The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  A MAN arrived in an ambulance one night. He’d been working in the local fish plant. He’d slipped into a machine that tore off both his legs at the knees. He was still wearing work clothes, and Lisa Loder was attempting to cut through a coat sleeve so she could start an intravenous line. She was nervous and the patient noticed. “Be careful with the scissors, love,” he said. “I can’t afford to lose an arm now, can I?”

  LISA Loder is Rennie Slaney’s granddaughter.

  “Sometimes there would be three or four [miners] on the men’s ward at a time,” she recalled. “Some of these men, their hearts just stopped, which was a good thing. But I witnessed a good many poor souls when their lungs totally collapsed and they’d bleed out and basically choke on their own blood. It was the worst thing to witness and not much you could do at that time. God bless them all.”

  One of the miners she nursed through his final days was Ned Stapleton. Stapleton had been working with Boyd Stone in the 508 South Stope in the Director mine, precisely where John Slaney and two other men were killed on the next shift. Boyd Stone packed it in shortly after. As he later tried to explain to the royal commission, there was “a dread” there every time he went to work. Too much dread. And so he quit.

  But Ned carried on. Maybe he felt that, as the old saying goes, lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. When he was only two years old, an accident at Black Duck mine had claimed his dad. Maybe that was enough to satisfy the demons of bad luck.

  Ned Stapleton died of cancer in November 1985, at the age of fifty-one.

  AND even after they had seen their patients die, the nurses still had obligations that might surprise colleagues working in a more conventional community. The hospital was understaffed. There was one nurse on duty at night and two in daytime, but there was also an outpatient clinic, and the day nurses were obliged to work there too.

  Carmelita Rowsell remembers one night when three sick miners died. When a death was confirmed, it was customary for the family to go straight to a local store to buy a casket. Because there was no undertaker, the nurse on duty at the time of death usually had to prepare the body for the wake and funeral and burial.

  In later years, when it became essential to establish a precise cause of death—for purposes of compensation—a nurse would be required to help the doctor with a quick post-mortem. And then the family would return from the sombre shopping trip and the nurse would help arrange the body in the casket.

  50.

  WE can never know what might have been. It’s an irresistible temptation to speculate. But it’s hard enough to know what really happened in past time, past life. Knowledge of the past is affected by perception in a future moment, what we call memory. But we wonder anyway. We speculate. What if ?

  Rennie Slaney was, by the demographic realities of St. Lawrence, an old man when he died. He was only sixty-two, but practically immobilized by heart disease and silicosis. What if he had continued in the coastal shipping service where his adult working life began?

  Would Michael Quirke, who died of cancer in 1956 at the age of fifty-two, have had a longer, healthier existence if he’d stuck with deep-sea diving out of St. Pierre? Or Roche Turpin, had he moved away, as so many other fishermen did, to Nova Scotia or the United States, where the fishery still offered viable employment in the hungry thirties?

  We can say with certainty that Ed Stapleton would not have died in an accident at Black Duck mine in 1936 if he had opted for another line of work. His son might have lived a longer life if, like his buddy Boyd Stone, he’d packed it in back in 1967, when he probably should have.

  But all employment has its perils. Who knows what might have happened to him and to his family in other circumstances?

  Roche Turpin’s widow, Priscilla, lived in fear of what might happen to her six fatherless children. When she learned that her youngest, Ellen, was determined to become a nurse, she was relieved. At least one of them would make something of her life. It was a comfort.

  Today, Ellen is a lawyer in St. John’s. The eldest girl, Lucille, and one of the four boys became teachers. Two of the boys are engineers. Another, an electrical technician.

  Sometimes things just work out. And sometimes they just don’t.

  AND how might Donald Poynter’s life have unfolded had he continued to develop his engineering career in the relative modernity of New York and New Jersey? Would his final days have been burdened by the discomfort of crippling arthritis and the anxieties of heart disease? Would his first spouse have lived a longer, more contented life had they listened to her parents and stayed away from Newfoundland?

