At about the same time that my father was lowering the flag, about a mile from our house, in the ballroom of the Newfoundland Hotel, the final documents were being signed that would consign the country of Newfoundland to oblivion—suspend our so-called Letters Patent, our one-hundred-year-old constitution, our elected legislature, the vote, our democracy. Nations have fallen into disrepute, I know, but I am not a nationalist, just a poor, foolish patriot like my father. Your greatest political writer, Mr. George Orwell, seems to have been the only one who knew the difference. “Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism,” he said. “Patriotism is an inoculation against nationalism”—and I have the cicatrices to prove it.
He was talking about devotion, you see, and as an old lapsed Catholic doomed to my devotions, I write to you today to demand an official apology for the disgrace, the humiliation, the egregious injustice that England inflicted upon us fifty years ago. I ask you, the present prime minister of the Mother of Parliaments, to state unequivocally in the House of Commons that stripping us of our democratic rights in 1934 was a mistake, a morally and politically unjustifiable act. If, as more than one historian has suggested, the British Empire in the East came to a moral end at Amritsar, India, in April 1919, then in the West it came to a moral end at St. John’s, Newfoundland, in February 1934. You may not have shot us out of cannons as you did your sepoys in Inja, but you shamed and demoralized us to such an extent that we still get a perverse pleasure out of shooting ourselves.
In A History of Newfoundland—the history of Newfoundland—Daniel Woodley Prowse, the Father of Newfoundland History, our Herodotus, our Gibbon, our Macaulay, said: “Our treatment by the British Government has been so stupid, cruel, and barbarous that it requires the actual perusal of the State Papers to convince us that such a policy was ever carried out.”
Now I have perused the State Papers myself, along with a lot of other papers, and here, for your enlightenment, are a few of the stupid, cruel, and barbarous things I found:
1. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, “the Great Appeaser,” in a Private and Confidential letter to Royal Commission chairman Lord Amulree on August 31, 1933, instructed “Our Right Trusty and Well-beloved Counsellor,” as King George referred to him on his appointment in February 1933, to see to it that our prime minister and his government agreed to accept all the recommendations in his report before it was tabled in the House. Now I wonder what the price was for securing that kind of collaboration. What did it take to buy them off?
2. The Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, J. H. Thomas, afterward to be known as “Leaker” Thomas, officially tabled Lord Amulree’s Royal Commission Report in the House of Commons in November 1933, but he’d tabled it among his family and friends a few days before that. His government’s plan to guarantee Newfoundland’s bonds meant that they would soar in price, and fortunes were made by unscrupulous speculators as a result of this leak. This skullduggery was never investigated, though allegations were made in Time magazine. In England, these allegations were actually cut out with scissors from newsstand copies. I have my own personal uncensored copy that I could send to you.
3. And now we come to the Right Trusty Lord Amulree himself, the third member of this Unholy Trinity, a sort of bumbling moral anthropologist who rediscovered fiery Friar O’Donel’s “howling moral wilderness,” the new ecclesiastical territory of New-founde-lande, 150 years after the man who would become its first bishop. Amulree looked and dressed like an undertaker, appropriately enough, considering the job he’d been sent out to do—arrange the death and burial of the Newfoundland state, no less, not to put too fine a point on it. While accusing us of the worst kind of waste, extravagance, and corruption, he was extravagantly indifferent to a memorandum sent to him by our finance department explaining that almost 40 percent of our $100 million debt was incurred raising a regiment to help fight the mother country’s battles in the First World War, a regiment that was decimated on the fields of France because of callous, incompetent swine like General Haig, a regiment that helped make the world safe for democracy but not, alas, the country that raised it. It only made Newfoundland safe for the bondholders.
In view of all this, and much else besides, I ask for nothing less than an official public apology in the House of Commons and posthumous diplomatic recognition of the independent country of Newfoundland.
Yours truly,
Brendan Harnett
As I said, there was no reply from Mrs. Thatcher, but Miles did get a rather pointed and undiplomatic response from someone else.
