Cumberland Museum board members Anne Davis, Brian Charlton and Meaghan Cursons—here in the museum’s replica coal mine—gear up for the 27th annual Miners’ Memorial weekend in June.
Photo by Boomer Jerritt
The past is very much present in Cumberland—and a tangible expression of this intersection of the historic and the contemporary is the annual Miners’ Memorial Weekend. Presented by the Cumberland and District Historical Society, this year’s 25th anniversary event on the weekend of June 18-19 commemorates the miners who worked, lived, and died in the mines at Cumberland as well as throughout the world. By means of music, story, and ceremony, the event is a celebration of workers and their families.
In the quiet dimness of the Cumberland Museum, plans for the event are at full steam. Museum board members Meaghan Cursons and Brian Charlton sift through boxes of archival material for a possible exhibit. Joined by Anne Davis, president of the Courtenay, Campbell River and District Labor Council, the group looks through the old newspaper clippings, posters, and photographs of past events.
“This is the Miners’ Memorial Day Box!” says Cursons, pulling from it an old program with a photo of the Memorial Cairn from #6 Mine. “1986—that would have been the first event,” says Charlton, reading the date. “Here are some of the press releases. Who’s in that picture?” Cursons wonders. “Rosemary Brown, Wayne Bradley, is that Roger Crowther?” begins Davis, and Charlton completes her thought: “They all look so young!” Everyone laughs.
“Here’s Barney McGuire,” continues Charlton with one of the clippings. “He was one of the initiators of the Miners’ Memorial event. He was with the CAIMAW union—the ones who broke away from the international unions in the Canadian Independence Labor movement.” Cursons wonders if he was the same McGuire that had left markers seen in museums across the province, with the famous labor slogan, “Don’t Mourn, Organize.”
“That’s a different guy—Barry McGuire!” says Brian Charlton. “It’s all the same family,” Davis adds with a laughs: “Brian is a McGuire!”
With his personal labor heritage, Brian Charlton is also very aware of the history of the Miners’ Memorial event. “It actually started in Sudbury in 1984, that was the first one,” he says. “I don’t know if they still do the Sudbury one, but Cumberland has kept up for 25 years now.”
“They aren’t in every mining community across Canada—Cumberland is very unique in that,” says Cursons. “People are coming from unions across the Pacific Northwest and sometimes further afield—they make it their summer trip. There’s groups of people that camp at Comox Lake, there’s groups of university students that have always attended, there’s the bus drivers in Victoria that actually get a city bus and make the trip every year—really interesting traditions of attendance that aren’t just local. I think that’s why it’s such a big deal.”
The interest in the event has been increasing over the last several years. “It comes from the nature of issues in the province,” Cursons says. “That seems to make a difference—it goes hand in hand with general activism, and where we’re at in an election cycle, lots of reasons why people are more animated at different times.”
Adds Charlton: “One of the reasons that Cumberland’s event has lasted so long is that it isn’t just the memorial ceremony at the cemetery. There’s so much else going on, with ‘Songs of the Workers’ the night before, the pancake breakfast, the camping… One of the best things has been the Saturday night around the bonfire—one time there were at least 10 people with guitars. Somebody even brought bagpipes!”
“It’s how I got my whole introduction to the labor activist community in the Comox Valley, and to the Cumberland Museum,” says Cursons. “Both of those were 15 years ago. The second year I was here, I ended up involved in Miners’ Memorial Day—I spoke and played music at ‘Songs for the Workers’.”
‘Songs for the Workers’ opens the Miners’ Memorial Weekend with a Pub Night on Friday, June 18 from 7 to 11pm at the Cumberland Cultural Centre, admission by donation. “It’s a combination of scheduled performers and open mic—everyone is welcome,” says Cursons. “There’ll be a combination of some traditional stuff and stuff you haven’t heard before. We have George Hewison playing, Doug Cox, Gordie Carter—we do a constant rotation of tunes. We pass the hat and share the proceeds between the musicians and the event.”
Charlton in particular is looking forward to hearing songs from Gwyn Sproule. “She does these traditional Geordie songs—English coal mining songs,” explains Cursons, adding that the event “goes as long as we can keep the energy going!”
The next morning the BCGEU hosts a pancake breakfast from 8-11am. “Again this is open to community, here at the OAP,” says Cursons. “All the proceeds go to the museum.” At 11am there will be a guided tour of the Cumberland Museum. The Campbell River, Courtenay and District Labor Council, the Cumberland OAP and the Cumberland Chamber of Commerce are all supporting the event to benefit the museum’s programming, operations, and labor and mining history exhibits.
