HISTORY
MINING HISTORY
MINING HISTORY
LABOUR HISTORY
by Gail Hussey-Weir
Created June 28, 2026
by Gail Hussey-Weir
Created June 28, 2026
The photo of surface mining below is from the MUN Maritime History Archive, Job Coll. PF-315.112.
The seventy‑one years of the mining operation on Bell Island were not without labour problems. Low pay and a high rate of accidents caused much dissatisfaction among the workers in the early years. Wars, politics, depressions, world economies and market conditions all affected the operation of the mines, sometimes bringing boom, more often causing slow‑downs or even compulsory “vacations.”
On August 24, 1896, only eight months after the first shipment of ore, Bell Island had its first miners’ strike. One hundred and eighty men struck for twelve cents an hour, two cents more than they were already getting. They were pacified by the promise that their grievances would be brought to the Company’s attention. The raise never came through. I.C. Morris, a St. John’s writer, visited the Island in August 1899. While riding in an ore car, he noticed that someone had written in chalk on the side, “I am killing myself for 10c./H.” [I am killing myself for 10 cents an hour.]
In 1900, there was a second, more serious strike with 1,600 men involved, 1,100 of whom were organized into their first Union, known as the Wabana Workmen and Labourers’ Union. This time the demand was for fifteen cents an hour. It was also stated by Thomas St. John, the Union president, that the strike had been precipitated when the Dominion Company had attempted to reduce the number of men hand‑loading ore cars. One in every four men was to be let go, and three men were to load two cars between them, instead of the usual two men per car. When these orders came, the miners stopped work and became involved in demonstrations and parades. Violence was threatened when longshoremen were brought from St. John’s to load an ore boat. All available policemen were summoned to the Island. Things calmed down when it was believed that a settlement had been reached, but soon there were more problems. St. John’s police had to be called again when the Dominion Company had their office staff go to the pier to unload a schooner of coal. The resulting riot ended with the Union officials being arrested. The strike finally ended when E.M. Jackman negotiated with the companies for a settlement, which became known as the “Treaty of Kelligrews” because that was where the negotiations took place. The agreement was for twelve and a half cents an hour for skilled miners and eleven cents for ordinary labourers. The Union dissolved once the strike ended.
Mining was extremely dangerous in those early days of the Wabana mines. There were so many accidents that the government passed Newfoundland’s first Mining Act in 1906 to provide for inspectors to investigate practices and conditions in the mines. This “Regulation of Mines Act” was the basis for all such subsequent Acts in Newfoundland.38 Still, there were 74 serious mine accidents in a two-month period in 1908 caused by the introduction of a powerful new explosive. Several attempts were made to form a Union over the next few years without success.
A group of disgruntled miners did finally manage to form another Union in 1923: The Wabana Mine Workers’ Union was registered on December 4th of that year under the signature of John P. Skanes, President. A month later, Joshua Humber became its first elected president. For just over a year, this Union was affiliated with the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers as Local 152, but it did not seem to gain any benefits from that association. Instead of negotiating directly with the Company, the Wabana Mine Workers’ Union negotiated through the government. This was probably because previous attempts by Humber and others to talk to Company officials had met with failure. This was not surprising as BESCO, the Company that had taken over both the Dominion and Scotia companies in 1920, was in big financial trouble. Frustrated by their inability to make any headway with BESCO, Humber and Skanes had been sent to Sydney by their fellow workmen in the fall of 1923 to see if they could enlist help from Unions there, but Humber was turned back by immigration officials in North Sydney, accused of being a labour agitator, and Skanes would not go on without him. Things came to a head in 1925 when BESCO introduced punch‑clocks. Until then, the men had always gone home when they had their quota of work done, whatever time of day that was. The Union won on this issue, and the clocks were taken out. Another concession won at this time was the right to be paid in cash instead of by cheque.
