The following is a transcript of the interview between Lucy Roy and Mr. Clarke Edwards of Prince Rupert, British Columbia on March 6, 1989. As part of the 75th anniversary of the Bombardment of British Columbia, CBC has been conducting various interviews to collate into a TV special set for broadcast on August 16 this year.
INTERVIEW WITH CLARKE EDWARDS
INTERVIEWED BY: LUCY ROY
TRANSCRIBED BY: BERNARD RICHARDS
TRANSCRIPT STARTS
LR: Mr. Edwards, thank you again for taking the time to have this interview with me today.
CE: At this point I spend most of the day watching the news so talking to the news is a good change I think.
Laughter.
LR: Fair enough, would you mind starting with when you were born?
CE: 1899, February 15.
LR: Were you born in Canada?
CE: I was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia but my brother was born in Birmingham in 1896.
LR: Birmingham, England?
CE: Yes.
LR: So your family came from the old country. Do you know why your family moved to Canada?
CE: My mother was never happy living in England, that's what I got from how she talked about it. She really loved my father but when he was offered a job in the Cape Breton coal mines, she said she just about jumped with joy.
LR: Did she say why she didn't like it there?
CE: Oh yes, she would talk about it at every chance she would get. Birmingham was right full of everything nasty she would say, coal mines, railways, factories, smelters. Mother said the air was rank poison at times, grew up there all her life and didn’t want her kids in that.
LR: When did your parents leave England?
CE: Summer of 1898 they arrived in Halifax, moved to Sydney right after I think.
LR: Do you know how long your family stayed on the east coast?
CE: Not very long, I think they moved to Nanaimo in 1900. The weather was a bit too much of a shock to my parents with two young children. Winters in Cape Breton was something that a lot of English people weren’t prepared for, a hard lonely life away from home with strangers. Mother would say she almost froze her hands off a few too many times trying to shovel the snow away from our door to even get outside.
LR: England is a fair bit nicer year round compared to the east coast, I can see that being a hard change.
CE: Yeah.
LR: Did you move because of the weather or was it because of a job?
CE: Both.
LR: Cape Breton was that bad?
CE: I guess so.
Laughter.
CE: We were taught never to ask about money but after working with some of the old Cape Breton miners who also moved out west later on, I can say they likely paid a fair bit more compared to back east. Mom didn’t complain nearly as much from what my father would say.
LR: Did you settle in one place when you got to Nanaimo or did you move around?
CE: We moved into a house on Wentworth Street right in Nanaimo and stayed there until about summer of 1913.
LR: And which mines did your father work in?
CE: He worked in Number One for awhile but Brechin was where he was for the longest time. Got hired there after a bunch of workers were fired for trying to get a union going.
LR: Unions were definitely a touchy subject in the coal towns, a lot of people got hurt later on.
CE: Yup that’s why we moved out of Nanaimo.
LR: Before we get to that, what did your father do in the mines?
CE: I don’t know but he got fairly high up in the mine. I remember as a kid that he was always taking courses through the mail from correspondence schools when he wasn’t working. It was hard to spend time with him but looking back, he never stopped trying to get us a better life. Framed up his diplomas and stuff on the walls, we were proud of him.
LR: So he wasn’t just content working as a miner but was trying to climb the corporate ladder? He sounds like a very driven man.
CE: Yes, he was a very smart and kind man to the point where my mother would tease him about wasting his time as a miner. Life in the mines was hard and made people mean but my father never got sour. He wasn’t just good to us but to people in town who weren’t as well off as we were too. We weren’t rich but he just about helped everybody he could. It might sound like I’m tooting my own fathers horn but if a lot of the old timers were still around, they’d tell you the same.
LR: I see. Is there anything specific you remember your father doing?
CE: When I was about 12, there was a terrible fire a few streets over at the Elliot house. Burned almost flat with everything they had inside, Mrs. Elliot and her son barely got out. Mr. Elliot worked in Number One after my father left, didn’t know the man at all but we took them in. We helped fix up our shed out back into a place for them to live, it was cramped and we had to share the house for cooking but they lived with us for a good few months before they found a place of their own. I don’t think my father charged them one cent and that’s how I made one of my best friends with their son Frederick.
LR: Your father sounds like a wonderful man, is there anything else you can recall happening like that?
CE: Yup I remember a year or two after that…..
Silence as Mr. Edwards thinks to himself for a moment.
