MIGRATIONS
By Leigh Hirst
I took Mom by the cemetery to visit some people. This took a while as there are a lot of gravesites to look at. All of the members of my four antecedent families are buried there. Except my great, great grandfather, John Hirst, whose headstone is in the wall at the tiny Pioneer cemetery further down the hill.
The Nanaimo cemetery, to me, is the finest piece of real estate in the city. It is situated at a high point and commands a fine view of the harbour and adjacent islands. The people there have a beautiful place to rest. We started with the Hirsts, William, Ada, Dyson and my father James (Mom wept briefly and left this grave quickly) who fall in direct line from the old guy who is buried at the place down the hill.
Then we visited Shentons, and then the Rutherfords. We took a brief detour to look up Annie (Brimble) Rutherford, Mom's Kiwi aunt. Finally we came to her father's, Andrew Parker's, grave. It happens to be where her mother, Lily, rests as well.
In the old days, the view from this graveyard included, in a number of locations, the surface structures of the coal mines that defined Nanaimo. I can remember, as a child, at the funeral of one of my relatives, gazing across the city at the skeleton of the old Number One mine - the smokestacks, the tipple and the huge spindled elevator wheel - unused for six years and in decay as the mine had been closed in 1939. It was the last of 55 different coal mines that had operated Nanaimo over a period of 90 years.
All of these buried relatives either came from or had their roots in Britain. In the middle of the 19th century, at the apex of the Industrial Revolution in England, the borders of the caste system were under siege. Victoria's reign had embellished the sliver slim layer of the noble class. Beneath that, however, was the still tiny but burgeoning upper class, vitalized by the titans of the new industries, some of whom were buying their way into nobility. Then there was the larger, but within the overall social context small, middle class - the merchants, professionals, artisans, and intellectuals (people like John Ruskin and Friedrich Engels), who were roiling the surface of this enormous sea change that was rising through British society.
Beneath this surface, the veritable vast bulk of the iceberg, was the relatively new, desperate working class - the workers in the brickyards, foundries, iron mills and textile mills - the Revolution's cannon fodder. This working class, from rural origins, had its own subtle caste distinctions. At the top were skilled people, men who could use their hands to create useful objects and were even literate. At the very bottom were the coal miners. The "Untouchables." Such was the lot of the coal miners and their families that they were shunned. A significant portion of the British working population (once there were over 3,000 coal mines in operation at the same time in Britain), they tended to keep to themselves. They were uneducated and mostly illiterate. They intermarried. They drank too much and they sang too loud. They were hard people.
A few years ago, I went down into a coal mine, a pit, at Caphouse in South Yorkshire - 500 feet into a black chill - and a retired miner explained what used to happen down there. The surface buildings had been converted into a museum which housed a myriad of interesting machines and artifacts. The walls were hung with illustrations and quotes. This is one I remember,
"Even within a mixed working population, there was a barrier between the miners and others. The shift system, the knowledge of shared danger and the miner returning home in his pit dirt each day to be scrubbed clean by his waiting wife, created a very obvious difference."
John Hirst was born in 1825. He was raised in the Gawber slums of Barnsley (Black Barnsley) in South Yorkshire. As a young boy he worked in the nearby Huskar Colliery in Silkstone near Barnsley. In 1838, 26 children working in this pit were killed when the mineshaft flooded. Eleven were girls, the youngest Sarah Newton, age 8. Of the 15 boys the youngest was Joseph Birkenshaw, age 7. His brother, George age 10, was also killed. Most of the children were 10 years old and younger.
A member of the Shaftsbury Commission investigating conditions in the Barnsley pits in the 1840's wrote this,
"The men work in a state of perfect nakedness and are assisted in their labours by females of all ages, from girls of six years old to women of twenty. These females being quite naked down to the waste . . . one of the most disgusting sights I have ever seen was that of females dressed like boys in trousers, crawling on all fours with belts around their waists and chains passing between their legs."
