Tag: 1928 Page 2 of 4
This illustration accompanied a story by Frederick Griffin on a railway that was discontinued.
By Gregory Clark, December 1, 1928.
This is the Time of Danger for Four Thousand Fishermen On Ontario Lakes
For four thousand men of Ontario this is the time of danger and grim omen.
Out of the northwest, any night or day now, may come without warning a gale that will turn to a blizzard and a tempest that will turn to a hurricane.
And when it comes, these four thousand must at once go forth and place their lives in jeopardy.
We think of sailors as being the men who now must walk with circumspection. But the great lakes fishermen, as far as the perils of their craft go, are in a class by themselves. When this November storm season comes, a whole department of government goes into action to warn and safeguard the sailor. But in their isolated fishing stations the fishermen do not receive meteorological notices.
When the blizzard comes, the sailors steer their ships for shelter. But it is when the hurricane breaks that the fishermen have to leave their little harbors and go forth to save their fortunes.
Despite the fact that one-third the surface of Ontario in water, we are landlubbers to the core in this province, and we do not grasp the extent and range of the fishing industry which is not only a great wealth producer, but one of the most colorful and romantic features of Ontario life.
We do not understand that a fisherman has an investment of fifty thousand dollars or more entrusted out there in the gale-swept reaches of the northern lakes to the cruel mercies of wind and wave.
One pound net, fresh from the makers, costs $600. When that pet is fitted and laid, anchored and buoyed, with all the infinite labor that we will shortly describe, its value, as it stands there off some rocky point, is in the neighborhood of $1,500. Many fishermen have the maximum number of these large pound nets, which is ten. That makes $15,000. His steam tug costs around $25,000. His three or four smaller gas boats total up another thousand or two. His fish-houses, ice plants, wharves, pile-driver and all the rest of the impedimenta necessary to netting fish from the water in paying quantities, run up to an unknown average, but they will bring the whole far above fifty thousand dollars all told.
And a storm can ruin it all. The terrible storms of last year came the second of December, and fortunately most of the fishermen had their nets safely hauled ashore and stowed for the winter.
But a storm that is a storm can take those costly nets and not only wreck them but utterly destroy them. They will not be seen again. Three years ago, that great August storm ruined many men and brought others close to ruin. Nets swept away, boats wrecked and smashed, lives lost.
34 Million Pounds of Fish
It is to try to save their property that the fishermen have to go forth when all the rest of mankind run for port. Epics are for the time being out of fashion in literature. But when the deeds of men once again transcend in popular fancy the psychoses of flappers male and female, then someone with the gift may find the material he is seeking along the north shore, from Killarney westward over the wide sea, amid white cliffs and gray sullen water where, curiously enough in this advanced day, men lie in port in fine weather and only go out to their task when the storm gods stream along the sky.
Ontario’s four thousand fishermen take their fish in a number of different ways. The pound netters and the gill netters require big outfits to lay and handle the nets. Last year there were about 1,300 pound nets, some of them belonging to big outfits that had ten, and some in singles and twos and threes belonging to more modest fishermen.
Over seven million yards of gill nets were used in the great lakes, from the St. Lawrence to the Nipigon last year. Try to picture yourself setting just a hundred yards of gill net down into three hundred feet of water, all properly leaded and buoyed, and then imagine seven million yards.
A hundred thousand hooks were also licensed last year. These are the long lines set in deep water, with hooks every two feet or so along the line, baited with small herring. Only a little outfit is needed for this kind of set-line fishing, and sometimes it gets very big results. A few seines, hoop-nets and lesser tackles are used by individual small fishermen.
These four thousand fishermen use over three million dollars’ worth of nets, boats and other plant. They own 118 tugs, over a thousand gas boats and launches and a thousand sail and rowboats.
On Lake Ontario is, strangely enough, the biggest fishing community, for while the lowest lake of the chain is naturally supposed to be fished out, from a commercial point of view, there are immensely rich fishing banks at the eastern end of the lake, down past the Bay of Quinte and the outlet to the St. Lawrence. Over 870 men are employed, mostly gill net men with gas boats, and their take of fish does not rank with other regions, being only around $400,000 a year.
Lake Erie and the Georgian bay each have about 750 fishermen working on them, counting the north channel as part of the Georgian bay. They both have something like 35 big tugs operating, but Erie has over 550 pound nets while the Georgian bay men have only a little over 200. Their take of fish both run over six hundred thousand dollars each.
Last year, altogether, they took over 34 million pounds of fish out of the great lakes. By far the greater part of this was sold to the States, shipped by highly-organized shipping service to New York, Chicago and other cities.
The biggest catch was of lake trout, seven and one-half million pounds, with whitefish at six millions, herring and the two kinds of pickerel at over five million pounds.
Many of these fishing outfits are located at out-of-the-way corners of the great lakes. And none of them is more picturesque than those along the north shore of the Georgian bay and the north channel.
The Fisherman’s Daily Routine
Just at the close of the season, when the phenomenal spawning run of the lake trout and whitefish were on, we visited Killarney. On Joseph Rocque’s tug, we went out and watched them lifting their nets and going through the daily routine of the fishermen’s life.
Rocque has eight pound nets. A pound net is a complex and elaborate affair. It cannot be set anywhere. Its location has to be a specially selected one, somewhere along the deep shores where the trout and whitefish cruise by in their eternal pilgrimage in pursuit of the herring.
Out from the shore is run the lead, which is a strong net sometimes several hundred feet long and as deep as the water is. The first of Rocque’s nets we visited had a lead three hundred feet out from shore, and its depth was eighty feet all the way. It reached from the bottom of the lake to the surface.
