Ginger Goodwin,A Murder, a Mob of Soldiers, and Canada's First General Strike

 

A mob of recently discharged soldiers armed and organized by local employers and authorities raid the Vancouver Labour Temple injuring the Labour Council Secretary, a female employee, and a longshoreman.  Other labor leaders were hunted down and arrested and/or simply kidnapped.  The rank and file of the striking unions, however, continued to conduct the one-day General Strike as planned.

On August 2, 1918 Canada saw its first general strike, a well-planned and highly effective one day protest in Vancouver, British Columbia over the suspected murder of labor activist and draft opponent Albert “Ginger” Goodwin.  It came during a war year punctuated by several strikes and labor unrest in the key industries in western Canada including lumbering and milling, coal mining, and on the docks.  Instead of letting the one-day action come and go, authorities and industrial barons colluded to violently suppress it using hundreds of recently de-mobilized soldiers.

Patriotic fervor was running high in Canada, particularly in British Columbia, considered the stronghold of the Dominion’s English-speaking Empire Loyalists.  Canadian troops had been fighting in France for three years and had taken heavy casualties in some of the worst of the trench warfare carnage of the Western Front. 

On the other hand, decades of pent-up labor frustration were coming to a head.  Many workers bitterly opposed the draft which they saw as “sending poor men’s sons to fight a rich man’s war.”  Socialism had taken deeper hold on Canadian workers than their American counter parts south of the border.  Many still took to heart the socialist international idealism of the pre-war period which had laid hopes on preventing war by refusing to allow workers of one country to be used to kill workers of another.  Unfortunately, despite that high minded rhetoric, one by one the western Social Democratic Parties had fallen in line behind their national governments.  Many western workers bitterly objected to that and remained opposed to the Great War.  Workers also recognized a strategic opportunity to use a pressing need to ramp up war production coupled by a labor shortage created by the draft and general mobilization, to press for significant gains in wages and working conditions.  The wave of strikes, large and small was a natural outgrowth of these circumstances.

The immediate precipitating cause of the General Strike was the death under highly suspicious circumstances of Goodwin, a popular union leader and militant. 

Albert "Ginger" Goodwin.

Goodwin was born in Treeton, England on May 10, 1887.  He immigrated to Canada in the early 20th Century and was working as a coal miner at Cumberland on Vancouver Island by late 1910.  In 1912 he joined the epic strike of the Cumberland mines that dragged on through the beginning of World War I.  The long, bitter strikes confirmed his working class militancy and lead him to taking a greater leading role as a radical and socialist in the trade union movement.  He also entered electoral politics running as an anti-war Socialist Party of Canada candidate in the 1916 provincial elections. 

Goodwin’s rise to union leadership was even more impressive.  In December 1916 he was elected secretary of the Trailmen and Smelters Union local on Vancouver Island, a part of the historically radical Western Federation of Miners and the next year he was elected Vice President of the British Columbia Federation of Labour.  After the WFM changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelt Workers (MMSW) he became President of District 6 and also of the Trail Trades and Labor Council which united the industrial union MMSW with craft unions in the mines and mills.  

He achieved all of this despite his well-known anti-war views and encouragement of draft resistance.  At first he did not, however, personally resist the draft in order to continue his labor work.  He duly registered and was granted a medical deferment on the basis of black lung disease from years in the coal mines and rotting teeth.  After he led a major strike of Trail Smeltermen in 1917 Goodwin found his deferment suddenly canceled and he was called up for active duty.  True to his principles, he fled, living for months in the bush supported by his fellow workers.

On July 27 while camping in the hills above Cumberland, Goodwin was discovered by Dominion Police Special Constable Dan Campbell who shot him dead.  Campbell claimed self-defense although Goodwin’s gun was not fired or found near his body.

When word reached Vancouver the labor movement there was outraged and assumed that Goodwin had been systematically hunted down and murdered.  That was probably a good assumption given that no investigation of the circumstances of the death was undertaken.  The Vancouver Trades and Labour Council (VTLC), not a notoriously radical body which included several relatively conservative craft unions, voted 171-1 in favor of calling a one-day General Strike in protest.  There was also a feeling that an effective General Strike would demonstrate the power and solidarity of Vancouver labor, strengthening the hands of member unions in their upcoming confrontations with employers over wage and hour issues.

