The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919

The 1919 strike is the largest in Canada’s history, and shut Winnipeg down. While the strike started out as a simple labor dispute, there were many factors involved in how it played out, and a conspiracy theory that it was a communist uprising.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Before we get started today, we have a
cool announcement to make. We are going to be in Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania for a live show on June twenty nine, nineteen.
That is part of Great Conversations at Gettysburg. That is
a whole day of programming. Our part is at four
pm when we will be doing Fearless, Feisty and Unflagging
the Women of Gettysburg. You can find out more information

(00:23):
about this by coming to our website clicking in the
menu where it says live shows, or just go to
Missed in History dot com slash shows Again. That's June
twenty nine, nineteen in Gettysburg. Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class the production of I Heart Radios How
Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy

(00:50):
Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly, We've had kind
of a run of nineteen nineteen episodes recently. You know,
we did not plan that. It just keeps happening. Yeah,
we had a collection of of centennials slash coincidences. We
have one more. I think this is the last, at
least in terms of what I have on my plate,
like this is the last nine nine thing for a bit,

(01:11):
I mean no promises, I don't know. I'll sign out
halfway through a thing that it's related to nineteen nineteen
and then be like, well, here we go. So we said.
We've gotten several listener requests for the center over the
last few months as well, including from Adrian, Donna and Sheina.
And this one is the Winnipeg General Strike of nineteen nineteen.
It has some things in common with last month's episode

(01:34):
on the Limerick Soviet Some of the context is similar.
Both things involve strikes that basically shut down a whole city,
But otherwise these two events have a lot of differences
both and how they progressed and then their impact on
their respective countries. So even though we just talked about
a strike, they're very different stories. In the wake of
World War One, Canada was facing many of the same

(01:55):
issues that have come up in our other recent nineteen
nineteen episodes. During the war, or the cost of living
had risen dramatically as much as seventy in some parts
of the country. Wages had risen by more like ten
to fifteen percent, so working people were facing huge financial difficulties.
Most working people weren't making enough money to pay for

(02:15):
food for their families, let alone meeting their other basic needs.
On top of all that, as the military was demobilized
after the war, soldiers and sailors were returning home just
as wartime industries were setting down. This was happening in
other parts of the world too. Unemployment was a huge problem,
and there wasn't a lot of transition support for these
returning veterans when they were trying to re enter civilian life,

(02:39):
often without being able to find a job. As was
happening in the United States, Canada was also in the
middle of a red scare following the nineteen seventeen Russian Revolution.
It was a climate of suspicion and fear of Bolshevism
and communism. These fears weren't just a reaction to the revolution, though,
they were also a response to changing patterns of immigration.

(03:00):
These changes were happening in much of the country, but
since today's episode is about events in Winnipeg, Manitoba, we
are going to focus on that part of it before them.
At eighteen hundreds, most Europeans in Manitoba were French. French
Canadians became a minority in Manitoba in the eighteen seventies
and eighteen eighties, as large numbers of people of British

(03:20):
ancestry arrived from Britain as well as from other parts
of Canada, particularly Ontario, which is the province next door.
But in the nineteen hundreds and nineteen teens, more and
more people started immigrating to Canada, and specifically to Manitoba,
from Russia and Eastern Europe. The population of Winnipeg sword
to about one hundred ninety thousand people, making it Canada's

(03:43):
third largest city, with a significant population of Slavic and
Jewish immigrants. These shifting demographics sparked a deep sense of
racism and resentment among Anglo Canadians, who feared these immigrants
weren't assimilating into British Canadian society, and we're bringing Bolshevis
them and Communism to Canada with them. Slavic and Jewish

(04:03):
immigrants definitely weren't the only people facing discrimination and racism
in Winnipeg. In nineteen nineteen, the region's first nation's population
had been forced onto reserves under a series of treaties
and laws, including the Indian Act of eighteen seventy six.
These were meant to eradicate First Nations cultures and to
force assimilation into European Canadian and particularly Anglo Canadian society.