In 1926, the Union purchased land on Davidson Avenue and built their first Union Hall. In spite of this, interest in the Union waned to such a low level that for the next 14 years, whenever there was a grievance, instead of enlisting the help of the Union, those involved would form a workmen’s committee to deal with the situation. An example of this occurred on April 21, 1928 when the face cleaners in No. 3 Mine struck for higher pay resulting in the mines closing down. At a mass meeting that afternoon in the C.L.B. Armoury, a committee was struck to send a petition for higher wages to the National Trust Company in Montreal, the mortgager that was temporarily managing the operations following the bankruptcy of BESCO. Representatives of head office arrived on Bell Island at the end of May to negotiate with the miners’ committee, but refused to allowed the M.H.A. for the district, Major P.J. Cashin, to sit in on the meetings because he was not an employee of the Company. When the Major raised the matter in the House of Assembly, Prime Minister Monroe replied that he did not consider it necessary to have a member of the government present as the miners’ delegates had impressed him as “intelligent and reasonable men” who, he felt, were quite capable of conducting their own negotiations. A wage increase of three cents an hour for all classes of workmen along with a new bonus scale was agreed upon a few days later.
It was not until 1941 that a Union with some real clout was formed by David Ignatius (Nish) Jackman. This Union was made up of five locals, each with its own executive officers. No. 1 Local comprised all those men who worked on the surface. The four other Locals were No. 2, No. 3, No. 4 and No. 6, the numbers of the four operating mines. On the title page of the minutes book of No. 6 Local, someone wrote, “From 1923, when the Union was registered, nothing happened. This Union began to function when Nish Jackman took over in 1941.”
David Ignatius (known as Nish) Jackman was born on Bell Island in 1901 to Catherine (Malcolm) and David Joseph Jackman. Nish’s father had been born in St. John’s, where he apprenticed as a tinsmith. He established a smithy in the mining town of Little Bay in 1887 and relocated to Trinity East in 1890, moving back to St. John’s in 1895, the same year that mining got underway at Wabana. In 1899 he moved to Bell Island to work as a tinsmith with the Dominion Company, and started his own general business in 1901. He was active in community affairs and was the first chairman of the local council formed in 1917. He later served as postmaster. Nish attended school on Bell Island and at St. Bonaventure’s College in St. John’s. He worked in the United States during the 1920s.
Nish was a nephew of E.M. Jackman, who had negotiated the “Treaty of Kelligrews” in 1900. E.M. Jackman had a St. John’s tailoring business and was known as “Jackman the Tailor.” He had been president of the tailors’ union in the 1880s and had been instrumental in organizing other tradesmen into unions, hence his involvement in helping negotiate an agreement in the 1900 strike. Nish’s cousin, Walter Jackman, was also very active and served on the Union executive as Vice-President. Aside from a family history of Union involvement, Nish had participated in Union activities in the United States. Len Gosse, who had been active with the Union at Wabana, recalled: "He was in the States connected with the Union up there for ten or fifteen years. That’s what made him good. He had lots of experience he got in the States with strikes and everything else."
Apart from this experience, however, Jackman had “paid his dues” in the Wabana mines: "Nish Jackman had an awful lot of qualifications. Matter of fact, he was a lumberman first, Nish. He lost his leg in No. 2 Mine. He worked in No. 2 Mines. And he had an accident and lost his leg. That was in 1938, I believe. He was down in the mines flogging, putting trips in. He went down and went in and got his leg cut off. His foot and his leg removed."
The Company’s announcement that work in the mines would be decreased to half‑time was the catalyst that Jackman needed to get workers united into the new Wabana Mine Workers’ Union. He became president in October of 1941 and negotiated directly with the Company. When what was known simply as “the Union” was first started, not everyone joined right away. The minutes book of No. 3 Local for November 1941 noted:
The General President [Jackman] then said that by all means we should take anyone in the Union, and that if the Company took one man and placed him on the Staff [ie. non-Union employee], we should take him off the Staff and throw him over the back of the island.
Peer pressure was brought to bear in at least one instance, as it was reported at a Union meeting on January 28, 1942 that the Unionized men of No. 2 Mine had refused to work with non-Union members. The outcome was that out of six non-Union men, four joined up, one “drew his time” [ie. quit his job], and one did nothing.
It was not long afterwards that Union dues started to be deducted at the Main Office. Eric Luffman recalled: "I think all hands were pretty happy with the Union. You see, they were losing nothing, and they were gaining all the time. So Nish got that. I don’t think there was any dispute about it at all. Everyone was awfully glad to join. I don’t think anyone complained too much. The Union did Bell Island good, and it didn’t hurt the Company. As long as they had a good person to negotiate with, you could always get a reasonable settlement. The Company didn’t want to have strikes. But you couldn’t go in and ask for something that they couldn’t give you. Nish got a lot of things with no problem at all."