The strike call included the whole of British Columbia but with just a few days to organize, participation outside of Vancouver was spotty. But in the city with the full support of virtually all of the city’s unions, the strike was paralyzing, but peaceful.

Employers and local authorities—and perhaps the provincial and national governments had enough advance notice of the strike based on the widely publicized call to do some organizing of their own.  Someone with excellent connections arranged to rally by large numbers of recently discharged soldiers to protest disruptive strikes in key industries during a period of national emergency.  Labor was portrayed as “stabbing the troops in the back” and as German agents and/or Bolsheviks.  Not only were the men worked up into a frenzy, but they were also provided with automobiles and armed with clubs and pistols.  A detailed plan for a surprise attack on strike headquarters at the Labour Temple at 411 Dunsmuire Street was drawn up and key mob leaders were provided with detailed layouts of the building.

                    Labor militant and well-known Suffragist Helena Gutteridge's eyewitness account of the raid on the Labour Temple stoked public outrage.  

The supposedly spontaneous mob attacked the building on the day of the strike.  At least 300 men ransacked the offices of the VTLC.  Twice attempts were made to throw VTLC Secretary Victor Midgely from the office window.  A female employee was badly roughed up and injured when she intervened to prevent it.  Midgely and a Longshoreman found in the office—probably acting as an unofficial security guard—were beaten and forced to kiss the Union Jack.  Prominent labor activist and suffragette Helena Gutteridge was also at the scene but was unharmed.  Her account of the attack was widely circulated afterwards.

The ex-soldiers searched the city for union leaders, arresting or kidnapping several.  But the strike was well enough organized that rank and file members kept it in force in good order with a minimum of violence, though there were several street scuffles between strike flying squads and the soldiers and local police. 

The strike ended as scheduled and most workers returned to work the next day.  Union officers, and strike leaders, however, were sacked and blackballed.

Ginger Goodwin's funeral procession in Cumberland, British Columbia, the mining town where he rose to prominence in the labor movement. 

To show the public that the strike had deep support of membership of the participating unions and was not foisted on them by a cabal of devious Bolsheviks, the officers of the VTLC and many member unions resigned en masse then stood for re-election.  The vast majority overwhelmingly re-elected.

The Vancouver General Strike helped set the table for the much larger and open-ended Winnipeg General Strike in June of 1919.  Vancouver would launch to most substantial sympathy strikes in support of Winnipeg that year.

In September of 1919 many leading members and unions of the VTLC bolted the Canadian Trades Council to help form the new One Big Union of Canada, an avowedly revolutionary union inspired by the Industrial Workers of the World in the States.  Like the IWW, it adopted industrial unionism rather than craft divisions, although in practice many old craft locals that joined the OBU continued to function without much change except for better co-ordination with other crafts in their industries. 

                                        A One Big Union of Canada flyer from 1919 refuting a well-orchestrated red baiting campaign.

The OBU was supported by the Socialist Party of Canada and by revolutionary syndicalists.  It flourished in western Canada well into the 1920’s but was beset by red busting harassment from authorities and employers and sapped by poor internal organization.  Member unions began drifting back to the established unions.  Eventually it shrank to a few thousand members, most in the Winnipeg Transit Workers and merged with the Canadian Labor Congress in 1956.

Bloody Sarajevo and the Birth of Modernity in 1914

 

A good case can be made for abandoning the current B.C./A.D.—or B.C.E/C.E.—division of historic time in favor of B.S./A.S.—Before Sarajevo/After Sarajevo.  Certainly, the world changed utterly on June 28, 1914 when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Duchess Sophie of Hohenberg were assassinated in the capital of provincial Bosnia-Herzegovina. 

 

Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Duchess Sophie of Hohenberg were admired and beloved by some.  The heir to the Empire was considered more moderate than his father, less autocratic, and more deeply committed to finding new ways to keep the multi-ethnic Empire intact.  But then European history is rife with cases of supposedly liberal-minded heirs becoming as despotic--or more--as their Fathers.  No one will ever know if Franz Ferdinand could or would be different.

The whole brutal avalanche of modern history turns on the death of a comic-opera princeling at the hands of a fanatic teenage nationalist.  Franz Ferdinand was the nephew of the elderly Austro Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph and was his designated heir.  He had assumed more and more public ceremonial duties from his uncle. 

The Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary ruled a multi-ethnic empire in central Europe.  In the late 19th Century it expanded southward, absorbing some of the former Slavic provinces of the fading Ottoman Empire.  Bosnia and Herzegovina first came under Austrian sway by treaty in 1878 when it occupied and undertook administration of the provinces which remained officially under Ottoman sovereignty. 