(04:27):
These laws did not apply to the Mate, who were
people of both European and Indigenous ancestry, and Winnipeg had
a significant Metti population. Many lived in the outer edge
of southwest Winnipeg in a community known as Rooster Town.
The origins of that particular name are not clear, but
before nineteen nineteen, many of Winnipeg's Metti population worked delivering

(04:49):
water door to door. But early that year, construction was
finished on an aqueduct that connected Winnipeg to Shoal Lake,
providing the city with a new supply of fresh water.
But Shoal Lake was in a a Shnabe territory, so
the completion of this aqueduct was delivering water to Winnipeg,
but it was doing so by taking water from the

(05:10):
an a Shnabe, specifically from the Shoal Lake forty Reserve,
who were not really consulted or even considered during this process,
and this is something that has never been resolved. The
aqueducts construction created what was basically an artificial island, so
Shoal Lake forty is literally surrounded by Winnipeg's supply of
fresh water, but has been under a boil order for

(05:33):
its own water for more than twenty years. The aqueducts
completion also put much of Winnipeg's Mayti population out of work,
and there were few other industries open to them. All
of this was underpinning the Winnipeg General Strike of nineteen nineteen,
although on its surface, the strike started out as a
simple labor dispute. During the nineteen teens, many of Canada's

(05:54):
industries were starting to unionize and union membership was growing dramatically,
but this process was really inconsistent from one industry to another,
and even in different parts of the same industry. By
the end of World War One, workers in some industries
had formed unions, but those unions were not recognized yet.
Others had formed unions that were recognized and had negotiated

(06:16):
contracts for their members, but hadn't been as successful as
they had hoped for getting terms that they wanted. The
nature of the unions themselves had also started to shift.
Most of Canada's first unions were craft unions, and they
were connected to one specific trade. Members of the unions
all did the same essential job, and the union's focus
was on workplace issues that were very specific to its

(06:39):
members and their craft. But by the late nineteen teens,
a lot of industries were shifting over to an industrial
union model, where, for example, everyone who worked for the
railroad was part of a railroad workers union, regardless of
exactly what type of work they were doing for the railroad.
As a general trend, industrial unions were more focused on

(06:59):
politics than craft unions were. Both types of unions might
vote to strike over things like pay or working conditions,
but industrial unions also tried to get members or sympathetic
people into the government to change the laws that affected
their workplaces and industries. During the First World War, most
Canadians had considered it unpatriotic for workers to go on strike,

(07:22):
and then in the later part of the war, an
order in Council prohibited workers from striking. Once the war
was over, though, and that ordering council was nullified, things
started to change. More unions started using strikes as a
tool to try to improve their pay and working conditions,
but even so, the victories tended to be really small.
A successful strike might involve a wage increase of just

(07:45):
a few pennies, and this wasn't unique to Canada or
to nineteen nineteen. It was part of a pattern in
many parts of the world, both before and after nineteen nineteen.
In nineteen eighteen, for example, a partial general strike in
Winnipeg secured higher wages for the members of four civic unions.
Winnipeg nine strike started with its metal and building workers.

(08:08):
Both of these industries had lots of small unions that
had established councils to try to represent all of them together.
These were the Building Trades Council and the Metal Trades Council.
The idea was that the unions had more bargaining power
than workers did individually. But then these councils had more
bargaining power than the individual unions did if they were

(08:29):
trying to negotiate separately. But the metal and building industries
had nearly opposite responses to this attempt to collectively bargain.
The Builders Exchange was open to the idea of negotiating
with the Building Trades Council. Negotiating with all the builders
unions at once seemed like an efficient way to get
one contract in place that applied to everyone. But even

(08:50):
though the Builders Exchange was expecting a post war housing boom,
it didn't think it could meet the Building Trades Councils
demands for better pay. Meanwhile, when of PEG's three biggest
metal working companies were Manitoba Bridge and Iron Works, the
Vulcan Iron Works, and the Dominion Bridge Company, these were
together known as the Big Three. While the Builders Exchange

