Night Train to Ottawa
Seventy-five years ago today, the leaders of the On to Ottawa Trek got on the evening train in Regina heading towards a meeting with an intractable R. B. Bennett.
Arthur Evans (2nd from left), Mike McCauley, James "Red" Walsh, Robert "Doc" Savage, Peter Neilson, Stewart "Paddy" O'Neil, Tony Martin, Jack Cosgrove (source: On to Ottawa Historical Society)
Not quite three days later, they arrived in Ottawa and cooled their heels at the Keewatin Hotel. This hotel is long gone but used to stand around the corner from the train station on Sussex South, roughly above the overpass that until recently was a good spot for sleeping rough in Ottawa.
The trekkers filled the time until their Saturday meeting with Bennett and his cabinet with meetings with representatives from various work camps, including the Rockcliffe camp (DND Work Camp Project 27 PDF).
Not surprisingly, the meeting with Bennett did not go well and quickly degenerated into insults of one sort or another. Bennett didn’t take kindly to be asked if he’d ever slept in a tar paper shack or eaten work camp food. Evans didn’t take kindly to being called a jailbird. Matters went downhill fast.
The Trekkers withdrew and help a rally at the Rialto Theatre on Bank Street where they called for a National Trek. The Trekkers primary audience would have been comfortable at the Rialto which was located between Waverly and Frank. Refurbished in 1932 with a small neon sign, a cream and gold interior it sat 485 people. It owner at the time, A. Levinson, once remarked “I’m not selling movies, I’m selling a heated sheltered park bench for a dime” (See A Theatre Near You). Since then the Rialto’s gone through multiple incarnations from seamy to high brow (see recent account for a sense of the streetscape then and now; and for oddly comic view, see an Ottawa Citizen piece on the Rialto’s reincarnation as an art house.)
Unmourned by the good burghers of Ottawa, the Trekkers retreated to Regina. The Trek ended badly but contributed to Bennett’s electoral defeat and the closure of the work camps. The Trekkers delegates went on with their lives. Walsh and Martin spent time in Spanish POW camps; O’Neil and Neilson died in Spain; Savage spent time in the merchant marine; Cosgrove and McCauley drop out of sight; and Evans carries on with his union and political work.
There are few left now who have first hand experience with the 1935 Trek.
Most of the people who signed the title page of Arthur Evans’ biography are gone now but the anniversary of their efforts is reconfigured in a new trek to Ottawa in protest of homelessness.
