The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  Certainly, the one man whose life was most at risk that night was Sir Richard Squires. He kept out of sight for as long as possible. But when he tried to leave the building, protected by an ecumenical brigade of clergy and loyal politicians, someone spotted him. Every way he turned, his path was blocked. The crowd, barely restrained by pleas from senior police officers, hurled abuse.

  The stalemate lasted for an hour. Squires was cornered. Now the crowd seemed uncertain what to do, milling mindlessly around the preachers, the police, the politicians, the prime minister. Some were loudly “advocating violence,” according to the press reports on April 6. And then Squires and his protectors made their move—headed for the sanctuary of a nearby private home, the Connolly residence at 66 Colonial Street.

  Once inside, Squires wisely kept on going, straight through the ground floor of the house towards the back rooms. A clergyman, according to the Telegram reporter on the scene, “had the premier make his exit from the back of the Connolly house to come over fences to a Bannerman Street house [a short block away] and without delay placed him in a taxi.”

  It was an image that would endure: the prime minister of the dominion scurrying through the darkness, through backyards, clambering over fences, to escape the wrath of the people who had elected him and who now blamed him for their idleness, their poverty, their hopelessness.

  Thus the political autonomy of Newfoundland entered a death spiral from which it would not recover for seventeen years. Any hope of continued nationhood died in the crush that afternoon.

  WHATEVER sense of obligation towards the devastated communities of the south coast still existed at the end of 1929, it had, by April 1932, been overwhelmed by the more immediate financial crisis in St. John’s. Now the spectacle of a mob attacking the Colonial Building—smashing windows, looting offices and liquor depots, systematically demolishing a piano in Bannerman Park—would, in the minds of bureaucrats and bankers and politicians, overwhelm whatever images remained from nature’s rampage through forty vulnerable villages, twenty-eight months earlier.

  While those earlier events, described by one anonymous Newfoundland writer as the “gaunt tragedy” of 1929, might have bolstered the moral strength of the dominion’s position in the Commonwealth, there is no evidence that the particulars of the south coast disaster factored into the appeals for help from the banks or the governments of Canada and Britain in 1932.

  The death, the injuries, the illnesses; more than a million dollars of damage to productive property; the devastation of the island’s most important economic resource, the fishery; more than a third of the population now directly dependant on relief—all human factors that somehow failed to figure in the fiscal and political equations. Instead, there was consistent hectoring about the dole, invariably framed in moral terms—economic helplessness rising from an absence of initiative combined with low intelligence. Newfoundlanders, according to one contemporary politician, didn’t have the brains to recognize political talent even when “a good man” stepped up to help them.20

  At the Imperial Economic Conference of Commonwealth leaders in Ottawa in 1932, the earthquake and tsunami didn’t seem to merit a mention as factors in Newfoundland’s grim financial situation. The overwhelming preoccupation of Sir Richard Squires and Peter Cashin, of Sir Percy Thompson, J.H. Thomas and Neville Chamberlain, was the confidence of banks and the credit ratings of Commonwealth dominions. And tactics.

  It was the beginning of the end of self-government for the island.

  And it could be that in the context of fresh memories about the most savage war in human history, a collapse of Western capitalism, and rampant poverty and unemployment throughout the developed world, it was easy to ignore twenty-seven (soon to be twenty-eight) deaths and the suffering of ten thousand people in a place that never made the news, that nobody important ever had to think about.

