EXTRAS
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE STORIES
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE STORIES
"AROUND THE BLOCK"
Growing up in the area of Wabana bordered by
East Track, Greenwood Avenue and Church Road in the 1960s
Growing up in the area of Wabana bordered by
East Track, Greenwood Avenue and Church Road in the 1960s
by
Dave Careless
Dave Careless
About the author: Dave Careless was born March 13, 1948 in Rotherham, in the coal-mining district of South Yorkshire, England. His father, Tom Careless, was working in the wages office of the National Coal Board at Aldwarke and Silverwood pits when he received a job offer in the autumn of 1957 to come to Bell Island to work at DOSCO's Main Office in charge of production and projections, determining how much ore was being produced and how much was required to fill the order books. Tom came on his own to get the lay of the land and was quickly promoted to Assistant to the General Manager (a position he held until the mines closed in 1966). In March of 1958, 10-year-old Dave and his mother, Jennie, arrived in Newfoundland. This is the story of Dave's memories of his eight years living on Bell Island before the mines closed. (You can read more about Tom Careless in the "C" section of the "People" page on this website. You can see more Careless photos on the "Photo Gallery" page.)
“An intense sleet storm on March 1st caused widespread damage to communication and power supply lines around the Conception Bay area and a complete blackout to Bell Island for several days” was reported in the Submarine Miner, DOSCO’s in-house magazine for the Wabana iron ore mines operation, March, 1958 issue.
This photograph was taken by my father, Tom Careless, in the aftermath of that March 1st sleet, or “glitter” storm. The photo is taken looking west on Greenwood Avenue, towards the East Track and the town water tower which stood at the corner of those two thoroughfares. The house pictured was a Company-owned property and, at the time the photograph was taken, was occupied by Gordon Phelan and his family. The low building opposite the end of Greenwood Avenue was just behind DOSCO’s main office building painted in the same colour scheme, just out of the picture, and housed the fire engine and the infrastructure of the Town of Wabana Volunteer Fire Department.
This photograph was taken by my father, Tom Careless, in the aftermath of that March 1st sleet, or “glitter” storm. The photo is taken looking west on Greenwood Avenue, towards the East Track and the town water tower which stood at the corner of those two thoroughfares. The house pictured was a Company-owned property and, at the time the photograph was taken, was occupied by Gordon Phelan and his family. The low building opposite the end of Greenwood Avenue was just behind DOSCO’s main office building painted in the same colour scheme, just out of the picture, and housed the fire engine and the infrastructure of the Town of Wabana Volunteer Fire Department.
DEDICATION
Patch
(1958-1966)
(1958-1966)
Dedicated to the small, white, mongrel dog that was
my constant companion those years that I lived on
Bennett Street and Greenwood Avenue
my constant companion those years that I lived on
Bennett Street and Greenwood Avenue
And it wasn’t just me he touched. Jim Hearn, who has spent the whole of his life on Bell Island and ran the Wabana Boys’ Club for his entire working career, looked after Patch at least twice when, as a family, we travelled to the United Kingdom for holidays that lasted at least a month and often longer. Patch, without fail, always visited Jim and his family at their house on Armoury Road every Saturday morning for years afterwards, and lay around the kitchen for an hour, going back home to Greenwood Avenue and appearing at their house again at approximately the same time the following Saturday. Just as they never forgot him, he never forgot them.
When I was in St. John’s several years ago, almost 50 years after I had left the island, I called Jim and explained who I was and arranged to visit him. I mentioned Patch, to which he replied, “Good Lord, I was just talking about your dog to somebody yesterday!”
I should take a moment to explain exactly how Patch ended up in our lives. Amongst the first friends that my father made on the Island, after he had arrived there less than two weeks before Christmas 1957, were Dr. Jim Wilson and his wife, Brenda, who were themselves new arrivals to Wabana as well. They became family friends, and my mother and Brenda got along equally as well as did my father and the good doctor. One afternoon, after we had been there just two months or so, the back door to our house on Bennett Street was quietly opened and a small white puppy, with a curly tail and a black patch over his left eye, was slid into the kitchen, and the door just as quickly closed again. Dr. Jim Wilson had made a delivery, and one for which I shall always be eternally grateful.
Over the years, I’ve had many pets, cats, dogs, rabbits, hamsters, you name it, and although I’ve loved them all, there’s a special place reserved in my heart for Patch. I’m confident someday I’ll see him again; I’ll be on my blue Raleigh bicycle, and he’ll be plodding along beside me, dog tags on his collar jingling, as we make our way slowly down Town Square, going to Carbage’s, perhaps, on an errand for my mother, or to Lawton’s maybe to pick up a 10-cent comic book, then walk back up the slope again, back to Greenwood Avenue, pushing the bike this time, at least on to the flat, with Patch right beside me, keeping me company. That’s quite possibly my idea of heaven.
When I was in St. John’s several years ago, almost 50 years after I had left the island, I called Jim and explained who I was and arranged to visit him. I mentioned Patch, to which he replied, “Good Lord, I was just talking about your dog to somebody yesterday!”
I should take a moment to explain exactly how Patch ended up in our lives. Amongst the first friends that my father made on the Island, after he had arrived there less than two weeks before Christmas 1957, were Dr. Jim Wilson and his wife, Brenda, who were themselves new arrivals to Wabana as well. They became family friends, and my mother and Brenda got along equally as well as did my father and the good doctor. One afternoon, after we had been there just two months or so, the back door to our house on Bennett Street was quietly opened and a small white puppy, with a curly tail and a black patch over his left eye, was slid into the kitchen, and the door just as quickly closed again. Dr. Jim Wilson had made a delivery, and one for which I shall always be eternally grateful.
Over the years, I’ve had many pets, cats, dogs, rabbits, hamsters, you name it, and although I’ve loved them all, there’s a special place reserved in my heart for Patch. I’m confident someday I’ll see him again; I’ll be on my blue Raleigh bicycle, and he’ll be plodding along beside me, dog tags on his collar jingling, as we make our way slowly down Town Square, going to Carbage’s, perhaps, on an errand for my mother, or to Lawton’s maybe to pick up a 10-cent comic book, then walk back up the slope again, back to Greenwood Avenue, pushing the bike this time, at least on to the flat, with Patch right beside me, keeping me company. That’s quite possibly my idea of heaven.
Bennett Street Beginnings
Being a child at the time, of course, I did not realize, until I was considerably older and had moved away, just how lucky I had been to have grown up in the town of Wabana on Bell Island.