This immense spread of net was supported every forty or fifty feet by an immense wooden spar, made of as many spruce poles as were needed, spliced strongly together and driven by a pile-driver into the sand at the bottom of the lake. Then it was guyed with strong ropes attached to regular ships’ anchors, attached to each upright pole. Rocks were fastened to its bottom to hold it trim and upright so that all the fish that came along that shore, on reaching the net, could not pass under or over it, but had to follow it outward until they got into the toils of the pound.
Try to imagine the task of setting that long lead, eighty feet deep and hundreds of feet long. without the services of a deep-sea diver. Against current and tide, wind and weather, that lead has to stand trim and true from spring until late autumn.
The lead runs out to the pound. Two other great fins of net reach outward, called the heart, to prevent the fish from swinging outward round the “pot” – as the pound is called by the fishermen – and these also are anchored and guyed in place.
The “pot” is simply a huge bag of net, square, thirty-five feet to a side, and eighty feet deep. or shallower or deeper as the water requires. Just an immense sort of landing-net.
In the side of it, facing the long lead out from shore, is a small opening, about three feet square, framed with metal. The fish that come feeling their way along the lead bump up against either the outer net wall of the “pot” or else the out-flaring wings of the “heart,” and in due time, such is the doggedness of fish, they discover this opening which they think is the way out. But it is, alas, only the way in.
Every two days, the fishermen come in their tugs, towing a sort of small fish barge. They run alongside the “pot,” three or four men get into the smaller craft, and taking one side of the great bag, haul upon it little by little, the bag is shortened and they have at the surface a thrashing and floundering netful of fish.
Then with hand-nets they scoop the fish out of the shortened bag into their boat, rejecting the under-sized ones and tossing them back, unharmed, into the water. That is one beauty of pound nets. They do not injure the fish as gill nets or hooks do. And furthermore, if great storms come up that prevent the fishermen taking the fish from the nets, they are in no way spoiled, swimming freely about in the big space of the bag. Whereas, in gill nets, if the eaten is not attended to within a certain reasonably short-time, the fish die and spoil. That is why, when you buy fish, you should look for those that show no net marks on them, by which they strangled and slowly died, or were half dead when taken from the nets, but try to get the firm fish that were leaping with life when taken out of the pound nets and promptly killed.
Nets Thousands of Yards Long
For as soon as the net is lowered again into the water, the barge comes alongside, the fish are thrown up aboard the tug into waiting boxes. And while the tug steams to the next net to be lifted, the fishermen clean the fish right on deck and have them ready to be immediately packed in ice on reaching the home wharf.
“How big do the hauls come?” we asked Joe Rocque.
“They vary from day to day. Some hauls we will take only a box or two of fish, but other times, almost a ton of trout and whitefish will be lifted. Record hauls for one pound net would be something over two thousand pounds. Maybe nearly three thousand.”
It takes about halt to three-quarters of an hour from the time the launch arrives at the net until it sets forth to the next net. In foul weather, the time may be much longer, for in handling the nets, nothing must be done that will endanger its security or tear the net. Home from the nets, the fish are promptly packed, a hundred pounds to the box, in chopped ice to await either the steamer that calls regularly for the shipment, or to be taken by the fishermen themselves to the shipping point. The north shore’s catch is picked up by a regular steamer service of the Dominion Transportation Co., carried to Owen Sound, where refrigerator express cars await the fish to be rushed to New York.
From the water in Georgian bay to the market in New York city, it is only thirty-six hours.
The gill nets outfits use nets hundreds and perhaps thousands of yards long, narrow four foot nets, that have lead sinkers on the bottom edge and wooden or tin floats on the top edge. And these are sunk down into all depths of water, even to 300 feet, where they rest, upright, on the bottom. And the fish, swimming along the bottom, run their heads into the meshes of the net and are caught, gilled. They run in as far as they can go, try to back out and are caught by their gills.
These gill nets can be lifted by hand from small craft, and are also lifted and laid by donkey-engines aboard steam tugs. No more than in the case of pound nets do the gill nets have to be taken out of the water. They are raised to the surface, the fish freed and taken out and the net is re-set in the depths.
This has to be done at all seasons. In the late fall, when the silver horde of whitefish and herring are on their spawning run, they come right inshore into ten feet of water and less, on to the shoals to spawn. This season is also the season of storms. But the gill net fishermen make their mightiest haul at this time. They set their nets in shallows. This naturally means grave risk, for nets in shallow water are likely to be torn to ribbons in a gale. On Fitz William island the fishermen camp along the beaches, their watch-fires burning all night, while the men lie ready to take to their boats at the first hint of a November gale, to let them and roll them up aboard, until the gale abates.
On other fishing grounds, such as Papoose island, out from Killarney, the fishermen stand by their nets as much as possible, ready to lift them.
A Risky, But Free Life
At no time is it not a dangerous business and in the fall it becomes a decidedly risky one, because then to save your property you must risk your life, or preserve your life ashore at the risk of losing your outfit.
Lifting and rolling up a gill net, even if it is miles long, is a simple task compared with putting a pound net away at the command of winter. The huge bag of the “pot,” the vast expanse of long and deep lead, have to be lifted and at the same time freed from the eighty-foot poles, from the anchors, rocks and guys. The spliced poles have to be freed from the bottom where the pile-driver sent them, and the anchors lifted. The whole huge apparatus is hauled ashore to dry. Then it is repaired and rolled up and carried back to the fishing station for the winter. Joe Rocque employs eight or nine men on his eight nets during the setting and final lifting, and four or five men during the season while taking the fish. The winter is spent in these remote little villages repairing nets, cutting timber for new ones, repairing boats, building fish boxes and doing the heavy work that prepares for merely the dangerous and fast work of the harvest season.
They make good livings. We heard of some outfit-owners along the shore who cleared, over and above their expenses, twenty and twenty-five thousand dollars cash last year, which was a good year. Yet this year has not been good. The catch has been poor. Bad weather has prevailed. One storm can wipe out the better part of the handsome cash profit.
