The Great Depression Read online

  2

  Death by Depression

  All across the country, families like the Lendrums were facing similar crises and undergoing the difficult and often searing experience of applying for public charity. It mattered little to those on relief that the major banks were again announcing that the worst was over and that there was “a definite increase in business activity,” to quote the Bank of Nova Scotia newsletter. That was no comfort to those who were forced to cut short a promising career, a high school or university education, or a chance to marry and raise a family.

  The national marriage rate decreased annually in the early years of the Depression – from 77,000 in 1929 to 62,000 in 1932. Marrying was a hazardous business for those with no resources; the sight of a teenaged couple with a child was unusual enough to cause heads to turn, as Main Johnson discovered in the summer of 1933. Johnson, the editor of the Toronto Star Weekly, was hurrying down Yonge Street one hot, dusty noon hour when he was stopped in his tracks by an unaccustomed scene. Coming along the street, his hat tilted back on his head, was a telegraph messenger boy. Beside him walked a slim girl in a pink frock, brown hair blowing about her face. On the boy’s shoulders was a baby. Johnson felt tears in his eyes as he watched them pass. He saw others stop and look back at the three happy children, oblivious to the glum faces around them. He went on to his luncheon appointment but couldn’t get the picture out of his mind.

  That afternoon, Johnson called in his best feature writer, Gregory Clark, and assigned him to find the couple and write about them. “Why do they look so happy?” he asked Clark. “Happiness isn’t so plentiful nowadays. Yet here are two children, already launched on the adventures of life, in a stormy time like this, and if I ever saw joy, I saw it on Yonge Street at noon today.”

  Clark found the couple through the telegraph company. The Star Weekly, then a full-size broadsheet, devoted the entire front page of its general section to a story and pictures about Clara and Harry Watson, who had met at a soda fountain when he was unemployed and she was an eight-dollar-a-week clerk at Simpson’s. They had married on impulse after Harry was hired as a messenger boy at three cents a message. She was seventeen; he was eighteen. They had no savings. The wedding supper was an ice cream soda at a Yonge Street fountain. Their first home, which Clark described as “their home of joy,” consisted of a ten-dollar-a-month flat on Dupont Street. When the baby came, Clara had to quit her job.

  In his feature story, Clark made much of the couple’s courage in marrying: “Perhaps only two in a million would take the risk of doing what those two have done. They have never had a quarrel. They have the same sweet, honest attitude toward life. They are happy. Hard working. Devoted. But it is not for the children we have told their story. It is for the older folk. The ones who come at life so practically and methodically, as if life were a cold pool, and they were prowling timidly or cautiously about its edge.

  “He is a telegraph messenger.

  “She is still a girl …

  “And where they walk, the sun shines.”

  The Star Weekly did not follow up the story it called “a living testimony that marriage is not the hopeless adventure a great many people believe it to be.” Nor is it probable that it would have published the sequel. For the sun did not shine for long on Clara and Harry Watson. They were so poor they were forced to move seven times, seeking cheaper and cheaper accommodation. Eighteen months after the story appeared, the constant worry about meeting the rent and the stress of scrimping for cheap food killed the marriage. They could not afford to live together and so agreed to part. He went back to his mother, and she, with a great sense of relief, returned to the home of the widowed grandmother who had raised her. Eventually they were divorced. She married again when times were better and raised three more children but could never forget that first failed attempt. “Another time, another place,” she has said, “it would have been nice.”

  Though the Watsons’ marriage failed, they both survived the Depression. But there were those who did not survive – victims of what might be called death by Depression.

  Humiliation killed a seasonal farm worker in Cabri, Saskatchewan, in January. At the age of forty-six, living on the charity of relatives, broke, and with no visible means of support, Gannett Bissett found himself charged with vagrancy and sentenced to thirty days in the Regina jail. The shame was too much for him to bear. When he was released he went back to Cabri and shot himself with a .22 rifle.

