, he would be the victim of frequent bouts of depression, and whatever dreams of a better life he had that had brought him to Canada would have to be played out in his children.

But it would take a while. Times were tough for the Douglases in the twenties, and even Annie and Isobel went to work, as sales clerks, after finishing grade school. As for Tommy, he wanted to go back to school but thought his father “was living in a dream world” if he imagined the family could afford such a luxury.

Tommy’s first job was as a messenger boy for a drug store at the corner of Higgins and Main, near the Royal Alex Hotel, and he earned six dollars a week. But he was an ambitious boy and, always on the lookout for better opportunities, soon answered an ad from the Richardson Press, which produced a variety of publications, including the Grain Trade News.

He went to the print shop and told the foreman he wanted a job. The man looked Tommy over and tried him out on a few things, and then said, “I’ll teach you all I know, and you still won’t know anything.”

As it turned out, Tommy would work as an apprentice printer for five years, thoughts of school and an education put aside. He started out as what was known as a printer’s devil, doing odd, dirty jobs in the always-dirty print shop. He broke lead type out of its wooden forms, melted it down for reuse, and scrubbed the ever-present ink off machines, walls, and furniture with gasoline. Soon he moved on to setting type, working full time Monday through Friday and half a day Saturday. By the time he was sixteen, Tommy was the youngest Linotype operator in Canada, earning full journeyman’s wages, forty-five dollars a week, even though he was still an apprentice.

Aside from work, his life was busy.

Two nights, he took printing classes; the rest of the week, he was active in church groups at the nearby Beulah Baptist Church and in Boy Scouts and the Order of DeMolay, a youth wing of the Masons, which his father had joined. As a Scout, Tommy quickly rose to troop leader, patrol leader, cubmaster and, eventually, scoutmaster. He loved working with kids younger than he was, a fact that would play a large part in his later decision to become a minister.

He also joined the militia, the 79th Cameron Highlanders, earning a small stipend for playing the clarinet in the band and wearing kilts on parade.

Tommy was active in sports, in addition to the boxing, primarily through the Scouts. His was a cycling troop – all the boys in his Elmwood neighbourhood had jobs and owned their own bicycles. “We painted them red with grey trimmings,” he remembered, “and on the weekends, we’d put packs on our backs and go out on the open road by East St. Paul (a Winnipeg suburb) and camp out. We’d go out on Saturday afternoon, and come back Sunday night or early Monday morning.” On these trips, their backpacks would be stuffed with baseballs and gloves, soccer balls and other sports equipment.

As for the boxing, he not only embraced it himself, but encouraged the boys in his Scout troop to give it a try. “That doesn’t mean I’d like any boy to get into professional boxing,” he said. “But you don’t avoid fights by never fighting. I think you avoid fights if somebody knows that you’re willing to fight.”

More significantly for his future life, he was a voracious reader, tackling books on politics and religion as well as the English novels, like the romances of Sir Walter Scott, he devoured; and the world of amateur theatre opened up for him. Those recitations of Robbie Burns by his grandfather Douglas had made a lasting impression, and Tommy, who had inherited his grandfather’s prodigious memory, began performing monologues, which were very popular at the time. This was in the days before television or even radio, and people went in for homemade entertainment. He took lessons with a famous Winnipeg elocutionist, Jean Campbell, who herself was a student of Jean Alexander, a nationally famous speaker and writer. Tommy became a hit attraction at Burns dinners – an annual occurrence on the great poet’s birthday – and at Masonic and other functions, where he would recite poems by Burns, Kipling, and Pauline Johnson, the Canadian Indian woman who was then all the rage. Sometimes the Scouts would organize concerts, with Tommy as one of the attractions, and sell tickets for a quarter.

Whatever fear of audiences Tommy may have had quickly evaporated. “It was excellent training for a life in politics,” he remembered, although at this point a life in politics was the farthest thing from his mind.

His active life made him “a bit of an oddity in the print shop,” he remembered. “I was always good friends with everyone, but I didn’t join the lads in the evenings. I didn’t go to the drinking parties and didn’t play poker, as most printers do. And at noon hour, whenever there was a poker game, I was usually memorizing a recitation for the evening or getting a little talk ready.” But, he added with a straight face, “I was provincial lightweight champion, and so they didn’t kid me too much.”

Two men were strong influences on Tommy during this period of his boyhood.

Through the DeMolays, he became close to W.J. Major and Dr. “Dad” Howden, who were sort of big brothers with the group.

Major, a lawyer who would later become attorney general of Manitoba and a Queen’s Bench judge, was largely responsible for persuading Tommy to return to school. He pointed out that the young man seemed to have talent aplenty, but without formal schooling, his potential was severely limited.

His other mentor, Howden, owned the Winnipeg Theatre and was a part owner in the Walker Theatre, a major stop in the vaudeville circuit, and Tommy and other boys would often attend performances with him. Gradually, Tommy began to get small roles, playing a butler or making good use of his Scottish accent.

Howden was so impressed he offered to pay Tommy’s way if he wanted to quit his job and take up dramatic training. But Tommy never took the stage that seriously.

“The experience gave me a feel for grease paint,” he said, “but I never really liked the idea of being an echo of someone else’s lines. I wanted to make up my own lines in life.”

His life on the stage led to one personally memorable moment, though.

As an understudy for one of the major roles at a play to be performed at a Masonic convention, Tommy stepped in without blinking an eye when the leading man had to drop out. He got a standing ovation from the five thousand Masons who saw him. Tommy would never forget what happened later that evening.

His father had been in the audience and was justifiably proud. But Tom Douglas was a reticent man who was sparing of praise, especially for his son.

“Let’s walk,” he said, as the two of them emerged from the old Board of Trade Building downtown. They walked in silence up Main Street and then along Henderson Road and through their old Point Douglas neighborhood, then across the Disraeli Bridge over the Red River and into Elmwood to the small old house at 132 McPhail Street.

“I knew from that he’d been deeply moved by the performance,” Tommy recalled. “We never exchanged a word all the way home, but, as we were going up the front step, he tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You did no bad.’ That was as close as he ever came to giving me a word of praise. He might tell my mother that he was pleased, but he found it very difficult to tell me.”

Saskatchewan Archives Board R-A26491

As a supply preacher to rural congregations, Douglas is so popular that sixteen-year-old Irma Dempsey comes to hear him and falls in love.