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“I heard a Blue Funnel captain saying down at Union Bay once that he would steam halfway around the world to fill his bunkers with Comox coal,” said Tom Mumford. “That was the reputation that coal had, it was supposed to be the best steam coal.”

Coal was not only Cumberland’s reason for existing but Vancouver Island’s first major industry. Retired newspaperman Torchy (H.H.C.) Anderson of Salt Spring Island told me that Kwakwaka’wakw people showed coal to one of his ancestors, a Hudson’s Bay Company factor, at Fort Rupert near Port Hardy during the 1820s. The HBC began mining the area in 1847, but soon abandoned it for a richer opportunity. In 1849 Chewechikan, a Snuneymuxw man, led Hudson’s Bay Company officers to accessible, high quality coal deposits near Nanaimo. This act gave Chewechikan the title of Coal Tyee (chief), arguably the only benefit to him or his people; settlers and industry steadily encroached on Snuneymuxw tribal lands. Nanaimo mining began in 1852 with miners brought from England and Scotland, and continued for more than a century. By 1910 Nanaimo was a prosperous—and relatively stable and orderly—city with a population of predominantly British origin. Outlying communities such as Wellington, Ladysmith and Extension went through a roistering coal-camp phase en route to a staid maturity. Miners there had their sights fixed on a security and dignity which often eluded working people in the “old country.” Such stability lay far in the future for Cumberland.

Cumberland’s mines governed the town’s life. Number Six pithead stood at the centre of town a block from the fire station and city hall, Number Five lay only about a mile’s walk northwest, and the mine train took only minutes to reach Number Four at Comox Lake. Number Seven operated at Bevan about three miles away. The small Number One, Two and Three mines were defunct, and short-lived Number Eight was still on the drawing board.

When the whistle blew, mine workers streamed toward the Cumberland pits. Married men, sons at home and lucky boarders carried galvanized dinner pails. Men who batched in shanties or rented rooms shoved their dinners in their pockets, twisted in oiled paper if they were too fastidious to accept pocket lint in their cheese butties. No one carried smokes; taking matches into a mine was a firing offence. Some favoured chewing tobacco, which didn’t call for a match. Tobacco gobs were far from the worst thing encountered underfoot in a coal mine. Smokers ditched their makings somewhere outside the portal, to be reclaimed after shift.

Boys usually started colliery work on the surface, picking or sorting coal as it travelled past them on a screen conveyor belt, and injured or older men ended their working days there. Coal was graded and sold by lump size, and the pickers separated lump coal from nut coal from pea coal. Compared to hewing coal all day in a low seam, it was easy work. Compared to today’s largely mechanized labour jobs, it was gruelling. Tending the pit ponies or mules was often the next job for young mine workers.

Trapper, rope rider, tunneller, timberman, mule driver, and coal digger were some of the specialized jobs in a mine (detailed descriptions of mine work enliven Lynne Bowen’s books Three Dollar Dreams and Boss Whistle and retired miner Bill Johnstone’s book Coal Dust In My Blood). Coal digging—Joe Naylor’s and Arthur Boothman’s livelihood in Cumberland—was the most highly skilled work, wielding pick and shovel to load cars at the coal face. In many mines coal diggers worked on contract, paid by the ton for the coal they loaded. Only a strong, deft and tireless man could make a living this way. A lad whose father or brother was a coal miner might go backhand for him, working as his assistant and student. Not every mine worker aspired to be a miner. Some were content working on day wages as labourers or timbermen or mule drivers. Many spent their working lives in an environment they hated and feared.

“It wasn’t a thrill to me, because every little squeak of a timber, they were caving in on me,” Jim Weir said. “I always say it was the conditions that formed the union. The men wouldn’t have been so anxious to join a union if the conditions had been better.”

“Mining? Today I would never walk into a mine if I . . . but in them days there was nothing else to do,” Chuna Tobacco told an interviewer. “If you had friends that started work in the mines and when you met them downtown they all had money in their pocket, and you had ten cents, what would you do? You would go to where the money was, and there was nothing else but the mines or the logging camps.”