  Racism killed an aged Chinese in Saskatoon in March. When Orientals were no longer allowed to collect even the meagre rations doled out to other citizens on relief, sixty were reduced to scrabbling in back alleys for bones, offal, and kitchen refuse. When one old man was found dead of malnutrition, the local authorities hastily approved a paltry daily allowance of about a pound of pork and rice per man – just barely enough to keep them alive.

  Bureaucratic rigidity killed a Polish Canadian in Montreal the same month. In a building on Dominique Street, a crippled tenant was being ousted from his bed by bailiffs seizing his furniture for unpaid rent. An angry crowd of neighbours gathered and vainly tried to stop the eviction. As the police arrived to restore order, another tenant, Nick Zynchuk, tried to enter the building to retrieve two suitcases from his own flat. As he mounted the steps to the front door, a policeman shot him in the back and killed him. The policeman was acquitted of murder because, the judge said, a “riot” was in progress at the time.

  Despondency killed four little children in the Quebec town of Ste Perpétue. Their father, Lucien Gerard, in despair over the loss of his farm, took a hammer and battered in their heads as they slept.

  But of all the stark tales that illuminate the bitterness of those years, none rends the heart more than the tragedy of Ted Bates, of Glidden, Saskatchewan, and his wife, Rose.

  Glidden was a tiny community some one hundred and twenty miles southwest of Saskatoon. Ted Bates was the village butcher – a big, jolly man, outgoing and cheerful, the kind who makes friends wherever he goes. In the words of G.V. Couper, the secretary-treasurer of the village, “he didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

  Ted and Rose were in their early forties and both were English immigrants. Ted Bates had come out in 1914, lured by the propaganda campaign that depicted Western Canada as a farmers’ paradise. He farmed for two years, moved to Glidden, and then decided to return to his original trade of butcher. In 1921, he met and married Rose Slatter, a quiet, slender Englishwoman, who had recently arrived from the old country. Three years later she bore him a son, Jack. In 1933, he was nine years old, a plump and cheerful boy, “the sunshine of their home,” in the words of a village official. They called him the Nipper. As one friend was to remark, “I never saw a mother more devoted to a son in my life.”

  The Depression wrecked the Bateses’ life. The butcher shop failed; even the cheapest meat was a luxury in Saskatchewan in those years. Bates sold his store in the spring of 1932 for $450. Like so many others who fled the drought-ridden prairies, the family moved west to Vancouver. Ted Bates opened a store in the suburb of Marpole, but that failed, too. The money that he had been promised for the sale of his store in Glidden did not materialize. The family was destitute, and Rose, always high strung, was now close to a breakdown from worry, her frail and anemic body reduced to a gaunt 105 pounds.

  To Ted Bates the idea of living on public charity was shameful. But he had no option and at last was forced to apply for relief. At that point he came up against the complexities of the social welfare system of the thirties.

  Direct relief was doled out by the municipalities, which were forced to put up a third of the total cost, the provincial and federal governments contributing the other two-thirds. Thus the municipalities set the rules. Vancouver, already jammed with newcomers escaping the arid plains, wasn’t prepared to advance help to anyone it considered a johnny-come-lately. Ted Bates was told that he and his family did not fulfil the residence requirements. They would have to establish domicile in Va
ncouver by a year’s residence or else go back home to get relief.

  The Bateses were now caught in the trap that snared thousands of Canadians in the thirties. They had moved once, hoping to better themselves. Instead they had been rendered immobile by the times. They couldn’t get help in British Columbia. They didn’t have the cash to return to Saskatchewan.

  The Salvation Army stepped in and offered them one-way tickets to Saskatoon, but they could not face the idea of returning to Glidden and applying for relief there. The whole neighbourhood would quickly learn that they had failed in Vancouver and been shipped home as charity cases. “I can’t go back, Slim,” Rose Bates told an acquaintance, Slim Babcock. “I would rather kill myself than go back to Glidden.” Rose seemed to be a woman in a stupor, and her husband was no better. Babcock described him in Great War terms: “He looked like a man blown up by a shell, buried, and blown up again.”