No motor car has ever left its track at Killarney. It has no movie or other modern attractions. The men who own these investments of many thousands of dollars and who sometimes clear as much cash as would make a good-sized Toronto business man take a winter trip to Europe or Florida at least, go about in their soiled overalls, unpretentious men, who put their winnings right back into the pot.
The day we went out first with Joseph Rocque it had blown all night and morning, but had eased off in late afternoon. The north Georgian bay was sounding its deep call, the call that has filled countless sailors with forebodings. The sky was dark and the clouds tied raggedly above the heaving water.
Watching the sky, Rocque finally said he would lift three of his nets, those beyond a partly sheltered arm of the north shore. He himself, boss of the outfit, had the wheel of the steam tug and drove it heaving out into the dark sea.
The gulls rose up from nowhere and pursued us in ragged, veering platoons. An eagle joined them and flapped heavily along in the hope of picking up a fish that might have been gilled in the great bag. A few are. It was a sort of Landseer sky, moving and grim.
“It’s a free life,” we cried from the shelter of the wheel house. When city men are slightly awed by the wild spaces of the elements, they mask themselves in a great reverence for freedom. “It’s picturesque and you never know when you have to move. It’s a free life!”
“That,” called Rocque from the wheel house, “is why we follow it.”
Editor’s Note: $50,000 (the cost of the whole investment in fishing) in 1928 would be $830,000 in 2022.
By Gregory Clark, September 8, 1928.
Human Spiders Who Weave Steel Webs in Clouds Are Inoculated to Height.
“What are you doin’ with your good pants on?”
The boss of the steel men stares curiously at the young man who has just come into the shanty.
“I’m quittin’ the job.”
The young man in the good pants looks straight at the boss. Above the shanty looms the colossal structure of the new Royal York. The air is filled with the shouting of the crane’s engine, the far tattoo of rivetters, the warlike sounds of steel going up.
“What you quitting for?”
“I lost me balance,” says the young fellow in the good pants. “I need a little rest up.”
“Get your pay Saturday,” says the boss. “Fired, you get paid right now. Quitting, you get paid Saturday with the rest.”
“See you later,” says the young man, walking out.
This young chap was a climber. A bridgeman. A steel worker.
One of his jobs, besides carrying planks, is to walk three inch beams in a gale of wind three hundred feet above the earth, with the earth glaring up at him beneath his feet and nothing between.
We’ll say they have got the sixteenth storey of spidery steel up. The cross pieces all laid. Then they set up the uprights for the seventeenth storey. Dozens of steel beams sticking up into the sky.
How do they get the beams of the seventeenth laid across those uprights?
With the derrick, you say.
Sure, with the derrick. The derrick hoists the giant steel beam up into the sky and lowers it slowly gingerly.
But who is there to take hold of it, to guide it to fit snugly on the bleak tops sticking up? Who Is there to pin it into place ready for the rivetters?
Why, a couple of climbers.
Up each of those bare, grim steel beams sticking into the sky shinnies a climber. He takes hold of the upright with his arms and his legs and climbs it to the top. There he clings, a hundred, two hundred feet in the sky, with the wind blowing and the earth far below sort of holding out its broad arms, and there he clings while the derrick men, with much waving of gauntleted arms, ease the vast swinging beam down, down, an inch at a time, until the climber can guide it to its pocket, slip in the pins, and then slide down to what he thinks is terra firma again.
One Mistake is Too Many
Thousands, tens of thousands of Toronto people have been watching the bridgemen on Toronto’s great new skyscrapers the last few months. Every once in a while the crowd standing back and staring skyward seemed to be thicker than usual. That was when a climber was shinning up a beam to make a joint. That was when the supreme stunt of the steel worker’s life was being enacted. Maybe you were not lucky enough to see it.
What does it feel like to be perched on the tip of one of those uprights waiting while an unseen derrick guides a couple of tons of steel towards you through the sky?
“It feels all right,” says the climbers, one and all. They are alert, nervous men – not stolid as we had expected.
“But how about nerves?”
“Eh?”
“How about being afraid of falling?”
“How can you fall when you’re hanging on?”
“But you might slip.”
“Sure. We might git hit with lightning.”
And they look at each other with that puzzled look that men exchange when they are tied up in conversation with somebody who doesn’t understand the a, b, c of things.
For Hughie McGovern, the superintendent of the steel men for the Dominion Bridge Company, who put up the bones of The Star building and the Royal York, assures us that there is nothing to climbing.
“You see,” he says, “in steel work you start at the ground. No, below the ground. With the foundations. Then you go up one storey. Then two. Then three. And so on, day by day, week by week, doing the same things forty feet below ground, forty feet above ground, and so on up. And you get used to going up gradually. If you went up that way you wouldn’t mind being up a couple of hundred feet. It’s because you are down here on the flat all the time that you feel giddy up high.”
And he is right. Those human spiders climbing about their steel web in the sky are inoculated to height. The runner does a hundred yards to begin with. Then stretches out. The soldier is put under fire little by little until he can stand a pandemonium. The climber goes up a beam at a time and as forty feet does not seem much higher than thirty feet, so hundred and ninety feet is not much different from two hundred feet.
Yet, as a rule, these climbers only make one mistake. And one is too many.
The lad in the good pants who said he lost his balance and thought he would take a rest gave us a hint of what four hundred deaths per year amongst steel workers in America means. He merely staggered for an instant. Luck was with him. He caught his balance and did not take the plunge. But he quit the job for a while, maybe forever. Because in most ventures in this life you can make more than one mistake. You can make many mistakes. But the steel worker can only make one.
“It still is a venturesome career,” said the junior Mr. Evans of the Dominion Bridge Co. “But safety laws and insurance company interests have done a great deal to take out the old daring. For example, in the Royal York job we are using ten thousand dollars’ worth of planks alone. Fifteen car loads of heavy planks. As one floor goes up we follow with the planks, making a floor right underneath the up-going steel. In fact, you will hear real bridgemen, the elite of steel men, complaining bitterly about raising a little steel and then spending a whole day hauling planks. But if a man falls off the steel nowadays he only falls a few feet to the planks below.”
