The Company Store - Cape Breton Victoria Regional School Board

The Company Store
By: Sheldon
Currie
Sheldon Currie
• Sheldon Currie – born 1934 in Reserve Mines.
• After high school in Cape Breton and some time in
the RCAF and a variety of jobs he went to
university and became a teacher first in high
school and then in university.
• He graduated from St. Francis Xavier University ,
the University of New Brunswick, and the
University of Alabama with his PhD.
• He also received an honorary degree from St.
Thomas University.
• He is an independent playwright, novelist, and
short fiction writer.
• He has won the Okanogan Award and the
Breton Books Award for his writing.
• His novel The Glace Bay Miners' Museum
was adapted into a film in 1995 titled
Margaret’s Museum.
• Other novels by Sheldon include:
Down the Coaltown Road: A Novel,
The Story So Far,
TWo More Solitudes: A Novel,
Lauchie, Liza and Rory
The Company Store.
(His first 1988)
The Company Store – An Introduction
• The 1920s was a decade of pleasure
and opportunity in most of North
America. World War I had just ended
two years prior to the start of the
decade.
• People were optimistic and the
economy was on the rise.
• Things were looking up and people
were immigrating to North America in
hopes of securing a good job and
financial security.
• The 1920s was also the time of
prohibition (making alcohol illegal),
leading to bootlegging and a great deal
of dirty money.
• Prohibition had a profound effect on
Canada.
• In fact, a town in Manitoba only started
selling alcohol in late 2011!
• The 1920s is often referred to as the
Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age.
• From bob haircuts and flapper dresses
to advancements in film and music to
new art movements, the 1920s was a
new explosion of cultural production.
• During this time of economic growth
coal mining was in full swing.
Immigrants came from all over Europe
looking for work in Cape Breton.
• Families would live in company owned
housing and their wages would go
directly towards paying for utilities,
food, clothing and other bills.
• However, this meant that a person
could receive a pay cheque of nothing
but pennies as their wages had already
been used to pay their debts.
• Miners often could not afford to pay
their bills in full even after working over
seventy hours a week.
• Due to this economic struggle, children
would work in the mines as soon as
they were able. Children hardly passed
the age of ten years old would work
twelve hours shifts.
• In 1922, the British Empire Steel Corp
(BESCO) introduced a one-third
reduction in wages and the coal miners
were devastated.
• They reacted in outrage by reducing
the coal produced by the mine by a
third. In 1925, the company went as far
as cutting of the miner’s credit at the
stores, which lead to a five month
strike in 1925.
• Published in 1988, Sheldon Currie’s novel The
Company Store provides readers with a
nuanced examination of the impact of the coal
mining industry on Cape Breton and its
families.
• Though the novel is set after the time of WW I,
Currie is nevertheless able to draw attention
to many contemporary issues facing Cape
Breton. Among these concerns are increasing
out-migration of youth, the challenges
associated with maintaining a regional identity
and the struggle to address economic
disparities.
• The Company Store takes place in a
small Cape Breton mining community in
the late 1920s.
• The novel primarily focuses on the life of
the MacDonald family, in particular, Ian
Macdonald.
• Ian is nineteen years old and the
protagonist. He returns from the air force
as the novel begins, unsure of what is
waiting for him at home.
• His family is in a state of chaos due to
the economic struggles faced by all
miners in this period.
• Ian returns home by train after serving
two years in the air force and gives a
monologue about his journey home.
• Ian is the protagonist of the story and
is 19 when we meet him (15/16 in the
flashbacks).
• He narrates throughout the play. He is
smart, a good writer and student, and
goes to the air force to be a radar
operator. When he realizes he is not cut
out for the military he returns home.
Mining: A History
• Daily life was different in coal-mining
communities. When miners work with
explosives, tunnelling deep underground or
out under the ocean, when they labour in
semi-darkness, breathe in foul, corrosive air,
and live constantly with the threat of death,
there is a complex dynamic at work.
• Miners spend entire lives working for little
pay, less satisfaction, and only to improve
the profit margins of their employers,
collective frustration and anger are
inevitable.
• And when life collides with death, as it
frequently does in the mines, entire
communities come to a halt and gather
at the pit-head to wait. The bonds
linking miner to miner below, and
family to family above, are enduring
and everlasting.
Company Control
• The arrival of the General Mining
Association at Pictou in 1827 marked
Nova Scotia's entry into the Industrial
Age.
• The subsequent development of the
province's coal reserves opened up
endless employment opportunities for
Nova Scotians; no one had to leave the
province to find work, and in the early
days there were jobs for anyone willing
to relocate a short distance.
• Wages were low but the work was secure,
and migrating from one mine to another, or
one community to another, was common.
• From the beginning, however, there was a
shortage of skilled labour, especially around
coal technology; as a result, mechanics and
engineers were frequently brought from
Great Britain, induced with offers of high
wages and special benefits. Managers and
senior staff, also came from Great Britain, or
later from central Canada and the United
States.
• They occupied company residences where
they lived in comfort which was opposite
from the hard-scrabble existence of the
thousands of men whose work and lives they
controlled.
• By the late 1800s, coal mines were being
developed in Nova Scotia faster than men
could be found to work in them; the work had
also become diversified, but technical
training was not yet available provincially.
The result was an influx of skilled immigrant
miners and their families, from France,
Belgium, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and
various Eastern European countries.
• The world in which the miners lived was
completely dominated by whatever company
employed them.
• It was the company that created the
community — in the early days, a group of
rough buildings and sheds quickly built to
service mine-related activities.
• Along with the gritty industrial sprawl that
formed the nucleus of a typical coal-mining
community, came the ever-present company
houses — tiny detached cottages or rowhomes, designed to keep miners and their
families together — close to the pit-head, and
in minimum comfort by the standards of the
day.
• Along with the company houses came the
company store — one in each community,
stocked with everything that the miner or his
family would ever need.
• These were quality goods, but they came
with a high price; everything could be
charged on credit against the miner's pay
envelope, and few families escaped being in
perpetual economic bondage.
• Over time, company stores in Nova Scotia's
coal-mining towns became symbols of
corporate oppression and in times of labour
unrest were the objects of looting and
violence.
• Conflict between miners and employers
was a constant in Nova Scotia after the
1860s, resulting in strikes and lock-outs,
company police, military intervention,
hostility, brutality and corporate
stubbornness.
• The long strike of 1909-11, which lasted
for 22 months in some communities, and
the bitter 1925 strike with its
accompanying suffering and descent
into violence, remain landmark episodes
in the province’s long, turbulent history
of unrest in the mines.
Mining Disasters
• The miner's life has always been a dark,
dangerous and precarious one, carried
out in the earth's margins and depths,
usually far underground — and in the
case of Nova Scotia's coal mines,
frequently in damp underground
tunnels stretching for kilometres out
beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Sweat from
the miner's brow has often been
mingled with blood on the coal or gold.
• Miners lived with death as a constant
threat, and are frequently the victims of
underground tragedies — dust
explosions, falling coal and rock,
asphyxiation from gas; still others
drown, are caught in machinery, or are
run over by coal cars.
• Above ground, coal miners die from
silicosis, black lung and other related
diseases caused by breathing coal
dust.
Date: ca.1920
Miners in railcars headed into the mine.
Date: ca.1925
Located at Reserve Mines, Cape Breton, this is said to be Canada's first co-operative housing
development. It was financed and built by the miners themselves, under the leadership of Father James J.
"Jimmy" Tompkins,"
28 September
1923.
Pay and
deductions
Date: 1923