In 1903 pretense was dropped and the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed the lands, which were peopled by a volatile mix of ethnic groups and divided by religion—Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslim Bosnians among others.  All resented rule from Vienna almost as much as they feared and distrusted each other. 

Meanwhile modern Serbia arose as an independent kingdom in 1882 and quickly became aggressive and expansionist seeking to unite Orthodox ethnic Serbs in several surrounding states into a Greater Serbia.  It had claims on Bosnia and nearly came to war when the Empire annexed it. 

In the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars with its neighbors, Serbia seized Macedonia from the Ottomans and Kosovo from Bulgaria.  Its reckless aggressiveness was made possible by a close alliance with the Orthodox Russian Empire which saw an opportunity to advance its sphere of influence deep into Europe. 

The Serbs sought to destabilize the Slavic provinces with secret terrorist societies like the Black Hand and by subsidizing local nationalist groups, like the Young Bosnia movement made up of teenage romantics.

For his part, Franz Ferdinand supported a break from the unyielding rule of his uncle when he would come to power.  He proposed making the Slavic south as a Third Crown in the Empire theoretically bringing them into equality with Germanic Austria, and Magyar Hungary.  Under the scheme the provinces would be granted significant self-rule and a policy of reconciliation with Serbia would be pursued. 

 

Perhaps fatally multi-ethnic and multi-faith,  The Austro-Hungarian Empire was far more fragile than it thought.

This equally alarmed the Serbs, who felt that such reforms would derail their plans for eventual annexation, the local nationalists, and the Russians whose ambitions would have been checked by their traditional rival empire. 

There had been sporadic assassination attempts against various officials, including Emperor Franz Joseph himself in 1910.  Tensions in the region were running high.  The provision of arms and explosives to local groups was managed by the Serbian intelligence services but may have been carried out either without the knowledge and consent of the King and Prime Minister, or with veneer of separation allowing for “plausible deniability.” 

When the Emperor announced he was sending Franz Ferdinand to observe military maneuvers in Bosnia on a date fraught with historical significance to Serb nationalists, Serb diplomats in Vienna evidently did warn officials of the possibility of an attack, but this was written off by the Austrians as a bluff. 

Serbian intelligence agents meanwhile smuggled handguns, grenades, money, and suicide pills to a small group of young nationalists in Sarajevo, including Gavrilo Princip, Trifun Grabež, and Nedeljko Čabrinović and sent others recruited from Belgrade, with Bosnian Muslim Mehmed Mehmedbašić, Vaso Čubrilović, and Cvjetko Popović, to undertake the assassination attempt. 

On June 28 the assassins were posted at various points along the announced route of a motorcade carrying the Archduke and his wife.  Two conspirators lost nerve as the motorcade passed but the third, Čabrinović, lobbed a bomb at the Archduke’s car which scratched Sophie’s cheek and landed on the pavement on the far side of the car.  Its timed detonator went off under the following car injuring 20 people. 

The Archduke dismissed the attempt as the work of a “lunatic” and ordered that the day’s activities be continued, although the caravan sped its way to the next scheduled stop, the Town Hall.  On its way the car passed three other conspirators too quickly for them to act.  It looked like the mission was a failure. 

Discouraged, one of the men 19-year-old, Prinicp, went to a delicatessen for something to eat.  When he emerged, he saw Franz Ferdinand’s open car reversing after having taken a wrong turn as it drove past. 

The Archduke had decided to visit the wounded from the earlier attack after making a speech at the Town Hall instead of immediately driving out of the city.  He was guarded only by Lieutenant Colonel Count Franz von Harrach standing on the running board of the car. 

Note the woman at the bottom left-hand corner with the white hat. To her right, standing just a few feet away is Gavrilo Princip. He cannot be seen because he is just out of range of the photo. The Archduke's car is starting to turn right into the street where the assassination is about to take place.

The car stalled as the driver tried to reverse.  Prinicp was able to get within feet of the car and squeezed off two rounds from his automatic pistol.  The first round passed through the car and caromed into Sophie’s abdomen.  The second struck the Archduke in the neck severing his jugular vein.  Sophie spoke then pitched forward between her husband’s legs.  Franz Ferdinand reportedly said, “Sophie, Sophie! Don’t die! Live for our children.”  As the car sped to a hospital he repeated weekly several times, “It is nothing,” before blood filled his throat.  Sophie was dead in the car.  The Archduke died upon reaching the hospital. 

