PEOPLE
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ARTHUR A. CLARKE
Created by Gail Hussey Weir
October 2025
Created by Gail Hussey Weir
October 2025
The following is a synopsis of an interview I conducted with Arthur Alexander Clarke (1911-2004) at his home at West Mines, Bell Island on July 15, 1991. His wife, Ellen (nee McCarthy) was present for the interview.
You will notice that some of the details of his life differ slightly from an interview he did around 1999 with Garry Cranford for the book, Not Too Long Ago: Seniors Tell Their Stories. This is not unusual when people are remembering events from the distant past.
You will notice that some of the details of his life differ slightly from an interview he did around 1999 with Garry Cranford for the book, Not Too Long Ago: Seniors Tell Their Stories. This is not unusual when people are remembering events from the distant past.
Arthur Alexander Clarke (1911-2004): Teamster, DOSCO Ambulance Driver.
He was born February 11, 1911 in St. Thomas (Horse Cove), Conception Bay, the son of Alexander Clarke, who was a fisherman/farmer in Horse Cove before he found work on Bell Island as a driller/blaster in the surface mines. I did not get his mother's name; she died sometime between 1915 and 1921. His father then married Sarah, who died in 1926 of tuberculosis when Arthur was 15.
I asked Arthur how much schooling he had. This was his response:
I didn't get very much school because there was no compulsory education in our days, you know what I mean. And the oldest in the family in most of the poor settlements, the oldest used to have to set off to help your father make a living. We made our living from the land and the sea. We used to do door-to-door sales around St. John's. There was no welfare, no baby bonus, no unemployment cheques or anything like that. Sometimes in the winter it was very, very hard to get around because you couldn't get to St. John's on the stormy weekends. And when you beat around St. John's all day, you might sell 10 or 12 dollars worth of kindling or vegetables, or whatever you had. But I used to beat around St. John's when I was 13 years old from one end of St. John's to the other, selling this and that and the other thing. Most everything was done by horse. And if you couldn't get out to St. John's on a weekend [to sell your produce] you put in a hard time in the winter. I mind one year our vegetables didn't grow very good. When we got to March, one weekend, we couldn't get to St. John's and we had no groceries. I went down in the root cellar and went through the clay and shucks of potatoes and got a 3-gallon bucket full of little marble-size potatoes and put them in the boiler. And all we had was course fish salt, no fine salt in the house, so we ate that for two meals, small potatoes mashed with gravy, and that's the most we had for two days when we couldn't get to St. John's. But we wrangled through it. But clear of that particular winter, we always had lots of vegetables and fish and everything. Some people had a pig. We always provided in the summer for the winter.
Eventually, his father began commuting to Bell Island to work in the mines. He moved his family to the Island around 1928 when he married a widow who Arthur referred to as Mrs. Brown. Arthur was 17 years old then.
When we shifted over here, I couldn't believe it. It was like another world we came to. Father married Mrs. Brown, and when I came over to Bell Island, they lived in a place just below this (West Mines) and when I see all the cheese on the table and the buns and the cookies and what have you, I said, "Gee, this is not Christmas, is it?" Because we didn't see that much over there [Horse Cove] only weekends and Christmas when we'd have something special. You had to watch every dollar, ever cent you ever made. But when I come here, I made a good living, a good bite to eat.
His father was drilling ore at 44-40, a surface mine, and Arthur began working alongside him digging the clay off the iron ore and carting it away with a horse and box cart. He worked six days a week, 60 hours total for 28.5 cents an hour. His take-home pay was $17.10 a week, while his father's cheque was between $20 and $25 a week. Anyway, we lived good, tell you the truth. There was a good living on Bell Island. That's why I like the damn old rock so much.
When winter came, he got a job in the East Barn (of No. 2 Mine). In the East Barn, they were looking for some young feller that knew something about horses and was used to horses, because half the boys that went there then was almost afraid of horses. So anyway, I put my name in for a job teaming. A few days after that, they sent for me. I went down and went to work in the barn, hauling coal, hauling water around the houses with a big old puncheon. After a year or so in the barn, the ambulance driver, Al Butler from Topsail, got sick, and I went in his place on the ambulance. I was around 25 years old then, and I was at that for 12 or 14 years, until Bert Rideout took it over [around 1948].