"All of my sisters have been hurriers. I hurry in the clothes I have now got on, trousers and a ragged jacket. The bald places on my head is made by thrusting the corves. I hurry the corves a mile or more underground. They weigh 300 cwt. I hurry eleven a day. I wear a belt and chain at the workings to get the corves out. The getters that I work for are all naked except their caps. Sometimes they beat me if I am not quick enough. The boys take liberties with me." Patience Kershaw, age 17, testifying before Ashley's Mine Commission, May 15, 1842.
Friedrich Engels wrote at this time about the physical circumstances of the miners, their utter exhaustion, especially the children wandering home from the pits. The miners worked 12-hour shifts, never seeing daylight for six days a week, for many months of the year. They did piece work and were paid by the ton of coal produced. Thus they sometimes employed their families. Wives and children as young as age four worked as a unit. Their lives were brutal. Their bodies by maturity were crippled and diseased. Men became old by age 28. Life expectancy was in the early 40's.
This is the existence from which John Hirst, his wife Harriet, and their infant daughter, Louisa fled. First to the Ballarat gold rush in Australia in 1855 and then, eight years later, to Nanaimo - the rough, remote outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company, where coal had been discovered.
All my people were coal miners. Refugees from the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Yet they didn't escape because it emigrated abroad with them. They followed the coal mines and they found them to be as godforsaken in the new world as in the old. They drifted on sea and on land out across the world. The original family, the Hirsts, arrived directly to Nanaimo by sailing ship.
The others sailed to Pennsylvania and New York, then moved through Montana, Wyoming and Colorado and over to New Zealand and Australia before eventually settling in Nanaimo. I have often wondered why Nanaimo? Why did my families cease their wanderings there? Perhaps it was because it was a major coal center. It was the main source of coal for the west coast of North America, San Francisco being the major market, and it made Robert Dunsmuir's fortune. (He became the richest man in British Columbia and possibly all of Canada). Nanaimo, also, was a real community, not just a camp that would disappear once the coal ran out. As well, a coal miner could own his own home in Nanaimo and not be vulnerable to eviction from a company house should he go on strike. His wife could have a vegetable garden and some properties were large enough to keep domestic animals - all of which provided a degree of stability to what was essentially a life of bare subsistence.
Still, the life of a coal family, while better than in Britain and in the coal camps of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, was hard. Work was dependent on coal markets and pay was substandard. Attempts to organize unions were thwarted by the importation of cheap labour, mainly Chinese, by the owners.
The coal was gassy. Methane gas explosions were common. One, at Number One mine in 1887, killed 148 miners, decimating a town barely 1500 people in size. During a 25-year period, from 1884 to 1909, the coal mines killed an average of 25 men each year. The Book of the Dead in the Nanaimo Museum lists the names of 700 coal miners. Andrew Parker was one of them.
I was born in 1939, the year the last coal mine was shut down. I grew up in the Townsite, a newer, up-market part of Nanaimo. My school, North Ward Elementary, was across the bridge close to downtown, and it drew children from the adjacent working class neighbourhoods. Tough kids. Coal miners' kids.
On cool, wet days, or when it snowed, my mother dressed me in a woolen, hip-length coat, breeches and rubber boots. My legs were wrapped, from the ankles to the knees, in puttees - the long, four-inch wide strips of woolen cloth, khaki coloured, that soldiers in World War I wore. Thus bundled and bedecked, the statement was clear - I was not a coal miner's kid. Instead I was a rich target for my classmates who wore non-descript, even ragged clothing. I quickly learned to hit back. And I learned things about Nanaimo that I never heard at home.
It wasn't that Audrey, my mother, was ashamed of her background. It was just that it was very painful. She and my father, Jimmy, had bootstrapped themselves up out of the coal mines, as had most of their friends. Dad quit school in grade eight and he vowed he would never work in the mines. He had a number of jobs before he found one in the funeral business. He eventually bought his own business. Mom worked alongside him. They were a fun-loving couple with a host of friends, most of whom shared the same background. They loved to dance. Life seemed good. The coal mines were never mentioned.
So, until I went to school, my perceptions were a bit illusory. It was as if, in 1939, a curtain had been dropped on the past. When I was old enough to understand, I crawled under it. There, for years, I have poked around in the scant remnants that remain. I have tried to cobble together a history, most of it oral, from people often reluctant to speak. The tragic events of my father's family are for another chapter.
