The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  The file does not have Seibert’s answer. But by the spring of 1938, it was obvious to everyone, including Cornelius Kelleher, that progress—slow and modest, to be sure—could no longer be delayed.

  DONALD Poynter’s time in the United States would have been frustrating, given what he undoubtedly knew of what was going on back in St. Lawrence. His reason for leaving Newfoundland was mostly personal. His wife’s complex illness was unresponsive even to the world-class treatment available to her in New York. She wasn’t getting better. He had an infant daughter, a reminder of more blissful times.

  Poynter wouldn’t have been getting much satisfaction from his work in the States—Seibert apparently kept him busy exploring other possibilities for fluorspar development.9 But it was a far cry from the challenge and innovation that had kept him energized in Newfoundland. And from what he could surmise, there were serious problems brewing in St. Lawrence.

  It should not have come as a surprise when, in 1937, the St. Lawrence miners hired a lawyer to challenge that undefined “back time” withheld from their wages. Under legal pressure, Seibert promptly put a stop to the practice.10

  Men whom Poynter respected for their forbearance—the willingness to put up with harsh conditions in the workplace, low wages, irregularity in paydays—now were growing confrontational. The new boss, Kelleher, clearly lacked the tactfulness of Doc Smith, who had always seemed to calm them down. Sooner or later, the consequences would show up in productivity. But that was Seibert’s problem. Poynter had enough to worry about in his personal affairs.

  Then came the uproar in June 1937. Claude Howse was a reasonable man. For him to blow his stack was persuasive evidence that Kelleher was seriously screwing up. And Donald Poynter would not have been surprised when, early in 1938, Seibert asked him to pack his bags and return to Newfoundland. He would be, at first, the assistant manager. But he could be reasonably confident that before long, he’d be running the whole show.

  As of March, he was back living in St. Lawrence, at the Giovannini boarding house. And one year later, in March 1939, he was boss.11

  IT WAS clearly an unexpected blow for Kelleher. A letter he wrote to Tom Pike in August 1939 displays surprising wistfulness about a place and people who had come to see him as an unreasonable bully.

  Pike, the First World War veteran and former relieving officer, was now working for the corporation and had obviously become Kelleher’s friend—had even named a son Cornelius in 1938. Kelleher makes reference to this in his letter, and to a family in Lawn who also named a little boy Cornelius. And to Pat Tarrant in St. Lawrence, who named his daughter Fluorina when Kelleher, perhaps facetiously, suggested it.

  There are also brief references, tinged with unsurprising bitterness, to Poynter, Doc Smith and, predictably, Claude Howse. But Kelleher sends warm greetings to Father Thorne and Adolph Giovannini and the nuns who ran the local school. “Give my regards to the folks there that you think I should like to greet.”12

  He commented on his warm feeling of satisfaction when a crowd gathered on the wharf when he was leaving and cheered lustily as he sailed away. It didn’t occur to him that the cheer was, perhaps, from a feeling of relief to see him go.

  The situation in the workplace would gradually improve. But the atmosphere of confrontation would never dissipate for long.

  26.

  BY 1939, a new company—called ANF, for American Newfoundland Fluorspar—the brainchild of yet another American investor, had started sinking a new shaft for what would turn into a significant addition to the local mining scene. The Director mine would have a major impact on the region during its long and productive lifespan.

  From day one, miners for ANF enjoyed working conditions that swiftly became the envy of men in the Seibert mines. They had up-to-date equipment. They wore protection for their skulls and feet. The company made underground rain gear available. The manager was someone everybody knew—Warren “Doc” Smith.

  The new mine would set workplace standards, but it was circumstances in the wider world that brought dramatic improvements to the lives of workers in St. Lawrence.

  In 1939, with war in Europe looming, the strategic significance of fluorspar was lost on nobody, least of all producers of steel and aluminum. In December 1939, the American proprietor of ANF sold out to the Aluminum Company of Canada, Alcan. The mining operation dropped the word “American” from its name. It would be known, throughout the coming years, as Newfluor, for Newfoundland Fluorspar Company, or just plain Alcan.