  And what of Patrick Rennie? We cannot know how his life might have turned out if there hadn’t been an earthquake or a tsunami at a time when he might have assumed that he was fundamentally secure. He knew the sea, its perils and its bounty.

  We know that when he left home to play cards at a neighbour’s house on the evening of November 18, 1929, he had a livelihood, a wife, six healthy children. By eight o’clock that night, his wife, three of his children, his house and his livelihood were gone. This we know.

  And we know that at the age of forty-four, he went to work at Black Duck mine, and that in 1951, at the age of sixty, he died of cancer.

  Patrick Rennie died in January. By April that year, his son Martin was actively considering a career change. He wrote to Premier Smallwood to inquire about the availability of government assistance to establish a small business venture. He was a St. Lawrence miner, he told Smallwood, and he wanted out. He believed there was potential for a poultry enterprise in the area. Smallwood’s reply was brusque: there was no such fund available for such a project.1

  Perhaps if Joey Smallwood had had more interest in the individual initiative of ordinary Newfoundlanders, the entire economy might have been transformed by dreamers like Martin Rennie.

  But Martin, perhaps instructed by what had happened to his father, took better care of himself and managed to survive into the twenty-first century in spite of Joey. He died in 2002 at the age of eighty-three, which was ancient in the tragic demographic of his community.

  His brother Albert, also a miner—but one who spent a lot of time away from mining, fishing with his brother—died in 1989 of cancer, but at the relatively advanced age of seventy-four.

  Based on the knowledge acquired after 1951, we know that Patrick Rennie fits a tragic profile—average length of time from first exposure to toxic smoke and dust and radiation to death was eighteen years. Rennie inhaled the abrasive dust, waded in the deadly water, got sick and died in approximately seventeen years. At the age of sixty, he was older than the average for dead miners when the mortality statistics were eventually compiled—most died between the ages of forty-eight and fifty-five—but he’d been older starting out. And yet, before 1951, there could be no precise link between the particulars of Patrick Rennie’s situation and the grim scenario that was unfolding all around him when he died and for decades after he was gone.

  Cause of early death in most cases before 1951? Bad luck.

  IN retrospect, it’s fair to conclude that the consequences of an earthquake and a tsunami and the shambles of the early mining operations in St. Lawrence were all compounded by a shocking absence of civil oversight. Newfoundland was, for nearly twenty years, from about 1930 to almost 1950, without a government that was in any way effectively accountable to its citizens. The results were unsurprising. Insensitivity and arrogance; public management on purely bureaucratic principles.

  In the dying moments of democracy, the government of Sir Richard Squires had managed to respond effectively to the catastrophe that claimed twenty-eight lives and wiped out the economic infrastructure that supported at least ten thousand people on the south coast. But the commitment didn’t last for long. Sir Richard’s power was rapidly diminishing, his country practically broke.

  The commission government that initially replaced the island’s imperfect democratic system was dominated by British administrators who,
in many cases, were ignorant about the place and indifferent to, if not contemptuous of, its history.

  In 1935, the commissioner for natural resources in the unelected government of Newfoundland, Sir John Hope Simpson, was surprised to learn of the tragedy that had happened only six years earlier. On a tour of communities along the south coast, with Father Thorne of St. Lawrence as his chauffeur and tour guide, he made notes on what he saw. “Yesterday we passed the remains of a settlement that was completely wiped out. The people who escaped never returned . . .,” he wrote. “The atmosphere of depression and hopelessness is terrible. I had never realized how bad things are.”2

  Sir John saw much that might have sparked some altruism on that trip, but beyond recording the impressions of a travel writer, he showed little inclination to follow up.

