| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

John Douglas Belshaw, Colonization and Community: The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2002).

COAL WAS THE BASIC FUEL of the 19th century. Highly prized as a source of power for factories, railways, and ocean steamers, it was also used to heat dwellings, generate electricity, and provide light. The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) began to mine coal on Vancouver Island in the mid-19th century, after Aboriginals brought local deposits to its attention. For the rest of the century, the industry was dominated by two companies, the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company, successor in 1862 to the HBC at Nanaimo; and the Dunsmuir family, which developed collieries from 1869 at Wellington, Extension, and Ladysmith; and further north at Union. The industry declined after World War I, although mining continued for another generation.

Vancouver Island miners were noteworthy for their heterogeneity: Aboriginal inhabitants, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and newcomers of European background all laboured at the mines. Among these groups, the ethnic British formed a plurality. And it is on them that Belshaw focuses.

Colonization and Community is serious and well-crafted, reflecting fifteen years of reflection on the University of London dissertation on which it is based. It fills a gap in the historical literature, which has paid scant attention to working-class emigrants from the United Kingdom. And it is the unique scholarly monograph on Vancouver Island miners, although it complements some fine popular works — history written without footnotes — notably Lynn Bowen's two books.

Belshaw also makes a strong contribution in his use of demographic data. He challenges the conventional view of this frontier mining community's overwhelming maleness and youth, offering evidence of family migration to the region, a significant female population, and high numbers of children. He also demonstrates high levels of geographic mobility and occupational change among the mining population.

The book is organized thematically: chapters are devoted in turn to the development of the Vancouver Island coal industry; the situation of potential emigrants and actual immigrants; the work of the mine and the standard of living it yielded; class and race-based conflicts in these coalfields; residential mobility and occupational change; and finally to the culture of the coalfields.

Considerable immigration was needed to meet the strong demand for labour at the large mines in operation on Vancouver Island by the 1870s. But as a site for British emigrants, it had considerable drawbacks: its extreme distance, the cost and discomfort of the voyage, the difficulty in returning home. Success in luring immigrants was limited, as was the ability to retain them once they arrived. Belshaw argues that British miners arrived with high expectations — which were disappointed. They responded both with workplace protests and by leaving the mines.

Viewing high nominal wages as a major lure, Belshaw seeks to compare the standard of living of the immigrant British miners with their experience in the United Kingdom. Because white boys were not nearly as widely employed in Vancouver Island mines as they were in the United Kingdom (or in contemporary Nova Scotia for that matter), immigration failed to produce expected improvements in living standards because mining families had recourse to relatively few secondary wage-earners and faced a higher cost of living on Vancouver Island.

Unique in late 19th century Canada was the significant Asian presence in British Columbia. Familiar with contemporary racist discourse, white miners levied a series of allegations against their Chinese counterparts: they depressed wages, took jobs from boys, discouraged European immigration, caused accidents in the mine, and acted as strikebreakers. European miners pushed for Chinese exclusion — with mixed success. Between 1850 and 1914 there were over a dozen significant strikes, reflecting a pattern of militancy in the coalfields in defence of white miners' skills and their authority in the workplace. These strikes were frequently marked by violence: the Dunsmuirs called in the militia to aid evictions from company housing in 1877, 1890, and 1901. In contrast to flourishing mutual aid societies, trade unions failed to gain a purchase in the Vancouver Island coalfields — in part because of the implacable hostility of the Dunsmuirs — until the Miners and Mine Labourers Protective Association emerged at Nanaimo in the 1890s.

Miners moved. They migrated from place to place. And, at least on Vancouver Island apparently, they moved out of the mine to other occupations in large numbers. Using a variety of evidence, Belshaw concludes that roughly half of the mining workforce persisted over any given decade. He claims additionally that "perhaps all [miners] — sought out alternatives to work in the pits" (160); and that one-half of Vancouver Island miners moved themselves or their sons out of the mine to operate farms and other small businesses like boardinghouses and shops, as well as to other occupations. (165)

Belshaw's treatment of the miners' culture aims to demonstrate a colonial "recalibration" of British practises. The rough and the respectable co-existed in the coalfields: drink and gambling (prostitution is unmentioned) co-existed with churches, friendly societies, the Mechanics' Literary Institute, amateur theatre, brass bands, schools, and the rituals of funerals. The displacement of cricket by baseball is emblematic of how the British became British Columbian.

The book has weaknesses. Miners' identity was tied closely to their mastery of a craft, their control over entry to that craft, and the customs associated with their experience of the mine. All were based on their experience underground, which Belshaw makes modest efforts to explain. Another aspect of his treatment of miners' identity is problematic. The claim that on Vancouver Island men's identity as miners was "fluid and temporary" (174) undercuts the book's over-arching argument about the making of the British Columbian working class. How can a working class be made if the mine was a way station on the route to a farm or small business? Is Belshaw not developing a position here on how the working class of British Columbia failed to make itself?

I am also uneasy with the overtones of the condescension of posterity heard in anachronistic observations of "squandering one's youth" (175) as pit boys; and in the description of "grimish clusters of humble homes." (213)

While the book is solidly researched, it reflects limited use of the extensive coal mining literature from Nova Scotia. While Belshaw rejects arguments about "western exceptionalism" in Canadian working-class history, he fails to develop the comparisons that would allow for an authoritative treatment of the question. The British-dominated Vancouver Island coalfields resembled in many ways contemporary Nova Scotian coalfields.

He also overlooks key 19th century trade journals like the Canadian Mining Review, the British Columbia Mining Record, or the Transactions of the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers. The age of the original research is reflected in the failure to use the 1901 manuscript census, accessible to researchers since 1993. Only the 1881 manuscript census appears to have been exploited in depth. And there is a tendency to slip into examples from the United Kingdom when suitable evidence from Vancouver Island is wanting.

Despite these reservations, this book warrants a place in the libraries of historians of the working class.


Robert McIntosh Library and Archives of Canada

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