And a foreman who permits his men to take chances, to ride the beams as they swing through space on the derrick, or to engage in any of the short cuts is soon in trouble. For the insurance companies keep their eyes on steel work, not to mention the management of the companies who have to pay their dues to the workmen’s compensation funds.
The way the workers get to the top of these tall structures is not by elevator, but by leg-work. They go up the ladders that roughly connect one floor to the other. You climb twenty ladders to get to your work and you would be ready to quit. That is how steel workers get to their jobs in the morning. They go up, a long monkey chain of them, ladder after ladder – ladders made of a bit of scantling with cross pieces made of any old waste bits –
And there is no planking except on the second to last floor! Is it any wonder that when necessity brings a steel worker down to earth during the day he wants to ride up again on a derrick load of beams? Or on the “ball.” The ball is the large iron counterbalance that comes down when a load goes up and goes up when the line comes down. A good man can stand on it and get a free ride to the top when nobody is looking.
Yet all the planks in the world do not cut much ice when the upright beams that have to be shinned are the corner beams, hanging sheer hundreds of feet straight above the world.
“How does it feel, really, when you find yourself clinging with arms and legs to the top of a beam on the corner, say, twenty storeys up?”
“It feels just the same as when you are clinging to a beam thirty feet up. You got a good hold. That’s all there is.”
“Yes. But you’ve got to use at least one hand to guide the cross beam that’s coming in and pin it.”
“One hand. You can use two hands. Haven’t you got your legs wound round?”
“And a – a wind blowing?” we asked.
“Wind swings the beam on the derrick, maybe. But it don’t bother us.”
“Doesn’t it feel queer to look down?”
“It would to you. But not to us. We’re used to it. It would feel mighty queer to us if the boss said go and git a story for The Star Weekly.”
Indians Make Good Climbers
The Dominion Bridge crews are made up of British-Canadians, Indians, French-Canadians, Americans and various nationalities from all the world. Bridgemen come in all varieties.
“What’s the good point about Indians?” we asked Hughie McGovern, the boss.
“They make great climbers and rivetters. The Caughnawaga Indian reserve is just across the river from the company’s main plant at Lachine. The young fellows come and get jobs with us when they are sixteen, seventeen. They start early. That’s the secret of good steel workers. A man of forty never got into the steel game. Indians are a quiet and easy-going race. They don’t get worried or excited. That makes them good at steel.”
“What is the biggest hazard in steel work? What is it the boys talk about around their lunch? Is it fear of falling?”
“No,” said Mr. McGovern. “As long as it’s solid the boys don’t care if it is three inches or six they’ve got their feet on. The big fear in this business is that something will fall.”
“On them?”
“No. You see, everything they work with is heavy. Tons of steel. Well, if you have a ten ton crane lifting a fifteen ton piece something might give. If everything is bolted up tight and the crane is lifting something well within its capacity and radius there is nothing to worry about. The fear that disturbs a steel worker is that something is going to give way or fall or slip. As long as everything is solid they don’t worry. They’ve got their feet and their hands and they know they can trust them.”
But when something does go wrong there are lot of small cars headed somewhere the next day.
For example, when anybody does all of the steel work everybody quits for that day. The whole job goes into a curious kind of industrial mourning.
The steel workers are nomads. They go where the steel is. A big company like the Dominion Bridge that has series of jobs laid out from end to end of the country keeps its crews together in almost army style. But they mooch along from job to job on their own, and in their own cars. Sometimes with the family aboard.
“Married men make good steel workers. They’re more careful.”
But there is a good deal of superstition and understanding in the game. If a man quits because he thinks the job is jonahed or has a jinx on it the foreman is not going to be nasty about it the next time that man comes for a job on another location. Every man is allowed his opinions as to jinx.
“Do many men quit as the result of nerves?”
“Yes, there is a regular proportion who quit,” said Mr. McGovern. “We don’t always know the reason or inquire it. A fellow makes a slip or comes near falling and he is entitled to quit. In fact, we don’t want nervous men on the job. They not only can’t perform their own jobs, but they make others nervous, too. So when a man quits he knows best.”
Have Faith in Their Feet
The seeing of an accident is one of the best reasons for a man quitting. If a man falls there are usually a few witnesses, and whether they lose their own nerve or whether they really believe in jinx they take it as their right to quit if they feel like it. But the majority of climbers are cool-headed fellows with supreme confidence in their own plain ability to look after themselves, and they carry on the next day, walking their beams, climbing their spidery minarets, as confidently as ever.
Nowadays falls do not always spell the end. A fall of ten or fifteen feet to the planks that are following faithfully below means a broken leg or arm more often than a broken neck.
“And they get pretty good at catching hold of things as they fall,” said Mr. McGovern. “There are lots of close shaves, when man slips and catches hold of the beam and hauls himself back on.”
And does that man quit? No. His hardest lot is to bear the kidding of his friends up aloft. They want to know if he is getting old. Or drinking too much, or the wrong kind. They suggest he change the brand.
A few brief conversations with climbers as they file past the pay office wicket, a little self-conscious at being asked absurd questions:
“Did you ever come near a fall?”
“Sure,” says an Indian. “Yesterday. I slip on a banana peeling on King St.”
And a big laugh at the expense of the press.
“Sure, I’ve fell,” says an Irish lad. “But I hit on some loose planks and only broke some ribs.”
Another said he had teetered once up a hundred feet on a bridge, teetered and swayed, with his arms waving to recover his balance, and for several seconds, he doesn’t know how long, he faced death on rocks far, far beneath. Then he recovered his balance and sat down. He wondered if he would ever be able to stand up on a three-inch beam again. Even to get back to solid structure so as to make the earth at last. But the foreman yelled at him and he got up and walked ahead with his job and it has never bothered him again.
