Not Your Grandfathers Mining Industry, Nova Scotia, Canada

John Roderick McDougall

Many Nova Scotian miners served their country during the World Wars working as tunnellers on the front lines. John Roderick McDougall (John R.) was one of them.

Born in Westville, Pictou County, in 1883, John R. was the son of Roderick (Rory) and Catherine McDougall.

Around the age of 12 or 13, John R. was sent to work on the farm of James Bigly, his mother’s cousin, in Browns Mountain, Antigonish. At 14, he decided farming was not for him and he travelled to Glace Bay, alone, to work for the Dominion Coal Company. Like his father, John R. became a coal miner, starting in the Dominion No. 3 mine. It was the beginning of a 50-year career underground.

His parents and two brothers, Duncan and Danny, soon followed him to Glace Bay and the males joined John R. at the No. 3.

John R. married Mary Florence (“Minnie”) Gillis in 1903, and they eventually had a total of 13 children.

John R. was working at the Dominion No. 6 mine in Donkin in 1909 when the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) went on strike against the Dominion Coal Company. Like many others, John R. and his brother Duncan were blacklisted from working in the company’s mines, so John R. and his family, along with Duncan, moved to Port Hood to work in the coal mine there.

Duncan only stayed in Port Hood a couple years. One Saturday, he put on his best suit and left town. His family heard nothing of him for the next four decades.

By the time World War One arrived, John R. and his family were back in Donkin and he was again working at the Dominion No. 6.

In August 1916, at the age of 33, he enlisted in the 246th Battalion of the Nova Scotia Highland Brigade. He went overseas in June 1917, and in England he was transferred to the 185th Battalion (Cape Breton Highlanders). He was then posted to No. 3 Tunnelling Company of the Royal Canadian Engineers in April 1918, and sent to France.

Although precise figures are not known, as many as 1,100 men may have served in the Canadian tunnelling companies during WWI. Approximately 200 were from Cape Breton, according to the Beaton institute. Miners had the unique skills and knowledge needed to tunnel in such difficult and dangerous conditions – quickly, in cramped spaces, and to do so quietly to ensure the enemy did not hear their work.

John R. served in the field until October 1918, when he was hospitalized at Boulogne with a hernia. By the time he recovered, the war was over.

Following the war, John R. resumed his career as a miner with the Dominion Coal Company. He was a trained shotfirer and worked in several mines, including No. 3, No. 4, No. 6, No. 11 and No. 16.

By 1925, two of his teenage sons, John Joe and Rannie, had joined him in the mines.

During a strike that year, John R. was working for the UMWA relief fund, and he used his horse and wagon to bring much-needed supplies from Glace Bay to the miners' families at Dominion No. 6.

The company store at No. 6 was looted during the strike, and one of John R.’s sons, 13-year-old Robert, saw the event and later told the tale to his family. He said people knew something was going to happen and had begun gathering outside the store. The store’s employees left, likely for their own safety. However, before the went, they threw all the footwear into a big pile so finding pairs would be difficult. According to family lore, people went around for weeks afterwards with one boot or shoe looking for its mate.

John R. lost his left eye in a workplace accident in 1936. He received $9.60 per month from the Workmen’s Compensation Board, as it was called then, for the rest of his life for the partial disability. However, he continued to mine until his retirement in 1947.

In 1942, at the age of 49, John R. tried to re-enlist to fight in World War Two. The doctor that conducted his physical examination, perhaps out of kindness or discretion, did not record the fact that he had only one eye and instead rejected him as simply being “under existing Physical Standards.”

Although he had little formal education, John R. was self-taught and helped the No. 6’s mine manager, Bill Blakey, teach night school to miners looking to improve their education.

John Roderick McDougall died in 1957 at the age of 75.

Coal mining continued to run in the family, as it so often does. A number of John’s sons worked in the mines and one of his grandchildren, Robert MacDougall Jr. - son of the Robert who witnessed the looting of the store – spent 28 years underground after leaving the military. He worked a quarter-century for Devco (the Cape Breton Development Corporation), whose mandate was to manage the eventual shutdown of Cape Breton’s coal mines while diversifying the island’s economy.

After Devco, Robert worked at the Grande Cache coal mine in Alberta and Cape Breton’s Donkin mine with Xstrata Coal.

Robert said he was raised on stories about the mines. At one point his grandfather, father and several uncles all worked in the Dominion No. 24 mine together, and in the 1940s, cousins also started working at the mine. Other family members were also miners.

John Roderick McDougall’s brother Duncan - the one who disappeared from Port Hood in his best suit – was eventually found in a Vancouver nursing home over 40 years later.

His family assumed that he had travelled west after his disappearance, working in various mines as he went, and letters were sent to mine managers across the country in the hope of finding information about him. A mine manager in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, originally a gold mining camp, said Duncan had worked there but had already moved on.

Duncan ended his days in a shelter for homeless men in Vancouver. When he realised he was dying, he reached out to a Catholic priest in Glace Bay and asked whether any members of the McDougall family were still alive. This led to Duncan and John R. reconnecting. It turned out that one of their sisters, who had moved to Vancouver, was only a few miles from Duncan and she visited him several times before his death.

Duncan died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave in Mountain View Cemetery. Another family member moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s and identified his grave because, although it was unmarked, the plot was registered on the cemetery’s plot plan.

It was later discovered that Duncan had served in WWI, so the family arranged for Veterans Affairs to place a marker on his grave.

Our thanks to Robert MacDougall Jr. for sharing his family’s story with us.