Passersby and police quickly seized Prinicp.  Čabrinović had been captured earlier after a failed suicide attempt.  The other conspirators were quickly rounded up as anti-Serb rioting swept the capital.  Eventually all but Mehmedbašić, who managed to escape to Montenegro and then to Serbia, were caught and tried along with others who aided them.  Those over twenty were condemned to death and were either hanged or died in prison.

                                                Twenty-year-old Gavrilo Princip, who fired the fatal shots, had obviously been roughed up in his mug shot.

Princip and others under the age of 20 received the maximum term of 20 years.  Held under harsh conditions, he developed tuberculosis, lost an arm to an infection, and was malnourished.  He died in prison at the age of 23 in April 1918. 

In 1917, as a result of negotiations to reach a separate peace between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, the leaders of the Intelligence services that had authorized the assassination were tried and three of them including the chief, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, known by the cover name Apis were convicted of various crimes and executed by firing squad. 

But the assassination itself was soon overshadowed the enormous consequences which seemed to fall mechanically into place.  Within weeks Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia.  Serbia agreed to most of the terms but refused to arrest plotters on the territory or allow the Empire to participate in an investigation.  They began mobilizing their forces with full assurance from Russia that it would honor their treaty of mutual defense. 

 

A contemporary cartoon pretty accurately illustrated the fatal chain reaction that led to global conflagration.

After a skirmish between boats carrying Serb troops and the Austrians on the Danube, the border between the powers, Austria Hungary mobilized on July 28.  Under the Secret Treaty of 1892 Russia and France were obliged to mobilize their armies if any of the Triple Alliance (Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy) mobilized.  By the first of August all major powers except the Italians were mobilized.  

Serbian troops were the first mobilized and moved quickly to attack the Empire secure in the powerful backing of Russia.

On August 1, Germany declared war on Russia and France.  The British declared war on the Germans after they refused to refrain from attacking France through neutral Belgium.  By September much of the world was at war. 

The Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Central Powers.  Italy eventually turned its back on its former partners and joined the Allies in 1915.  The United States entered the war in 1917. 

 

The Great War spawned on the streets of Sarajevo left much of Europe a smoldering ruin.

The conflict saw carnage on an industrial scale never before imagined.  The introduction of the machine gun, modern high explosives, long range artillery, poison gas, and aerial warfare made the battlefield a lethal killing zone in which the maneuvers, charges, and counter charges of the 19th Century became impossible.  Massive offensives failed at anything but piling up the dead. 

The British alone suffered 57,470 casualties including 19,240 dead on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Stalemated trench warfare became the norm.  At the end of the war the Allies had total casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) of 22,477,500 of which 5,525,000 were dead.  The losing Central Powers had casualties of 16,403,000 of which 4,386,000 were dead.  These figures do not include millions of civilians on both sides who died of starvation, disease, or military action or the millions more made homeless and displaced. 

At war’s end the empires of Austria Hungary, Russia, the Ottomans, and Germany were destroyed.  Russia had withdrawn from the war in 1917 following the ouster of the Tsar but was soon mired in bloody civil war from which the Bolsheviks would emerge as the masters of a new nation, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).  

With old Europe bled dry and financially ruined by the long war, the late arriving upstart the United States emerged as the dominant power in the world.  

The dramatically re-drawn map of Europe after the Treaty of Versailles catered to some nationalist fervor in the old Empire's Balkans but thwarted other ambitions and stoked jealousies.  Equally drastic was the disposition of the old Ottoman Empire and Germany's overseas colonies in Africa and the Pacific.

The League of Nations was founded to avoid future conflicts, but the U.S. despite the pleas of Woodrow Wilson, who conceived the organization, refused to join and it proved itself incapable of managing real international conflict.  Disarmament was tried and failed. 

Resentments and humiliations arising from the war festered, particularly in Germany, leading to another conflagration within a generation. 

The Balkans, the powder keg of the war, remains divided by ethnic and religious hostilities and is perpetually on the verge of erupting into more senseless conflict.

Lines drawn on maps dividing the spoils of colonies have continuing consequences reaching down to the Arab-Israeli conflict and wars in the cobbled together state of Iraq. 