(09:12):
was expecting to get more work after the war, a
lot of the metal production had been tied to wartime
industries that were being shut down, So the Big Three
weren't really open to negotiating with the entire Metal Trades
Council at once. They thought they would get better terms
by working with the nineteen member unions individually. They also

(09:32):
sort of seemed more interested in saying that they supported
workers rights to collectively bargain than in actually recognizing in
bargaining with the unions. People felt like they were getting
a lot of lip service from them. On May one,
the Building Trades Council voted to go on strike, having
been unsuccessful in their negotiations for higher wages. The next day,

(09:54):
the members of the Metal Trades Council walked off the
job as well, not only because they wanted better pay,
A forty hour work week, but also because they wanted
the Big Three to recognize the Metal Trades Council as
their collective bargaining unit. These weren't the only workers voting
to strike. Winnipeg street car workers voted to strike at
about the same time, although their strike didn't start immediately,

(10:16):
and then in mid May, workers and other industries throughout
the city joined the building and metal workers in a
sympathetic strike. And we'll talk more about that after a
sponsor break. The Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council, or w TLC,

(10:36):
is a labor council that represents the whole collection of
member unions, and it still exists today. On May six,
the w TLC pulled its members about whether to join
the building and Metal unions in a sympathetic strike, and
the result was an overwhelming yes, with more than eleven
thousand people voting in favor of going on strike and
fewer than six hundred voting now. People voting yes generally

(11:00):
wanted to support the striking building and metal workers and
to reinforce the idea of collective bargaining in Winnipeg. People
voting no did so for a number of reasons. Some
thought that a strike wasn't necessary in this case. Others
were in lower paying industries and didn't think they should
have to go without income to support people who were
at the higher end of the pace gale. For Winnipeg's

(11:23):
unionized workers, the general strike began at eleven am on
May fifteen. That was the official start time, although some
people were striking earlier than that. Some of the first
workers to walk out were the switchboard operators, also known
as the Hello Girls. They clocked out at the end
of their shift at seven am, and the next shift
didn't come on to replace them. Also among the first

(11:45):
to walk out where the bread and cake workers, which
was another largely female occupation with shifts that ended in
the very early morning hours. The sympathetic strike included both
public and private employees. Public employees included police and firefighters,
postal workers, utility workers. Private employees included people who worked
in factories and shops and in transportation. About thirty thousand

(12:09):
workers went on strike, and about half of those participating
did so even though they weren't in a union. This
brought the entire city to an almost immediate stand still.
A strike committee was also established to manage the strike
itself and to keep essential services running as the strike
was going on. It's fifty three members were elected from

(12:30):
each of the w TLC's member unions. Two of the
committee were women. Meanwhile, Winnipeg's business and civic leaders formed
the Citizens Committee of one thousand to both oppose the
strike and to recruit people to replace the striking workers
and essential industries. The Citizens Committee was extremely secretive, and
it wasn't always clear who was and wasn't a member,

(12:53):
and which efforts they were organizing and which were being
handled by other people. In general, though many of its
members came from Winnipeg Board of Trade, the Winnipeg branch
of the Canadian Manufacturers Association, and the Manitoba Bar Association.
Shortly after the strike started, the Citizens Committee, the Strike Committee,
and representatives from the Winnipeg government all met to try

(13:14):
to work out a plan to keep things like the
switchboards and the water system, and milk and bread delivery
and firefighting operational. The result was an agreement that these
types of services could continue to operate with a permit
that was issued by the Strike Committee. This included things
like the milk delivery trucks having placards in the front

(13:35):
that they were quote permitted by authority of the Strike Committee,
very similar to some of the businesses during the Limerick
strike we talked about exactly. Here's an explanation published by
William Ivan's in the Western Labor News on May seventeen.
It ran under the headline why some industries are running,
and it read quote theaters and picture shows are running

(13:57):
under strike permit so that the worker can keep off this. Treats,
milk and bread concerns are running under permits to feed
the people. Hospitals are given permits so that the sick
may not suffer. Water is kept at low pressure rather
than cut off, so that the workers shall be able
to get it. Light is supplied for the same reason.
So it is with all these industries that work under

(14:18):
permit of the strike Committee. They are supplying the prime
necessities of life to the workers so that the fight
may be carried on until it is one. All these
concerns are organized fully and could be stopped at a
minute's notice, but for the present the Strike Committee believes
that it is better to let them run, hence its
order for them to stay on the job under permit.