“Beams ain’t slippery,” he said. “And once you know your feet they ain’t going to play tricks with you. So you’re all right, ain’t you?”
The worst that most of them had to say was that in their careers, a derrick had given way, or a piece of steel scraped some skin off them.
“But those were in the little hay-wire outfits, not the big companies.”
The little hay-wire outfits are the small companies that have not got the equipment to handle big stuff. And no steel man wants to have anything to do with hay-wire.
So when you stand on solid pavement and watch these men moving quietly and confidently about on remote and tapered structures in the sky you need not try to imagine they are in fear of their own hands or feet betraying them, but that the steel itself or the slow swinging cranes will do the falling.
Editor’s Notes: The Royal York Hotel in Toronto was completed in 1929 and is 28 storeys tall.
“Jonahed” refers to Jonah in the Bible. It also means jinxed.
This illustration went with a story by Ceasar Smith, a regular contributor to the Star Weekly in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It made fun of what a woman looks for in a car, compared to a man.
By Gregory Clark, July 7, 1928.
When someone calls your telephone and has the wrong number, do you admit it?
Then you are missing a lot of fun. The thing to do when a strange voice says –
“Is that the butcher’s?
Is to say –
“Yes, ma-am.”
“This is Mrs. Dingus speaking. Will you send up at once a pound and a half of sirloin steak?”
Then you say, in the best imitation of a butcher you can work out:
“Mrs. Dingus. I will send no more steak up to your house until you settle your account with me.”
And then hang up smartly.
There are so many curious conversations to be expected that after while you will be waiting to hear the phone ring in the hope that it will be a wrong number.
Here is a fair transcription of a conversation I had a few days ago.
“Hello, is that Mr. Boomer’s house?”
“Yes, ma-am.”
“Is that Mr. Boomer speaking?”
“Yes, ma-am.”
“Well, this is Mrs. Giffus speaking.”
“Oh, yes. How are you Mrs. Giffus?”
“Very well, thank you, Mr. Boomer. I wanted to speak to you about that cottage.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Is it for rent this year?”
Yes, it’s for rent as usual.”
“How much are you asking for it for July only, Mr. Boomer?”
“A thousand dollars, Mrs. Giffus.”
“A thousand dollars! Mercy! Just for July, Mr. Boomer?”
“Yes. Just for July. I’ve made a lot of improvements. I’ve painted it and built two new ice-houses.”
“Two new ice-houses! Why, the old one was all right, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was all right, but the two new ones won’t do any harm, will they?”
“No, but…”
“Then I’ve put a piano in each room…”
“Oh, Mr. Boomer, you are joking…a thousand dollars!”
“No, Mrs. Giffus, I was never more deadly serious in my life. Anyway, I don’t like the way you left the cottage last year.”
“Why, Mr. Boomer! How can you say such a thing! I left it much cleaner than we found it!”
“Ah, that’s what you say, Mrs. Giffus.”
“Really. I don’t know what to say! If you don’t want to rent the cottage. Just say so. But …”
“Now I tell you what to do, Mrs. Giffus. You call Mrs. Boomer. She is the one that is mad. Not me. She just wore herself out last fall cleaning that cottage, and all those empty beer bottles . . .
“Mr. Boomer!”
“And the way the dirty dishes were left about, and the floors filthy …”
“Mr. Boomer! There must be some mistake!”
“I know there is. But you had better call Mrs. Boomer. She is not in now, but will be in in about ten minutes.”
The next time Mrs. Giffus apparently got the right number because I never heard from her again.
Another time a lady said sharply:
“Is that you, George?”
“Yes,” said I, meekly.
“When are you coming home?” she shrilled.
“NEVER!” I said, distinctly and loudly.
“What!!”
“NEVER!” I shouted, slamming up the receiver,
And I do hope my bravery helped the poor chap in his domestic relations. There are no end of possibilities to this sort of thing. You can imagine poor George coming home, a little later, and finding a meek and astonished wife. … But this is fact, not fiction.
A man’s voice said quietly:
“Is that you Mr. Henderson?”
“It is,” says I.
“I have a very painful duty to perform,” said the stranger. “This is your neighbor, Jefferson, speaking.”
“Ah, yes.”
“I am speaking on behalf of the whole neighborhood. That second boy of yours, Mr. Henderson, will have to be dealt with.”
“And who,” says I, “is going to deal with him?”
“Now, don’t get ratty, Mr. Henderson. I am speaking to you only in your own interests. You being away all week you don’t know what goes on. But that boy is really the limit. It ended to-day with him nearly killing my boy, Edgar.”
“Was it a fight?”
“Well, I suppose it was. But we can’t let children go to such extremes. He blacked Edgar’s eye . . .”
“Come, come, Mr. Jefferson! We all fought in our day.”
“Well, I won’t have it! If you don’t curb that kid of yours some of us will.”
“Who will?”
“I will!”
“Oh, you will, will you! Just let me hear of you laying hands on my son!
“What would YOU do?” demanded the stranger loudly.
“Why, I’d bust you on the nose.”
“Just try it.”
“All right, my friend, I will do it right now if you like! Come out in front! I’ll meet you right now!”
“You haven’t got the nerve!” challenged the stranger.
“Oh, haven’t I? I’ll be there in one minute!”
What happened?
Did Mr. Jefferson go out and walk up and down in front of his place, casting blood-in-the eye glares at the neighbor’s house? How long did he wait for Mr. Henderson to come out and fight? Or did he come out and see the innocent Mr. Henderson sitting quietly on his porch or perhaps tending the front garden?
It is interesting to speculate.