Arthur likened the enclosed horse-drawn ambulance to a chuck wagon, like ones he had seen in cowboy movies. John Skinner, who worked in the Surgery assisting Dr. Templeman, described it as resembling the Red Cross ambulances used during WWI. He said there were two lit flares (torches) on the front of it (the white objects on the front in the painting). These helped light the way on dark nights while driving over unpaved roads with open ditches, and also served to alert others on the road. The photo below is of a 1991 painting by Hubert Brown that is hanging in the Bell Island Community Museum. To do the painting, Mr. Brown consulted with Arthur Clarke, who described the details of the Company ambulance to him. Steve Neary commissioned the painting and later donated it to the museum.
He was born February 11, 1911 in St. Thomas (Horse Cove), Conception Bay, the son of Alexander Clarke, who was a fisherman/farmer in Horse Cove before he found work on Bell Island as a driller/blaster in the surface mines. I did not get his mother's name; she died sometime between 1915 and 1921. His father then married Sarah, who died in 1926 of tuberculosis when Arthur was 15.
I asked Arthur how much schooling he had. This was his response:
I didn't get very much school because there was no compulsory education in our days, you know what I mean. And the oldest in the family in most of the poor settlements, the oldest used to have to set off to help your father make a living. We made our living from the land and the sea. We used to do door-to-door sales around St. John's. There was no welfare, no baby bonus, no unemployment cheques or anything like that. Sometimes in the winter it was very, very hard to get around because you couldn't get to St. John's on the stormy weekends. And when you beat around St. John's all day, you might sell 10 or 12 dollars worth of kindling or vegetables, or whatever you had. But I used to beat around St. John's when I was 13 years old from one end of St. John's to the other, selling this and that and the other thing. Most everything was done by horse. And if you couldn't get out to St. John's on a weekend [to sell your produce] you put in a hard time in the winter. I mind one year our vegetables didn't grow very good. When we got to March, one weekend, we couldn't get to St. John's and we had no groceries. I went down in the root cellar and went through the clay and shucks of potatoes and got a 3-gallon bucket full of little marble-size potatoes and put them in the boiler. And all we had was course fish salt, no fine salt in the house, so we ate that for two meals, small potatoes mashed with gravy, and that's the most we had for two days when we couldn't get to St. John's. But we wrangled through it. But clear of that particular winter, we always had lots of vegetables and fish and everything. Some people had a pig. We always provided in the summer for the winter.
Eventually, his father began commuting to Bell Island to work in the mines. He moved his family to the Island around 1928 when he married a widow who Arthur referred to as Mrs. Brown. Arthur was 17 years old then.
When we shifted over here, I couldn't believe it. It was like another world we came to. Father married Mrs. Brown, and when I came over to Bell Island, they lived in a place just below this (West Mines) and when I see all the cheese on the table and the buns and the cookies and what have you, I said, "Gee, this is not Christmas, is it?" Because we didn't see that much over there [Horse Cove] only weekends and Christmas when we'd have something special. You had to watch every dollar, ever cent you ever made. But when I come here, I made a good living, a good bite to eat.
His father was drilling ore at 44-40, a surface mine, and Arthur began working alongside him digging the clay off the iron ore and carting it away with a horse and box cart. He worked six days a week, 60 hours total for 28.5 cents an hour. His take-home pay was $17.10 a week, while his father's cheque was between $20 and $25 a week. Anyway, we lived good, tell you the truth. There was a good living on Bell Island. That's why I like the damn old rock so much.
When winter came, he got a job in the East Barn (of No. 2 Mine). In the East Barn, they were looking for some young feller that knew something about horses and was used to horses, because half the boys that went there then was almost afraid of horses. So anyway, I put my name in for a job teaming. A few days after that, they sent for me. I went down and went to work in the barn, hauling coal, hauling water around the houses with a big old puncheon. After a year or so in the barn, the ambulance driver, Al Butler from Topsail, got sick, and I went in his place on the ambulance. I was around 25 years old then, and I was at that for 12 or 14 years, until Bert Rideout took it over [around 1948].
Arthur likened the enclosed horse-drawn ambulance to a chuck wagon, like ones he had seen in cowboy movies. John Skinner, who worked in the Surgery assisting Dr. Templeman, described it as resembling the Red Cross ambulances used during WWI. He said there were two lit flares (torches) on the front of it (the white objects on the front in the painting). These helped light the way on dark nights while driving over unpaved roads with open ditches, and also served to alert others on the road. The photo below is of a 1991 painting by Hubert Brown that is hanging in the Bell Island Community Museum. To do the painting, Mr. Brown consulted with Arthur Clarke, who described the details of the Company ambulance to him. Steve Neary commissioned the painting and later donated it to the museum.