Ginger Goodwin’s funeral procession, August 1918. Photo courtesy Cumberland Archives & Musuem C110-001.
“At noon on Saturday, there’s a group who are going to walk to the cemetery—recreate the funeral walk from Ginger Goodwin’s funeral,” Cursons continues. Ginger Goodwin was the well-known coalminer and labor organizer whose leadership of several strikes and outspoken opposition to the 1914-18 war brought him to the attention of authorities. Despite his health problems, his conscription status was changed from ‘unfit’ to ‘fit for service in an overseas fighting unit’. He went into hiding in the bush near Cumberland, with the help of townspeople, but was tracked down and shot by a hired private policeman on July 27, 1918. His death sparked Canada’s first General Strike.
“There was a processional of people from Cumberland all the way to the graveyard—and there wasn’t a single dry eye,” says Cursons, quoting the reports of the time. Anne Davis has researched the route described in Ruth Masters’ book of local history at the museum, and the group will try to recreate the same route for the procession on June 19.
The name Ginger Goodwin still elicits a strong response in the community. “It’s interesting that he died in 1918, and he still provokes a lot of feeling,” says Charlton. “He’s been dead for almost 100 years and we’re still battling it out because issues that were debated back then and fought about back then are still relevant today.”
Davis has a personal story of Ginger Goodwin’s influence. “When I moved here in 1974, I was 19, and my then partner and I bought one of the old houses on Camp Road. It had belonged to Jimmy Ellis, who had gone into care at that point,” she says. “I went down one afternoon to meet him at the old folks home to just ask him some questions about the house and he sat me down and told me the story of Ginger Goodwin.
“As a kid, Jimmy had gone up to the lake with his father and was taking food up to those who were hiding out. When he told me this story he had tears in his eyes, and it was tears of anger. I grew up in Victoria and I had never heard of Ginger Goodwin but I got the message that something really important had happened here. That was my very first introduction to labor history, and I’ve ended up being a labor activist for all of my adult life. It was so important to Jimmy to pass that story on to the next person who was going to live in his house in Cumberland. It had quite an impact.”
Adds Cursons: “Something really important happened in Cumberland that connects to what all of our lives look like right now, and connects to struggles that are still going on. That kind of thing never gets written down by the official establishment. When you go to the archives, it’s only going to read a certain way if it’s a newspaper clipping from the mainstream press. So the real story only lives because people have told it through stories and music—it doesn’t exist in the official record the way it needs to exist.”
The ceremony at the heart of Miners’ Memorial Weekend is the Graveside Vigil at the Cumberland cemetery at 1 pm on June 19. “Miners’ Memorial Day for labor activists is a bit like getting back to your roots—that reminder of the struggles of the past,” says Davis. “At the time Ginger Goodwin was killed, people were fighting for—and sometimes dying for—the eight-hour day, the two-day weekend, basic health and safety standards. Because we’re not taught that history in school—the history of unions, of organizing—we have to go out and find it, and remind ourselves and others of our roots. I think it’s a really important event for that, for connecting again, and remembering that the struggles we’re involved in today are sometimes not so different from what they were fighting for back then.”
Speakers at the cemetery will include labor leaders and historians. “It’s an open mic, which can be interesting!” says Charlton, “because you get some fiery rhetoric—young Turks—like a lot of the Wobblies (the IWW – Industrial Workers of the World) and some of the other political groups.
“Marianne Bell, who used to be president of the Labor Council, is going to be speaking about women in Cumberland at the cemetery,” he adds. “And one time there were some Chilean miners here, and they introduced their tradition of honoring people who had died in the last year—they would say the name, and everybody in the crowd would say ‘Presente’, meaning ‘Here’, which was quite a touching thing. Another time when Roger Stonebank was researching the book that he did, he got in touch with some of Ginger Goodwin’s relatives in England. They thought he was some kind of black sheep shot by the cops and Roger told them that there was actually a ceremony going on in Cumberland, BC for the last 20 years celebrating Ginger Goodwin—so they came up the next year.”
“It was very emotional the first year they came,” Davis recalls. “They were quite tearful at the cemetery talking about him. It blew them away that he was being honored.”