(14:39):
The Citizens Committee and the Winnipeg government were deeply opposed
to the idea that essential services were being permitted by
the strike Committee. That seems too much like the strike
Committee had just decided when and how to run the city.
So the Citizens Committee and the government started focusing their
attention on breaking the strike and on getting people back

(14:59):
to work as soon as possible. To that end, the
Citizens Committee organized its own volunteers to replace striking workers.
This included six hundred people to operate the telephone and
telegraph exchange, a volunteer fire department, and a volunteer security
team to guard the fireboxes so that the fire department
wasn't driven to exhaustion by false alarms. Some of the

(15:21):
false alarms were pranks, and others were meant to intentionally
harass the strike breakers. The Citizens Committee also brought in
volunteers to pump gas at the gas stations and to
run the pumps in the municipal water system. The Strike
Committee announced all these volunteer groups as scabs. But there
was a whole other layer to all of this besides

(15:41):
just the striking workers on one side and the Citizens
Committee in the city government on the other side. The
government and the Citizens Committee also became absolutely convinced that
this was not a simple labor dispute at all. Instead,
they believed that radical communists and Bolshevists had infiltrated Winnipeg's
labor movement, and that this was a coordinated effort to

(16:03):
violently overthrow the government of Winnipeg and replace it with
a Communist dictatorship. This idea was there right from the
beginning and was part of the reporting in most, but
not all, of the newspapers covering the story. For example,
on May sixteenth, the Vancouver World ran a headline that
read Soviet government is in control in Winnipeg. On mayo,

(16:24):
in the Winnipeg Citizen quote the Red Element which planned
to bring about anarchy in this country and on the
ruins build a tyranny is made up of a small
junta of avowed Bolshevists who have succeeded by persistent scheming
in taking the place of the same leaders with an
almost solid foreign born following. Also connected to all of

(16:44):
this was the idea of one big union which would
represent all the workers in Western Canada. This was a
real idea. The Trades and Labor Congress of Canada had
discussed it at the Western Labor Conferences on March thirteenth
of nineteen nineteen. But the One Big Union didn't exist yet,
and it would not formally form in Calgary until June fourth,

(17:05):
at which point the strike was well under way. Even so,
there was this widespread perception that the One Big Union
was behind the strike and that all of it was
an alien plot. They came to this conclusion even though
that union didn't exist yet. It did not help that
the One Big Union idea was also connected to the

(17:26):
Industrial Workers of the World ak the Wobblies, which were
so widely reviled and were the targets and producers of
so much propaganda that it is still hard to tell
what was real and what wasn't. We talked about them
in our Bisbee deportation episode. Just ignore the times that
we accidentally called them the International Workers of the World.
You know, that was my fault. Sometimes these things happened.

(17:51):
To be clear, there were certainly Bolshevists and Communists among
Winnipeg's labor unions and among the striking workers. The striking
workers were not a modelith. Some wanted to strike for
better pay and working conditions and recognition of their labor
unions and labor councils. Others were certainly a lot more
radical and thought that capitalism itself needed to be replaced

(18:13):
with some other, more equitable system, and some of the
language that was used among the strikers did praise the
Russian Revolution and favored a more socialist or communist economic system.
But there is no indication at all that this strike
was part of a huge conspiracy to violently overthrow the
Canadian government. Even so, the government and the Citizens Committee

(18:35):
heavily pushed the idea that this whole thing was the
result of Soviet and Communist influences. They insisted that aliens
were to blame and characterized Winnipeg's growing Slavic and Jewish
immigrant community as having taken over Winnipeg's labor. They maintained
this position in spite of the fact that almost all
of the prominent organizers of the strike itself were people

