On May 20, 1938, about 600 demonstrators staged a sit down strike at the Vancouver Post Office, the art gallery and other locations. The protesters were men who had been unemployed and drifting for months, before Canada had any practical social safety net.
The prime minister at the time, R.B. Bennett, was a millionaire who inherited half his fortune and earned the other half as a corporate lawyer. He had no sympathy whatsoever for the masses of young men criss-crossing the country looking for work. When they began to organize, he characterized them as treasonous bums and set the full force of the state against them.
Despite the contempt of the state, the drifters had massive public support across the country. In Vancouver, dozens of women’s committees organized marches and straw polls to support the workers that attracted thousands.
Several weeks into the occupation, the police forcibly evicted the occupiers with truncheons and tear gas. The brutal mistreatment of these men caused 10,000 Vancouverites to rally at Powell Street in sympathy and outrage, demanding Canada do better.
Siddown, Boys, Siddown
Lyrics and music by Kerri Coombs
When I was a young man my family went bust
When long years of drought turned our fortunes to dust
I searched for employment in sleet, hail, and rain
But each town I passed through, the talk was the same
Move on boys, move on, to the next town along
If you heard there was work here, you must have heard wrong
My boys went West also when things here got rough
If you meet them, my dear, won’t you send them my love
In the dark of the boxcars, the talk of the boys
All hinged on our schemes for becoming employed
Sent packing from every city and town
At the end of the line, we would have a sit-down.
Sit down, boys, sit down, when we roll into town
And don’t let ’em budge you or push you around
We’ll sit down together and fight side by side
To preserve what remains of our honour and pride
At the end of the line, we arrived on the coast
We moved into a branch of the federal post
The folks of Vancouver, they kept us well fed
Supporting our struggle with blankets and bread
With the city and province and country we pled
If you can’t give us work, then arrest us instead
But thirty days later, deployed by the feds
Cops choked us with tear gas and bashed in our heads.
Sit down, boys, sit down, when we roll into town
And don’t let ’em budge you or push you around
We’ll sit down together and fight side by side
To preserve what remains of our honour and pride
The folks of Vancouver were grieved and appalled
They gathered in protest outside city hall
So they kept us alive till the following fall
When Hitler stepped up to make work for us all
Stand up and stand tall, they put out the call
As over in London, the bombs start to fall
We won’t have to beg for our bread any more
They’ve put guns in our hands and they’ve sent us to war.
About the Artist
In her youth, Kerri created a prodigious repertoire of over 60 original songs, nearly all of them relating to how she felt personally and how her relationships were going. Despite positive feedback, college radio appearances and numerous gigs in folk clubs, festivals and songwriter showcases, her well of youthful angst eventually ran dry. Unsure what else there was to write about, she spent the next decade collecting and performing traditional songs from a wide variety of genres and cultures. This project is an integration of her “songwriter” and “traditional music” backgrounds.