HE’S SIR WILLIAM
ON $100 A MONTH
(By Charles W. Wood, in Collier’s
Weekly)
I have been talking with the mov
ing spirit of the strangest labor union
in the world. Probably he is the only
labor agitator to be knighted by the
King of England as a result of his
agitation.
This man, Sir William Ford Coaker,
is from the oldest and most conserva
tive of British Colonies—Newfound
land. He is the executive head of
The Fishermen’s Protective Union.
And he was knighted, not under the
Labor Government of England, but
under the preceding Conservative gov
ernment.
Sir William did not come to the
United States to talk politics or wave
any banner of reform. He is loss of
a theorist than any other politician or
labor-union organizer I ever met. He
deals with facts; and being a New
foundlander, he confines himself to
Newfoundland facts. But one cannot
deal with facts for many years with
out discovering some truths; and one
of the truths which Sir William dis
covered is that politics has become
more alive and less rotten in New
foundland since the fishermen began
to vote as fishermen instead of as
Conservatives and Liberals.
I met him at the Hotel Belmont,
in New York City. They had had
him knighted, I had fancied, because
he was a philanthropic grandee who
hadn’t offended the better classes and
had kept labor from becoming arro
gant. I was 100 per cent wrong. He
is one of the most powerful persons
in Newfoundland; but for many years
his very name was a stench in the
nostrils of Newfoundland’s most re
spected citizenry. He was cursed for
attempting to organize the fisher
men.
But William F. Coaker knew that
the whole colony was dependent al
most solely upon the fishing industry,
while the actual fishermen were in a
perennial state of insecurity and pov
erty.
Fishing is not a modern industry
and it hasn’t yet been modernized.
Fish may be distributed, to be sure,
according to modern business princi
ples, but they still have to be caught
in much the same old way. In his
economic status, the fishermen is
more like the small farmer than like
the modem factory worker. He
doesn’t work for wages; he works for
fish, and what he gets for fish de
pends upon what the state of the mar
ket happens to be.
The result was that the fishermen
generally got for this season’s fishing
about enough to keep him alive until
the next season began. Rarely did he
have enough money to fit out his boat.
He had to depend upon some trader
to grubstake him. The trader fur
nished him with his food and other
supplies, charging perhaps three
times their value, and got in return
a first lien upon the fish that would
be caught.
Thousands of fishermen were vir
tually penniless from one year’s end
to another. They might have food
enough to carry them through the
winter, but they had no resources
with which to meet the emergencies
of life. They were not united in any
way, not even geographically.
That was the situation as William
Coaker saw it when he wras a boy on
the St. John’s wharves. He was not a
fisherman. He was a wharf laborer.
Later he worked as a telegrapher.
Still later he settled on a wild islan 1
and turned it into a farm. He saw
Newfoundland, an empire built on
fish, in which the last person who had
any chance in life was a fisherman.
Fifteen years ago, while still on his
farm, he thought out his scheme for
bringing these fishermen together
But he faced no easy task. He
couldn’t do it through printed propa
ganda; for the people of these scat
tered hamlets didn’t read to any great
extent. He couldn’t hire a hall and
have a big meeting. He had to visit
all the hamlets personally and talk Vo
groups of forty or so at a time.
Coaker is one of those rare phenom
ena of hrfnan energy who seem to be
capable of doing the work of a hun
dred ordinary men. Rooseveltian is
probably the word. For instance, in
one year, in addition to speaking and
traveling and editing a paper in which
almost every printed word was his
own, he wrote 3,000 letters with his
own hand. In three years he had the
Fishermen’s Protective Union fairly
under way.
Then the villification began in ear
nest. Coaker replied b\ declaring the
“Fishermen’s Union price” for fish.
Somehow, he always got it, too. He
was canny. He didn’t set impossible
prices. All along the coast “Mr.
Coaker” was hailed as a Messiah.
“Sink or swim with Coaker” was the
fishermen’s slogan. Whenever he vis
ited a hamlet every blunderbuss was
pressed into duty to give him a royal
salute. Nobody, however, thought of
calling him “Sir William” then. The
fishermen called him “Mr. Coaker. ’
Others called him almost every epi
thet the rich vocabulary of New
foundland had in stock.
“How did you come vo go into poli
tics?” I asked him.
“We discovered,” he said, “that a
lot of the things which would have
to be done, if fishing were ever to be
raised to the level of decent employ
fnent, would have to be done by the
Government. But the fishermen were
not represented in the Government.
Politically they were divided accord
ing to religious or historic traditions.
So he organized the Fishermen’s
Union party. He organized it only i 1
those districts where almost every
body was a union member. Then he
made a deal with the Liberals, and
the two parties easily overthrew the
Tory Government.
Last year the Fishermen’s Union
party had twelve of the thirty-six
seats in the Newfoundland Parlia
ment; and with this balance of power
Sir William Coaker virtually dictated
governmental policies. The union now
has 25,000 members. When the Gov
ernment advised the British Colonial
office as to candidates for knighthood
one of the names submitted to it was
that of probably the most villified
person in the three hundred years’
history of Newfoundland.
The Newfoundland fishermen are
no longer the serfs of St. John’s
traders. Thy have not become rich
but they are emancipated. And busi
ness, strangely, doesn’t seem to have
been destroyed.
Even before the Fishermen’s Union
went into politics, it went into busi
ness. Coaker organized the ‘‘Union
Trading Company,” which is the larg
est firm of its kind on the island to
day. It is owned by the union and
is co-operative. It has never aimed
to moropolize the fish trade. He also
organized the Union Shipbuilding
Company, along similar lines, and
several minor business enterprises.
There is nothing socialistic in Sir
William’s scheme of things; but a
union dealing with business, he be
lieves, must know something about
what business is.
And how is this Soviet of Fisher
men, I wondered, affecting the gen
eral business situation in the island
of Newfoundland ?
The answer is that, not the Con
servatives nor the Liberals, but the
Fishermen’s Union party, has taken
the lead in encouraging the industrial
development of the island’s resources.
Sir William himself went to England
and secured the co-operation of the
Armstrong-Whitworth interests in
the devlopment of Newfoundland’s
pulp and paper resources; and at the
instance of the Fishermen’s Union
party the Newfoundland government
guaranteed their bonds. The largest
newsprint mill in the world is now
being erected.
Although he is not a socialist, and
believes in the capitalist system, it is
interesting to note that he himself
has utterly neglected to get rich. He
works on a salary as chief executive
of the Fishermen’s Protective Union
and of its subsidiary business enter
prises. His salary is $100 a month.
LIQUOR LAW COSTLY
Liquor law enforcement is costing
the Manitoba government more than
in the days of prohibition, Attorney
General Craig stated at Winnipeg.
The opposition had attacked the pro
posal to deduct part of the cost of
enforcement from the municipalities
liquor profits.