Wink English told me, “It was a rotten system, boy. I got fired for no reason at all. I got fired dead off a job I wasn’t even on it. Yeah, and then those others guys were walking around the mine . . . them guys walking around doing nothing . . . the buggers never did five minutes’ work in a day. They were cousins and uncles and all kinds of relations.”

Women never worked in the early Vancouver Island mines. In Britain until the 1860s women crawled through the dark on hands and knees, harnessed to haul coal cars, while their small children worked as trappers, opening and closing the canvas doors between mine sections. Their tendency to fall asleep in ditches after twelve-hour shifts, their frequent illness or death, their malnourishment and alcoholism, irritated the coal masters. Humanitarians and mine workers alike were pleased to see women and children finally banished from coal workings, despite the resulting loss of family income. Miners, deeply conservative in many ways, had long memories. When a guest party including a woman went down pit in the Nanaimo mines, my grandfather said, the warning would echo down the shaft and along the drifts: “Woman in the mine!”

Some men liked the work and got ahead in life, especially if the bosses took a liking to them.

One mine manager “switched me around with a lot of different men,” Ben Horbury said. “I was backhanding. If you were willing to learn, and able to learn, you got all the experiences from all these different miners. That way I was a little bit ahead, and I was younger. There was only about four or five young fellows that actually went to the face when they were young. I got my miner’s certificate through [Charlie] Parnham. He sent me in for it.”

Mules, ponies and a few horses—even years after mine locomotives were available—hauled coal cars along trackage in many mines. Mules were smart and sturdy, and ponies were small enough to enter low workings. Some miners claimed mules fared better than humans. Mine owners found mules harder to train and costlier to replace than men.

Only a few old-timers now recall the pleasures and purgatories of mule-driving, Ginger Goodwin’s occupation in at least one pit.

Bill Marshall first worked in Number Five switching empty cars. “Then I got a job doing what they call skinning mules, and that’s the worst job that ever was invented, I think. Some of those mules would try to kick your head off.”

The top levels of Number Four suffered constant seepage from nearby Comox Lake. Jim Weir drove a mule there, putting coal cars into three or four working places. Sections of the travelling roads were so low the spaces between ties had to be dug out so the mules could get through, and these holes filled with water. When the mules’ hooves slipped off the ties, a great shower of water would drench the driver.

“If you got an ornery mule, you were in trouble. I never saw any biting, but kick! And kick they would, too,” Weir said. Some mules refused to stop; others would get into a tight spot and refuse to start, like one mare he drove. “I couldn’t get past the car. There was no room, it was too tight. There she was standing there, and me cursing and swearing trying to get her going. She’d take time, she’d stop for a little while, then she’d make up her mind and away she’d go. She knew I couldn’t get at her.”

“Sometimes it was nice, if you got a good mule. Most of the mules knew as much as the driver did, once they got onto system of how they changed they cars. They’d run the load down and then they’d pull the empty up,” Weir said. “You’d block the empty and unhook the mule from the front, and he’d climb back down past the car. Then you’d push the car up close to the face where the miner could work on it,” loading it with coal.

Pithead photos of mule drivers often show them with formidable whips coiled several times over one shoulder and under the other arm. But Weir said stories about whips were exaggerated. Good drivers didn’t need whips. “There was one or two that had whips, but very few. You didn’t need a whip. The mule knew what to do, and they went and did it. Sure.”

Several people told me mine haulage animals were well treated, even pampered, on shift and in their underground stables. No doubt many were well treated. Others were less fortunate.

“Things I could tell you about animals you would never believe,” Chuna Tobacco said. “Horses with broken legs, and the scars, and no skin on them. They would be working in places and they would be maybe six foot high, and then the roof would keep squeezing, coming down, coming down, and then the first thing you know their hind and backs and heads was rubbing, all the skin coming off. They never stopped them horses from working.”

“Today I would never do what I did in them days to hang onto a job,” Tobacco said. “I would never treat an animal like I did in them days. We had no option. We had to do it or we didn’t work. That animal you’d got down there had to pull that coal out of the mine. If you couldn’t make him pull somebody else would.”