From the Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds: “A Letter to the Prime Minister of the Indignation,” a reply to Brendan Harnett from “Anon.” (letters were still being published under a pseudonym at this time), in “Letters to the Editor,” the Evening Telegram, February 22, 1984.
The Editor
The Evening Telegram
Dear Sir:
(I would like to respond to a recent letter from a Mr. Brendan Harnett, published in your issue of the 16th of February.)
Dear Mr. Harnett:
Do you think it’s going to rain? In the Name of God, why can’t you give it up? Why can’t you let go of it? The People voted to surrender the Country. They themselves voted in July 1948, and their elected Government voted on their behalf in November 1933. They cut the painter themselves, you old fool. I suppose you’ll be writing sour, indignant letters to the Prime Minister of Canada fifteen years from now on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Greatest Event in our history? Yes, CONFEDERATION. But go back into the archives and have a better look. Our first Premier, the Father of Confederation, the Only Living Father of the Canadian Confederation, the Honourable J. R. Smallwood, issued Progress Reports on Confederation, on 16 mm film, in the early 1950s. And he’d written Progress Reports on Newfoundland long before that—The New Newfoundland, written in 1931, and the great Book of Newfoundland, in 1937.
Now let me give you a Progress Report because you have obviously been living in a root cellar or some other kind of a hole in the ground since 1949. Our People are educated, they’re healthy, they’re happy, they’re well fed, they have jobs, and they don’t need a passport and a TB clearance to go off to the mainland to find a job if they don’t have one. Go back into your hole, will you, and ignore the sunlight next February if perchance it happens to penetrate deep enough to unthaw the frozen turnip of a brain you have in that numbskull of yours. If you come up, you’ll see a shadow, but it’s your own. You’re casting it yourself, if you know what I mean.
It started in 1833 and ended, thank God, in 1933. As Mr. Edgar Bowring said at the Royal Commission hearings that year, we weren’t fit for it, we weren’t fit to govern ourselves. One hundred years of trouble was enough. An exercise in political futility. “An embittered Little Ireland,” one historian called us. And aren’t you just like one of those old Irish harpers who prided themselves on stealing the tunes from the British army pipe band when they were out on parade. The soldiers might have shot them on regular duty the next day, but, no matter, they had the tunes. Now, I’m half Irish myself, but will you please stop singing those sad old tunes.
You want “posthumous diplomatic recognition,” do you? Well, here’s Recognition for you, with a capital R. I know you’re a man of letters, Mr. Harnett, so perhaps you’ll recognize this. If Newfoundland history is a tragedy—and I’m sure even you wouldn’t deny that—what were the signs, the Recognitions, as Aristotle called them? Well, I’ll tell you. What hope could there be for a country whose government began its sittings in a tavern—and was even kicked out of there for not paying the rent—and then moved to an orphan asylum. What hope could there be for a country whose legislative building was built on a bog; whose members sat on the wrong side of the Speaker—the left hand of God; whose “Founding Father,” as you call him, your Dr. Carson—who failed medical school, by the way—couldn’t even get himself elected to the first Assemb
ly? What hope could there be? And here’s the clincher for you. The so-called architect—an Irish stonemason—who built the Colonial Building used as his model a neoclassical Italian villa—La Malcontenta, they call it—that was said to be haunted by an aggrieved spirit. Do I need to go on? No wonder the whole thing came to naught.
I’m sure you will be coming up out of your hole for the fiftieth anniversary of Confederation, just as you came up in 1974 for the twenty-fifth, prating and harping on about Smokescreens and Conspiracies. The Amulree Report was a Smokescreen. The National Convention was a Smokescreen. The Referendum was rigged—a Great Conspiracy that your friend from the University uncovered. We voted 52 percent against Confederation instead of 52 percent for it. They reversed the result and burned the ballots out on the barrens. Well, where’s the evidence? Preserved in the peat bogs, perhaps. Well, why don’t you go out and dig it up? Take it to Court. Get those Terms of Confederation annulled. Let’s become a glorious sinkhole, sanatorium, poorhouse, graft shop, dole house of a country once again, an International Exhibition of poverty, unemployment, disease, illiteracy, corruption, bankruptcy, and misery, the sort of dark hole only a bitter, querulous old groundhog like yourself would want to live in, to preside over, and I hereby nominate you for First Minister, Prime Minister of the Indignation. I will personally install you in La Malcontenta, no doubt a House you’ll be happy living in, though it’s clear to me that, metaphorically speaking, you’ve been living in it all your life.
