It was during this unhappy period that the neighbour boys made all the difference for Tommy.
All his life, Tommy would vividly remember those boys’ acts of kindness that winter when he was ten. He had just come out of hospital and could only walk on crutches. He could get to school in good weather, but when the streets became too clogged with ice and snow, it seemed impossible. It would have been different if his family had a car, but there was only one family in the neighbourhood with such a luxury – later, Tommy remembered that car was “the wonder of the world, and we were allowed to look at it and touch it.”
One morning, there was a knock on the door. It was a Polish boy and a Ukrainian boy, fellows Tommy knew from the street and his school, with a sleigh. “They told my mother that they would pull me to school and bring me back each day,” Tommy recalled later. There was no request for payment – the boys were motivated just by friendship and kindness. “Those boys speaking broken English, the kind of people that some folks referred to as dagos and foreigners and bohunks, these were the people who came and took an interest in another immigrant boy,” he said. “Otherwise, I just wouldn’t have got to school.”
Tommy Douglas’s lifelong hatred for racism, or intolerance of any sort, had already been spoon-fed to him at the knee of both his grandfathers, but it was reinforced that cold day in Winnipeg, and every day of the winter that followed.
He would soon learn another lesson that would stay with him the rest of his life.
Times were tough for his family. His father, used to a good workingman’s wage in the iron foundries of Falkirk, could only count on three days’ work a week at Winnipeg’s Vulcan Iron Works. So whenever Tommy was hospitalized, it put an even greater strain on the Douglas family’s pocketbook – in those days, there was no public medical insurance and no employee benefits. In hospital, Tommy was on a ward with other children, and he received the standard medical care – no specialists, certainly no top-notch ones. The doctors did what they could, but eventually they delivered bad news: the leg should come off.
While the family was wrestling with the gut-wrenching decision of whether to let that happen, Tommy happened to come to the attention of Dr. R.H. Smith, a well-known orthopedic surgeon who was leading a group of medical students through Tommy’s ward.
Dr. Smith paused at the foot of Tommy’s bed, exchanged a few pleasantries with the boy, who was homesick and in pain but cheerful nonetheless, and flipped through his chart. He read of one failed medical procedure and operation after another, and the awful prognosis. The case interested him. When Tommy’s parents came for a visit later, the surgeon had a proposition for them: he’d take over and try a tricky form of surgery that just might save Tommy’s leg, although it would probably leave the knee permanently stiffened. All they had to do was allow him to use the operation as a teaching exercise, with the students watching. How could they refuse?
“As a result of several operations, he saved my leg,” Tommy said later.
In fact, the operation was even more successful than anyone imagined. As an adult, Tommy Douglas liked to tell the story of how, after the knee had healed, the great surgeon and his students gathered around the young patient to remove the bandages and inspect the handiwork. Dr. Smith poked and prodded and pronounced himself satisfied – up to a point. “It’s too bad he cannot bend his knee,” he told the suitably impressed students.
“But Doctor, I can bend it,” the young patient exclaimed. And he did!
Years later, after another injury, the old bad knee would come back to plague him. But so successful was Dr. Smith’s handiwork that for the next thirty years, Tommy Douglas was able to hike, bike, kick soccer balls, box, and keep up with the strenuous rigours of political campaigning.
Tommy had been very lucky. “When I thought about it,” he recalled, “I realized that the same kind of service I got by a stroke of luck should have been available to every child in that ward, and not just to a case that looked like a good specimen for exhibition to medical students.”
He always felt a debt of gratitude to the doctor who came to his rescue, “but it left me with this feeling that if I hadn’t been so fortunate as to have this doctor offer me his services gratis, I would probably have lost my leg. I felt that no boy should have to depend either for his leg or his life upon the ability of his parents to raise enough money to bring a first-class surgeon to his bedside. And I think it was out of this experience, not at the moment consciously, but through the years, I came to believe that health services ought not to have a price-tag on them, and that people should be able to get whatever health services they required irrespective of their individual capacity to pay.”
And so it was that the germ that developed into the national health care program was planted in the mind of the boy who would grow up to become the premier of Saskatchewan and to be known across Canada as the “father of medicare.”
Thomas Clement Douglas was born in Falkirk, Scotland, on October 20, 1904, the first of three children of Tom Douglas, a recently returned veteran of the Boer War, and Anne Clement, daughter of Highlanders who had migrated to Glasgow. The birth was an auspicious one that brought about a reconciliation between Tom and his own father, also named Thomas, a stern, demanding disciplinarian who was noted in the community as a fiery orator.
The elder Thomas was a lifelong Liberal who took pride in having once introduced William Gladstone at a political rally. His son came home from South Africa sickened by the horrors and injustices of war and, shortly after, announced that he had switched allegiances to the relatively new Labour Party, the socialists. The father threw the son out of his house and for over a year the two didn’t speak.
But after little Tommy’s birth, the proud grandfather couldn’t stay away long. One day there was a knock at the door, and there stood the elder Thomas Douglas, “come to see the boy.”
Over the next few years, each of the old man’s other seven sons “went Labour,” and eventually he too made the switch, so Tommy Douglas, who would become the head of the first socialist government in North America in 1944, came by his politics honestly.
The town of Falkirk, about midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, lies close to the site of a decisive battle in 1297 between British troops and Scottish forces led by William Wallace. The great iron works that was established there, fuelled by coal from nearby mines, made cannons for Wellington during the Napoleonic Wars. The men of the Douglas clan had worked at the iron works for several generations. It was a large and loving family, and little Tommy, as the first grandson and because he was always a bit sickly, was particularly loved. Although his father was a working man, he made a comfortable living by Falkirk standards, and Tommy enjoyed a happy childhood, except for his health problems.
The Douglas clan lived in two stone houses owned by Grandfather Douglas at the foot of a brae, the Scottish word for hill. At the time of Tommy’s birth, the houses still had thatched roofs, though later the thatch was replaced with slate, and they were heated by fire-places. There was a lot of reading done in those houses and a lot of arguing, about politics, religion, philosophy. It was a stimulating environment for a bright, observant boy like Tommy, a daydreamer who chafed at the limits placed on him by his poor health.
His grandfather Douglas had the large callused hands and broad shoulders of an ironworker, but he was a Sunday painter. In addition to introducing Gladstone, he had painted a portrait of the great man. And, most significantly for his young grandson, he was an amateur orator with a wide reputation – Tommy remembered him as “one of the finest speakers I ever heard”– and had committed to memory hundreds of verses of Robert Burns, Scotland’s beloved national poet. Tommy’s earliest memories were of sitting on the old man’s knee by the fireside as he recited lines from “Tam o’ Shanter” and other famous Burns poems.
Young Tommy absorbed Scottish history and the nationalism, egalitarianism, and religious fervour of Burns. A boyhood hero was Robert the Bruce,