Police battled strikers on East Van waterfront in Battle of Ballantyne Pier
On June 18, 1935, 1,000 striking waterfront workers and their supporters tried to march to Ballantyne Pier, where strikebreakers were unloading ships. At the foot of Heatley Avenue they were met by the RCMP, who fired tear gas into the crowd. A mounted squad then rode in, riding crops swinging. The Battle of Ballantyne Pier was on. A pitched battle raged for half an hour, with the RCMP clubbing the protesters, and the protesters showering the police with rocks. “Scores were injured,” Pat Terry reported in The Vancouver Sun. “Hundreds suffered the effects of ‘weeping gas’ from police bombs. Police were injured by rocks, iron bolts and lead bars thrown by the crowd.” The march had been announced two nights before at a rally at the Denman Arena by Ivan Emery, the leader of the Longshoremen and Water Transport Workers of Canada. Emery delivered an incendiary speech, stating that the longshoremen would not be intimidated by police. “Many of us were overseas (fighting in the First World War) and faced the best guns a whole nation could put against us,” Emery stated. “We have heard the rattle of machine-guns. I believe we have enough ex-servicemen on the waterfront who are prepared to listen to them again.” Emery was arrested shortly before the march, but it went ahead without him. An estimated 4,000 people came out to watch as the marchers came up Powell Street around 1 p.m., singing First World War songs. At the front of the march was a well-known local Victoria Cross winner, Mickey O’Rourke; another veteran carried the Union Jack. At the railway tracks, Vancouver’s chief of police, Col. W.W. Foster, held his hand up and tried to talk to the marchers. They halted, just as a plainclothes RCMP officer shot off a tear-gas canister. Sun reporter Bob Couchette found himself in the middle of the melee. “From behind the box-cars charge a squad of provincials on horseback,” Bouchette wrote. “Screams and shouts and curses. Rocks are flying from behind me. Everybody begins running. The sight of galloping horsemen is truly terrifying. “A (tear gas) bomb hits the platform of the Heatley Avenue railway station and bursts. Our eyes stream with tears. “The police are laying to left and right with their batons. And quite suddenly the tracks are clear. “But the battle has fanned out. It is proceeding in a hundred places in streets and lanes. You cannot get a picture of the whole — just flashes. “The horsed policemen are thundering up Heatley Avenue. You must watch your head. You stand an even chance of being hit by a rock or a swishing riding crop.” Sun photographer Syd Williamson captured the scene with a series of blurry photos. They were blurry because Williamson was tear-gassed. “Through a stream of tears he tried to focus his camera on little bits of action here and there after getting an eyeful of the first bomb,” The Sun reported. The marchers retreated into the backyards and houses of Japantown, with the RCMP and city police in pursuit. Williamson took an incredible shot of mounted police charging into a group of marchers who had taken shelter on a veranda on Heatley Street. Anybody on the streets was a target. “In a vegetable store nearby an elderly woman is waiting for an ambulance,” Bouchette reported. “She has suffered a nasty blow on the back of the head. She says ‘I was trying to get some eggs and a mounted policeman told me to get off the sidewalk. I told him I was a taxpayer and he hit me with his crop.’” One hundred civilians and 44 police were treated for injuries following the battle, which is also known as the Powell Street Riot. Sixteen people were arrested the day of the march, including Emery, who was charged with inciting a riot. He received three months in jail. The worst police injury was to constable Len Cuthbert, who was dragged out of his car at Heatley and Powell. “A mob gathered and he was pounded on the head by a large rock,” The Sun reported. “His face was ground in the dirt, alongside a fence. Another civilian grabbed a single-bitted axe and started to smash the car.” Cuthbert would achieve infamy 20 years later as one of the key figures in the Mulligan inquiry, which exposed corruption at the highest level of the Vancouver police.