Freemealin’

On the morning of Saturday, January 13th, 1923, ten men entered Leonard’s Café on Hastings Street near Granville. They took their seats, ordered breakfast, and asked the waitress to put it all on one bill. There was nothing unusual about these guys. They were fairly well dressed and groomed, and café staff assumed they worked on the waterfront. When asked, one of them said they worked “out back here,” jerking his head towards Burrard Inlet. A police constable who happened to be standing outside the window while the men ate also assumed they were probably just another group of longshoremen.

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Bows and Arrows Hall

686 Powell Street was once known as the Bows and Arrows Hall. In Vancouver’s early decades, Squamish longshoremen specialized as lumber handlers on the waterfront. In 1906, they formed Local 526 of the Industrial Workers of the World (or Wobblies), and held their meetings on the Mission reserve in North Vancouver. Local 526 won some initial battles with the shipping companies, but was crushed the following year during a lockout designed to raise working hours and lower wages. In 1913, Squamish longshoremen again organized, this time into Local 38-57 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, which became known as the “Bows and Arrows.” Over the years, several prominent aboriginal leaders in BC earned a living as lumber handlers on the waterfront, notably Joe Capilano, Andrew Paull, and Dan George.

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"It makes men out of slow-going, discouraged weaklings"

Long before Charles Atlas introduced the iconic “insult that made a man out of Mac,” there were these gems that regularly appeared in Vancouver newspapers. A lot could be said about these images, but I’ll let them speak for themselves.

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Black and Blue, Life and Death

“If Vancouver were south of the Mason Dixon line there would be a lynching today,” began an editorial in the Daily World on 9 October 1922. The occasion was the death of 23 year-old Robert McBeath, a Victoria Cross recipient and one of Vancouver’s finest. Constable McBeath was fatally shot at the corner of Granville and Davie streets after he and Detective Quirk stopped a car allegedly being driven erratically.

The driver and shooter was Fred Deal, a black sleeping-car porter. Passed out drunk in the seat beside him was Marjorie Earl, the owner of both the car and the police revolver Deal was packing. She was a white woman, well known to the police because she ran a bawdyhouse out of her Granville Street apartment. That’s where they were headed when the two officers jumped on the running boards and ordered Deal to stop the car. They pulled him out of the vehicle and soon after McBeath lay dying on the sidewalk from a gunshot wound just below his heart.

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