Yours truly,
Anon.
From the Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds: “To Lord Amulree’s Newfoundland dog and all his pedigree,” unedited version of a reply to Anon. from Brendan Harnett, read to the Prowse Society, at the Travers Tavern, on February 24, 1984; edited version published in “Letters to the Editor,” the Evening Telegram, February 28, 1984.
The Editor
The Evening Telegram
Dear Sir:
(I would like to reply to the letter from Anon., addressed to me, published in your paper on February 22.)
Dear Anon.:
“For his nose was as sharp as a pen, and he babbled of green fields,” as Mistress Quickly said of Falstaff on his deathbed.
They may be educated; they may be well fed; they may be happy; but their souls are dead.
Yes, I’m sure you still have your Canada’s Happy Province licence plate screwed to the front bumper of your car. Perhaps you even have the letters reversed—you got everything else reversed—so we can all read it in our rearview mirrors to remind us just how happy we are.
I have written a letter or two to this esteemed paper on matters political, harping and prating, as you say, but on the matter of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the greatest anticlimax in our history, as I sometimes think of it—if I think of it at all—you may be confusing me with this paper’s long-time political columnist, who wrote a fine piece on that anniversary date, April Fool’s 1974, in reference to the 1948 Referendum and Confederation in 1949. It bears repeating, and I quote: “On the final ballot, Newfoundlanders voted against joining Canada but what we said didn’t matter a tinker’s dam. We are nothing. We are slaves. We are livestock. We are fools. We are part of Canada today simply because we were driven out of one garden and into another like a ragged herd of brute beasts. It was by this means that we were discharged as a colony of Britain and conscripted as a province of Canada. By the most basic, blatant and odious backstabbing of ‘democracy’ there is. By an interference with the ballot boxes. That was twenty-five years ago. What difference does it make today? What difference does it make if, twenty-five years ago, we were transferred against our wishes like a herd of livestock from one owner to another? Answer, you sheep! What is your answer? Perhaps to say: ‘What the hell. Don’t worry about it.’ Or perhaps: ‘This is the invisible load that has been weighing on Newfoundland for twenty-five years.’”
Well, there’s not much I can add to that, except to say that the load weighing on me goes back fifty years, to 1934, and may be twice as heavy. But what is your answer, Mr. Anon.? There are no groundhogs in Newfoundland, but there are plenty of sheep—and plenty of Newfoundland dogs. So maybe you’ll recognize this, since you’re so fond of Recognitions.
A political cartoon by one John Doyle appeared on a broadsheet in England in 1832 depicting our first Legislative Assembly as a bunch of Newfoundland dogs—Landseers, they look like. “New Legislative Assembly, Newfoundland, the Speaker Putting the Question: ‘As many as are of that opinion say…Bow! Of the contrary…Wow! The Bows have it.’” It was called “the Bow-Wow Parliament” for a long while thereafter. But, as it turned out, the real Bow-Wow Parliament was not elected till 1932, one hundred years later—Lord Amulree’s Newfoundland dogs—and you, you—yes, I recognize you, I know you’re a political man, Mr. Anon., I know who you are, though I didn’t think there were any of you left—you were one of them. You were a member of what our penultimate prime minister, Richard Squires, called the “bought Legislature”—in that diary that Smallwood didn’t get his hands on. Squires knew a few things about buying and selling, though I don’t think he would have sold the country down the drain.
Now I know there’s more than a good bit of Lord Amulree’s Newfoundland dog in the whole bloody lot of us—what other people on earth have two dogs named after them?—but tell me, Mr. Anon., I want to know, why, fifty years ago, all of you were lured by that old siren call, that old colonial lullaby, and all of you voted to rejoin the Old Colony Club. Why did the whole Bow-Wow Parliament lie down and roll over like a bunch of snivelling, slavering, quivering dogs? What is your answer, Mr. Anon.? Answer, you dog! What is your answer? No…I don’t expect to get an answer. You didn’t have a word to say then, and I don’t think you’ll have anything to say now.
