Читать книгу Ginger - Susan Mayse - Страница 8

In the sunlit photo a young man pauses on the porch step. On his way to work, he’s clean for a coal miner. His freckles show clearly, and his hair shines so its bright red is lost to the brighter blaze of morning sun. Earlier sometime he’s pulled on dungarees and laced up his hobnail boots. At his neck his sweat rag is crossed in front with ends tucked to the sides, as miners wore them in Yorkshire, to keep the coal dust out. His waistcoat, buttoned all the way down, traps the ends of the sweat rag. The left pocket of his dark jacket bulges with his dinner, and an enamelled oval pin shines on his left lapel. A wet comb through his hair, and out the door to the photographer.

Smile. Don’t look at the camera. Not knowing what to do with his hands, he folds them in front of his waistcoat. He looks about sixteen. He’s twenty-four, and has already worked nine years deep underground in the dark. The light is in his eyes, turning his half-smile into a perplexed half-frown as he looks west, where sunshine is striking the glacier on Mount Albert Edward and the wooded flanks of the Forbidden Plateau. Here at the furthest shore of the British Empire, north of the railroad and north of almost everything else on Vancouver Island, raw stumps stand at the town limits. Beyond them waits a dark wall of fir and cedar, then wilderness. All right, mate. Got it. And on a sunny 1911 day, he steps down into a red-dirt Cumberland street, out of the photograph and into the morning.

“Hi, kid.” Many years later, in the smoky office of Cumberland’s new museum, John Marocchi admired the likeness. “Oh, that’s a good one. That’s Ginger!”

The Cumberland photo remains in Cumberland, like much of the scant information about Goodwin. Other pictures are illuminated by the same fitful British Columbia sunlight. A few show him a little older, a little wearier. This one seems to capture his youth, even innocence. Karl Coe of Cumberland told an interviewer, looking at the photo, “You see, he looks a timid lad.”

“He was a little bit of a guy with red hair. He wasn’t healthy,” Donetta Rallison remembered. “There was nothing to him when you saw him. He seemed to be very meek and quiet.”

Quiet and timid he might have been, but Goodwin already showed promise as a tough, smart political and union organizer. The labour movement’s success rate in those years for direct action, including strikes, was low. In his nearly twelve years in Canada, as rank-and-file striker or union official, Goodwin would in a sense lose every battle and win every war. Every strike he took part in failed to achieve its short-term goals, yet had long-term effects on local working conditions. But the sunlit 1911 photo reveals none of this, only an oblique blue-eyed gaze westward, upward to the hills. Whence cometh my help would not readily occur to Goodwin, a strong socialist and immune to religious cant. Events proved the psalm untrue in this case, anyway. In July 1918 those hills would bring not help but destruction.

Looking more closely at the snapshot one sees that his jacket, worn around the hem and grey with coal dust, has been made for someone inches taller. The narrow-legged cotton dungarees hang loose. His legs are bandy, perhaps from crouching to heft shovel and pick in coal seams so low that men occasionally have to be pulled by their feet from their working places. The trousers are creased; underground, he wears them rolled above his boot tops to keep them dry. Alternating dust and damp are bad enough without courting lung diseases like the dreaded tuberculosis, widespread among coal miners. Only the hobnail boots, well-made and well-kept on his small feet, show quality. Scots miners call them “tak-ye-ta-bits,” as useful in back-alley brawls as in mine work. But Goodwin also owns more elegant clothes. He wears the light grey suit with a white shirt—its detachable collar rounded in the fashion of the day—and a pale silk tie. The worker in hand-me-down pit clothes on a Cumberland porch is also the debonair young man in a convention group photo taken earlier that year.

Albert Goodwin stood a slight five feet six and a half inches, short even by the standards of malnourished European immigrants. Two team photos taken around the same time show him as a soccer player: well-proportioned and athletic, but not robust.

The photo reveals nothing of Goodwin’s health. “They say he had consumption, very poor teeth, very poor health all the time,” Karl Coe said. “He wasn’t a very strong man, you know. He was quite frail, actually.”

“I don’t know how he ever worked, he was such a frail fellow, even as a kid I remember that. I don’t know how he got along and done as much as he did.”

Poor teeth among working-class English immigrants usually resulted from a starchy, sugary diet and ignorance of dental hygiene. An acquaintance later described Goodwin’s teeth as rusty-looking stubs; they must have given him constant pain. He also reportedly had ulcers. But most serious by far of Goodwin’s complaints was lung disease.

