The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  Approximately two thousand people had been employed by the mining companies between 1933 and 1961. It was still early in a continuum that would curve up dramatically in the years ahead. But as of 1961, of the total mine-related workforce, 630 of those employees had worked underground. Sixty-nine of the underground workers had already died from work-related illnesses—twenty-five from lung cancer.11

  The average age of the miners who had died from lung cancer was about forty-seven years. The average underground working life of the men who’d died was about eighteen years—which explained why the incidence of lung cancer would begin to soar in the early sixties and continue rising through the seventies and eighties and well into the nineties.

  The death rate for St. Lawrence men between the ages of twenty and sixty-four was, even by the late fifties, three times the provincial average.

  The Windish–deVilliers study acknowledged that the picture was possibly worse. Before 1951, there were no reliable statistics. There were few autopsies, few questions asked. Up to that point, almost every fatal lung disease was called tuberculosis.

  WHAT is unexplainable is why it took a decade before anybody in authority responded with any sense of urgency—except to commission studies and convene meetings for long discussions of the findings. There was intense discussion among peers reviewing technical inquiries into the phenomena, but in St. Lawrence, the most pertinent concern was with the growing number of fresh graves in the local cemetery.

  The bureaucratic, corporate and political sclerosis would inevitably end. The beginning of the end came on February 15, 1965, the day Roche Turpin died and Rennie Slaney laid out the facts of life and death in St. Lawrence in terms that could no longer be deferred, ignored or contradicted.

  But Slaney would have to wait two more years before he could understand the impact he’d made in his appearance before the review committee on February 15, 1965. The committee members had listened after all, and they included his entire text in their final report, which Joey Smallwood tabled in the provincial legislature in February 1967. The report described Slaney’s submission in bold words: grim, startling, extraordinary.

  Responding to the list of specific names of dead and dying miners, a list well beyond the cautious science-based estimates of the Windish–deVilliers analysis, the committee had asked the Workmen’s Compensation Board (WCB) to review its files and present its own official numbers. The contrasts were stark but unsurprising, as the board files could reflect only those cases for which compensation had been approved—four deaths from silicosis/tuberculosis.

  According to the board’s files, nobody died from work-related illnesses in St. Lawrence prior to 1951, which was when the WCB was created. Where Rennie Slaney had named fifty-eight miners he knew personally who had died from lung cancer, the board had records for thirty-four—all after 1960, when the board became obliged to notice.

  The committee members decided that Slaney’s lists were “clearly much nearer the truly ghastly totals” of death from work-related illnesses among St. Lawrence miners, and they boiled their opinion of the St. Lawrence mining crisis down to one blunt observation: “The only recommendation we feel we can make is that this act be ignored altogether. The tragedy has far exceeded the scope of the act. On the grounds of cost alone, it is impossible to apply.”

  The committee members recommended a formal inquiry, perhaps even a royal commission, into the history of fluorspar mining in St. Lawrence “in every aspect,” including the impact on the miners’ health. Premier Smallwood disagreed. The St. Lawrence crisis was old news, “past history,” he declared. The basic problems had all been fixed. The mining companies had improved ventilation. And that was good enough.

  But Smallwood had underestimated the impact of the blunt words of an ailing former miner from St. Lawrence, now published in the daily St. John’s Telegram, the graphic tale of exploitation and suffering, the names of more than a hundred people in a small town and the certainty that there would soon be hundreds more—men dead or dying for having worked to earn a living.

  Soon, the story of the St. Lawrence miners was making headlines everywhere—“A National Disaster,” it was now called in bold type over stories that described what many felt had really been a national disgrace.

  SMALLWOOD eventually buckled before a rising storm of public outrage. Newspapers in Newfoundland were on the story, now tenaciously, and the headlines were sensational. Shortly after the compensation committee report was tabled, national reporters were on the ground in St. John’s and St. Lawrence.

  Soon the dying and dead miners of St. Lawrence were acquiring names and personalities in the homes of strangers across Canada, their stories being told in detail. On April 5, 1967, the government announced the Royal Commission Respecting Radiation, Compensation and Safety at the Fluorspar Mines of St. Lawrence. In June, the national newsmagazine Maclean’s published the shocking story of the St. Lawrence tragedy, told by writer Ian Adams in the voices of the victims and their families.

  One of those voices belonged to Rennie Slaney. Another to his friend Jack Fitzpatrick, whom Adams had interviewed at length that spring. But Jack Fitzpatrick—who was, like Rennie Slaney, a soccer standout in his youth—never got to see his story in Maclean’s. He died before the magazine came out.

  THERE were some raised eyebrows when Smallwood’s choice for chair of the royal commission became known: Fintan J. Aylward, a lawyer and past president of the provincial Liberal Party. But Aylward’s personal resume also included the fact that his brother was a merchant and the mayor of St. Lawrence. Their father, while he never worked in any aspect of the mining industry, had been the first head of the St. Lawrence miners’ union.

  One of the first decisions by the royal commission, and a signal that it planned to take its mission seriously, was to hire Rennie Slaney to write a first-hand history of the mining industry in St. Lawrence, its primitive beginnings and its tragic evolution.

