Senior Rugby, St Bee’s School, 1939. Peter Nixon, top row, fourth from left

(To the Lighthouse Part 1: Geological Time, Historical Time, Genealogical Time.)

(To the Lighthouse Part 11: You Don’t Want to be Me.)

To the Lighthouse: Part 111. One Mean SOB

I think, once again, of the thick- legged cads on the colliery team. Tough as nails.  It would be a shame for them to beat us on the rugby field – or on the battlefield.

A pair of kittiwakes soars and shrieks 15 feet over us, just as the eight students approach slowly from the south, at a jogging pace,  two of them cupping their pockets and looking very self-satisfied.

“We got three big eggs,  and one just for you, Nixon,” speaks up Armstrong in a flattering tone.  He’s normally the most belligerent of my young charges. Another with Border Reiver blood. It’s a bribe and a most worthy one.

The Nixon clan was once in thrall to the Armstrong clan, I recall  Grandfather Nixon, a sawmill worker, telling me a few years ago as we walked the well-trod path from his home in Helmsley North Yorkshire to nearby Rievaulx to see the stone quarry where he had laboured as a young man, the famous cathedral ruins and the small thatched cottage, Abbot’s Well, where Mary Ellen Richardson, his wife, my grandmother, grew up. She was a tailor’s daughter.

Abbot’s Well Rievaulx, North Yorkshire

“They are falcon’s eggs, we think” interrupts Bell, Armstrong’s sidekick, also of Border Reiver blood. You should have seen the mother. She attacked us with her enormous beak and flapping wings.” Falcon? I now understand this to be a ruse. Or is it?

Can miracles of nature happen? Can schoolboys steal some eggs from a falcon’s nest? Might the war in Europe never really start?

The smirk on the faces of all the young chaps tell me there will be no eggs, gull’s or falcon’s, for luncheon today. It is all a big joke.

“Well, let’s turn around them, we’ll never make to the lighthouse and back with those falcon’s eggs intact,” Armstrong says, stubbornly sticking to his story.  I can taste the savoury most-likely fictitious fried eggs  and it STILL makes my mouth water.

“The headmaster told me to take you to the lighthouse and back,” I say, nonchalantly exercising my power over them as is my right.   The boys groan. I start to run, outpacing them but staying close enough to make sure they don’t delay.

We pass the ruins to the entrance of the old King Pit, once the deepest shaft in the world. 160 fathoms deep built in 1750 by the Lowther family. Or so says a plaque next to it.  I once again think of the boys on the colliery team and their ancestors who worked within these mines. The rise of all the towns around here, Whitehaven, Maryport, Workingham is thanks to the 18^th century coal trade with Ireland. The collieries on the coast once covered thousands of acres. I must have read that on another plaque somewhere else.

I have no coal miners in my family tree. We are too tall. I come from farmers, mostly.  My father, Robert Nixon, was a footman at elegant Dunscombe Park in Helmsley before he took the Lutzer ocean liner out of Southampton to Singapore in October, 1912.

He probably already was acquainted with  my mother, Dorothy Forster, as her father, John, was preaching in Helmsley at the time.  Who knows when they got engaged.  Dorothy, a land girl during WWI, a titch of  a woman tasked with leading the enormous Clydesdales through the forests with their loads, followed him to Malaya in December 1921, a mere ten months before I was born.

Robert is  6 foot 4. The gentry like their footmen tall and presentable. Still, Robert preferred to try his luck out in the bug-infested jungle. Perhaps it was Dorothy who insisted, she not wanting to be married to a lowly servant. He started out as a labourer, wielding the whip, but soon rose to be manager of the Batu Caves Rubber Estate in Selangor with almost life and death power over the Indian workers. He was born a servant in England but became a demi-god in Malaya. His imposing height helped him there, too, no doubt. And the fact he is one mean SOB.

Right now, he has the management of two rubber estates in Selangor, just to make ends meet. The economic downturn has made it hard on him and my mother. My mother has taken on a job as the librarian for the Kuala Lumpur Book Club.

Batu Caves Religious Resort, Selangor, Malaya

This war in Europe will not affect them, thank goodness.

I  continue to run into the past, toward Whitehaven on the Cumberland Coast. Sandstone cliffs and igneous outcrops and beaches covered in pebbles. Geologic time, historical time, genealogical time, historical memory, family myth. The rest of the boys follow with Cowen, his cheeks as red as a robin’s chest, slipping behind. I slow down the pace just for him. My little friend.

We pass ‘the candlestick,’ the old chimney of the Wellington Pit.  We’re almost at Whitehaven now.

But an armed guard, an old man in his grey-blue denim LDV jacket, with a gold star on the sleeve, waves at us with his rifle and says, “ Go back!   The lighthouse is off limits. There are motor launches out on the water looking for German subs. Can’t you see?”

The boys gather in a circular group and they all cup their eyes with their hands to look out to sea. A few with very good eyesight, like mine, point in the direction of the boats.

The  old armed guard waves us on.

