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During the night of 17 June 1919, William Ivens, minister in the Labour Church and editor of the Strike Bulletin of the Western Labour News was arrested on two charges of seditious conspiracy for his leading role in the Winnipeg General Strike.
The Strike Bulletin was a daily sheet prepared by the Labour News, the weekly newspaper of the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council during the Strike. It became a vital source of information for the strikers, who had shut down the telephone and telegraph services and all three daily newspapers. By agreement of the Trades and Labour Council, members of the Printers Union at the Labour News did not join the general sympathetic strike, but supported it instead by vastly increasing their labour.
After Ivens' arrest, the editorship of the Labour News was taken up by J. S. Woodsworth, a former Methodist minister and outspoken advocate for labour. Woodsworth too was arrested, but this did not stop publication of the paper. Fred Dixon, a moderate MLA had allied himself with the strikers, and abandoned the Legislature to serve as spokesman for the Strike Committee. After Woodsworth's arrest, Dixon took up the editorship and managed two more editions before a warrant was issued for his arrest too. Dixon ignored the warrant, and from hiding published several more editions under the names of the Western Star and The Enlightener, turning himself in only after the end of the Strike was certain.
Page revised: 27 August 2009
