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3

A Commitment to the Church

A Sunday morning in spring, 1922, the Canadian National Railway station at Stonewall, Manitoba, a short ride north of Winnipeg.

A young man dressed in his best suit steps tentatively out of a coach and onto the crowded platform. He’s nineteen but he’s small, slender, baby-faced, and looks more like fourteen.

The whole congregation of the Stonewall Baptist Church, about forty people, are milling about on the platform, looking for the man sent up from Winnipeg to be their preacher for the day. Nobody takes any notice of the shy young man, on his first assignment as a lay preacher.

Since no one pays any attention to him, he goes up to a boy who is leaning against his bicycle. “Can you tell me how to get to the Baptist church?”

The boy looks at the young man in surprise. “What do you want at the Baptist church?” he asks suspiciously.

“I’m supposed to be taking the service this morning,” the young man answers.

“Are you the new preacher?”

“Yes, I am.”

Then, in a loud voice, the boy calls out: “Ma, this kid says he’s the new preacher!”

All eyes turn to Tommy Douglas and, he would recall later, “the disappointment in their faces was very noticeable.”

Just the same, his service is a success – and he’s invited back.

Tommy Douglas seems to have been born to the preacher’s trade, just as he was born to the life of a politician.

Both his grandfathers had been religious men. Old Thomas Douglas was a devout follower of Scotland’s establishment Presbyterian Church who, despite his love of Burns and Scotch whisky, frowned on singing and dancing, particularly on the Sabbath. Andrew Clement had, as a young man, been a drunkard who was “saved” by the ultra-conservative Christian Brethren. A sober, quiet man at the time Tommy knew him, he had become a lay Baptist preacher who often would stop to deliver sermons as he made his rounds as a delivery man.

Anne Douglas was also quite religious and, in Winnipeg, steered her family to the Baptist Church, always harbouring the hope that her son would be attracted to the ministry. The whole family, with the exception of Tom Douglas, who had little use for religion, became active in the neighbourhood Beulah Baptist Church.

When he was studying to be a preacher, Tommy remembered a time when the straitlaced minister of the Beulah church came to call on the Douglases around supper time. Tom arrived home from work shortly afterwards and, as was his custom, tramped into the kitchen in his dirty pants and boots, the smell of molten metal still clinging to him.

“I’m going to have a bottle of beer,” he told their guest. “Would you like one?”

The minister declined. Anne and the children were mortified by this behaviour, but later Tommy came both to value that forthrightness in his father and to learn a lesson about the clergy. If he was to be a minister, he decided, it would be one who would welcome a glass of beer at a parishioner’s home, who would accept his parishioners as he found them and would strive to be one with them.

Tommy’s first taste of a preacher’s life came when he was fifteen or sixteen and was appointed chaplain of his DeMolay chapter. His role was to give a prayer at the start of meetings. He usually just read the words from a book, but one night, after several children had been injured in a fire in the city, he was pressed into tailoring a special prayer, which he successfully improvised.

Beulah was a conservative church, with the emphasis on salvation and the afterlife, on doing good works to insure getting into Heaven, not for their own sake. But Tommy, with J.S. Woodsworth as a role model, was developing decidedly more liberal religious views. He and his good friend Mark Talnicoff (later changed to Talney), a fellow Scout leader, would spend hours discussing politics and religion, and their talks focused on the increasingly intriguing notion of the social gospel, “the application of the gospel to social conditions,” as Tommy later described it. They saw themselves as rebels. The germ of the idea to become a preacher was planted in Tommy’s head, but not because he had “a call.” Rather, he and Mark saw the church as a way of working for social change.

One chilly night, walking home from church, the two boys decided that the ministry was for them, and they started thinking about Brandon College, a combination liberal arts and Bible school run by the Baptist Church. Brandon College was a hotbed of liberal ideas and was just a couple of hours’ train ride west of Winnipeg.

As it turned out, it would be another year or so before either of them actually made it to college. Tommy used that year to read as much as he could, to take on practice preaching assignments like the one at Stonewall and other nearby country churches, and to set a little money aside.

Tommy made good money as a printer, more than his father, but most of it went to help pay off the mortgage on the family home. For a year, he made special efforts to save money toward college, although when he did arrive at Brandon, in the fall of 1924, just a few weeks before his twentieth birthday, he had only ninety dollars in his pocket.

As it is with many students, money was always an issue for Tommy during his entire six years at Brandon: three years making up for his missed high school, and three as a theology student, or “theolog.” To make ends meet, he made himself available as a public speaker and performer at concerts and dances, as he had in Winnipeg, doing monologues and recitations at five dollars a performance. That first fall in Brandon, he was the star of the fowl-supper circuit for miles around the city.

In his first couple of years at college, Tommy took on other odd jobs to make a few dollars, waiting on tables and acting as late-night doorman at the dormitory. Students who came in after the doors were locked had to ring a bell and were fined a quarter. As Tommy remembered it: “You kept the twenty-five cents for getting up and opening the door. Any fellow who wakes you up at one o’clock in the morning deserves to pay two bits.”