  Priscilla Turpin was one of the many Newfoundlanders who felt that the formal investigation was long overdue, and that it never would have come about but for Rennie Slaney’s whistleblowing. She would appear before the royal commission with a brief that described the daily struggles of the widows and their families. Her words, like Rennie Slaney’s before the compensation review committee, had a profound impact. In its final report, the commissioners would make special mention of Priscilla Turpin and Margaret Pike, another St. Lawrence widow, for their “very thorough brief.”

  “Nowhere else in Newfoundland, and indeed, nowhere else in Canada . . . can one find so many widows of so many individuals who worked and died in the same industry,” the commissioners reported. “The widows of St. Lawrence find themselves in a community where they can find little or no help from their next-door neighbour, as their next-door neighbour is, in many instances, in a similar position.”12

  THE definitive account of what had happened in St. Lawrence and the communities around it appeared in 1969 with the publication of the final report of the royal commission that Smallwood had grudgingly appointed two years earlier.

  The mining companies got off lightly. After all, Seibert and his company were, by then, both dead. Alcan’s Newfluor had been scrambling since 1960 to improve ventilation, which was commendable. The company was spared censure for past lapses.

  The report was mildly critical of the provincial and federal bureaucrats and politicians who had dithered for so long, looking for the hard evidence that would enable them to apportion blame or obscure responsibility for what was happening before their eyes: miners were dying because of where they worked.

  But the report was thorough. There had been consultations with international experts and local people who spoke for the many victims. There were three public sessions in St. Lawrence.

  The commissioners eventually presented the government with sixty-nine conclusions and recommendations, and it came as no surprise to anyone who had followed the long saga of the St. Lawrence miners that the government
rejected many of them.

  While the commissioners had resisted blaming any individuals or companies for the tragedy, they were generous towards the victims and their families. They called for a new compensation policy that would give the benefit of any doubt, in cases where miners who had worked underground before 1960 had become disabled or died, to the worker or his family.

  In the absence of an autopsy, or when “diagnosis is in doubt” and there is either silicosis or lung cancer, the commissioners wrote, there should be compensation. Even though evidence might be inconclusive about the causes of lung ailments like bronchitis, silicosis, tuberculosis, tumours, radiation fibrosis or cardiac disability, any symptom of “loss of pulmonary function should definitely be taken into account when considering compensation.”

  The government specifically rejected the proposal that the families of dead miners receive “the benefit of the doubt” in the absence of hard evidence. And they refused to expand the list of compensable respiratory diseases, adding only silico-tuberculosis.

  The commissioners recommended a special fund to supplement the available assistance to disabled miners, as well as widows and children of the deceased. The fund was to be financed jointly by the federal and provincial governments, the Newfluor mining company and the Seibert family.

  This proposal was implemented, but only partially. Ottawa refused to chip in. The Seibert family didn’t even respond to repeated requests for a commitment to contribute.13

  THE royal commission agreed with the widows of St. Lawrence that even when a family qualified for compensation, the payments were seriously inadequate. The final report called for the removal of a ceiling on payments to the families of dead and dying miners. The cap had been $312.50 per month, regardless of the number of dependents in a family. Many families, even when approved for compensation, were forced to turn to welfare to avoid total destitution.

  Robert Kelly, in younger years an admired St. Lawrence soccer star, found himself in such a situation: he’d been working underground for twenty years, for the corporation at Iron Springs and for Newfluor in the Director mine. He’d started feeling unwell in 1965, and by 1969, he couldn’t work at all. He had twenty-one children, and most of them were still at home. He had lung cancer.

  The family struggled by on welfare, supplemented by earnings from the older kids. It wasn’t until 1972 that the government of Newfoundland finally decided, under pressure, to accept the royal commission recommendation to remove the compensation ceiling.

  The Kelly family was in dire straits by then. Robert’s cancer was being held in check by frequent bouts of radiation treatment. The family lost count when the treatments numbered in the hundreds. The skin on his chest and back became like leather.14

  But with the removal of the ceiling, the Kellys qualified for a significant retroactive payment—much of which was clawed back by welfare authorities to cover supplemental compensation while Bob Kelly was still alive.

  When he died, in 1980, at the age of fifty-three, there were still thirteen children living at home. According to the family, his widow, Eileen Tobin Kelly, had to buy his coffin from a local merchant on an instalment plan.

  47.

  YOU always had the dread over you there.”

  It was one of the more startling assessments of working in the St. Lawrence mines by witnesses appearing at the royal commission.15 It came from Boyd Stone, a timberman at the Director mine. He was referring to a particular situation, but he might have been speaking for many St. Lawrence miners who, for years, had worked in the shadow of a nagging consciousness of what was happening to people they knew—what Boyd called “the dread.”

  By the time he appeared before the commissioners in 1968, the death toll from work-related illnesses among St. Lawrence miners had surpassed 175. There had been, between 1963 and 1967, twenty-four deaths from lung cancer alone. Boyd Stone’s reference to “the dread” was, however, more specific. On September 14, 1967, he’d been working in 508 South Stope, a huge cavern on the 550-foot level of the Director mine.