When there was a mine accident, Arthur, or in his absence one of the 16 other teamsters, would take the horse-drawn ambulance to the scene to remove the injured and bring them to the surgery for treatment. The dead were taken directly to the Dominion Fire Hall to be prepared for burial. There was a "dressing station" in each of the underground barns and that's where anyone who got hurt would be brought to be cared for while awaiting the ambulance. There was a horn on the outside of the East Barn that would blow to announce an accident. Someone from the barn in the affected mine would call the East Barn to summon the ambulance. Once the call came in, the horse would have to be harnessed. It took five minutes to reach No. 3 Mine and 12 minutes to reach No. 4, the furthest away. Arthur's only training for this part of his job was some first aid courses. He was mainly the driver, getting the patient into the ambulance and then to the surgery for treatment, but he assisted the doctor in whatever way he could, and was witness to some terrible scenes. Besides the emergency ambulance driving, he would also drive the Company doctors to their house calls, sometimes after work. He would also be called out to drive midwives to home deliveries, which were often done without a doctor in attendance. The ambulance emergency work was not an everyday occurrence and most of the time was taken up with looking after the horses of No. 2 Mine, cleaning out the barn, liming it, cleaning and mending harness, keeping track of the 17 or 18 horses, some in the mine, some in the barn, some on the surface. Around 1948, the Company contracted the ambulance work out to Bert Rideout, who had purchased Bell Island's first motorized ambulance. Arthur continued working with the horses in the East Barn until No. 2 Mine closed down in 1950, at which time he went to No. 4 Mine as a blacksmith's helper.
This is how Arthur described his work in the East Barn:
I had more to do besides drive the ambulance. People thought you were an ambulance driver and that's all you did. But we had to go down, we had 17 or 18 horses in the barn, some in the mines and some on the surface. You'd have to go down in the morning and the first thing you'd have to do is clean out the barn, clean the horse stalls out, oh, I'd say, a good pick-up full after all night. And then you'd have to clean the harness, lime the barns, keep track of the horses. You'd have a job for all day. You'd have your working clothes on. You wouldn't rig up in a suit for the ambulance. You'd jump aboard the ambulance with your working clothes on. They could smell the barn off you before they'd see you, that's the truth.
You'd be on all sorts of calls. I minds one morning when I went to work. It was in the winter and we were after getting a northwester, freezing wind. The snow was squishing under your feet. And just as I was going through the barnyard, the horn rang. There was a horn on the outside but you could hear it all over the place when she'd ring. So when I went in, the boss said, "Walt Carter was in and he said, you got to go over to No. 6 Check Office. There's three or four men over there frost burned." So the boss said, "Take the horse and slide because there's a lot of snow on the road." So we went over and there was three men there frost burned. And there was an old man, I say he was old but he was in his 60s I'd say, came there from the West Mines. He had a summer cap on, pepper and salt cap with one ear hauled down agin the wind and a hand holding the other side. And he come in, the tabaccy juice down over his chin. "Boys," he said, "there's no skitties [mosquitoes] out this mornin. What's wrong with you fellers?" There wasn't a peck knocked out of him. But the rest of them had their chin frost-burned and their face frost- burned. They used to walk from Lance Cove, out through a short cut, come across the marsh to the Whack Road, they called it in them years, used to even walk from that far away.
I asked him about the location of the barn for No. 2 Mine:
The barn was on the surface. But now, there used to be a barn down in the mine too. That's where they got the calls from, the barn down in the mines, where the horses down in the mines were kept. That's where the dressing station was at for anyone got hurted. That's what fellers couldn't understand. They used to ring from the barn in the mine to our barn on the surface. You knows where you takes the turn to go down to the Controllers, the liquor store on the Green, [Knights of Columbus Drive] well our barn was right on the corner of that. That's where it was. There was five little barns there.
About the horses used for the ambulance:
They were all Company horses, big horses. The feller that I had to handle was 1,700 pounds. And in order to work so well, it used to take me five minutes every time to get the horse ready and out through the door. They had the reins in the pen, they called it, and the collar and bit was together. Slip it on over his head and he'd open his mouth for the bit, that's how tame they was. And as soon as you'd take the reins off of the pad to back out behind him, he'd come back on the fly and he'd take off through the door. One day I got called to go to No. 6. Just as I caught hold ready to haul back, I couldn't get the reins to come. And the horse come back that fast, and he took off through the door and I lost the reins, lost everything. "Holy jumpins," I said to myself, "the horse is gonna go up on the Green now." But the horse went up and the boss was up with the door open in the ambulance shed, and the horse went right up to the ambulance and backed in under like that. Boy, he was some nice horse. He was 1,700 pounds. Mostly I took that one horse all the time. His name was Tom. We had a lot of horses in the mines, sick, cut and bruises on them, and we had to look after them all. We never stopped, you know what I mean. It wasn't ambulance work alone; we had to look after all of the horses.