“Haven’t you St. Beghian’s heard?” he says. “The Huns have attacked Denmark and Norway. The war is on for real.”

And just as he speaks, a lone steel and wood bird buzzes into view. I am the first to see it with my impeccable long range vision, but soon all ten of us stop running and turn our eyes toward the misty sky to gaze into our future.

1. My father ended up in the RAF, posted at Dorval in Montreal, headquarters of the Ferry Command, where he met my French Canadian mother at a meet-and-greet at the Mount Royal Hotel.

 See  Night Flight, here on this blog

As it happens, one of the St Bees Village boy, a printer’s apprentice, signed up in 1939 and distinguished himself early on. He was then posted in Dorval and died on a flight mission to the Bahamas in 1941. I have no idea whether or not my father knew him, before or after enlistment. He never mentioned this.  There is information on this man, Alan  Rodgers, posted on the St. Bees Village website.

In January, 1941, a few days after Pearl Harbour, the Japanese invaded Malaya, dropping bombs on the ‘green’ in Kuala Lumpur, also hitting the building housing the Kuala Lumpur Book Club.  Four died there in the rubble, but Dorothy, my grandmother, hid under a desk and survived.  She and her husband, Robert, ended up interned at Changi Internment Camp.  Read about it in Beads in a Necklace, our book. Also here at the Globe and Mail. Read  or LISTEN TO a one act play about John Forster’s dementia in A Stranger in his/her Bed.  

Or read the complete story of Dorothy Nixon’s life in the colonies here in my e-book, Looking for Mrs. Peel.

This year is the 70^th Anniversary of the Asbestos Strike. (1949-2019) It has often been singled out as a turning point in the history of the province of Quebec and has also been referred to as the beginning of the Quiet Revolution.

Asbestos, Quebec is a mining town located in the Eastern Townships midst a beautiful rolling countryside, approximately 120 kilometers from Montreal. It was a company town with an open pit (Jeffrey Mine) where asbestos, a non-flammable fibrous mineral was extracted. They also mined underground and the fibres were extracted and processed in the mill.

For several months before the strike in early 1949 the miners were becoming more and more disgruntled with the working conditions. They sought an increase in wages, better working conditions and an improvement in health care.

Our parish church, St. Aime, was the meeting place for the workers. The parish priest, Father Camillrand was deeply involved in the miners’ plight. The government of Quebec under the firm hand of Premier Maurice Duplessis was aligned with the Canadian John-Manville Company, (CJM) the employer and owner of the entire mining enterprise.

On the eve of Valentine’s Day, 1949 the miners gathered in St. Aime Church in Asbestos. They voted overwhelmingly to go on strike the following day.

I was nine years old during the strike and although It was difficult to comprehend what was happening in our community, I knew that something was awry. I have vivid memories of several events that took place over five months.

At school there was taunting. Some of the students’ parents were on strike while others continued to work. This lent itself to an unpleasant situation for many. Despite the turmoil all around, all in all, life went on as normally as possible for children while the media covered the event in detail. Most townsfolk were sympathetic toward the miners. They were very generous with donations. Many workers did not have money to provide adequately for the families.

The newspapers covered the events daily and, in our home, we received the now defunct Montreal Star and Toronto Daily Star, that always arrived two days later than published. I was eager to read about the strike. At that time, I read articles by Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Gerard Pelletier, both journalists and Jean Marchand, who was a union organizer. They wrote daily columns and kept the public informed. Years later they became members of Parliament and Pierre Trudeau became Prime Minister of Canada.

Everyone in the town was affected by the strike, particularly the merchants. Most of the population in the town worked at one of the CJM operations.

CJM was the main employer, however, the Asbestos strike was not localized in the one town. It included many of the small mining companies in the area. The town of Asbestos had the largest group of miners. The open pit was the largest in North America and one of the largest in the world where they produced what was considered a magic mineral and was used in a multitude of ways. The construction boom after WWII created a large demand for asbestos products; roofing shingles, floor tiles, insulation and brake linings in cars.

Negotiators for the union and the company officials attempted to come to an agreement. It was not to be, and the violence began to escalate when the companies hired outside workers.

In May, Premier Duplessis sent in the Provincial Police. They were lodged in the nurses’ residence where their headquarters were also located.

I remember being frightened seeing the black Mariah bus loaded with burly policemen arriving in town and wondered if there would ever be an end to the ongoing troubles. Would they be able to quell the unrest before lives were lost?

The strike continued throughout May and June. The Provincial Police tactics were brutal. Several miners were seriously injured.  It was time to put an end to the strike.

Finally, in early July all parties negotiated a settlement. The strike ended with the employees having gained few of their demands, one being a small increase in hourly wages. Most of the workers went back to work, while others moved on.

They were tumultuous times that left indelible memories.

Sources: Photograph: Jeffrey Mine 1944 By Harry Rowed – https://www.flickr.com/photos/lac-bac/31123426351/in/album-72157665191042359/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56279338‘

There will be a follow-up to this article. ”Asbestos 70 Years After the Strike”