Into the Blizzard

by Michael Winter

  VICTORIA CROSS

  I picked up Eric Ellis’s diary and kept reading. Two days before Christmas, the Newfoundlanders learned that Tommy Ricketts had won the Victoria Cross—the only man in the regiment to do so. There was much cheering. On Christmas Day, the men were up early and took church parade. Some received holy communion. The officers appeared to have no use for the men. The King was not toasted. Mick Nugent was the only one to give a proper speech. On the whole, Eric Ellis wrote, the worst Christmas I ever spent.

  Mick Nugent was forty-two when he signed up. Black hair and brown eyes, he was married and had a family of twelve to support. He fell ill after Gallipoli and missed the Beaumont-Hamel catastrophe. In June of 1918, he was part of the sports day for the Newfoundland Regiment, overseeing a sideshow stall. He asked Hugh Anderson for advice on buying one hundred coconuts at Covent Garden for a coconut shying event. He survived the entire war.

  Matthew Brazil was another Newfoundlander who joined up early and lived. He was a miner, almost six feet tall, and weighed 165 pounds. From reading the records in the museum, I got the sense that Matthew Brazil enjoyed himself while he could, but also looked after the men that were in his company. One of those men was seventeen-year-old Tommy Ricketts. Brazil was wounded in the face and leg, had a scalded hand, and was gassed at the very end of the war. He was afflicted with recurring bouts of gonorrhea and was hospitalized because of it for eight solid months. Brazil, I imagined, took to heart Lead Belly’s bread-wagon song: “when the boys go over the top, he won’t be dodging shotgun shells but doing the eagle rock.”

  Captain Sydney Frost was the officer who wrote up the citation selecting Tommy Ricketts for the Victoria Cross. But he also put forward Brazil’s name, and it may have been decided by others in the British army that Matthew Brazil was not the man to represent the Newfoundland army and shake the King’s hand.

  EDWARD JOY

  I left the archives to walk around the city. I was looking at houses where a soldier had returned unharmed and, adjacent, the mourning family of a soldier who had perished. I thought about the way military operations get written about by civilians. The way historical events are treated with the bias of hindsight. The revisionism of one’s modern place and the translation of the past into an experience relevant to contemporary life. Even a forty-year-old describing the thrill and fear of a twenty-year-old. Who am I to judge and weigh and pooh-pooh?

  They loved it. The food was better. The hours at the front were not long. They saw the world. They brought home other perspectives. They broke the class system. Promotion was earned and not bestowed.

  A lot of the city has changed. There is a whole section in the center that was demolished in the 1960s and the great concrete bunker of City Hall was built. My first job after university was working with city planning. On the first of July the mayor had invited all municipal workers to join him in singing “O Canada.” But it was raining. The rain kept everyone indoors. Everyone except me. I felt patriotic and hang the weather, so I sang, in the rain, on the City Hall steps. I sang “O Canada” and then sang, for it was July first, the bits I remembered of the “Ode to Newfoundland.” The mayor and his aide finally did come down the stairs but they noticed I was alone. They turned around and walked away.

  I phoned the mayor about this, about being gutless and not singing, in the rain, with an employee. Who is this? he shouted into the phone, and I hung up. But the call was traced, and the next week I was handed my pink slip.

  I stood in front of City Hall and remembered that first job, and how I had realized then that the development of a city is methodical and planned. Scale models are built to attempt to predict traffic congestion and housing needs if certain economic factors occur. Buoyed with research, I thought too of Sergeant Edward Joy, who was one of the last of the Blue Puttees to go over to England with the Florizel. He was born and grew up on this hill, which was the central slum of St John’s, on a street that no longer exists. City Hall, Mile One Stadium and the two hotels stand on the hill that was Joy’s neighbourhood. His attestation papers describe his colouring as “fresh.” During his training in Scotland in early 1915, his conduct sheet is peppered with reprimands for being absent from tattoo, absent from church parade, fighting in barracks, absent from coal parade, drunk and disorderly, creating a disturbance in camp, using obscene language and violently resisting arrest. When I read these judgments I was filled with pride for the individual who could not be broken. Joy then fought for four years and saw action in Gallipoli and Beaumont-Hamel and Gueudecourt. He was decorated for bravery at Monchy and Marcoing (a bar to his Military Medal). My God, he survived everything. In a letter to his father, the chief staff officer wrote that “During an attack when his own officer was killed, Joy took charge of his platoon and showed the greatest courage and leadership in encouraging and leading his platoon. His personal example was the greatest asset to the whole company.”

