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The Toronto printers' strike of 1872 stands out as one of the most impor tant events in Canadian labour history, and the story has already been told from several different perspectives. Two decades ago the biographers of Macdonald and Brown presented it from the viewpoint of their protagonists, while Bernard Ostry placed the episode in the context of Grit and Tory politics in the 1870s. More recently Sally Zerker has covered some of the same ground, but from the standpoint of the Toronto printers' union. John Battye treats the strike in relation to the Nine-Hours movement in central Canada, while Greg Kealey interprets it as part and parcel of an emergent working-class consciousness in the Queen City.1 None of these authors has cited the letter reprinted below, a recollection by one of the major participants in the strike which was composed some 35 years after the event. John Armstrong, a leader of the Toronto Typographical Union and later president of the International Typographical Union, was closely affiliated with the Conservative party. After the strike he served as president of the Toronto Trades and Labour Council, and Macdonald appointed him in the 1880s to the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital. Still later he became secretary of the Ontario Labor Bureau, where he was working when this letter was written. He sent it to Edmund Bristol in response to a telegraphed request, but unfortunately the exact nature and purpose of Bristol's query is not known. Bristol, a well-known Toronto lawyer and Conservative party supporter, had succeeded E.F. Clarke as MP for the Toronto Centre riding in 1905.2 Armstrong's letter to Bristol sheds some new light on details sur rounding the strike, and, more importantly, lends weight to the conclusions of some interpreters, while undermining the arguments of others.
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