  Besides the perils of dust and radiation, the Director mine had been plagued for years by rockbursts, sudden spontaneous explosions of stone from wall or roof, caused by tectonic pressures in the surrounding granite. Sometimes there were warnings—threatening sounds like gunshots or small stone particles spitting. Sometimes there were danger signs the miners could react to—slabs of solid rock hanging from a ceiling or a wall that they could pre-emptively knock down. And sometimes there was no warning at all. It seemed that the peril grew as the mine penetrated deeper into the earth’s crust.

  By the mid-sixties, rockbursts had become a persistent problem at the Director mine. In a three-year period, from 1961 to 1963, there were 155 “events” recorded, from flaking to major falls of stone. On January 4, 1963, an underground rockfall shook surface buildings. On November 30, 1966, there was a spasm in 508 South Stope that resulted in a 10,000-ton fall of rock and a concussion that shook buildings in town, two miles away.

  Fatalities in St. Lawrence, other than from work-related illnesses, were comparatively rare. In a twenty-five-year period, seven miners died while working in the Director. Three of those deaths happened in a sudden rockburst in the early morning hours of September 15, 1967, in 508 South Stope. The shock-waves from this one would be felt far beyond St. Lawrence.

  BOYD Stone had been a miner for thirteen years, all of them at Alcan’s Newfluor. His partner on the day shift on September 14, 1967, was Ned Stapleton. When Ned was only two years old, his father, also Edward Stapleton, was killed in Black Duck mine, the first mining fatality in St. Lawrence.

  Stone and Stapleton knew the history of rockbursts in the Director mine, and especially in the 508 South Stope. When he appeared before the royal commission a year after the three fatalities on the shift that followed his on that mid-September day, Boyd Stone was prompted by the chairman, Fintan Aylward, to elaborate on how he felt, working in the 508 South Stope.

  “Could you be a bit more specific as to what you mean by, you know, trouble and the dread you had there?” Aylward asked.

  Stone replied, “Well, small cracking in the wall . . . small bits of ground falling, then you’d move back and wait for it to settle and you’d go back to work again.”

  “Was this a daily experience?” the chairman asked.

  Stone replied: “No . . . not every day . . . probably twice a week.”

  On their daytime shift on September 14, he and Stapleton had been slushing—that is, removing rock from the stope using a kind of scoop that was shuttled back and forth by cables powered by a motor safely located under protective timber.

  Shortly after midnight on the next shift, when their replacements were working in the stope, a cable became detached from the scoop. The two operators and their supervisor had to move out from the protection of the timber to reattach the cable. They were on the muck pile struggling with the awkward apparatus when the roof fell in on top of them. One of the dead men was Bob Edwards, the night captain. The other two were Noel Warren and John Slaney.16

  Several miners quit their jobs in the days following the accident. One of them was Boyd Stone. The Director mine was now being called a death trap in the community.

  In the long, dark history of mining in St. Lawrence, the 550-foot level at the Director mine captured the essence of the larger tragedy. In 1959, the federal investigator, Jack Windish, reported that while testing air quality there, he’d found there wasn’t enough oxygen to keep a match burning. Among measurements to establish the levels of radioactivity in the St. Lawrence mines, his highest readings were at the 550-foot level of the Director.

  Within weeks of the accident on September 15, 1967, the royal commission on radiation expanded its terms of reference to include fatalities from other causes, including rockbursts. But it was unclear what, if anything, the commission could achieve by studying the problem. There was little anyone could do to mitigate the risk inherent in a place where peril is a norm.

>   More sophisticated ventilation by then had improved the quality of air and dramatically reduced the radiation readings. But there seemed to be nothing anyone could do about the rockbursts. There were standard precautions—heavy mesh screening, rock-bolts, timbering to prop up unstable ceilings, scaling “loose” from walls and overhead. But it wasn’t possible to timber everything, and screens and rock-bolts sometimes failed.

  The commission embraced this added tragedy because it was becoming clear that public patience with the mining operation in St. Lawrence was just about exhausted. The least anyone could do was to provide a place to talk about the fear and the misgivings that were now identified as dread.

  48.

  THE thrust of Rennie Slaney’s presentation to the compensation review committee in 1965 was that perhaps the most tragic cases in St. Lawrence weren’t the workers who had died quickly—like Roche Turpin, who lasted only two years after his diagnosis. Scores had died by then, but many of the men, like Robert Kelly, would linger for years or even decades, disabled and tormented by their idleness and hopelessness, their usually large families suffering with them.

  The people who needed compensation most were those who would need it longest—men for whom the end would come slowly, over years, as well as the widows and the children of the dead. But these were the cases that received the greatest scrutiny, and for which the “benefit of the doubt” was invariably denied.

  The royal commission report and the tepid political response seemed to mark a turning point in public attitudes. A situation that had been clinically identified in 1952, when Dr. John Pepper performed his extraordinary autopsy on Isaac Slaney, was now, nearly eighteen years later, beyond question.