I was exactly 10 years and three days old when I first set foot on Bell Island, on Sunday, March 16th, 1958. My father, Tom Careless, had been employed in the coal mining industry in south Yorkshire, in England, ever since he’d left school in 1929, apart from the six years he’d spent serving in His Majesty’s forces during the Second World War, 1939-1945. I suspect my father hadn’t ever seriously considered leaving the employ of the National Coal Board, as it was known after the British coal industry was nationalized sometime in the late 1940’s, until one day, quite unexpectedly, sometime in the autumn of 1957, he received a letter from Newfoundland, Canada, on paper that had the letterhead of Dominion Wabana Ore Limited, an item of correspondence that had literally arrived completely ‘out of the blue.’
The letter had been sent by one Hubert S. (John) Haslam, who was the General Superintendent at Wabana at the time, second only in command to the Works Manager, V. J. Southey. Obviously, he had crossed paths with my father at some point, as he had also been involved in the coal mining industry in and around the Rotherham area of Yorkshire where we lived, and for one reason or another my father must have made an impression on John Haslam, as he was known. I must point out that my father was not a mining engineer or anything of the sort. He was a ‘number cruncher,’ for want of a better term and, in fact, had spent most of his time with the Coal Board in the pay offices of several local collieries, working out miners’ wages. The job that John Haslam envisioned for my father had everything to do with figures, but with tonnages of iron ore being produced and nothing to do with iron ore miners’ wage packets. My father would be responsible for determining exactly how much iron ore was being produced on a daily/weekly basis, and making sure that the stockpiles of ore were sufficient to fulfil the requirements of the order books, and consequently to fill the holds of the iron ore carriers that were arriving every few days to haul the ore way to feed the blast furnaces of England, Germany and, just as importantly, those of the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation, of which Dominion Wabana Ore was a partner, at their huge steel making plant in Sydney, Nova Scotia.
Needless to say, my father was intrigued by the offer and, after some back and forth correspondence, a day trip to Leeds for my mother, father and I to each have a complete medical examination to meet Canadian immigration policy, and an evening spent at the local Methodist Chapel watching a film on the virtues of Canada, courtesy of Brooke Bond Tea (!), my father set out for Scotland by train one Sunday morning just a few weeks before Christmas 1957, from there to fly from Prestwick to Gander, in Newfoundland, to check out Bell Island and the possibility of relocating there. He and my mother did eventually return to Yorkshire to live, but only after another twenty-two years had passed!!
As I’ve already noted above, it was March of 1958 when my mother and I eventually joined my father in St. John’s. On the night of March 10th, a Monday, we had flown from London to Manchester, and on to Gander, where we were supposed to meet up with my father, who had travelled there by train, but the weather had something to say about that. After our pilot made a few half-hearted attempts to land in a snowstorm, mother and I ended up flying on to Montreal, returning as far east as Sydney by Thursday, the 13th, which also happened to be my 10th birthday, and which we spent in an hotel in Glace Bay, before finally flying on to St. John’s the following day. Bizarrely, despite the fact that my mother and I didn’t actually reach Newfoundland until four days after our planned arrival date, we ended up getting to St. John’s before my father, who was still stuck in deep snow in Gander and arrived in the capital city the next day, having travelled there by train overnight. It definitely took a little longer than anticipated, but we did eventually make it and were reunited with my father when his train finally rolled into the station in downtown St. John’s.
I was exactly 10 years and three days old when I first set foot on Bell Island, on Sunday, March 16th, 1958. My father, Tom Careless, had been employed in the coal mining industry in south Yorkshire, in England, ever since he’d left school in 1929, apart from the six years he’d spent serving in His Majesty’s forces during the Second World War, 1939-1945. I suspect my father hadn’t ever seriously considered leaving the employ of the National Coal Board, as it was known after the British coal industry was nationalized sometime in the late 1940’s, until one day, quite unexpectedly, sometime in the autumn of 1957, he received a letter from Newfoundland, Canada, on paper that had the letterhead of Dominion Wabana Ore Limited, an item of correspondence that had literally arrived completely ‘out of the blue.’
The letter had been sent by one Hubert S. (John) Haslam, who was the General Superintendent at Wabana at the time, second only in command to the Works Manager, V. J. Southey. Obviously, he had crossed paths with my father at some point, as he had also been involved in the coal mining industry in and around the Rotherham area of Yorkshire where we lived, and for one reason or another my father must have made an impression on John Haslam, as he was known. I must point out that my father was not a mining engineer or anything of the sort. He was a ‘number cruncher,’ for want of a better term and, in fact, had spent most of his time with the Coal Board in the pay offices of several local collieries, working out miners’ wages. The job that John Haslam envisioned for my father had everything to do with figures, but with tonnages of iron ore being produced and nothing to do with iron ore miners’ wage packets. My father would be responsible for determining exactly how much iron ore was being produced on a daily/weekly basis, and making sure that the stockpiles of ore were sufficient to fulfil the requirements of the order books, and consequently to fill the holds of the iron ore carriers that were arriving every few days to haul the ore way to feed the blast furnaces of England, Germany and, just as importantly, those of the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation, of which Dominion Wabana Ore was a partner, at their huge steel making plant in Sydney, Nova Scotia.
Needless to say, my father was intrigued by the offer and, after some back and forth correspondence, a day trip to Leeds for my mother, father and I to each have a complete medical examination to meet Canadian immigration policy, and an evening spent at the local Methodist Chapel watching a film on the virtues of Canada, courtesy of Brooke Bond Tea (!), my father set out for Scotland by train one Sunday morning just a few weeks before Christmas 1957, from there to fly from Prestwick to Gander, in Newfoundland, to check out Bell Island and the possibility of relocating there. He and my mother did eventually return to Yorkshire to live, but only after another twenty-two years had passed!!
As I’ve already noted above, it was March of 1958 when my mother and I eventually joined my father in St. John’s. On the night of March 10th, a Monday, we had flown from London to Manchester, and on to Gander, where we were supposed to meet up with my father, who had travelled there by train, but the weather had something to say about that. After our pilot made a few half-hearted attempts to land in a snowstorm, mother and I ended up flying on to Montreal, returning as far east as Sydney by Thursday, the 13th, which also happened to be my 10th birthday, and which we spent in an hotel in Glace Bay, before finally flying on to St. John’s the following day. Bizarrely, despite the fact that my mother and I didn’t actually reach Newfoundland until four days after our planned arrival date, we ended up getting to St. John’s before my father, who was still stuck in deep snow in Gander and arrived in the capital city the next day, having travelled there by train overnight. It definitely took a little longer than anticipated, but we did eventually make it and were reunited with my father when his train finally rolled into the station in downtown St. John’s.