Tuberculosis or consumption was—in Cumberland still is—mentioned in whispers. Nearly always fatal, it was a leading cause of death in Canada at the time. The disease results from poverty, overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions, poor nutrition, stress, air pollution: all the industrial revolution’s assaults on the human body. Rest, nutritious food and good hygiene were the main treatment for “the white plague” before the development of a vaccine in the 1920s. In the early twentieth century, TB patients from privileged families might recover at private sanatoria. TB patients without means died a lingering death, consumed by their disease. An industrial lung disease, pneumoconiosis, was equally common among miners working in dusty conditions without adequate ventilation. Blacklung or miner’s TB, the coal miner’s equivalent of the silicosis found among hardrock miners, is a common form. Like tuberculosis, blacklung causes lung lesions, progressive breathing difficulty, pain, weakness and—if untreated—death.

Goodwin’s lung disease, later described loosely in non-medical terms by lay people, may have been tuberculosis or pneumoconiosis. No one can now be certain. In 1911 he was healthy enough to play soccer, swim and carry out a coal mine job. Yet a 1918 newspaper account said that his ailment was obvious even to those not informed of it; he probably suffered conspicuous shortness of breath and coughing attacks. By 1918, after sixteen years of mine work, he may have been too weak for heavy labour. All this was to be critical in the last year of his life.

None of this was apparent, perhaps least of all to Ginger Goodwin, on that 1911 day when he directed his ambivalent smile toward the island’s mountain spine, where one hillside probably carried more trees than the whole South Riding of Yorkshire, his birthplace.

Albert Goodwin was born 10 May 1887 to Mary Ann Goodwin, formerly Brown, and Walter Goodwin, a coal miner, in the small town of Treeton near Rotherham just northeast of Sheffield. Albert was a popular name at the time. It derived from the Old English Athelbeorht, which meant “noble and shining.” Anglian kings ruling the area that was later Yorkshire bore the name as early as the late sixth century. The name Goodwin was equally ancient, and equally Anglian. Pre-Christian English interpreted Godewine as “good friend” or “friend of goodness;” later Christians interpreted it as “God’s friend.” Walter and Mary Ann Goodwin probably knew little history. Like thousands of other English parents, they were naming their son after the beloved husband of Queen Victoria.

Goodwin had at least two brothers, a newspaper later claimed. Elsie Marocchi of Cumberland recalled seventy years later that he arrived with a brother who died young of tuberculosis. When a friend provided the details for Goodwin’s death certificate in 1918, he knew of no living relatives. Friends later agreed that Ginger never spoke to them of his family or childhood. Pansy (Jimmy) Ellis said, “I never knew him as anything but Ginger, and I knew him pretty near all the time he was in the country. Never, never heard him mention about when he was a young fellow in the old country or anything.” He wouldn’t be the only young man to emigrate alone, unwilling to talk of his past. England, the family, the grey stinking skies, the poverty and sickness, the hateful class system—all fell behind in the wake of sailing ships and steamships bound west, always west.

Karl Coe, who remembered Ginger as a “big brother,” had only a vague idea about his origins. “I always figured he’d come from Yorkshire, because him and Joe were such pally friends.” Joe Naylor was from Lancashire. Canadians confused the broad midlands and north-country English accents; their different intonations carried similar social and economic messages. Goodwin was later identified as having a Cockney accent, perhaps because of this confusion about old-country dialects and his largely unknown past.

In August 1906 Goodwin boarded the SS Pretoria as a steerage passenger in England, bound for Boston and Halifax. The passenger list recorded a minimum of information on the young immigrant: Albert Goodwin, nineteen, single, miner, English, from Yorkshire, destination New Aberdeen, able to both read and write. He was one of 110 steerage passengers, many of them bound for New Aberdeen, Glace Bay and other Cape Breton Island mining communities. Most had jobs arranged. Upstairs in second class was Lily Goodwin, twenty-six, miner’s wife, with her two small children Olive and Watts, from Chesterfield, Derbyshire, about twenty kilometres south-west of Treeton. Lily was the wife of Watts Goodwin, whose entire family eventually settled in Alberta. She may have been a distant relative by marriage, but Goodwin was a common name in the English midlands. The Pretoria steamed into Halifax at 9:45 p.m. on Sunday, September 2, the day before Labour Day.

In 1907 and 1908 Albert Goodwin lived at 471 New Aberdeen in Glace Bay (George Goodwin from Chesterfield lived nearby at 362 New Aberdeen). By 1910 he was boarding at Caledonia. His move from company housing to a boarding house probably resulted from an event that turned the Nova Scotia labour movement inside out for two years. In July 1909 the American-based United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), having by their count organized 95 percent of the Cape Breton miners, called their first Canadian strike.

