As for the boxing, he not only embraced it himself, but encouraged the boys in his Scout troop to give it a try. “That doesn’t mean I’d like any boy to get into professional boxing,” he said. “But you don’t avoid fights by never fighting. I think you avoid fights if somebody knows that you’re willing to fight.”
More significantly for his future life, he was a voracious reader, tackling books on politics and religion as well as the English novels, like the romances of Sir Walter Scott, he devoured; and the world of amateur theatre opened up for him. Those recitations of Robbie Burns by his grandfather Douglas had made a lasting impression, and Tommy, who had inherited his grandfather’s prodigious memory, began performing monologues, which were very popular at the time. This was in the days before television or even radio, and people went in for homemade entertainment. He took lessons with a famous Winnipeg elocutionist, Jean Campbell, who herself was a student of Jean Alexander, a nationally famous speaker and writer. Tommy became a hit attraction at Burns dinners – an annual occurrence on the great poet’s birthday – and at Masonic and other functions, where he would recite poems by Burns, Kipling, and Pauline Johnson, the Canadian Indian woman who was then all the rage. Sometimes the Scouts would organize concerts, with Tommy as one of the attractions, and sell tickets for a quarter.
Whatever fear of audiences Tommy may have had quickly evaporated. “It was excellent training for a life in politics,” he remembered, although at this point a life in politics was the farthest thing from his mind.
His active life made him “a bit of an oddity in the print shop,” he remembered. “I was always good friends with everyone, but I didn’t join the lads in the evenings. I didn’t go to the drinking parties and didn’t play poker, as most printers do. And at noon hour, whenever there was a poker game, I was usually memorizing a recitation for the evening or getting a little talk ready.” But, he added with a straight face, “I was provincial lightweight champion, and so they didn’t kid me too much.”
Two men were strong influences on Tommy during this period of his boyhood.
Through the DeMolays, he became close to W.J. Major and Dr. “Dad” Howden, who were sort of big brothers with the group.
Major, a lawyer who would later become attorney general of Manitoba and a Queen’s Bench judge, was largely responsible for persuading Tommy to return to school. He pointed out that the young man seemed to have talent aplenty, but without formal schooling, his potential was severely limited.
His other mentor, Howden, owned the Winnipeg Theatre and was a part owner in the Walker Theatre, a major stop in the vaudeville circuit, and Tommy and other boys would often attend performances with him. Gradually, Tommy began to get small roles, playing a butler or making good use of his Scottish accent.
Howden was so impressed he offered to pay Tommy’s way if he wanted to quit his job and take up dramatic training. But Tommy never took the stage that seriously.
“The experience gave me a feel for grease paint,” he said, “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.”
His life on the stage led to one personally memorable moment, though.
As an understudy for one of the major roles at a play to be performed at a Masonic convention, Tommy stepped in without blinking an eye when the leading man had to drop out. He got a standing ovation from the five thousand Masons who saw him. Tommy would never forget what happened later that evening.
His father had been in the audience and was justifiably proud. But Tom Douglas was a reticent man who was sparing of praise, especially for his son.
“Let’s walk,” he said, as the two of them emerged from the old Board of Trade Building downtown. They walked in silence up Main Street and then along Henderson Road and through their old Point Douglas neighborhood, then across the Disraeli Bridge over the Red River and into Elmwood to the small old house at 132 McPhail Street.
“I knew from that he’d been deeply moved by the performance,” Tommy recalled. “We never exchanged a word all the way home, but, as we were going up the front step, he tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You did no bad.’ That was as close as he ever came to giving me a word of praise. He might tell my mother that he was pleased, but he found it very difficult to tell me.”
Saskatchewan Archives Board R-A26491
As a supply preacher to rural congregations, Douglas is so popular that sixteen-year-old Irma Dempsey comes to hear him and falls in love.
3
A Commitment to the Church
A Sunday morning in spring, 1922, the Canadian National Railway station at Stonewall, Manitoba, a short ride north of Winnipeg.
A young man dressed in his best suit steps tentatively out of a coach and onto the crowded platform. He’s nineteen but he’s small, slender, baby-faced, and looks more like fourteen.
The whole congregation of the Stonewall Baptist Church, about forty people, are milling about on the platform, looking for the man sent up from Winnipeg to be their preacher for the day. Nobody takes any notice of the shy young man, on his first assignment as a lay preacher.
Since no one pays any attention to him, he goes up to a boy who is leaning against his bicycle. “Can you tell me how to get to the Baptist church?”
The boy looks at the young man in surprise. “What do you want at the Baptist church?” he asks suspiciously.
“I’m supposed to be taking the service this morning,” the young man answers.
“Are you the new preacher?”
“Yes, I am.”
Then, in a loud voice, the boy calls out: “Ma, this kid says he’s the new preacher!”
All eyes turn to Tommy Douglas and, he would recall later, “the disappointment in their faces was very noticeable.”
Just the same, his service is a success – and he’s invited back.
Tommy Douglas seems to have been born to the preacher’s trade, just as he was born to the life of a politician.
Both his grandfathers had been religious men. Old Thomas Douglas was a devout follower of Scotland’s establishment Presbyterian Church who, despite his love of Burns and Scotch whisky, frowned on singing and dancing, particularly on the Sabbath. Andrew Clement had, as a young man, been a drunkard who was “saved” by the ultra-conservative Christian Brethren. A sober, quiet man at the time Tommy knew him, he had become a lay Baptist preacher who often would stop to deliver sermons as he made his rounds as a delivery man.
Anne Douglas was also quite religious and, in Winnipeg, steered her family to the Baptist Church, always harbouring the hope that her son would be attracted to the ministry. The whole family, with the exception of Tom Douglas, who had little use for religion, became active in the neighbourhood Beulah Baptist Church.
When he was studying to be a preacher, Tommy remembered a time when the straitlaced minister of the Beulah church came to call on the Douglases around supper time. Tom arrived home from work shortly afterwards and, as was his custom, tramped into the kitchen in his dirty pants and boots, the smell of molten metal still