Haywire My Life in the Mines

Haywire My Life in the Mines

By Doug Hall

Copyright 2013, 2020, by Doug Hall

Smashwords Edition

Cover picture courtesy marke clinger flickr

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For Mom

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When things are haywire they are not functioning properly and/or are disorganized. When people are haywire they are erratic or crazy. In my experience and I am sure in the experience of others, the mining industry and frequently the people in it are haywire. The word haywire is used very frequently in the mines.

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Table of Contents

Forward

Chapter 1: Father’s Story

Chapter 2: Mother’s Story

Chapter 3: A Mining Family

Chapter 4: Virginiatown and Bancroft

Chapter 5: Early Days – Bancroft and Manitouwadge

Chapter 6: Early Days - Sudbury - Boulders Above My Head

Chapter 7: Sudbury – The Grizzly

Chapter 8: Sudbury - The Grizzly and Fat Women

Chapter 9: Sudbury –Tons of Muck Above My Head

Chapter 10: Sudbury - The Grizzly - Blasting and the Boys from the East

Chapter 11: Sudbury - The Motor and Transporting Dynamite

Chapter 12: Sudbury - Sleeping Underground and Blasting Heavy

Chapter 13: Sudbury - The Cage and a Friend’s Death

Chapter 14: Shoulder Patch

The Story of Gordon Stanley Hall from Hillsburgh during World War II

Postscript I (June 2009)

Postscript II (April 2010)

Postscript III (PAINTON, ROBERT JAMES Lieutenant)

Postscript IV (March 2015)

Postscript V (January 2018)

Postscript VI

Postscript VII

Postscript VIII

Postscript IX

Postscript X

Postscript XI

Chapter 15: Denouement – Southern Ontario

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Pictures

Father

Tarzwell

Thomas Hall and Family

Alex Rae

The Cabin at Hough Lake (1)

The Cabin at Hough Lake (2)

The House at Dane

Ronald Rae

Uncle Ron and Uncle Doug

Uncle Hamish

The Author (1966)

The Author (in the early 70's)

The Author (circa 1990)

Shoulder Patch

Forward

Most of the events portrayed in these pages happened forty-five or more years ago. Many of the people described herein must have passed on by now. Having said that, it is not my goal to cause any problems in anyone’s life, so I have changed some names where I have deemed it necessary to hide the identities of the persons involved. I have left other names intact where I have deemed my references to them to be innocuous or complimentary.

In some cases I have referred to accidents and many times to fatal accidents. It is not in any way my intention to bring pain to any person involved in these accidents including any survivor. My goal is to describe the events that happened during the time that I worked in the mines. Perhaps some will learn from these events. Perhaps, somewhere a life will be saved. That is my hope.

I have in various places referred to the ethnicity of various persons. Some may find these references provocative but I consider them to be made in a lighthearted manner and not to be taken seriously. Know that I bear no grudge against any ethnic group.

I had many experiences in the mining industry years ago. I did some stupid things underground and consider myself to be lucky to be alive and lucky to have never killed anyone else. The experiences I will relate are not the experiences of some kind of mining professional but rather just the experiences of an average Joe who went underground when he was eighteen years old and didn’t know what he was getting into.

I begin by describing our family and how we arrived in northern Ontario mining country and then describe my own experiences in the mines.

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Father

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Chapter 1: Father’s Story

The Hall surname is said to have come into England after the Norman invasion and since the Normans were Vikings it follows that the Halls were of Viking extraction, at least at that time, nearly one thousand years ago. Subsequent to the Norman invasion, the Halls were invited into the border area between England and Scotland where they became one of the main border raider (border reiver) families. A more or less continuous war was fought along the English-Scottish border for over two hundred years ending in the early 1600’s when King James the first of England (King James the Sixth of Scotland) ascended to the throne and determined to put a stop to border raiding using the draconian method of drowning those even suspected of being border raiders.

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There were some notable ancestors on father’s side of the family. The first to come to Canada came in 1823. He was a man by the name of Jesse Tarzwell who was given a land grant near present day Erin Ontario, because he was a veteran of the English army who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars. Jesse was in the First Foot Regiment (also known as the Royal Scots) and had fought at the Battle of Waterloo. He had been wounded at Waterloo and had a pension from the Royal Chelsea Hospital (the veterans’ hospital) in London, England because of his wounds. It is said that Jesse stayed on in the English Army as a Chaplain for a time after he was wounded and eventually immigrated to Canada as a combination (Baptist) Minister and farmer.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that the Royal Scots (Third Battalion) also fought at the battle of Quatre Bras, which took place the day before the Battle of Waterloo. Out of the two battles they had 363 casualties from a strength of 624 or a fifty-eight per cent casualty rate.

After the Napoleonic wars there were a large number of wounded veterans in England, so many in fact that their pensions were a serious drain on the finances of the English government. Consequently the English government came up with a plan to give these ex-soldiers a final payment of one year of pension money and then send them to Canada where they would be given land on which they were to presumably support themselves.