Yours truly,
Brendan Harnett
8. FLOWER HILL
Westron wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I were in my bed again!
—Anon.
When Elaine’s father died and left her the family house on Flower Hill, she said she saw it as a sign. She decided right then and there that this was the time and place to do what she’d been wanting to do all her life—open a flower shop. I still hadn’t been inside the shop, but I had driven by, stopped across the street, in fact, and read the large and busy hand-painted sign. The shop itself was called Flower Hill, and the sign, planted on the lawn, said, “Flowers…and more,” followed by a long list that included vitamins and herbs.
Yesterday, my day off, on the pretext of giving Anton an opportunity to replenish his own herb and vitamin supply—his “Funk Pharmacy,” as he calls it, after Casimir Funk, the obscure Polish-American biochemist who supposedly discovered vitamins—I went along with him to see Elaine’s shop.
Anton refused to drive so we walked all the way across town from Churchill Park: uphill through the Belvedere Cemetery, up Newtown Road, down Parade Street, past the small two-storey house where Elaine’s father grew up, across the old university campus near Fort Townsend, and then across Harvey Road to the steps leading to Long’s Hill. I walked down the steps while Anton lingered near the top, taking in one of the best views of the harbour and the Narrows in all of St. John’s—and also of all the tall buildings blocking the downtowners’ harbour view. It was here that Anton’s incredulous head-shaking began.
He turned and walked a short ways down the Harvey Road sidewalk and looked over the iron railing at the large vacant lot directly below, which was adjacent to the red-brick Presbyterian church, the Kirk. A decade or more ago a developer had applied to build a condominium on this spot, where an elementary school had burned down years ago, but was turned down by city hall because he wanted to build it too high—perhaps the only instance of this kind of high-minded low-level thinking at city hall in the past thirty years. Hardly enough to c
heer Anton up, I thought.
He had turned his back to the harbour now and was shaking his head at the truly ugly office building right in front of his face. It had been built on top of the old Paramount Theatre, where, in 1953, Elaine’s mother and father had gone to a show on their first date, and afterward for a late-night snack at the Candlelight restaurant. Twenty years later, the theatre’s concrete roof cracked one night during another show, and the building was evacuated. Two days later, the roof collapsed altogether and the structure was condemned.
I walked back up the steps and looked at the empty storefront where the old Candlelight restaurant used to be. Next door was Gin’s restaurant, still in operation but looking, as usual, just as empty and forgotten as the Candlelight, though it was lunchtime and there was an OPEN sign in the plate-glass window. I glanced in through the window and saw a Chinese family—perhaps the owners—eating lunch in one of the bright red booths. An old-fashioned jukebox glowed like a candlelit shrine against the rear wall. This restaurant had been there for as long as I could remember, had survived all the new restaurant openings and closings, the razing and building, the fires and assorted acts of God, changes in culinary fashion and taste, though I had no idea who, if anyone, ever patronized the place. It looked like a restaurateur’s version of Heartbreak Hotel.
We walked down the steps together, then down Long’s Hill and along Livingstone Street, behind the bunker-like city hall and the new office tower, hotel, and convention centre. A whole neighbourhood of streets had been razed from this site, which was still half empty, waiting for progress to wave its magic wand once more. At the back of the hotel, Anton began to shake his head rather fiercely and sputtered a few harsh words into the raw wind that was funnelling up the hill between the glass towers.
He spent a long time staring at a blasty-boughed evergreen set in a concrete box, an evergreen transformer that was emitting a loud hum, and a tall, white, vertical fuel tank that looked like a rocket. The tank and the transformer were enclosed inside a chain-link fence. Anton sized them all up as if committing them to memory, an exhibit of installations devoid of art, an exhibit for the prosecution in some enlightened future court of correction where those philistines of urban planning and design would be tried and found grievously guilty.
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