Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly UpdatesIN AUTUMN 1952, FISHERMAN Elgin "Scotty" Neish travelled through Eastern Europe en route to the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference in Beijing, China. A member of the Labor-Progressive Party (LPP), as the Communist Party was then called, Neish penned letters home during his seven week trip for publication in The Fisherman, the newspaper of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union (UFAWU). These letters provide a unique window into the perspective of a radical British Columbia trade unionist at the height of the Cold War and touch on diverse global themes.
Elgin Neish was a salmon troller who had helped organize the UFAWU during World War II. The son of Scottish immigrants, he grew up in the squatter colony of Deadman's Island, off Vancouver's Stanley Park. After civic authorities evicted the squatter families in the early 1930s, Neish left school at age eleven to join his father and brothers fishing aboard the home-made skiff Lindmore Lass. He was a war veteran, serving in the "Gumboot Navy," the armada of British Columbia fishers that guarded the coast against Japanese U-boat attack. (1) After the war, Neish belonged to the "militant minority" that challenged the assumptions and practices of the Cold War, as McCarthyism enveloped North American political culture and British Columbia's "Red" unions came under siege. (2) According to a Vancouver Province expose, the UFAWU had "the tightest Communist control of any union on the North American continent. It has life and death power over BC's second largest industry through a leadership hierarchy that is solid Communist from top to bottom." (3)
Neish served as president of the UFAWU'S Victoria local, challenging large fishing combines for control of British Columbia's resource wealth. The spring prior to his Beijing trip, Neish joined a flotilla of fishing boats that descended on Victoria's inner harbour, pressuring politicians in the legislature to extend workers' compensation benefits to fishers. (4) As Neish departed for Eastern Europe and China, fishers tied up ships from the mouth of the Fraser to northern Prince Rupert in a major strike over the price of salmon, a dispute aggravated by slumping export markets. (5) Neish expressed regret over his absence, but was confident that "the operators will know there is a Union in the fishing industry." (6) Like many communists, Elgin Neish was an early partisan of the postwar peace movement. (7) His union had played a leading role at the first BC Peace Conference in May 1950, which endorsed the Stockholm Appeal for "the unconditional prohibition of the atomic weapon"--a statement the Vancouver Sun attacked as "a mischievous and evil thing." (8) Neish was elected founding president of the Victoria Peace Council, an affiliate of the BC Peace Committee where UFAWU secretary Homer Stevens served as first vice-president; business agent Alex Gordon travelled to Sheffield, England for the second World Peace Congress in 1950. (9) Responding to the Korean War, the UFAWU executive wired Canadian prime minister Louis St. Laurent urging a negotiated peace. (10)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Enduring communist strength in the UFAWU led to deteriorating relations with other unions and persecution of fishermen such as Neish. The parent Trades and Labor Congress of Canada had declared that "no known Communist can hold office in the Congress or its provincial and central bodies," language incorporated into the Victoria Trades and Labor Council's constitution in a fractious vote. (11) In December 1950, Neish was stripped of his labour council credential on grounds of his association with the Victoria Peace Council and the "Ban the Bomb" campaign, prompting other UFAWU delegates to boycott the labour body. (12) In the mid-1950s, Neish would be expelled from the Royal Canadian Legion because of his "subversive" peace activities and criticism of the Korean War. (13)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Such was the context for Elgin Neish's 1952 trip across the Soviet Bloc to Beijing. In early September, he was elected as one of twelve Canadian delegates to the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference, which took place from 2-12 October 1952, a trip sponsored by the UFAWU, other "red" unions', and local peace councils. The Beijing conference reflected the global contours of communist-led peace activism during the early Cold War years and also revealed strong ties between Canadian and Chinese communists; organized by the Chinese Peace Committee, it saw 400 "fellow travelers" from 35 countries pass behind the "bamboo curtain." (14) Neish returned from the fishing grounds and then boarded a Canadian Pacific Railway train to Montreal--travelling around the world rather than across the Pacific due to the limitations of air technology and restrictive border laws. He flew to Paris and then visited Prague and Moscow, receiving first-class treatment as a fraternal traveller to these "new Democracies." (15) Neish then hop-scotched by short-haul plane across Central Asia and Mongolia to Beijing. (16) At the Chinese capital's industrial exhibition, he marvelled at the array of manufactured goods (subject to an American-led trade embargo) and insisted that "you Cannot blockade half the world." (17) In his address to peace delegates in Beijing, Neish tied the emerging international arms race to the living conditions of the working class: "as long as the cold war policies and the building up of armaments are being pursued, the living standards of the working people will continue to get worse." (18)