  The family decided to accept train fare from the Salvation Army in the hope that they would be able to get relief either in Saskatoon or somewhere else in the province – anywhere but Glidden. That was a forlorn hope. When they applied for relief in Saskatoon on Friday, December 1, 1933, the authorities told them they’d have to go back to their home town. That was the rule. Since there was no train to Glidden until Monday, they were given vouchers for a room at the Western Hotel for the weekend and two meals a day at the Ovido Restaurant.

  At this point, Ted and Rose Bates, two middle-aged people with a nine-year-old son and no future, came to a terrible decision: they would kill themselves and their boy rather than accept charity in their home community. There followed a grisly discussion about the method. Rose Bates suggested cyanide. But Ted convinced her that carbon monoxide from the exhaust of a car would be simpler and just as effective. Rose pawned her jewellery for ten dollars, and with that sum they rented a 1929 Chevrolet coach at Allen’s Service Station and bought a small amount of gas. On Monday morning they set off, apparently for Glidden.

  At the little town of Perdue on the way to Biggar, they stopped to converse with a local barber. Bates was looking for an empty building. “A man’s got to do something,” he said cryptically. They drove on to the Avalon district and almost out of gas, bought two or three quarts from a local farmer, John Lee, who invited them to dinner. Later they parked their car near the drive shed of the Avalon district school. They turned the windows up, kept the motor running, attached a tube to the exhaust, and as young Jack in the rear seat innocently devoured two of the Big Little Books that were so popular with children of his age (Chester Gump at Silver Creek Ranch and Mickey Mouse, the Mail Pilot) they sat quietly in the front seat and waited for death.

  It did not come for Rose and Ted Bates. They woke at dawn, groggy and physically ill from the effects of the gas, but alive. By the bitterest of ironies, their own poverty had saved them. Because they had not been able to afford enough gasoline for the car, the motor had died during the night. But not before their son had succumbed. There he lay in the back seat – the Nipper, his body already stiff and cold, the two Big Little Books beside him.

  They had killed their own son! That knowledge fuelled their need to end their own lives. Rose pleaded with her husband to get the big butcher knife, the tool of his trade, out of his luggage and stab her to death. He shrank from that: unless he stabbed her cleanly he would cause excruciating pain. He decided, first, to knock her unconscious with the automobile crank. In spite of hitting her repeatedly, he did not succeed. The carbon monoxide had done part of its work; he was too weak to be effective. Now he made a feeble attempt to kill her with the knife, but when he tried to plunge it into her heart, her winter clothes softened the blow. She begged for death, asked him to cut her throat. He pulled out a pen knife, severed the muscle on the right side of her neck, but missed the carotid artery by a fraction of an inch. With blood flowing down her clothing, she asked for razor blades. The couple then tried to sever the arteries in their wrists, but that was not possible either. Weak from loss of blood and the effects of the gas, they sat and waited for death.

  Again, it did not come. Some neighbours had noticed the car in the schoolyard and assumed that the family, unable to find accommodation, had decided to stay in the car for the night with the engine running to keep out the December cold. Others thought there might be bank robbers in the car – a not farfetched possibility in those days – and so were afraid to approach it. At last somebody called the police, who discovered the pair lying half-conscious in a welter of their own blood with the corpse of their son in the back seat.

  Rose and Ted Bates were taken to the hospital at Biggar. Both recovered; both were charged with the murder of their boy. Now the village of Glidden rallied round. The entire community turned up at a mass meeting, postponed for a day so that farmers from the outlying districts, blocked by snowdrifts, could attend. The meeting raised a fund to pay for Jack Bates’s funeral and to underwrite legal fees for the coming trial.

  The family’s former neighbours in Glidden understood their dilemma – why they refused to accept local charity even at the cost of their own lives. It is this stiff-backed sense of pride that comes through again and again in the stories of those who were forced by circumstances to accept relief. It belies the attitude that in those days was typical of men of the Bennett calibre – and, indeed, is still alive in some quarters – who believed that the dole would weaken human initiative and produce a generation of sloths feeding from the public trough. Canada failed the Bates family as it failed thousands of others who were perfectly willing to pay their way but couldn’t because of conditions over which they had no control.