The rapid disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire may be an object lesson to the United States about how far and fast a supposedly stable and dominant power can fall.

O! the Humanity When a Dream Ended in a Ball of Fire

Thanks to newsreels, dozens of photographers, and the chilling live radio coverage, for the first time Americans and people from around the world were witnesses to a great disaster.  The impact was profound. 

On May 6, 1937 a dream died with a bang, along with 37 souls.  Up until then, the future of trans-oceanic and other mega-long distant air service looked like it belonged to lighter than aircraft.  Airplanes, it was thought, were too limited by fuel needs and lift capacity to economically serve this need.  They were alright for military use, which was proved in the Great War, and had a place supplementing good rail service in shorter distance travel, but the great dirigibles held the promise of connecting the world with fast, reliable passenger service and a lift capacity that could also eventually become a major freight hauler.

All of that changed when the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg ignited and crashed in a fiery inferno as it attempted to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. The event was captured in all of its dramatic horror by newsreel cameras and described in a live remote broadcast on WLS Radio of Chicago.

Dirigibles were a refinement on the concept of a powered balloon developed by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin beginning in 1899.  Unlike their predecessors, Zeppelin’s creations featured a light but rigid cigar shaped envelope inside of which lighter than air gas was contained in a series of bladders.  The envelope provided additional space inside which could be used for freight or passengers.  The ships were powered by two or more gasoline or diesel engines and a cab extending below the envelope served as a pilot station.  

German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin invented and developed the dirigible--a semi-rigid lighter than aircraft capable of long-distance flight and significant lift for military, passenger, or freight service.

Zeppelin built several models of increasing size and lift potential over the years.  In World War I they were pressed into military service and famously bombed London. 

The British, French, Italians, and the U.S. all scrambled to enter the field with lighter than aircraft themselves.  But crashes and failures dogged all attempts. The British R34 became the first dirigible to cross the Atlantic in 1919, but it crashed in a storm two years later.  A larger sister ship R38 exploded in 1921 when its frame snapped, causing a spark which ignited explosive hydrogen gas used for lift. 

The U.S. hardly fared better.  It’s ship, the U.S. Navy’s ZR1 Shenandoah, was built in 1923 and used non-combustible helium for safety.  Despite this advantage Shenandoah broke up in a thunderstorm over Ohio in 1925 killing 19 of 43 crewmen. 

The Navy, which remained committed to lighter than air ships, commissioned the Zeppelin company to build it a ship as part of war reparations from defeated Germany.  The commission kept the company alive while Germany was forbidden by treaty from building airships for its own military use.  Delivered to the Navy in 1924, it was also designed for use with helium.  Designated ZR3 Los Angeles it became the most successful large dirigible yet with a capacity for 30 passengers in addition to crew.  It made more than 250 flights including trips to Puerto Rico and Panama. 

The Navy's  Macon  was an aircraft carrier which could launch and retrieve Sparrow Hawk scout biplanes from the exterior platforms on either side of the ship.  The idea was to be able to cover wide areas giving the Navy long distance eyes in search of any enemy fleet, in anti-submarine operations, or for search and rescue.  She and her sister the Akron represented the pinnacle of military development of the dirigibles.

Impressed, the Navy arranged for the Zeppelin company to license the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company to build ships of German design.  The results were the Akron and the Macon both of which could serve as aircraft carriers capable of launching and retrieving 5 light scout planes.  Delivered in 1931, both ships went into service.  But the Akron but was lost in a storm over the Atlantic in 1933 and the Macon crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 1935. The Navy then abandoned building new rigid airships, although it continued to fly the Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the British re-entered the race with two new mammoth airships, the largest ever built.  The R-101, with a passenger capacity of over 100, crashed and burned near Beauvais, France, on October 4, 1930 killing 48 of 54 aboard.  The slightly smaller R-100 made a successful round trip to Montreal, Canada, but was withdrawn from service and ultimately scrapped after the R-101 disaster.

Despite the dismal safety record, the fact remained that no dirigible ever manufactured by the Zeppelin company in Germany had ever crashed.  They seemed immune from the stresses of extreme weather that had doomed most other ships.