The doctors on the Island that Arthur dealt with:
I drove for Dr. Lynch, he was the first one I drove for, and Dr. Templeman, Dr. Crummy, and I used to drive Dr. Dawe around, mostly house to house calls. We used to drive doctors around house to house calls, sometimes after work. Anyone had cuts or bruises or anything on them, we used to have to go pick them up with the buggy. If I never, someone else did. But after work, the doctor might have five or six calls to make out to the Front of the Island, up to Scotia No. 1, or down East End, and you'd have to take the doctor around to patients. And all babies were born home in them years. Most all babies were born home. And we used to have nurses that we used to call midwives. You'd get them and you'd go in and bring them to the houses. And sometimes they'd born the babies without the doctors. And very few times they had any hard luck, you know what I mean. Everything used to go very good. There was no welfare then like now. Now they go to the doctor every month or every two months to get a checkup, and then they send you over to the hospital. Not in them days. We used to go through storms with Dr. Templeman out to the Front of the Island, and one time I remember so well up to Paddy Foley's up on the Avenue [Middleton?]. His wife was two days expecting the baby. Anyhow, this night there was a big storm and Dr. Templeman called me and we went up. And on the way, I got bogged down in No. 4. We didn't go the road we goes now. And there was drifts of snow and flurries coming down heavy, and I had to shovel the horses out. And we got up to Paddy Foley's about 12:00 and we was there until 3:00 in the morning. But Dr. Templeman, there was something wrong; he was a sick man at that time. He couldn't do no walking or anything like that. And when I come down agin Butler's old shop, he said, "Art boy, you put in a hard night, didn't you?" I said, "Doctor, yes, it was all right, I suppose, but Paddy had a few drinks of rum up there for Christmas, and meself and Paddy drinked a half a bottle." He said, "You never, did you?" I said, "Yes, I did," I said. "What are you worrying about? Sure you're okay; you made twenty dollars out of it." "Ah," he said, "I'll split it up with you before Christmas is over." So, in Christmas, he did give me a bottle. Yeah.
Driving the ambulance at night:
But it was hard weather getting around in them times. The worst thing I used to find was if I had to go in the night time. We had to work night shifts on the last of it. And if I had to go in with the ambulance in the night time, you'd get lots of calls. There was no lights on the poles like there is now on the roadside. On the Company areas, there'd be a few lights here and there, but not on the roadside, very, very few. And then, in the night time, you only had the lights on the ambulance, one on each side, and you could see the drain by the road. You could see the horse and the wheel and that's all. You'd watch the wheel and you'd watch the side of the road. That's the only thing you could do. Especially foggy nights would be hard. The cold weather in the winter was terrible. The sides of me jaws used to be froze, and they used to call me "lobster jaws," I'd be that red.
I never did go off the road, but I'll tell you one thing. There was a Chinaman on the Green, had a laundry down there. And they called him "Honey Blue Bag," that's what they called him. And one time, going down over Compressor Hill, Honey was going back home after going to his customers, and I had my head side-on to the wind, driving the horse's sleigh. And I thought I heard somebody bawling. I couldn't understand what they were saying, and I couldn't see no one, the weather was that dirty. I stopped the horse anyhow, and when I stopped the horse, there he was. Honey had a big blue bag on his back, and a shaft of the sleigh was gone under his arm. And that's where he was at, on the bottom, on the shaft of the slide, the sleigh. But he never got hurt. As luck should have it, he never got hurt. But only for I heard him bawling, I would have went on. When I looked, I see him, speaking as fast as they come, he down there like that, "yak, yak, yak, yak."
The Company Surgery:
This little surgery was down where Stoyles got his shop, House of Stoyles, around there, that's the place where the Surgery was. It was only a two-storey house. I think there were four beds. There was a piece built on, a long piece built on the back of it. I think there was four beds was in it, and there used to be four and five men sometimes would get hurted. Charlie Skanes and Frank Bowdring was the worse ever I see. [Skanes and Bowdring were badly burned. They were two of five survivors of a gas explosion in No. 6 Mine on April 27, 1938. Two other men died.] But anyhow, I helped the doctor with one thing and another. And Dr. Lynch or Dr. Templeman, I'm not sure which, sent me up to all the big foremen to get some liquor. I brought down three bottles, parts of bottles of liquor, from the staff people, brought down to the surgery for them. Nurse Smith was one of the nurses; she lived above the Surgery. She used to have to do all the wounds that came in the Surgery to get done up. All the patients that came night or day, she had to get up and tend to them.
