THOMAS J. SHENTON. By Leigh Hirst "Not that the earth and the experience offers us a paradise. Oh no! Many were the homes to be broken up, many instances in which no work could be found and oft the teeth of the wolf seemed to gnash in our face. I am giving the story of a miner. Like that of all my kin, the wolf of poverty was oft times inconveniently close on the heels of myself and my family. However, thank God, we always had a crust of bread to meet the situation.". Tom Shenton had a scarce education. He went to work in a coal mine at age 11. That such a statement as this could be written by him is a hint of his achievements in a life that spanned 90 years, the first 50 of which were focused upon simply ensuring that there was enough food on the table every day. Yet he and his wife Sarah were blessed with a good mix of optimism, endurance and faith. Tom augmented this with a tenacious sense of righteousness that provided him with more than his share of conflict. He was born at Dawley Green, Shropshire, England in 1863. He died in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada in 1953. Sarah predeceased him a year earlier. They had been married for 65 years. Their life together was marked by continual movement across oceans and around the North American continent as Tom searched for a better life for them and their children. They found home in Nanaimo in 1899. Tom Shenton was the youngest of 4 children. His family lived in a one-room hovel in Shropshire that measured 8 ft. by 12 ft. The roof leaked. John, the oldest boy was killed in a mine explosion at age 12. Young Tom followed him into the coal mines when he was 11. Pay was sixpence per day for 10 hours. In the winter he would not see daylight for 6 days a week. He would fall asleep at the dinner table, and have to be put to bed, and in the morning his mother would rouse him and carry him to the table for breakfast before he went to work. "Human life in the boy was not cuddled and cared for as it is today. The business of the boy was to serve and that only - a mummy to be moved at the behest of the overseer, and in the case of mistake, to be kicked and rough-handled." In 1887 Tom married Sarah Ann Jones in Chase Terrace, Staffordshire, where he was working as a coal miner. They had 3 children before Tom left the family to look for work in America. This was the first of many employment induced partings that left Sarah to maintain the household and raise the children. He went first to Chicago and then Seattle, eventually ending up in Nanaimo in 1893 where he worked in the Protection Island Mine and then No. 1 Mine. He began a correspondence course in Mine Management during this period. He then went back to England to fetch Sarah and the children. They sailed to New York and were processed through Ellis Island. From New York, with 3 small children in tow, they traveled by train to Sheridan, Wyoming. This was in 1896. In Sheridan, they lived in a tar-paper shack and Tom worked in the nearby Higby Coal Mine. (If you go to Sheridan today you will find no trace of the Higby Mine nor anyone who has ever heard of it. Out on Higby Road, however, if you know where to go, you can find some crumbling concrete foundations half covered by the remnants of a slag heap. This is where Tom Shenton worked.) In the summer of 1896, the Higby Mine closed and Tom heard of work in southern Colorado. Thus began an incredible four year odyssey that saw the Shenton family roam the length of the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains from Aldridge, Montana in the north, through Wyoming, to Trinidad, Colorado on the New Mexico border. The first journey, 775 miles from Sheridan to Trinidad, was in a horse-drawn wagon. Tom traded a silver pocket watch for one horse and then, riding that one, rounded up another stray horse on the prairie. He put a mattress in the wagon and off they went. For food, they bought produce along the way and Tom shot game. They forded the Powder River and rolled into Colorado and then into Denver where they camped in a vacant lot in front of City Hall. Then into the high country south of Denver and eventually to Trinidad. The journey took 31 days. They lived briefly in Starkville, near Trinidad, where Tom found work in a coal mine. But the pay was low and in scrip. So the horses and wagon were sold. Eventually Tom quit and, leaving Sarah and the children, went 200 miles north to Cripple Creek looking for work. Then he came back to Starkville, where they lived in an adobe house. It was here that Evelyn, their fourth child, was born. Work was intermittent and poorly paid so again Tom left Sarah and headed, with a friend in his wagon, back up north to Sheridan, where he went to work again in the re-opened Higby mine. He then sent for his family to join him. "The changes were so mystifying and hard to understand. Life was like the rolling, restless waves of the ocean, scarcely a moment to call quiet, sometimes gnawing at the heartstrings." (It is worth noting that Trinidad and adjacent camps like Starkville were the communities central to the bloody Colorado Coalfield Wars, which erupted in 