In 1930 the English artist Rhoda Dawson, came
out to Newfoundland to work for the mission which had been founded in the
country by Sir Wilfred Grenfell. Grenfell himself had arrived in Newfoundland
in 1892, one hundred years ago, and his purpose there was to save souls, heal
bodies, and employ hands and minds. The latter function was the responsibility
of the Mission's Industrial Department, which had been started early in the
century by the American Jessie Luthur, a pioneer in the field of occupational
therapy. It was to work in the Industrial Department, which produced
handicrafts for a growing and appreciative market at home and abroad, that
Rhoda Dawson was recruited by the Grenfell organization.
At Mission headquarters in St.
Anthony, she designed hooked mats, a staple of the handicraft trade. In keeping
with the tradition of the Industrial Department, her designs depicted local
life and work. She also painted many watercolours which have only recently came
back into public view. These constitute an important cultural resource for the
Province.
Dawson returned to England in 1933
and staged two exhibitions of her Newfoundland work. In 1934 she returned to
Newfoundland and taught school at Payne's Cove on the Strait of Belle Isle.
Thereafter she sojourned at Twillingate, where she worked in the hospital run
by the American physician and surgeon John Olds, one of Newfoundland's most
celebrated medical practitioners. Her Twillingate work includes some graphic
operating room scenes and a strong portrait of Olds.<R><R>From
Twillingate she went to St. John's where she ended her Newfoundland days with
an extended visit. Her St. John's watercolours are some of the finest
depictions ever made of Newfoundland's salty old capital.<R><R>The
following is her own hitherto unpublished account of her adventures in St.
John's. The way of life she describes has, like the country of Newfoundland
itself, long since disappeared. But, happily, it is still possible to glimpse
the glory she saw in sky and barren. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are
indeed fortunate that such a sympathetic and talented individual touched in on
their shores and that her watercolours have survived to light up the otherwise
dark decade of the 1930s.
The article was edited for
publication by Professor Peter Neary author of a forthcoming book on Rhoda
Dawson. Explanatory material is indicated in [ ].
St. John's must be the nearest town
to Europe on the American Continent. It was also probably one of the first
settlements; certainly the beautiful harbour, so sheltered that the entrance
cannot be seen from the sea until the ship is almost under the cliffs, has been
the chief port ever since Cabot returned from his voyage of discovery and
reported the waters of the New Isle to be teeming with fish. But although an
Island, Newfoundland is definitely part of the American Continent, and of the
New World. Its news value is far greater to American papers than to English,
and its Capital presents an intriguing ensemble of English and American
cultures, ancient crafts and modern superficialities. The well-to-do
townspeople bowl along the left-hand roads in American cars built for
right-handed traffic; glorious Chrysler taximeters rub shoulders with country
carts, two-wheeled floats from the wharves, and a couple of old Victorias,
preserved as London preserves a Hansom cab or two; sturdy fisher-girls with
permanent waves and gum in their cheeks, spread fish on the flakes [wooden
platforms built for drying fish] of the Battery [fishing village on the cliff
face at the harbour-mouth]. Schooners with patched sails beating out through
the narrow entrance meet shiny white liners from New York coming in.
Americans themselves acknowledge
these phenomena; comfortable and at home among the familiar advertisements,
magazines, cereal foods and the very smart American frocks, Koka Kola, Chinese
laundries and ice-creams, and even the schooners which are built to the
beautiful American model, they are brought up all standing by some unexpected
British usage or characteristic; I have known them petrified by the stiff
official atmosphere surrounding Government House, that modest building which, a
trifle dowdy but very solid, hides among trees on the top of the hill near the
huge American hotel. While English people find here an aspect of their ancient
heritage unspoiled by piers, fun-fairs, or the usual concomitants of the
English sea-side, made stylish by the lovely lines of the schooners and
interesting historically by the survival of some of the old fishery techniques.
One can live in the town and almost
forget it is a port, if one is caught up in the social round, for people have a
very good time here, as indeed they do in other Dominions, with Bridge-parties
and tea-parties, bathing at the Country Clubs, fishing and hunting, golf and
tennis and ice hockey, all intensified by the bright "Colonial"
hospitality, and the remarkably good food. On the outskirts of the town the
great merchants have their pleasant houses, and far in the woods their summer
shacks and log huts, while people tied to the city make trips to the tea-houses
and inns around Conception Bay, where the sea is calm as glass, and the coves
are like Devon Coombs, but sometimes a bank of smoke in the sky and the smell
of a distant forest fire, the cold threat of fog from the sea, reminds the gay
parties that their country is indeed in the New World, with its freedom, its
possibilities and its crudity. And everywhere, in town and country alike, is
the sweet smell of cut spruce and woodsmoke, for spruce is the chief fuel, and
houses, fences, boats, wharves are all made of it and its forests clothe the
land.
