Barbara Stannard interview : [Mayse, 1984]
- AAAB5773
- Item
- 1984-03-22 [date recorded]
CALL NUMBER: T4132:0001 RECORDED: Nanaimo (B.C.), 1984-03-22 SUMMARY: Childhood at Jingle Pot Mine. Chinese workers. Hostile tongs. Shifts. Mine horses and mules. Good treatment of mine animals. Nanaimo Harbour. Balls and concerts in Nanaimo. Miner's picnics on Newcastle Island. Protection Island -- dances, picnics, Chinese settlement near pithead. Tugboat whistles. CPR boats. Coal fossils. Undersea mine adits. Swamping of Kanaka Bay adit. No. 1 mine. Fossils at Protection island. No. 1 tunnel. Beauty of coal. Spontaneous combustion in coal dust. Use of carbide lamps and candles. Open oil lamps in early mines; later, carbide or battery lamps.
CALL NUMBER: T4132:0002 RECORDED: Nanaimo (B.C.), 1984-03-22 SUMMARY: Various homes after Nanaimo. Estevan; mine strike. Ann Buller's hypnotic effect. Estevan strikers' march and shooting, 1931; RCMP blamed for deaths. Mobs dreadful. Buller and her brother persuasive. Ann Buller's rhetorical technique. People "poor and helpless". Mrs. Stannard always a rebel; unusual parents and childhood. Her mother [musician Elizabeth Inez Martell] still alive and playing piano. Mother's youth. Return to Nanaimo. Father (Harry Freeman) was a civil engineer. Island projects during World War II. Injured in Suquash Mine; led to blindness. Father's father's background. Grandparents reached Nanaimo in 1880s by CPR train and stagecoach. Harry Freeman's education and work as an engineer and manager.
CALL NUMBER: T4132:0003 RECORDED: Nanaimo (B.C.), 1984-03-22 SUMMARY: Suquash coal. Return to Nanaimo. Origin of name "Jingle Pot". Baron Alvo von Alvensleben, owned Vancouver Nanaimo Coal Company, but left mine management to Harry Freeman; disappeared in World War I [sic]. Mrs. Stannard doesn't believe he was a German spy. Harry Freeman mediated during 1912 coal strike -- prevented bloodshed. Frank Farrington and Ginger Goodwin -- two different types of UMWA organizers. Suffering during strike -- Thomas Stockett caught between miners and had courage of convictions. Nanaimo miners slow to strike. Hatred of Chinese from 1880s. Goodwin a nice person, joked, danced well. Her father was upset when Goodwin was shot. Some scabs arrived for job and found they were strikebreakers. Rehired strikers. Jingle Pot miners had good relations with her father. Dangers of mines; too gassy to reopen today. Nanaimo's core population and long memory. Actor Mr. Stevens from Nanaimo. Only one murderer hanged. Fraser Street brothels well organized, useful service, interesting madames.