At the March 13, 1942 meeting of No. 1 Local, the motion was passed to acquire the former Church of England Academy on Bennett Street at the corner of Grammar Street for use as the Union Hall. At that same meeting, it was reported that:
The President, Mr. Jackman, went on to speak of Unionism and was very interesting. He also told of some of his experiences in Unions and charged all members to be on their guard against all rumours and to be true Union men and to be up to our slogan: “to go forward together.”
The Union became an affiliate of the Newfoundland Federation of Labour in 1944. It became Local 4121 of the United Steel Workers of America in 1948. From this time onward, labour‑management relations ran smoothly and there were no major strikes or disagreements. Eric Luffman: "They were getting thirty cents an hour when Nish Jackman took over, and in about five or six years when we went into Confederation, there was only one place in Canada better paid than we was. He got a lot of concessions. I know one time he asked for twenty‑four cents of a raise, and we all thought he was crazy. He got it and never lost a man hour."
Len Gosse remembered a dispute over wage increases: "I was vice‑president of No. 4 Local, submarine Local, for a little over a year. On strike one day only, that was over wages. We notified the Company we were going to be off, and the Company only laughed. Monday we called her off. When all the boys went to work, we called her off, and that was it. We lost that day and that was all. The next day we went to work. Got five cents an hour increase."
Ron Pumphrey, who published and edited a weekly newspaper on Bell Island during the 1950s and 60s, remembered the Union leader well: "Nish Jackman was a diminutive, ferocious, little man. And he was a fighter, a real fighter. I can see him now in the Union Hall, stripped down to the shirt. And he had one leg. He had an artificial leg. And he was a real leader. And he incited the men to unionize, to go on strike, to get their rights and what have you. And I remember, but I won’t name the prelate, a certain priest who got up and denounced him as being a communist. But Nish Jackman had a lot of power, a lot of power. I had a reverence for him which had the elevation that one would have for his god. He was a ferocious little man, but I liked him."
Jackman’s ability to make gains for the miners was legendary and, while he may have been fiery at Union meetings, he kept a cool head in his dealings with the Company. Eric sat in on at least one negotiating meeting and remembered it this way:
"We had a meeting in the Main Office this morning over something that happened in the mines, the men went home for some reason or other. So we got in there and Nish listened to them, never opened his mouth for two hours, and then he settled the whole thing just like that. The Company were just like children as far as negotiating went. The Old Man, Proudfoot, said to me, “Eric,” he said, “that’s Nish Jackman. That’s the way he’s been for the past twenty years. When he comes in here,” he said, “there’s times he don’t speak for three or four hours. But when he speaks, everybody listens. And he’s always reasonable. He’s always satisfied to compromise. If C.B. Archibald says, ‘Nish, this can’t be done,’ he’ll tell him why. They’ll go to work on it. Like getting delay caps to the blasters. Delay caps cost a lot of money. They were working on that so the blasters wouldn’t have to go back in the smoke, you see. Nish worked on that for years. But Nish Jackman didn’t go bawling and roaring and swearing. He went in and talked like a gentleman, and they treated him like a gentleman. No use in trying to bribe Nish Jackman. He knew nothing about the like of that."
All evidence indicates that Nish Jackman was not the kind of Union leader to take his men out on strike on a whim. As Eric Luffman recalled: "A strike would have spoiled everything. But Nish Jackman was too smart for that. Besides, that was too much work for Nish. He wasn’t the kind of a man who was going to make work for himself. And he knew what he could do. Nish Jackman knew to what extent he could push, and he pushed that much and no more. He got what he wanted without any trouble. Nish was a good leader."
After the negotiating meeting mentioned above, Nish and Eric talked about strikes over a bottle of beer: "I said, 'Nish, you’ve never had a strike.' 'No, Eric,' he said, 'strike never comes in my mind, because I know the men can’t stand a strike, and I’m not going to put them into a strike. My job is to get everything I can from the Company in the peacefulest possible way. I never saw where I could do my men any good by putting them on strike. They’re paying me a salary and that’s all I got to do is try to get things. If I’m not able to get a raise of pay or get conditions without a strike, I’m no good. When I go in, I try to make things better for them. That’s my job,' he said. 'If I put them on strike one week, it’ll take them a month to get over it. If they’re out a month, it’ll take them a year to get over it. Chances are, some men with big families, chances are they’ll be hungry. That’s what they got me for,' he said. And he was right. He was a good president. He had a lot of friends, an awful lot of friends."
