Flame and Ashes
Page 13
Alfie and Ned both volunteered to join the Newfoundland Regiment when World War I broke out in 1914. Alfie was rejected because of his asthma, and went to work in his father’s shop when he graduated from the Church of England Academy, which by then was called Bishop Feild College. Just before Ned left to fight in France, he married Susie Verge, whom he met the Christmas after the fire when she was living in Bannerman Park. He was wounded in the Battle of the Somme on July 1st, 1916, and lay on the battlefield for three days, convinced he was dying, before he was rescued and eventually returned to Newfoundland. Mr. Winsor, and Alfie after him, always found a place for Ned in the family business. When Ned’s wounded leg made it impossible for him to do active work, he learned to be a bookkeeper.
Matthew Bright and Rose Noseworthy married in the summer of 1893. When the bank crash made life difficult in St. John’s, they relocated to his native town of Trinity. For decades after, a hat made by Mrs. Rose Bright was considered essential for the well-dressed woman on any major occasion, all the way from Trinity Bay North to Bonavista Bay South. They named their first daughter Tryphena.
Triffie’s drawing talents increased as she grew and she studied art at the St. John’s Art School under the direction of John Nichols, the drawing master who visited the Synod Girls’ School. A few suitors proposed, but she rejected them all. By the time Mr. Nichols retired in 1908, Triffie began to give private drawing lessons and everyone in her family regarded her as a confirmed old maid. That year, she attended a lecture given by an American doctor, Robert Broadmore, who had visited Labrador as a medical missionary. Attracted by her clever questions, he asked if they might correspond by letter. Two years later, when he returned to St. John’s, he proposed. Triffie accepted and her dream of travelling the world was finally realized. She continued to sketch even after her two sons were born, and her views of exotic places, from Labrador to India and many places between, were proudly displayed on walls in all her friends’ houses.
St. John’s has never had another fire like the one in 1892.
Historical Note
In January of 1890, a visitor from New York described St. John’s, Newfoundland, like this: “Upset a child’s box of toy houses down a very steep hillside, overturn a mud cart on top of them, [and] send a good hard shower of rain to mix all these ingredients well up together.” The city may have seemed quaint and backward to him, but St. John’s was proudly modern. A water system piped clean water into homes, a gasworks provided light and there was even a new electricity plant. Safe behind the massive rock hills that protect St. John’s from the open sea, this harbour town of about thirty thousand people was thriving. Then, suddenly, everything changed.
St. John’s had seen many fires before, and after the last big fire in 1846, streets were widened and no wooden buildings were allowed on the two main downtown thoroughfares of Water and Duckworth Streets. The city had a system of water tanks, three fire stations — each equipped with a huge fire bell — and a modern steam-powered fire engine. People felt confident their city was safe from fire.
To lose two-thirds of a city overnight to fire, many things must go wrong. On July 8, 1892, everything went wrong. The weather had been unusually hot and dry for weeks, so the wooden houses were completely dry. Strong winds gusted over the city toward the sea, whipping up waves in the harbour, and the water supply had been shut off for the day to make repairs to the pipes. The water was turned on again by 4:00 p.m., but it would take hours to reach the upper levels of the city.
Around 4:30 p.m. some farm helpers were busy milking cows in a large barn on Freshwater Road, uphill from the harbour, when one of them dropped his pipe or a match into a pile of hay. A bucket of water would have put the fire out, but there was no water. Firefighters soon arrived to find the barn and adjoining house in flames. About 9 metres from the barn stood a tank intended to provide water for fighting fires, but it had been emptied weeks before when the firemen were practising, and had not been refilled. The firefighters were helpless.
High winds swept burning debris down the hill toward the harbour, and soon small fires sprang up all over the downtown. Before an hour had passed, people realized their terrible situation and began to leave their houses, taking whatever they could. Many put possessions and property into sturdy brick and stone buildings downtown, such as the Anglican Cathedral, and gathered upwind in Bannerman Park, on the grounds nearby Government House, or near the Catholic Cathedral. Even though crews of men tried to fight the fires, everything worked against them. The fire burned all night. By morning, over a thousand houses and most of the downtown business district were gone. Out of the thirty thousand people who lived in the city, just over ten thousand were now homeless.
News was sent by telegraph to the rest of the world. Big fires were not unusual in cities in the 1800s, and people all over North America and Britain responded with generosity. The first aid — tents and blankets and food — arrived from Halifax by ship just days after the fire.
Most people found shelter with relatives or friends, or built sheds of their own, sometimes in the ruins of their own houses, but about fifteen hundred people had nowhere to go. Sheds were built for them in Bannerman Park and on Parade Street near the Constabulary barracks at Fort Townsend. They were built so quickly, they had no floors. People rented these sheds for $25 a year; more than a year after the fire, some were still living in them. Others spent that first summer in tents on the shore of Quidi Vidi Lake.
