William Coaker and the The Fishermen’s Protective Union – Part 1, the Early Years

One of the great stories of Newfoundland and Labrador labour history is that of the Province’s first independent fishers’ union, founded by William Ford Coaker. Coaker was born in Newfoundland’s capital city, St. John’s, in October 1871. His father was a carpenter by trade, and served on sealing vessels as a master watch. According to one account, the elder Coaker was a “bayman” who married a St. John’s native named Elizabeth (Ford). Another source alleges that the elder Coaker and his wife came from Devon, England, and that they first settled at Twillingate before moving to St. John’s. In any case, young William grew up near the city’s Southside Hills, just alongside St. John’s busy waterfront. Almost every trade involved with the colony’s fishery and seal hunt was practised there, and the setting would have given William the chance to see the social and economic divisions between merchants and the labourers they employed.

Coaker attended the General Protestant Academy and Presbyterian Finishing School, but left sometime between age eleven and fourteen. From there young Coaker worked on the waterfront at a warehouse owned by Job’s, one of Newfoundland’s most important fish exporters. Just two years later the boy, who had been hired as a fish handler, assumed a heavier load when he led the other boys in a strike. Coaker and his colleagues demanded wage parity with workers at rival fish merchants Bowrings; they won. It was the youthful Coaker’s first experience of the strength of the organized working man.

Coaker later took a job as clerk for the firm McDougall and Templeton. He must have impressed his employers. At the tender age of sixteen Coaker was sent to manage the firm’s store at Pike’s Arm on New World Island, Notre Dame Bay. The youth managed the store each Summer for four years, returning to St. John’s in Winter. In the capital he worked days, and at night resumed his schooling under the tutelage of future Newfoundland Prime Minister, William F. Lloyd (1864-1937). At age twenty Coaker decided to buy out his old employer’s store on New World Island and go into business as an outport merchant on his own account. This venture didn’t last long. After only four years Coaker’s enterprise was ruined by Newfoundland’s 1894 bank crash, the same debacle that finished the Duder Company in nearby Twillingate.

This was certainly a setback for the young man, but undaunted he turned his great physical strength to farming on an uninhabited island at Dildo Run, near Herring Neck, which he named Coakerville. Before long the energetic and able Coaker turned his island into one of the colony’s most successful farms. He was probably helped in this by a short tenure at MacDonald College, near Montreal where he studied practical farming (This was, incidently, the only time William Coaker travelled outside Newfoundland). Coaker also did some fishing and lobster canning, but his greatest contribution to the area in these years came in the Winters. Since the men could not fish during this time of year Coaker opened a night school to teach subjects like reading. He also opened a community branch of the Orange Lodge. Always looking for a challenge, Coaker became involved in politics. He was a supporter of Newfoundland Liberal politician Sir Robert Bond (1857-1927), canvassing Herring Neck on Bond’s behalf. This support earned him a number of government jobs in the Winter months, such as telegraph operator and chair of the local Roads Board. With a Conservative election win in 1897 Coaker lost the jobs, but regained them when the political tide turned in 1900. He was also made a postmaster and collector of customs.

In keeping with his early commitment to labour, Coaker formed a telegraph operators’ union which published its own newspaper. Before long Coaker’s superiors began to view his union activities with suspicion. This was not to mention the fact that Coaker had become disenchanted with Bond by 1904, supporting a splinter party. With Bond’s electoral victory, Coaker resigned back to his farm at Coakerville before he could be fired.

William Coaker’s next venture was even more radical than the telegraph operators’ union, and has forever linked a tiny community on Newfoundland’s Northeast Coast with organized labour. Reflecting on his own setbacks, Coaker became more aware of the plight of fishers at Herring Neck, whom he felt were treated little better than serfs. After the 1908 fishing season brought in especially bad prices – half that of the previous year – Coaker decided to organize fishers into their own union. This wasn’t going to be easy. His prospective members were spread over thousands of miles of coast in many isolated communities. A large number could neither read nor write, and they were not wage earners, often hopelessly indebted to merchants under the truck system. Still, Coaker would try.