Shortly after becoming the Union president, Nish once again followed in the footsteps of his uncle, E.M. Jackman, and became involved in provincial politics. The elder Jackman had served as Minister of Finance and Customs in the Robert Bond government from 1900 to 1909. In 1946, Nish was elected to the National Convention as the delegate for Bell Island. The Convention had been set up to find an alternative to the Commission of Government that had been ruling Newfoundland since 1934. One report on the Convention said of Nish:
Ignatius Jackman, the fiery little president of the Bell Island Miners’ Union, thought that since the Convention was an elected body it was far superior to the Commission of Government. “If any commissioner dares to defy us,” he said, “let us remove him and put another in his place.” (Source: John R. Courage in “A Capsule History of the National Convention,” in J. R. Smallwood, ed., The Book of Newfoundland, 6 vols. St. John’s: Newfoundland Book Publishers, c.1937-1975, 5:169-184; 1967 p. 171)
Nish advocated for stronger relations with the United States. He formed a “Union with America” party in 1947 and petitioned the British government to have union with the U.S. placed on the referendum ballot. He later supported Chesley Crosbie’s Economic Union Party in joining forces with the Responsible Government League for the referenda of 1948. Following Confederation with Canada, he was elected to the House of Assembly twice, 1949 and 1951, as the Progressive Conservative member for Harbour Main-Bell Island. He lost the 1956 provincial election and a bid for a federal seat a few years later when he ran as an independent labour candidate. (Source: Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, V.3, p. 88)
Eric recalled: "He attended the House of Parliament [Assembly] only once. He was a P.C. That’s what Smallwood couldn’t understand. 'I never seen a P.C. in my life,' he said, 'in the Union.' But Smallwood said this, 'He was probably the best Union leader in the Dominion of Canada.'”
In the mid‑fifties, the Union membership began to feel that he was neglecting them for the provincial political scene. There was also dissatisfaction with some of his policies, leading to his being ousted as Union president when the 1956 vote was taken. Ruben Rees was elected president in his place, but resigned a year later. Jackman was returned to office when elections were held the following year, and by 1963 he had gained such favour that the Union voted him a pension for life. Only a year later, however, in the June 1964 election, he was voted out of office for the last time and was replaced by John S. Power. Power was to remain president until the Union’s charter was revoked in 1967. After twenty‑two years as Union leader, Jackman left Bell Island on October 3, 1964 to spend his retirement years with his children in Montreal. He died there only three years later in 1967.
On August 24, 1896, only eight months after the first shipment of ore, Bell Island had its first miners’ strike. One hundred and eighty men struck for twelve cents an hour, two cents more than they were already getting. They were pacified by the promise that their grievances would be brought to the Company’s attention. The raise never came through. I.C. Morris, a St. John’s writer, visited the Island in August 1899. While riding in an ore car, he noticed that someone had written in chalk on the side, “I am killing myself for 10c./H.” [I am killing myself for 10 cents an hour.]
In 1900, there was a second, more serious strike with 1,600 men involved, 1,100 of whom were organized into their first Union, known as the Wabana Workmen and Labourers’ Union. This time the demand was for fifteen cents an hour. It was also stated by Thomas St. John, the Union president, that the strike had been precipitated when the Dominion Company had attempted to reduce the number of men hand‑loading ore cars. One in every four men was to be let go, and three men were to load two cars between them, instead of the usual two men per car. When these orders came, the miners stopped work and became involved in demonstrations and parades. Violence was threatened when longshoremen were brought from St. John’s to load an ore boat. All available policemen were summoned to the Island. Things calmed down when it was believed that a settlement had been reached, but soon there were more problems. St. John’s police had to be called again when the Dominion Company had their office staff go to the pier to unload a schooner of coal. The resulting riot ended with the Union officials being arrested. The strike finally ended when E.M. Jackman negotiated with the companies for a settlement, which became known as the “Treaty of Kelligrews” because that was where the negotiations took place. The agreement was for twelve and a half cents an hour for skilled miners and eleven cents for ordinary labourers. The Union dissolved once the strike ended.
Mining was extremely dangerous in those early days of the Wabana mines. There were so many accidents that the government passed Newfoundland’s first Mining Act in 1906 to provide for inspectors to investigate practices and conditions in the mines. This “Regulation of Mines Act” was the basis for all such subsequent Acts in Newfoundland.38 Still, there were 74 serious mine accidents in a two-month period in 1908 caused by the introduction of a powerful new explosive. Several attempts were made to form a Union over the next few years without success.