The following day, Sunday, March 16th, my mother and I, accompanied by my father, found ourselves on the ferry Elmer W. Jones, travelling across the Tickle for the very first time, to get to what was to be our new home for the foreseeable future, on Bell Island. The above photo commemorates the event, with a few of the houses of Portugal Cove pictured in the background
Initially, we were domiciled in the Company Staff House, which was in effect a mini-hotel on Bennett Street, ironically right next door to the Company house to which we were assigned but unable to move into until our furniture arrived from England, which took several more weeks. The Staff House was home to a couple of other families in the same position, and was also more or less a permanent home to some of the senior mining personnel who were single. One such was Steve Richards, a mining engineer. My father, who had been living in the Staff House since his arrival on the Island just a few days before Christmas, 1957, often recalled Steve, and attempted to mimic Steve and his western Canadian accent, when he would apparently often ask Hilda, the girl who served the Staff House meals, what was on the menu that evening: “What’s for supper tonight, Hilda; ham?!!” My father was constantly entertained by Steve Richards; he’d certainly never come across his like before in his previously held position in the wages office of a typical small colliery in the middle of the South Yorkshire coalfield. (For the record, Hilda stayed working at the Staff House for several years. She was Hilda Collett from Trinity Bay, but became Hilda Vokey when she married Bell Islander Harold Vokey. Hilda and Harold, like many others, left Bell Island in 1966 and settled in Cambridge, ON.)
The building on the right, half-buried by snow, is the newly-built staff house on the south side of Bennett Street. The town water tower on the East Track is seen above the roof line. On the left of the photo is the Court House, with the DOSCO Main Office directly behind it.
Eventually, our belongings arrived, courtesy of Ledrew’s Moving in St. John’s, and we were able to take possession of our new home at the corner of Bennett and Bown Streets, on the opposite corner to the Imperial Grocery and just along Bown Street from St. Augustine’s School, where I was enrolled in Miss Baird’s Grade IV class. I’m not going to spend time unduly on the period that we lived in this first house we had on the Island, because it’s the years spent living on Greenwood Avenue that I’ve been keen to write about, but it was a pleasant house, although far too big for two adults and a 10-year old child, but a nice, comfortable house all the same. With its polished hardwood floors, it was without a doubt by far the most well-appointed house we had lived in up to that date, certainly in my brief lifetime at that stage.
The Bennett Street house, at the corner of Bown Street, our first residence on Bell Island. We lived there from April ’58 until October of the following year.
I’m pretty confident in saying that growing up in traditional two-up, two-down English working-class terraced houses, my parents had never enjoyed the luxury of such a spacious home up to that point in their lives either. Our first Christmas in Canada was spent in that house. In the summer we had acquired a dog, Patch, who was just a young puppy, and the photograph below is of Patch and myself next to the Christmas tree in the living room of that Bennett Street house, sat on the carpet that had been in our previous living room back in Rotherham, before it, along with us, emigrated to Newfoundland.
Patch and I in the living room at Bennett Street, Christmas 1958. Patch is enjoying a bone, but I still have a few books in my possession from that era with a corner missing that he’d obviously enjoyed just as much.
For quite a few years before we had left Rotherham, I’d been fascinated with the local buses in the town, and had been disappointed when I’d had to leave, as I could no longer enjoy my hobby; I would keep notebooks filled with their numbers and knew all the various types and styles of bodywork to quite a remarkable degree, considering I was only nine years old when I left. My father was genuinely sorry to drag me away from that and, in an attempt to make up for it, bought me an annual subscription to a monthly magazine for bus enthusiasts of school age and older, published in the UK, beginning with the May 1958 issue. I kept these on a shelf in my bedroom in that Bennett Street house, and I’m not ashamed to say that they and hundreds of subsequent issues (I subscribed to it for well over thirty years) reside on a similar shelf in my bedroom in Halifax today, 62 years after that May 1958 issue was first delivered. I mention this because, although there were only two very old buses on the island, with no numbers on them worth writing down in a notebook anyway, there were other vehicles running about on the Island to pique my interest! M.A. Rose and Son were a trucking and excavation company based in West Mines, along with their offshoot company, Enterprise Construction & Contracting Ltd., that built roads and houses on the Island amongst other things, as well as doing general trucking, mostly for Dominion Wabana Ore, the mining company. Although they weren’t buses, nor were they nearly as charismatic or as well looked after as the fleet of blue and cream double-deckers that I’d left behind in Rotherham, Fred Rose’s trucks (Fred was M.A. Rose’s son, apparently) at least carried numbers that could be scribbled into a notebook whenever one was seen. It turned out that the regular sightings of the red trucks of Fred Rose passing our front door were instrumental in us moving from the Bennett Street house a few hundred yards over to Greenwood Avenue in the fall of 1959.
Of the various items of equipment that Fred Rose had at West Mines, and there was quite a large field of it behind his garage on the main road, some of it worn out and dumped and other vehicles and heavy machinery still in use, there was a small fleet of English-built Commer dump trucks, painted red, with ‘Enterprise Construction & Contracting’ stenciled on their cab doors. I no longer have the relevant notebook (!), but I believe there were nine of these trucks: they were numbered 36-44 to the best of my recollection, with their numbers nicely hand-painted in gold leaf on the pillar behind the cab door. These nine Perkins-engined Commers were raucous machines, and could be heard coming for most of the length of Bennett Street, which of course was a bonus as it gave me plenty of time to get the notebook and pencil ready for when whichever one it was rumbled by! The reason for their regular appearance at all hours of the day along Bennett Street was that they were hauling rock from No. 3 Yard, presumably spoil from the concentrator, out the East Track to a location about a quarter of a mile or so along there, where the rock was being tipped to provide a base for five new homes to be built, the cul-de-sac so formed becoming colloquially known as ‘Snob Hill’! The Commers were kept busy for several months transporting the rock to form the new street, by which time I had seen and spotted all nine of them on multiple occasions, along with newer trucks that were kept busy on the same work; they all went into the notebook too, rest assured! Presumably it was ‘Enterprise Construction’ that built the houses as well, that eventually sat on the new rock base. The fifth and furthest house in from the East Track was eventually moved into by the Wabana Mines Works Superintendent, Hubert S. Haslam and his wife. When they did take up their new lodgings on Snob Hill, my folks and I moved into the Company house that they had vacated, one of four identical small houses, this being one of two on the rather unaptly named Greenwood Avenue, adjacent to the new St. Boniface Regional High School, the other two being ‘around the block’ on the East Track. This ‘new’ house, that my parents, myself and Patch took possession of in October 1959, was much more suitable for a small family of three plus a dog. The fleet of Commers, likely worn out from hauling all that rock, had disappeared from the scene, such that it was no longer necessary to keep the notebook handy, which meant from my point of view there was really no need to stay on Bennett Street a moment longer anyway!