Anyone who died in a mining accident, you brought them to the old fire hall that was where the Post Office is now.
When people had to be taken to St. John's, did you go with them?
No, I wouldn't go to St. John's. I'd take them to the boat in the ambulance and they'd go from there on the stretcher, down aboard the boat, and the ambulance would pick them up in Portugal Cove then. But we used to take the hockey team on the ice, two or three winters across on the ice. It was meself and Eddie Power, that was me buddy, and a man from the Scotia barn, Harvey Kitchener, we used to take one horse and a big long slide and the hockey teams, and they won the cup that year.
Memories of Monsignor Bartlett:
Monsignor Bartlett was a wonderful man for sports, my dear, was he ever. No matter what denomination you was, if you passed along by where he was, he had something for you to do. He'd say, "Come here I wants you. Here, get at that there, look." Just like that, and you'd do it. You wouldn't ask no questions. The playground [formerly the Sports Field], meself and a man the name of Garland Pittman, we ploughed all that up with a big old scoup, a big old plough and a team of horses. We ploughed all that up for nothing, free labour. [The Sports Field was constructed in 1931-32, the early years of the Great Depression when 1,736 Bell Island miners were out of work. Many of them volunteered their labour to get the job done for the community.] If I happened to be going along agin the fence, he used to call me, "Art, Art, come here. Get in there and take that plough, will you, give Gar Pitman a spell." Whenever there was work, my son, he was like that to everybody. No odds who you were, he'd call you. Come in and set in. A lovely person. He was all for sports, yeah.
After Bert Rideout took the ambulance work over around 1948:
I still stayed in the barn, repairing this and that. And after a few months, the barn closed up. They got all this stuff, trucks, you know what I mean, come in that done all the work all around. And down in the mines, they got motors to put on the tracks down there instead of horses, and all the horses was done away with. Then I got a job over in No. 4 as a blacksmith's helper. I was only over there about two or three years and that closed up when they started bringing in material already made up. Then I went over to the concentrator. That's the last place I worked for the Company. I went over there on cleanup. I had to bump somebody to get that. I said, I'm not going up no further, I'm going down, you know. I got a cut of pay because a blacksmith's helper was better pay. But anyhow, I was only there a few months, and I loved blacksmith work, see, and I learned a little bit about machinery and this and that. So anyway, sometimes when the maintenance man's helper would be off, he'd say to me, can you give a hand with this, and after a while I got to be the maintenance man's helper. And about a month before the mines closed, they made me maintenance man. Just a month, and it was a good job, and then she closed down. [June 30, 1966.]
Were you surprised when the mines closed:
Not really, because Labrador opened up, and I knew here the mines had advanced so far out under the bay. It cost so much money for belts and trucks and machinery, I can't see how it would pay. And the grade of ore went down too. But then when Labrador opened up and it was a good grade, I said to the boys, "I don't give much for this place now, she's liable to close all together." So one day the maintenance boss came in and said, "Boys, I got bad news for you, the mines is closing." I could have went away to Owen Sound to another concentrator job, but I wouldn't go. I thought about it. The boss had a job waiting for him up in Owen Sound at a concentrator, and I could go maintenance man too. Some of the boys went with him, but I wouldn't go. I said, "Mr. Brown, I'll tell you. I'm 55 years old and I got very little education. When I leaves this rock, I'll be sot down along side the welfare officer; he'll be hauling out of it too." And he said, "I don't mind you, Arthur, boy, because you'll make a living where the rest won't make nothing."
I happened to be down to Charlie Cohen's store when they come in spreading the news around that the mines was closed for good. I saw oldish women there, middle ages like meself, I was only 55, crying. Where were they going to go? What was they going to do? It was going to be a ghost town and all this. And I saw me buddies, young Stoyles, he had his house just about finished, a new home. $1,500, that's what he got for it. [Provincial Government resettlement allowance given in return for houses regardless of value.] Gave it away. A lot of people on the Island, young married couples like that, had new homes. $1,500 and they grabbed it, and they went up. Some of them was sorry for it because they never made it good up away. Some made good, some made it. They'd like to get back home. They wanted to live here anyway, but they had nothing to come back to.
