in 1913 to working-class English parents in Batley, near Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire — in that era, a grim and grimy district of mining and heavy industry. His father immigrated to Canada, intending to send for his family once he found work. Hearing nothing, Garner’s mother brought her children here in 1919, only to learn that her husband had abandoned them — disappeared — leaving them to fend for themselves.
The back jacket of the McClelland & Stewart hardcover first edition of The Silence on the Shore features a pugnacious-looking Hugh Garner.
Hugh Garner grew up in the streets and alleys of Toronto’s East End, in an area close to the shore of Lake Ontario and long known as an enclave for Anglo-Saxon, Scots, and Irish immigrants. He quit public school at sixteen and began his lifelong pattern of unsuccessful employment, though one of his jobs held out promise. In 1929 he was taken on as a copyboy at the Toronto Daily Star and when seen to have reportorial skills was singled out for advancement by the editor and proprietor. But he lost the opportunity, as he would lose so many others through the years, either quitting or being let go — the distinction hardly mattered. He was not, so to speak, a farmer tending his plot in order to support himself. Rather, he was a raider descending on some menial and often meaningless job to grab enough money to carry him to the next target. Once jobs became terrifyingly scarce as the Depression worsened, this pattern of behaviour could no longer be sustained, at least not if he remained in Toronto.
In 1933 he slipped across the border into the United States and for several years travelled from place to place as a hobo, “riding the rods,” and undertaking an astonishing range of casual labour across the United States and from Mexico to Canada. He picked fruit, harvested tobacco, stoked wheat, worked construction, bussed tables, and sold soap door to door — the list seems almost endless. Garner was often arrested for vagrancy and other misdemeanours, and served short sentences in municipal and county jails in cities large and small. At one point he was living in New York City on sixty-five cents a day.
Garner was also educating himself and becoming radicalized. Using The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw (1928), he began to see how the dilemma within which he existed might be understood in terms of socio-economic theory. In the public libraries of New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, he read Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as well as popular literature. He also, as seems significant as we look back on him now, read What Is Property? (1840) by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to call himself an anarchist in the philosophical sense. Like Garner, Proudhon was a poor working-class lad. He never forgot the humiliation of having to wear sabots when his school fellows wore proper shoes, just as Garner never overcame the memory of wearing clothing distributed to Toronto’s poor children by the Daily Star each Christmas. Proudhon’s book contains the catchphrase “Property is theft.” This was an indictment not of private ownership but rather of exorbitant rents and similar inequities. Radicalism permitted Garner to become a writer. His first publication was an essay about the Cabbagetown slums. It appeared in the mildly progressive journal Canadian Forum in 1936, the year that saw the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (which some anarchists prefer to call the Spanish Revolution).
In February that year the Popular Front, a wide-ranging and unwieldy coalition of left-wing parties and organizations, came to power in Spain’s national election. Inevitably, violence erupted between the Popular Front and the right-wing Falange and its own array of affiliated groups. In Spanish Morocco the military mutinied, and a career officer, Francisco Franco, assumed command there. With the help of Adolf Hitler of Germany and Benito Mussolini of Italy, Franco moved his army home to Spain to destroy the democratically elected government. To counteract the Nazis’ and Italian fascists’ support of the Spanish fascists, who were termed the Nationalists, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union pledged aid to the anti-fascists, known interchangeably as Republicans and Loyalists. By August, volunteers from major democratic countries were signing up to fight on the Loyalist side. The conflict was one in which Garner, as he would write in his autobiography One Damn Thing After Another, became involved “both ideologically and personally. Through a combination of my life up to then — through class, intellect and political ideology — I was an anti-fascist, and still am. When I discovered that foreigners, the forerunners of what were to become the International Brigades, were fighting with the Spanish Loyalists in University City and Casa de Campo on the outskirts of Madrid I knew I had to join them.”
The International Brigades included, among others, Americans, Britons, Canadians, French, Belgians, Dutch, Czechs, Russians, people from the Scandinavian countries, and a full range of Latin Americans. There were even some anti-fascist Germans and Italians. The volunteers came from all walks of life (letting Garner claim that “the Loyalist forces probably contained more distinguished novelists and poets in relation to their size than any fighting force since Caesar’s”). Garner was not a communist but rather a communist sympathizer with anarcho-syndicalist tendencies, whereas many of the others, though by no means all, were committed communists, responding to the call by the Comintern in Moscow that the Loyalists must be supported.
Just as the Nationalists were commencing their major offensive against Madrid, the League of Nations, representing the capitalist countries, enacted a ban (it proved unenforceable) on participation by foreign volunteers. That was in February 1937, the month that Garner crossed the Pyrenees from Portugal into Spain, wearing a suit and tie, with a homburg on his head and spatterdashes on his feet. Each of the International Brigades was made up of from four to six battalions, which were usually dominated by one ideological position (Stalinist, Trotskyite, or anarchist) or a particular nationality. Like a number of the other Canadians who joined the struggle early on, Garner had enlisted in an American unit, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. A short time later, Canadian volunteers formed their own Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, named for the two men who had led the Upper and Lower Canada Rebellions a century earlier. Through legislation, arrests, spying, intimidation, and even by refusing to issue passports, the Canadian government tried to prevent Canadians from joining the Spanish cause.
In 1937, Garner served in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion during the Spanish Civil War, fighting on the Republican side against Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
The Nationalists were supplied by Nazi Germany and others, while the Loyalists had much less sophisticated arms from various sources, including the Soviet Union. Even though Garner later wrote a long memoir of his Spanish days for the Star Weekly, a leading national magazine of the day, he was maddeningly vague as to which particular fights he took part in, though it is clear that he saw action in the Jarama Valley and at the Battle of Brunete and other places. He was in a machine-gun company and was equipped with a hand-me-down Russian-made Maxim gun mounted on spoked wheels. The fact that he once witnessed a sabre charge by Loyalist cavalry underscores how unfairly matched the two sides were.
As he admitted freely in his published reminiscences, he was of course frightened. Yet he was also frustrated, he said, when confined to the periphery of the action. So, on his own initiative, he left his unit and went to Madrid, intending to visit brigade headquarters and seek assignment to another unit closer to the centre of the fighting. He was picked up by the police. Believing he was being framed by the Stalinist leadership, he left Madrid and joined an anarchist outfit (“they’d take anybody”) but later decided to return to his own battalion. He was then accused of desertion. There was even brief talk of his being executed by firing squad. In the end, the charges were reduced to being absent without leave. He served a short time in detention and returned to the fighting but was sent back to Canada.
Garner arrived home with no sympathy for the Moscow-trained officer class whose infighting with Trotskyite and anarchist comrades undermined the common cause and contributed to the Nationalist victory in the war. He was hardly alone. Whatever good faith persisted between and among the communist camps was expunged in August 1939 when Stalin and Hitler signed a mutual