Following the success of its Los Angeles for the U.S. Navy, the Zeppelin company began construction of a new airship for German civilian use.  The Graf Zeppelin completed in 1928 was meant to be a prototype and a demonstration for a new generation of air ships meant for passenger packet and airmail service.  It was a huge success.  It made a trans-Atlantic flight to Lakehurst in October and was welcomed with great ballyhoo including a New York ticker-tape parade for the crew and a reception at the White House.  The next year she completed an around the world trip that officially began and ended in Lakehurst after she had crossed the Atlantic again.  After that there were triumphant tours of Europe and trips to South America.  Crossing from Germany to Lakehurst became almost routine, if not yet regularly scheduled.

The company planned for a larger airship to inaugurate regular scheduled service.  Plans for that ship, designated LZ-129 had to be reconsidered after the R-101 disaster.  The ship was made heavier and stronger, but also intended for the safer helium being successfully used by the U.S. Navy.  As the ship was being re-designed the Nazis came to power in Germany.  Despite the resistance of old Count Zeppelin, company's operating chief Dr. Hugo Eckener impressed the Graf Zeppelin and future air ships into a new state-owned airline.  From then on German airships would be ablaze with the Nazi swastika on their tail fins and the air ships would become propaganda tools for the Third Reich. 

Last triumphant moments for the sleek symbol of Nazi pride--the Hindenburg soars over New York City on May 6, 1937.

The new ship was dubbed the Hindenburg by Eckener in honor of the former German President Paul von Hindenburg, much to the annoyance of Nazi authorities who had hoped the ship would be named for Hitler.  She was tested in March of 1937.  But due to the rise of German militarism, the Zeppelin company was unable to obtain helium from the United States, the only nation with a capacity to produce it in large quantities.  Helium was restricted as a strategic material.  Eckener was forced to fly the new ship with dangerous hydrogen under pressure from the government.

After a series of trial flights and an extensive propaganda tour of Germany the Hindenburg made its first trans-Atlantic flight to Rio de Janerio, Brazil.  The ship was then put into the long dreamed of regularly scheduled service.  In 1936 she made ten trips to Lakehurst and seven to Rio. 

The Hindenburg left Frankfurt for Lakehurst on May 3, 1937 on its first scheduled round trip between Europe and the United States that season.  She arrived over New Jersey three days later but attempts to land were delayed until a line of thunderstorms passed Lakehurst.  The press was out in force to cover the still unique event.

When the weather cleared, Hindenburg made a routine descent. Just after she had dropped bow lines to be taken up by Navy personnel on the ground, the ship was rocked by an explosion.  Fire erupted about a third of the way from the ship’s stern.  She dropped to the ground in 37 seconds and was completely engulfed in flames in moments.  WLS announcer Herbert Morrison famously sobbed “Oh the Humanity!” as he attempted to describe the horrible scene.  

His clothing burned off Walter Banholzer is led away for medical assistance by a Navy ground crewman and a Zepplin company steward, both as shocked, stunned, and traumatized as the survivors of the crash.

Amazingly, of the 36 passengers and 61 crew on board, only 13 passengers and 22 crew and one ground crew member died.  Others were severely injured including those with horrible burns.  Whatever the toll, it was enough to end commercial lighter than air travel.  German invincibility in the air was disproven and the image of the burning ship was seared into the public imagination.  The Graf Zeppelin was withdrawn from service and work on its replacement, Graf Zeppelin II was scrapped.

Although many theories abound as to the cause of the explosion ranging from spontaneous combustion to sabotage, no cause has ever been proven.  Ultimately, any airship using explosive hydrogen and at the mercy of any stray spark was probably doomed.  We will never know if the safe operation of the ship with helium might have led to continued development of lighter than air fleets.

The compressed laboratory of wartime soon produced technological innovations that made trans-oceanic service by fixed wing aircraft not only possible, but routine.

Today, despite some efforts to revive them as freight handlers, lighter than air ships are mostly blimps, much smaller gas filled bags used for advertising and as camera platforms for sporting events.  But the rapid development of drone technology is rendering them obsolete. 

 

Robert Service Was the Bard of the Parka and the Mukluks

 Robert Service at his Dawson cabin circa 1910.

One of the joys of my life is highlighting poets that drive poetry snobs the brink of homicidal mania.  They are so cute choking on outrage and condescension.  And no poet fits that bill better than the once wildly popular Canadian bard Robert W. Service. 

Service was born on January 16, 1874 in Preston, Lancashire, England.  He was the oldest son of a Scottish banker and was eventually joined by 10 brothers and sisters.  Despite having the honor of being named for his father, the boy was farmed out for one reason or another to the care of his paternal grandfather, the local Postmaster in Kilwinning, Scotland and three maiden aunts. 

