Alan Caswell Collier, Relief Stiff

Book excerpt: 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.