Of the various items of equipment that Fred Rose had at West Mines, and there was quite a large field of it behind his garage on the main road, some of it worn out and dumped and other vehicles and heavy machinery still in use, there was a small fleet of English-built Commer dump trucks, painted red, with ‘Enterprise Construction & Contracting’ stenciled on their cab doors. I no longer have the relevant notebook (!), but I believe there were nine of these trucks: they were numbered 36-44 to the best of my recollection, with their numbers nicely hand-painted in gold leaf on the pillar behind the cab door. These nine Perkins-engined Commers were raucous machines, and could be heard coming for most of the length of Bennett Street, which of course was a bonus as it gave me plenty of time to get the notebook and pencil ready for when whichever one it was rumbled by! The reason for their regular appearance at all hours of the day along Bennett Street was that they were hauling rock from No. 3 Yard, presumably spoil from the concentrator, out the East Track to a location about a quarter of a mile or so along there, where the rock was being tipped to provide a base for five new homes to be built, the cul-de-sac so formed becoming colloquially known as ‘Snob Hill’! The Commers were kept busy for several months transporting the rock to form the new street, by which time I had seen and spotted all nine of them on multiple occasions, along with newer trucks that were kept busy on the same work; they all went into the notebook too, rest assured! Presumably it was ‘Enterprise Construction’ that built the houses as well, that eventually sat on the new rock base. The fifth and furthest house in from the East Track was eventually moved into by the Wabana Mines Works Superintendent, Hubert S. Haslam and his wife. When they did take up their new lodgings on Snob Hill, my folks and I moved into the Company house that they had vacated, one of four identical small houses, this being one of two on the rather unaptly named Greenwood Avenue, adjacent to the new St. Boniface Regional High School, the other two being ‘around the block’ on the East Track. This ‘new’ house, that my parents, myself and Patch took possession of in October 1959, was much more suitable for a small family of three plus a dog. The fleet of Commers, likely worn out from hauling all that rock, had disappeared from the scene, such that it was no longer necessary to keep the notebook handy, which meant from my point of view there was really no need to stay on Bennett Street a moment longer anyway!
Move to Greenwood Avenue
In the driveway of the Greenwood Avenue house, probably in the Spring of 1960. Patch and his friend, Prince, are vying for attention in front of the family car, a two-tone blue Ford Zephyr. The houses in the background are on Main Street, and behind them can be seen the hills of the mainland on the east side of Conception Bay, around Bauline. The infrastructure at the premises of the Avalon Telephone Company on Main Street can just be seen in the left background.
This new, smaller home was, as I’ve said, much more suited to a family of three with a small dog. There were three bedrooms, two upstairs and, unusually, two bathrooms, although the upstairs one contained only a sink and a toilet, and had no window. This came in quite handy as my father pursued his new-found interest in photography, as I will relate in due course. It had quite a large garden both front and back, which was all fenced off with green-painted ‘DOSCO’ steel mesh fencing, complete with hinged gates at the end of the path and the driveway. I made a visit to Bell Island about eight years ago, in 2012 and, remarkably, the fencing was still in place and looked to be intact some 60 plus years after it was first installed! The house was finished on the outside with a kind of shale/tile material, which was quite thin and rather brittle, hard to describe really, but it seemed to wear well. It had a full basement with a coal storage area and was heated by hot water, fired by a coal- burning furnace. All in all, it was a comfortable spot, and although we’d enjoyed our time in the Bennett Street mansion, this new company abode, although considerably smaller, was by far a much more acceptable alternative.
My upstairs bedroom was on the south side of the house, overlooking Church Road, so named due to the fact that St. Cyprian’s Anglican Church was on it, set at the corner of Church Road and Main Street. I well recall that first Christmas spent in our new house in 1959. For the festive season, St. Cyprian’s had two small illuminated crosses on the roof, which did look very Christmassy. I was given a copy of Thomas Hughes’ book, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, as a Christmas present that year, and I can distinctly remember lying on my bed reading it, and occasionally looking out and seeing those lit-up crosses on the roof of the church, a very pleasant Christmas memory of some sixty years ago.
My upstairs bedroom was on the south side of the house, overlooking Church Road, so named due to the fact that St. Cyprian’s Anglican Church was on it, set at the corner of Church Road and Main Street. I well recall that first Christmas spent in our new house in 1959. For the festive season, St. Cyprian’s had two small illuminated crosses on the roof, which did look very Christmassy. I was given a copy of Thomas Hughes’ book, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, as a Christmas present that year, and I can distinctly remember lying on my bed reading it, and occasionally looking out and seeing those lit-up crosses on the roof of the church, a very pleasant Christmas memory of some sixty years ago.
Children of Main Street-Church Road-Greenwood Avenue area skating on frozen-flooded ground on Greenwood Avenue behind Bennett's service station, c. 1961. You can just pick out the small illuminated crosses on the roof of St. Cyprian's.
Directly opposite my bedroom window, on the same side of Church Road as the aforementioned church, was my friend Eddie Mercer’s house. I didn’t know Ed until we moved to this new location, he went to St. Kevin’s and I attended St. Augustine’s, but we soon became good friends and enjoyed spending time together. Ed’s father, Bernard, worked underground in the mine, and his mother, Ann, was a traditional housewife and homemaker; Ed’s house seemed to always smell of freshly made bread, no matter what day of the week it happened to be.
Ed and I likely smelled of something else a lot of the time. Behind their house was an area of scrubland, small bushes and trees, and a swampy section with a small brook running through it that acted like a veritable magnet to two 12-year-old boys. This scrubland extended from directly behind their house as far as the newly formed ‘Snob Hill’ on which sat those five new Company houses. Ed and I had managed to get hold of some bits of wood and heavy gauge cardboard from somewhere, likely their basement, and set about building a ‘camp’ in the bushes, the main purpose being to have somewhere to huddle to smoke the illicit Export ‘A’ cigarettes that Ed seemed to have no trouble getting hold of most of the time! We didn’t even know how to smoke them properly, and I can remember stumbling out of there in the dusk to head home for dinner, dizzy from inhaling smoke, and no doubt reeking of tobacco although, as I recall, thankfully neither of our sets of parents ever seemed to notice anything amiss.