Some of the 80,000 inhabitants of
St. John's resent the fact that visitors are apt to concentrate upon the
quaint, rather than the modern, aspects of their city. But while the Park and
the swimming pools in the river, and the children's organized games, and the
drives and new roads and pretty gardens on the outskirts are desirable and
delightful, the function of the harbour as the centre of the fisheries for the
whole of the North East Atlantic coast, even as far as Greenland, where a
schooner or two goes every year, cannot fail to make the principal interest,
and the fact that sail survives here more than anywhere else in the world, adds
to that interest. The capital is far more truly Newfoundlandish, for instance,
than the modern mill-towns of the lumber districts, which might equally well be
in Canada or the States. And St. John's reacts at once to any international
situation, as indeed do even the far Labrador and all the places where
stock-fish [dried salted cod] is made, for the countries most deeply involved
have in the past been the chief consumers of salt cod, and this is the
principal reason for the present distress and financial difficulties.
The big shops on Water Street are
the emporiums of the firms who buy fish, and to a small extent fur, and salmon,
and so on along the whole coast as far North as Cape Chidley [Labrador], and
all round the Newfoundland shore. Their windows display the latest New York
fashions, (St. John's girls are smarter than their London sisters) while on the
wharves behind, schooners are fitted up for the summer with salt beef and pork,
biscuits, tea and molasses; and the young ladies inside deal with mail-orders
from the outports involving sets of wool-cards for home spinning, flannel
petticoats and old-fashioned stays. The stores all over the coast deal in the
same way with the local fishermen, fitting them up for the season and taking
their catch in payment at the end of it. Many of these smaller merchants are
agents or do their buying from the Water
Street firms. In the same way the
winter catch of sealskins is bought by the local trader and sent to town, while
in St. John's the seal hunt assumes larger proportions, and attracts crowds of
men to the city in the early spring, some on foot, some coming by train, others
by schooner from the southern harbours, to sign on board the sealing steamers
which go out to the ice in March. They all leave on the same day, to avoid
unfair advantages being taken and to obviate argument, and return singly in
about 6 or 8 weeks time. The men who join are thus sure of at least board and
lodging (and the food is good now-a-days) for nearly two months, and the chance
of anything from $8 to $80 share-out at the end. In old days the men took their
own food or lived on the seal meat they were allowed to cook at the Galley
fires, the ship providing only one or two necessaries. I watched one of them, a
large modern steamer, coming back to the wharf, her bows crowded with grimy
cheerful men, her ancient skipper of 82 on the bridge, her hatches off ready
for the unloading. I was allowed to work on the sealers wharves by the two
firms who own the vessels, and for weeks I went daily across the harbour in the
ferry boat of one or the other, and spent the whole day among the vats and
tanks and crowds of sealers in the factory. It was an unsavoury atmosphere, but
among the workmen and the regular employees and engineers I met some of the
nicest men on the coast. I was invited to eat in the engineer's mess, a tiny
room at the top of the vats, where we ate seal-meat stewed or fried, or bully
beef hash, washed down by large mugs of potent tea. Once I even dined on board
the steamer, in the saloon among the company of sealing captains, old
experienced schooner-skippers, the ship's captain and the navigator. They were
all a little silent, but extremely polite in the presence of a foreign female.
I was used to seal meat in the
North, and the partiality for seal flippers in the South was incomprehensible
to me; but while nobody wanted to eat seal-meat in general here, except the
liver which is a delicacy anywhere, all the various local bodies had their
annual flipper suppers in May or April, even the Cathedral. The steamers always
brought a load home, and each man expected a share including the stokers, cooks
and stewards who were paid on a different basis. I remember there was trouble
on one steamer, the stokers complaining that they had not had their fair share
of flippers, assuming a threatening attitude and being ordered off the deck by
the Old Man [Captain]. No sooner were they off the ship on one side than they
were clambering up on the other, till he was obliged to give way and allow their
demands.
I was making drawings and studies
of the work, and I penetrated each department at first from curiosity and later
because I found that no one wanted to be left out. I had intended only to paint
the busy wharves, with the town rising behind the masts and scunners' barrels
of the sealers, just like a painted drop curtain, incredibly scenic, the tiers
of houses overlapping one another from the water's edge to the top of the hill,
capped by the towers of the Roman Catholic Cathedral, spotted with lines of
windows, the whole mass gashed by streets like canyons running athwart the main
thoroughfares, designed as fire-breaks after the last disaster. But I found the
scheme of work in this odd trade very absorbing and discovered curious rhythms
and patterns just as in the fishery business. The skins for instance are packed
for a time in salt pickle in a large shed; the men stand on the growing piles,
one party moves forward laying down the rolled up pelts, another group follows,
spreading them out. A regular pattern is discernable throughout the pile, and
it is all done in a damp half-light, salt pickle dropping everywhere, the tall
dark figures stooping and rising and weaving about in the gloom, laughter and
snatches of song and chaff flying around the shed. I even worked in the
super-fatted steam of the room at the top of the vats, where gangs of men fed
the pelts to the skinning machines and the blubber to the cookers. Here I
realized the danger of working to an admiring audience. An engineer hanging over
my shoulder murmured wonderingly, as I carefully drew his machine and the
strapping young boys grouped round it, "My, that almost as good as the
catalogue picture." He was quite right too; it was.