CE: Or was it before? It must have been Mr. Stuart. No, no that isn’t.…wasn’t it......hmmm
Unintelligible murmurs, a few moments pass.
LR: Please Mr. Edwards, take all the time you need.
CE: Damn it all. Sorry, sorry, my memory has started to get bad the last few months. That’s why I wanted the interview.
LR: I understand, we can go back to the strikes and why you left Nanaimo if that is better.
CE: Yes, yes, thank you. Well uh, you probably know there were strikes all through coal mines in British Columbia in 1913, Brechin mine where my father worked wasn’t no different. The workers wanted better conditions, unions and to have bad people kicked out of their positions but the companies fought tooth and nail to stop that.
LR: Bad people?
CE: Slave drivers they used to call them. Bosses and people trying to get ahead on the backs of everybody else, horrible horrible people.
LR: I’m guessing your father being the good samaritan that he was, was right in the middle of the strike?
CE: Yeah, he and the other men organized a lot of rallies, events, marches, you name it. The mine closed and everybody was on strike pay for awhile but it got bad really fast. The upper bosses and owners at the mines knew who my father was and where he lived, the strikers used our house and property to organize and plan sometimes.
LR: It was bad enough that you had to leave Nanaimo then?
CE: Well one day after me and my brother went to help my mother get groceries, we came back to find our property wrecked. The shed behind the house had two coups attached for rabbits and chickens, we had them to eat but later I found out my father and the other men in town used to fight roosters for extra money on the side. It looked like somebody had set off a bomb out there, the coups were destroyed and the animals all gone, the doors and chimney were torn off the shed, all of the tools were gone or thrown out into the yard broken.
LR: Did your parents report this to the police?
CE: Damn right they did, they looked around but nothing ever came of it. I don’t know if there wasn’t any proof or the police were in the pocket of the companies but either wouldn’t surprise me. That was only the start, we got threats in the mail more than a few times and our dog Chip ended up missing. Wait no was it Blacky or Chip? No Chip was after when we...…anyway never found the poor feller.
LR: I can see why your parents would want to move then, something like that is bad enough for adults to deal with let alone having children in the middle of it. Nobody was ever caught?
CE: Not that I know, the police were around a lot but nothing ever happened.
LR: How old were you at the time? Were you two boys aware of this stuff going on at your age?
CE: I was 14 at the time and my brother was 17, back in those days you were practically an adult at that age so yeah, we knew. Our mother told us about bad men around town and made sure we would try to keep ourselves safe. It was hard to ignore things on the end of it when they were throwing bricks through our windows.
LR: What? Bricks?
Mr. Edwards laughs for a few moments.
CE: I like to look back and think my father must have done a real hell of a job to make them hate him that much but yup, bricks.
LR: How much more did your parents take after that? I can’t imagine staying around if it had escalated to that point.
CE: Because that’s when we were sure we had to leave. The evening that my mother was cooking supper, me and my brother were both at the table reading or doing schoolwork when this big crash came from the front of the house. A good few bricks sailed right on through and stopped pretty damn close to us at the table. When my father got home, we helped him pick up the glass and cover the windows before we were sent to bed. I snuck out to get some water later that night and saw him sitting out on the front porch with his gun. I think he was there all night.
LR: And that’s how you ended up at Mill Creek?
CE: Eventually but we moved around for a few weeks first. Stayed with a few friends of my father to keep low, we weren’t allowed to see our friends or go to school which at the time seemed like the biggest deal ever. My father was a pretty capable man and could work just about any job like most of the older fellas back then but when he was forced away from the mine, it was really hard to find work.
LR: Nothing available?
CE: Most of the mines were striking or closed so that was a lot of the jobs there gone. What few were open had more than enough people, they didn’t want troublemakers like my father. These coal companies had a lot of money or say in what happened back in those days, they owned the grocery stores, houses, property, trains, you name it. If you got on their bad side and were on the blacklist like we think my father was, basically every door would get slammed in your face like you were dripping with crap or something.
LR: But there was an opening in Mill Creek then?
CE: Not advertised but one of our family friends managed to pull some strings to get my father into the pulp mill there and we came with him to live on the property.
LR: When was that exactly?
CE: Around the end of summer in 1913.
LR: What was life like there? And for any of our listeners who are confused, Mill Creek is the original name of the area we now know as Woodfibre which was changed in the 1920’s.