  He visited St. Lawrence, calling it “another depressing settlement.” It was, he observed, “mainly Catholic-Irish—a bad combination in a country where sturdy hard work and thrift are essential to comfort.”3

  But St. Lawrence, he noted, had “a struggling fluorspar mine . . . which would be a great thing for the place if it had sufficient capital. We went to see it [Black Duck mine]. It is a cleft dug in the ground four feet wide, eighty-five feet deep, and without hoists, except for the mineral. The men go down a complicated arrangement of ladders. I would not like to work down there.”

  From a tourist, his observations would be astute and even interesting. From one of the most powerful bureaucrats in a country run by bureaucrats, his first-hand exposure should have signalled the beginning of some corrective action. But it didn’t.

  He understood the reach and the potential of his authority as a commissioner. In a letter to his daughter Mary, on January 31, 1936, he noted that Newfoundland had a new governor (Sir Humphrey Walwyn) who seemed “very energetic . . . who, I think, hopes to make us sit up.”4

  The new governor was also the chairman of the commission of government, of which Sir John was a part. This didn’t give him any special authority, however, and actually seemed to mark him as a figurehead and a rubber stamp for whatever the commissioners were inclined to do. Or not do.

  “He [Walwyn] was the admiral in charge of the Indian navy and before that he commanded a battleship, in both of which capacities he said ‘Go’ and they went, or ‘Do this’ and it was done. As governor he has to shed that aspect of authority if he wants to avoid trouble.”5

  With his fellow commissioner, Thomas Lodge, Hope Simpson occasionally revealed a sense of hopelessness when he reflected on the future of the place. At the root of all the problems, he believed, was education. “The next generation is the hope, but will be no better than the present one unless we get to a better system of education.”6

  It was a view shared by Thomas Lodge, who openly doubted “whether there is a purely white community in the world on such a low cultural level or where complete ignorance of anything outside the daily toil is so widespread.”7

  And it might have been predictable that even after the return of democracy, it would take years to impose rules of basic oversight on Walter Seibert’s company. In 1930, when the allure of power was already strong in Joey Smallwood’s vision for prosperity in Newfoundland, he made a telling observation in a private memoir. He predicted that by 1955, Newfoundland would have become “one of the greatest mining countries in the world.”8

  And so it should not be surprising that the government of Premier J.R. Smallwood, like the unelected government that came before, had done so little, by way of oversight and regulation, to restrain the initiative and enterprising vision of a mining man like Walter Seibert to help assure a safe and healthy workplace.

  51.

  AS OF 2007, the unofficial number of miners who had died from work-related accidents and illnesses in the St. Lawrence mines had reached 313, and of that total, 191 had died “hard” from cancer of the lung. The total doesn’t include the heart attacks resulting from the inefficiencies of lungs damaged by silicosis and bronchitis.9

  There was a presumption that miners who went to work in the more enlightened years after 1960 wouldn’t face the peril of contracting lung cancer. There were new rules and regulations, and new ventilation shafts and fans to move fresh air to where the men were working. But as of 2007, there were twenty-eight more lung cancer cases among men who had gone to work in the St. Lawrence mines after 1960.

  By 1969, the social fabric of St. Lawrence had been altered irrevocably. Rick Edwards, whose uncle was the merchant Aubrey Farrell, recalls that when he graduated from high school that year, twenty-six of the forty-four students in his class were fatherless.10

  Strangely, in the years after 1969, there was a sharp spike in the rate of accidental injury in the St. Lawrence mines. It might be significant that half the increase involved men with less than a year’s experience, and many with less than six months’, working underground. These would have been men who eagerly took jobs with only an indifferent awareness of why so many of the veteran miners of St. Lawrence were no longer available for employment. They were dead or sick or had opted to leave home for less dreadful mining jobs in other places.

  Among those who survived the workplace perils there is, even now, a reluctance to complain, to point fingers. The survivors are old men now, their lives compromised by chronic respiratory and heart ailments—veterans of the early days, like Mick Slaney, living out his final years with family, struggling to breathe, or Peter Quirke, using a wheelchair to get around the seniors’ wing of the local hospital. Old men looking back with a surprising wistfulness on years of sacrifice and mourning.

