Monday, 15 July 2024

David Frank

Miners’ houses: Lawren Harris in Glace Bay

Historian David Frank on Miners’ Houses, the painting of a Glace Bay townscape by Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris, now on a stamp. Harris visited Glace Bay in 1925, the same year striking miner William Davis was shot by company police. “Glace Bay is really no town, but a number of huddles of box-like houses around scattered coal mine mouths. . . . It’s drab and dreary and bedraggled even on a sunny day . . . “, Harris wrote at the time.

The Economic Gospel of J.B. McLachlan, 1919

With Labour Day around the corner, Professor David Frank introduces an essay by the great J.B. McLachlan on the ideal preacher. McLachlan, known first and foremost through the Cape Breton coal miner strikes, is Nova Scotia’s most important labour leader, and he is on fire here.

“In a word, the “Ideal Preacher” is not a soothsayer. “He stirreth up the people,” for which he may get hanged some day, but if he gets his way the disinherited will refuse to remain disinherited.”