I remember that the living room in Ed’s house had one of those pictures on the wall that a lot of Newfoundland homes of that period seemed to have, that being a memorial to the sinking of the Sydney – Poet-aux-Basques ferry, the Caribou, by a German U-boat on October 14th, 1942. A lot of the victims’ portraits were shown around a photograph of the ship in the
picture frame; that photograph, and the wonderful aroma of the fresh bread, are two of my enduring memories of the Mercer household.
Our smoking exploits in the makeshift ‘camp’ in the woods were not the only thing Ed and I shared. As well as playing catch in Ed’s yard with a baseball and our two gloves for hours at a time, we cycled everywhere around Wabana together on our English-made bicycles that had no doubt come from Charlie Cohen’s Town Square shop, Ed on his 3-speed red Hercules, and I on my gearless blue Raleigh. I very much doubt we could have had much more fun if we’d tried.
I have another Christmas memory of that period, this one particular to Ed; a Mrs. Sapp had a small store on the east side of Town Square, more or less opposite Charlie Cohen’s, and amongst the items she sold were 45rpm records. I remember Ed and I being in there and coming home with a copy of Elvis Presley’s Christmas LP, which we listened to a good many times over the holidays.
Ed and I likely smelled of something else a lot of the time. Behind their house was an area of scrubland, small bushes and trees, and a swampy section with a small brook running through it that acted like a veritable magnet to two 12-year-old boys. This scrubland extended from directly behind their house as far as the newly formed ‘Snob Hill’ on which sat those five new Company houses. Ed and I had managed to get hold of some bits of wood and heavy gauge cardboard from somewhere, likely their basement, and set about building a ‘camp’ in the bushes, the main purpose being to have somewhere to huddle to smoke the illicit Export ‘A’ cigarettes that Ed seemed to have no trouble getting hold of most of the time! We didn’t even know how to smoke them properly, and I can remember stumbling out of there in the dusk to head home for dinner, dizzy from inhaling smoke, and no doubt reeking of tobacco although, as I recall, thankfully neither of our sets of parents ever seemed to notice anything amiss.
I remember that the living room in Ed’s house had one of those pictures on the wall that a lot of Newfoundland homes of that period seemed to have, that being a memorial to the sinking of the Sydney – Poet-aux-Basques ferry, the Caribou, by a German U-boat on October 14th, 1942. A lot of the victims’ portraits were shown around a photograph of the ship in the
picture frame; that photograph, and the wonderful aroma of the fresh bread, are two of my enduring memories of the Mercer household.
Our smoking exploits in the makeshift ‘camp’ in the woods were not the only thing Ed and I shared. As well as playing catch in Ed’s yard with a baseball and our two gloves for hours at a time, we cycled everywhere around Wabana together on our English-made bicycles that had no doubt come from Charlie Cohen’s Town Square shop, Ed on his 3-speed red Hercules, and I on my gearless blue Raleigh. I very much doubt we could have had much more fun if we’d tried.
I have another Christmas memory of that period, this one particular to Ed; a Mrs. Sapp had a small store on the east side of Town Square, more or less opposite Charlie Cohen’s, and amongst the items she sold were 45rpm records. I remember Ed and I being in there and coming home with a copy of Elvis Presley’s Christmas LP, which we listened to a good many times over the holidays.
Town Square about 1959. This is not a Tom Careless photo but may have been given to him by family friend, Ev Ferguson.
There were several other kids of a similar age, as well as Ed, to hang about with. Peter Spencer lived next door in an identical house to ours, and was in the same class as me at school. We spent a lot of time in each other’s company, although we didn’t really share the same interests the way Ed and I did. Peter’s father, Gordon, was the Purchasing Agent for the Company, and they had come to Bell Island from Sydney, Nova Scotia. Peter was the youngest of four children, and was the only one still at home, the other three remaining in Nova Scotia. As such, he tended to be spoiled, and pretty much got whatever he asked for. He’s still the only school kid I’ve ever known who was allowed to take afternoons off and stay home to watch the World Series on television every year when the baseball playoffs were on. His mother, Isobel, served the best homemade French fries I’ve ever come across.
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Hanging out on a wharf at the Beach with Peter Spencer. Tragically, Peter lost his life in a car crash in Nova Scotia the 1990s. |
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On the other side of the Spencer’s house, on the corner, was the large, dark green house where the Forshner family lived; Gerry Forshner, the Chief Mechanic for the Company, his wife Valerie and their three children, Gerald Jr., ‘Butch’, as he was nicknamed, younger brother Billy and, in-between, daughter Robin. Their yard seemed to be a focal point for games from time to time, being flat as it was, and while they were living there, Gerry Forshner built a sizeable garage on the property. With some bits of left-over wood from the garage activity, we built a tiny ‘clubhouse,’ or shed, adjacent to it, and spent a fair bit of time in there, playing cards and giggling mostly, as I recall; we were just kids. I can’t remember if we risked the occasional illicit Export ‘A’ in there or not, but chances are we did.
Gerry Forshner did one thing in particular in that house that I noticed and have often thought about in a positive way since. In each of the children’s bedrooms, he’d screwed a heavy eye bolt into the skirting board, to which was attached a seriously stout length of rope, long enough to reach the ground. In the unlikely event of a fire, all three kids had been instructed to smash out the bedroom window with a chair which was kept handy, throw the rope out and shinny down it to safety. Thankfully it was never needed, but every time I sadly hear of a child dying in a house fire somewhere, I think of Mr Forshner’s foresight with respect to that length of rope in each of his kid’s bedrooms. His position as Head Mechanic presumably meant he could be called out at all hours in case of an incident with equipment and, thus, he was entitled to the use of a personal Company Land-Rover. Most of the Land-Rover fleet were painted the standard light blue, but his was a dark green one, with the ‘DOSCO’ flames logo emblazoned on its doors. For the record, it was numbered ‘4’; I’m pretty sure I would have had it recorded in my notebook somewhere.
Continuing ‘around the block’ in a counter-clockwise direction from the house that the Forshner family occupied, next door to that was the similar large Company house, painted in a considerably paler green to the Forshner house, that was home to mining engineer Fred Rees, his wife, Sadie, and their six children, two boys and four girls. Needless to say, they covered quite a range of ages, considering that daughter Cheryl taught me Chemistry one year at St. Boniface High School while her youngest brother, Brian, had barely started elementary school at the time. Sadie Rees was a friend of my mother, and the two of them served as leaders in the Girl’s Auxiliary. Fred Rees, of course, went on to become the General Manager of the Wabana Mines as they were winding down to eventual closure in the mid-sixties and, as such, moved across Greenwood Avenue to occupy the house which went along with the top job. It was situated on the other side of the road, more or less on the corner of East Track and Bennett Street.