This quickly turned into a fiasco as the land they were given was bush land that had to be cleared; the ex-soldiers were in many cases getting on in years and in many cases they had been quite badly wounded with for example missing limbs. It is also said that many of these ex-soldiers were illiterate and did not realize that they would receive no more pension money after the one year payout. These ex-soldiers quickly fell on the welfare roles of Upper Canada and were not thought of very highly in Upper Canada despite their service during the Napoleonic war.

Fortunately, my ancestor did not quite fall into this category since he had immigrated to the new world under his own initiative rather than as part of this scheme to stop paying pensions to the English soldiers. It was not to be quite that simple however as my ancestor’s pension did not immediately follow him to the new world. Rather there are quite a few letters from him in the archives pleading for his pension. It was eventually restarted but he never did receive any back pay.

Another of our ancestors came to Canada about the same time. This was a man named Aaron Wheeler and his family. It is said that the Wheelers were related to British royalty and were quite wealthy when they immigrated to Canada. Unfortunately they had a shipwreck in the St. Lawrence and lost all their wealth and were in the position of having to start over when they arrived in the new world. In 1830, they were also given a land grant in the Erin area for the purpose of establishing a gristmill. Eventually, three Wheeler sisters married three Tarzwell brothers and father is descended from one of those Tarzwell-Wheeler marriages.

One of father’s grandfathers (my great grandfather) was a man by the name of Thomas Hall. Thomas was also a veteran of the English Army and had served in the Crimea during the Crimean War. It is said that Thomas contracted dysentery while in the Crimea and at that time many English soldiers were dying of dysentery because of very poor sanitary conditions. Florence Nightingale earned her reputation by cleaning up the hospitals and thereby saving the lives of many British soldiers. Arguably father and I would not have been here, if it were not for Florence Nightingale. It is said that Thomas was Florence Nightingale’s mailman in Sevastopol during the Crimean War. I assume this was during a period of convalescence from dysentery. He was a farmer in Canada.

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I have taken this excerpt regarding the Crimean War from the internet: On 28 March 1854 Britain and France declared war on Russia, and for the next two years British, French, Sardinian, and Turkish troops fought against Russians in the Crimean War. The loss of life in the war was colossal; of 1,650 000 soldiers who began the war (of all nations), 900 000 died. The majority of those who perished did not die from wounds; rather they died from diseases brought about by the terrible living conditions which they suffered. (https://understandinguncertainty.org/node/204)

Note that these figures appear to be somewhat in dispute but the death rates were horrific.

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Thomas married a woman named Sophia Trott in Canada. She was a member of two loosely connected families called the Toby’s and the Trott’s. Sophia was only seventeen when she married while Thomas was forty-one. Afterwards the extended Toby and Trott families moved to the United States leaving behind only Sophia because she was already married, and also her brother Will who was by that time a successful business man and the mayor of St. Thomas, Ontario.

My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Susannah Tarzwell. Susannah’s father (my great grandfather) had a saw mill in southern Ontario near the town of Erin at a place called Slabtown because of the sawmill and now called Cedar Valley. As a part of his sawmill business, he and his sons followed the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway (later renamed the Ontario Northland Railway) as it went north, building railroad stations and small stores along the way.

The Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway was constructed between 1903 and 1933. I cannot say what years my great grandfather was in the north building railroad stations and stores. However I do know that my great uncle James Tarzwell (Susannah's brother) stayed to run one of these stores - the one built at a location later named Tarzwell. Tarzwell was about fifteen miles south of the gold mining town of Kirkland Lake.

The store at Tarzwell was also a postal station and (great) Uncle Jimmie was the Postmaster. In those days smaller towns frequently adopted the name of the postmaster and so Tarzwell was named after my great uncle, Jimmie Tarzwell.

My father’s brother, Uncle Arnold, eventually bought the store, which included some cottages and rather a lot of land on Round Lake behind the store. After the war, father came north and worked for Uncle Arnold for a while in some of his enterprises, which in addition to the store and cottages included mail delivery and a taxi business.

Father’s experiences during the war are a story of survival against great odds and I will describe these experiences more completely later (in the chapter entitled, Shoulder Patch). And so, through war and family business father came to be in the North where he met mother.

Postscript: Although he did not figure greatly in our immediate family's history (so far as I know) father had another relative who went north. This was William or Bill Shepherdson who went to the New Liskeard area in the early 1900's. My paternal grandmother's maiden name was Tarzwell and her mother's maiden name was Shepherdson. Bill (or William) Shepherdson was father's great uncle. One of Bill Shepherdson's enterprises in the New Liskeard area was a basket factory. The building in which the basket factory was housed was later moved to a location closer to Highway 11 and now houses the town of New Liskeard's museum. Also Shepherdson Road is one of the major thoroughfares of New Liskeard.