Danger was never far away in the mines. Sometimes haulage ropes would break, sending fifteen or twenty cars hurtling back down a slope. “They’d pile up and they’d cause a cave-in that would take maybe a day, maybe four hours, maybe twenty hours to get cleaned up. It would be just the same when the wall caved in, men would be hurt or trapped underneath a fall of rock—not timbered, not done right, not done properly—their timber wasn’t big enough or not strong enough. It would collapse and the whole thing would come down and fall on top of them and kill them or maim them.”

“It was more carelessness than anything else that would cause a mine disaster,” said Jim Weir, who tried every mine job before joining management. “You knew there was gas there so you didn’t take any chances.”

He did survive one explosion when he was installing machinery in wet, gassy Number Five. The fireboss was on a lower level firing shots (controlled detonations to loosen coal from the working face) so miners on the next shift could start loading. Smoke started to rise through the ventilation system. “Usually it came up and went, until he fired another shot. This time it came, and it started to keep coming. We looked down the wall and we could see this gas exploding from underneath the coal, shooting out in a flame. So it was time we got out of there, and we got out of there.”

And he saw the aftermath of other explosions. “I saw the results of it, the men bringing the dead men, the bodies, out. One of the bodies they brought out was a Chinaman, all he had on was a pair of shoes. It just blew the clothes right off him.”

Ben Horbury’s father quit one mine because of the hazard. “It was so bad in Number Six with firedamp and blackdamp—they were working with open lamps, the old teapot [a lamp mounted on a soft cap], and fish oil—he had to go into his place packing his lamp halfway. If you put it down, it went out in the blackdamp, and if you put it up, well, you had a fire going. Flash fires.”

An uncle who was “cross-shifting,” working a different shift in the same mine, decided he couldn’t take any more. “His brother says, I’m finished. I’m not going down there again. The tools are down there. If you want them, you can go down and get them. You know, they bought their own tools then. My father went down and got them. Of course he was finished. They went to Number Four. About two weeks after, she blew.”

“Years ago I don’t think human life meant very much. I can remember my dad coming home and saying that he wondered who was going to get it, because the ceiling was so low, and it was tough. I think all miners were [worried] when they worked in the mine,” Mary Fedichin told me. “Naturally, when the town depends on the mines, all the men worked in the mines. So it was, ‘We were lucky this time, will we be lucky next time?’”

British Columbia’s department of mines knew of the perils. Local historian and retired schoolteacher Margaret Eggar researched in the provincial archives, often rising before dawn for a four-hour bus trip to Victoria, an afternoon’s study of musty documents, and another four-hour ride home. Her findings were disturbing. “The inspector of mines would recommend that certain things should be done, but they weren’t always done. And then sometimes the inspector was only allowed to see a certain part of the mines when he came to inspect.”

Another more insidious hazard was getting and keeping a job under bosses who could fire without notice or cause. Piggy Brown said men evolved their own solutions: gifts of liquor, cigarettes or cold cash. “In those days there was lots of hanky panky. When pay day come, some of the bosses—they’d hire a guy and give him a job—well, he’d leave money in hidey places, you know, kickbacks.”

A 1912 letter from Cumberland illuminates the workers’ frustrations and fears. The eloquence is unpolished but impassioned. Perhaps Ginger Goodwin, who drove a mule in at least one mine, or a friend wrote to the United Mine Workers Journal under the pseudonym “A Driver in the Mud Hole”:

I just send you a few of the facts regarding the conditions in this, one of the camps which is a part of Vancouver Island. Well, I might as well say that the conditions of the mines are rotten. There are four mines and one they are sinking will be five someday. The first one which I will write about is No. 4, a slope over one and a half miles down. This mine is very poorly ventilated, according to the gas that accumulates. The return airways in some parts is unfit to travel in on account of standing water, which it is impossible to get through without gumboots. The company, on several occasions, has been notified concerning the ventilation, but could not see their way clear to improve it in any way for fear of the expense, although they may have been told by the inspector of mines that if there was no improvement made soon and a certain amount of air travelling that it would have to be closed down. It can easily be understood what is the condition of this mine when it had to be stopped for over a week till safety lamps were put in.