CE: Yup. It was a lot lonelier than being in Nanaimo, all of our friends were gone and we still lived half scared until the miner strikes stopped the next year. Our new home was more of a shack than a real house, Mill Creek wasn’t much more than some shacks for the workers and the mill itself back then before they built it up a lot more. We left school and both me and my brother started working, he worked at the mill and I did odd jobs around for our neighbors. Our mother didn't want me at the mill too.
LR: It must have been quite different to living right in a town like Nanaimo then?
CE: It was hard at first but we eventually made new friends with some of the other local kids, being around the woods there meant there was a lot to do still. Didn't really have any fancy toys but we made our own fun. Climbing trees, making forts off in the woods, hiding in the lumber yard, hunting and my favorite, going fishing for trout out in Howe Sound.
LR: What kind of work did your father and brother do at the mill?
CE: Our father didn’t talk about work much around us, I think he had enough of it at work. My brother helped tend the lumber horses though, it was a safer job than down in the mines but he almost got squished a few times when those big logs went loose.
LR: I suppose it was hard to find any work in a frontier like British Columbia that wasn’t a bit dangerous. Did anything change there when the war started?
CE: You ain’t kiddin’! Well we were uh told to look out for Germans around the mill but none of us knew what a German looked or sounded like. So I guess we mostly went on doing what we did, a lot of talk and rumor but not much happened until that ship sunk a few weeks later.
LR: The
Rainbow?
CE: Yup that’s the one, papers said she got sunk by a German ship down the coast and everybody started getting really crazy.
LR: How so?
CE: People were scared that the Germans were going to come and attack. All kinds of nasty stuff about what they were doing to the people in Europe, they'd do it here too. Most everything on the coast here is right by the sea so it wouldn’t be too hard for them to come. People started to leave, packing up their things and heading away from the coast. Some of the mill workers and their families went and with a lot of young fellers joining the army to try to fight the Germans, there were a lot of empty houses. I remember the old Scotsman and his wife were trying to pack up but their chickens got out and ran all around the property. It took everybody hours to get those darn things. We had nowhere to go and even if we did, my father wouldn’t leave unless there was a damn good reason. People do stupid things when they are scared and we didn’t scare too easily. No way we would have known the Germans would come for real.
LR: Would you like to talk about that Sunday in August of 1914 then?
CE: I suppose I’ve rambled enough. That is what we had this whole thing for.
LR: Yes, your grandson mentioned that briefly.
CE: He’s one of the only people I ever told about that day until now.
LR: Please, we have as much time as you need.
CE: Um okay well….my brother and I had planned a fishing trip up the sound that morning. He skipped out on work at the mill and we borrowed a canoe from one of the older guys who lived near us. Nice man, he told us that he caught some really big trout along the shore between Mill Creek and Britannia Beach so off we went. We left pretty early in the morning so by the time we got out there paddling that canoe and got into fishing, there was no way we could have known about the Germans attacking down the coast.
LR: Did you hear the German guns from where you were?
CE: Uh huh but we didn’t know who was shooting or that it was shooting. The army had big guns in forts down the coast and they had fired before. The mines around would blast quite a bit too so big booms wasn’t really strange for us.
LR: When did the Germans arrive or maybe I should say when did you know they were there?
CE: It was into the afternoon, almost sure it was after 1:00pm. We took a break and hauled the canoe off to the shore to cook up some trout on an open fire around dinner time. Got back to fishing about an hour later and that’s when my brother saw them coming up the sound. Didn’t think much of it at first because all we saw was the smoke coming out of the stacks, ships came all the time to the mill and the mine at Britannia. Went back to fishing but we heard this awful racket coming from either the ship or the mine, some kind of high pitched siren I think. It wasn’t long after when they started shooting.
LR: Did you ever get to go to Britannia Beach when you lived in Mill Creek?
CE: No but I got a good view of the place when the Germans were blowing it all to hell. It was a few miles away but there were binoculars in the canoe. We both fought over who got to use them, ended up taking turns in the end so I only got to see some of it. One would look and say what happened to the other. They had a big dock at the mine where ships came to take the copper away, there was a big ship there that they shot at first. All I saw was splashes of water for a bit but eventually it rolled over with a big bunch of water thrown up, gone in a flash.
CE: Have you ever seen the mine building Miss Roy?
LR: Yes I’ve been to the concentrator museum, it is quite a sight.