The violence and distress that followed are remembered even today. Sydney’s annual police report for 1910 includes—in addition to the usual drunkenness and bawdy house offences—a sizeable list of assaults, refusals to move after the Riot Act was invoked, fighting, obstructing police officers, unlawful assembly, obstructing a man going to work, and calling men “scab.”

“These [UMWA] papers kept urging the men to strike and remain on strike,” thundered the Sydney Record, no friend of organized labour, six months into the strike. “They kept on repeating the falsehood that ample provision in the way of food, clothing and shelter would be made for all. Many of the workmen, unfortunately, took these representatives of the UMW at their word. The result we have witnessed during the past few weeks. A more pitiful one we have never been called to witness in this province. And all because of the deception practised by the UMW, its press, and paid agents and solicitors . . . ”

Soldiers were called in to control strikers and protect strikebreakers, as often happened during early Canadian strikes. To governments of the day, employers were allies and workers were enemies. Glace Bay council bickered over who should foot the bill, but the soldiers stayed on duty. Meanwhile an editorial in the Record claimed that the strike was a ploy by the UMWA to put control of Canadian workers in American hands, and ultimately to raise and stabilize American mine workers’ wages. Just when Montreal was bidding on a major coal supply contract, the strike forced Nova Scotia mine operators to discuss their pricing structure openly, the Record said, “The very secrets our American competitors are paying money to get in order to underbid our Canadian business just sufficiently to get the contracts.”

Wilfred Gribble analyzed the strike in the Western Clarion, the Socialist Party of Canada’s newspaper, as a party organizer in Vancouver in 1912. “This was a wage dispute. It was an argument between buyers and sellers over a just price for labour power . . .

“I might remark here that any dispute between employer and labour is always a wage struggle. Whether the men are asking for higher wages, shorter hours, or better conditions, it is always asking more material advantages for the same work, and these material advantages always mean money.

“The miners thought the trouble was with wages. They did not know that the wages were fixed by laws of supply and demand, and, therefore, beyond control either by labourers or owners.

“They said, ‘If you will not pay us more for our labour power we will take it out of your mines,’ and they did so. Now, if every man in Canada had had a job they would have won their cause. Then they would have been stronger and would have had the right to higher wages.

Instead, Gribble wrote, the owners imported labour and broke the strike. “They had the power, therefore they had the right.

“These 5,000 able-bodied men were beaten by a mere handful of men, inferior to them in nearly every way, because they fought on the wrong field. Dollars were the weapons, and the capitalist has the most dollars. Votes should be the weapons and labour has the most votes.”

Goodwin probably left Nova Scotia in 1910, like other union miners, blacklisted and penniless. Some of his Cape Breton Island friends—the Boothman and Weir and Patterson and Walker families among them—had the same notion of heading west.

“They all grouped together. The Walkers were there, and Arthur Boothman, and my uncle Tom. They all seemed to move away together, up into the Crowsnest to work, and then they moved from the Crowsnest up to here,” Jim Weir said, though he couldn’t remember hearing Ginger Goodwin travelled with them. “The others just seemed to be a tight group. When one moved, they all moved.”

“We knew him east, too, in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. My brother knew him but I didn’t know him,” Gert Somerville told me. Her brother Arthur Boothman, when the Cape Breton crowd had settled again, would become a coal digger and star soccer player for another coal town, another island.

Alberta was a disappointment to some Cape Breton miners, although coal mines pocked the face of the new province—carved from the Northwest Territories only five years earlier—from Edmonton south to the American border. Nova Scotia and British Columbia produced mainly steam coal, hard and clean-burning anthracite, for industrial use; Alberta produced mainly foul-burning soft bituminous or lignite for domestic use. Large mines in the Crowsnest Pass and Drumheller operated year-round, but most workings were small and seasonal. Mine owners expected miners to work underground in the winter, then hire on as farm hands or labourers during the prairie summers when householders bought no coal. The prosperous mines scattered through a score of towns and hamlets of “The Pass” attracted blacklisted Nova Scotia miners, but just as quickly sent many on their way. UMWA District 18 struck in 1911 for better wages and union recognition. Union miners, faced with a choice between scabbing and starving, pushed on. Some pushed west, still farther west, to Vancouver Island.