  By the end of 1932, Squires’s political career was finished. His government had been replaced by a perhaps potentially more honest, but seemingly more confused and impotent administration, led by . . . it didn’t really matter anymore. Moses, Jesus and Muhammad would have been equally perplexed by the challenges facing this remote society. One prominent Newfoundland politician, publicly and quite seriously, called for the emergence of a Mussolini. “If a man with a soul encased in steel, experienced and not under forty years old, appeared on the political horizon in this country today as a Mussolini, I would support him with all my strength.”21

  In the absence of a Mussolini, Newfoundlanders got a committee of bureaucrats and recycled politicians—an appointed commission of government, effectively controlled from England. For fifteen years, Newfoundland would be governed by seven unelected people, four of them (including the chairman) from the British public service. The attitude with which the British commissioners approached their task was encapsulated in a comment recorded in the Dominions Office in London on September 2, 1933, as the political future of the island was being hammered out: “The political life of the island was corrupt from top to bottom, as the main object of the individual politician and the individual elector was to get what each could out of the public till.”22

  SIR John Hope Simpson arrived on the island in February 1934. A former British MP and civil administrator, he had been comfortably retired when he heard about the crisis in Newfoundland. All the former British colonies seemed to be having problems—financial problems from the First World War, the Great Depression. But this remote dominion was facing bankruptcy. And that was a threat for everyone, including Britons.

  It was a challenge that a long-time loyal public servant could not resist. He was to become commissioner for natural resources, potentially one of the most influential positions in the new government. For him, the only hope for Newfoundland was to find ways to diversify the economy to reduce the dependency on fishing. It was fairly obvious to him: build up other economic sectors, like agriculture and forestry. There also seemed to be a limited but strong mining industry with significant potential for expansion.

  Sir John felt the long-term solutions to the problems in Newfoundland should have been obvious to anyone with knowledge of public service systems and familiarity with backward places—new industry for sure, but equally important was a renewed spirit of industrious resolve by ordinary people.

  Newfoundlanders were a proud, potentially heroic folk, as they’d demonstrated in the Great War. The best of British stock. Democratic politics had failed them. What the people needed now was competent administration, which educated Englishmen were very good at, as they had demonstrated masterfully in the Indian subcontinent, where Sir John Hope Simpson had spent nearly twenty useful years.

  But his long career in the British foreign service—India, Palestine, Greece—would have stamped what was fundamentally a “liberal” tendency in politics with certain prejudices about people and their needs. He was compassionate, but also a strong believer in traditional virtues, like enterprise and pluck.

  There were many reasonable explanations for the failure of the dominion. But failure never justifies a feeling of defeat. This was the challenge facing Sir John and the other members of the new commission government. Rekindle confidence. Get the ordinary dole-corrupted Newfoundlander off his ass.

  And perhaps if he’d had twenty years to spend in Newfoundland, Sir John might have made a difference. But he’d be there for only thirty months. He would become familiar with entrenched and crippling poverty and its awful consequences. Malnutrition. Illness. Tuberculosis was rampant. To catch it was to die. The death rate from the disease was by far the highest rate anywhere in the so-called developed world. There were also recorded deaths from starvation. Rickets and beriberi were commonplace, especially in the more remote settlements. These were some of the reasons why one-third of the population was on the dole, with no immediate prospects for getting off it.

  For Sir John, home would be, for the duration of his stay, the Newfoundland Hotel. His wife, Lady Mary Jane (known to acquainta
nces as Quita), was much impressed by their accommodations (“heavenly” linen and “rose du Barry silk eiderdowns”). “We are,” she enthused, “much more luxurious than at home.”23

  The physical grandeur of the island was, of course, inspiring. But the poverty, seen up close, was profoundly distressing. They’d have to have been senseless not to notice the sight, the sound, the smell of it. You couldn’t miss it, especially in St. John’s, where the poor were more conspicuous and noisier.

  And on the day they docked from England, mingling with the dignitaries waiting to receive them, they saw “a crowd of poor folk—pitifully poor and half starved, they looked.” Lady Hope Simpson was aghast. “The accounts of the condition of the people are simply appalling. They are so apathetic—they have suffered for so long that there seems to be no energy in them.”24

  The time she’d spend in Newfoundland would only reinforce her first impressions. “Work among these people is most disheartening. They have been practically serfs and have no traditions—no moral impetus. They are apparently charming to meet—very friendly, but there it ends.”

