1. Главная
  2. Ресурсы
  3. Библиотечный поиск
The Speech BillPritchard Never Gave James NaylorTom Mitchell2019 год

The Speech Bill Pritchard Never Gave
статья из журнала

Полный текстСтраница публикацииПубликация в OpenAlex
Аннотация: The Speech Bill Pritchard Never Gave James Naylor and Tom Mitchell A half-century after his 1920 trial and conviction for seditious conspiracy, William Arthur Pritchard was invited by the "faculty and student body" of the University of Winnipeg to return to the city to tell his story of the dramatic legal aftermath of the Winnipeg General Strike. The talk never took place, however, because "the keeper of the money bags" at the university "had cut out the 'frills'" and was no longer willing to bring the 83-year-old socialist from California, where he had lived since 1938.1 Pritchard had never lived in Winnipeg. Indeed, he was barely in the city during the 1919 general strike. He was, at that time, a leading member of the Socialist Party of Canada (spc), living in Vancouver, British Columbia. Of Welsh background and born and raised in a working-class family in Lancashire, the home of the Industrial Revolution, Pritchard had arrived in Canada in 1911 and quickly joined the spc. By 1914, he was the editor of the party newspaper, The Clarion. By the end of World War I, he was an active member of the longshoremen's union and was a delegate to the famous Western Labour Conference in Calgary in March 1919 that articulated solidarity with the Russian and German revolutions, encouraged the use of the general strike as a tactic, and proposed building the One Big Union (OBU).2 It was as a leading socialist and advocate of the OBU that Pritchard travelled to Winnipeg toward the end of the strike (his first speech was at Victoria Park on 12 June) to bring a message of support and encouragement. Having left Winnipeg, he avoided the early morning sweep of "strike leaders" five days later, only to be arrested in Calgary en route home to Vancouver and returned to Winnipeg. As Pritchard [End Page 279] points out in this speech, only one of those arrested, R. B. Russell, "had any official connection with the Strike Committee." As he makes clear here, the decision about whom to arrest, along with the nature of the charges and evidence, reveals a political purpose on the part of A. J. Andrews and the Citizens' Committee of 1,000: to criminalize socialism and labour radicalism. The trial was, as Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell have carefully documented in When the State Trembled, a travesty of what each side would have called at the time "British justice."3 Pritchard handled his own defence; his two-day-long closing address to the jury was published by the defence committee formed to raise funds to defend the "strike leaders."4 Inevitably he was among those found guilty. He was released from the prison farm, where the strike leaders had been committed, on 28 February 1921 having served less than his one-year sentence. The prisoners were working-class heroes. Pritchard's first public speeches in Winnipeg and Vancouver drew thousands.5 Bill Pritchard, of course, is looking back on these events 50 years after they occurred. In the meantime, he had returned to the West Coast and the longshoreman's union. As the spc collapsed in the 1920s, he found his way into the Independent Labour Party and eventually the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf). He was elected reeve of Burnaby just as the Great Depression was taking hold. Local politics, of course, focused on the challenges of unemployment and poverty; Pritchard found himself in trouble in 1932 for having illegally diverted funds intended for other purposes to the support of those on relief.6 When he moved to California later in the decade, he joined the small World Socialist Party of the United States, whose ideas, in many ways, continued the pre-World War I views of the spc. The Bill Pritchard who was to speak at the University of Winnipeg held as firm to the same fundamental values and goals as had the defendant who addressed the jury a half-century earlier. Pritchard's talk contains considerable insight into the strategies of the anti-strike forces. Still, it should be noted that the title of speech demonstrates that he shared an assumption about the...
Год издания: 2019
Авторы: James Naylor, Tom Mitchell
Издательство: Athabasca University Press
Источник: Labour / Le Travail
Ключевые слова: Canadian Identity and History
Другие ссылки: Labour / Le Travail (HTML)
Érudit (Université de Montréal) (PDF)
Érudit (Université de Montréal) (HTML)