I asked Mrs. Clarke (Ellen, nee McCarthy) if she had wanted to move away when the mines closed:
No, no, I never did want to move off the Island. I was born and reared here [at Scotia No. 1, close to where they were now living.]
A few years before this interview, in 1989, Arthur had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. At first he wasn't sure he wanted to be operated on for it, but after thinking it over, he decided to have the operation, which was successful. However, in the process of having tests, it was discovered that he had an aneurysm. Once again, he was operated on, and once again it was successful.
Arthur died on January 20, 2004 at age 92, at the Dr. Walter Templeman Hospital on Bell Island. His wife, Ellen, died October 22, 2002 at age 82. They are buried in St. Cyprian's Anglican Cemetery, Bell Island.
This is how Arthur described his work in the East Barn:
I had more to do besides drive the ambulance. People thought you were an ambulance driver and that's all you did. But we had to go down, we had 17 or 18 horses in the barn, some in the mines and some on the surface. You'd have to go down in the morning and the first thing you'd have to do is clean out the barn, clean the horse stalls out, oh, I'd say, a good pick-up full after all night. And then you'd have to clean the harness, lime the barns, keep track of the horses. You'd have a job for all day. You'd have your working clothes on. You wouldn't rig up in a suit for the ambulance. You'd jump aboard the ambulance with your working clothes on. They could smell the barn off you before they'd see you, that's the truth.
You'd be on all sorts of calls. I minds one morning when I went to work. It was in the winter and we were after getting a northwester, freezing wind. The snow was squishing under your feet. And just as I was going through the barnyard, the horn rang. There was a horn on the outside but you could hear it all over the place when she'd ring. So when I went in, the boss said, "Walt Carter was in and he said, you got to go over to No. 6 Check Office. There's three or four men over there frost burned." So the boss said, "Take the horse and slide because there's a lot of snow on the road." So we went over and there was three men there frost burned. And there was an old man, I say he was old but he was in his 60s I'd say, came there from the West Mines. He had a summer cap on, pepper and salt cap with one ear hauled down agin the wind and a hand holding the other side. And he come in, the tabaccy juice down over his chin. "Boys," he said, "there's no skitties [mosquitoes] out this mornin. What's wrong with you fellers?" There wasn't a peck knocked out of him. But the rest of them had their chin frost-burned and their face frost- burned. They used to walk from Lance Cove, out through a short cut, come across the marsh to the Whack Road, they called it in them years, used to even walk from that far away.
I asked him about the location of the barn for No. 2 Mine:
The barn was on the surface. But now, there used to be a barn down in the mine too. That's where they got the calls from, the barn down in the mines, where the horses down in the mines were kept. That's where the dressing station was at for anyone got hurted. That's what fellers couldn't understand. They used to ring from the barn in the mine to our barn on the surface. You knows where you takes the turn to go down to the Controllers, the liquor store on the Green, [Knights of Columbus Drive] well our barn was right on the corner of that. That's where it was. There was five little barns there.
About the horses used for the ambulance:
They were all Company horses, big horses. The feller that I had to handle was 1,700 pounds. And in order to work so well, it used to take me five minutes every time to get the horse ready and out through the door. They had the reins in the pen, they called it, and the collar and bit was together. Slip it on over his head and he'd open his mouth for the bit, that's how tame they was. And as soon as you'd take the reins off of the pad to back out behind him, he'd come back on the fly and he'd take off through the door. One day I got called to go to No. 6. Just as I caught hold ready to haul back, I couldn't get the reins to come. And the horse come back that fast, and he took off through the door and I lost the reins, lost everything. "Holy jumpins," I said to myself, "the horse is gonna go up on the Green now." But the horse went up and the boss was up with the door open in the ambulance shed, and the horse went right up to the ambulance and backed in under like that. Boy, he was some nice horse. He was 1,700 pounds. Mostly I took that one horse all the time. His name was Tom. We had a lot of horses in the mines, sick, cut and bruises on them, and we had to look after them all. We never stopped, you know what I mean. It wasn't ambulance work alone; we had to look after all of the horses.