1912-1914. The two-year strike against the Rockefeller controlled coal companies resulted in the eviction of the miners and their families from the company-owned houses. They set up tent encampments in the region and continued to pursue the strike. One April morning in 1914, company sponsored militia surrounded a tent city at Ludlow, 14 miles north of Trinidad. Most of the men were away, demonstrating at Trinidad. The militia opened fire with machine guns and then proceeded to torch the tents. Many innocent people died that day - mostly women and children.) It was at Sheridan, the second time around, that Tom Shenton had his first of many confrontations with coal mine owners and managers. Anyone familiar with the history of coal mining in the United Kingdom and in North America knows of the deplorable conditions, the danger and the general insecurity that were constant in a coal miner's life. Tom Shenton had a finely honed bone of indignation in this regard. In Sheridan in 1898, during a strike, this resulted in a blacklisting that forced him to move his family once again - this time to Aldridge, Montana where they lived in a log cabin and Tom worked in the mine. At Aldridge Tom began building a house but again a strike interrupted life. Tom, now considered a troublemaker, was offered a management job but he refused. The next move was to Nanaimo. This was in 1899. Tom and Sarah were now approaching 40. Sarah had given birth to 5 children, two of which were born during the wanderings in the mountain states. The most recent, a baby boy, died in Aldridge. They were poor, penniless and exhausted. They had nothing to show for 4 hard years of perseverance. How did they manage, and in essence prevail? Part of the answer lies in their faith. From the early years in England they had been devout Christians. Tom had been a Methodist preacher and had migrated into a sect known as the "Primitive Methodists" which was known for its support and advocacy of the poor. He and Sarah carried this faith with them throughout their lives. In Nanaimo, Tom Shenton went to work in the No. 1 Mine. There his lower back and left leg were crushed in a cave-in, resulting in severe damage to his sciatic nerve. He spent 14 weeks in hospital and he nearly lost his leg. But he would not give in and he eventually recovered and went back to work in the mines. This was at the time that the local coal miners union affiliated with the United Mine Workers of America. Then the real trouble began. The strike that began in 1912 decimated Nanaimo and will always be remembered as a watershed event. Tom Shenton was an active participant on behalf of the miners and the union. In the years prior to the strike the owners and managers recognized him as a threat and thus he was offered management positions - one of which he accepted with the Western Fuel Company in the Brechin Mine. The infiltration of the union by Pinkerton detectives from the U.S. alarmed Tom and instead of accepting a promotion, he resigned his managers job at Brechin. He then became an agitator, writing letters to the Nanaimo Herald which included accusing the mayor of Nanaimo of culpability in favouring special tax treatment regarding water rates for Western Fuel. During the strike and the occupation of the city by the militia - "Bowser's Seventy Twa" - Tom Shenton wrote a letter to the Herald titled "We Do Not Fear Jail". Subsequently he was jailed for 9 days on a trumped up charge of illegal picketing. The sight of soldiers patrolling the streets of Nanaimo, with bayonets drawn, with machine guns and with horse drawn cannons, incensed him. After the strike, Tom left his family again and went to Australia with his oldest son, Arthur, in search of work. After a year they returned home. Tom was now 52 years old. Son Arthur went his way and daughters Anne, Elizabeth, and Evelyn were married and on their own. After raising seven children, Tom and Sarah were now alone. Ironically, after over half a lifetime of struggles, they were about to feel the sweet breath of fortune. Tom applied for and was given the job of Inspector of Mines (Northern Inspectorate) which covered Northern British Columbia. They moved to Prince Rupert where they lived for 19 years until 1937. Fittingly, in 1937, Tom left his position with the government in dispute. He disagreed with the amount of pension he was to receive and so appealed through a number of different channels. All entreaties failed. Eventually Tom and Sarah moved back to Nanaimo, and as luck would have it, he got into a dispute with the city over sewer facilities for the house that they purchased. He won this one, but not before one of the city councillors, a former miner, quipped to him "Ah, Tommy, on the picket line again." Sarah Shenton died in 1952 in her 89th year. That year she and Tom celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary at a party hosted by their daughter Elizabeth Hirst and her husband Dyson. Tom died the following year closing out ninety tumultuous years of a life truly lived. Copyright © Leigh Hirst, October 2001. (Leigh Hirst is Tom & Sarah Shenton's great-grandson) All Rights Reserved.