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   Edmonton's Story - Chapter 5. War and Depression, 1913-1939
   Edmonton History > Edmonton's Story > Edmonton's Story - Chapter 5. War and Depression, 1913-1939







 Edmonton entered the year 1914 with the general feeling of confidence that had marked the last two decades considerably shaken. 1913 had been a year of striking contrasts with the opening of the new legislature and the high level bridge balanced against the sudden credit freeze that had brought construction almost to a halt and produced the first serious unemployment the city had known. In December a thousand unemployed men marched on city hall. There had also been an ominous drop in the city's tax receipts. Most citizens regarded these portents as only a temporary setback and approved their city council's plans to go ahead with bringing natural gas to the city from the newly discovered field at Viking. They also thought it made sense to prepare for future growth by changing to the present street numbering system from the street names that had been used to that time. The only named streets that survived were Jasper and Whyte avenues and a handful of lesser thoroughfares.


 Had the world remained at peace in 1914, those who thought the economic downturn was a minor hitch might well have been right, but events in distant Europe were about to take a hand. The assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne by a terrorist group in the city of Sarajevo in June produced a diplomatic crisis that refused to go away like the others that had threatened the peace over the previous few years. In May of 1914 the Edmonton Bulletin had expressed a global consensus when it opined that modern weapons had made a general war impossible but suddenly in August the troops were marching and the major European powers, including Britain, found themselves at war. That meant that Canada, still legally a British colony, was also at war. With French, German and Russian armies numbering in the millions, Britain could only hope to survive as a major power by relying on manpower from the Empire. Most Canadians responded enthusiastically to the call and Edmontonians were no exception, although there was little enough to work with at first.
 Canada in the period before the First World War spent less money per capita on defence than any other country in the world and relatively little even of that insignificant amount made its way to the new provinces of the West. Although a number of residents of the city had served with distinction in the South African War, requests to organize militia units in Edmonton were ignored until 1908. In that year a mounted regiment, the 19th Alberta Mounted Rifles (after 1911, the 19th Alberta Dragoons), and an infantry unit, the 101st (Edmonton Fusiliers), were authorized, and recruiting began. The city provided land near the exhibition grounds, although the splendid Prince of Wales Armouries building was not completed until the war was well under way. Militiamen got uniforms, rifles, ammunition and a week or two of training each summer at Sarcee Camp near Calgary. That was hardly enough to prepare them for the machine guns, massed artillery, and poison gas of the trench warfare to come, but even the professional soldiers of Germany and France had not anticipated war fought with the technology and industrial production of the 20th century.


 		 Canada's erratic Minister of Militia and Defence, Sam Hughes, managed to make a confused situation worse by scrapping all the existing militia units with local ties in favour of new and theoretically interchangeable numbered battalions. Both Edmonton units suffered this fate; a squadron of 200 from the Dragoons left in August and the Fusiliers, 1200 strong in early September. The Fusiliers were disbanded on reaching Valcartier and most of the men incorporated into a new 9th Battalion. That unit reached England where it too was broken up as replacements for other battalions. The last privately-financed regiment in the Canadian Army also had its origins partly in Edmonton at this time. Hamilton Gault, a wealthy Montreal businessman paid for the raising and equipping of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry and almost a quarter of the original members of the regiment came from Edmonton, including their pipe band.



 Before the year 1914 came to an end, two more battalions were allowed to begin recruiting in Edmonton, the 49th and the 51st. One of the Dragoons officers, Major W.A. Griesbach, was brought back from England to command the 49th. 'Billy' Griesbach was one of the most colourful individuals in the early history of Edmonton. He had come to the area as an infant when his father took over command of the North West Mounted police at Fort Saskatchewan in the 1880s. He served with distinction in the Boer War and returned to Edmonton to practice law and politics. He was elected to city council and a term as mayor while still in his twenties. A Conservative in Liberal Edmonton, Griesbach was never successful in winning election at the provincial or federal level but his good humour and obvious devotion to the community made him a popular figure. When recruiting for the 49th started in January of 1915, he had no difficulty in filling the ranks in a matter of weeks. Although several more battalions were raised in Edmonton, the 49th alone kept its identity and served as a front line unit in the Third Division through all the great battles on the Western Front, from the spring of 1915 until the end of the war.


