Steve Brodie, "Letter to Today's Unemployed" (1996), with a 1938 chronology and his obituary (Livable4All)

Read 10 Oct 2026. Robert “Steve” Brodie (1910-1997), leader of the post office sit-down: born at Falkirk, Scotland, orphaned, sent to Canada at 14, a farm labourer, then a rider of the freights and a relief-camp man; chairman of Division 1 of the Single Unemployed Protective Association and a Communist Party member “until the fall of 1938”; beaten unconscious at the post office on 19 June 1938; later a merchant seaman and an Esquimalt dockyard worker; died in Victoria on 6 December 1997.

• The chronology (compiled for the page, not a contemporary record): the men demanded “work not train rides”; “No damage is done”; mail service was “not interrupted”; on 18 June Pattullo said he would fly to Vancouver on 20 June “to save the men the trip”; the 4:55 a.m. request to leave, the men’s offer to submit to arrest, and the gas at 5:40.
• Brodie, 1996: “Demanding arrest and trial is what stalled the attacks for thirty days”; the protests were “mostly spontaneous eruptions that the official party could not control”; and “the only weapon in the workers hands is to make unemployment so expensive, that full employment will be cheaper.”

See pattullo-bloody-sunday.