Howse knew the Americans had a strategic interest in fluorspar and were, through Walter Seibert, diverting tons of it for special military purposes. Exactly what purposes, he didn’t know. And then he received an unexpected invitation to that private luncheon in Washington.
The get-together was unpublicized and, at least in Canada and Newfoundland, remained unknown other than to a tiny circle of insiders until Howse, near the end of his career, produced a modest family history. The book has never been published and is basically a family tree and a dry account of his career trajectory—but for one intriguing reference to that quiet lunchtime gathering in Washington.
“I remember the catfish and the veal cutlets,” Howse remarked. Then he wrote:
After the meal, the host, Assistant Secretary [for defense production] Mr. Lautenberg, the man who had invited me, gave a nice speech, thanking us one and all for our efforts, which had combined to make a most vital and necessary contribution to the victory of the United States and its allies.
Then, with a smile on his face, he told us something that had been known to the half of the group I hadn’t recognized, but not known to the other half, of which I was one.
From the beginning of the fluorspar operation we had been told, as a matter of top secrecy, that the fluorspar was being used in the processing of high octane gasoline. He apologised for hoodwinking us in the interests of the war effort and then explained that the fluorspar had been the critical chemical in the separation of the U235 isotope from the predominant U238 in uranium ores.
Fluorspar had made possible the processing of uranium hexafluoride, and from this the deadly U235 used in the atomic bomb was extracted.28
It was, and is, no secret that Walter Seibert had a special relationship with Washington, and that his mining enterprise enjoyed its most lucrative years because of sales to the US government. It is also possible that he was involved in a second assignment related to the Manhattan Project. In the summer of 1942, he dispatched a team of Newfoundland miners to a remote section of Labrador, in the Torngat Mountains, to dig up and ship high-grade graphite to a secret American destination. It was at a time when scientists involved with developing the atomic bomb were having difficulty finding graphite of sufficient quality for the production of plutonium, which was potentially, like U–235, a weapons-grade explosive. U–235 and plutonium were the lethal elements in the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Gus Etchegary, then a teenager in St. Lawrence, was part of the Seibert expedition to Labrador. He clearly remembered the four-month adventure in the wilderness and recalled that even at the time, he was aware of being a small cog in a much larger set of wheels. Later, he became convinced that the Labrador graphite was bound for a laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where engineers and scientists were building one of the world’s first nuclear reactors, a crucial part of the Manhattan Project.
WITHIN a few months of the Roosevelt–Churchill summit on Placentia Bay, America would be propelled into the war by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and Newfoundland would become a vital base for American military operations in the North Atlantic and Europe. The little country would soon be a temporary home for ten thousand US servicemen.
One of the happy consequences of turning all those Americans loose in Newfoundland was a much-needed boost for the economy, which would hopefully reduce dependence on the mother country. A secondary, but more enduring, consequence of the American invasion was an unprecedented focus on what was perhaps the most pressing problem on the island at the time—the health of Newfoundlanders. The Americans’ strategic interest in Newfoundland would lead to an assessment of the health risks their soldiers and sailors faced in the remote and isolated place.
Of course, they were concerned, as always, with venereal disease. (It would turn out that Newfoundlanders had more to worry about than the Americans—syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases would spike after the Americans arrived.) But the Americans would discover a more surprising problem: the mortality rate for tuberculosis in Newfoundland was nearly 200 per 100,000 population, which was significantly higher than that in “any other portion of the British Empire inhabited by white people,” according to a US report from the time. “The mortality rate compares with a rate of 70 in England, Scotland and Wales, and a rate of approximately 40 in the white population of the United States.”29
On top of VD and tuberculosis, the Americans were also worried about the perils of diphtheria, dysentery, meningitis, scarlet fever and typhoid fever. And they were especially shocked by the poverty of health care—the scarcity of doctors and hospitals. These were just some of the issues “considered of actual or potential importance in the maintenance of health of armed forces in Newfoundland.”
They sent their soldiers anyway, and most managed to survive the hostile germs and viruses. Some stayed and assimilated. Many went back home again to begin families with brides from Newfoundland.
But the presence of the Americans, by providing a major boost to the economy, would in turn empower working people who had, for generations, accepted hardship and danger as normal in a perilous and often brief existence. And that, in turn, would inflame demands for an end to medieval social circumstances—especially a crushing vulnerability to disease, especially in the town of St. Lawrence.
31.
THE government in St. John’s, in late November 1941, finally announced the inquiry the St. Lawrence union had been demanding for about six months. There would be hearings by a three-member trade dispute board to investigate and find solutions for the labour troubles in St. Lawrence.
Workers at both the Seibert mines and the Alcan operation had been on strike since mid-November to enforce demands for outside mediation. Everyone was back at work by December 5. The panel—made up of an academic, a businessman and a retired bureaucrat—scheduled hearings to begin in January 1942.