The doctors on the Island that Arthur dealt with:
I drove for Dr. Lynch, he was the first one I drove for, and Dr. Templeman, Dr. Crummy, and I used to drive Dr. Dawe around, mostly house to house calls. We used to drive doctors around house to house calls, sometimes after work. Anyone had cuts or bruises or anything on them, we used to have to go pick them up with the buggy. If I never, someone else did. But after work, the doctor might have five or six calls to make out to the Front of the Island, up to Scotia No. 1, or down East End, and you'd have to take the doctor around to patients. And all babies were born home in them years. Most all babies were born home. And we used to have nurses that we used to call midwives. You'd get them and you'd go in and bring them to the houses. And sometimes they'd born the babies without the doctors. And very few times they had any hard luck, you know what I mean. Everything used to go very good. There was no welfare then like now. Now they go to the doctor every month or every two months to get a checkup, and then they send you over to the hospital. Not in them days. We used to go through storms with Dr. Templeman out to the Front of the Island, and one time I remember so well up to Paddy Foley's up on the Avenue [Middleton?]. His wife was two days expecting the baby. Anyhow, this night there was a big storm and Dr. Templeman called me and we went up. And on the way, I got bogged down in No. 4. We didn't go the road we goes now. And there was drifts of snow and flurries coming down heavy, and I had to shovel the horses out. And we got up to Paddy Foley's about 12:00 and we was there until 3:00 in the morning. But Dr. Templeman, there was something wrong; he was a sick man at that time. He couldn't do no walking or anything like that. And when I come down agin Butler's old shop, he said, "Art boy, you put in a hard night, didn't you?" I said, "Doctor, yes, it was all right, I suppose, but Paddy had a few drinks of rum up there for Christmas, and meself and Paddy drinked a half a bottle." He said, "You never, did you?" I said, "Yes, I did," I said. "What are you worrying about? Sure you're okay; you made twenty dollars out of it." "Ah," he said, "I'll split it up with you before Christmas is over." So, in Christmas, he did give me a bottle. Yeah.
Driving the ambulance at night:
But it was hard weather getting around in them times. The worst thing I used to find was if I had to go in the night time. We had to work night shifts on the last of it. And if I had to go in with the ambulance in the night time, you'd get lots of calls. There was no lights on the poles like there is now on the roadside. On the Company areas, there'd be a few lights here and there, but not on the roadside, very, very few. And then, in the night time, you only had the lights on the ambulance, one on each side, and you could see the drain by the road. You could see the horse and the wheel and that's all. You'd watch the wheel and you'd watch the side of the road. That's the only thing you could do. Especially foggy nights would be hard. The cold weather in the winter was terrible. The sides of me jaws used to be froze, and they used to call me "lobster jaws," I'd be that red.
I never did go off the road, but I'll tell you one thing. There was a Chinaman on the Green, had a laundry down there. And they called him "Honey Blue Bag," that's what they called him. And one time, going down over Compressor Hill, Honey was going back home after going to his customers, and I had my head side-on to the wind, driving the horse's sleigh. And I thought I heard somebody bawling. I couldn't understand what they were saying, and I couldn't see no one, the weather was that dirty. I stopped the horse anyhow, and when I stopped the horse, there he was. Honey had a big blue bag on his back, and a shaft of the sleigh was gone under his arm. And that's where he was at, on the bottom, on the shaft of the slide, the sleigh. But he never got hurt. As luck should have it, he never got hurt. But only for I heard him bawling, I would have went on. When I looked, I see him, speaking as fast as they come, he down there like that, "yak, yak, yak, yak."
The Company Surgery:
This little surgery was down where Stoyles got his shop, House of Stoyles, around there, that's the place where the Surgery was. It was only a two-storey house. I think there were four beds. There was a piece built on, a long piece built on the back of it. I think there was four beds was in it, and there used to be four and five men sometimes would get hurted. Charlie Skanes and Frank Bowdring was the worse ever I see. [Skanes and Bowdring were badly burned. They were two of five survivors of a gas explosion in No. 6 Mine on April 27, 1938. Two other men died.] But anyhow, I helped the doctor with one thing and another. And Dr. Lynch or Dr. Templeman, I'm not sure which, sent me up to all the big foremen to get some liquor. I brought down three bottles, parts of bottles of liquor, from the staff people, brought down to the surgery for them. Nurse Smith was one of the nurses; she lived above the Surgery. She used to have to do all the wounds that came in the Surgery to get done up. All the patients that came night or day, she had to get up and tend to them.
Anyone who died in a mining accident, you brought them to the old fire hall that was where the Post Office is now.
When people had to be taken to St. John's, did you go with them?
No, I wouldn't go to St. John's. I'd take them to the boat in the ambulance and they'd go from there on the stretcher, down aboard the boat, and the ambulance would pick them up in Portugal Cove then. But we used to take the hockey team on the ice, two or three winters across on the ice. It was meself and Eddie Power, that was me buddy, and a man from the Scotia barn, Harvey Kitchener, we used to take one horse and a big long slide and the hockey teams, and they won the cup that year.