Ginger Goodwin reached Cumberland in time to play for the town’s championship soccer team in September 1910 and to appear on the 1911 voters’ list as Albert Goodwin, miner. He was the only Goodwin on the list, but others would turn up over the next few years. The Marocchi bakery’s cash book listed among its credit customers Robert Goodwin, somil. The Italian-speaking accountant, with his typically phonetic interpretation of names and descriptions, possibly wrote Robert for Albert as he wrote “somil” for sawmill. A July 1910 Cumberland Islander story lists men and women who chipped in to help a recent Courtenay widow. An H. Goodwin, at Fraser River Mills Logging Camp near Cumberland, contributed fifty cents, roughly a quarter of his day’s wages. Neither H. nor Robert Goodwin appears elsewhere in Cumberland records, which were notoriously inaccurate and variable for names. Ginger Goodwin may have worked in a sawmill or logging operation near Cumberland when he first arrived. Securing a mine job, no matter how experienced the worker, was often a matter of crossing the right palm with silver.

Albert Goodwin worked in Cumberland’s Number Five pit. The company and union records are long gone—“Goodwin’s name was all over them,” said one of the crew that destroyed them with the miner’s recreation centre in 1969—but he left other traces. A few years later in another coal town Ginger Goodwin gave his occupation as miner and hired on as a mule driver.

By his own account, Goodwin first went down the pit in 1902 when he was fifteen. He was literate, and that was no mean accomplishment for a coal miner’s son. He probably had several years of education, either free or paid for by his parents. The Goodwin family must have been more solvent than others who sent their boys to work younger still. Boys had to be twelve or fourteen to work full-time, depending on local labour laws. When a family needed another wage-earner, however, boys would pad their ages. Foremen, often in return for gifts or outright bribes, would wink at their lies. Ginger Goodwin worked four years in the Yorkshire mines in some capacity. It was long enough to get a grasp of the coal miner’s skills, long enough to learn to cross the neck rag tight, keeping out some—not enough—of the pervasive and fatal coal dust.

Cumberland’s Number Five pit lay scarcely a mile from the sunlit porch with its kerosene lamp bracket beside the plank door. After the shutter’s snap, after he clattered down the steps into the dusty street, Ginger Goodwin was only a few minutes’ walk from work in probably the world’s most dangerous coalfield. In 1902, World Mining Statistics (quoted in William Bennett’s book, Builders of British Columbia) listed deaths per one thousand persons employed in coal mining: 1.29 for the British Empire, 2.38 for foreign countries, 3.38 for Nova Scotia and 4.15 for British Columbia. Vancouver Island, The Pass, Cape Breton, South Wales and Pennsylvania all had their explosions and fires and deadly vapours: blackdamp, whitedamp, firedamp, afterdamp. Some debated which mines were most lethal, but it was an abstract argument, since each field killed hundreds or thousands during a scant century of coal extraction. Island miners went underground all the same. In 1911 they had little choice.

Coal miners called British Columbia’s first strike over working conditions in 1855, just a few years after mining began on Vancouver Island. For another century the island coalfield produced handsome profits at the cost of grisly mine disasters which crushed, drowned, suffocated or dismembered workers. Strikes were endemic. Miners were clannish, proud and quick to help each other on or off the job; even so, they needed more than personal self-help networks. As individuals they were helpless against wage rollbacks, discrimination, arbitrary dismissal, unsafe practices, job-buying, all the injustices of the nineteenth century workplace.

In December 1911 Vancouver Island became District 28 of the United Mine Workers of America. Cumberland Local 2299 organized energetically with meetings, lively dances, concerts, moving picture shows, smokers and other entertainments. About 150 men signed up. One member was Joseph Naylor, a coal digger in Number Four pit and a former organizer for the militant Western Federation of Miners. Another 250 union miners—many of them blacklisted elsewhere in Canada and the United States—had recently arrived in town. One of them was probably Ginger Goodwin.

Older, seasoned miners formed the executive of Local 2299, but Goodwin may have assisted in the membership drive. Johnny Marocchi remembered him as a union organizer. Cumberland knew him before Vancouver and Trail knew him, before he was a strong public speaker. He used to go into the woods alone to work on his technique. Standing on a high-cut stump left by pioneer loggers, he would address an unresponsive audience of other stumps. His self-taught public speaking skill repaid his efforts. People later said that he spoke forcefully about the wrongs he’d suffered and seen as a worker. Even the military police in 1918 noted “speaks volubly and assertively” on his search description.

“He used to go out and practise speaking all by himself out in the bush,” Cumberland’s retired barber Peter Cameron said. “Just so he could get up in a crowd, I guess.”

