She Never Was Afraid
The Biography of Annie Buller, by Louise Watson

CHAPTER THREE
The Montreal Labour College

Becky was overjoyed to have Annie back, and was wholeheartedly in favour of the plan to set up the Labour College. So now they were a threesome, and from then on their lives were closely intermingled. They lost no time in getting around to the people on their list, soliciting help in preparation of the College.

A Committee was set up in the spring of 1920 which included Mike Buhay, Annie, Becky, Bella, Mrs. Frankel, Mike Garber of the CPR, Nathan Mendelssohn, George Lloyd, Dick Kerrigan, Bill Long, Sylvia Robertson. The first meeting of this Committee was held in a room in St. Joseph's Hall on East St. Catherine Street. It was from this meeting the College was launched. Premises were purchased at 70 Jeanne Mance Street. This was a three storey house, in the basement of which a restaurant was opened. The upper floors held rooms for the purpose of study, union offices, meeting places, and a library. One large room was reserved for public meetings.

The College got off to a good start with teachers Arthur Taylor, Mr. Leith, George Lloyd, Mike Garber, Mike Buhay, and of course Annie, Becky, and Bella. The subjects to be studied covered different phases of the labour movement and Marxism.

Lecture courses were arranged, and visiting lecturers included Max Armstrong, whose topic was anthropology, Joe Knight (who attended the conference about which Lenin wrote Left Wing Communism), Scott Nearing, J. Hardy (prominent in the American Labour Movement, and later in the British Communist Party), and Mrs. Florence Custance of the Toronto Labour College.

A Labour Forum was started and the attendance came almost entirely from the trade unions, with such speakers as John Bruce, National Organizer of the Plumbers and Steamfitters, Professor Carrie Derrick, Labour MP J.S. Woodsworth, and many others.

The meeting rooms were well used for shop meetings and full membership meetings by several unions, such as the Pattern Makers, Milk Drivers, Asbestos Workers, Frank Hall's Railway Workers. Also a couple of unions rented office space — the Boilermakers and Machinists.

For a few years this was the pattern of activity which centred around the College. As time went on it was inevitable that differences of political opinion would create rifts among the people who came to the College, and among those who carried out the work, and finally it disintegrated. However its usefulness in the struggle to educate Montreal workers along political lines was tremendous. This might be summed up in an excerpt from a letter which Bella wrote to Annie in later years:

I think it is safe to say that the Labour College prepared the groundwork for the formation of the C.P. in Montreal. Most of those active in the Labour College became members of the C.P. and carried on the work which they started in the Labour College.

As for Annie, she had now set her feet firmly on the path of revolutionary struggle. She was a confirmed Marxist, and for her that meant action. She pledged herself to organize workers wherever she found them — employed or unemployed, men or women — in the factories, the farms, the mines, the forests, or women in their homes — to fight in a united way for better wages and working conditions, union protection, lower prices, care of children — all current objectives in the long-range perspective on the road to socialism. She would write, she would teach, she would bring to them an understanding of the Marxist theory of class struggle as she herself understood and accepted it. She lost no time in setting out to fulfil that pledge. She was to become known from coast to coast as a tireless, fearless fighter for the needs of the workers and the building of a united, militant Canadian labour movement. Tom McEwan met her at this stage in her life, and in his book The Forge Glows Red he has this to say of her:

... There she was, a tall, slender, beautiful woman, crowned in a wealth of golden auburn hair and an infectious smile, starting out on a long road that was to see many heartbreaks and many victories, years of endless bargaining on the "market" for her exploited sisters and brothers in the needle trades, long months in prison in Brandon and North Battleford for her struggles on behalf of coal miners, endless battles to build the Workers Unity League unions and her beloved Communist Party, long years of arduous work seeking to direct the steps of her sister Canadians along the pathways to peace and progress.

Annie soon came to the realization that the workers needed their own political party. She was scornful of those in the leadership of the AFL unions who were content to rest on their laurels and present once or twice a year a brief to government couched in polite and moderate terms. They gave no thought to the great army of workers in the growing mass production industries who were not allied to any particular trade and so were not eligible for membership in those unions, nor to the many in their own ranks who felt they should unite with other workers and carry on the struggle on a much broader basis than their own particular craft.

These workers needed a strong, militant voice, and a party that could give them that voice in the public arena. Such a party had already come into being in June 1921 at a convention held under conditions of illegality in a barn on the outskirts of Guelph. In December 1921, a conference was called to consider the launching of a public, working class party based on the principles which had been set forth by the Communist International. Annie Buller and other Marxists who saw the need for such a party attended the February 1922 conference at which the Workers' Party of Canada was established as a legal party, and which later was to become the Communist Party of Canada.

continued

[ Top ] [ Table of Contents ]

Copyright South Branch Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
www.socialisthistory.ca  ▪