Gerry Forshner did one thing in particular in that house that I noticed and have often thought about in a positive way since. In each of the children’s bedrooms, he’d screwed a heavy eye bolt into the skirting board, to which was attached a seriously stout length of rope, long enough to reach the ground. In the unlikely event of a fire, all three kids had been instructed to smash out the bedroom window with a chair which was kept handy, throw the rope out and shinny down it to safety. Thankfully it was never needed, but every time I sadly hear of a child dying in a house fire somewhere, I think of Mr Forshner’s foresight with respect to that length of rope in each of his kid’s bedrooms. His position as Head Mechanic presumably meant he could be called out at all hours in case of an incident with equipment and, thus, he was entitled to the use of a personal Company Land-Rover. Most of the Land-Rover fleet were painted the standard light blue, but his was a dark green one, with the ‘DOSCO’ flames logo emblazoned on its doors. For the record, it was numbered ‘4’; I’m pretty sure I would have had it recorded in my notebook somewhere.
Continuing ‘around the block’ in a counter-clockwise direction from the house that the Forshner family occupied, next door to that was the similar large Company house, painted in a considerably paler green to the Forshner house, that was home to mining engineer Fred Rees, his wife, Sadie, and their six children, two boys and four girls. Needless to say, they covered quite a range of ages, considering that daughter Cheryl taught me Chemistry one year at St. Boniface High School while her youngest brother, Brian, had barely started elementary school at the time. Sadie Rees was a friend of my mother, and the two of them served as leaders in the Girl’s Auxiliary. Fred Rees, of course, went on to become the General Manager of the Wabana Mines as they were winding down to eventual closure in the mid-sixties and, as such, moved across Greenwood Avenue to occupy the house which went along with the top job. It was situated on the other side of the road, more or less on the corner of East Track and Bennett Street.
In this photo, Ron Emery is standing in back with his sister, who came all the way from South Africa to spend Christmas of 1959 or 60. In front of Ron is his wife, Mary, with Dave Careless and Diane & Sheila Emery. On the right are Jennie & Tom Careless. It's not certain if this was the older Company house referred to below, but you can see an exterior photo of the house at the top of this article.
Next to the Rees’ house, and on the corner of the East Track directly opposite the town water tower, was another large, older Company house that had been occupied by the Phelan family up until about the time we moved to Greenwood Avenue. For a time, in perhaps 1960/61, it was lived in by Ron Emery and his wife Mary and their two young girls, Diane and Sheila. Ron Emery was a South African, and was the Chief Electrician at the company while he was there. Their house had quite a lot of native African art in it, wooden carvings and the like, and he himself was a bit of an artist and painter in his spare time. I have an oil painting here in Halifax that he did for my folks while he was living in that large, old corner house, and I can vaguely remember it being on an easel in their living room while he was working on it. It eventually hung on the wall in our Greenwood Avenue house, and on the wall in the many different houses and apartments that my folks lived in throughout the rest of their lives. When my father passed away in the UK in 2007, I brought Ron Emery’s oil painting of a Newfoundland rural scene back to Canada; it’s fair to say that it’s been in the family for at least 60 years now.
This photograph likely dates from the Spring of 1961. Taken in the front yard of the Greenwood Avenue house one Saturday morning, with the Anglican high school, St. Boniface Regional, directly behind me across the road, and on the other side of the school property, the Prince’s Theatre movie house and buildings on Main Street, at the top of the hill that led down to Kennedy’s Corner and Town Square. The white building with the shaped rooftop façade housed the Happy Home Loyal Orange Lodge No. 2210; it had a bowling alley in it, if I remember correctly. As always, whenever I was outside, Patch was never far away; although it was all of 60 years ago, I still miss that cherished little dog of mine to this day.
Not long after the painting was done, the Emerys and their African art and bullwhips they had on the wall moved to one of the five ‘Snob Hill’ houses, and the old house on the corner was demolished. It was replaced by two stylishly-modern low bungalows with big plate glass windows, and each house having a built-in garage, likely the only two houses on the Island with that feature. They were covered with attractive slate type shingles; the corner one was a reddish shade, not unlike iron ore, and the mirror image residence next door was finished in an attractive light blue colour. When they were finished, the Forshners, who I’ve mentioned lived in the big, dark green house on the corner opposite the high school, moved into the red one, and Roy Paddon and his family, who had been living in a Company house on Bridal Avenue out at The Front, moved into the blue one; this would have been in 1962. The Forshners left Bell Island the following year and moved back to Nova Scotia, and Jim and Frances Archibald and their daughter, Ruth, and son, Jamie, moved into the still relatively new corner bungalow. In fact, I’m told that Ruth can remember watching, through those large plate glass living room windows, St. Augustine’s school, on the opposite side of the sports field, burn to the ground when it was tragically set on fire on the night of December 10th, 1963.
Gerry Forshner had obligingly flooded his front yard to make a rink in this view taken likely circa March of 1963 or thereabouts. On the left are brothers Tom and Ed Kent, then Gerald Jr. ‘Butch’ Forshner, then me. Luckily, the puck we were shooting around was kept well away from those big windows, or there might well have been recriminations!!
You’ll note the Kent brothers, Tom and Eddie, in the photograph above. Their father, Tom Kent, was a Mine Superintendent, and they lived at the northeast corner of Bennett Street and Bown Street, directly across the road from that large Company house that we moved into when we first arrived on the Island. There was a younger brother, Jimmy, as well, plus they had a slightly older sister, Karen. I was always impressed with how well Karen could skate. I remember seeing her at the General Skating sessions at the Arena on Scotia Ridge, skating arm in arm with her girlfriend, the two of them absolutely in sync with each other, going round and round, crossing their skates over one another when they negotiated the corners, just perfectly each time; I used to be quite fascinated by that. Those Saturday night skating sessions at the rink were always fun, the records playing and the little canteen open, where you could buy a pop and some chips, and perhaps even a hot dog; I still think about it today. I believe the Kent family moved to Labrador City when the mines eventually closed. I mentioned earlier in the text how Gerry Forshner, due to his position as Head Mechanic at Dominion Wabana Ore, commanded a company Land-Rover for use in going about his job; in fact, said Land-Rover, no. 4, can be seen in the photograph above. My father’s job didn’t call for the use of a Company Land-Rover as his duties didn’t normally require him to leave his Bennett Street office. However, he did have an incident with a Company Land-Rover on one occasion that did cause a brief period of stress in his relationship with next-door but one neighbour, Gerry Forshner!