Streets in the downtown were widened and straightened again after the 1892 fire. The spot where Triffie’s school once stood is now in the middle of a road. Like Triffie’s family, the merchants of St. John’s recovered quickly, but it took about three years before the city was fully restored. The many theatres that had attracted travelling companies from the United States and Britain never recovered. Some cultural landmarks, such as the huge City Hall Skating Rink and the Athenaeum, were lost forever. Then in 1894 a bank crash plunged Newfoundland into an economic depression and St. John’s was never quite the glittering Victorian city of Triffie’s childhood again.
Images and Documents
Image 1: The S.S. Miranda, St. John’s Harbour, around 1885. Merchant premises Harvey and Company and March and Sons are fore and aft. The City Hall Skating Rink is at the upper left.
Image 2: Water Street before the fire. St. John’s natural harbour is protected from the open Atlantic by the Narrows. On the right is the edge of the South Side neighbourhood, where many relocated after the fire.
Image 3: The busy wharves of St. John’s Harbour were turned into charred stumps by the fire.
Image 4: Because coal was stored inside them, many buildings smoked for days after the fire. The ruin of Ordnance House is on the right.
Image 5: The 1892 fire caused over $13 million in property damage. Many buildings were reduced to piles of rubble.
Image 6: Water Street stores became gutted shells.
Image 7: People without places to stay had to live in temporary shelters known as “tilts” in Bannerman Park for months.
Image 8: The ruins of the Anglican Cathedral (centre, top) and Gower Street Methodist Church overlook crumbled walls and foundations of the Methodist College and Masonic Temple.
Image 9: News of the fire spread across the Commonwealth, including neighbouring Canada, as reported in Montreal’s The Gazette on July 9, 1892. The article is not completely accurate — the Roman Catholic Cathedral and the Union Bank were not destroyed.
Image 10: The fire started along Freshwater Road and spread quickly. Most of St. John’s downtown was destroyed by the fire, though few people were killed in the blaze.
Glossary
at sixes and sevens: out of sorts; confused
barachois: spit of land and pond near Freshwater Bay
between the jigs and the reels: in the middle of everything
bread soda: baking soda
brin bag: burlap bag
buckram: heavy cotton cloth
clewed up: fini
shed
close: stuffy
crossing-sweeper boy: street urchin
crowd: group of closely-related people
a dab hand: handy
drung: laneway
flankers: large cinders
galey: the state cats get into when the wind is high
hangashore: layabout; lazy person
have the vapours: a nervous condition of women in Victorian times
jigging: fishing
jink: jinx
like a birch broom in the fits: messy hair
lunch: a snack
mauzy: cool and foggy
now the once: right now
peppermint knob: peppermint candy
playing copyhouses/cobbyhouses: playing house
rodney: small seaworthy boat
sleeveen: thug or rogue
some: very, as in “some ugly”
streeling: dragging; moving in a disorderly way
think on: think about
tilt: shelter, lean-to, hut
wincey: linsey-woolsey, wool and cotton fabric used for clothing
Where’s he to?: Where is he?
wonderful sad: very sad
yaffle: armload
Credits
Cover cameo (detail): A Little Girl, Cecilia Beaux; image courtesy of the Art Renewal Center® www.artrenewal.org.
Cover background (detail): Downtown St. John’s after the fire, 8 August 1892; photographer S.H. Parsons; reproduced by permission of Archives and Special Collections (Coll.-137, file no. 05.01.007), Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University, St. John’s, NL.
Image 1: S.S. Miranda with view of the city in the background: Harvey and Company premises and March and Sons premises, c. 1885; reproduced by permission of Archives and Special Collections, Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University, St. John’s, NL (Coll-137, file no. 3.05.012).
Image 2: View of south side of Water Street and Sclater’s Store, pre-1892; reproduced by permission of Archives and Special Collections, Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University, St. John’s, NL; Coll-137, file no. 1.02.005.
Image 3: 1892 Fire, St. John’s. View looking west from the railway track, showing Devon row and the harbour, in the aftermath of the 1892 fire; reproduced by permission of Archives and Special Collections, Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University, St. John’s, NL; Coll-137, file no. 05.01.012.
Image 4: St. John’s after the fire, still smouldering [after 8 July, 1892], S.H. Parsons; The Rooms Provincial Archives Division, VA-152-46.
Image 5: Ruins After the Great Fire, ca. July-August 1892; reproduced by permission of Archives and Special Collections, Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University, St. John’s, NL; Coll-137, file no. 05.01.008.
