InFocus Magazine

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, sales
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.

“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.

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, dosage
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.

“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.

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.

“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.
Vancouver Island’s newest micro goat dairy is located on Holiday Road in Fanny Bay.  Unless you knew that fact, no rx you could easily drive by the Snap Dragon Goat Dairy and be unaware that it was there.

Karen Fouracre and Jaki Ayton have been developing their compact 1.6 acre farm for the last 14 years.  A mixed farming operation, they raise hogs for meat, goats for milk, and chickens for eggs.  There are gardens and a 40-foot greenhouse in the front yard.  Peach, pear, cherry, apple and plum trees are sprinkled around the property.  Behind the house you’ll find various small buildings, the new milking parlor, several paddocks and pastures.

Over the years they have tried raising ducks, turkeys, sheep, rabbits, peacocks and cows to see what works best for them and their property.  Goats have been part of the herd from the start.  In addition to providing milk, the goats have contributed to Ayton and Fouracre’s recreation opportunities and extended their network of friends.

Ayton shows some of the purebred Toggenberg goats at the summer fairs.  One of them, La Mountain Dutchess, is very close to achieving permanent grand champion status.  Both women are active in local 4-H Club activities giving goat care workshops and assisting as judges.  “They can’t have the parents sitting in on their kid’s presentation; they need spare adults to come,” says Fouracre.  “They do some amazing presentations, it is the most fun, and it is really entertaining.  They put a lot of work into it.  So it has really enriched our lives.”

The idea to establish a micro dairy came when David Wood, the owner of the Salt Spring Island Cheese Company, approached the Vancouver Island Goat Association (VIGA) last fall looking for milk from Island producers.  He was buying milk in the Fraser Valley and wanted to find sources closer to home.  As members of the VIGA, Fouracre and Ayton heard of the enquiry and they immediately began to investigate whether or not they could start a dairy.  Selling their milk to the cheese company would provide them with a way to offset the costs of keeping their ever-growing goat herd.

“I have quite a few goats now and quite a few purebreds and they’re not cheap,” says Ayton.  “We did some stats for the Vancouver Island Goat Association a couple of years ago and it is about $750 per year to keep an adult female goat.”

Logistically it worked because Salt Spring Island Cheese was already purchasing sheep’s milk from a farm in Black Creek, thus making a Fanny Bay stop convenient.  High start up costs had always been a stumbling block to the idea of setting up a dairy.  Cow dairies have setup costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Also, the milk marketing board establishes quotas that can be both difficult and expensive to purchase.  They discovered that the small number of goat dairies in BC makes quotas unnecessary thus leaving the question of the start up costs.  “We got a tour of the sheep dairy,” says Fouracre.  “The fellow was very nice and let us come and take a look.  He has a very simple operation and we went and looked at it and said we can do this.”

They have decided to milk 14 of their 33 goat herd.  Most of the commercial goat dairies in BC have herds of 200-500 animals.  The approximately 300 litres of milk per week that Snap Dragon will produce would be the equivalent of a large dairy’s single day output.  However, that amount of output spread over the eight months of the year that they will sell to Salt Spring Island Cheese should achieve the objective of “getting the girls to pay for themselves.”

In order to get licensed as a Grade A dairy, Fouracre and Ayton had to absorb the very detailed regulations of the BC Dairy code and build to its strict specifications.   “It was a matter of finding people who could help us out,” explains Ayton of how they approached the task.  “Island Dairy Products is the guy who services all the big dairies.  So we phoned Lawrence, we talked to him.  He’s been a really good resource.  We talked to Gerald Smith who has a sheep dairy and asked him tons of questions.  I talked to some of the big goat dairy people on the mainland, and just asking questions, reading it, checking, emailing the BC licensing place back and forth, etc.”  In the Fanny Bay community they found many people to help them, including retired dairyman and neighbor Glenn Plewis, who assisted with contacts to source the various components needed.

“One of the hardest things is to do was find a dairy tank that was small enough,” says Fouracre.  Adds Ayton: “Getting the equipment small enough has been expensive.  Everything is very big.  There is commercial stuff that is big or there is specialty stuff that is completely out of line expensive.”

It took three months to find a dairy tank that would work.  They finally found one in the Fraser Valley—at 1,000 litres it is bigger than they need but the smallest they could find.  Karen had to significantly modify the plans for the milking parlor/processing building in order to make it fit.  In order to meet the goal of shipping milk in May, many of their friends and Holiday Road neighbors have been called upon to assist with their expertise and a helping hand.  They are most appreciative of all the assistance they have received and they look forward to paying it back with their own labor.  “We’ve had friends, three or four times now, we’ve had anywhere from two to seven of them show up for a day and help us build,” says Fouracre.