  In May of 1918 Joy found himself returning to Newfoundland for four months on Blue Puttee leave. He was home, he was alive! He caught a cold while in St John’s and got more ill on the trip back to England in the reinforcement draft of late September. He disembarked in Devonport on 12 October 1918, wrapped in blankets. The blankets were returned to the ship. He died of pneumonia two days later, and is buried in the Plymouth cemetery.

  In January of 1919, Joy’s parents received their son’s medals and a letter which expressed regret that their son “will not be able to have the honour of wearing them.”

  SPANISH FLU

  Influenza is what killed Edward Joy, and it had spread through St John’s during the last year of the war. It went from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, much like I was walking now, and Edward Joy had returned home to catch it. The virus crept through the world killing more people than had died in four years of fighting. For twenty-four weeks during that summer and fall of 1918, the virus travelled through armies and civilians alike. It may have been the cause of the final collapse of the German army. It certainly prolonged the peace talks, as many of the officials detailing the negotiations became ill or were still recovering. The elderly, usually the first to be killed by the flu, were generally spared: they had survived the Russian flu of 1892, and so carried some resistance.

  This flu had a strange process: a cytokine storm caused those with a strong immune system to react more violently than those with a weak system. The bodies of fit young soldiers were struck at a greater rate than any other group. This was a puzzle. During peacetime, when someone is very sick they remain home and do not have much interaction with the general population. Those with milder symptoms continue on with their day. In this way, the milder strains of the flu get disseminated through the population while the more severe strains are treated in isolation, and those patients die at home.

  In the war, when a soldier was struck ill he was transported from the front to a hospital in the rear. Along this route he came into contact with many people before landing in quarantine. A soldier with mild symptoms remained where he was. Therefore the aggressive strain of the flu was passed around far more widely than the milder strains.

  The virus caused a violent reaction—and the stronger the immune system, the worse the reaction. So it killed the young. War governments censored the press, but in neutral Spain news about the outbreak was allowed to be published. The flu was called Spanish because the world heard of it mostly from Spain.

  I walked down to the harbour and saw a restored schooner from the White Fleet docked where the Florizel had docked a hundred years before. The Portuguese used to fish the Grand Banks and then tie up at the harbour right up into the 1980s. Tall wooden ships receiving provisions and the fishermen took rest in this lively port. There used to be a sign posted in Bannerman Park that said:

  PROIBIDO JOGAR FUTEBOL

  The Portuguese sided with the Allies in March of 1916, and a year later sent fifty-thousand men to the Western Front. Seven thousand were killed in the war. The hull of this vessel was now decked out in s
teel. I climbed aboard and stared at the city. It is always nice when you live by the sea to be on the water and look back on the place where you live. It makes you, for a moment, a stranger.

  I had a clear view of the courthouse on Water Street. The building looks exactly as it had when it was built in 1904. But I knew that every stone in the exterior of that building had been removed and sandblasted and repaired or replaced. This was where John Bennett had addressed the citizens of St John’s on the resolution recording its “inflexible determination.” A year later, from the Colonial Building near Bannerman Park, the fallen heroes of Beaumont-Hamel were honoured. There was a giant naval and military parade. In front of the Colonial Building, between the pillars on the top stone steps, were the German machine guns captured by the regiment at Gueudecourt. A parade assembled at the Church Lads’ Brigade and marched to the Colonial Building. “It was the largest gathering of citizens ever seen to assemble at the Colonial Building. And while honouring the dead there was much to be proud of.” The premier, Edward Morris, said that this celebration, he hoped, would inaugurate an anniversary to be cherished by future generations.

