"Ole Boy": Memoirs of a Canadian Labour Leader, JK Bell

Gerald J. Stortz is an assistant professor of history at the University
of Waterloo.

This is one of the new generation of biographies of Canadian labour
leaders in which the subject speaks for him- or herself; the words are
then put into publishable form by an editor. The subject in this case is
J.K. Bell, the founder of the Maritime Marine Workers’ Federation
(MMWF). Sue Calhoun, a journalist who has written two monographs on
labour history in the Maritimes, is the one who has put this into
publishable form.

All good oral historians will acknowledge that an individual’s
remembrances of decades past cannot be totally trusted. Nevertheless,
the tale that Bell weaves is fascinating. He begins with the first
strike he organized at age 14 in a lumber camp, an effort for which he
was fired. Ultimately he became the founder of the MMWF. A year later
Bell came to Ontario, where, fighting against the Hepburn regime, he
infiltrated the unemployed camps. His tales of both the abysmal working
conditions and the unreported confrontations between police and
unionists ring true. His account of breaking into an internment camp
near Hull is a little harder to swallow. What is clear, however, is that
the hard-drinking Bell was an important figure in Canadian labour
history.

Sometimes Bell’s accounts seem self-serving. Despite denying that he
ever joined the Communist Party, Bell indicates the sympathy he had for
the organization and that in World War II, he joined the Labour
Progressive Party. In most people’s minds that was simply a front
organization for the Communist Party after the King government outlawed
it.

In all, however, this is a good book, full of interesting anecdotal
history that is not only worth preserving but fun to read.