 		 The 49th quickly acquired a reputation as one of the best battalions in the Canadian Army, although the cost was heavy. Just over 4000 men served in the 49th in the three and a half years the battalion fought in the trenches. Nine hundred and seventy-seven of those died and 2282 were wounded, a casualty rate of 81%. Privates John Chipman Kerr and Cecil John Kinross earned the Victoria Cross with the 49th.. The 49th thought of themselves as 'Billy's Boys' even after Griesbach was promoted and went on to command a brigade.


 Although the battalion inevitably absorbed many replacements from other parts of the country, it retained a strong core of officers and men from the city and surrounding area. Private Frank R. Hasse from Lac Ste. Anne who served with the 49th from its inception to the end of the war put it best when he wrote in his diary on discovering after the Armistice that the battalion was not to be part of the occupying force in Germany, "Winding up the watch on the Rhine ... makes an appeal to some, but to the majority of Forty-Niners the only worthwhile road is that which leads to Jasper Avenue." The demands of the army quickly soaked up the large group of unemployed that had accumulated in Edmonton after the financial crash of 1913. The price of wheat went steadily higher throughout the war years and agriculture boomed. The prosperity of the surrounding country helped Edmonton's economy avoid complete disaster but it was not nearly enough to sustain growth. The city's population dropped by almost 18,000 people between 1914 and 1916, an amazing 24%.


 		 City employees got less than their full pay in 1914; contracts for sewer construction were unilaterally cancelled and the power plant was leased to a private company in 1916. The city took over thousands of lots for non-payment of taxes, but since there were no buyers, many of the planned subdivisions reverted to cow pastures. The city police force dropped from 134 to 58. Edmonton was even forced to introduce a civic income tax in the years 1918-1920. Oddly enough, these dire economic circumstances were the indirect but indispensable cause of one of Edmonton's finest attractions, its river valley park system. Until 1915 the valley lands were the site not only of a good deal of residential development but of industry as well. Lumber mills and brick yards lined the banks on both sides of the river. The great flood of 1915 submerged them all, and when the waters receded there was no incentive to rebuild. Credit was unavailable, and the population did not recover to 1914 levels until the late 1920s. Almost all the land in the valley reverted to the city for non-payment of taxes.


 		 When industry eventually revived, it made more sense to locate close to the main railway lines. In the 1950s and 1960s Edmonton did not have to go through an expensive process of acquiring and redeveloping industrial land for its unique park corridor. At the end of the war in 1918 a wave of radicalism swept North America, in reaction to the expectations raised by the idealistic side of the struggle to 'make the world safe for democracy,' and the reality of rampant inflation and falling standards of living at home. In Canada the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was the most dramatic example. Edmonton had its own milder version of the general strike which passed more quickly and without the bloodshed of Winnipeg's. In part this was due to the fact that Edmonton lacked the heavy industrial base to get in on war production contracts and therefore had a less concentrated working class than other Canadian cities. It was also in part the result of better working conditions in important local factories like the Great West Garment company. Edmontonians expressed their radicalism in this period mainly by voting in Joe Clarke as mayor in 1919 and 1920.






 Clarke had first emerged as a spokesman for the working class, ethnic east end of the city as an alderman before the war and he was to remain a fixture in Edmonton civic politics for three decades.With the passing of the great influenza epidemic that killed 445 people in the city in late 1918, the return of the soldiers, and the general strike, Edmonton moved into a placid decade of slow growth. The 1920s may have roared elsewhere but in Edmonton they barely whispered. The city finally got its natural gas connection in 1923, and citizens celebrated the triumphs of the famous Edmonton Grads women's basketball team that was unquestionably the best in the world at the time, but there was not much else to cheer about. The staid and cautious United Farmers of Alberta government dominated the legislature during the 1920s, never living up to its rhetoric of agrarian radicalism. No new public buildings of note were constructed in the decade and very few houses. Some wartime aviators like Wop May and Punch Dickins tried to make a living using airplanes to supplement Edmonton's traditional water routes into the north.