When he was only six year old he showed off his native aptitude by composing and reciting his first poem—grace at the dinner table.  Recorded for posterity it went like this: 

            God bless the cakes and bless the jam; 

            Bless the cheese and the cold boiled ham: 

            Bless the scones Aunt Jeannie makes, 

            And save us all from bellyaches. Amen 

When his father got a plumb job at the Bank of Scotland in Glasgow the boy rejoined his family and began studies at age 9 at Hillhead Primary School, a prestigious day school attended by children of the faculty of the near-by University of Glasgow, civil servants, and the managerial staff—the aspiring middle class.  In addition to pursuing the established curriculum young Robert widely read in the English Romantics.  He was soon peddling occasional verse to local newspapers for a few pennies of spending money. 

In the new Hillhead High School, Robert excelled in his studies but also enjoyed adventure yarns, especially stories about pioneers and cowboys in the American West.  After graduating from school and saving his money from a Commercial Bank of Scotland minor clerkship, Service was able to immigrate to Vancouver Island, British Columbia arriving on the scene to some ridicule bedecked in a costume modeled on Buffalo Bill Cody. 

Service took up the life of a sort of gentleman hobo ranging down the Pacific Coast as far as Mexico and back working an odd assortment of catch-as-catch-can jobs, sponging off sympathetic fellow Scotts when he could find them, and having various adventures including a suitably tragic doomed romance. 

In 1899 he found himself a clerking in a Cowichan Bay, British Columbia store.  An offhand comment to a customer that he wrote verse resulted in an invitation to submit pieces to the Victoria Daily Colonist, which published six pieces on the Boer War in the summer of 1900 under the initials R.S.  For inspiration Service drew on letters of his younger brother Alex who was in Boer prisoner of war camp with a young cavalryman named Winston Churchill.  One of the poems, The March of the Dead, attracted a lot of attention and was picked up by papers across Canada.  The poem would end up in Service’s first collection.  

The Colonist continued to print Service’s verse through 1902, and he discovered that he was getting something of a literary reputation.  But he failed at love and at a fling at brand new Victoria College, a two-year off shoot of McGill University. 

So, in 1904 he used his Bank of Scotland letter of recommendation to get a job with the Canadian Bank of Commerce branch in Victoria.   He proved his worth and was soon advancing. In 1905 Service got his dream post, to a bank branch in  Whitehorse, a rough and tumble frontier town and the hoping off point for the Yukon gold fields.  Service had been dreaming of this adventure for some time and had already composed some gold field ballads before ever arriving on the scene. 

Service passed his idle time in the saloons frequented by sourdough veterans and naïve city kids caught up in the flush of gold fever.  He played the piano and kept his ear open for good yarns.  Using popular verses like Casey at the Bat and especially Rudyard Kipling’s Barracks Ballads as his model, he began to turn some of those yarns into poetry. 

Services's phenomenally successful first collection made him rich and famous.

The Shooting of Dan McGrew was dashed off at the suggestion of a local newspaper editor for recitation at a Sunday afternoon Church entertainment.  That was so well received that he quickly finished another The Cremation of Sam McGee.  The poems made him famous almost overnight, and he continued to collect more yarns and set them down in rhyme and meter.  He seldom ventured far from Whitehorse himself, and he did not make it to Dawson in the Klondike   until 1908, ten years past the frenzied peak of the Gold Rush.   

Service sent sheaves of his poems to his father, by then living in Toronto, who arranged them and found a publisher.  Service had planned to pay for the run himself and peddle his books back around Dawson and Whitehorse.  But the editors and typesetters were so taken by the rhymes that they legendarily began reciting them as they worked.  Friends shared them informally in galley proofs.   Based on word of mouth, more than 1,700 were sold in advance before the book could be bound.  Songs of a Sourdough went through seven printings even before its official release date.  Editions printed in New York, Philadelphia, and London were just as successful. 

Service was suddenly a rich man, making more than $100,000 pre-inflation dollars on his first book alone. 

But he was still working for the bank.  After finishing three years in Dawson Service was given a three month leave which he used to go back to Vancouver Island and to look up the pretty girl who had once spurned him because of his poverty and slim prospects.  This time Constance MacLean agreed to an engagement.  

