A Township At War by Jonathan F. Vance

Author:Jonathan F. Vance
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Published: 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Fleming family just before leaving for Canada: Mary, John, Annie, and Isabell, with Tom in the back. Photographer unknown. (Author’s collection)

In family pictures taken at the time, little Isabel gazes directly at the camera, confident, forthright, unaffected. Her parents and siblings were all dark—Isabel alone was fair, with masses of wavy, golden hair that turned to a lustrous auburn as she got older. I try to reconcile the little girl in the pictures with the jumble of images that come to mind when I recall my grandmother later in life, before Alzheimer’s attacked her mind: a patrician demeanour like her older sister Elizabeth, golf in Myrtle Beach, a bowl of plastic fruit, a beige living room full of uncomfortable furniture, a white Ford Thunderbird with suicide doors. At first, I can’t put them together. But then I think of my grandmother laughing, her eyes sparkling as she threw back her head, and I can see in her the merest shadow of the girl in the photos.

My father and his sister remembered John and Annie Fleming with great affection, but a certain amount of trepidation. They both spoke with thick Scottish burrs that made them nearly impossible to understand. This was not so bad with Annie, for she was a typical Scottish grandmother of melt-in-your-mouth shortbread and bedtime songs softly sung. John was more alarming, thanks to the black leather glove he always wore to conceal a damaged hand. To his grandchildren, being approached by an old man with a black claw who spoke a language they couldn’t understand was unnerving.

The Flemings had never been to Canada before, but their fortunes were already tied to the country. In the spring of 1913, their son Willie, then just nineteen, had boarded the Donaldson Line steamer Saturnia in Glasgow, bound for Quebec. The sailing records only hint at his motives. In neat columns, immigration officials listed the personal details of each newcomer, particularly their intentions once in Canada. Willie listed his destination as Winnipeg, Manitoba—the gateway to the west, the most ethnically diverse and vibrant city in Canada, and a magnet for young immigrants with a dream but not much else to their name. In answer to the question “What is your intended occupation in Canada?,” he said “Anything.” He was far from the only passenger arriving that May afternoon to declare as much, but Willie went a step further to ensure a favourable verdict from the immigration official. He took the precaution of adding two years to his age before tackling the question about his employability: “Have you ever worked as farmer, farm labourer, gardener, stableman, carter, Railway surfaceman, navvy or miner?” To this, Willie responded that he had seven years’ experience as a miner, and had been going down in the pits since 1906.

Was he telling the truth? He was born and raised in Scotland’s “Black Country,” the rich coal seams of Lanarkshire, southeast of Glasgow, and Scottish lads could start working down below at the age of twelve. There’s

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