Another thing you never hear about or seen in this particular mine, although there is an accumulation of dust all over it, is the sprinkling of the roads. The only time that there is any water put on it is when there is a fire, which, I might say, has happened lately in this particular mine. The next is No. 6 mine, which is connected with No. 5, both being shafts. This mine in itself is a little better than the last, with the same failing regarding the sprinkling, and I am very much in doubt whether there is a sufficient number of man-holes or not or travelling roads along the different inclines. No. 5 in itself is what you would call a mud hole from leaving the cage until you land at your working place.

This mine I may say is the training quarters for drivers. Without fear of being contradicted, there have been more drivers in this mine since it was a mine, or mud hole, than all the mines on this island put together. This is the condition the drivers have to work under from month end to month end for the paltry sum of $2.85 a day the price for the use of his power. The next mine, No. 7, is a slope which is about as bad as No. 5 for water, and I see that the report of the chief inspector of mines was that it was in a very unsanitary condition. I think all miners know what that means.

These are a few of the conditions the miners have to work under. In the first place, you receive 60 cents per ton for coal, only have to produce about 2,700 pounds of coal before you receive your 60 cents for 1 ton of coal. To produce this coal it is all got through shooting off the solid and in turn you have to pay 15 cents for every stick of powder to shoot it with, where the company only pays six cents. It’s a regular thing for a miner to have $50 or $60 for powder alone in one month. In all these mines a miner is troubled with a certain quantity of rock, which you have to shoot with your coal, varying from one foot to three feet, and some parts more. You get a little remuneration for picking this rock in the way or yardage which in turn varies from $1.50 to $3, and then at all times, unless the miner is a sucker, is liable to be cut at the month end say 25 or 50 cents per yard. Unless it is a good shooting place, where you don’t use much powder, you don’t get as much for your yardage as will pay your expenses.

When a miner starts in these mines to dig coal he has to work till measuring day before he knows what he is going to get as yardage; that is, after he starts to work, the rock in his place gets thicker and might continue to do so for three weeks out of the month before it becomes better. You think or have an idea that the bosses might be a little generous and give you a little more yardage according to the thickness of this rock which you have worked through for the preceding three weeks. But no, nothing doing. You get as much as your fellow workman in the next place, who, I might say, has loaded two or three cars a shift more, as he had not the same amount of rock to handle. If your place is wet and the other fellow’s is dry, it is just the same. If your place is bad to shoot and you use twice the powder as the other fellow, it is just the same. You get what you make, which in lots of cases comes to about $2 to $2.50 a day. There is a minimum wage of $3.30 for a few who get a stand in with the bosses, or a man that comes from the face to drive, but without there is nothing doing.

Here is the way they have robbed us for years: At No. 7 mine they were using a car on which the men were getting from 14 to 17 hundredweight. The same cars were sent to No. 5 and the men got from 20 to 25 hundredweight and some as much as 29 hundredweight on the cars, and the cars that they were using in No. 5 then went to No. 6. Where the men were getting from 16 to 18 hundredweight in No. 5 for these cars, they got from 14 to 16 hundredweight in No. 6 mine, a matter of 2 hundredweight difference in the cars. In No. 4 and No. 7 they have put in new cars, which are bigger in height, length and breadth, and still the men are not getting as much weight as they did before. The machines they have for weighing coal are, I think, one of the latest patents that were put on the market 100 years ago.

These are a few of the conditions which drivers and miners are working under here. There is lots more I will write about at some future date. Taking all these things into consideration, I think you will agree with me in saying that we should in the near future go in for recognition as we have no agreement of any kind. I think if the men were putting their heads together and studying the powder question they would find the company reaping the benefit of $10,000 profit per month.

They are also selling their coal in San Francisco at $12.50 per ton, and I also see where Mr. Clapp, the geological surveyor for British Columbia, says that the coal in Comox district can easily be mined at $3.50 per ton, leaving a balance of $9 per ton, for which the miner receives 60 cents for 2,700 pounds.

That there be no misunderstanding in any way, I would like to say that the coal in Nos. 5 and 6 mines is practically the same and that the men have no checkweighman. So you will see what some of the good company weighmen that were never in a coal mine in their lives, don’t even know the weight of a shovel or a pick, would not even know how to make a charge of powder up, and these are the nincompoops, good looking idiots and know nothings that we have to buck against and be barefacedly robbed by . . .