I was followed about by an acolyte
with a box for a stool, covered reverently with a green flag from the signal
locker and I was handed up ladders, and over gang-planks, and shewn all the
sights, with the most tender care and never a hint of familiarity or offence.
Asking for a model one day, one of the managers sent up the ship's carpenter. I
saw him on the desk, running round in great excitement telling his friends, but
he soon found that sitting for his portrait wasn't so much fun, and finally
allowed it to be "tejus." He was the Sunday School Superintendent in
his home town, an upright person, and he offered me a lift on the schooner he
and his mates had chartered to take them back home, a few bays away. I was
sorry not to accept, for he promised to look after me well, but I could see no
justification for the jaunt, and a female on board is apt to be embarrassing,
but I should like to have gone, and been looked after.
The last vessel was empty and the
men being paid off, when I climbed a ladder and found myself in the
culling-chamber, almost empty, the last wheel-barrow load being taken away.
"We expected you yesterday, Miss" the Culler said reproachfully,
"Howsumever, bring the barrer back, Byes, we'll do 'em again," and
they staged a whole scene for my benefit, re-culling the pelts while I
"sketched off a fotygraf" and pleased not to have been left out.
The sealing vessels were moved to
the end of the wharf, steam-cleaned and purified after the dirty trip, and
overhauled. The bows of one of them were opened up for repairs so that we could
see the enormous thickness of the greenheart sheathing, and the tremendously
strong construction of the fore-part. Finally they were towed out to the middle
of the harbour and moored there all together, the big new steamers on either
side of the old converted sailing ships, a shabby battle-worn group. One at
least is famous [The Terra Nova]; she carried Captain Scott to the Antarctic.
Now the work is over, the machines are still, the wharves blister in the heat,
and the oil lies in the sun tanks in the roof of the factory, refining in the
strong light, water white and almost as thin; then across the harbour to the
town again, for now the schooners are coming in and soon the town wharves will
be a mass of sail.
The bosses of the big stores spend
time on the wharves talking to the skippers, most of whom have known them from
childhood, doing business with that curious mixture of friendliness and
shrewdness which is so characteristic of the country; recounting old yarns and
listening to new ones, talking interminably of the price of fish, the
possibilities of strife abroad, and the gossip of the coast and the capital.
Most fishermen and their wives too, can keep a conversation going very ably,
from constant practice in a life that has few opportunities of amusement apart
from the daily contacts, and full of long waits, waiting for wind or for wind
to stop, waiting for a boat to come in, waiting for the ice to go out or the
snow to come. And the schoonermen take the opportunity to cruise about the town
and see their friends, while other men anxious to fish from the Labrador shore
take passages on board, bringing their supplies and gear.
Sometimes a big Banker, the larger
schooners that fish the Newfoundland Banks, comes in for water or repairs.
After a storm two or three vessels may limp in to go into dry-dock. One day a
fine four-masted Portuguese banker came up the harbour, damaged in a recent
hurricane, her rigging fluttering with washing and oilskins hung up to dry and
her decks piled high with the 72 dories of her 72 men, some of them with spread
sails, their sacred emblems giving a curious ritualistic finish to the general
clutter on board.
As the schooners leave for their
summer work, the local fishing begins, and the two Batteries, the fishing
quarters on either steep side of the harbour mouth, all that is left of the old
fortifications, become places of interest. The scrambly paths climbing up hill
and down among the little houses and shacks and flakes, sometimes drop into
green gloom right underneath a great platform, where you have to walk carefully
if fish is spread and dripping overhead. Here the men keep their boats, pulled
up among the piles, and under some better-lit ones, make their nets. These
shore fishermen work with motor-boats, visiting their nets, or traps, at the
harbour mouth 4 or 5 times a day, the more substantial families working as a
crew, under the head of the group, eldest brother or father. The poorer men
work either alone with lines and a row-boat, in which case they are called
"hook-and-line" men, or as share-men with a group, paid by a
pre-arranged share of the catch. Hence these parties of men we see working
together under the flakes on one of the great nets, or standing at the
splitting table till far into the night, splitting and gutting the fish as it
comes in until two in the morning, on the job again at five. Quite likely the
white-collar boy of the family, a clerk in the town, will lend a hand, at
night, and his typist sister will go out to the trap with the boat in the
evening, just to see the fun. These groups seem on the whole to work very
harmoniously. There are no feuds in this country, and the fishing-village,
odourous as it may be in season, is far more healthy and pleasant than some of
the town slums, where the tattooist and the shroud-maker ("Robes for the
Dead") ply their weird trades.
At the end of a day's work it is
pleasant to climb up to either headland, and in half an hour to be sitting
beside some lonely tarn, back in the primeval Continent, nothing to see but sky
and the barrens with the cotton grass blowing, and a snipe beating somewhere in
the evening light. Below in the basin of the hills the town is bustling like an
ant's nest, but up here the land is the same as it was when Cabot sighted it,
or the first Icelander set foot on America 1,000 years ago.