On 2 November, at the Orange Lodge in Herring Neck, Coaker called a meeting of fishermen. In a two hour speech, typically unpolished but powerful, the would-be labour leader told his audience they could take charge of their own destinies, breaking the hold of merchants over them. His idea was that fishers would stop buying from the merchants, who were only looking out for their own interests, and purchase fishing supplies from union-owned stores. Cash would be used for transactions. With even a little money one could start on the road to freedom from merchant credit. Another thing Coaker wanted to change was the servant-like attitude most fishers displayed towards merchants and authority figures, another by-product of the system. Finally, Coaker hoped to increase education standards among the fisherfolk, making them better able to stand up for their rights. The union motto was suum cuisque (“to each his own”), reflecting the fact that fishers, unlike the better off in Newfoundland society, did not get their own share of its benefits. About 250 people attended the meeting, but Coaker was able to sign up only nineteen of their number to form the first union council. Those few were the first members of the Fisherman’s Protective Union, following its simple and democratic constitution, drawn up over a three year period by Coaker himself.

Determined to make a go of the union, Coaker gave another speech at Herring Neck the following night, despite the toll the first had taken on his voice. He was soon off to a nearby community recruiting more FPU members, being taken by horse courtesy of one of his newly-unionised fishers. Coaker spent the Winter of 1909 canvassing Notre Dame Bay, often on snowshoes, to enlist support. Before long the organizer’s reputation preceded him, and in the Spring fifty union councils, encompassing about 1,000 members, were in place.

These members paid a fee of twenty-five cents to support their Local and District Councils, along with the union’s Supreme Council. In the days when fishers saw very little cash for their labours this was no small amount, and reflects on the commitment of early FPU members. These members, for once encouraged to be proud of themselves, wore regalia much like a fraternal order and had their own newspaper, the Fisherman’s Advocate, every word of it written by Coaker himself. At this time the northern fishers held Coaker in considerable awe, and wrote him many letters on every type of subject. In keeping with his personal touch on the union newspaper, Coaker wrote his replies personally ­ a full 2,500 in one year alone!

To break the hold of the credit system over fishers FPU locals began taking orders for fishing supplies from members. These were bought in St. John’s and sold at cost. Coaker soon formed the Union Trading Company (UTC) in which union members purchased shares. By 1919 the FPU operated forty cash stores, doing more than $3,000,000.00 in business that year. The UTC was successful in raising the prices paid to fishers for their catch. In 1910 Coaker acted as their agent, and many refused to sell until a union-set price was matched. Coaker also used union revenue to start new enterprises like the Union Exporting Company to sell members’ fish abroad. One of the FPU’s boldest moves was the foundation in 1916 of a model community, Port Union, on the Bonavista Peninsula. The town was one of the first in Newfoundland to have electricity, plus it enjoyed modern innovations like fish-dryers and a soft-drink bottling plant. Port Union became the centre of the FPU’s activities, although an office was retained in St. John’s. Later the Congress Hall was built, patterned after St. Paul’s Cathedral, which served as the union’s home base and convention centre. The town was also home to the Union Publishing Company which turned out newspapers from its own commercial printing plant.

His organizing activities, and regard for the plight of poor fishers earned William Coaker the nickname the “Messiah of the North.” He visiting isolated coastal communities in his small yacht, the F.P. Union, to the accompaniment of salutes fired from sealing guns, and displays of hand-knitted mats emblazoned with union slogans. The semi-religious nature of the FPU was probably no coincidence, since Newfoundland society was dominated by the church, whether Catholic or Protestant. Coaker intended that the union be non-denominational, and in the beginning it was. The goals of the FPU, which seemed aimed at upsetting the traditional order, drew fire from the established churches (It probably goes without saying that established merchant interests also strongly opposed Coaker and the FPU from the outset). The Anglican supported Society of United Fishermen told members to steer clear of the FPU, and the Roman Catholic establishment did the same with its adherents. With less authority over their parishioners, the Protestant Churches didn’t stop the growth of the FPU in Newfoundland’s northern districts. In the largely Catholic southeast of the Island the admonishments of the bishops had more effect; the union never did have much strength in the region. The failure to enlist all the Dominion’s fishers may played a role in its ultimate failure. In an early work on the FPU, future Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Joseph R. Smallwood (1900-1991) contended that Coaker’s greatest mistake was taking the FPU in a new direction before the union was firmly established in all parts of Newfoundland – that direction was politics.

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