For the miners, money was a major issue, and the board members would listen sympathetically. But the hearings also gave the workers in St. Lawrence a rare opportunity to talk about problems that, in the ten years since Walter Seibert set up shop in Newfoundland, had become more troubling than the paltry wages they were paid.
The workplace was making people sick. Turpin and individual miners complained about the dust and flooding in the corporation mines. The broken-down equipment. The lack of sanitation. And above all, the absence of health care—doctors, nurses, hospital facilities.
While the board members supported wage increases for the miners, they were deaf, or at least indifferent, to most other issues. In their final report, the commissioners declared themselves “genuinely impressed by what the Corporation has been able to achieve in a few short years.”30 They found the manager, Donald Poynter, admirably flexible, professional.
Echoing the observations of the English labour expert T.K. Liddell, the board members rejected a union demand for a closed shop, claiming that leadership seemed to have little control over an unruly and largely unprofessional workforce. The miners were, nevertheless, being underpaid, they acknowledged, and this should be corrected right away. The panel members were assured by Donald Poynter that past delays in payment were part of the growing pains associated with a new mining venture starting out in unusual circumstances.
On issues of health and safety, the commissioners were unmoved even when Fred Walsh, the driller from Iron Springs, described the dust in vivid terms, along with his sleepless nights, struggling to get his breath. His brother Alonzo, another driller, also spoke of working in the choking dust and smoke from blasting. Donald Poynter, when asked about the dust, wouldn’t disagree: “He would not say [it was] innocuous, but claimed [he] had no knowledge of any ill effects.”31
The St. Lawrence union brief complained that the absence of medical services near a workplace where conditions were routinely and officially described as “primitive” was inexcusable. Nobody—miners, managers or panel members—disagreed. But the panel was unwilling or unable to suggest a pra
ctical solution, other than to lobby health officials in St. John’s.
The union had made one specific—and ultimately critical—request: that the company and the government arrange for regular x-rays for the miners. The board was again noncommittal. “We are not competent to pronounce as to the necessity for such an examination but we desire to place the union’s wishes on record, as they were expressed very strongly.”
A time would come when chest x-rays were a terrifying part of a frequent diagnostic routine. But that was far off in the future.
THE hearings in 1942—a grudging response to the union agitation that began on St. Patrick’s Day 1941—were followed by years of relative harmony in labour–management relations and improvements in technology and productivity. But concerns about the “secondary” issues—health, safety and quality of life—would continue to be talking points for years to come. They would become priorities only after what, years later, was described officially as a “ghastly” consequence of at first indifference and then denial.
During the coming decade, doctors and nurses would arrive periodically in St. Lawrence, stay briefly and then leave. The hospital everyone agreed was a priority was also in the distant future. And when it finally arrived, more than a decade later, it was only after years of stonewalling by bureaucrats and politicians in St. John’s.
That there would one day be a hospital at all was a response by American politicians to acts of heroism by the men and women of St. Lawrence.
The impetus and the money for a hospital would come not from Newfoundland or Canada, but from the government in Washington, at the insistence of the US Congress.
Conversations with the Dead II
v.
It floats in the memory without a specific time reference. My father being home for a while and using the time to wire the house for electricity.
Miners are multi-skilled. Jacks of all trades. They are plumbers because air and water are delivered underground through pipes. A lot of the mine machinery is air-driven. The water flows through drills to suppress the dust, at least a little bit. And because the underground environment is always changing, pipes are always being moved.
Of course, you learned about explosives, how to achieve a particular kinetic outcome in a wall of rock by drilling holes and stuffing them with dynamite.
You learned about electricity. Machinery of all kinds. Electric motors. Gasoline-driven pumps. Diesel-driven air compressors. You had to learn how to respond when one of these machines broke down.
There were, obviously, electricians and mechanics in the mine, but there wasn’t always time to wait for them to come and solve a problem. Especially if it was a little problem.
You learned the basic principles of mechanics, engineering, geology and science.
My father was comfortable in all aspects of those occupations, even though he had no formal education. Not a single day in a school of any kind, other than what he loved referring to as the school of hard knocks.
I remember him crawling around the attic in our Cape Breton house with elementary tools and a lantern for light. Hammer, pliers, screwdriver, wire cutter, auger. Doing the wiring so all that was left for the professionals was the outside hookup.
The point of the memory is that the wiring project obliged me to stick my head up into the attic while he was there to find out what was going on. I remember being told to leave before I got in the way or smothered, but before I did, I noted that there were interesting boxes and old suitcases up there, along with other fascinating artifacts.
And when the coast was clear, I ventured up with a flashlight to explore the mysteries in the boxes.
There were embarrassing letters back and forth between my parents. One of the boxes yielded a document that shocked me at the time: a small blue card with my name printed on it and a heavy bold-faced stamp that screamed “Landed Immigrant.” Huh?