What are the ethics of this business? Well, if a man calls the wrong number – and in these days of the dial telephone it is the person’s own mistake that results in the wrong number – if he calls the wrong number and gets a man out of bed or up out of his comfortable reading chair to answer for the other’s carelessness then he is entitled to a little excitement.
Or isn’t he?
Cowardice merely causes that gust of pity or contempt which is the thing men fear from their comrades more than bullets.
By Gregory Clark, June 9, 1928.
Does Killing A Man Make His Comrades Brave?
What is a coward?
Where does cowardice begin or end?
These questions have recently been debated in the British House of Commons in connection with the matter of abolishing the death penalty for cowardice in time of war.
And some of the most interesting thoughts on cowardice that have ever been produced were advanced during this debate.
Are cowards born or made?
Isn’t a man who is cowardly born that way, with all the other miserable ingredients in him, part of him and his heritage, like the color of his hair and eyes, his size, his way of walking, or his ability to sing?
And if a man was made that way by God, why shoot him? Can the death penalty prevent cowards from enlisting?
Lord Hugh Cecil, speaking from the point of view of the born aristocrat, made the best plea for the death penalty.
“If,” said the noble lord, “you shoot a soldier for cowardice, that makes the whole army think that it is a shocking thing. The penalty of death has quite the unique quality of setting up a particular offence, and making people think that that is a thing which no one should do not mainly from the fear of the actual penalty but because It sets a stigma upon the offence which nothing else can do.”
Mr. Dutt Cooper, M.P., financial secretary to the War Office, if not an aristocrat himself, at least married to one, supported Lord Hugh Cecil’s view ingeniously:
“During the war,” said he, “at one time it was made a crime for which people could be sent to prison to take matches into a munitions factory. Some careless young employee, some girl perhaps under twenty, forgetting the importance of that rule, would take a box of matches into a munitions factory.
“No moral turpitude whatever was involved in it, and yet people were sent to prison for doing it, and rightly, because it was only by putting upon them some terrible penalty that you could make people realize the seriousness of the act they were carrying out.
“In the same way, in time of war, when one man’s action may betray so many others and may lead to such great disaster, you attach a penalty to it such as we are asking the committee to pass to-day.”
Whether for these or other reasons, and in spite of very strong objections expressed against the death penalty for cowardice and desertion – which is merely the effect of cowardice – the old fashioned and time-honored institution of death for the coward was preserved in the British army.
Opposing the Death Penalty
Australia went on record, at the outset of the last war, against the death penalty, and sent her contingent to the war on the understanding that the death penalty would not be inflicted – at least without reference to the government of Australia. But Canada abides by the king’s regulations and orders – therefore Canada still employs the death penalty for cowardice.
But since the war, nine other army crimes that were during the war punishable with death before a firing squad – looting, striking a sentry, sleeping on sentry post and so forth – have been deleted from the army regulations. Only two – cowardice and desertion, are left of the laws that have prevailed in the armies of the world since, you might say, Caesar’s time.
Those who were opposed to the death penalty for cowardice in the House of Commons were soldiers -not Labor members.
General Sir Frederick Hall was one.
“I do not know where cowardice starts or where it finishes,” said the general, “but I remember that during the war this point was brought home to me most vividly in the case of a schoolmaster upon whom devolved a rather difficult duty which required a certain amount of courage to be shown. I believe that that man had as much courage as many of those who did not show any fear under similar circumstances.
“I have yet to learn that there is any man, from the highest to the lowest degree, who served in the important danger zones during the war who did not experience some fear come upon him, not once or twice or thrice, but very often. It was not a question of the death penalty that kept men from showing fear. The men felt that they had a job to carry out. I do not think that fear of the death penalty affects the soldier at all; he does his job because he thinks it is his job, and I do not think any fear of the death penalty enters his head.
“When the schoolmaster I have alluded to came to me and told me the condition he was in, I saw the medical officer, and I got him sent back to the base. A week or two after he came back, and I am sure that man was no more desirous of showing cowardice than any other soldier, but fear was in his nervous system.
“He had been brought up in quite a different life, and he possessed the scholastic mind. I told this man what it meant if he acted nervously, and I pointed out to him that his actions might place others in a most difficult position. I want hon. members to realize that this kind of thing deflects upon the men themselves, although I cannot say where cowardice starts or where it finishes.”
There is a curious punch to the ideas Major Hills submitted to the debate. He said:
“You shoot a man for cowardice, but you do not make that man any braver, for he is dead. Do you make his comrades any braver?
“Many members of this House know what it is just before the zero hour – just before going over the top. I am perfectly certain that no man said to himself, ‘I must go forward, or else I shall be shot,’ and I rather mistrust the argument that you make men brave by that threat. … My experience of life, and such experience as I had in the war, have shown me that the greatest men are afraid of something, and that the greatest cowards are brave under some conditions.
“Cowardice is a matter of the greatest difficulty. Some people, fortunately, were not afraid of shells, but they might have been afraid of something else; and a man might be shot just because the special sort of danger of which he was afraid was one which he could not resist. Perhaps the greatest argument which I have against it is this:
“It is all very well to have a death penalty when you have a professional army, and men enlist on terms which they know, but if we were, unfortunately, at war again, our army would not be a professional army, but an army of all the manhood of the nation. What right have we to take a man from the shop or the office and, if his nerves failed under the strain of war, to shoot him? I do not think that we have that right, and I do not think that it would do any good, or make the army braver.
“Courage is something in the man himself, and is not put into him by the idea of any punishment such as death.”
Comically Amended Sentences
As far as Canadians are concerned, there is a point of view that was entirely overlooked by the Scotsmen and Englishmen who were arguing.
And that point is that not only does the death penalty or, as it might be called, the threat of execution, not deter men from being cowards, but it offends and hurts them in a curious way that has its reaction in the psychology of discipline.