  Governor Davidson sent a message declaring his wish that July first become a national holiday for Newfoundland. This will be the day, Morris said, we celebrate, when our heroes fell facing their foe. He compared Beaumont-Hamel to the passing of Thermopylae for the Greeks and the holding of the Bridge by Horatius for the Romans.

  Davidson, educated in England, resorted to the history lessons of his school years, when the British Empire searched for classical examples of expansion that would excuse colonial behaviour. But he preached these values on the steps of a modern world devastated by these attitudes, to a population no longer convinced by this method of conduct.

  William Lloyd of the Opposition drummed up the proud reputation of being “better than the best.” He spoke of the war as a struggle of endurance, and brought up the submarine menace, and the tonnage problem.

  The band rendered “The Banks of Newfoundland” and the parade made a tour through the city, returning to the Church Lads’ Brigade Armoury where it was dispersed.

  Morris had written a letter to Prime Minister Borden praising the Canadians on their Jubilee—their fiftieth. Morris wrote that the Canadian people are their greatest resource.

  The very next year, 1 July 1918, was another mammoth parade but “very little bunting.” People came not to cheer but to remember their fallen sons. “They did not attend the parade to have a gay time.” The new governor, Charles Harris, insisted that it should be “primarily a commemoration of the fallen and not an occasion of rejoicing.” James Moore had suffered a gunshot wound to his head at Gallipoli and a gunshot wound to his thigh at Beaumont-Hamel. Both of his legs were sheered off below the knee by a shell at Gueudecourt. He spent a year at Wandsworth and then two artificial limbs were fixed for him and he was sent home. He was there, in his house at 31 Duckworth Street, all dressed and waiting for someone to come help him with his crutches, but he was forgotten for the parade.

  That was two years after Beaumont-Hamel. Beaumont-Hamel was to become Newfoundland’s defining moment as a nation. The historian Robert Harding writes about this attempt at celebrating the July Drive. Like Vimy for Canada, Beaumont-Hamel was our statement to the world that Newfoundland had arrived as an independent nation. The political powers were determined to make July first a day of nation-building.

  Until Confederation with Canada. And with confederation came a revisiting of the tragedy of Beaumont-Hamel. To what it is seen today—a symbol of how we lost a generation of young men who could have risen to power and made Newfoundland strong and viable. Instead, the destruction of the regiment was the beginning of the loss of our status as a self-governing nation. We sat on our bed, crutches at our side, waiting for someone to take us to the parade on the very day the rest of the nation celebrates Canada. And there we mourned our stripped independence.

  James Moore’s house was a five-minute walk from the Colonial Building.

  The war ended. On the next anniversary there was a terrific attendance at a shrine in Bannerman Park. The event was close to the signing of the Peace Treaty “in which,” the governor said, “we hope to find the inauguration of a finer and better age.” Newfoundland was not represented at that peace conference, but this celebration “has been the spontaneous act of the officers of the Regiment itself.”

  Charles Harris brought up Thucydides, who records a speech in which Pericles pronounced a eulogy over those who had fallen in one of the wars of the Athenian republic. “That was not an isolated event,” Harris said. “It was the regular practice of the Athenians, the most striking historic instance of a powerful democracy, to appoint a regular day in which they could commemorate the virtues of those who had given their lives for the State.”

  RICHARD SELLARS

  We often travel on the first of July to spend our summers in Newfoundland. We have a guidebook and I’ve tried naming all the wildflowers. Every year I learn the local names of all the things that bloom here, and then, through the winter, I forget them. Truth be told, I’ve even forgotten the family tree of the people who have owned this house, and I would have to consult this book to recall how Richard Sellars is related to the land I am now standing on.