  The mass meeting in Glidden drafted a resolution declaring its firm conviction that the Bateses’ tragedy was “a direct result of the Depression” and urging the Dominion government to take full responsibility for relief so that those who were forced to move from one community to another wouldn’t have to starve. It was ignored by Ottawa.

  Meanwhile, an inquest was held at Biggar. A coroner’s jury was asked by the Crown counsel to fix blame for Jack Bates’s death – presumably on his parents. But the jury pointedly ignored the request. And when the case came to trial, one hundred days after the tragedy, another jury returned a verdict of not guilty, to general applause.

  The hot light of publicity that had been focused on Ted and Rose Bates for all that time was finally extinguished. They returned to Glidden and obscurity. Ted Bates died at Rosetown on December 14, 1954. Rose Bates went back to England. They had no more children.

  3

  Childhood memories

  Most survivors of the Depression living today were children or teenagers in 1933. They weren’t part of the labour force, however, and they had no personal experience of unemployment. Most were in school, and a remarkable number didn’t realize there was a depression because they had no other period with which to compare it.

  Memories of hunger and humiliation still linger in the minds of those who were shaped by the times – hunger because there was never quite enough for growing children to eat, humiliation because of the hand-me-downs or relief clothing that they were forced to wear to school. Charles Templeton, who became a media star, would never forget the feeling of an empty stomach on those days when the larder was empty. Templeton was sixteen in 1933, living with his mother and three siblings in Parkdale, a Toronto suburb. The family existed on groceries obtained with relief vouchers, but the mother couldn’t make these stretch for more than six days. On the seventh they existed by drinking water to help dull the pangs.

  Mike Bevan, who was thirteen that year, would always remember roaming the prairie south of Calgary, trying to fill up on wild strawberries, chokecherries, bear berries, Saskatoon berries, and even Russian olive. In the winter when there was no wild fruit, the emptiness was worse, for there were no second helpings in his household. They did not go on relief until his father, a proud man, finally gave in to his mother’s entreaties. She threatened to leave him unless he applied for the dole.
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br />   For Lara Rapson, who was five in 1933, a treat consisted of bread with lard and sugar. When things grew worse, Lara and her mother and three sisters had “bread and point” – meaning you could always point to where the butter and jam were supposed to be. Their luncheon sandwiches were filled with nothing more than ketchup or mustard, and the Rapson kids pretended to their classmates that they actually preferred these to beef or cheese. When the health teacher talked about good nutrition and asked each child what she’d eaten for breakfast that morning, Lara told another white lie: she simply announced that she’d eaten everything on the list of nourishing foods the teacher produced. She knew that the teacher suspected she was lying, but at least she saved face.

  Lara’s father, a Toronto printer, was out of work the entire decade. Because the family could never afford new clothes for Lara, her mother made over garments that the neighbours’ children had discarded. Her most mortifying experience – the one that stood out in her mind above all others – was the day when she sat in church wearing a made-over rose-coloured coat with a matching wide-brimmed hat, knowing that just three rows behind sat the girl who had worn that very outfit the year before.

  New shoes were a luxury that few lower-class families could afford. Eileen Palmer, who was thirteen and lived in Toronto’s Cabbagetown, always remembered her single pair of shoes, which, when they started to wear out, were layered with cardboard to make them last. That was a common experience in the thirties. More than one family made cardboard insoles from Turret cigarette boxes. The Palmer family wasn’t on relief, but life was still precarious. Eileen’s father worked for the gas company, and they barely existed from week to week on his meagre pay. She would never forget the day when he was laid off for two weeks because somebody had spotted his truck outside a coffee shop. She was devastated. There was no food in the house – only what his fellow employees brought him. Christmas was coming, and when Eileen mentioned the family situation in church, St. Bartholomew’s sent a Christmas packet. That infuriated her father. He didn’t want to take charity; besides, he said, the gas company would frown on it. That Christmas, Eileen Palmer’s stocking contained nothing more than an orange and a quarter. Yet for Eileen Palmer, the Depression was not an unmixed horror. Her father had a job – one of only four breadwinners that did on their block of twelve houses. As she has said, “In those days it didn’t matter how little you had, someone else had less.”