CE: Even more of a sight when it's on fire I can say that for sure. That big building on the hillside reminded me of set of stairs with the levels it had, almost looked like it should have slid down and the Germans almost made it happen. I watched them shoot their guns up into the windows and roofs, watching the explosions was really something to see. There was weird sets of trains and pulleys high up on the hill too that brought stuff into the mine building, parts of those came tumbling down around and into the building. We hoped everybody had got out but the Germans only gave them so much time. They kept circling around the water in front of the mine and shooting, almost like a big eagle but on the water.
LR: And you said you saw the concentrator on fire too?
CE: I half saw near the end once the fire got real big but not at the first when it must have started. It was hard to see a lot of little stuff because of how far away we were but the Germans made a real mess. Big booming sounds, clouds of steam, smoke or something, it was hard to tell. The buildings near the bottom by the dock got blown up, that could have been where the first started. By the time the fire had got really big and easy to see even with your eyes, the Germans were coming our way so we didn’t pay as much attention.
LR: I can see how that could have been distracting for a few teenagers, hard to break yourself away from something terrible like that.
CE: I suppose, we didn’t even think that the Germans would come to attack the pulp mill. Don’t know what went through our heads but when we realized that, I think that was the most scared I had been in my life. We started paddling back home as fast as we could but two kids with a canoe never could beat a real ship. The big grey bugger passed by us only a few minutes after we started paddling, it was a few miles away but we got a good long look at it. It was all full of holes, burns and scratches. Looked like a ship out of hell, something tried to stop them before and they didn’t, now they were coming for us. She was a big sucker, especially to us kids. People on deck didn’t even look at us when they went by, even though we shouted our guts out at them, some of the meanest things I think I’ve ever said.
Mr. Edwards begins to hoarse up.
CE: It took us an hour and a half to paddle that canoe back home, the Germans made it to Mill Creek in about fifteen minutes. My brother stuck me in the back of the canoe so it was hard to see past him at the pulp mill, the canoe was pointed towards home and he couldn’t look away. I kept trying to peek around him but leaning to see would almost tip us over. Once I heard that siren and the booms that followed it, my eyes got cloudy with tears and I didn't see a thing but we kept paddling. It was like somebody was hitting me inside with a hammer every time they fired, it was horrible.
Mr. Edwards is breathing heavily.
LR: Would you like to take a break? We’ve been at this for quite awhile and I can tell this isn’t easy for you.
CE: Yes please, maybe a few minutes should be okay.
Recording cuts for a moment, resumes.
CE: I am very sorry for that, I thought I would be a bit more prepared for this.
LR: Like I said Mr. Edwards, we greatly appreciate you doing this interview. Please take as long as you need.
CE: I don’t want to waste any of your time so I’ll try again.
Brief pause.
CE: As we got closer to home, the smell of fire and the sound of the guns got worse and worse. Over and over and over, they didn’t stop, they just kept shooting and shooting. Eventually the flames couldn’t hide behind my brothers back anymore and I could see the pulp mill burning high into the sky. It all happened so slowly and all we could do was watch. The Germans left the same way they came back, I only half saw the shape of the ship off in the distance through my tears. Me and my brother both were thinking the same thing, I knew that, we wanted to know if our parents were alive. Once we reached the shore, everything happened so fast compared to that agonizing canoe trip. We ran home as fast as we could around the fire and the debris everywhere. Once we came around the corner where our house was and saw it was standing, I fell down and cried even harder. I felt so relieved but the panic came back when my mother or father both weren’t home.
LR: Had everybody evacuated the town when the Germans had started shooting then?
CE: Yeah but I wasn’t really in a clear mind at that point. One of our neighbors must have stayed back because all I remember was them hauling me by the hands for what felt like forever towards the woods before I found my mother hugging us both so tight I almost couldn’t breath. I must have cried and babbled nonsense at her forever before I came out of my little spell. I looked around and asked where my father was but my mother started to cry too. My father got out of the mill before the shooting got too bad but when the fires started and they realized nobody had put out the boilers, him and some other men went back in to shut them down.
LR: Were the boilers that important? The town didn’t have a fire department?
CE: If the boilers got hit by those guns or the fire got to it, they would have exploded like bombs and hurt a lot of people. It wasn’t really a town back then and more like a bunch of shacks outside of the pulp mill itself. They had some gear to fight the fire with but there wasn’t enough of that or people to put out such a big fire fast enough. We were too far away for any other town to help and from what I heard later, what happened to us was happening everywhere else too. Me and my brother wanted to go help but our mother wouldn’t let us go, everybody stayed out into the woods while the men went back onto the property to try and fight the fire.
