Thanks for the contribution about Joe Naylor on The Cumberlander website. His protégé, Ginger Goodwin, has taken much of the limelight since their time together as Cumberland comrades. It is good to see some of the limelight shared with Naylor who made many active contributions to the labour movement in the first two decades of the 20th century. I can add some details to the posting from my Ginger Goodwin research that resulted in Fighting For Dignity: The Ginger Goodwin Story, published in 2004:

Naylor was born in Wigan ("Wigen" on the website is a typo) or to be technical, according to the 1901 British census, in Upholland which is five miles west of Wigan. His father was Joseph Naylor, aged 69 in the 1901 census, a widower, and a sister, Mary, aged 24, lived with them. It appears that Joe worked at the Albert Colliery of Albert Upholland Holdsworth and Company. Upholland was at the extreme western limit of the Lancashire coalfield.

Joe died at Cumberland General Hospital from prostate cancer on Oct. 5, 1946. An article in the Comox District Free Press said he came to Cumberland in 1908 and retired as a miner in 1943. He lived "in his little home" which was a cabin at Comox Lake - to which, incidentally, Bronco Moncrief delivered the Vancouver Sun in 1942 when he was 15 years old. Bronco has said: "He was just a great old fellow. In my book, his heart was pure as gold. He was a big, powerful man, and rowed a 16-foot boat. My eyes popped out when he offered me stew and dumplings, warmed up from the day before, for breakfast."

Like Ginger, Naylor was a life-long bachelor. The funeral service on Oct. 7,1946 was held, most appropriately for the former leader of the mineworkers in Cumberland, under the auspices of Local 7293, United Mine Workers of America. Tribute was paid by local president John Cameron at the graveside, in the next row and almost beside Ginger's grave, in Cumberland Cemetery. The local's secretary, John Bond, read the burial service. The Canadian Mineworker said Naylor worked in coal mines in Lancashire until 1908 and that he was survived on his death by a sister, Mrs. T. Woods, of Atherton, Lancashire. One of the pallbearers was Karl Koe who described Naylor as "a plain, big old Englishman. I sat by his side when he died in 1946. He lived in several different places and then a cabin at the lake. He left no letters or diaries. He was a very pleasant man."

I found this scrap of information in the UMWA files in Washington, D.C. In a letter, Robert Harlin, president of District 10 (Washington State) and a UMWA vice-president, told UMWA president John White that Naylor was appointed in 1917 as a UMWA organizer on half-time to try to build up the membership in a "quiet campaign" in Cumberland and Ladysmith. In Cumberland there were only 50 or 60 members paying dues to the union, in Nanaimo the union "is practically extinct," but in Ladysmith 50 per cent were paying dues and in South Wellington 90 per cent belonged to the union (no membership figures were given in either case). Naylor at that time was president of the BC Federation of Labour and sought the UMWA organizing job. Without that work, Harlin said Naylor would be compelled to leave Vancouver Island "as he could not secure employment at the mines." This was because of the blacklist following the end of the 1912-1914 strike-lockout at the mines. Naylor was a half-time organizer for about six months.

Naylor came to Cumberland in 1909 from Nanaimo and had also worked in Montana, according to his testimony to the provincial Royal Commission on Labor 1912-1914. Among the mines he worked in was No. 7 in Bevan, before the Big Strike, and much later after the blacklist ended at No. 4 mine near Comox Lake. He saw the successful return of the UMWA to the coal mines of Vancouver Island in the 1930s with a collective agreement with Canadian Collieries - something for which he struggled so hard more than two decades earlier.

In a province where racism was rampant (and that included unions), Naylor stood out by refusing to adopt anti-Chinese sentiments. At the 1914 convention of the BC Federation of Labour, Nanaimo Local 2824 of the UMWA successfully proposed a resolution for "the total exclusion of Asiatics from this dominion" because of their serious competition to white labor - they worked for a fraction of white wages. Naylor told the convention the Chinese and Japanese miners in Cumberland were forced to return to work in the Big Strike by 200 special policemen. "They would not have gone to work until the white men had gone to work if they had been left to themselves," he said. Referring to white strike-breakers, Naylor said it was not the Chinese and Japanese who "are the curse of BC, it is the white men, and especially the men who come from the same country as myself, and that is England, that are the real curse in this province, it isn't the Asiatics at all." Nevertheless, Naylor said his local - already on record as supporting Asiatic exclusion - instructed him to vote for the Nanaimo UMWA resolution, and he did so after making his personal statement.

The posted illustration headed "IWW" is misleading in the context of Joe Naylor. The poster comes from the Industrial Workers of the World, founded in 1905 and headquartered in the United States. The IWW frequently referred to itself as the "One Big Union." However, the One Big Union that was founded in Canada in 1919 had no connection with the IWW. Indeed, the leaders of the OBU were primarily members of the Socialist Party of Canada, a Marxist party quite different philosophically and politically from the syndicalist IWW. Naylor was one of five men constituting the Central Committee of the OBU in 1919 although his participation ended sometime in the 1920s as the OBU faded after initially reaching a membership of more than 40,000. He was frequently spied on by the police and, in 1918, he was labelled one of the Chief Agitators in Canada in a list compiled in 1918 by the Public Safety Branch of the Department of Justice.

Roger Stonebanks,
Victoria, BC