A group of disgruntled miners did finally manage to form another Union in 1923: The Wabana Mine Workers’ Union was registered on December 4th of that year under the signature of John P. Skanes, President. A month later, Joshua Humber became its first elected president. For just over a year, this Union was affiliated with the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers as Local 152, but it did not seem to gain any benefits from that association. Instead of negotiating directly with the Company, the Wabana Mine Workers’ Union negotiated through the government. This was probably because previous attempts by Humber and others to talk to Company officials had met with failure. This was not surprising as BESCO, the Company that had taken over both the Dominion and Scotia companies in 1920, was in big financial trouble. Frustrated by their inability to make any headway with BESCO, Humber and Skanes had been sent to Sydney by their fellow workmen in the fall of 1923 to see if they could enlist help from Unions there, but Humber was turned back by immigration officials in North Sydney, accused of being a labour agitator, and Skanes would not go on without him. Things came to a head in 1925 when BESCO introduced punch‑clocks. Until then, the men had always gone home when they had their quota of work done, whatever time of day that was. The Union won on this issue, and the clocks were taken out. Another concession won at this time was the right to be paid in cash instead of by cheque.
In 1926, the Union purchased land on Davidson Avenue and built their first Union Hall. In spite of this, interest in the Union waned to such a low level that for the next 14 years, whenever there was a grievance, instead of enlisting the help of the Union, those involved would form a workmen’s committee to deal with the situation. An example of this occurred on April 21, 1928 when the face cleaners in No. 3 Mine struck for higher pay resulting in the mines closing down. At a mass meeting that afternoon in the C.L.B. Armoury, a committee was struck to send a petition for higher wages to the National Trust Company in Montreal, the mortgager that was temporarily managing the operations following the bankruptcy of BESCO. Representatives of head office arrived on Bell Island at the end of May to negotiate with the miners’ committee, but refused to allowed the M.H.A. for the district, Major P.J. Cashin, to sit in on the meetings because he was not an employee of the Company. When the Major raised the matter in the House of Assembly, Prime Minister Monroe replied that he did not consider it necessary to have a member of the government present as the miners’ delegates had impressed him as “intelligent and reasonable men” who, he felt, were quite capable of conducting their own negotiations. A wage increase of three cents an hour for all classes of workmen along with a new bonus scale was agreed upon a few days later.
It was not until 1941 that a Union with some real clout was formed by David Ignatius (Nish) Jackman. This Union was made up of five locals, each with its own executive officers. No. 1 Local comprised all those men who worked on the surface. The four other Locals were No. 2, No. 3, No. 4 and No. 6, the numbers of the four operating mines. On the title page of the minutes book of No. 6 Local, someone wrote, “From 1923, when the Union was registered, nothing happened. This Union began to function when Nish Jackman took over in 1941.”
David Ignatius (known as Nish) Jackman was born on Bell Island in 1901 to Catherine (Malcolm) and David Joseph Jackman. Nish’s father had been born in St. John’s, where he apprenticed as a tinsmith. He established a smithy in the mining town of Little Bay in 1887 and relocated to Trinity East in 1890, moving back to St. John’s in 1895, the same year that mining got underway at Wabana. In 1899 he moved to Bell Island to work as a tinsmith with the Dominion Company, and started his own general business in 1901. He was active in community affairs and was the first chairman of the local council formed in 1917. He later served as postmaster. Nish attended school on Bell Island and at St. Bonaventure’s College in St. John’s. He worked in the United States during the 1920s.
Nish was a nephew of E.M. Jackman, who had negotiated the “Treaty of Kelligrews” in 1900. E.M. Jackman had a St. John’s tailoring business and was known as “Jackman the Tailor.” He had been president of the tailors’ union in the 1880s and had been instrumental in organizing other tradesmen into unions, hence his involvement in helping negotiate an agreement in the 1900 strike. Nish’s cousin, Walter Jackman, was also very active and served on the Union executive as Vice-President. Aside from a family history of Union involvement, Nish had participated in Union activities in the United States. Len Gosse, who had been active with the Union at Wabana, recalled: "He was in the States connected with the Union up there for ten or fifteen years. That’s what made him good. He had lots of experience he got in the States with strikes and everything else."