LR: What ended up happening to your father?
CE: We didn’t end up finding out until later that night after most of the women and kids had went home. The fire kept burning at the mill until the place collapsed into the night but the houses in town were far enough away that we would have likely been fine. Our mother told us that our father was helping to put out the fire and would be back with the rest of the men in the morning but when one of the mill bosses showed up alone that morning, we knew he wasn’t coming home. The mill was running when the Germans attacked Britannia Beach, mostly everybody had got out but they were in such a rush that they forgot the boilers were left lit. He told us that the men managed to put the boilers out and helped a few people trapped in the basement but part of the building collapsed on the way out. Only a few people from the group managed to get out and my father wasn’t one of them.
LR: Your father sounds like a good man, I can see why everybody had so much respect for him
CE: He was a great man. That's why I wanted to have this interview with you.
LR: To talk about your father?
CE: No, so people won't forget him. My wife has only been gone for a few years now and some days I sit for hours trying to remember things we did together. Almost everybody who knew my father is gone now. Every time I wake up, I’m scared that I'll be the next person to forget. I told my grandson a few weeks ago when he found me trying to write this all down in my journal, I'm so arthritic now that its hard to even write my name.
LR: Don't worry Mr. Edwards, that's why we're here.
Silence for a few moments.
LR: Life must have been hard after that day. I have a hard time imagining what that would be like.
CE: It was hard on us but it was hard on everybody too. My fathers funeral wasn’t the only one and everybody you talked to even from outside of town had lost someone. The pulp mill was destroyed, the Germans blew up all of the buildings and machines used to load the wood onto the ships. Not that it mattered, lumber as far as the eye could see on the property got burned down into toothpicks and they said there was no ships left to move it. Nobody had a job anymore, the unlucky didn’t have houses either. The bosses let us all stay for awhile anyway though, there wasn’t anywhere to go. We moved back to Nanaimo later that year but that place wasn’t much better than Mill Creek. My brother and I both worked to support our mother for a year or so after that but my brother went overseas not long after.
LR: Did you and your brother ever talk about what happened?
CE: There wasn’t much to say. I felt guilty about everything for a long time after, I thought about what I could have done to help and maybe our father wouldn’t......you know. But I was still a kid then and you think silly things when you are that age. I spent a long time thinking about what happened and my brother joined the army to try and do something about it. Our mother tried to get him to stay but I knew that nothing either of us could have said would have changed his mind. It was hard without him home but his money and my other jobs let us get by. I wrote to him a lot but it was hard to get mail through, got a few letters back but I didn’t get to see him until after the war.
LR: Do you remember when he came home?
Pause, silence.
CE: He didn’t.
Further silence.
CE: Me and my mother went to visit him at Vimy in 1936, when the rest of the families and veterans went to France. I had met some of the boys my brother served with and we talked for hours on the big liner when we went across. They were very nice men, it helped my mother a lot to talk to their families. There was people just like us, she wasn't the only person going through it all.
LR: Sorry, just drying my eyes, please continue.
CE: That was the first time I had been out to sea, I was dreadfully sick for parts of the trip. The ships didn't really roll or anything even with the big waves but it was something about being out there that I didn't like. I'll never forget though one of the mornings that I was up on the deck getting some fresh air, I saw this big ship nearby coming up over the waves and crashing down through them. She was flying our flag and I could see that she was full of guns all over, I asked one of the guys standing nearby if he knew what ship it was. He told me it was the
Rainbow, the ship named after the one that was lost all those years ago to the Germans and that she was leading us across the Atlantic. For a few moments there I felt like a kid again, holding a newspaper and looking at those headlines but this time, I didn't feel scared. I knew we were in good hands.
A few moments of silence before Mr. Edwards clears his throat.
CE: I don't think you want to see an old man cry again. Would you and your friend like some tea Miss Roy?
LR: Yes, I think that would be very nice.
Transcript Ends.
www.pc.gc.ca
A shipping tag franked with four stamps of Canada’s "War Issue" of stamps on a Bank of Nova Scotia shipping tag paid the postage for money that was to be paid to Chinese employees of a British Columbia pulp & paper mill. Part 1
www.ephemeraltreasures.net
Britannia Beach gravity mill, also known as the 'Concentrator' as seen from the waters of Howe Sound.
View of the rebuild and renamed town of Woodfibre from the waters of Howe Sound.