More importantly, he joined other students and became an active “supply” preacher, working all through his college years – even while he was still technically in high school – on weekends and summers at neighbouring rural churches, too small to afford a fulltime preacher.

In fact, even before he’d arrived at Brandon, he had his first paying assignment: on his way to the college, he was to get off the train at the small town of Austin, about midway between Portage la Prairie and Brandon, and do a quick job, winding things up at a church that was being disbanded.

“The church had been going to pieces,” he told an interviewer years later. “They’d had a row and half the congregation had become British Israelites. And so I was to go and have this service, close them off formally, and bury the dead.” He thought it was a shame, though, that differences about biblical interpretation should deprive the youngsters of the community of religious education. “At twenty years of age, you’re brash and ready to hand out advice to people three times your age with complete equanimity. So I proceeded to preach a sermon saying it was disgraceful that they were closing this church.”

Afterwards, the congregation met and the deacon came sheepishly to Tommy “and admitted they had been a little foolish.” If he would agree to come every Sunday, they’d try to make a go of their church for another year.

Brandon College officials took a dim view of a first-year student having such a heavy load, but they agreed to allow him to preach every other Sunday, with his friend Mark Talney sharing the position, at fifteen dollars for each Sunday.

Tommy also spent two summers in Austin. “The first summer, I got around to all the farms on a bicycle,” he remembered. “The next year they got me an old Ford car; it took me halfway and I pushed it the rest.”

After two years, Tommy was assigned to a Presbyterian church in Carberry, just a short train ride east of Brandon. Although the Knox Church wasn’t Baptist, it was desperate for a minister and appealed to the college. Ecumenicalism worked to Tommy’s advantage in another way at Carberry as well. His reputation as a preacher attracted the attentions of a pretty girl named Irma Dempsey, a petite, brown-haired Methodist with shining eyes who came to hear him one Sunday and quickly changed churches. It was the start of a romance that would blossom into marriage.

Tommy was in Carberry for two years, then was reassigned to Baptist churches in the Shoal Lake and Strathclair area, a couple of hours northwest of Brandon. He would take a Saturday afternoon train to Minnedosa, where he’d change to a train to Strathclair. He’d spend the night with an elderly farm family named Kippen, two brothers and two sisters who would make sure to get him to the church on time – Shoal Lake in the afternoon, Strathclair in the evening – by old Model T Ford in good weather, a team and cutter in the winter.

Finally, in his last year at Brandon, Tommy was sent for a tryout to Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where the Calvary Baptist Church was looking for a permanent minister.

Tommy was extremely popular as a student minister, especially among children. He organized drama and sports clubs, showed them the manly art of boxing, and regaled them with tales of big-city Winnipeg. At Sunday school, he always had stories and jokes, and one of his favourites involved a bit of sleight of hand. He would flash a shining red heart, cut out of construction paper, and caution the children what might happen if they lied, stole, or were disrespectful to their parents. He would say some magic words and – presto! – the red heart would be replaced with a coal black one.

On September 29, 1929, he wrote a message in the autograph book of a young parishioner in Shoal Lake:

Dear Wilma,

If instead of giving gems or flowers, we could drop a beautiful thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.

T.C. Douglas.

Demanding as this practice preaching was, Tommy also was taking a full load at Brandon. He excelled in his studies, which included Greek and Hebrew, and he won top marks in the latter, in a class that included several Jews studying to be rabbis. He was head of his class for the first three years. Then he met his match in the form of Stanley Knowles, another printer newly arrived at the college. The careers of Knowles and Douglas would have many parallels – both became Baptist ministers and both became distinguished left-wing politicians, with Knowles reigning as “the dean of Parliament” until his retirement in 1984. For the moment, though, they were the friendliest of rivals, dividing academic honours between them, though Knowles scored more gold medals in their graduation year.

“I tried to take the gold medals but they made me put them back,” Tommy quipped.

To which Knowles retorted: “Tommy was smarter, but I was better at writing exams.”

Brandon College was an affiliate of McMaster University in Windsor, Ontario, another Baptist-founded school. At the time, the Baptist Church was polarized by radical and fundamental views on a wide range of theological issues, and many Baptists would have been scandalized to learn what was taught in the hallowed halls at Brandon that they helped to support. The notorious Scopes “monkey” trial, which had pitted the theory of Darwinism against religious fundamentalism in the United States, had played itself out only a couple of years before Tommy enrolled at Brandon, and many Baptists were on the fundamentalist side. But at the college, liberal ideas were given full rein (ironically, Brandon College was noted for its geology program, which taught a theory of an earth millions of years old that was diametrically opposed to the biblical view), and a charge of heresy had been levied against several Brandon professors. Tommy sarcastically described the position of the fundamentalists this way: “I want complete freedom of thought unless your point of view is different from mine, in which case you’ll believe what I believe.”