Apart from this experience, however, Jackman had “paid his dues” in the Wabana mines: "Nish Jackman had an awful lot of qualifications. Matter of fact, he was a lumberman first, Nish. He lost his leg in No. 2 Mine. He worked in No. 2 Mines. And he had an accident and lost his leg. That was in 1938, I believe. He was down in the mines flogging, putting trips in. He went down and went in and got his leg cut off. His foot and his leg removed."
The Company’s announcement that work in the mines would be decreased to half‑time was the catalyst that Jackman needed to get workers united into the new Wabana Mine Workers’ Union. He became president in October of 1941 and negotiated directly with the Company. When what was known simply as “the Union” was first started, not everyone joined right away. The minutes book of No. 3 Local for November 1941 noted:
The General President [Jackman] then said that by all means we should take anyone in the Union, and that if the Company took one man and placed him on the Staff [ie. non-Union employee], we should take him off the Staff and throw him over the back of the island.
Peer pressure was brought to bear in at least one instance, as it was reported at a Union meeting on January 28, 1942 that the Unionized men of No. 2 Mine had refused to work with non-Union members. The outcome was that out of six non-Union men, four joined up, one “drew his time” [ie. quit his job], and one did nothing.
It was not long afterwards that Union dues started to be deducted at the Main Office. Eric Luffman recalled: "I think all hands were pretty happy with the Union. You see, they were losing nothing, and they were gaining all the time. So Nish got that. I don’t think there was any dispute about it at all. Everyone was awfully glad to join. I don’t think anyone complained too much. The Union did Bell Island good, and it didn’t hurt the Company. As long as they had a good person to negotiate with, you could always get a reasonable settlement. The Company didn’t want to have strikes. But you couldn’t go in and ask for something that they couldn’t give you. Nish got a lot of things with no problem at all."
At the March 13, 1942 meeting of No. 1 Local, the motion was passed to acquire the former Church of England Academy on Bennett Street at the corner of Grammar Street for use as the Union Hall. At that same meeting, it was reported that:
The President, Mr. Jackman, went on to speak of Unionism and was very interesting. He also told of some of his experiences in Unions and charged all members to be on their guard against all rumours and to be true Union men and to be up to our slogan: “to go forward together.”
The Union became an affiliate of the Newfoundland Federation of Labour in 1944. It became Local 4121 of the United Steel Workers of America in 1948. From this time onward, labour‑management relations ran smoothly and there were no major strikes or disagreements. Eric Luffman: "They were getting thirty cents an hour when Nish Jackman took over, and in about five or six years when we went into Confederation, there was only one place in Canada better paid than we was. He got a lot of concessions. I know one time he asked for twenty‑four cents of a raise, and we all thought he was crazy. He got it and never lost a man hour."
Len Gosse remembered a dispute over wage increases: "I was vice‑president of No. 4 Local, submarine Local, for a little over a year. On strike one day only, that was over wages. We notified the Company we were going to be off, and the Company only laughed. Monday we called her off. When all the boys went to work, we called her off, and that was it. We lost that day and that was all. The next day we went to work. Got five cents an hour increase."
Ron Pumphrey, who published and edited a weekly newspaper on Bell Island during the 1950s and 60s, remembered the Union leader well: "Nish Jackman was a diminutive, ferocious, little man. And he was a fighter, a real fighter. I can see him now in the Union Hall, stripped down to the shirt. And he had one leg. He had an artificial leg. And he was a real leader. And he incited the men to unionize, to go on strike, to get their rights and what have you. And I remember, but I won’t name the prelate, a certain priest who got up and denounced him as being a communist. But Nish Jackman had a lot of power, a lot of power. I had a reverence for him which had the elevation that one would have for his god. He was a ferocious little man, but I liked him."