Passionate intensity and a highly-coloured style distinguish his few surviving letters. He used graphic examples, and deployed a dark humour that must have been especially biting at first hand. His rhetoric was industrial-strength socialist doctrine about slaves of the system and capitalist imperialism. Complex, sometimes shaky, his grammar revealed the extensive vocabulary of someone with little formal education but a voracious appetite for knowledge and ideas. Clearly he put words on paper just as he spoke them, in a rush toward meaning and effect. A labour newspaper later described Ginger Goodwin as an informed and well-spoken socialist, a gentleman in the best sense, whose language was inoffensive even to an unsympathetic audience.

Socialism flourished in Cumberland as early as 1903, when the town sent delegates to a gathering of twenty-one diverse groups in British Columbia which planned to form a national party. The convention resolved to stand firm on “the one issue of the abolition of the present system of wage slavery as the basis for all political propaganda.” A year later the British Columbia groups founded the Socialist Party of Canada, with Vancouver organizing Local 1.

Ginger Goodwin, like Joe Naylor, was a charter member of Local 70 of the Socialist Party of Canada in Cumberland, another party member recalled years later.

“Oh, he was a socialist,” Gert Somerville said. “A real good one.”

British Columbia socialists and trade unionists would fall into bitter schism within a few years, but in 1912 they shared common goals. The executive officers of the new UMWA local, despite the international union’s relative conservatism, were all socialists.

Local 70 met at least once a week to discuss “the principles and programmes of the revolutionary working class.” Their book list included Class Struggle in America, Ethics and the Materialist Concept of History, and Karl Marx’s Capital—weighty off-shift reading.

“Labour produces all wealth, and to the producers it should belong,” the party platform stated. “The present economic system is based upon capitalist ownership of the means of production, consequently all the products of labour belong to the capitalist class. The capitalist is therefore master; the worker is slave.”

About a hundred men and women joined, though not all attended every meeting. Three members pooled their funds to buy an old store opposite the post office on Dunsmuir Avenue, which they turned into a meeting place. This drew the mockery of local newspaper editor E.W. Bickle, a former miner who had profited as notary and city clerk. In his weekly Cumberland Islander he suggested, when someone painted “socialist hall” on the meeting place door, that an E in the second word would be more appropriate than an A. The socialists fired their own verbal barrages in return, though not on the pages of the Islander.

“Bickle run it. He was never much as far as the men were concerned,” Peter Cameron explained. The Islander usually supported the company and attacked the union and its organizers.

Children of the Cumberland socialists remembered waiting impatiently for interminable meetings to end. Elsie Marocchi told interviewers, “[Ginger] used to come down there with all the other radicals, as we used to call them, and they used to have meetings there. All us kids used to be locked in the bedrooms. We weren’t allowed out, so we started to say, Oh, if only they would go home. Well, eventually they would start to sing . . . ”

The workers’ flag is deepest red, it shrouded oft our martyred dead. And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold their life blood dyed its very fold.

“The Workers’ Flag” signalled adjournment and, for the children, escape.

“They used to hold socialist meetings. One time Tim [Walker] asked me . . . I went, but I wasn’t interested in socialism. Oh boy, they were going at it,” Johnny Marocchi told me. He knew Ginger well. “At nighttime we’d meet in Shorty’s poolroom and talk. And then of course he was a union organizer, he worked for them. I was in business, I was at the Big Shop in the grocery store. But we’d meet there and we’d talk.”

Like other Cumberlanders, Johnny listened with interest to touring speakers such as American UMWA organizer Mother Jones and later Canadian communist Tim Buck. He never joined the socialist party. “You see, I was a capitalist. I’d sit on the fence.”

His friend Ginger stood firm on the revolutionary socialist side of the fence. His activism separated him not only from the social mainstream but apparently from his own family. No one survives who can explain how and when this happened—arguably before he reached Cumberland.

Goodwin’s 1911 photo is faded and speckled with age. Even so, grey gradations in the black-and-white print show his neck rag was a lighter shade and a different hue from his coat and dungarees. Clean, carefully wrapped, it seems as deliberate a statement as the oval pin on his left lapel. We can safely guess it was, like his hair and his politics, blazing socialist red.

A less serious-minded Ginger Goodwin—ruffled, breathless, warily regarding the camera—looks out from the soccer team photo. In the grey island mid-day the Number Five Thistles are grouped before Cumberland’s usual backdrop of evergreens stunted by coal dust. One player is darkly handsome, another is a jug-eared teenager, several are smiling. They are sweaty, but scrubbed pale: coal diggers, mule drivers, rope riders, they spend their waking hours down the shaft at Number Five mine. Even in their twenties already a few have the sloped shoulders of men who spend their days at heavy labour.