 The technology of the war surplus planes they flew was not adequate to the challenge, however, and there was not yet sufficient mining activity in the north to stimulate the development of aircraft that could do the job. Near the end of the 1920s the aviation picture began to look more promising. City council came up with $400.00 in 1926 to make some improvements to the cow pasture called the Hagmann estate which fliers had been using for some time. They were rewarded by Ottawa designating it a 'Public Air Harbour,' the first municipal airport in Canada. The Edmonton and Northern Alberta Aero Club quickly followed and, in 1929, the heroic and highly publicized flight in an open-cockpit aircraft in minus 30s temperatures by Wop May and Vic Horner to deliver diphtheria antitoxin to Fort Vermilion, raised public consciousness about the possibilities of aviation. New larger aircraft with reliable engines and enclosed cabins like the Lockheed Vega that May and Horner's Commercial Airways bought in 1929 were becoming available. Government airmail contracts promised a steady source of revenue for those lucky enough to get them.


 		 The 1930s was the decade in which the airplane came into its own in Edmonton. With gold and later uranium discoveries in the north, demand for a quick and reliable way to get prospectors and their supplies in grew rapidly. As the mines developed the traffic became steadier and the successful companies like Mackenzie Air Services, Western Canada Airways and Yukon Southern Transport acquired ever larger planes, capable of hauling machinery weighing several tons. By the end of the 1930s more freight was being carried by plane in Canada than in all the rest of the world, a majority of it through Edmonton into the north. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the air freight business was first developed in Edmonton. Important elements of aviation infrastructure like the seaplane base at Cooking Lake and the overhaul facilities of Aircraft Repair Limited were already in place.


 In 1937 the federal government provided money for extending and improving the runways at Blatchford Field. It also began operating radio and weather stations along the route that led through the Peace River country and northern British Columbia into the Yukon. These developments encouraged Grant McConachie to establish Yukon Southern Transport and begin a scheduled service to Whitehorse. This additional northern air route would soon, under the stimulus of war, expand beyond the wildest dreams of those flying it in the late 1930s.
 If the expansive 1920s failed to raise Edmonton's economy as much as other Canadian cities, the converse was true for the 1930s. As the country, and western Canada in particular, sank into the great depression, Edmonton did not fare as badly as most places. The population of the city continued to grow at a steady, although slightly reduced rate in the 1930s, reaching a population of 90,000 by 1939. The growth of northern aviation was one contributor to the economy. Fifty or sixty aircraft does not seem much of an economic factor but they required fuel and services of all sorts. Perhaps more importantly, as one of the very few growth areas of the period, they provided an important psychological boost to the city. Although the rural economy around Edmonton suffered as much as elsewhere from very low agricultural prices, the region did not suffer the devastating drought that produced dust bowl conditions farther south. In fact, many who were driven off the land on the southern prairies moved north to start again. As the provincial capital Edmonton had a substantial population of civil servants most of whom remained employed through the depression, although they took pay cuts and at times did not get paid at all.




 The Social Credit government of William Aberhart that took office in 1935 did little to help the city, although its monetary theories and very public fights with Ottawa and with the Edmonton Journal brought national and even international attention. The apparent crisis of the capitalist system had brought Joe Clarke back to the mayor's chair in 1935 and he had a few ideas about how to get things moving. In the north-east of the city, the federal government had maintained a penitentiary in the early part of the century, with the inmates put to work mining one of the coal seams in the area. That institution closed down in 1920 and a commercial mine took over until it too ceased operations in 1929. Mayor Clarke, always an enthusiastic athlete and supporter of sports activities in the city, thought that the site would be perfect for a football stadium. He set up an organization to negotiate for the site and raise the money. By the time the stadium was completed in 1938 Clarke was no longer mayor, but city council had no trouble agreeing that it should bear his name.
 The symbolic event that ended the decade of the 1930s for Edmonton was the royal visit of 1939. With Hitler firmly in control of Germany and building a massive war machine, it was apparent to most that war in Europe could not long be avoided. In Canada, although to a lesser degree than in the United States, many people believed that staying out of European wars was the only sensible course of action. The Canadian tour of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth was designed to solidify the support of the majority, who favoured support for Britain in the event of war. On a brilliantly sunny day in early June, the royal couple drove down Portage Avenue (soon to be renamed Kingsway in honour of the occasion). Stands on both sides of the street were filled with tens of thousands of cheering spectators, many of whom had come to Edmonton from all over the province. The long period of economic stagnation was about to end for the city, but not without the ordeal of a new world war.