Fortunately, I never had anything to do with an execution nor was any man I was ever acquainted with executed for any cause. But it has been my duty, more than once, as an adjutant of infantry, to call a parade and read out the sentence of the court martial on a man. We would muster a parade -deliberately. I would have it made as flimsy and weak a parade as the regulations permitted – the accused soldier would be paraded before the assembled companies, and in a voice about as clear and audible as a shy curate’s, I would mumble over the business of the court martial, reading the charge, the conviction, the sentence of the court.
It would go like this: automatically, a man found guilty of desertion – not an uncommon crime amongst the wilder Canadians – has to be sentenced by the ordinary field general’s court martial to death. But that was merely because the king’s regulations – dating back to hard-boiled days when soldiers were enlisted by the press gang for instance – demanded death as the penalty for desertion. But none of the officers of the court who made the conviction had the slightest expectation that the poor devil would be executed. The case would be passed from brigade to division and from division to corps, each general in turn taking a whack at paring the sentence, until after it had gone through the hands of Sir Arthur Currie, the thing would come back vastly, almost comically amended.
So that the adjutant; standing out in front of the parade, with the accused abjectly facing them under guard, would read out that the accused had been sentenced to death by the court, which sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the brigade commander, which sentence was reduced to ten years penal servitude by the divisional commander, which sentence was reduced and confirmed by the corps commander to two years hard labor.
Aside from the fact that the accused, after spending a more or less hard-worked period of three or four months at some military prison down near the base, In total security and bomb-proofedness, would be restored to his regiment, looking hale and hearty and ready for another desertion if it offered enough excitement, the interesting feature of all this pomp and circumstance is this: that if the adjutant read the charges out loud enough for all the men to hear, there would be a most decided sense of embarrassment and resentment on the part of the men.
What had all this to do with them?
Were we trying to scare them? Them?
If so, we were a pretty poor lot. For was not the officer reading the papers himself a bomb-proof dug-out king? And were any of the officers on parade a bit better than the men, as far as courage went?
That sense of resentment and affront which manifested itself whenever occasion demanded what you might call an “example” being made was most apparent to myself, since my profession as a newspaper man calls for sensitiveness to public feeling of this sort.
Brave Men Experience Fear
It is perfectly safe to say that the death penalty, as far as the Canadians were concerned, created only pathos and bitterness wherever it appeared, and that as far as deterring men from being cowards, it had no effect whatever.
For we had our cowards like all other armies. And those of us who were cowardly were so despite deterrents far more powerful than the fear of death by firing squad.
What is cowardice?
Is it fear? It is not, because ninety-nine per cent of soldiers in the last war experienced fear, and they were not cowards.
Is it submitting to fear, surrendering to fear, so that one fails in one’s duty because of fear?
That is about it. One of the bravest officers I ever knew was walking across a grain field during the battle of Amiens when an unexpected machine gun opened on him. He was in full view of three or four hundred of his comrades. He ducked and lay down, ran and crawled in the most comic fashion that you could imagine. He slithered down banks, lay flattened to earth with his expression clearly visible as he glared back at us and used, we doubt not, profane language at this public reduction of himself to the absurd. At last he got out of range of the enemy gun and rejoined us, shaken and outraged and very crestfallen.
He was no coward. He was performing no duty when this occurred. He was merely strolling across what looked like an innocent field to get a look at some ground we were expecting to attack in an hour or two.
An hour later, that same officer, in the performance of his duty leading his men in battle, executed simple marvels of bravery and courage, exposing himself to fire, attacking strong points and hedges fearlessly, a very demon of courage, who, a short hour before, had been sliding like a scared rabbit from machine gun fire.
And both times he was doing his duty; first, in not getting needlessly killed; second, in risking his life in order to ensure dash and valor to the attack, which called for those very qualities first and above everything.
There are a great many of us who often think that, were it not for a certain occasion when we were cowardly for a moment, we would not be here.
It is that fact which makes us very careful about the use of the word coward even now long after the war. And certainly, during the war, I never heard the word coward used, nor the word cowardice, by any man, though something like two hundred officers and three thousand men passed through my regiment while I was with it. There were poor fellows, timid by nature, whose very shape and physical condition we that of rickety and nervous men, who were spared everything possible by their comrades, because, simply, they were “no good”. They were cowards. In the old meaning of the word, that’s what they were. They swung the lead: that is, they pretended they were sick on every occasion; they had sore feet, pains, they would malinger, which means that they would take steps to make themselves sick, by eating mildly poisonous matter, or by starving themselves, or by the reversal of Christian Science, deliberately thinking and willing themselves to be ill.
They did all duties badly. They were always complaining, grousing.
Cracking Up Under Strain
If you found anybody crouching down in the trenches during a strafe it would be one of them. They were well known in practically every platoon. Nobody minded them. They came in for a lot of unmerciful kidding from the rest of the platoon. And the worst part of their lives was the fact that they knew themselves that they were cowards. But they had reached that state of nerves, or they were naturally born with that state of mind, that they did not care, so long as they were spared.
The others did not revenge themselves on these chaps. In fact, they were rewarded. For they escaped all patrols and dirty Jobs. No officer or n.c.o. wanted them with them. And if any soft bombproof jobs came along, such as working at a divisional dump or helping at a laundry or bath house, or turning the crank at a movie tent, these abject, timid fellows and not the good brave men were rewarded. Not only could we not spare the good men, but there was more or less feeling about taking bombproof jobs. I have known men to refuse them indignantly.
I had a sergeant who had come in June, 1916, and who, after the Somme, Vimy and Passchendaele, was getting old at the game. Perfectly natural. He had seen much war, close up. He had seen scores of his men killed and mangled in every conceivable fashion. He had had dozens of his comrades and chums pass on to their doubtful reward. He had had his own hair breadth escapes from that indescribable destruction that modern machine warfare dishes up. He could recall them easily enough, I suppose, in those long night watches, where we drifted, lonely and alone, in a world of ghostly light and shadow. He began to crack up a little. He became irritable and his hair began to grow gray at the sides. He was in his late thirties. At home he had a wife and four little boys. One night we had a patrol. Before going out, the darkness did not conceal from me that he was nervous and trembling and that he had a little trouble with his voice. It was husky – ah, what a familiar symptom!