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Tarzwell

This picture of Tarzwell was likely taken in 1947. The store owned by my Great Uncle Jimmie Tarzwell and later by my Uncle Arnold Hall is in the foreground. Past the store to the right is a garage that had been converted into an apartment building. It is the first home I ever lived although I don’t remember living there.

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Thomas Hall and Family

This is a picture of Thomas Hall, his wife Sophia (nee Trott) and their family. My grandfather, Stanley Hall is sitting beside his father. Thomas Hall was a veteran of the Crimean War.

Sophia is sitting in the far right of the middle row. Given the difference in age between Sophia and her husband Thomas, she was still fairly young when he passed on. She remarried and curiously she married a man from Guelph, Ontario, who had the exact same name as her deceased husband - Thomas Hall. This new Thomas Hall had also been previously married and as was the custom in those days had had a large family with his first wife. I often think that either by blood or through this second marriage of Sophia’s that I am related to quite a few of the Hall’s in the area although admittedly Hall is a rather common name.

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Father was quite sickly when he was young. In fact, they didn’t think he was going to live. Eventually my grandfather took father in to see the doctor and the doctor checked father all over and he finally said that he couldn’t find much wrong with father except that for sure his tonsils had to come out. This happened during the Depression and of course there was no such thing as medicare, at that time so my grandfather made a deal with the doctor to take father’s tonsils out and the operation was done right then and there in the doctor’s office.

Years later in 1950, my grandfather passed away and at that time there was a payout from my grandfather’s estate. Father received less money from this payout than his siblings and was later overheard telling mother that he got less money than the others because he had to pay for the tonsil operation. My brother remarked that that was the kind of people they were, you didn’t get anything for nothing.

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Father told this story about the Great Depression, In the fall of 1929, we sold our potatoes off the farm for one dollar for a hundred pound bag. In the fall of 1930 we began selling our potatoes for seventy-five cents a bag but the price quickly collapsed down to five cents a bag. The farmers from all around told us we were crazy to sell our potatoes for five cents a bag and what we should do is dig a pit in the field and put the potatoes in the pit until the spring when the price would surely be up.

Well father continued, we sold all of our potatoes for five cents a bag and in the spring of the year the people in the cities were starving and the government said that they would provide free transportation into the cities for any potatoes the farmers’ might have if they would donate their potatoes.

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My uncle Norman Orr (husband to father's sister, Ethel) told me one time that during the Depression you could get a good man to work beside you right from morning to night for room and board and $5.00 per month and that $5.00 per month would be just enough to buy his tobacco.

Chapter 2: Mother’s Story

Alex Rae

The picture shows my maternal grandfather, Alex Rae in his First World War dress uniform.

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My maternal grandparents came from a small town in the north of Scotland called Rogart. They were, of course, Scottish Highlanders or Gaels who are said to have been invaders from Ireland in the fifth century CE. The Highlanders or Gaels spoke Gaelic, a Celtic language. I never heard either of my grandparents speak Gaelic but years ago (probably in the late 1960’s) we had a relative visit from Scotland and her and my grandmother began speaking in Gaelic. I was not there at the time but my mother later said that she could not understand a word they were saying.

My maternal grandfather, Alex Rae, was with the Seaforth Highlanders from Scotland in the First World War. Grandfather was lucky during the war as he was sent to the Balkans, and since there was little fighting on the eastern front, he saw very little action. Grandfather, grandmother and my Uncle Hamish immigrated to Canada around 1921. Grandfather and his family were not to escape the Great Depression as easily as he had escaped the Great War.

I stopped in to see my grandparents in the summer of 1974 in King Kirkland where they were then living. I thought I would stay a few hours and ended up staying for ten days. Every morning after breakfast I drank coffee at the back of the house with grandfather and he told me the story of his life. He told me how lucky he had been during the First World War. And he told me about the Great Depression.

Grandfather was born in 1898 and was thirty-five years old in 1933. That was the worst year of the Great Depression, and in that year Grandfather had a wife and four children.

He told this story: I had a job working at a dairy in Hamilton. And in 1933, another dairy bought the dairy I was working for, and they brought in their own men to run the dairy where I was; so I was out of a job. You couldn’t buy a job in 1933. We spent the summer of that year living on the streets of Hamilton (Ontario) and in the fall of the year, I didn’t know what to do. But we knew people who had gone north homesteading - eighty acres of land, a dollar an acre, ten dollars down; so I went north and built the cabin at Hough Lake (which is near Englehart, Ontario).

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The Cabin at Hough Lake (1)

This picture was taken in July 1947. Mother, grandmother and a family friend are at the cabin at Hough Lake. Mother is in the middle and pregnant. I was born six weeks after this picture was taken.

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The Cabin at Hough Lake (2)

This is a picture of mother holding a team of horses