Pilling Family Stories: #2 - Learning more about 'The Timmins Interest'

[NOTE:  As a reminder, you can find links both the audiofile and to the PDF of Doral Pilling's life story on the LaRue Investments website here:]

lots going on on p. 55

In the Moose Dome video I did last summer, I had used a bit of an audio of Doral Pilling saying "when the Timmins Interest 'took over' and literally kicked us out, we had quite a tumble."   

At the time I was making the video, I didn't really know much about the Timmins' interest, or about any takeover.   And so, I have been doing a bit of reading.   

It was on p. 55 that the "Timmins Interest" piece of the puzzle started to emerge.  As you can see, I did need to pull out some pens and colours to help me map out some of what was going on here.  There are a whole bunch of people named on this page:  R.H.Webb, Noah Timmins, J.J.Ranking W.H.Clearndon Mussen.   How did these folks play into the story?

To contextualize things, this in 1927ish.  And at this point, things are starting to really move on the 'oil discovery front'.  The 'problem' for the Pillings at this point was that they had invested 2.5 years of work to: 

1. 'discover' the structure (find Moose Dome)
2. acquire oil leases (held by The Trust Comany)
3. buy an oil rig
4. build roads
5. start drilling

So, in 1927, they bought the charter for an oil company. Basically, someone had already done the work of creating the structure for an oil and gas company, and the Pilling crew started there (rather than paying for a new company to be created).  The name of that company they bought is admittedly entertaining:  The Lucky Strike Oil Company Limited.  I have a little fantasy in my mind of finding an image or logo for that company, but I am guessing there isn't any such thing.  The first thing the Pillings did (in 1928) was change the name of that company to Moose Oils Limited.  And then, they assigned their oil leases to Moose Oils. 

R.H.Webb

But now, they needed money to really start drilling.   How to find it?   First player on the stage?  Col Ralph H. Webb.  Doral descibes him as a friend, and someone who "seemed to be a very fine man."   He was also the Mayor of Winnipeg (and later an MLA in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Webb

He agreed to put the Pillings in touch with some friends from the East who could put up $150,000 for a half interest in Moose.   The friends were Noah A. Timmins and W.H. Clarendon Mussen.  

Basically, the proposal was for something like a 50/50 partnership where one half is putting in the money, and the other half is doing the sweat equity. 

Noah A. Timmins

The challenge one might anticipate (and one that we experienced for some time inside LaRue) has to do with decision-making.  Unless you have a way to break a tie, a 50/50 split can leave you in a deadlock.  And Doral tells us that the Pillings did not want to lose control.  

So the idea then was that Webb too would be one of the group (50,000 shares for having helped set up the deal), and if there was  a conflict, he would vote with the Pillings.  As becomes clear later in the story, Webb did not hold to his part of the deal.  However, without jumping too far ahead, the end result was that there were 999,945 shares issued:

• 47.5% Pilling Interest (held in the name of Edna Pilling)
• 47.5% Timmins Interest (1/2 Timmins, 1/2 Clarendon Mussen)
• 5% Col Ralph H. Webb 

At this point, I started wondering a bit more about who these folks were.  It was easy to find more on Timmins.   Amongst other things, the town of Timmins, Ontario would appear to be named after their family.  

It was interesting seeing that Noah A. Timmins is,  according to the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame, "unquestionably a founding father of this country’s mining industry." (https://mininghalloffame.ca/noah-a-timmins/).  Both the Timmins Wiki page and the entry on Noah Timmins in Dictionary of Canadian Biography point to the "Porcupine Gold Rush" of 1909.  Noah Timmins (who was the head of Hollinger Consolidated) was in on the ground floor. The wiki webpage says:  

"By the end of the 1920s, the Hollinger was the largest gold mine in the British Empire and paid annual dividends of more than $5 million. By 1927, a 3.5 mile aerial tramway was in operation.  In the 1930s, Hollinger Consolidated Gold Mines built 250 houses which were located in one area of the Town of Timmins. These houses remained in place right up until the late 1970s."

So that is part of the link between Moose Dome and Timmins.  Or at least, it looks like the quest for oil was financed from the quest for gold.  Certainly, that is what was going on around 1927/28.

I did note that another connecting line seems to be that these men were "entrepreneurial" by nature, and not so much interested in the condition of the workers.  Here is a nice clip from the Timmins wiki page about working conditions in the Timmins mines in 1912:

In November 1912, 1,200 members of the Western Federation of Miners Local 145 held a strike at all three mines in response to a proposal to lower their wages.^[29] Mine operators hired gun thugs, who fired on the picket line and were ordered out by the provincial government.^[30] After months without work, many men chose to leave the settlement; only 500 miners returned to work in July 1913.^[29] The strike won the men a nine-hour workday and a pay increase.^[29]

Uh... gun thugs firing on the picket lines?   I couldn't help but think of the Great Strike of 1912 going on here on Vancouver Island at the same time.  

• Ben Isitt did an amazing PhD taking up the protest ("Patterns of Protest"), and talks about the Vancouver Island stike.  You can find the dissertation on line here.  I learned TONS from it (see pp. 49-74 for a discussion of the coal strike,  one that was finally ended by the militia)
•  https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/0d2fd8fa-179a-48a5-ab09-d91ce734a4f1/content

• Audrey Behan, "Reasons for the Vancouver Island Strike"
•  https://wordpress.viu.ca/1912vancouvercoalstrike/ 

• Çağla Güneş and Rob Lyon, "The Great Vancouver Island Coal Strike of 1912"
• https://www.marxist.ca/article/the-great-vancouver-island-coal-strike-of-1912

Really, my point here is that Colonel Ralph Webb too seems to have not been oriented towards organized labour.   He was a politician, and a military man.  His life history is pretty darned interesting, and if you click here, you will see a page on him by the CEFRG (Canadian Expeditionary Force Research Group).  Perhaps there is also a link between his experiences there, and his very strong opposition to 'communism' (or indeed organized labour)?  On his wikipedia page it says: 

He was a virulent opponent of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919, calling for the deportation of "radical agitators" and urging "the whole gang be dumped in the Red River".  .....   

After a series of labour strikes in 1931, Webb urged the "deportation of all undesirables", including communists, from Canada. 

Well, maybe that is all for today.   My takeaways?   Interesting to think about the larger picture of nation building, and extractive industries, and the ways capital was intervening to create space for these particular kinds of industries.   Of course, I am also thinking about the impacts (of oil and gas extraction, of goldmine tailing ponds, etc).  These are parts of the family history that I have just a bit of discomfort with, of course.  Trying to both honour the power of the family history, while also thinking about the logics of colonialism that invites us not to think too deeply about the intial conditions in which one could be said to "discover" oil, or "discover" gold.   And that is of course a story for another day....