“Think of being a groundhog or an ant. You’re crawling around trying to find entrances and exits in pitch black for nine days. It’s pretty terrifying.”
This is the scene playwright and performer Beau Dixon who Calgary audiences may remember from Alberta Theatre Projects’ The Motherfucker With the Hat paints when describing what seven miners who were caught up in the 1958 collapse of the Cumberland mine in Springhill Nova Scotia had to endure. Those seven miners were the final seven survivors to emerge from the mine in the disaster that left another 74 dead.
Among those seven men was African-Canadian Maurice Ruddick the subject of Dixon’s one-man play Beneath Springhill: The Maurice Ruddick Story at this year’s High Performance Rodeo. Dixon says he was “immediately” attracted to Ruddick’s story. “He’s not really talked about in the history books and no one really knows about him” says Dixon who has written several other plays dealing with the history of African-Canadians.
Furthermore Dixon says he and Ruddick have several things in common. Ruddick was a musician a pastor and of mixed race — his father was black and his mother was white. Dixon is a musician his father was a pastor and he also has one white parent and one black.
Beneath Springhill begins on the day of the “bump” a tremor in the earth not unlike that of an earthquake that caused the mine to collapse. Dixon says the event became an “international catastrophe” as CBC Television broadcast the rescue and recovery efforts — the first such live broadcast in Canada. “Across the map people were really tuned in to their TVs” says Dixon.
Ruddick’s story is notable because he is credited with helping to save the lives of the six other buried men by keeping up their morale. During those nine days of terror Ruddick played guitar and sang to the other men banging on his lunchbox for percussive accompaniment. “When everyone else had surrendered to their death after being down there for nine days he never lost hope” says Dixon.
In fact the Toronto Telegram named Ruddick their Citizen of the Year for his role in saving lives during the Springhill Mine disaster.
While 1950s Canada was marked by racist tendencies Dixon says Ruddick’s story is more about equality. “Coal miners accepted each other in a sense. When they’re two miles underground they’re all the same colour working for the same wages all covered in the same soot. There’s a level of respect among miners and a sense of equality down there” he says.
In Beneath Springhill Dixon portrays nine characters including Ruddick’s wife one of his 13 children six other miners and a CBC reporter covering the disaster.
Dixon designed the sound and music for the production in order to give audiences a flavour of the chaos and panic that ensued after the collapse. He also relies on dim lighting and plenty of shadows to recreate the grim atmosphere in the collapsed shaft. “When I interviewed miners to prepare for this show one miner said ‘You don’t know true darkness until you have been in a mine’” says Dixon. “That really stood out for me.”
Dixon also takes audiences into the miners’ lives post-rescue. While Ruddick’s daughters told Dixon their father was able to cope with the disaster and “move on” other miners were not as strong. “A lot of men lost their sanity. Some crawled out of there having nightmares a lot of them felt they could never be left in an elevator. There were so many repercussions and mental setbacks for many men” he says.
Ruddick died in 1988 in relative obscurity but he is survived by his children grandchildren nieces and nephews.
“I feel that writing this story helps rejuvenate his legacy…. It’s a fabulous story it’s very touching…. When Maurice is facing death in the eyes he instinctively does the heroic deed which keeps his fellow workers alive. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white you call on your fellow brothers to pull you out of the trenches” says Dixon.
Beneath Springhill: The Maurice Ruddick Story runs until January 24 at Lunchbox Theatre.