The Journal’s editor noted that he’d run the letter under a nom de plume to allow the writer, working in a non-union mine, to “spread the healthy discontent that will lead to organization.”

Cumberland lacked union recognition, but unions were much on men’s minds.

Vancouver Island miners—as an inevitable response to dangerous and oppressive working conditions, and a natural evolution from informal mutual aid societies—began organizing workers’ associations such as the 1890 Miners’ and Mine Labourers’ Protective Association. Mine owners like coal baron Robert Dunsmuir opposed every move by the infant organizations with threats, firings, evictions and blacklists. When these tactics failed, owners hired private police forces or called on the new province’s obliging government for artillery and troops. But if government and capital attempted a colonial version of feudalism, workers countered with the revolutionary ideas that had reshaped mid-nineteenth century Europe. British Columbia, with many organized workers arriving direct from Britain and the United States, was much more radical than Eastern Canada. In 1898 Nanaimo elected British Columbia’s first socialist Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP), a mine worker. The first miners’ associations and the first strikes failed miserably, until island miners organized in 1902 under the militant American-based Western Federation of Miners (WFM). The WFM under the legendary Big Bill Haywood encouraged not only direct action such as strikes, but armed defence against company and government abuses. A WFM convention in British Columbia resolved, in part:

. . . capitalism can never be dethroned and wage slavery abolished until the natural resources of the earth and the machinery of production and distribution shall be taken from the hands of the few by the political power of the many, to become the collective property of all mankind, to be utilized for the use and benefit of all humanity . . .

From its birth the WFM saw socialism as the only political means of securing this redistribution of wealth and resources, and eventually endorsed the Socialist Party of Canada. Exploitation of both picket line and ballot box characterized the emerging generation of British Columbia radical labour socialists. Among the most active and outspoken, even in 1903, were coal miners in Union and Cumberland.

A WFM coal strike collapsed that year. The subsequent royal commission into British Columbia labour problems—its secretary was federal deputy labour minister William Lyon Mackenzie King—decided that the WFM was a political organization, not a legitimate union, and that recent strikes were a socialist conspiracy. Despite the strike’s failure, island miners were getting used to organizing and taking direct action. In a pinched labour market flooded by new immigrants, with petroleum steadily threatening coal markets and prices, island miners organized again. This time they didn’t raise the banner of the ultra-radical WFM. In 1911 Cumberland and Extension mine workers invited a powerful international union, the United Mine Workers of America, to undertake an organizing drive; Vancouver Island became the union’s District 28. One of Cumberland Local 2299’s members, soon one of its leaders, was a tall burly coal digger with light blue eyes and dark hair.

Joe Naylor was thirty-seven in 1909 when he arrived in Cumberland via the West Kootenays hardrock mines where, Mrs. Eggar’s uncle told her, he’d organized for the WFM. Born in Wigan, he spent his boyhood and young manhood in the Lancashire coal pits. Naylor was self-educated—Cumberland people still remember that he read two newspapers a day, the Vancouver Sun and Seattle Times, plus Tolstoi’s works and various labour and political publications—and his knowledge ranged across the spectrum. A radical labour socialist to the bone, he was also a resolute pacifist. In 1912 he and two other men wrote a letter to the Cumberland Islander and the Western Clarion on behalf of the UMWA and Socialist Party of Canada, opposing the formation of a Cumberland Boy Scouts troop. They said boys could be expected to kill their own mothers or fathers at the order of a superior officer, as in the army.

It is quite obvious that the boy scouts movement is only another way of using one portion of the working classes to keep the other portion in subjection. To order a man to go to war, whether with the workers of another country or with the workers of his own country, as in a strike, is like ordering him to take a gun, load it, dig his own grave, crawl into it and shoot himself. Bayonets are made by the working class, nicely polished by the working class, and then patriotically thrust into the working class for the capitalist class.

Joe was a Cumberland character by any criteria. Friends and colleagues referred to his blunt and forthright speaking style, and called him a rough diamond. He favoured natural foods, ate stew for breakfast like many workers who’d spent years on night shift, and consumed impressive amounts of whole wheat bread and beer from John Marocchi’s store.

“We had the only bakery around,” Elsie Marocchi told interviewers in 1987. “Joe Naylor . . . wanted a special bread made for him. So it was made for him once a week and it was steamed, not baked.”