  The Director mine had started out as an open pit, but by late 1939 it had underground workings from a shaft 150 feet deep.13 That was only the beginning.

  EVEN with the influence of the new mine and the example of how working conditions could and should be upgraded at the Seibert mines, improvements were slow in coming. Finally, in the late summer of 1939, miners from the Seibert and Alcan operations formed a union—the St. Lawrence Miners and Labourers Protective Union. It was, in the beginning, a low-key advocate for change. The first president had never been a miner. He was, in fact, a local businessman.

  From the start, the union made reasonable demands in a reasonable tone of voice. Nevertheless, Donald Poynter made his disapproval clear almost from the outset. Maybe it was philosophical. Like so many in his generation, he was leery of labour unions and the potential they presented for conflict, disruption. Perhaps it was from a sense of what was coming.

  Poynter would have understood and maybe even sympathized with the miners’ motivation. But Seibert was the boss. Despite his early promises that Poynter and Doc Smith would become shareholding partners in the corporation, Walter Seibert was still the sole owner, accountable to no one. The influence of local managers like Poynter was limited.

  Poynter’s job was to run productive, profitable mines, which from his perspective would be good for everybody. His preference was to work out grievances man to man, to improve the workplace and the wages as circumstances allowed. He believed in firm, reasonable dialogue, one on one. But the balance of power, one on one, was always going to favour the boss. He knew as well as anyone that with Seibert, promises and handshakes were no longer good enough. But Donald Poynter, no matter what his private disposition, was Seibert’s man in Newfoundland. He had a job to do.

  The creation of the union was a signal, and Poynter got the message: times were changing. But if the company’s affairs were now to be determined by an adversarial dynamic—well, he was once a football player. He could butt heads as well as any of the soccer-playing miners of St. Lawrence.

  THE union demands were swift in coming. Formal recognition. Bargaining. Better wages, paid promptly, in cash. Health and sanitation. Drinking water was a problem. Years of poverty had left many miners suffering from malnutrition. The ferocious dust was unavoidable. Combined with unsanitary conditions in the workplace, these factors left St. Lawrence miners more vulnerable than others to the scourge that was then sweeping Newfoundland: tuberculosis. And the standard treatment for TB didn’t seem to work for St. Lawrence miners. It was worrisome. The men were already complaining of difficulty breathing, loss of appetite, lack of energy. Chronic stomach ailments. Maybe through negotiation between equal parties, there could be a start in addressing these persistent problems.

  Presented with specific demands, Poynter stalled and stonewalled. He could truthfully argue that he was making reasonable improvements if and when and as quickly as he could. But the changes weren’t coming fast enough to mollify the workers. By April 1940, when negotiations with Seibert’s outfit bogged down after months of talk, the corporation’s miners replied collectively by walking off the job again.

  The commission government in St. John’s ordered a magisterial inquiry. There was now a war on. Fluorspar was vital to the war effort. It was critical for the production of aluminum and steel. The union wanted recognition and a contract. Neither should have been difficult. But the company position at the hearings was defensive. Contract or no contract, wages were improvi
ng, the workplace was improving.

  On sanitation in the workplace, Donald Poynter was unable to resist an offensively sarcastic observation: “When St. Lawrence will take an interest in its own sanitation and drinking water and show evidence of this interest in their own homes, this company will gladly give them the equal in their working conditions.”14

  The remark was deeply insulting, and it wouldn’t be the last time that Donald Poynter belittled people who complained about health hazards in the workplace. But his mood in 1940 should, perhaps, be judged in the light of pressures he was under in his private life as well as on the job. His wife, Urla, was by then slowly dying in a sanatorium in Wyckoff, New Jersey, from an illness she had probably contracted in Newfoundland.15 Poynter was under constant criticism from his family and in-laws. Against their wishes, he’d taken his new bride to what they considered to be a perilous and backward wilderness. Now they were convinced that his recklessness had destroyed his family, and they didn’t hesitate to remind him of their earlier misgivings.

