Collection search - Cowan, Jack - Interview

Record information – Brief

1

Cowan, Jack - Interview

Item number (ISN):

379038

Series title:

[The Great War and Canadian Society]

Hierarchical level:

Item (Accession level)

Date:

1974-06-24/1974-06-26

Item number (ISN):

379038

Type of material:

Sound recordings

Found in:

Archives / Film, Video and Sound

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Record information – Details

Fonds/collection:

THE GREAT WAR AND CANADIAN SOCIETY PROJECT

Accession:

1975-0098

Media:

Sound

Part:

2 of 2

Production date:

1974-06-24/1974-06-26

Production company:

Opportunities for Youth

Production credit:

interviewer, Lori Rotenberg

Description:

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Interview of Jack Cowan of Toronto, age 74, who was born in 1900 in London, England to Polish-born and came to Canada in 1906. Subjects discussed include: his parents; the very religious Jewish household of his family; his parents' decision to move to Canada in search of a better standard of living; growing up in Toronto; his father's work as a tailor, for a clothing factory, Lowndes Company and then the Berger Tailoring Company (later called Tip Top Tailors); a connection with Sir Sam Hughes which won the Berger Tailoring Company contracts to make military uniforms when the war began; a depression in 1907 which made it hard for the family to make ends meet; his mother having to go to work, sewing for her brother, a custom tailor; his father's humiliation over being forced to work on Saturdays and the grandfather's anger over his working on Saturdays; the primarily Jewish workforce at Tip Top; the clothing workers' union; Tip Top Tailors inducing workers to buy shares in the company at $30 a share and buying the shares back at $5 a share in the Depression; the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the union at Tip Top; his father forced to leave Tip Top at age 55 in 1933, with no pension, and without any support from the union; the work done by men and women at Tip Top; the use of different machines to make a different section of the garment; the transition from custom tailoring to mass production of clothing; plentiful jobs in the clothing industry in World War One; the shortage of goods and backlog of demand in 1919 and 1920; the depression which began in 1921 and lasted 2 or 3 years; cyclical depressions in 1907, 1914, 1921 and 1929; his primary school education; leaving school at age 13½ to go to work; the Jewish community in downtown Toronto circa 1906 to 1908 and how it was not integrated with non-Jewish people; the language barrier because most Jewish people spoke Yiddish; local synagogues; various Jewish neighbourhoods in Toronto; the predominance of Jewish workers in the clothing industry; no paved streets or sidewalks in west end Toronto when he was a boy; playing hockey with a piece of coal; swimming in the Humber River; more on his father's working conditions and pay; reading the newspapers; his parents' inability to read English-language newspapers; reading the Toronto daily Hebrew Journal and journals from New York; going to the movies, the Exhibition and Toronto Island; his going to work as a messenger boy because his family needed the money; working for a man who repaired optical instruments and for the Consolidated Optical Co.; the company's wartime work producing military instruments such as transits, levels, binoculars and helioscopes for signalling; working for Canadian Liquid Air Company starting in 1916; going to Halifax in 1918 as the assistant district manager for the Maritime Division, later working for the company in Toronto and Vancouver; the Halifax explosion in 1917; ships refuelling in Halifax during the war, soldiers being shipped out and ships gathering in the harbour, waiting for convoys; rumours that there were submarines that might fire on Halifax; the wartime blackout in Halifax; the opposition to conscription in Quebec; military police in Montreal; having to show his proof of identity to police in Halifax; the Canadian Liquid Air Company supplying oxygen and acetylene gas for welding, important for shipbuilding; his view that conscription was necessary; beginning to think politically after the Russian Revolution in 1917; beginning to wonder about the origins and purpose of the war; his feeling from 1918 on that the war should never have been fought; joining the Young Socialist Club in Toronto in 1917; and his sympathy for French Canadian opposition to the war, especially when he came to question the purpose of the war because Canada was not threatened.~He also talks about: the reluctance by many Jewish people in Toronto to enlist because Russia was on the side of Britain and France, and most of them were from Russia and Eastern Europe and hence not keen to fight for the Czar; support for the overthrow of the Czar in 1917; his salary as an employee of the machine shop of Consolidated Optical; his work on the drill press, small lathe and lacquering finished parts; war work in the factory; work by men and women in the factory; working conditions; the lack of a union in the factory; going to a job at a company making snap buttons; going to night school to study architecture; leaving school because he was transferred to Halifax; more details of the work at Canadian Liquid Air Company; having to go to the railway sheds to get back the steel cylinders in which the oxygen and acetylene was made, it being impossible to get new cylinders made; his salary; his marriage; sales of equipment such as cutting torches and welding torches; anti-Semitism; his resignation from his sales job in Vancouver when he found out that the Canadian Liquid Air Company feared that customers would not want to deal with a Jewish salesman; his return to Toronto; jubilation in Halifax on Armistice Day; the postwar economy; violence against various ethnic communities because veterans and Anglo-Saxons blamed them for the unemployment rate; support among his circle of friends for the Bolshevik Revolution and socialism; educational and social activities of the Young Socialist League; support for the Winnipeg General Strike; religious beliefs and morality at the time; his lack of a social life in Halifax; leisure activities while he worked in Vancouver; socialists and working-class intellectuals there; grain shipments through Vancouver; support by Canadian banks, grain elevators and railways to ship grain east; the Jewish community in Vancouver at the time; his getting another job in Toronto in 1925; his view that World War One was an unnecessary and imperialist war, leaving huge debts and unnecessary loss of life; and his view that the only positive thing that came out of the war was the Russian Revolution.

