Harold Catherwood Interview – Protesting the Dam

An interview with Harold Catherwood where he discusses protesting with a small group at the dam site.

Title Screen: Circular logo on a black backdrop. Logo is an image of four waves turning into wheat on the left end. The title “Stories Beneath the Surface” is circled around the image in capital letters.

Interview with Harold Catherwood. Shows Mr. Catherwood; a white man with grey hair, wearing a blue, white, and grey plaid shirt and black vest. He sits in a brown armchair.

Revelstoke Museum and Archives logo in the bottom right hand corner.

Transcript of Narration:

[Speaking to someone off camera, to the left of him.]

The people in Nakusp, there was a little group there that were also objecting very strongly to this, well it’s not a buy-out, it was a steal of the properties of the valley.

And so we decided, we would put up a, go down and put up a protest at Castlegar.

There were four of us went down from here – and when I say here I’m talking about mostly at Sidmouth, well all the way to Revelstoke.

Oh anyway we ended up by going and I’ll name them: John Rauchert, he provided the car and Jack Hall went and a person by the name of Mitro Toma who had a sawmill and he was getting the same type of dealings as the rest of us, which was very poor.

We had arrived at a kind of an opportune time.

Dam building was negotiated on the fact that there would be no strikes by any union or any other people involved in it.

[Gestures with his hand.]

Union found a loophole in the people that supplied the oil to do the building of the dam down at Castlegar.

But anyway out come this oil, this um, representative of the oil companies and he asked us what our complaint was, and of course it didn’t take very long to tell them.

And he said well he said: I would like to take ’em, he said I’ve just put those men back to work yes- I don’t know that day or the day before.

But he thought: I’d like to pull them all out again, but he said: I’m afraid, he said, I can’t even help you because there’s not enough proof or power in what we were standing there for.

And so consequently our picket line didn’t last very long, but at least I’m proud to say I objected and I’m not ashamed to say it either.