(5) The Battle of Lansdowne Library

Grandfather came to mind yesterday. An errand randomly sent me through the intersection of Bloor Street and Lansdowne Avenue. There’s a corner for you. A corner about as inspiring as a black-and-white photo of the Communist Party designated pleasure quarter of Minsk in 1959 during a wintertime power outage at night.

The coffee shop there is dubious. Its name changes more often than people overdose in the washroom cubicles. Traffic is heavier and buses seem noisier here. Most people avoid Bloor and Lansdowne because it flattens the emotions and is just a low-rise waste of a major intersection in Canada’s business capital and North America’s fifth largest city. About the only thing to catch the eye here is the slim neon tubing of a three-part sign that depicts a stripper. In blue pumps, she’s from an age of kinder, gentler smut. She leans forward at the waist every five minutes or so all night, every night.

Some of the now forgotten history of the corner may explain the taintedness of its present. That arch-fronted, stuccoed building holding up the stripper stands at what was once a weedy empty lot but had been the location of a graceful library.

Yes, a library! A fine one, noted throughout the British Empire for its spaciousness and sensible layout. Fifteen tall stained-glass windows graced the Lansdowne Avenue side. Equal to anything in the mother country, or the American republic, no expense was spared, dear reader, on the Lansdowne Library.

Lansdowne Library had acres of interior murals depicting a Dominion of Canada still all youth and clean water and made of nothing but scenic wonders. The latest standards in electric lighting and sound insulation were applied. Electric book lifts and pneumatic tubes were installed to speed knowledge to hundreds of patrons at a time. The newspapers raged as costs spiralled up for such things as a wonderful copper dome, twin observatories, music hall, and ornamental fountain. The interior was noted for its especially rich use of materials, mahogany and dark green and white marble.

Sadly, the call to war that so shocked the world in August of 1914 went up just weeks before the new library was to receive its many books, bound volumes of periodicals, children’s materials, Braille translation machinery, atlases, almanacs, geological and fossil specimens, gazetteers, stamp and coin holdings, musical recordings and planetarium fittings. The war did not go well and began to draw great resources. As the battles of 1916 began to unfold in failure, horror and strategic blunder the Imperial War Offices slid a tentacle toward the Lansdowne Library. It was taken up as a documentation office. Pointless, prolonged, scientific slaughter being as administratively intense then as it is now.

Grandfather’s part in the Great War came to an end when he made his last sudden explosive decompression with the Royal Canadian Navy's Diving Bell Squadron Number Six. In 1920, ex-second lieutenant Owen Russell found himself back in Toronto’s west end with relatively little to do. It is said that each day he put his big, dark blue duffel coat over his strong six-foot two frame and took a quiet walk through the streets of the place he’d been raised in, reflecting on the near lethal combinations of responsibility and adventure he’d recently experienced.

Thinking that he might be cheered looking in on what had been billed, at his departure nearly five years earlier, "the loveliest single cultural treasure within direct sight of a Great Lake," by Ontario Premier William H. Hearst, Grandfather decided to walk to the Lansdowne Library after his bacon and eggs one morning. He found himself looking through the dusty rear windows of a disused shell instead. Devoid even of the rows of meticulous Imperial War Office clerks.

By Christmas, Grandfather was the head of the Unemployed Veterans Committee barricaded in the library. "Jobs, Dignity and the Allotted Books or Red-style Revolution Here As Well," was the demand. A quotation from a UVC leaflet further illustrates the nature of the standoff.

"...if we are thrown out of our improvised home and the community soup kitchen closed we will surely march on city hall with these dozen Vickers guns for a petition. Oh yes! The authorities should remember that we are doing them a service in taking over this empty building. We are using it to distribute food which we collect from sympathetic dockers, market men and trades people on Saturdays and have now a scheme on hand to mend the kiddies' boots and send them dry-shod to school ...we in this way keep control over 17,000 unemployable men who might otherwise be driven to far more violent things than seizing an empty building ...ours is a sensible, direct sort of action, we don't want to break anything if that can be avoided."

New Year 1920 dragged in with the authorities showing intermittent interest in negotiation. A brace of water-cooled Vickers machine guns were more than enough to keep the Toronto Borough Constabulary across the street. Many of that force were just back from the European war and knew what overlapping arcs of gunfire meant for human bodies protected only by cloth uniforms. Others had become TBC men when specifically warned by friends and older male family members to seek local police employment in place of military service. At the same time, the Vickers guns enraged the authorities as did the hint of Bolshevism. A harsh, make-an-example-of-them response was inevitable.

Police Master Sergeant David "The Bastard" McMurrin, a Belfast man, hammered with his nightstick on the library door. Grandfather opened it two inches and asked McMurrin what he wanted. The Master Sergeant, newly promoted to the leadership of the Special Disturbances Squad, leaned in and uttered his foulest curses. McMurrin was taking the strike personally and the caution of many of his own men had angered him further.

Grandfather remained silent. The morning was all sun and ice.

“You’ll not see out the day in there, Russell,” McMurrin affirmed. The red hairs on his neck tingled with the prospect of smashing in somebody’s smug face for them.

McMurrin had been in charge of the security detachment in the shipyard that built RMS Titanic before he came to Canada and joined the Toronto Borough Constabulary. During his Belfast tenure McMurrin instituted a morale-building athletics program that increased its members’ skills in bare knuckle boxing, Greco-Roman wrestling, rugby, football, Ludo, checkers and hitting Catholics with cement blocks.

Now, as I've mentioned, Grandfather was a navy man. And not just of any deck-swabbing kind either. In the salt chill of the North Sea mine fields he'd learned to skipper the most enormous class of diving bells, the Morris-Hawker Mark 10s. Complex craft, diving bells require difficult trim adjustments to operate smoothly. These adjustments are accomplished with a cast iron wrench, the size of which can be guessed by its having been nicknamed “the elephant's pecker” by the men who used them. Aside from the duffel coat that matched the eyes McMurrin now stared into, an example of such a wrench had been Grandfather's sole souvenir of participation in the First World War.

The sound McMurrin's skull made when Grandfather's wrench crowned him King of the Pigs was heard all the way to the steps of the Provincial Legislature, so it is said. At Grandfather's funeral in 1961 the largest of the floral arrangements was from Toronto's finest who also honoured him with their full pipe band. McMurrin, secretly in the pay of higher levels of government, had been unpopular for years and a younger, more progressive, generation of local police yearned to be free of him.

An entire brigade from the Provincial Police Force replaced the Toronto Borough Constabulary and directed a wave of arrests at the network of women supporting the barricade. Water and electricity was shut off. Also, an internal element favoured quitting the library protest when a relief act promising nineteen cents a week to all mothers with a minimum of six children was passed. Grandfather hewed to the wishes of the majority and led the march out of the library. He continued straight to the lounge in the Drake Hotel where he could be found for most of the next forty years.

At sunset, the day of the victory parade, a mysterious fire tore through the library. Each of the fifteen stained-glass windows exploded with a report like a sniper's rifle and dropped into Lansdowne Avenue. Grandfather is said to have winced each time.

When we walked by yesterday the stripper leaned over and, well, we knew how the old man felt.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009