There were many paupers' graves in the Nanaimo cemetery. In recent years some of the modest headstones have been replaced. Still, many remained. Including the one on my mother's father's grave. It was a rough piece of concrete with the name PARKER stenciled into it. Nothing else. Not another word.
I didn't know my grandfather. He died eight years before I was born. His wife Lily remarried a few years later. Stanley Frye, a jovial longshoreman from Seattle, was the man I knew as my step-grandfather. They lived together in Seattle until he retired and then they moved back up to Nanaimo.
Andrew Parker, in 1883, was three years old when he embarked with his parents from Liverpool on a sailing ship, bound for New Zealand. They survived a shipwreck off the Irish coast. They then sailed aboard another ship, the Wild Deer, which delivered them, after five grinding months at sea, to Dunedin.
In New Zealand, the Parker family grew to 10 children. My sense is that Andrew was the proverbial "black sheep." He was the only one of his siblings to leave New Zealand. In 1900 he turned up in Nanaimo and went to work in the coal mines. He married Lily Rutherford, a coal miner's daughter. Not long after, during a prolonged strike at one of Robert Dunsmuir's mines in Wellington, he decided to move back to New Zealand.
Thus a retinue of Parkers and Rutherfords, including Lily's parents and brothers, packed up and headed 8000 miles south. The men worked in the coal mines near Greymouth, on the South Island. Andrew and Lily had two sons and my mother was conceived there. One of the Rutherford boys married Annie Brimble, the local publican's daughter. Then, inexplicably, they all packed up and came back to Nanaimo, bringing Annie with them. She might have felt, even if it was voluntary, that she’d been carried off by a band of coal-digging gypsies. She never saw her Kiwi home again. This was in 1911.
The returnees settled in South Wellington, near Nanaimo, where Andrew went to work in another one of Robert Dunsmuir's mines. He was able to buy five acres there - a fine property that slopes down to a small lake. He built a rough dwelling. No electricity, no running water, an outdoor privy, wood stoves for heat. Audrey, the fourth child, was born (eventually there would be seven). They raised livestock, a cow, pigs and chickens. They had two horses, Babe and Pete.
In 1912, the Nanaimo coal miners went on strike. In the annals of the Canadian labour history, this strike was the most violent and the longest. It lasted two years and when it was over, families had been decimated, many miners were sentenced to prison terms and most businesses in Nanaimo were bankrupt.
The worst incident occurred at Extension in August 1913. There, armed strikers confronted strikebreakers, also armed, who had built barricades around the pithead . The ensuing gunfight lasted all day and ended only with the intervention of the militia. Martial law was declared in Nanaimo and adjacent communities. Soldiers manned machine guns on street corners. Hundreds of striking miners were arrested.
Andrew Parker was a striker. He didn't work for nearly two years. His house was torched by a mob of strikebreakers as were most of the houses in South Wellington. At age three Audrey, my mother, lived in a tent for a year.
World War I ended the strike and the war effort increased the demand for coal. Andrew and Lily were able to rebuild their lives. Work in the mines was steady. After the war, coal markets softened and work was sporadic but by this time the years of toil underground had taken their toll on Andrew. Though not a broken man, he had become hard. My mother remembers his violent temper and his harsh treatment of his sons. Once, the story goes, he beat, with a chain, a horse that had kicked him.
Yet within that temporal community, he was respected. He was a labour organizer and he was chair of the local school board. He, being a Kiwi, introduced rugby and he coached the local team. He had a sense of humour. When one of his horses, Pete, died he buried him at the bottom of the property. Unfortunately the hole wasn't deep enough and when the gathered assembly heaved him over the edge into his grave, he landed on his back. So for months the view from the porch of the house was Pete's four legs sticking up out of the ground like forlorn fence posts. Andrew told his sons to make sure they did a better job of burying him.
In 1931 he was working in the Extension mine when a large outcrop of coal, a 'niggerhead', fell from the ceiling of a tunnel and crushed him. He was one of the very last men to die in a Nanaimo coal mine. Hundreds of people attended his funeral, following the cortege through the streets of Nanaimo.
