Boxing Rings and Grease Paint
June 21, 1919 – “Bloody Saturday.” A front page photo in the paper this evening shows vividly a climactic moment in the violence that marks the end of the Winnipeg General Strike.
It’s a panoramic view of Main Street in the throes of a riot. The famous streetcar the strikers overturned and set ablaze is over there, and there, at the left, lies the body of a man gunned down by police. Crowds mill in the background and on the sides.
The photo is dominated by a troop of uniformed RCMP officers, charging down the street on their horses and brandishing clubs.
And over there, slightly above the centre, you can just make out the shapes of two figures on a rooftop, watching the horrific scene, never to be forgotten, unfold before them.
The two are fourteen-year-old Tommy Douglas and a friend.
“We were too stupid to be scared up there,” Tommy remembered. “We were just excited by it all.”
Tommy and his mother and two sisters had arrived back in Winnipeg early in the year and rented a house on Gordon Street, not far from where they’d lived a few years earlier. Tom Douglas, still not mustered out of the army, would follow in a few months. Anne Douglas got a job at the Singer sewing machine factory. Tommy had every intention of honouring his father’s wishes and returning to school, but, for the moment, money was tight, and he too went to work.
So it was that he and another boy, Mark Talnicoff – who would later marry Tommy’s sister Annie – were delivering copies of a newspaper in the Market Square near city hall on that Saturday afternoon when they heard the commotion. The two boys shimmied up a pole and made it to the roof of a two-story building on Main Street near the corner of Williams Street, right in the heart of the tumult, just as shots started to ring out. Police fired in the air at first, and several bullets whizzed by the boys’ heads. They ducked, scared and exhilarated, but they didn’t turn and run.
From their vantage point, they could see everything: the streetcar tipped over, the fighting, the charge of the Mounties, the shootings and clubbings that left two men dead and many others wounded. It was the culmination of the city’s – and country’s – first ever general strike, then in its thirty-eighth day, and would break the strike’s back. Scores of strike leaders were rounded up over the next few days, including the Douglas family’s pastor, James Woodsworth, and several of them were tried and sent to prison.
Tommy remembered the scene this way: “We saw the mounted police and the men who had been taken in as sort of vigilantes riding from North Main straight down toward the corner of Portage and Main, then reforming on Portage Avenue and coming back down again, riding the strikers down and breaking up the meetings, breaking up their parade.
“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.