On May 10 their dairy dream became a reality when Salt Spring Island Cheese owner David Wood came to help pick up the first shipment of milk.  Wood, originally from Scotland, moved to Toronto in 1973 to work as executive director of Pollution Probe.  His entrepreneurial endeavors prior to establishing Salt Spring Island Cheese in 1994 included Solartech, a renewable energy company, and, the David Wood Food Shop, which by 1989 included three Toronto stores and a catering division.  Salt Spring Island Cheese specializes in handmade goat and sheep cheeses.

Fouracre and Ayton are pleased to share their knowledge of raising goats and how to approach setting up a micro dairy.  “If you are going to start with animals, join all the animal clubs first,” says Fouracre.  “Then get your animals.”

Ayton agrees.  “It’s like getting a dog.  You want to know the community, know the breeders, get the history and background and then start spending large quantities of money.”

Mastering the art of animal husbandry is their number one recommendation for anyone thinking of setting up a dairy.  Get to know your animals and how to care for them.  This will keep them healthy, which will ensure a good product and will keep the vet bills down. They are very proud of the fact that their goats have nice personalities and, on average, they live to be about 24 years of age.  The average life span for a goat is about 15 years.

Another tip from Fouracre:  “Keep the farm clean and tidy because if you don’t, you’ll have a vet bill.  If there is something lying around that shouldn’t be there, you should move it.  Either that or it is going to be tripped over, stepped on or swallowed.

“One thing we learned early is there is no such thing as tomorrow,” she adds.  “There’s no such thing as later either—we’ll do it later.  It’s like, okay, that fence is looking wobbly.  No, you fix it now!  Whatever you were doing you fix the fence now.  Or you’re searching for the goats later, or you’re getting up because they’re in the garage and they’re in the feed.  Or, the buck is breeding the does you didn’t want bred, you know!  When all you had to do was stop for 20 minutes, get the nails and the hammer and fix the fence.  But you didn’t do that so now you’ve got this!”

Ayton outlines some of the essential elements for setting up a dairy:  “Estimate high on all your expenses—we had a business plan and a business plan budget.  There are a couple of really good ones online and we went through and figured it out,” she says.  “I know our price point of how much each goat has to produce per day.  Each one has to produce a good amount of milk, we can’t have loafers.  And you have to be willing to be a farmer, which means cull.  And cull to us means kill.  It means different things to different people.  You have to be willing to look at your herd and say. ‘Okay that one’s no good; they have to go to the butcher.’  I mean you love them to death, like the babies, you get lots of babies every year, you can’t keep them all.  And that’s just part of the animal part of it.  Seeing these are the good ones, these aren’t good ones.  Taking the time to figure it out and then getting rid of the ones that aren’t productive.”

Fouracre agrees, adding, “That took a long time to learn.  That is a whole mind set that took two or three or four years to start thinking that way; to actually be able to do it.”

Adds Ayton:  “Most people only have goats for four years, because they’re not farmers and they don’t get rid of them.  If you start with two goats you can have 15 in four years if you don’t get rid of them.”

The women have obviously worked hard to learn all the necessary parts of farming.  Listening to them describe their dairy and how they take care of their animals it is easy to assume that farming is in their background.  In fact, says Ayton, it took some years to learn how to view their goats like farmers.  “I wasn’t raised on a farm; I grew up in a townhouse.  We’re not farmers by birth.”

But they are now dedicated farmers by choice.  Ayton still works off the farm in public health but with the launch of the dairy, Fouracre is now working at home full time.  In addition to her dairy chores, she will also be selling produce, flowers, eggs, fruit and hand-drawn art cards from a farm stall.   They love what they do and where they live.  They also love sharing the experience with others.  This past April they held their second “Open Farm Day” where anyone interested was invited to visit the farm and see the animals up close.  Donations are collected to go to YANA and it also serves as a form of self-preservation.

“It’s just for fun,” says Ayton.  “Everyone wants to come and see the babies.  They want to see the farm and see the goats, so we open the farm.  We have so many people who want to come and see the babies we figured we better designate a day, otherwise you don’t get anything done.”

Watch for their ads next year so you don’t miss the chance to visit these two interesting women and see this most unique micro dairy operation.