Writing from the eastern bloc in 1952, Neish revealed his views on class relations in Canada, shone light on fraternal bonds within the international communist movement, and illuminated aspects of cultural, economic, and political life behind the "Iron Curtain." Like many red-tinged "peace workers," Neish's views often jelled with the strategic imperatives of Soviet foreign policy and he cast an uncritical eye on the social experiments unfolding in Prague, Moscow, Ulan Bator, and Beijing. Demands for "peace," trade with belligerent countries, and a ban on atomic weapons--although motivated by benevolent ideals--served the dual purpose of blunting the military capacity of NATO armies in their crusade against expansionary communism. Neish visited Moscow and Beijing as Canadian soldiers fought a proxy war against Chinese and Russian communism in Korea. Neish's journey occurred during the apex of Sino-Soviet friendship and the twilight of Stalin's rule; his experiences would shape his attitude during raucous debates that split the BC Communist Party in the 1960s, when he and others were expelled for "Maoist sympathies." (19) In 1952, however, Neish's sympathies lay squarely with the united communist bloc in its conflict against the capitalist democracies of the West. Elgin "Scotty" Neish, a lifetime fisherman with a grade six education, sought to transcend Cold War barriers and forge working-class solidarities more durable that national boundaries.
MONTREAL, CANADA, 10 September 1952:
It is just about two weeks ago since I was asked if I would accept nomination to attend the Pacific-Asiatic Peace and Economic Conference to be held in Peking, China, and it's just about a week ago since I got the word on the grounds that I was elected and we broke off our [fishing] trip and returned to Vancouver and sold out our trip.
Well, here I am, September 10, ready in Montreal to leave to-morrow night for France on the second leg of my journey to Peking, China, in company with 11 other Canadian delegates to represent Canada at this all-important conference.
I believe I am the first fisherman to be on such an extended trip as this (although Homer Stevens was a member of the Beaver Brigade (20)) and I have promised George North [editor of The Fisherman] to keep him posted as my trip progresses and also on the conference itself.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
I felt right at home this morning when I came out of Central Station here in Montreal. It was pouring rain.
Coming across the prairies, they say what I saw from the train windows was a bumper grain crop. I guess a few of the boys who left to go fishing will be wishing they were back there when they hear the reports from home.
I met Laurie MacDonald on the train. He was returning to his home in Lockeport, Nova Scotia, after putting in the summer out of Prince Rupert on the halibut and I believe he said he was trolling with Thor on the "Larry H." He is considering moving his wife and family out to the coast so you better move over boys and make room.
By the price of things here, I would say the cost of living is about on a par with the West. Mind you, that is just from what I have seen in an afternoon browsing around.
I know the meals are no different. You just get two small sausages, one pullet egg, two slices of toast, one piece of custard pie and coffee for 75 cents plus five percent Hospital Tax. (I hope the hospitals get it because there is very little social security in our Social Security Tax).
I notice there are many openings for waitresses (bilingual). I wonder if it could be on account of the miles they have to walk in relation to the pay they get. On the West Coast, the waitresses just keep their top of the table clean. Down here, I notice that while they are "resting," the proprietor gives them a bucket of water and a rag and they wash all the tables and chairs right down to the floor. I guess they might even have to do the floor. The one that served me took a rest between me and the next customer by washing four chairs and two tables. A janitor must find it hard to get employment in restaurants here in Montreal.
Talking about meals, went back into the dining car on the way across and took one look at the menu and walked right back out again (by the way people looked at me, I guess that's the first time it happened). I bought myself a can opener, knife, fork, pork and beans, sardines, etc., at the next stop and mugged up in the galley of our tourist coach all the way here. I haven't lost any weight yet.
FEED