Later, my mother, who was a teacher, assured me that I was not adopted, and not a DP. Neither a displaced nor misplaced person. I was not a foreigner in the literal sense, though I was, in fact, born in a foreign country. Newfoundland.
I had assumed that Newfoundland was always a part of Canada.
—No, she told me. Not before 1949, which was when Newfoundlanders joined Confederation.
—And what was it before that?
—Well, for many years it was a colony of Britain. And then it became a dominion, a sort of independent country with ties to the British Commonwealth. But that all failed for complicated and controversial reasons. And for another spell, it was like a colony again, ruled by unelected big shots.
So that’s why I was technically an immigrant. I was born there but moved to Canada while Newfoundland was still a responsibility of Britain. But when it became part of Canada, in 1949, I became as Canadian as everybody else.
I recall a feeling of disappointment, of having lost the brief cachet of being, somehow, exotic and mysterious. That I had somehow lost a desirable identity. A feeling that was and still is, in many quarters, not uncommon throughout Newfoundland.
vi.
—Summer 1942. You saw St. Lawrence for the first time. Arrived on a boat. What was the boat?
—It was called the Home.
—And maybe only about ten months later, you arrived for the second time. Same boat, but with someone else.
—Yes. You. Coming from the Burin Cottage Hospital.
—What was my first impression of the place?
—A high, round knobby hill on the left. Cape Chapeau Rouge. Shingle Point jutting out. Houses clustered around the harbour. Big church on the right, on the hillside. It was early June. Nice weather. The week before, your father and Jack MacIsaac had walked all the way to Burin on the old Corbin Road, just to look at you.
—That would have been a long walk. It was a happy time of your lives, I think.
—I suppose so.
—Lots of friends. Socializing. You were. Fond of. Each . . . other?
—When you’re young, everything is possible. Happy? Maybe.
—I got that impression from the sappy letters you wrote to each other any time you were apart.
—You shouldn’t . . .
—How long did it last?
—What?
—The happy.
—Who knows? Who knows about the happy? Ever.
—I used to think that I existed because of an earthquake. Part of the fallout from 1929. The tsunami. Hardship exacerbated by the collapse of the fishery. Walter Seibert gets his mining industry thanks to local desperation. The mining industry eventually brings in outside workers. Your boyfriend from back home is one of them. He’s impressed by the place. Sees potential for a family. Marries you and starts one.
—And you don’t think that now?
—It was exciting to think that the cause of my existence was so dramatic. Earthquake and tsunami, et cetera. But maybe it was more mundane than that. A government report. A trade dispute investigation. Boring politics.
—Not sure that I know about that.
—There was an inquiry in 1942 because of serious labour problems in St. Lawrence. Miners all riled up. Among the less talked about observations of the trade dispute settlement was that maybe St. Lawrence needed miners with outside experience. So the inquiry people said perhaps it was time to send some of the local miners away to work with more experienced people. Or to bring in some experienced outsiders. That’s how we got there. Your future husband came, looked around, said to himself, Hey, this is a big improvement over where I’ve been before . . . in the wilderness. Here there’s a town. Families. Church. Schools. A fellow could have a life here.
—And?
—And that was where he decided to start a family.
—I guess that was it, essentially. Poynter promised to build a house for us, out by the Iron Springs mine. It took quite a while, but he eventually came through.
—And you remember Poynter?
—Of course.
—And what was Poynter like
?
—Smart. Blunt. Sarcastic. Loved to socialize. Dinners. He’d have what he’d call cocktail parties. Just drinks, basically, celebrating little things. Even small improvements. He had a lot of enthusiasm.
—Sarcastic?
—He gave me a Christmas gift one year. A box of fancy hankies. Next time I saw him, I thanked him. Said I hadn’t expected a Christmas gift, but thanks anyway. So Poynter says, Don’t mention it. The handkerchiefs will save your sleeve. He was quick like that.
—Did it bother you that there was no hospital in St. Lawrence?
—That was normal for us. Where we came from, in Cape Breton, hospitals were few and far between. But there was no doctor there. That was a problem.
—But there were lots of midwives.
—Yes. There was a midwife for your sister. But there was lots of sickness on the go.
—Is that the reason we moved away eventually?
—Part of it.
—What about the miners’ sickness?
—That came later.
Six
The Rescue
32.
IRON SPRINGS MINE
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1942
THE men of the day shift were killing time around the headframe at Iron Springs, lingering over cigarettes, complaining about the weather and the day ahead. It was Ash Wednesday morning, the first day of Lent, the start of six bleak weeks of self-denial—the booze, the sweets and the music—all luxury suppressed in the cause of spiritual improvement. Nothing but prayer and penitence and aggravation. A grim day all around.
There had been a terrific storm all night, with high winds and heavy drifting snow. The snow had stopped and the winds had fallen off, but the men could tell that it was just a lull in what was going to be a stormy day, a good day to be underground.
The Wake Page 16