  Poynter bore his family’s complaints in silence. And now he was diminishing the complaints of his employees, who were also his neighbours and, in many cases, friends.

  The role of manager or boss in a small company town, where almost everyone is either related or at least acquainted, makes for complex challenges—constant tension between a human need to “fit in” and a political requirement to stand apart. Poynter walked a kind of tightrope in St. Lawrence, and the need for balance would only grow more acute as years went by.

  THE magistrate’s report, when it finally appeared later that year, was silent on many of the miners’ main complaints and, in a startling expression of paternalism, advised them to be friendlier. “To succeed [the union] must be prepared to discard its warlike actions . . . [and] frame its demands in a reasonable and intelligent manner and be prepared to discuss them in friendly co-operation with the Corporation.”16

  If the miners needed a reminder that they were going to have to fight harder for improvements in the workplace—and in their still-precarious lives—this was it. They also might have been aware of a report, released that same year, by an English expert on labour relations, who had been commissioned by the Newfoundland government to assess the growing militancy among the island’s workers.

  T.K. Liddell was contemptuous of Newfoundland, its people and, particularly, its industrial workers. They were inefficient and undisciplined and “easily led into trouble,” he declared. “The majority . . . have yet to learn what trade unionism is . . . its claims, its rights, its duties and its obligations.”17

  The effect of Liddell’s bias was implicit in the official government response to the complaints of workers in St. Lawrence in 1940 and long afterwards—which was, for the most part, to ignore them. The noise of war had deafened government to all but the most basic issue bothering the miners: money.

  The deafness would linger on, in varying degrees, for another quarter century.

  IN August 1940, Seibert’s corporation finally signed a formal contract with the new union. The miners got less than they’d been looking for. Poynter gave up more than he’d intended. He might have thought that it was the end of acrimony, a return to cordiality and cooperation. He couldn’t have been more mistaken.

  Mechanization was coming, but it was slow. The obsolete dry “hammers” were still prevalent. The lack of health care in the area—doctors, nurses, hospitals—added to the urgency. With no access to treatment for injury and illness, there had to be a focus on prevention. Health and safety. Quality of life. But these were only concepts, abstract issues. The official attitude seemed to be that future perils are impossible to contemplate in the here and now.

  In the St. Lawrence mines, however, where the men spent their days and nights, the here and now was full of concrete warnings about perils that, if ignored, would inevitably lead to pain and worse.

  The miners now had some understanding of their potential as a group. But the larger factor giving them new clout would come from dramatic circumstances unfolding in the world around them.

  27.

  BY 1940, Newfoundland and Britain were at war with Nazi Germany and its allies. Canada was in it. Much of Europe was either on the other side or neutral, occupied by the enemy or about to be reduced to ruins. It was just a matter of time before the United States was drawn in to the affray.

  Whether for the fighting overseas or production back at home, ordinary working people now had unprecedented value. Seemingly unlimited employment options were driven by wartime construction projects, including several important military bases that were soon to be established in Newfoundland by the Americans.

  Newfoundland fluorspar was vital to the war effort. It was essential for the production of steel, aluminum and chemicals. Mining fluorspar was recognized as the equivalent of military service. In fact, St. Lawrence fluorspar had strategic uses so secret that only a few Newfoundlanders would ever hear about them.

  The Americans informed the government of Newfoundland they might need as much as fifty thousand tons of fluorspar a year for the duration of the war, maybe longer. Traditional European suppliers were now out of bounds, and American steel companies turned to Newfoundland. The US government offered loans for modernization and expansion of production. Walter Seibert suddenly was flush with funds to build modern new facilities, to upgrade equipment, to phase out the old “dry” drills responsible for the lethal clouds of dust.