Australian Ron Bartlett, who lived in a Company house on Bennett Street with his wife, Helen, and their two sons, Mark and Simon, had the title of Project Engineer, and as such was, for instance, in charge of the many Company houses, and was the person you would contact if redecorating was requested or you had a broken window or leaky roof, etc. Ron did quite a bit of running back and forth during the day, and as such was provided with a Land-Rover for his daily use, this being a nice standard light blue version with covered top and complete with ‘DOSCO’ flames logo on its doors, no. ‘2’ in the company Land-Rover fleet. And true to form, in the same way he looked after his Volkswagen car, Ron kept his designated Land-Rover in impeccable condition. In the early sixties, my mother worked as a volunteer one afternoon a week at the Wabana Boys’ Club. The club had a room fitted out as a library, with bookshelves and some reference books, and a couple of long tables and chairs, the idea being that it would provide a quiet space for children from big families around the town that might not have a quiet space at home in which to study or do their assigned homework. My mother, along with four other ladies, took it in turns to spend a couple of hours there one afternoon a week in order to maintain order in the room and attempt to help with homework, answer questions if possible, etc. So it was in this capacity that my mother spent two hours every Wednesday afternoon from 4-6pm in the Homework Room at the Boys’ Club. On one particular Wednesday afternoon in perhaps January or thereabouts, a nasty snowstorm had started up, such that by mid-afternoon it was a raging blizzard. It was becoming obvious that father’s small Ford Zephyr was not going to be capable of taking my mother down to the Boys’ Club to fulfil her obligations in supervising the Homework Room. However, as she was still determined to go, apparently Ron Bartlett offered my father the use of his only recently-assigned Land-Rover no. 2 in order to “run Jennie down to the Boys’ Club, Tom, no problem.” Confronted by the worsening conditions, my father took Ron up on his generous offer, despite the fact that it wasn’t exactly the done thing to loan a fellow employee your assigned Land-Rover, just as it wasn’t exactly good form to accept the use of one that wasn’t assigned to you, whatever the reason might be. Under normal circumstances, the quick run down to the Boys’ Club to drop my mother off would no doubt have gone totally unnoticed and nobody would have been any the wiser, and my father’s unauthorised use of the Land-Rover wouldn’t have been an issue at all, but as the old saying goes, “the best laid plans of mice and men!!” At the northeast corner of Church Road and Main Street, there was an area of tall reedy grass that was more often than not flooded and boggy, an area that Gail Hussey-Weir and myself both distinctly remember and jokingly refer to as ‘the cesspool.’ On the day in question, this ‘cesspool’ area had become frozen over, and it was here that Land-Rover no. 2’s “quick trip down to the Boys’ Club” turned ugly. My father temporarily lost sight of just where the roadway was in the ensuing blizzard and, although his vision was only impaired for a few seconds, it was apparently long enough for Land-Rover no. 2 to slide off Church Road and embed itself in the ice on top of the cesspool. Embarrassing enough as this was, it was set to get even nastier not long afterwards when the Company grader sent to retrieve the Land-Rover attempted to do so from the Main Street side rather than drag the Land-Rover backwards up the slight embankment back on to Church Road again. Needless to say, the heavy grader broke through the ice and itself ended up mired in the cesspool, much to my father’s dismay!! I think it was later the following day that both Land-Rover no. 2 and the grader were recovered, both of which had suffered at least a degree of incidental damage! Gerry Forshner, whose mandate was to look after the company vehicles, was not best pleased with my father for a time. Nor was management very happy with Ron Bartlett for offering my father the use of his dedicated Land-Rover but, of course, it all blew over eventually, as these things do. From that day on, however, there were never any future offers of loaned Company vehicles to drive my mother to the Wabana Boys’ Club to supervise the Homework Room on a Wednesday afternoon, however bad the weather got!
Australian Ron Bartlett, who lived in a Company house on Bennett Street with his wife, Helen, and their two sons, Mark and Simon, had the title of Project Engineer, and as such was, for instance, in charge of the many Company houses, and was the person you would contact if redecorating was requested or you had a broken window or leaky roof, etc. Ron did quite a bit of running back and forth during the day, and as such was provided with a Land-Rover for his daily use, this being a nice standard light blue version with covered top and complete with ‘DOSCO’ flames logo on its doors, no. ‘2’ in the company Land-Rover fleet. And true to form, in the same way he looked after his Volkswagen car, Ron kept his designated Land-Rover in impeccable condition. In the early sixties, my mother worked as a volunteer one afternoon a week at the Wabana Boys’ Club. The club had a room fitted out as a library, with bookshelves and some reference books, and a couple of long tables and chairs, the idea being that it would provide a quiet space for children from big families around the town that might not have a quiet space at home in which to study or do their assigned homework. My mother, along with four other ladies, took it in turns to spend a couple of hours there one afternoon a week in order to maintain order in the room and attempt to help with homework, answer questions if possible, etc. So it was in this capacity that my mother spent two hours every Wednesday afternoon from 4-6pm in the Homework Room at the Boys’ Club. On one particular Wednesday afternoon in perhaps January or thereabouts, a nasty snowstorm had started up, such that by mid-afternoon it was a raging blizzard. It was becoming obvious that father’s small Ford Zephyr was not going to be capable of taking my mother down to the Boys’ Club to fulfil her obligations in supervising the Homework Room. However, as she was still determined to go, apparently Ron Bartlett offered my father the use of his only recently-assigned Land-Rover no. 2 in order to “run Jennie down to the Boys’ Club, Tom, no problem.” Confronted by the worsening conditions, my father took Ron up on his generous offer, despite the fact that it wasn’t exactly the done thing to loan a fellow employee your assigned Land-Rover, just as it wasn’t exactly good form to accept the use of one that wasn’t assigned to you, whatever the reason might be. Under normal circumstances, the quick run down to the Boys’ Club to drop my mother off would no doubt have gone totally unnoticed and nobody would have been any the wiser, and my father’s unauthorised use of the Land-Rover wouldn’t have been an issue at all, but as the old saying goes, “the best laid plans of mice and men!!” At the northeast corner of Church Road and Main Street, there was an area of tall reedy grass that was more often than not flooded and boggy, an area that Gail Hussey-Weir and myself both distinctly remember and jokingly refer to as ‘the cesspool.’ On the day in question, this ‘cesspool’ area had become frozen over, and it was here that Land-Rover no. 2’s “quick trip down to the Boys’ Club” turned ugly. My father temporarily lost sight of just where the roadway was in the ensuing blizzard and, although his vision was only impaired for a few seconds, it was apparently long enough for Land-Rover no. 2 to slide off Church Road and embed itself in the ice on top of the cesspool. Embarrassing enough as this was, it was set to get even nastier not long afterwards when the Company grader sent to retrieve the Land-Rover attempted to do so from the Main Street side rather than drag the Land-Rover backwards up the slight embankment back on to Church Road again. Needless to say, the heavy grader broke through the ice and itself ended up mired in the cesspool, much to my father’s dismay!! I think it was later the following day that both Land-Rover no. 2 and the grader were recovered, both of which had suffered at least a degree of incidental damage! Gerry Forshner, whose mandate was to look after the company vehicles, was not best pleased with my father for a time. Nor was management very happy with Ron Bartlett for offering my father the use of his dedicated Land-Rover but, of course, it all blew over eventually, as these things do. From that day on, however, there were never any future offers of loaned Company vehicles to drive my mother to the Wabana Boys’ Club to supervise the Homework Room on a Wednesday afternoon, however bad the weather got!