“Joe Naylor, if he saw a fly in the house he’d never go after it or kill it,” Karl Coe told me. “He’d let spiders go, and you could see spider webs in every corner of the window, anywhere you looked in that shack there was a spider web, and he would never touch it. I said, Joe, let’s clean up around here, one day when I went out to meet him, let’s get these spider webs. Like hell, he says, they kill the bloody flies. Leave them spiders alone.”

Naylor is still revered in Cumberland for his tireless day-by-day work to better people’s lives, not just through union and political organizing but through educating them five minutes at a time from his porch steps, carrying their groceries, singing them a ditty or slipping them a dollar. Seventy-odd years later, the only negative comment I heard about Naylor was that in the 1920s he relentlessly pushed mule drivers to deliver more empty coal cars to his working place. More cars meant more coal loaded, more money earned. Why did he need the money, a coal digger then batching alone at Comox Lake? It seems he’d reached into his own pocket to buy a house for a woman left homeless by her husband’s death—she was his only love and finally declined to marry him, but that’s another story—and he was paying her mortgage.

“Many a time when I’d be sitting out there with Joe he’d get me to talk,” Karl Coe said. “We’d get to arguing about it, and he’d say something about, ‘What would you do if the company did this, took over this?’ And I’d give him my impression and raise hell about the company and all this, call them this and call them that. And he’d say, ‘That’s not right. You’ve got class hatred. You shouldn’t have that if you want to be unionized. You’ve got to have class consciousness.’”

“He did try to tell us. He’d talk to anybody like that about conditions and policies and what not.” As a young man Coe didn’t pay much attention. “He described the moon and the sun to me one time. He was calling them stable mobility and mobile stability. He knew all that kind of stuff. But Christ, it was too deep for me.”

“He was very strong on the red side,” Roy Genge told me. “I don’t like to call people reds, but he was . . . a hot one. A real hot one.”

Did Joe Naylor truly want a revolution? I asked, and Roy laughed. “You’d think so the way he talked. But there’s no use answering what you just think, because it’s not always true, is it?”

The 1912 letter about the Boy Scouts stated Joe’s beliefs clearly enough. . . . there are no foreigners in the working class, the only foreigner to our class is the capitalist class . . . we have nothing in common with the capitalist class, who by virtue of their ownership of the means of life hold the working class in slavery . . . our ultimate aim is to bring about a state of society where universal peace and brotherhood will reign . . . this end can only be accomplished by the complete overthrow of the present form of society . . .

His egalitarian acceptance of “foreigners” stumbled when they deserted the labour ranks. Within a year of the letter, Chinese mine workers intimidated with threats of deportation became targets for racist slurs, although he claimed he objected to Chinese strikebreakers only, not all Chinese. Yet for his era he was a model of racial tolerance.

Joe liked children and always had a song or joke for them. Josephine Bryden told an interviewer, “I remember rowing Joe Naylor around the lake as a little girl, and I came home singing, ‘We’ll keep the red flag flying.’ I heard my father say to my mother, ‘Do you hear what that child’s singing?’ And my mother said, ‘That’s Joe Naylor.’”

“Joe was a great guy, too,” Jimmy Ellis said. “He was a great socialist, and he was a great man, a good talker, a great organizer, and a man who knew what he was talking about.”

Naylor was one of many working men and women who strove lifelong to “bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.” He would be quick to deride any special claims that smacked of the cult of personality. Naylor organized, picketed, educated any who would listen, counselled friends to acts which the government found seditious, served prison time for his beliefs. So did many others. But Naylor had more effect.

“To me he was just as good an organizer as Ginger was. It’s just because Ginger was shot they made a martyr of him. There was so much fuss about it, like causing that general strike in Vancouver for a day,” Karl Coe said. “He did everything as good as Ginger.”

Mobile stability and stable mobility, the words Karl remembered so long, suggest a planetary motion. Joe and Ginger: did one exert a gravitational pull, the other follow as a satellite? Or were they bound together, unlike on the surface but at the core like-minded, in the motion of binary stars? Across time’s gulf we see the steady dark one keeping to shadow, the volatile bright one always passing into sunlight.