Coal and trouble
The Lights on the Tipple Are Going Out: Fighting Economic Ruin in a Canadian Coalfield Community
by Tom Langford
Vancouver: UBC Press, 2024
$39.95 / 9780774869294
Reviewed by Ron Verzuh
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As a little boy I remember my family driving an old 1951 Ford across southeastern British Columbia and passing through two little towns called Michel and Natal, twins in the coal-mining Crowsnest Pass. Among the black-dusted homes stood one freshly painted white one. It was a scene reenvisaged by Tom Langford’s tightly documented story of the slow demise of those historic places in the wake of deindustrialization and climate change.
In a way, the white house serves as a metaphor for the hope that Alberta and B.C. coal-mining families held in their struggle for survival in what Langford calls a 125-year “legacy of environmental disturbance, destruction and pollution.” Add a devastating “history of social dislocation” in the Crowsnest Pass and Elk Valley to the mix and you have a good sense of what this book is about.

Langford begins with the story of veteran coal miner Robert Lilley. Working with Thomas Uphill, the long-time Fernie mayor and labour MLA, Lilley fought to improve the lives of miners both as an alderman and an active representative of United Mine Workers (UMWA) Local 7310. He was also an executive member of District 18, the powerful regional union that did not always act in the best interests of its affiliated members.
The Lilley story is an appropriate starting point. The coal miner’s life and his slow disintegration at the hands of the coal companies and the failures of government epitomizes the problems that faced the western coal-mining regions. Lilley, distraught and downhearted, throws himself under a train in mid-1963, shocking the community he so earnestly tried to help.

Lilley’s death “symbolized the death of Fernie as a trade union city” and in turn the demise of coal communities like Michel and Natal. The suicide could also be seen as a metaphor for the thousands of miners “abandoned by their employers. Given only meagre assistance by governments and the UMWA, they were unable to adjust to a new reality in which coal miners had become ‘yesterday’s people’.”
Langford minutely details the mine union’s fight for coal justice in the wake of repeated mine closures and undelivered economic promises. He also addresses unsafe working conditions, faltering job security as well as the constant threat to miners’ pensions.
Tipple (a structure used for loading coal, ore or minerals into railroad cars) is as much a community history as an economic study of the coal industry. With illustrative comparisons to mining communities in Wales and Pennsylvania, Langford devotes much space to working-class pride and union solidarity. He also documents the demise of both as coal towns try to shift to auxiliary industries to survive.
Langford is a retired sociology professor who knows the communities and has a special knowledge of towns like Fernie, Sparwood, and others in the East Kootenay district. His previous work, particularly A World Apart with historian Wayne Norton, examines similar situations in the same region. More recently, his chapter in For A Better World: The Winnipeg General Strike – A Workers’ Revolt (University of Manitoba Press, 2022) tells how those communities responded to the 1919 strike.

He also knows his mining labour history and he helpfully supplies short sidebars of specific mine leaders. One of them, Harvey Murphy, merits almost three pages, a mini-biography. Why devote so much space to him? The miners of the Crowsnest and Elk Valley saw him as a “little god” because of his organizing efforts in the coal fields of Alberta and eastern B.C. He boldly declared himself “the reddest rose in the garden of labour” and mining families in Blairmore and other towns believed him.
Tipple also covers the numerous occasions where the women of the communities rose up to support striking miners and courageously face down those who revealed themselves as workers’ enemies. “Significantly,” Langford argues, “working-class women played a prominent role in the fight” to found a militant environmental protest movement to defend their communities, “beginning with grievances against pollution.”

2022
In the end, the white house was blacked out by the industrial juggernaut that pushed its way into miners’ lives, displaced them and ushered in new forms of industry that promised economic survival for communities like Coleman, Bellevue, Blairmore, and, yes, Michel and Natal.
In his conclusion, Langford maps out an ambitious, some might say impossibly ambitious, plan to improve the lot of coal miners as their world quickly disintegrates. He links it to the need to work with First Nations to shift from profit-based industrial projects to nature-preserving cooperative communities. Such communities, he advises, would be better organized and run by small governing bodies outside the current governmental structures.
It is a tightrope to walk at a juncture where coal is no longer king as the bygone source of energy gives way to green power. The issue is how to fairly retrain the miners who dedicated their lives to a job that history may be bypassing.
NOTE: The battle for coal continues in modern times with hearings being conducted into a revival of a mine in the Crowsnest Pass. See the Globe and Mail for Dec. 6, 2024, under the headline “At hearings into Alberta’s most contentious coal mine, pleas, tears – and a song.”
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Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. [Editor’s note: Ron has recently reviewed books by Ron Thompson, John Ibbitson (ed.), Bob McDonald, Rosemary Cornell, Adrienne Drobnies, and Tim Bray [eds.], Derek Hayes, and George Galt for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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