The goaltender and fullbacks stand with arms folded across their black jerseys, moustachio’d bruisers who gleefully shut out haughty Nanaimo and trounce effete Victoria. At their knees crouch the three glowering midfielders. The five forwards pose artfully in front, two wingers leaning languidly against the inside forwards, the centre sitting up straight behind the scuffed ball.

Inside left forward and inside right forward, those are the goal scorers. Today they’d be called the strikers, the lads who drive the ball into the net once midfielders or halfbacks and wingers have set up the shot.

Agility is more important than size in soccer, which is nominally not a contact sport. The two smallest men on this team, neatly matched for size, are the inside forwards. The inside left, dark and lean, is still remembered by a few old-timers as one of Cumberland’s finest players. Arthur Boothman’s mine nickname was Duffy; his nimbleness earned him his soccer nickname of The Spider. The inside right looks chunky by comparison, clasping his shins with square hands. He’s been out on the playing field or riverbank enough to tan between his freckles. His knee socks are slipping and his high soccer boots look the worse for wear. Unlike the others he hasn’t combed his hair, as though he’s decided soccer is no place for the bourgeois cult of personality. For his flaming hair or his spirited nature, on or off the field, he’s called Ginger.

Soccer, fitba to Cumberland’s Scots miners, was clean, fast and elegant as played by near-professional island mine teams in 1911. Coal companies always somehow found work for good footballers as a matter of corporate and civic pride. Soccer was important. Ben Horbury said, “When Nanaimo came to Cumberland to play football half of Nanaimo come up. They had special trains.”

“We played to win. We trained hard. We practised hard,” Chuna (Charles) Tobacco told a Cumberland student who interviewed him for a 1975 school project. He was speaking of basketball; his words apply equally to soccer. “We wanted to be the best.”

Goodwin still occupies a place in Cumberland memories as an exceptionally good player. This may just reflect the town’s lasting affection. Johnny Marocchi and a handful of other people told me Arthur Boothman was a dazzling player. Ginger played soccer as he played pool, Johnny said, well but not brilliantly. It was a pastime. “He wasn’t what you’d call a top-notch player. You see, Canadian Collieries used to bring in players, semi-pros.”

Though Johnny thought otherwise, Goodwin and Arthur Boothman may have been among these star imports. A September 1911 Islander story lists among recently signed Number Five Thistles players “C. Walker, A. Goodwin, and A. Boothman from Tottenham Hot Spurs, Runners up of the English League.” The “Spurs” for years ran circles around other soccer sides. There was professional English football and, in a class apart, there were the Tottenham Hotspurs. Even today they hold their own in North London, less magnificent perhaps than eighty years ago, but still trailing wisps of glory. If the three young arrivals from Cape Breton Island (or even just Boothman) had indeed played for Tottenham, they would be great assets to the Thistles. The Islander story promises “This team with good support will show first class football to the people of Cumberland during this coming season.”

A gold soccer medal is one of Goodwin’s meagre possessions that found its way into the collection of Cumberland Museum. Its complex florette gleams with red, white and blue enamel spelling out CNP. Engraved script on the back spells out Albert Goodwin, Soccer, Crow’s Nest Pass. He won it either on his way west to the island in 1910 or during a four-month stay a few years later.

Ginger always asked Arthur’s sister Gert Somerville about her children. “‘Are they playing football yet?’ That’s all he talked was football. And I said, ‘Not bad.’ He said, ‘Tell Arthur to get after them, make them play football.’”

Nine feet of split cane, a long true cast, days dappled with river light, the silver arc of a fighting fish: this other off-hours pleasure of Ginger Goodwin’s offered a contemplative and solitary counterpoint to football’s noisy camaraderie. With Joe Naylor he fished the island lakes and rivers freely, unchallenged, as he could never have fished England’s gentry-owned waters.

Barber’s Hole and Meeker’s Hole on the Puntledge River which slides tawny and talkative down to tidewater; glacier-fed Trent River, frothing through alpine meadows; wild green Cruikshank River and Rees Creek; Tsolum River, Tsable River, Little Oyster River, Comox Lake, Willemar Lakes: today the waters draining the Beaufort Range lie beautiful and remote at the unsettled heart of Vancouver Island. Seventy years ago they were almost unimaginably lovely to poor folk from the black English midlands, the desolate Scots and Welsh coal valleys, and industrial Northern Italy. Birds sang. Panthers sunned on rock outcrops. Bears combed the blackberry patches. Rivers seethed with game fish. If Cumberland’s coal mines tunnelled near the boundaries of hell, solace lay south of Jerusalem on the Perseverance Trail and north along Paradise Creek to Paradise Meadows.