  We bring on the plane to Newfoundland the potted Christmas tree we had in Toronto—kept alive through the winter—and plant it in the barren acre of grass behind our house. This way, our son will have a memory of his Toronto Christmases when he visits Newfoundland. “There,” he will one day say to his children at the height of summer, pointing to a grove of spruce and fir. “Those are my winters in Toronto.”

  Our house in Newfoundland dates to 1908. It was built so that the family of George Loveys could move out of his parents’ house. George and his brother Ormsby, who is listed in the census of 1912 as a carpenter, worked on it.

  When we bought the house it had no running water. We went to visit Nellie Loveys, ninety-seven years old, who had been born in the house. We told her we had a son whose first nights on earth, after being born in the hospital in St John’s, had been in the house she’d been born in. I asked her where the well was. Oh, she said, we always meant to dig a well.

  So what did you do for water? I asked, and she mentioned taking a bucket to the brook. I went to the brook at the back of the property and almost didn’t make it back. My feet found, hidden in the brambles, an old dry bed of stone where a brook had run many years before.

  The house is on a small parcel of land with community pasture in behind. To the west is land that used to have a house on it—you can see the foundation still and, in amongst the rocks, a ceramic door handle, a rusty hand-forged nail.

  We needed the land if we were to put in a well and a septic field. And so I set about hunting down who owned it.

  If you talk to the old people of a place, they will tell you very specific stories about who owns what and how fields were swapped—someone might need hay for a horse, while another family would like a vegetable garden. A bit of this kind of thing happened with this land. It is how I found the story of the Daltons and their uncle, Richard Sellars. I walked over the field of Richard Sellars where we had dug a well and rocked over the well and added good soil and planted the seeds I had collected from cemeteries all over the Western Front. I walked over this land and understood how the story of Richard Sellars had affected me, and I felt I should get to the origins of Newfoundland’s larger personal story. Which meant retracing the steps of Tommy Ricketts and where he lived and worked and loved and died.

  THE HOLLOWAY PHOTO

  In England, January 1919 was a dull and wet month. The mean temperature was below normal—the least number of days of sunshine since 1901. The first major snowfall of 1919 occurred in the first week. Heavy snow occurred in the Midlands and northern England, causing damage to telegraph wires in the north and a foot of snow to fall at Buxton, Derbyshire. The fog on 13 January made it impossible, at Dover, to see ten yards ahe
ad of you. It rained non-stop on January twentieth and there was hail every day at the end of the month. It was the most flooding in Southport since 1882. Near the end of the month there was another heavy snowfall.

  On 30 January, Tommy Ricketts and a large contingent of the Newfoundland Regiment left England aboard the Corsican. A week later, the ship’s captain asked if they should continue on to New Brunswick or Nova Scotia—the ship was delayed because of impenetrable ice. The minister of militia replied that the ship was to come into St John’s “as it was out of the question to take the soldiers so far out of their way and no arrangements had been made for transportation other than that for debarkation at this port.”

  The ship would have to steam south to get around the ice floe, and therefore would not arrive until late in the night. Because of this, the city holiday was postponed.

  The Corsican came into St John’s harbour the night of 7 February, a Friday. The next day the men were let off.

  Brigid Browne, in St John’s, wrote to her son studying in Toronto that they will have a great time when the boys come home. Ricketts, she wrote, is among them—our Victoria Cross. They are making up money to educate him. He belongs to a little place where there are no schools. He went back for the ammunition twice in the face of the German gunfire.

  Thomas Ricketts climbed out of a rowboat on the harbour apron a hero. The men carried him on their shoulders and placed him in a horse-drawn carriage. The horses were unhooked and men took the yoke and pulled him through the city. He stopped in at one house—the home of a doctor whose son Ricketts had seen die in the war—then continued on. He was asked to stay at the Crosbie Hotel but he insisted he return to his boarding house on Colonial Street. This was where he roomed before sailing off to war. He had been gone for a thousand days. He was nineteen years old and promoted to a sergeant.