  He could even afford to be sympathetic to concerns about health and safety, but he felt those were matters under the control of governments, dictated by laws and regulations. Which was true. But it was also true that Newfoundland had no government, in the normal democratic sense. And practically speaking, there were no laws relevant to the health and safety of miners, no useful regulations. There were only vague, outdated rules and little evidence of the ability or disposition to enforce them.

  DONALD Poynter took a break early in 1941 to visit the head office and the family in New Jersey. Seibert was fretting. The once cooperative Newfoundlanders were becoming hostile. But Poynter’s primary concern at this point was that his wife, Urla, was on her deathbed.

  In his absence, and apparently without his knowledge, there was a quiet coup within the union in St. Lawrence. There had been growing opposition to the leadership of the local president, Patrick Aylward, a non-miner, too easygoing by far and much too polite in his dealings with Poynter. Leading the rebellion was the local’s secretary treasurer, Aloysius Turpin—a miner and a carpenter, and in the view of management, a mouthy troublemaker. Aylward, in fact, had urged Poynter to get rid of Turpin. Do us both a favour: fire him. But Poynter had refused, saying there had to be a better reason for dismissing Al Turpin than the fact that he was stirring up his brothers in the union local. That better reason would soon arise.

  While Poynter was away that January, in 1941, Turpin led a putsch that ended with the defeat of Patrick Aylward. Al became the new president and promptly dissolved the St. Lawrence Miners and Labourers Protective Union and replaced it with a new one: the St. Lawrence Workers’ Protective Union. The name hadn’t changed much, but the corporation was about to discover that there had been a dramatic change in attitude and tactics.

  The new union formally came into existence on March 15. Two days later, Turpin signalled the beginning of a fractious new dynamic in relations between St. Lawrence miners and their managers.

  28.

  ST. LAWRENCE, NEWFOUNDLAND

  MONDAY, MARCH 17, 1941

  ALOYSIUS Turpin must have been in a very good mood pulling on his socks that morning. He was a carpenter by trade. It was a Monday, a workday, but he’d not be showing up today. Instead, he’d don a clean shirt and Sunday trousers. It was St. Patrick’s Day.

  The feast day of the Irish patron saint was a day of celebration wherever there were Irish men and women. And there were Irishmen and Irishwomen everywhere, especially on St. Patrick’s Day, and especially in a place like St. Lawr
ence, Newfoundland, where even people with names like Etchegary and Giovannini could truthfully claim an Irish heritage.

  Invariably, March 17 fell in the middle of Lent. It was, traditionally, like Mardi Gras—a time to go a little wild, to leaven the long, grim period of sacrifice and penitence. It was therapeutic and it was tradition. But St. Patrick’s Day was not a public holiday. It wasn’t even a holy day of obligation in the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church. At best, in St. Lawrence, it had once been a “church day.”

  By tacit agreement, in the old days, the people, the Irish and the almost-Irish, treated St. Patrick’s Day as if it were a Sunday. They didn’t work because they weren’t obliged to. As fishermen, they were essentially self-employed. So they took the day off and attended Mass. And then they let their hair down.

  This changed when the mining started. Tradition be damned. March 17 was another workday—unless, of course, it fell on a Sunday. Which it didn’t in 1941. And so, by the power vested in Al Turpin as president of the new St. Lawrence Workers’ Protective Union, an old tradition was about to be restored. St. Patrick’s Day was about to become a holiday again.

  He was sure that over the weekend, the membership had all agreed. They would begin the day, as called for by tradition, in church. He looked out a window to check the weather. It was clear and chilly. There had been a fall of snow over the weekend, and across the harbour, near the corporation offices, he could see men . . . shovelling.18

  Shovelling? Yes. Men shovelling snow. Union men . . . working.

  Surely an oversight. But maybe not. Poynter must have got to them. Al Turpin donned boots and coat and headed out for Mrs. Giovannini’s boarding house, where Poynter lived. Mr. Poynter wasn’t there. He must be at the office.