(18:57):
who had immigrated to Canada from Britain, not from somewhere
else in Europe. In fact, there were no new immigrants
from Eastern or Central Europe on the strike committee at all.
The Government and the Citizens Committee also maintained this position
in spite of the fact that As many as eighty
five percent of Winnipeg's returning veterans were in support of

(19:20):
the strike, and veterans became increasingly visible among the strikers
As time went on. This ultimately became violent, and we're
going to talk about that. After we first paused for
a little sponsor break, the Winnipeg General Strike managed to
unite workers all through Winnipeg, largely cutting across gender, ethnicity,

(19:44):
and economic status. Its size and its scope were unprecedented
in Canadian history. But at the same time, the government
of Manitoba didn't really want to get involved in the
early days of the strike. It left it largely up
to the Strike Committee and the Citizens Committee of thousands
and the city government to try to work it out
among themselves. As we noted earlier, the strike began on

(20:06):
May fifteen. The Winnipeg Tribune joined the strike, returning to
work on May on, the postal workers were ordered to
return to their posts but refused. On May nine, about
two thousand veterans marched to the capitol to demand that
employers be required to recognize collective bargaining rights. Two days later,

(20:27):
ten thousand people made the same march to hear Premier
Tobias Norris's response, but he told them that was not
within his control. On June fourth, a different group of veterans,
ones who opposed the strike, marched to the capitol to
offer their assistance to restore order. On June five, there
were two different veterans parades, one opposing the strike and

(20:49):
one supporting it, and that same day the province banned parades.
There are a lot of parades. It was a lot. Yeah,
it's a lot of march. I mean, the same things
that you see and other strikes were all happening here.
There was a lot of marching, a lot of demonstrating,
all of that going on through all of this, and
although the government of Manitoba was reluctant to get involved,
the federal government was concerned that the strike might spread

(21:12):
to other cities. So in early June, Gideon Robertson, who
was Minister of Labor, and Arthur Meighen, who was Minister
of the Interior and acting Minister of Justice, came to
Winnipeg to assess this situation. But they only met with
the Citizens Committee of one thousand. They did not meet
with the Strike Committee or any of the strikers. Through

(21:33):
all of this there were lectures, demonstrations, educational events in
a coordinated outreach program largely staffed by women to distribute
food and supplies to the striking workers. As we noted earlier,
most of the leaders of the strike were immigrants to
Canada from Britain, and on June six, Canada changed the
terms of the Immigration Act to allow British born immigrants

(21:56):
to Canada and naturalized Canadian citizens to be deported if
they were charged with sedition. Parliament also expanded the definition
of sedition in the Criminal Code to also make the
definition more abroad, as well as include guilt by association.
On June nine, Winnipeg's police force was ordered to return

(22:16):
to work, denounced the strike, and signed loyalty oaths. They refused,
and the city fired them all, replacing them with a
force of eighteen hundred special constables known as Specials, most
of whom were affiliated with the Citizens Committee of a thousand.
They were armed with clubs and received a salary that
was higher than the police officers they were replacing. A

(22:38):
day later, a riot broke out after Specials on horseback
armed with clubs, charged into a demonstration. On June twelve,
a mass gathering in Victoria Park was nicknamed Ladies Day
for its focus on working women. By that point, workers
and other parts of Canada were starting to strike in
support of the workers in Winnipeg as well. On June fourteenth,

(22:59):
the Vancouver Son scheduled an editorial titled No Revolution in
Vancouver that prompted that papers workers to walk off the
job for four days. Canada's railroad unions hadn't participated in
the strike, and in early June they had offered to
act as mediators. Railroad workers union structure was very similar
to what the building workers had and what the metal

(23:21):
workers wanted. Individual unions rolled up into the Federated trades,
and then the federated trades rolled up to an organization
called Division four. Division four appointed the Negotiating Committee, which
negotiated for all the member unions. On June sixteenth, after
ongoing negotiations through the railroad unions, the Big three metal

(23:43):
companies agreed to negotiate with the separate metal working unions,
but they made no mention of the Metal Trades Council.
They made this agreement under huge pressure from getting In Robertson,
the Minister of Labor, who was worried that if this
strike went a lot longer, the railroad workers who had
been acting as mediators might ultimately join it as well.

