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 clinging to him.
“I’m going to have a bottle of beer,” he told their guest. “Would you like one?”
The minister declined. Anne and the children were mortified by this behaviour, but later Tommy came both to value that forthrightness in his father and to learn a lesson about the clergy. If he was to be a minister, he decided, it would be one who would welcome a glass of beer at a parishioner’s home, who would accept his parishioners as he found them and would strive to be one with them.
Tommy’s first taste of a preacher’s life came when he was fifteen or sixteen and was appointed chaplain of his DeMolay chapter. His role was to give a prayer at the start of meetings. He usually just read the words from a book, but one night, after several children had been injured in a fire in the city, he was pressed into tailoring a special prayer, which he successfully improvised.
Beulah was a conservative church, with the emphasis on salvation and the afterlife, on doing good works to insure getting into Heaven, not for their own sake. But Tommy, with J.S. Woodsworth as a role model, was developing decidedly more liberal religious views. He and his good friend Mark Talnicoff (later changed to Talney), a fellow Scout leader, would spend hours discussing politics and religion, and their talks focused on the increasingly intriguing notion of the social gospel, “the application of the gospel to social conditions,” as Tommy later described it. They saw themselves as rebels. The germ of the idea to become a preacher was planted in Tommy’s head, but not because he had “a call.” Rather, he and Mark saw the church as a way of working for social change.
One chilly night, walking home from church, the two boys decided that the ministry was for them, and they started thinking about Brandon College, a combination liberal arts and Bible school run by the Baptist Church. Brandon College was a hotbed of liberal ideas and was just a couple of hours’ train ride west of Winnipeg.
As it turned out, it would be another year or so before either of them actually made it to college. Tommy used that year to read as much as he could, to take on practice preaching assignments like the one at Stonewall and other nearby country churches, and to set a little money aside.
Tommy made good money as a printer, more than his father, but most of it went to help pay off the mortgage on the family home. For a year, he made special efforts to save money toward college, although when he did arrive at Brandon, in the fall of 1924, just a few weeks before his twentieth birthday, he had only ninety dollars in his pocket.
As it is with many students, money was always an issue for Tommy during his entire six years at Brandon: three years making up for his missed high school, and three as a theology student, or “theolog.” To make ends meet, he made himself available as a public speaker and performer at concerts and dances, as he had in Winnipeg, doing monologues and recitations at five dollars a performance. That first fall in Brandon, he was the star of the fowl-supper circuit for miles around the city.
In his first couple of years at college, Tommy took on other odd jobs to make a few dollars, waiting on tables and acting as late-night doorman at the dormitory. Students who came in after the doors were locked had to ring a bell and were fined a quarter. As Tommy remembered it: “You kept the twenty-five cents for getting up and opening the door. Any fellow who wakes you up at one o’clock in the morning deserves to pay two bits.”
More importantly, he joined other students and became an active “supply” preacher, working all through his college years – even while he was still technically in high school – on weekends and summers at neighbouring rural churches, too small to afford a fulltime preacher.
In fact, even before he’d arrived at Brandon, he had his first paying assignment: on his way to the college, he was to get off the train at the small town of Austin, about midway