It was a pleasant day, the day I took mom by the cemetery. It turned out to be her last visit there. As we stood looking at that simple piece of concrete that read PARKER. I could sense her suppressed frustration. Her pain. Her anger. Yet, to my surprise, she began to reminisce.
1931 was a tragic year. First her grandfather, Jimmy Rutherford died and her grandmother Sarah then came to live with them. At the time mom was 20, working in Nanaimo, but still living at home, sleeping in the same bed with her two sisters. Then Aunt Annie (Annie Brimble, the abducted Kiwi) died during a menopausal birth. Her baby daughter, Bonnie, was also taken in by Andrew and Lily. Then Andrew was killed. My grandmother, Lily, was left a penniless coal miner's widow, with her own mother and five children at home, plus her brother's infant daughter. My mother and her older brother had jobs, which helped hold things together. This was during the Great Depression.
When Audrey finished talking, I could see some relief. The long years of silence had finally ended.
Lily proved to be a resilient woman. She died at age 92, outliving two more husbands. I remembered her, in her final year, asking Mom who her, Mom's, father was.
Mom said, "Andrew, your first husband, was my father."
"Oh, yes," Lily replied. "I remember him."
So Andrew Parker was buried in a pauper's grave with only his surname as identification. When Lily's second husband, Stanley Frye, died, he was cremated and, conveniently, his ashes went into the grave with Andrew. Lily defied the grim reaper for many more years, but when her time came she too was cremated and she joined her first two husbands in that common grave. There they were. All buried together. All labeled PARKER.
"Mom," I said, "We should do something about this."
She agreed. Now a fine smooth marble headstone graces the grave. It is divided into three separate compartments. The center bears Lily's name and her birth and death dates. On her right the same appears for Andrew. And Stanley Frye is on her left. Underneath their names the inscription reads:
United in Life
Resting Together
Andrew told his sons to bury him properly. It took a while but now, I hope, he can rest in peace.
Epilogues
One: Today South Wellington looks much the same as it would have looked before the coal mines were dug there. It is a bucolic little cove, untouched by Nanaimo's urban sprawl. The Parker property still slopes down from Gomerich road to the lake. There is no longer a house, as there are few houses left in South Wellington. Across the lake, still visible, but increasingly overgrown with trees and vegetation, is the slag heap, the last vestige of what brought my families to Nanaimo - the coal mines.
Two: Shortly after the new headstone was installed, I asked my mother if she knew anything about her father's relatives in New Zealand. Remarkably she had remembered all of the names of his nine brothers and sisters. Lily had told her about them. She even knew the married names of Andrew's sisters. He had corresponded with them until he died. Then, as Lily tried to cope with her new, unfortunate circumstances, contact with the family in New Zealand was lost.
In 1991, armed with the nine names, I put an advertisement in the Dunedin (NZ) newspaper, asking the descendents of these people to contact me. I received eight replies, five of which were real. (The other three "wannabes" probably thought that some rich Canadian had died and a lawyer was trying to locate potential heirs).
When the first letter arrived, from a lady named Ruth Beveridge, I felt a bit of a rush, like a tingle across my forehead. Contact! After 60 years of silence. Ruth was my mother's first cousin, one of 27 first cousins in New Zealand, 16 of whom were still live. They didn't know she existed and vice versa.
Later that year my wife Gilly and I traveled to New Zealand and we have been back twice since. Each visit was like a continuous family reunion. We traveled from Auckland in the north to Dunedin in the south, visiting our newfound Kiwi relatives.
Leigh Hirst
November 25, 2002
Footnote.
Hurrier -
a person, generally a young woman who, while crawling, pushed a corve full of coal from the workings along the floor of the tunnel to the elevator shaft.
Corve -
a smooth bottomed tub used to transport coal along the underground tunnels.
Workings -
a place at which the getters obtain the coal from the seam, or face, by blasting, picking and digging.
Getters -
men, often very young, who dig the coal at the workings.
Copyright © Leigh Hirst.
All Rights Reserved.
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