Language:

English

Notes:

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1. The interviews took place in 1974 and resulted in the publication of a book entitled "The Great War and Canadian Society" edited by Daphne Read - copyright 1978 - New Hogtown Press, Toronto.~2. Release forms, data sheets, and summary analysis/transcripts are available in binders labelled Opportunities for Youth - War and Canadian Society in VSA's audio-visual section.~3. Interview was recorded on 24 June 1974 and 26 June 1974.~4. Part of a series of recorded interviews with elderly citizens who lived in Canada during the period of World War I. The interview material consists of their opinions and observations about the war, the war years, and the effect on Canadian society during and after WWI.~5. The interviewee signed an agreement giving consent for a recording of this interview to be placed in the Public Archives of Canada for the purposes of historical research and also signed a publication agreement allowing any transcribed portions of the interview to be used in the book under the condition that no full names, addresses or phone numbers would be published.~6. Subject description is based on information found in the fact sheet, deposit agreement, publication agreement and summary analysis.
~7. The Fact Sheet gives the date of the interview as 24 June 1974 but the typewritten list of interviews prepared by the archives lists the date as 24 June and 26 June 1974.

Detailed holdings information:

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Vault ISN:

436372

Format:

SOUND

Location number:

C01387

Vault code:

GAT

Number of items:

1

Kind of sound:

R/R

Technical description:

POLY

Made from:

FROM LOANED MATERIAL

Status:

MASTER

Vault ISN:

436373

Format:

SOUND

Location number:

C01388

Vault code:

GAT

Number of items:

1

Kind of sound:

R/R

Technical description:

POLY

Made from:

FROM LOANED MATERIAL

Status:

MASTER

Vault ISN:

439025

Format:

SOUND

Location number:

A1 2007-05-0056

Number of items:

1

Kind of sound:

CD

Duration:

79:28

Status:

REF

Vault ISN:

439026

Format:

SOUND

Location number:

A1 2007-05-0057

Number of items:

1

Kind of sound:

CD

Duration:

38:28

Status:

REF

Vault ISN:

737200

Format:

SOUND

Location number:

1975-0098/075
1975-0098/076

Vault code:

GAT

Number of items:

2

Kind of sound:

CASSETTE

Made from:

DEPOSIT

Status:

ORIG

Vault ISN:

1003819

Format:

SOUND

Location number:

A4 2007-05-0056
A4 2007-05-0057

Number of items:

2

Kind of sound:

CD

Made from:

C01387
C01388

Status:

MASTER
Ordering and viewing options

Conditions of access:

Open

Consultation copy number:

A1 2007-05-0056
A1 2007-05-0057

Restrictions on consultation:

No Restrictions / Pas de restrictions

Reproduction access:

With written permission of Copyright Owner / Avec la permission écrite du détenteur des droits d'auteur

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Date modified:: 2024-07-24