(24:03):
Apart from the huge impact this would have by shutting
down the railroad, if the railroad workers joined the strike,
that was probably going to cause the strike to just
spread through the entire country, rather than having a few
isolated communities that were supporting the strike with their own strike.
The leaders of the railroad unions who had acted as
negotiators released a statement that this was the same type

(24:24):
of collective bargaining that the railroad workers enjoyed, but it
really wasn't. The reason for this about face is not
entirely clear. That the railroad unions were also under a
lot of pressure from the Minister of Labor to get
things resolved, and they feared they might lose their own
unions recognition if they didn't bring things to a close.
The General Strike Committee was really not satisfied with this outcome,

(24:47):
especially because they had not even seen the last round
of proposals during the negotiations before this announcement came about
an agreement being reached. There was also just a lack
of clarity about exactly how to define collective bargaining. That
was yet another layer of complexity in this whole situation.
The Big Three was insisting that workers had collective bargaining

(25:08):
powers because they had agreed to recognize the individual unions,
but the workers, or at least the more elite among
the workers, insisted that they did not have collective bargaining
because the Big Three would not recognize the Metal Trades Council.
The strike committee refused to call off the strike, so
in June seventeenth, the Northwest Mounted Police, aided by specials,

(25:30):
rated the homes of several strike leaders and arrested ten
of the most prominent, as well as two members of
the One Big Union, which by this point existed. Groups
of Eastern European immigrants were arrested as well, and after
the strike was over, Canada deported waves of immigrants who
were suspected of Bolshevism or Communism. The arrested strike committee

(25:50):
members were taken to Stony Mountain Penitentiary, and they included
union and labor leaders John Queen A. Heaps, Robert Lloyd Russell,
and George arms Wrong. Armstrong's wife, Helen, was the head
of the Women's Labor League and was one of the
strike's most visible women. She refused to let the authorities
take her husband until she had confirmation that they actually

(26:11):
had a warrant. William Ivan's of the Western Labor News
was also arrested, as was Roger E Bray, who was
a former private in the Canadian Army who had been
trying to rally support for the strike among military veterans. Initially,
the plan was to immediately deport the British born strike leadership,
but it became clear that even people who were opposed

(26:31):
to the strike thought this was extreme, so authorities charged
them with seditious conspiracy and planned to bring them to trial.
Four days after these arrests, on June one, striking workers
held a silent parade. That day, the city's street cars
had started running again, and the demonstrators stopped one of
the street cars and tipped it over. This prompted the

(26:53):
Northwest Mounted Police and the Specials to charge into the strikers,
killing two people and injuring at least thirty. Nearly a
hundred people were arrested. This incident was nicknamed Bloody Saturday,
and afterward federal troops occupied the city of Winnipeg. At
this point, the strike's most vocal and radical leadership had
been arrested, leaving more moderate people in charge, and people

(27:16):
began to fear that there would be more violence and
more deaths if the strike continued. So on June, the
strike ended and the workers who had not been fired
for striking returned to their jobs. In the end, this
strike achieved almost none of its goals. The metal workers
hours were reduced by five per week, which was less
than the reduction they had asked for, but that was

(27:38):
really it. Civic employees were also required to sign documents
attesting that they would not strike again in the future
before they were allowed to return to their jobs. Afterward,
there was a hugely bitter divide between labor and capital.
The Citizens Committee of one thousand continued to try to
undermine labor organization long after the strike was over. The

(27:59):
strike and the committee's continued work had an overall chilling
effect on labor activism immediately afterward. In July of nineteen nineteen,
a commission was convened to investigate what had happened during
the strike. Justice R. A. Robeson led the inquiry and
rejected the idea that it was a revolution meant to
overthrow the government. His reports supported the idea that this

(28:21):
was a dispute over the issue of collective bargaining and
that the strike was not seditious in its character. In
spite of that, several of the strikes leaders were tried
for seditious conspiracy in November of nineteen nineteen and in
the early months of nineteen twenty, in prosecutions that were
funded by the Department of Justice under the War Appropriation Act.

