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  • A Hard Man to Beat: The Story of Bill White, Labour Leader, Historian, Shipyard Worker, Raconteur ed. by Howard White
  • Andrew Parnaby
A Hard Man to Beat: The Story of Bill White, Labour Leader, Historian, Shipyard Worker, Raconteur. Edited by Howard White. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2012. Pp. 256, illus. $21.95

Part autobiography and part oral history, A Hard Man to Beat was first published in 1983. The original text was derived from over thirty hours of “vast and rambling [recorded] conversations” between publisher Howard White and labour leader Bill White, who headed the Marine Workers and Boilermakers Union Local 1 in Vancouver from 1944 to 1955, the union’s heyday. A “working stiff” who spent “a lot of time on jobs where a man just didn’t have any goddamn rights at all,” White recounts his own story in a punchy, anecdotal way, unspooling tale after tale about work and labour politics, fellow workers, and [End Page 159] union leaders (43). “Bareknuckle” Bill’s recollections shed light on the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s in Vancouver and Canada more broadly, an era marked by economic extremes, state expansion into workplace relations, and fierce fratricidal battles within the labour movement. Out of print for some time, A Hard Man to Beat has recently been republished to help celebrate Vancouver’s 125th anniversary. I am thrilled to see it back in print.

When A Hard Man to Beat was first published, oral history was still something of a novelty. As part of the wider reorientation of historical research and writing that began in the 1960s, it offered not only a method to access the histories of men and women (Indigenous, immigrant, working class) whose voices were rarely present in conventional print sources, but also a forum in which ordinary people could participate in the production of history itself. Early popular experiments in this form came from Studs Terkel, Ronald Caplan, Barry Broadfoot, and, indeed, Howard White, who published the first volume of Rain-forest Chronicles in 1972 and the original A Hard Man to Beat a little more than a decade later. Yet even as Howard embraced this new methodology and helped to secure its legitimacy, he also sought to change it. As he writes in the book’s new introduction, “I wanted to do a book that would go further than anyone had before in capturing the exact way one effective but untutored speaker reflected his whole world view and his whole being in the way he used language.” To this end, Howard edited, sequenced, and buffed up the interview transcripts so that “Bill [came] across in print very much the way he did in person” – as a person who cared deeply about the working man, hated “phoneys” of all types, and was often very funny (12–13).

Born in Ontario in 1905 and raised in Saskatchewan, Bill worked as a ranch hand, logger, railway worker, trapper, and Mountie before turning to welding in 1941, just as Vancouver’s shipyards expanded to meet wartime production. Three years later he was head of the union and a member of the Communist Party of Canada: “If you come on a job and start putting up a fight for conditions, the men don’t give a shit whether you’re a communist or an Episcopalian” (39). And fight Bill did, relentlessly: for better wages, safer working conditions, fair compensation for workplace injuries, stronger legal protection for trade unions, and the persistence of the militant tradition. Conflict with bosses and employers who treated workers “like nothing, like shit on their boots” was endemic to all of this (38). And so too was friction between Bill and other labour advocates, from the “right-wing reactionary red-baiting son of a bitch” Aaron Mosher [End Page 160] of the Canadian Congress of Labour on one side to high-ranking Communist Party officials who acted as if they were on a “holier plain” on the other (189, 227). From the author’s perspective, these conflicts within the house of labour were driven by politics, tactics, and personalities – all of which were shaped decisively by a person’s own work history; most of the “fakers...

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