Adds Cursons: “When we’re down at the cemetery we’re standing together and talking together, there’s music, and the act of doing ceremony and ritual—it’s a really neat blending of culture and politics, which strengthens both, which is why it’s such a powerful event.”
Davis agrees. “I think that’s partly what draws people to come from Vancouver and Victoria too,” she says.
“The graveside part is really important to people, and because there’s a whole lot of activities over the whole weekend it’s worth coming the distance to be part of it.”
The ceremony consists of a “combination of music and speeches, and laying of the wreaths—bouquets this year,” says Cursons, noting that the memorial flowers are traditionally ordered and placed by unions, but any family, business or individual can order a commemorative tribute.
“We call out the different unions or individuals who want to lay a bouquet, and they come up and lay it at Ginger Goodwin’s grave,” says Charlton. “We go down to Miners’ Row, for miners who don’t have marked graves, and lay some there. And this year we’re also going to be laying some flowers for the women of Cumberland, the wives of the miners. Then we’re planning a ceremony for 2:30 at the Japanese and Chinese cemeteries.”
Cursons recommends ordering the tribute bouquets before June 10 through the Cumberland Museum. “It’s also a fundraiser for the museum,” she says. “But something we’ve discussed this year—talking about workers and workers’ rights—is that the international cut flower industry is devastating for women. There is heavy pesticide use throughout the cut flower industry. So this year we had a real serious conversation about where those flowers are coming from—we’re doing fair trade flowers for the bouquets from Comox Valley Flower Mart.
“It’s funny how you don’t necessarily connect the dots—especially something that symbolized love and mourning and respect—like roses,” she adds. “You really need to think about who is producing roses, what is their wage like, what is their quality of life like, and how far are the flowers flying in jet planes—some really important questions. So I hope that every year that we’re challenged by doing this right.”
At 3:30 pm on Saturday local historian Gwyn Sproule will lead a walking tour leaving from the museum, of the Cumberland mine sites. Registration for the tour is not required; however advance tickets for $15 are necessary for the Miners’ Memorial Day Dinner at 6 pm. “The big dinner is put on by the Cumberland Museum Board,” says Cursons. “At that event Stephen Hume will be speaking, and Jim Sinclair. There will be music and TheatreWorks is going to be doing a performance.” Depending on numbers, the dinner will either be at the OAP or the CRI. All food for the dinner is donated from local businesses, with proceeds going to the museum.
Music is threaded throughout the weekend. “There’s music Friday night, music at the cemetery, music as part of our dinner,” Cursons says. “Worker’s music is also folk music in its purest form. It’s people’s music, songs of the workers—those have been sung for political reasons or for mourning or to set a pace to your labor. And new verses show up, where some sort of relevant current event changes the lyric. We may not be mining here anymore in Cumberland, but people all over the world are still doing really dangerous, horrendous work. This last year has been a huge year for deaths in coal mining.”
“I think Miners’ Memorial Day is where people’s politics and their cultural expression line up— it’s not a dry political event. It has a very political cultural component. I like politics in our art and our craft!” Cursons says, acknowledging she also wrote a song that came out of Miners’ Memorial Day.
That thought further inspires the planning group. “I think we’ve got enough songs now for a CD!” says Charlton with a laugh. “As a fundraiser for the museum,” adds Davis. “Brian’s got a line on pretty well every Ginger Goodwin song that’s been written!” The idea catches on, with suggestions of songs to include: Cumberland Waltz by Wyckham Porteous, The Day They Shot Ginger Down by Gordon Carter, and songs by Joey Keithley, David Robics and Richard von Fuchs.
“There’s so many new people that live in Cumberland and in the Valley who don’t have a total connection to this history, so we’re working really hard this year on inviting the community as a whole to come out,” says Cursons. “As part of that, we’re inviting other musicians who haven’t traditionally been involved in the event because we just want to hear workers music—it doesn’t have to be a particular union or labor song. This event is totally relevant for all workers. It’s going to be what we make it, as a community, for the next 25 years.”
Clearly Miners’ Memorial Weekend isn’t just a memorial caught in the past. Cultural elements of the event are constantly being renewed, in a continual connection to contemporary issues. The 25-year history of the memorial event itself is now part of the story of Cumberland as a community.
“We have an exhibit case that we want to get some of this material into,” says Cursons, placing the past event posters and flyers back into their folders. “We want to keep everything intact and keep it safe, so people can see the progression of the event—this event is now part of our history.”
For more about the event visit: www.cumberlandmuseum.ca.