“There was quite a good deal of shooting. Most of the mounted policemen were shooting into the air, but some of them shot into the crowd.”
Although Tommy wasn’t directly involved in the strike, he retained vivid memories of the fist-waving speeches given by strike leaders like Fred Dixon, John Queen, and the gaunt, bearded Woodsworth, who had become a sort of role model for the boy.
Woodsworth, usually known by his initials, J.S., was a Methodist minister and head of the All People’s Mission, a combination social centre and school where Anne Douglas was a volunteer and Tommy often used the library and sports facilities. He was a soft-spoken man who suddenly turned into a lion when he stepped on a soapbox. A strong advocate of the concept of “practical Christianity,” or the social gospel, “in the part of society that we moved in, he was a little god,” Tommy said. He would be elected to Parliament as a Labour candidate in two years and would become a colleague of Tommy’s fifteen years later. Now, it was shocking news to hear that Woodsworth had been arrested.
“It’s an awful disgrace when your minister goes to jail,” Tommy said.
The Winnipeg strike left an indelible impression on Tommy Douglas, who became increasingly interested in politics and began to work in local campaigns, handing out leaflets and doing other small chores. It wasn’t just the jailing of Woodsworth and the violence he witnessed on Bloody Saturday that effected him.
“Not until after the Estevan riot (which Tommy also witnessed, a dozen years later) and later the Regina riot (in 1934) did I realize that this was all part of a pattern,” he would recall. “Whenever the powers that be can’t get what they want, they’re always prepared to resort to violence or any kind of hooliganism to break the back of organized opposition.”
Three years later, another fight. The scene is an old arena on Main Street across from the Union Station by the Fort Garry Hotel. A Saturday night in spring, and there’s a big crowd. The smells of beer and sweat are in the air, and there’s an all-but-palpable sense of excitement. The main event is about to begin, and this time, Tommy isn’t watching – he’s in the thick of it.
In the sixth and final round of their championship fight, defending champ Cecil Matthews and the challenger, seventeen-year-old Tommy Douglas, are tied on points. Tommy is small and, by his own admission, “not a particularly outstanding boxer. I was too short in the arm to be a good boxer, but I was fast on my feet and could hit fairly hard.”
But this day in 1922, Tommy gets a lucky break. With the clock ticking down, Matthews gets careless. He tries to come in fast and go under Tommy’s guard; in the process, he drops his own guard and leaves himself wide open. Wham! Tommy connects. It’s not a knockout but it’s enough to win the round for Tommy, and the fight, and with it the amateur lightweight championship of Manitoba.
You’d think a boy’s parents would be proud of this kind of achievement. Not Tommy’s – they were disgusted. Anne Douglas’s religious scruples were too strict to see boxing as anything less than the devil’s work, and Tom had seen enough violence in two wars to last a life-time. On the trail to the championship, their son had collected a broken nose, a couple of lost teeth, a strained hand, and a sprained thumb. Now they looked him over, his face red and puffy, his hand throbbing with pain, and they shook their heads sadly. “It serves you right,” Tom declared. “If you’re fool enough to get into this sort of thing, don’t ask for any sympathy.”
Nor did Tommy get any.
Tommy had begun boxing when he was fifteen and weighed in at 135 pounds (61 kg). He used to go to the gym operated by the One Big Union, a labour organization that had sprung up during the General Strike, and was attracted by the lure of the ring. After all those years tied to a crutch, Tommy was now remarkably fast on his feet. He found himself cast as a sparring partner for Lloyd Peppen, who became Canadian lightweight champion, and Charlie Balongey, who went on to be a heavyweight champ. He continued to fight through his teenage years, and his boxing culminated in the championship, which he successfully defended the following year, when he was eighteen.
Tommy Douglas the boxer! That was something the doctors who worked on the skinny boy’s infected leg a few years earlier would never have expected. But the Tommy Douglas who returned to Winnipeg in 1919 was a far different boy than the one who had left it four years earlier.
Until Tom Douglas rejoined them that spring, Tommy assumed many of the responsibilities in the family, and the fourteen-year-old boy grew up in a hurry. Indeed, from the time Tommy returned to Canada, as the Bible says, he pretty much put aside childish things and began to speak like a man.
“I was the man of the family,” he’d recall, “and had to look after things: see that the storm windows were put up, and that my sisters would start school – I went with them and got them placed – and this sort of thing. And this isn’t bad for a boy.”
Even after his father came home, Tommy continued to play more of an adult’s role than that of a boy. Tom Douglas was weakened, both physically, from exposure to gas in the trenches, and emotionally. For his service to king and country, he was awarded a bonus, which the family used as a down payment for a house on McPhail Street, near the Elmwood Cemetery. He also received a military pension of about twelve dollars a month, not nearly enough to live on, and he soon returned to the iron works. It was dangerous work and twice Tom narrowly escaped serious injury when he was splashed with molten metal. For the rest of his life, he would be the victim of frequent bouts of depression, and whatever dreams of a better life he had that had brought him to Canada would have to be played out in his children.
But it would take a while. Times were tough for the Douglases in the twenties, and even Annie and Isobel went to work, as sales clerks, after finishing grade school. As for Tommy, he wanted to go back to school but thought his father “was living in a dream world” if he imagined the family could afford such a luxury.
Tommy’s first job was as a messenger boy for a drug store at the corner of Higgins and Main, near the Royal Alex Hotel, and he earned six dollars a week. But he was an ambitious boy and, always on the lookout for better opportunities, soon answered an ad from the Richardson Press, which produced a variety of publications, including the Grain Trade News.
He went to the print shop and told the foreman he wanted a job. The man looked Tommy over and tried him out on a few things, and then said, “I’ll teach you all I know, and you still won’t know anything.”
As it turned out, Tommy would work as an apprentice printer for five years, thoughts of school and an education put aside. He started out as what was known as a printer’s devil, doing odd, dirty jobs in the always-dirty print shop. He broke lead type out of its wooden forms, melted it down for reuse, and scrubbed the ever-present ink off machines, walls, and furniture with gasoline. Soon he moved on to setting type, working full time Monday through Friday and half a day Saturday. By the time he was sixteen, Tommy was the youngest Linotype operator in Canada, earning full journeyman’s wages, forty-five dollars a week, even though he was still an apprentice.
Aside from work, his life was busy.
Two nights, he took printing classes; the rest of the week, he was active in church groups at the nearby Beulah Baptist Church and in Boy Scouts and the Order of DeMolay, a youth wing of the Masons, which his father had joined. As a Scout, Tommy quickly rose to troop leader, patrol leader, cubmaster and, eventually, scoutmaster. He loved working with kids younger than he was, a fact that would play a large part in his later decision to become a minister.
He also joined the militia, the 79th Cameron Highlanders, earning a small stipend for playing the clarinet in the band and wearing kilts on parade.
Tommy was