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Alan Caswell Collier, Relief Stiff

Alan Caswell Collier, Relief Stiff

An Artist's Letters from Depression-Era British Columbia

Edited by Peter Neary

Published by: University of British Columbia Press

Imprint: UBC Press

368 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 mm, 89 b&w photos and illustrations

Hardcover
9780774834988
Published: March 2018

£36.00

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

Alan Caswell Collier was one of Canada's most successful landscape painters, but during the Depression he joined the thousands of single, unemployed men who rode the rails or hitchhiked across North America in search of jobs.

He eventually made his way to British Columbia's remote government-run relief camps, the birthplace of the famous Communist-led On-to-Ottawa Trek. Labouring for twenty cents a day, he detailed camp life and politics in letters to his fiancée and depicted his fellow "relief stiffs" and the BC landscape in character sketches and paintings.

Incisive and candid, his letters reveal a born contrarian with a strong sense of social superiority over his fellow "twenty centers." Collier resisted the mobilization that led to the Trek, but in the 1940s he became a union activist and an ardent social democrat.

Illustrated with well-known paintings and never-before-published sketches, portraits, and landscapes, Alan Caswell Collier, Relief Stiff offers a fresh perspective on an eminent Ontario artist and on the politics, hopes, and dreams of a generation who came of age at a time of economic upheaval and class conflict.

Preface

Principal Persons

Introduction

2231 Blenheim St., Vancouver

Camp 506, Big Bend Road, Near Revelstoke

Camp 376, Tappen

Camp 378, Notch Hill

2231 Blenheim St., Vancouver

Afterwards …

Appendix; Further Reading; Index

Peter Neary is a historian and the editor and author of several books, including White Tie and Decorations: Sir John and Lady Hope Simpson in Newfoundland, 1934–1936 and On to Civvy Street: Canada's Rehabilitation Program for Veterans of the Second World War. He is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Western Ontario.

[Collier] was a skilled letter writer and his lively narrative is free of pretension. He attempted to record the toughness of the life in a way that was authentic, while no doubt taking off a few rough edges and embellishing anecdotes, as all writers do … This book is an easy read and will appeal to general readers, as well as those interested in the 1930s life or Canadian art. This fascinating slice of social history forms a Canadian counterpart to the volume of Pollock family letters.
- Alexander Adams, art critic (alexanderadamsart) Peter Neary has done a real service by bringing Alan Collier's letters to a wide public audience. Collier's views of the politics of the camps, while contentious, provide a useful comparison to the more familiar leftist reading of the era. More importantly, his letters, along with the paintings and photographs that Neary has collected, provide an intimate and detailed glimpse, a view from the inside, of the relief camp system, a short-lived but embryonic experiment in social control during a time of economic crisis. - Daniel Francis (The Ormsby Review)