(28:42):
Robert Boyd Russell was convicted in December nineteen nineteen. On
March seven, ninety six, other leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Roger Ebray was also convicted of being a common nuisance.
That immediate chilling effect on Canada's labor movement started to
lift as these trials were happening. Labor leaders were elected

(29:04):
in both municipal and provincial elections in nineteen nineteen and
nineteen twenty. Some of those leaders were still incarcerated for
the role in the strike that they had played when
they were elected. The Conservative Party was defeated in the
ninety one federal election, and the newly elected government promised
labor reforms. Provinces also started enacting collective bargaining legislation in

(29:26):
the nineteen forties, with the federal government enacting a collective
Bargaining statute in nineteen forty eight. After being released, many
of the strikes leaders went on to be active in
the labor movement and in the government. John Queen and
William Ivans both served in the Manitoba Legislature, and John
Queen served as the Mayor of Winnipeg for seven non
consecutive terms. Abraham Heaps was elected as a member of parliament. J. S.

(29:50):
Woodsworth had been charged in connection to the strike, but
those charges were later dropped. He became a member of
parliament as well. He also helped found the Cooperative Coman
Wealth Federation, which later became the New Democratic Party. Since
this here's the hundredth anniversary of the strike happening, there's
been a lot going on related to it in the
last few years. A monument to the strike was unveiled

(30:12):
at Lily Street at Market Avenue. In that monument is
made of metal to honor the striking metal workers. A
Bloody Saturday monument was scheduled to be unveiled on June nineteen,
that is after we are recording this podcast. But before
the podcast is coming out, there's also been a lot
of hundredth anniversary stuff happening in Winnipeg, including a huge

(30:36):
labor conference to sort of commemorated and function as a
labor conference. Do you have a listener mail? I do
have listener mail. I'm not sure the name of the
listener who has sent this. They didn't sign the email,
but it says I was wondering if you could provide
more context regarding the Quakers and others that would not

(30:57):
have the bell rung for them that were referenced. That
was an the Samuel Peeps episode, mainly why would Quakers
not want the bell rung and why even we're we're
ringing the bell in the first place. I listened on
the regular and appreciate the stimulating thoughts you conjure up
the rest of the day after listening to this pod.
So thank you for this email. So that was in

(31:17):
the Samuel Peeps episode and Samuel Peep's diary about how
many people had died of the plague. He made a
comment about how the number might actually be a lot
higher because of Quakers and others who would not have
the bell rung for them. So there were bells being
rung for lots of different reasons at this point in
London and then specifically during the plague for multiple reasons.

(31:41):
UM bells would be rung at churches when deaths were reported,
and bells would also be rung at burials. Part of
this was required by law. The idea was that if
there were these bells ringing every time somebody died, then
maybe people would remember to take precautions about the plague. UM.
But all of this bell ringing was happening when people

(32:04):
had a church that they were part of, and we're
being buried in the churchyard, UM. And Quakers and other
people who were part of like non conforming denominations were
generally being buried in their own graveyard that wasn't part
of a church and did not have that church bell
connected to it. So UM, I think that's what he's
referring to in terms of the bell not being wrung

(32:26):
usually UM when Quakers and others were buried, that just
wasn't part of the the funeral or the death notification.
So that has led to some um lack of clarity
in terms of the death records from the plague because
a lot of the record keeping was being kept through
formal church channels, so if you were part of a

(32:47):
nonconforming religion that did not have those church channels, your
death might not ever be formally recorded. So thank you
for that question. If you would like to write to
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(33:09):
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(33:32):
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