  Sir John and Lady Hope Simpson would eventually find small grounds for optimism. They toured the scenery. They made friends. And they might have been intrigued had they met another married couple, young people, Americans still in their twenties, also drawn to Newfoundland by a belief that the island’s natural resources could transform the place.

  Donald Poynter, an engineer from New Jersey, had arrived a few months earlier and was settling into a little town on the south coast, a place the new commissioner would soon get to know and, however briefly, see as part of a solution to the economic problems at the core of Newfoundland’s political collapse.

  The town was St. Lawrence. And the project that brought Donald Poynter to the place was exactly the kind of venture the new commissioner would be encouraging while he was there. A mining operation.

  It was already up and running. That was a spot of good news. But St. Lawrence was a long way from St. John’s, and the commissioner would be halfway through his mission in the distant island before he’d get to see, at first hand, what was really going on there.

  Four

  The Cooperation

  21.

  ST. LAWRENCE, NEWFOUNDLAND

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1933

  FOR a couple of Methodists fresh out of Nutley, New Jersey, it must have been a scene straight from the Middle Ages, this Roman Catholic performance. The mournful singing; the timeless weathered faces gazing raptly on the man at the front, magisterial in purple vestments appropriate for a commemoration of the dead; back turned to the people; wheeling and gesturing, genuflecting, rising, holding above him the totems of the faith, the round white disk, the golden chalice; all the while muttering as if he were alone, in a private world, communing privately with God.

  The two Protestants didn’t recognize the words but assumed they were Latin. They knew that much about Catholics and their rituals. There were gruesome scenes of torture and crucifixion on the surrounding walls. Candles flickered, casting eerie shadows on the lurking statuary.

  Donald and Urla Crammond Poynter knew vaguely why they were there. Fascinated, they had listened at the Giovanninis’ boarding house, where they were living, to quiet references to the event that was being mourned at this commemorative Mass.1

  And their astonishment was even greater when this priest, this Father Thorne, finally set his things aside, strode to the pulpit and acknowledged that they were all there together with a single purpose—to remember twenty-eight dead people and thousands who were ill and grieving and suffering the aftermath of an earthquake and a tidal wave. But they were also there in the spirit of thanksgiving, that their own community, St. Lawrence, had been spared the loss of life. Property demolished, yes, but as anyone could see around them even after just four years, property can be replaced.

  How could the Poynters not have heard? An earthquake? And then they had a renewed and deeper understanding of the isolation of this place, their new home, the distance they had travelled from the thriving precincts of Brooklyn, from dizzying Manhattan, from the bucolic gentility of the countryside and small towns of New Jersey. Another world entirely, this New-Found-Land. How could they not have known about the suffering of this place, now so vivid to them, so recently, in 1929?

  And yet, strange to say, the tragedy that had struck four years before they got here was now partly theirs by virtue of their participation in the communal grieving, which was also a celebration of recovery—a rebirth in which Donald A. Poynter was determined to play a major role.

  After the Communion, after the members of the congregation, with the exception of the two Protestants, shuffled to the cloth-covered railing at the front, knelt, received a wafer from the priest, mumbled gratitude, rose, turned and made their way back to their pews, Poynter recognized many of the faces. Hard, craggy faces temporarily softened by the sacrament, the memories of lost loved ones. Men from the mine. Or to be more candid, as he was in private moments with his new bride, from the glorified trench that he, Donald Poynter, would help, hell or high water, to turn into a mine.

  HOW long had it really been since their arrival? Just over two months? It felt like a lifetime, and in a way, it was a lifetime, since they had travelled through time to a place that seemed to be a century removed from Nutley and everything they remembered from the United States, to this frontier country, the entire dominion with a population only two-thirds that of Jersey City.