Image 6: Water Street stores in ruins, ca. July-August 1892; reproduced by permission of Archives and Special Collections, Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University, St. John’s, NL; Coll-137, file no. 05.01.011.
Image 7: Tilts put up in the Park to shelter the poor who had been burnt out, Eliot Curwen, Eliot Curwen fonds, The Rooms Provincial Archives Division, VA 152-53.
Image 8: View of the Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Baptist which was burned by the fire of 1892; Library and Archives Canada, PA-066621.
Image 9: reproduced from item in Montreal’s The Gazette, July 9, 1892.
Image 10: Map copyright © Paul Heersink/Paperglyphs.
In memory of Paul O’Neill (1928–2013) actor, broadcaster, historian of St. John’s, kindly employer, bon vivant.
About the Author
Janet McNaughton has a doctorate in folklore, so it’s not surprising that she loves digging into research, where she sometimes finds things that surprise her. “The people who wrote eyewitness accounts of the great fire of 1892 almost never mentioned the looting that went on while the fire raged, but stories of raids and arrests crept into the local newspapers soon after. Stores on Water Street were completely emptied; and furniture and carpets — even a piano — disappeared from some houses. I expected that people would be tried and put in jail, and even went looking for court records.
“Although some people were charged at first, the authorities must soon have realized that Her Majesty’s Penitentiary would not be big enough to hold all offenders. One day near the end of July 1892, police collected two cartloads of stolen furniture in the neighbourhood where I now live, without arresting anyone. By August, the newspapers ran a regular notice, telling people to surrender what they had stolen or face the consequences. Soon the police had recovered enough things to fill a curling rink and an old military parade shed. I was surprised at first to learn that so many people were not punished for a crime as serious as looting, but Newfoundlanders are practical and forgiving. This way, people who had acted badly in the heat of the moment could make amends, while those who lost their houses were unexpectedly reunited with some of their lost valuables.”
Though she was born in Toronto, Janet has lived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, for thirty-five years — her current home is not so very far from where the 1892 fire started. As she walks the city, she now envisions the streets as they were over a century ago. “It’s as if an old plate glass photo negative of the city before the fire appears in my imagination when I look at St. John’s. I can see the modern city I’ve always known, but now I also see many of the buildings that disappeared overnight in July of 1892. I wasn’t expecting this book to change the way I look at my home city, but it certainly did.”
One thing Janet loves as much as research is reading … though that has also got her into trouble. She says that as a child in grade two she grew to love where stories would take her. In fact, she loved reading so much, and spent so much time at it, her parents actually took away her library card.
Janet’s novels, including To Dance at the Palais Royale, The Secret Under My Skin and Make or Break Spring, have won the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, the Ann Connor Brimer Award, the Violet Downey IODE Award, a Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Honour Book and a Mr. Christie’s Book Award, among many others.
Acknowledgements
Many people helped with this book, and I would like to thank them. Joan Ritcey, head of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, and Linda White from the CNS Archives both patiently dealt with my questions, even the ones that had no immediate answer. The CNS also borrowed the only existing hard copies of The Morning Despatch, and had them scanned and posted in the Memorial University Library’s digital archive collection, making my work much, much easier than it would have been otherwise.
Helen Miller and her staff at the St. John’s City Archives gave me hours of their time, helping to locate and name houses and buildings that disappeared in the fire of 1892. Dr. Philip Hiscock of the Folklore Department at Memorial University was always available to discuss the fine points of Newfoundland English, and actor and children’s author Andy Jones helped me nail down the elusive cod of misery.
Two dear writing friends got this book off to a proper start. Barbara Haworth-Attard was brave enough to tell me that Triffie, in her earliest version, was not a likable character. Karleen Bradford later confirmed that Barb’s advice had set me on the right path. My agent, Ginger Clark, then picked up the ball and ran with it to Scholastic, a publisher that has far exceeded my expectations. I want to thank fact checker Barbara Hehner and Dr. Melvin Baker of Memorial University’s History Department for asking all the right questions and saving me from embarrassing mistakes. Finally, Sandy Bogart Johnston has been an insightful editor who was extremely easy to work with, and Diane Kerner’s input was always valuable. I felt I was in good hands while working on this book.
While the events described and some of the characters in this book may be based on actual historical events and real people, Triffie Winsor is a fictional character created by the author, and her diary is a work of fiction.
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Copyright © 2014 by Janet McNaughton
Published by Scholastic C
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McNaughton, Janet, 1953-, author
Flame and ashes : the Great Fire diary of Triffie
Winsor / Janet McNaughton.
(Dear Canada)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4431-2443-0 (bound).--ISBN 978-1-4431-3901-4 (html)
I. Title. II. Series: Dear Canada
PS8575.N385F53 2014 jC813’.54 C2014-901801-0
C2014-901802-9
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