“We used to walk to Courtenay and stay four or five days on that little sandy beach in the park.” Karl Coe remembered his fishing trips with Ginger Goodwin and Joe Naylor when he was a young boy. “There used to be a nice beach in there, at the top end of it. We used to go down there and camp right there, put our tents up there, and start fishing from there.”

“If we knew it was going to be good weather we wouldn’t take the tent. We’d just sleep right on the beach. Of course that was wild, in those days.”

Goodwin’s fishing rod is now in the Cumberland Museum; he left it to Karl, who still kept it in his house when we talked not long before he died. Its nearly ten-foot length is phenomenal by modern standards; a strong wrist and good co-ordination are needed to drop a trout fly where you want it. Its solid brass lock-screw ferrules prevent the tip from shooting off on a powerful cast. The work of a renowned English rod maker, Henry J. Wilkes, it probably cost Ginger Goodwin a month’s pay. Karl said, “He prized it very well. He was a true sportsman when it came to fishing.”

Ginger and Joe were both strictly trout fishermen, though Joe sometimes stooped to fishing with a worm instead of a fly on his fine Hardy fly rod. Other equipment was more rudimentary, like Ginger’s simple wood and brass reel. Rubber hip-waders and multi-pocketed fishing vests were for well-heeled swells; the miners waded from pool to pool in their trousers and hobnailed mine boots.

Karl was only seven or eight years old on the earliest of these trips to the Puntledge River near Courtenay, and used to stay in camp while his “big brothers” fished. “It was too far for me to walk, and they’d be in and out of the river, wading across the river, back across to the other side.” “Joe he’d go up the river all the time toward the power house, Ginger he’d go down toward the Tsolum River, he’d always fish that part. And I would stay in camp playing around on that beach there all the time. Joe would say, Don’t worry about him, he’ll be all right,” Karl said. “Ginger used to worry. What are you going to do, are you going to be there?”

Joe knew the boy’s self-reliance. On an earlier grouse poaching trip, Joe and Karl’s father Richard Coe were lost for two days and a night in the wild mountain country between Cumberland and Alberni. Karl sat in their camp, playing with a friendly mink, yelling for his dad once in a while but unafraid.

The friends were always trying to best each other in fishing. “I can remember one time when both of them were coming back to camp. Joe had a pretty nice catch, he caught several like this [in the timeless fisherman’s gesture, Karl spread his hands to demonstrate trout of two or three pounds] and he was bragging away there. Pretty soon Ginger walked into the camp, and Joe said, ‘Christ!’ He had several nice ones, and besides, they were big steelhead. Joe said, “Hey, I’m not going to try to fish upriver again, the hell with them.’ They was always trying to beat each other, you know. And Joe said, ‘Oh, I quit. I’m not going to try to beat you no more.’”

Ginger, having perhaps lost one brother and left the rest of his family in Yorkshire, seems to have found another brother in Karl. In Joe, fifteen years his elder, he may have found another father. An anonymous letter to the UMWA Journal, if not written by Goodwin, at least expressed his feelings that Joe “had practically come to be looked upon as a father for his wisdom and judgment in all matters was asked and worked upon.” Karl said that whenever they were both back in town from organizing trips, Ginger and Joe were almost inseparable. Union and political organizing, mine work, soccer and dances were an adult world; Karl knew Ginger mostly from the child’s world of fishing. “But when I was with him he seemed to be a very jolly man, easy to get along with, that’s why he always treated me so good. Just like a big brother.”

“He always seemed to be happy and talkative when we were fishing down there, when he come back in—what have you been doing, and how are you feeling, and what did you do today? All that kind of stuff. Just simple stuff, nothing serious about any politics or unions or anything like that.”

Karl Coe told often and eloquently of those long-ago summer days by the Puntledge: camping under the stars, Ginger’s strong swimming as a young man, Joe’s jokes and friendly teasing. Karl’s memories endured most of a century and still survive in others’ telling, still illuminated with a great poignancy.

“They used to kid me quite a bit down there in the pool when they were fishing. And one time when Ginger used to swim across that river, he’d take me on his back and swim across the river.” Once when they were halfway to the far shore, as a joke Joe shouted out to let Karl go in mid-stream. “I damn near choked Ginger to death before we got to the shore.” Karl laughed. “He said, Let go, Karl! Let go, I can’t breathe! By heck, I’ll never forget that.”

