LABOUR LEADER SHOT AT WHARF
Two CPR police arrested, but cleared of Rogers’ death
On April 14, 1903 Vancouverites woke to the headline “Innocent Man Was Shot.”
“Mr. Frank Rogers is lying at the point of death at the city hospital as a result of a bullet wound from some person unknown,” reported the Vancouver World.
“The shooting occurred at the foot of Abbott Street and the closest inquiry today shows no reason, or justification, for it.”
Rogers wasn’t just any uninvolved bystander. He was one of B.C.’s most prominent labour leaders, a former president of the Fishermen’s Union.
On the night of the shooting, Rogers had a late dinner at Williams Oyster Depot at 215 Carrall St. He left the restaurant with two companions and walked up Water Street to Abbott, where they heard some commotion coming from Stimson’s Wharf nearby.
There was a nasty railway strike at the time, and they crossed the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks about 11:20 p.m. to investigate.
“Rogers was in the advance, and he says just after he crossed the second track a revolver shot flashed out,” the Province reported.
“The three men stopped and tried to make out what was happening in the darkness beyond. They themselves were standing directly in the light of the electric lamp at the railway crossing.
“In a moment four or five other shots rang out in rapid succession. Rogers thinks it was a bullet from the second or possibly the third shot that struck him in the stomach.”
The Province reported some strikers had roughed up a strikebreaker earlier that evening, which may have led to the shooting. But when Rogers was interviewed by the police he told them he had “no row, no dispute with anyone, and I have no idea who fired the shots.”
He died from his wounds two days later. Up to 1,500 people turned out for his funeral April 18, which the World called “the largest turnout of labour men and labour sympathizers ever seen in Vancouver.”
Socialist leader Ernest Burns later wrote “about halfway to the end of the line of march a terrific storm burst, as cold and pitiless as capitalist justice itself. Rogers was the first martyr to Labour’s cause in Vancouver; he was shot down by thugs during the course of the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees strike.”
Two CPR “special police” were arrested for the crime. The first was Alfred Allan, but he was let go after it turned out his gun used a different calibre of bullet than the one that killed Rogers.
“In the language of the street Arab he was ‘shooting off his mouth (about killing Rogers),’ and the police are of the opinion that that is about all the shooting he did do,” the World reported April 15.
James MacGregor was charged with the murder April 16, but no murder weapon was produced and he was found innocent.
Still, the Labour movement had no doubt one of the CPR’s policemen had killed Rogers.
“The special police were boasting about having shot somebody,” said Geoff Meggs, who writes about Rogers in his new book, Strange New Country: The Fraser River Salmon Strikes Of 1900-1901 And The Birth of Modern British Columbia.
“It was that kind of an era, when there were no rules. It was a tough time, it was a very bitter strike (Rogers) was supporting at that time.”
Rogers was quite famous in his day.
In July 1901, he was charged with kidnapping nine Japanese fishermen and leaving them “marooned” on Bowen Island during the fishermen’s strike.
He was acquitted, but spent four months in jail before he was allowed out on parole.
But Meggs said information on Rogers is scant: there is no record of his death at B.C. Archives, there is no information on where he was born, and there is no known photograph of him.
The World’s story on April 14 said he was married and had a family, but there are no mentions of a family in other stories.
“He kind of dropped out of sight for a couple of years after the Fishermen’s strikes,” said Meggs, who is chief of staff to B.C. Premier John Horgan.
“(But) he pops up again during this strike of railway workers, which was very bitter because the locomotive engineers and other craft union people didn’t go out in support of the lower qualified guys.”
In 1978 a labour group installed a commemorative headstone at his grave in Mountain View cemetery. It reads “Frank Rogers, Murdered by a Scab in Strike Against CPR, Died April 15, 1903, Union Organizer and Socialist.”