Jackman’s ability to make gains for the miners was legendary and, while he may have been fiery at Union meetings, he kept a cool head in his dealings with the Company. Eric sat in on at least one negotiating meeting and remembered it this way:
"We had a meeting in the Main Office this morning over something that happened in the mines, the men went home for some reason or other. So we got in there and Nish listened to them, never opened his mouth for two hours, and then he settled the whole thing just like that. The Company were just like children as far as negotiating went. The Old Man, Proudfoot, said to me, “Eric,” he said, “that’s Nish Jackman. That’s the way he’s been for the past twenty years. When he comes in here,” he said, “there’s times he don’t speak for three or four hours. But when he speaks, everybody listens. And he’s always reasonable. He’s always satisfied to compromise. If C.B. Archibald says, ‘Nish, this can’t be done,’ he’ll tell him why. They’ll go to work on it. Like getting delay caps to the blasters. Delay caps cost a lot of money. They were working on that so the blasters wouldn’t have to go back in the smoke, you see. Nish worked on that for years. But Nish Jackman didn’t go bawling and roaring and swearing. He went in and talked like a gentleman, and they treated him like a gentleman. No use in trying to bribe Nish Jackman. He knew nothing about the like of that."
All evidence indicates that Nish Jackman was not the kind of Union leader to take his men out on strike on a whim. As Eric Luffman recalled: "A strike would have spoiled everything. But Nish Jackman was too smart for that. Besides, that was too much work for Nish. He wasn’t the kind of a man who was going to make work for himself. And he knew what he could do. Nish Jackman knew to what extent he could push, and he pushed that much and no more. He got what he wanted without any trouble. Nish was a good leader."
After the negotiating meeting mentioned above, Nish and Eric talked about strikes over a bottle of beer: "I said, 'Nish, you’ve never had a strike.' 'No, Eric,' he said, 'strike never comes in my mind, because I know the men can’t stand a strike, and I’m not going to put them into a strike. My job is to get everything I can from the Company in the peacefulest possible way. I never saw where I could do my men any good by putting them on strike. They’re paying me a salary and that’s all I got to do is try to get things. If I’m not able to get a raise of pay or get conditions without a strike, I’m no good. When I go in, I try to make things better for them. That’s my job,' he said. 'If I put them on strike one week, it’ll take them a month to get over it. If they’re out a month, it’ll take them a year to get over it. Chances are, some men with big families, chances are they’ll be hungry. That’s what they got me for,' he said. And he was right. He was a good president. He had a lot of friends, an awful lot of friends."
Shortly after becoming the Union president, Nish once again followed in the footsteps of his uncle, E.M. Jackman, and became involved in provincial politics. The elder Jackman had served as Minister of Finance and Customs in the Robert Bond government from 1900 to 1909. In 1946, Nish was elected to the National Convention as the delegate for Bell Island. The Convention had been set up to find an alternative to the Commission of Government that had been ruling Newfoundland since 1934. One report on the Convention said of Nish:
Ignatius Jackman, the fiery little president of the Bell Island Miners’ Union, thought that since the Convention was an elected body it was far superior to the Commission of Government. “If any commissioner dares to defy us,” he said, “let us remove him and put another in his place.” (Source: John R. Courage in “A Capsule History of the National Convention,” in J. R. Smallwood, ed., The Book of Newfoundland, 6 vols. St. John’s: Newfoundland Book Publishers, c.1937-1975, 5:169-184; 1967 p. 171)
Nish advocated for stronger relations with the United States. He formed a “Union with America” party in 1947 and petitioned the British government to have union with the U.S. placed on the referendum ballot. He later supported Chesley Crosbie’s Economic Union Party in joining forces with the Responsible Government League for the referenda of 1948. Following Confederation with Canada, he was elected to the House of Assembly twice, 1949 and 1951, as the Progressive Conservative member for Harbour Main-Bell Island. He lost the 1956 provincial election and a bid for a federal seat a few years later when he ran as an independent labour candidate. (Source: Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, V.3, p. 88)
Eric recalled: "He attended the House of Parliament [Assembly] only once. He was a P.C. That’s what Smallwood couldn’t understand. 'I never seen a P.C. in my life,' he said, 'in the Union.' But Smallwood said this, 'He was probably the best Union leader in the Dominion of Canada.'”
In the mid‑fifties, the Union membership began to feel that he was neglecting them for the provincial political scene. There was also dissatisfaction with some of his policies, leading to his being ousted as Union president when the 1956 vote was taken. Ruben Rees was elected president in his place, but resigned a year later. Jackman was returned to office when elections were held the following year, and by 1963 he had gained such favour that the Union voted him a pension for life. Only a year later, however, in the June 1964 election, he was voted out of office for the last time and was replaced by John S. Power. Power was to remain president until the Union’s charter was revoked in 1967. After twenty‑two years as Union leader, Jackman left Bell Island on October 3, 1964 to spend his retirement years with his children in Montreal. He died there only three years later in 1967.