Ginger Goodwin’s workmates and comrades in Cumberland had names he’d never have heard in Yorkshire, and accents to match. There were Austro-Hungarians like Johnny Marocchi, Welsh like Dai Davis, Norwegians like Ole Oleson, Americans like Richard Coe, a Finn who changed his name after a dockside incident he’d rather forget, Chinese, Japanese, blacks and Slavs. Many had old-country English voices like Joe Naylor and Arthur Boothman. In a virulently racist era, across language and ethnic distinctions, a startling assortment of people proudly called themselves Ginger’s friends. They would remember him all their lives.

Sam Robertson: “He was my chum, we were good friends. My wife and Ginger were good friends, too.”

Pansy Ellis: “He was a well-liked fellow, not only through his union activities, he had a great personality with him.”

Jack Horbury: “Dad always said that Goodwin practised what he preached.”

A former Cape Breton miner who knew Ginger as a greenhorn immigrant saw in him a carefully engineered reputation and a towering ambition. Chas Walker was secretary of the Socialist Party of Canada local for years, a soccer club official and a fellow mine worker, yet he didn’t know his friend had lung disease. He thought Goodwin was swell-headed and wanted the limelight as a labour leader. Walker’s observations are exceptional in the flood of unconditional praise. Overreaching pride, the Greeks’ hubris, since time out of mind has brought down the mighty. Did Goodwin fall of his own weight, having overestimated his self-created importance? He was described as quiet and meek, even furtive, yet he thought well enough of himself to endure hostility to his radical activities. It seems an unworthy view of a man loved by friends and often respected by opponents, but Walker’s criticism was not the only hint of this, as events were to unfold.

“He was very popular with the girls,” labour organizer Bill Pritchard of Vancouver said.

“He loved to dance. He liked to have a good time, all right,” said Karl, whose big sister Mabel used to dance with Ginger at Cumberland’s Saturday night gatherings. A local orchestra played the popular music of the day: sentimental waltzes, spirited ragtime. It was all above-board, even innocent. Cumberland was too close-knit a town for young men to get away with much licentious behaviour, at least overtly. Karl said, “They all had good words for Ginger.”

“He was a nice dancer, and he attended all the dances,” Sam Robertson said.

“He was a willing sort of a person. If you were going to the show, he’d pay your way into the picture show. He was a generous sort of a man. If you’d got a book he’d ask you what kind you had. He said, Do you mind if I have a lend of it?” Gert Somerville recalled. The socialists sometimes held informal meetings in her house when she was a young wife with small children; her brothers Arthur and Bill boarded there. She would make tea and excuse herself; she’d heard enough discussion around her parents’ dinner table about the rights and wrongs of socialism and the labour movement.

“He was a wonderful young man. I don’t know if he was ever married or not, I couldn’t say. I don’t think he was.”

Gert said she never looked closely enough to notice the colour of his eyes. “But I always remembered his hair. You could see the stars just shine . . . I said to him one time, You’ve got hair something like some of our kids have got . . . shiny red hair. He said, I don’t have red hair! And you could see the red sparks every once in a while all over his head. And he couldn’t see it . . . He wouldn’t even look in the mirror.”

Ginger Goodwin looked in the mirror before he stepped onto the porch for his 1911 snapshot, at least long enough to slick down his hair. Such sparse information survives about his life that the photograph itself is a remarkable document. Perhaps its most remarkable feature is that it exists. What event, what circumstances, led to this photo?

Another early photo in the Cumberland Museum shows the Number Five miners and mule drivers and bosses standing and kneeling in grimy rows, squinting into the camera’s gaze. All look weary: Chinese and Japanese workers ranked behind polyglot white Europeans and one black worker. The hastily daubed placard says they’ve broken a pit record for tons of coal loaded, 524 tons in eight hours. Such an event called for a photo of mine workers still in their coal dust.

But for most occasions—sending a portrait home as proof of prosperity in the new land, an engagement, a marriage, a birth—working class people donned their best, or borrowed, clothes to venture among the potted palms and painted backdrops of a photographic studio. They didn’t want to be recorded for eternity in the coal miner’s hobnails and dungarees, the factory girl’s apron and clogs. Even once Kodak box cameras were commonplace, they would at least scrub themselves shiny and pose on the sidewalk in Sunday finery.

Albert Goodwin was different. He was proud to be a worker, and he was proud of a thumbnail-sized enamelled metal oval on his left lapel. On his way to drive a mule or load coal in Number Five pit, a friend—they were all friends then—photographed him with his new United Mine Workers of America membership pin. It was so bright its details burned themselves to overexposure on a lost negative, brighter than his hair, brighter than the sun.