  Peter Quirke recalled that his father, Michael, facing death from lung cancer at the age of fifty-two, “never complained . . . he never seemed to realize.” Michael Quirke died quickly, just a few months after the cancer diagnosis. “It hit me hard. I thought a lot of my father. He was strict and he was upright. But I would not have traded him for anybody.”11

  His father never wanted Peter to become a miner, but he became one anyway, at the age of seventeen. Mining is as much a culture as a job, which is part of its allure. Peter entered willingly and left reluctantly when the mining in St. Lawrence ended.

  At the age of eighty-six, he insisted that he had no mine-related health problems “that I know of.” Then he added: “And if I do, they’re probably from smoking cigarettes.”

  Days after that conversation, Peter Quirke died in his sleep, on May 28, 2017.

  52.

  IT was a potent blend of rising expectations and outrage in the early seventies that set the stage for a final confrontation in St. Lawrence. And when it came, it was shocking not for its intensity and unexpected outcome but for its source.

  For nearly forty years, the women of St. Lawrence and the neighbouring communities had suffered quietly as their fathers and sons, brothers and neighbours died or became disabled, leaving them to cope with the responsibility of raising children and running households without partners or sufficient means for meeting basic needs.

  By the early seventies, they’d had enough. On April 6, 1971, as contract negotiations between the miners’ union and the one surviving mine were breaking down, about thirty women from St. Lawrence and Lawn set up a picket line at the waterfront, at the entrance to the loading dock. The objective was to block an attempt to load an ore carrier with fluorspar that was destined for the Alcan smelter in Arvida, Quebec.

  They stayed there for two days and two nights, until the ship sailed away—empty. By late August, after a miners’ strike that lasted more than a month, management and union representatives signed a new two-year contract and the men went back to work. But they had discovered, in the summer of 1971, a new potential source of strength—their wives, their mothers and their daughters.

  INEVITABLY, acrimony resurfaced in contract talks in 1975. By May 27, negotiations for a new contract had been stalled for six weeks. The likelihood of a strike was nearing certainty. On that day, an ore carrier once again arrived in St. Lawrence to load
cargo for the Alcan smelter in Arvida. The women mobilized again.12

  At twenty-seven, Monica Kelly was the eldest of Bob Kelly’s twenty-one children. “We all got together to see what we could do,” she recalled. “The men didn’t want to go on strike. We thought that if we stopped the boats from loading, they wouldn’t need to.”13

  Her militancy was partly driven by her father’s situation. He was languishing at home. Both sides of his chest and back were “burned brown” from radiation therapy for the lung cancer that would eventually kill him.

  The miners were demanding a hefty wage increase, to stay abreast of the rampant inflation of the time. Monica could identify with their concerns. Ever since her father had stopped working, her large family had been struggling to survive on welfare and small compensation payments. “Mom scrubbed our clothes on a scrub-board. She washed us in the washtub. We were never hungry—there always seemed to be lots of moosemeat. But life was tough.”

  The women of St. Lawrence once again descended on the wharf. There had been thirty of them in 1971. Now there were two hundred. The St. Lawrence fluorspar was going to remain in St. Lawrence for as long as was necessary for their men to negotiate a proper contract.

  The story was irresistible to the media. Company officials cringed before a new wave of bad publicity. The media loved the warrior women who were possibly more frightening than the miners. When someone unwisely tried to drive a car through their picket line, they flipped it over.

  A St. Lawrence resident who’d moved from Ontario as part of a beefed-up security contingent for the company in 1975 married there and stayed. He cannot forget the trepidation he felt when he had to face the women.

  The captain of the ship made one attempt to come ashore, but quickly retreated when he was told in lurid terms what would happen to him if he persisted. Word spread.