He was not, I venture to say, one-half as frightened as I was at that moment. But I was younger, greener and had a little more of what might either be intelligence or low cunning – I could hide my feelings better for those several reasons. We had a rotten time of it. No enemy was met. No shot was fired. But of all patrols I ever remember, that was the jumpiest, most nerve-racking, for I knew the sergeant was windy, which made me windy, and the sergeant sensed my condition and the men caught it, like a yawning fit, froze us. I was a rag when we re-entered the trench.
Two days later I had a chat with my old sergeant and put it up to him: would I try to wangle him a job somewhere? There were some splendid jobs to be had as an instructor at the divisional school, and I was sure the colonel would admit the sergeant had had a long siege and would appoint him to the next vacancy.
What do you suppose that sergeant did?
He flew into a rage.
What did I think he was? A shell-shock? Who was I to accuse him of being jumpy? Was there a man or officer in the regiment who had done more real fighting? He always thought I was his friend, and then I go and suggest a thing like this! Instructor at a school! Refuge for broken-down old women!
He stayed on a few weeks, getting rockier and rockier, until the men began to feel it, and all the splendid two years’ reputation of this valiant sergeant began to count for naught.
Where does cowardice enter in here? Not by a thousand miles was this man a coward. Yet if we had had a jam of some kind about that time, I am perfectly sure the old sergeant would have failed, not from cowardice, but from nervous exhaustion. For he ended up in tears, asking to be relieved, and sent to some place to recover his old fire.
Oh, it has a thousand aspects. I have known timid, nervous men who were the scariest mortals imaginable at the start, but who, as time went on, and experience stiffened them, became bolder and gamer every month. It is a fact.
We had an officer join us and the minute he came in we smiled secretly at one another. For he was so obviously the raw material of shell-shock, as we termed all limitations as to courage. He was a mamma’s boy, by the look of him. He was assigned to one of the companies and plans were made to get rid of him at the first opportunity to some command job away from the regiment where he wouldn’t have much rough work to do. Yes, that’s the way it worked. For we were hanged if we wanted our jobs made more difficult by the shortcomings of junior officers.
For month or two he was the perspiring image of alarm and fear. He could change color from red to white and red again quicker than any man I knew, to the sound of an incoming shell.
One night there was a rumpus on our left front, a German patrol unquestionably came close to our front, either to raid us or to bring us gifts of some kind, we didn’t know. But a Lewis gun that mysteriously and unexpectedly appeared some distance out in No Man’s Land and raked flank-wise along the raiding party’s course, put it all to an end.
A Hero of Fiction Type
When the hero was sought, he was found in very perspiring and nervously giggling lieutenant, who said:
“My sergeant and I distinctly saw, from the side, against a distant flare a mile or so north of us, a group of Germans walking about in No Man’s Land, up opposite the next company. So I ordered out a Lewis gun and just as we got into a position to fire, their barrage came down. So we caught them, curiously enough, exactly at the moment their raid started.”
“Did you take the sergeant with you?” we demanded, expecting to get at the secret of this dandy stunt.
“How could I?” cried the nervous lieutenant. “I could not leave the trench without one of us in charge, could I?”
No. He did it alone. And when we cautiously inquired of the number one of the gun crew, it transpired that the lieutenant, from his superior position, had insisted on firing the gun himself.
“I took quite a good mark in machine gunnery at school in England,” blushed the lieutenant unhappily when the accusation was made in the mess, later.
That was the start of the most curious evolution I encountered overseas: a man who actually got better and bolder as time and experience went on. This chap ended up with a reputation for daring – soft, polite daring, that belongs in fiction rather than in fact.
“Once you get the hang of the thing …” he used to say.
There were some of us who were what civilians call cowards all the time; and all of us were cowards upon occasion, except, of course, those blood-in-the-eye lads who worked back of the line, or at the bakeries at the base. For it was curious how bloodthirsty people got as the distance increased from the front line. Why, we poor fellows in the front line were nambly-pamby compared to the gallant bayonet instructors over on the far side of England.
No official facts have ever been produced respecting the number of Canadians who were executed during the great war. It has been a carefully guarded secret, to spare the kin of those few who were victims of a quite meaningless institution. But it is supposed that there were twenty-two executions amongst Canadians, most of them in the early part of the war, before there had crystallized that quite distinct and characteristic Canadian discipline which was as noble a thing as any other kind of discipline history recounts. Most of these executions would have been for desertion. A few were certainly for looting. Outrageous cases of looting, where men simply went amuck and neglected important duties to loot – cases where example would really count, since the men appeared to be getting something out of it.
But as for the example of a coward – in modern warfare, so slowly does it move, and on such machine made scale, the example of a coward can rarely be seen.
And when seen, it merely causes that twinge or gust of pity or contempt which is the thing men fear from their comrades more than bullets –
Bullets fired at twenty paces, at a white sheet, on which is marked a round, red circle.
It was curious how bloodthirsty people got as the distance increased from the front line.
Editor’s Note: This was a very controversial aspect of the First World War in Canada, as can been seen by the content of the article at the time, as well as subsequent debates in the decades since. A total of 25 Canadians were executed during World War One, 22 for desertion, 1 for cowardice, and 2 for murder. The ones not charged with murder were posthumously pardoned on 16 August 2006. The concept of PTSD (“shell-shock” in WW1, and “battle fatigue” in WW2) was not understood at the time.
These illustrations by Jim accompanied an article by Charles Vining about Income Tax coming due.