Memories of Monsignor Bartlett:
Monsignor Bartlett was a wonderful man for sports, my dear, was he ever. No matter what denomination you was, if you passed along by where he was, he had something for you to do. He'd say, "Come here I wants you. Here, get at that there, look." Just like that, and you'd do it. You wouldn't ask no questions. The playground [formerly the Sports Field], meself and a man the name of Garland Pittman, we ploughed all that up with a big old scoup, a big old plough and a team of horses. We ploughed all that up for nothing, free labour. [The Sports Field was constructed in 1931-32, the early years of the Great Depression when 1,736 Bell Island miners were out of work. Many of them volunteered their labour to get the job done for the community.] If I happened to be going along agin the fence, he used to call me, "Art, Art, come here. Get in there and take that plough, will you, give Gar Pitman a spell." Whenever there was work, my son, he was like that to everybody. No odds who you were, he'd call you. Come in and set in. A lovely person. He was all for sports, yeah.
After Bert Rideout took the ambulance work over around 1948:
I still stayed in the barn, repairing this and that. And after a few months, the barn closed up. They got all this stuff, trucks, you know what I mean, come in that done all the work all around. And down in the mines, they got motors to put on the tracks down there instead of horses, and all the horses was done away with. Then I got a job over in No. 4 as a blacksmith's helper. I was only over there about two or three years and that closed up when they started bringing in material already made up. Then I went over to the concentrator. That's the last place I worked for the Company. I went over there on cleanup. I had to bump somebody to get that. I said, I'm not going up no further, I'm going down, you know. I got a cut of pay because a blacksmith's helper was better pay. But anyhow, I was only there a few months, and I loved blacksmith work, see, and I learned a little bit about machinery and this and that. So anyway, sometimes when the maintenance man's helper would be off, he'd say to me, can you give a hand with this, and after a while I got to be the maintenance man's helper. And about a month before the mines closed, they made me maintenance man. Just a month, and it was a good job, and then she closed down. [June 30, 1966.]
Were you surprised when the mines closed:
Not really, because Labrador opened up, and I knew here the mines had advanced so far out under the bay. It cost so much money for belts and trucks and machinery, I can't see how it would pay. And the grade of ore went down too. But then when Labrador opened up and it was a good grade, I said to the boys, "I don't give much for this place now, she's liable to close all together." So one day the maintenance boss came in and said, "Boys, I got bad news for you, the mines is closing." I could have went away to Owen Sound to another concentrator job, but I wouldn't go. I thought about it. The boss had a job waiting for him up in Owen Sound at a concentrator, and I could go maintenance man too. Some of the boys went with him, but I wouldn't go. I said, "Mr. Brown, I'll tell you. I'm 55 years old and I got very little education. When I leaves this rock, I'll be sot down along side the welfare officer; he'll be hauling out of it too." And he said, "I don't mind you, Arthur, boy, because you'll make a living where the rest won't make nothing."
I happened to be down to Charlie Cohen's store when they come in spreading the news around that the mines was closed for good. I saw oldish women there, middle ages like meself, I was only 55, crying. Where were they going to go? What was they going to do? It was going to be a ghost town and all this. And I saw me buddies, young Stoyles, he had his house just about finished, a new home. $1,500, that's what he got for it. [Provincial Government resettlement allowance given in return for houses regardless of value.] Gave it away. A lot of people on the Island, young married couples like that, had new homes. $1,500 and they grabbed it, and they went up. Some of them was sorry for it because they never made it good up away. Some made good, some made it. They'd like to get back home. They wanted to live here anyway, but they had nothing to come back to.
I asked Mrs. Clarke (Ellen, nee McCarthy) if she had wanted to move away when the mines closed:
No, no, I never did want to move off the Island. I was born and reared here [at Scotia No. 1, close to where they were now living.]
A few years before this interview, in 1989, Arthur had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. At first he wasn't sure he wanted to be operated on for it, but after thinking it over, he decided to have the operation, which was successful. However, in the process of having tests, it was discovered that he had an aneurysm. Once again, he was operated on, and once again it was successful.
Arthur died on January 20, 2004 at age 92, at the Dr. Walter Templeman Hospital on Bell Island. His wife, Ellen, died October 22, 2002 at age 82. They are buried in St. Cyprian's Anglican Cemetery, Bell Island.