Fellow traveller: a British Columbia fisherman writes home from the eastern bloc, 1952.

IN AUTUMN 1952, FISHERMAN Elgin "Scotty" Neish travelled through Eastern Europe en route to the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference in Beijing, China. A member of the Labor-Progressive Party (LPP), as the Communist Party was then called, Neish penned letters home during his seven week trip for publication in The Fisherman, the newspaper of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union (UFAWU). These letters provide a unique window into the perspective of a radical British Columbia trade unionist at the height of the Cold War and touch on diverse global themes.

Elgin Neish was a salmon troller who had helped organize the UFAWU during World War II. The son of Scottish immigrants, he grew up in the squatter colony of Deadman's Island, off Vancouver's Stanley Park. After civic authorities evicted the squatter families in the early 1930s, Neish left school at age eleven to join his father and brothers fishing aboard the home-made skiff Lindmore Lass. He was a war veteran, serving in the "Gumboot Navy," the armada of British Columbia fishers that guarded the coast against Japanese U-boat attack. (1) After the war, Neish belonged to the "militant minority" that challenged the assumptions and practices of the Cold War, as McCarthyism enveloped North American political culture and British Columbia's "Red" unions came under siege. (2) According to a Vancouver Province expose, the UFAWU had "the tightest Communist control of any union on the North American continent. It has life and death power over BC's second largest industry through a leadership hierarchy that is solid Communist from top to bottom." (3)

Neish served as president of the UFAWU'S Victoria local, challenging large fishing combines for control of British Columbia's resource wealth. The spring prior to his Beijing trip, Neish joined a flotilla of fishing boats that descended on Victoria's inner harbour, pressuring politicians in the legislature to extend workers' compensation benefits to fishers. (4) As Neish departed for Eastern Europe and China, fishers tied up ships from the mouth of the Fraser to northern Prince Rupert in a major strike over the price of salmon, a dispute aggravated by slumping export markets. (5) Neish expressed regret over his absence, but was confident that "the operators will know there is a Union in the fishing industry." (6) Like many communists, Elgin Neish was an early partisan of the postwar peace movement. (7) His union had played a leading role at the first BC Peace Conference in May 1950, which endorsed the Stockholm Appeal for "the unconditional prohibition of the atomic weapon"--a statement the Vancouver Sun attacked as "a mischievous and evil thing." (8) Neish was elected founding president of the Victoria Peace Council, an affiliate of the BC Peace Committee where UFAWU secretary Homer Stevens served as first vice-president; business agent Alex Gordon travelled to Sheffield, England for the second World Peace Congress in 1950. (9) Responding to the Korean War, the UFAWU executive wired Canadian prime minister Louis St. Laurent urging a negotiated peace. (10)