Service was assigned by the bank back to Whitehorse, where he used his spare time to collect more yarns from old timers.  His second book, Ballads of a Cheechako, was as big a success as the first.  He now felt comfortable turning down a promotion to manager of the Whitehorse Branch and quit banking for good in 1909. 

A scene from the 1915 silent version of The Shooting of Dan McGrew.  Service was on set for the 1924 MGM remake.

He returned to Dawson where he rented a small cabin and set about to write a novel. The Trail of ’98, written in five intense months of work, was yet another best seller.  Service used his new wealth to travel to Europe and to Hollywood where some of his best-known poems were being made into silent films.  But somewhere in those travels and adventures he lost his lady love. 

Service came back to Dawson one last time in 1912 to collect stories for another book of poems, Ballad of a Rolling Stone. After that it was off to Europe as a foreign correspondent covering the Balkan Wars for before settling in France to live off his considerable wealth. 

In 1913 he settled in Paris with a summer home in Lancieux, Côtes-d’Armor, in Brittany.  In Paris, despite his wealth, Service chose to live as an artist on the Left Bank.  He married Parisienne Germaine Bourgoin, thirteen years his junior, a happy union that produced children and lasted the rest of the poet’s life. 

Service as an Ambulance Corps driver on the Western Front.

When the war broke out Service was turned down for active service with the British because of varicose veins.  Instead, the 41-year-old poet became a war correspondent again.  After nearly being shot as a spy by panicked English troops near Dunkirk, Service enlisted in the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps, the same outfit in which other writers like Ernest Hemingway and e.e. cummings served.  His book of wartime poetry, Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, in 1916 was dedicated to his brother Lt. Albert Service, Canadian Infantry, killed in action that August.  Most critics agree that the verses represented his best work ever.  They were written in Paris after his health broke under the strain of combat. 

In post-war Paris, Service reveled in the life of the city.  By day he could be a gay boulevardier bedecked in finery, carrying a gold-headed cane and wearing a monocle.  At night he caroused with the doorman of his pension in the lowest dives and bistros in the city.  He was reputably the wealthiest expatriate writer in Paris and sometimes a soft touch for down and out artists and writers.  He chronicled those days in a new collection of poetry, Ballads of a Bohemian in which the verses are interspersed with journal passages. 

Through the ‘20s Service concentrated on writing popular thriller novels, some of which were adapted to Hollywood. 

The rise of tyrants of the Left and Right caught his attention after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1930 which inspired the savage sarcasm of a new long poem Lenin’s Tomb.  Hitler fared no better in poems printed in the popular press.  When news of the Hitler-Stalin Pact broke in 1939 Service and his family were in once again visiting.  With the secret police of both nations looking for him, the family had to go on the lam across the continent. 

                                                Service playing himself with Marlene Dietrich on the set of The Spoilers.

After a brief return to Canada, Service and his family settled into California during World War II.  He lent his talents to the war effort by entertaining the troops with recitations of his most popular work.  He found that many of the GIs could recite with him, word for word.  At the request of Marlene Dietrich he was cast as himself in The Spoilers with John Wayne and Randolph Scott. 

 

After the war, Service and his family returned to France.  They found their summer home in Brittany destroyed.  They rebuilt the chateau and Service lived there the rest of his life between travels.  In semi-retirement he continued to write novels, occasional satiric verse.  He completed two volumes of memoirs, Ploughman of the Moon and Harper of Heave in addition to six more books of verse.  If his poems seemed old fashion, if the critics sneered—and they always sneered—if the new volumes failed to sell faster than they could be printed, Service was unconcerned 

 

He never claimed to be a poet, he said, just a simple versifier who could catch the imagination of common people much like himself.  He never won an award or prize.  His status in Canada became more of one of national buffoon instead of the national bard despite selling more poetry than anyone before or since.   

Scoffed at by critics Service's poems remain popular with ordinary folk and was celebrated by the Canada Post.

 

Service died on September 11, 1958 at age 84 in Lancieux, Côtes-d’Armor, and was buried there. His wife Germaine lived on 31 years following his death, dying at age 102 in 1989. 

 

Critics may continue to scoff.  But when I was a Cub Scout long ago, we voluntarily memorized The Cremation of Sam McGee so that we could recite it around a winter campfire. No greater tribute could there be. 

 

There are strange things done in the midnight sun 

      By the men who moil for gold; 

The Arctic trails have their secret tales 

      That would make your blood run cold; 

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, 

      But the queerest they ever did see 

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge 

      I cremated Sam McGee.