5 Trading the Pulpit for Politics
11 A New Challenge, and Putting Down the Sword
Chronology of Tommy Douglas (1904-1986)
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green and pleasant land.
– William Blake
“Improving people’s economic conditions is not an end in itself, it’s a means to an end…. I never thought a man could save his soul if his belly was empty or that he could think about things like beauty and goodness if he had a toothache.”
– Tommy Douglas in conversation, 1982
“I am conscious of the fact that it is not customary for ministers to take an active part in the affairs of the nation; but I also remember that there was One who went about doing good so that the common people heard Him gladly. And I would not be worthy of His name if I did not take up the sword on behalf of the underpaid and underprivileged. I therefore dedicate myself this evening to the service of this constituency….”
– Tommy Douglas in his first nomination speech, November 4, 1933
National Archives of Canada/PA172625
Tommy Douglas (at right) dressed as King Arthur, along with (from left) Conservative Leader Robert Stanfield, Stanley Knowles (as Merlin) and Audrey Schreyer (as Queen Guinevere) in a 1971 Parliamentary Christmas skit, “Chamelot,” authored by Stanfield. Tommy was once urged to take up an acting career, “but I never really liked the idea of being an echo of someone else’s lines. I wanted to make up my own lines in life.”
1
An Immigrant Twice Over
The cold Winnipeg wind whistles around the corner of the house like a freight train bearing down on them, and little Tommy Douglas hunches his thin shoulders, willing the wool of his coat to be thicker and warmer somehow. It’s uncomfortable in the sled, the cold and wind, the ice beneath the runners so close to him, every bump shooting through his spine and zeroing-in on his sore knee. But complaint is the farthest thought from his mind. Rather, he’s filled with gratitude and wonder at the stoic, silent strength of his two friends who, also uncomplaining, every morning help him into the sled and pull him, across frozen streets, the quarter mile to school.
The pain in his knee is nothing new to Tommy, but just about everything else is. The first years of his young life were spent in the bosom of his father’s family in Falkirk, Scotland, where Tommy was the eldest son of an eldest son of an eldest son, all part of a large working-class family of iron moulders. Then, when Tommy was not yet seven, the family packed up their belongings and moved halfway across the world to Winnipeg, on the Canadian frontier. It was 1911 and the world was very different than it is today.
Tommy had been small and sickly almost from birth, and a serious bout with pneumonia when he was six had only made him weaker. Shortly after that, he fell against a stone and hurt the knee of his right leg, an injury that would nag at him for the rest of his life. Osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone, set in and there followed a series of operations on the leg. There was no money for a hospital. Instead, the doctor in his long frock coat and black top hat came to the house. The kitchen was the operating room, with the surgery performed on the table where the family had eaten breakfast shortly before. Young Tommy was sedated with chloroform applied to a gauze mask, his mother, grandmother, and a neighbour woman assisting. The doctor cut an incision in the flesh just above his knee and exposed the infected bone, the femur, so he could scrape it with a knife. No sooner had the doctor left then a suture came out and the wound began to bleed, causing a commotion in the family before it could be stanched.
The Douglas family was already in ferment at this time. Tommy’s father, Tom, had fallen prey to the lure of the new world and gone to Canada to check out possibilities, winding up in Winnipeg. As soon as he was settled, the family was to join him. The trip over was delayed by Tommy’s injury, but, after two more operations, and months of hobbling around the house and school on crutches, in the early spring of 1911 the leg seemed healed. Tommy, his sister Annie, and their mother, pregnant with another girl, Isobel, set out from Glasgow by ship, seventeen foggy days in the frigid North Atlantic, the trip made all the longer by dangerous sea ice. That was followed by a five-day train trip in the dilapidated old CPR colonist cars, with little kitchens, hot and filled with spicy smells, at the end. The cars were crammed full of immigrant families heading out to the Canadian West – the Great Lone Land – to make their fortunes.
Winnipeg was filling up with families like the Douglases and immigrants from all over Europe speaking so many languages that the city’s North End, where most of them gravitated, was like the Tower of Babel. Tom Douglas rented a house on Gladstone Street – it was just a coincidence that the street was named after his own father’s hero, William Gladstone, the former British prime minister, and just a coincidence that the neighbourhood was known as Point Douglas. Only one other family on the block the Douglases lived on was from the British Isles, but that made little difference to the kids playing in the street.
Tom Douglas was encouraged by this. He would tell Tommy: “You’re playing with the Kravchenko kid. This is marvelous, this is what the world should be like. Sure, I can’t understand the family next door, but you kids are growing up together, and you’ll work for the same kinds of things, you’ll build the same kind of world.”
The little house on Gladstone Street (just a block from Winnipeg’s notorious red light district on Annabella Street) had an outhouse for a toilet and a pump in the yard for water, but Tommy’s mother, a small, lively woman who was forever encouraging Tommy, made a comfortable home there, taking in boarders to help pay the rent. Tommy enrolled at a little schoolhouse on Norquay Street where, while his leg held out, he played some football. He loved the freedom of Winnipeg, where he and his friends could play unfettered along the banks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, so unlike the confines of Scotland, where most land was private and posted against trespassers.
But