  No roads. Everything by water. There was a railroad, if you could call it that, but even to get to the train you had to take a boat. Getting to St. Lawrence had involved what seemed like an endless boat ride along the coast, stopping at small places on the way. Charming little places with romantic names and friendly people who gathered on the docks to see the strangers on the boat, to collect their parcels and their mail. François. Hermitage. Belleoram. Lamaline. Donald Poynter loved boats, and he would have enjoyed the journey more if he hadn’t been in such a hurry to get to the destination, to start the work, to turn Walter Seibert’s dream into a reality.

  And what a destination it was. St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. A speck of a place on the end of a boot-shaped peninsula thrusting southwards in defiance of the unforgiving North Atlantic. Population nine hundred, give or take. No streets, but a few roads and cow paths between quaint houses crowded round the harbour. A few stores. A school. Glowering over the whole scene, this cavernous church.

  And all around, the knobby hills, rocky barrens softened by ponds and streams and soggy bogs, gale-stunted evergreens. Pale green lichen and grey moss mottling the outcroppings of granite. Here and there the sparkle of fluorspar, pink and purple. But all-defining rock, everywhere you looked—you couldn’t survive here for any length of time without becoming as rugged as the rocky landscape, unyielding as the ocean. It was something he would have to keep in mind, this insight into the local character.

  He studied the faces of the men returning from the Communion rail. He would soon know them all—the names, the families, the family connections—for the venture at Black Duck mine was starting small. Just thirty miners, if you could call them that. Fishing had been their occupation for centuries before this slump, which was caused, as far as they could tell, by that tsunami and that other, greater earthquake originating back near where Donald Poynter came from: Wall Street. As foreign and mysterious to him as Newfoundland, and as challenging to him as mining was for these south coast fishermen.

  Donald Poynter was an engineer. And an athlete. He’d gone through Bucknell University in Pennsylvania on a football scholarship. He wasn’t much interested in high finance—only what financiers could do for (or to) the people who depended on them. He’d learned that lesson bitterly. His father’s lighting business back in the States had gone under thanks to the calamity on Wall Street in 1929.

  A weird coincidence: the earthquake, the tsunami, the market crash, he and Urla being here now, in this unlikely place. And an ev
en weirder coincidence—how he’d come to be involved with Walter.

  It had been through their mothers. They shared a German heritage, and after the two women met some years back, in Brooklyn, they stayed in touch. Their sons were close in age. Walter had embarked on a career in high finance. Donald wasn’t happy in his engineering work. When their mothers introduced them, he was with a company that was building a boardwalk for visitors to Staten Island.2 It was a job that, in his mind, was literally going nowhere. He quickly became enthused when Walter explained the industrial importance of fluorspar and described his potential mining properties, out on a rocky place in the middle of the Atlantic, past the edge of North America.

  Poynter was keen to go there, and the young woman he was about to marry, Urla Crammond, also saw the move as an adventure and a way for both of them to escape their overbearing families. It came as no surprise to them when their families strenuously opposed the move to this godforsaken place—which, from what they could learn about it, seemed to have a lot in common with Siberia. Urla, they insisted, was too delicate for such a risky venture.

  The couple packed up and headed off anyway. The ocean voyage from Brooklyn to St. Lawrence was a kind of honeymoon.

  NEWFOUNDLAND was, the climate notwithstanding, a warm and exotic place. From the moment they had disembarked they’d found friendly faces, unselfish curiosity, an English dialect that was curiously accented and peppered with vocabulary and expressions and syntax that defied immediate interpretation. The people of the south coast were obviously poor, and now that he knew more about the recent history, Poynter was amazed by the forbearance, the absence of complaint. He was determined that as he and Walter Seibert prospered, so too would these worthy people.

  Seibert’s project was evolving slowly, but the vision was impressive. It was large and it was audacious in the tradition of America’s most successful enterprises. It demanded a certain pioneering perseverance and conscientious ruthlessness. But Seibert had persuaded him that the place was a perfect testing ground for the American pioneering spirit—approach all obstacles, be they geographic, environmental or human, as challenges to be surmounted by whatever means became available. That ethos would make everybody wealthy in the long run.