Patch and I in the living room at Greenwood Avenue one Saturday night during the winter of 1962/63. Saturday nights were usually spent in front of the television watching the hockey game from either Toronto or Montreal. All the furnishings seen in this photograph had been brought from Rotherham with us when we emigrated in 1958, including the patterned rug! Patch doesn’t look all that concerned about which team might have been winning the game!!
Continuing around the block formed by Church Road, Greenwood Avenue and East Track, the two new bungalows on the corner, occupied by the Forshner (succeeded by the Archibald) and the Paddon families led to two more company houses to the south of them, identical to the one I lived in. The one next to the house occupied by the Paddons was the home of Donald and Flora Cameron and their small dog, ‘Boy.’ Don Cameron was originally from Halifax, and was a mining engineer who had spent the bulk of his career at Wabana and was regarded as a valuable member of the management team. He was very well respected, and was definitely ‘Mr Cameron’ to a young schoolboy of my age. In the month of February 1962, there was a severe freezing rain storm one Saturday night. A lot of poles and wires were brought down by the sheer weight of the ice on them, such that we had no electricity for several days, perhaps for well over a week. I remember that, one night, Don and Flo Cameron invited us round there for dinner, a quite wonderful meal cooked by Flo entirely on a Coleman camping stove, no mean feat! Unlike us, having spent a good many winters on Bell Island, they’d seen and done it all before, many times. The effort and the end result were admired enough such that it prompted my father to go down to Bowring’s store on Bennett Street the following morning immediately after they opened to purchase the last similar Coleman stove that they had in stock. The Camerons had two children, a son, Bill, and a daughter, Anna, but they were quite a good few years older than myself and the kids who lived on the block that I knew, and had both moved away by the time I was living on Greenwood Avenue. Anna was a teacher, I think, possibly in St. John’s. The only thing I can remember about Bill Cameron is that I seem to recall once, on a dare, he attempted to eat a sandwich made with the contents of one of the tins of their pet Boy’s dog food but, as you might well imagine, the experiment didn’t go all that well. It was definitely one of those “I don’t know what on earth I was thinking” moments!
The Cameron and Tucker houses, identical to each other and to the one we lived in on the other side of the block. When this picture was taken, they were under construction in late 1957 or 1958. They are situated on land formerly occupied by the old Staff House that burned to the ground on May 20, 1956.
Next door to Cameron's was the identical company house that Bert and Irene Tucker and their three children occupied, Ivan, Janice and young Bert Junior. Bert Tucker was Personnel Manager at Wabana, and was born and bred on Bell Island, having been brought up in that same house on Bennett Street in which Tom Kent and his wife raised their family on Bennett Street, directly across the road from the house we first lived in after arriving on the island. On retirement, Bert Tucker’s parents left the Bennett Street residence and moved to a bungalow just a couple of houses down from the corner on Bown Street. Bert Tucker’s wife, Irene, was a war bride from Staffordshire in England, having met Bert while he was serving overseas with his Newfoundland Regiment. Irene spent a lot of time in her garden, and had quite a green thumb. She had a rockery covered in flowers and plants that was quite something to behold when everything was in full bloom. Ivan was a year or two older than me, but I hung out with him on occasion, nevertheless. He was the only person I knew who somehow managed to collect all 120 Shirriff hockey coins featuring the likeness of an NHL player, one given away in each packet of Sherriff jelly powder. In his bedroom, he had them mounted on to a piece of cardboard backing, of which I was extremely envious. Ivan must have been quite keen on hockey. He was the goalie for the St. Boniface high school hockey team for at least a couple of years. He might not have been hugely successful in the net, but it has to be said that he definitely always tried his best. Janice was the same age as me and was in my class at school. She was a nice girl, very popular, and laughed a lot. She and a classmate, Betty Farrar, were well nigh inseparable in high school, and I’ve often wondered if they maintained their friendship, at least to some degree, in the years afterwards. The Tuckers also had a dog, a portly little Beagle predictably called ‘Lassie’ after the collie that starred in the television show of the same name that was hugely popular at the time. I fed and looked after Lassie a time or two when the family went away on holiday; she was a lovely animal. We’re three quarters of the way around the block by now, and are on Church Road and heading down to the corner of Greenwood Avenue again, back to where we started. The house directly behind Tucker’s Company dwelling was a duplex and, at the time I was living on Greenwood Avenue, it was owned by the Anglican School Board. One side of it was the home of the Vice-Principal of St. Boniface High School, Clarence Rideout and his young family, and the other side, the eastern side of it, was occupied by the Principal and his wife, Lester and Harriet Clarke. Mrs Clarke gave birth to a son whilst they were living there, sometime in the early sixties. I recall being in the house only once. During the fall of 1964, Lester Clarke was ill for some time, and the school put together a fruit basket for him to enjoy, which was a nice gesture. Whoever was in charge of the effort, likely Clarence Rideout, talked Janet Stares and me into delivering it one Saturday morning. We went round with it and dutifully took it in, but didn’t really want to hang around, only staying long enough to hand it over and mumble some ‘get well’ epithet or other before heading out the door again! Needless to say, thankfully he did make a complete recovery and came back to the school a few weeks later. I’m not sure how much the selection of fruit from Carbage’s actually played in the Principal’s recovery, but after all, surely it’s the thought that counts.
Next door to the School Board duplex was a bungalow belonging to the Stares family. Bert Stares worked in the same Company office as my father; I think he was in the Accounting Department. His wife, Rita, was the District Nurse, as there was no hospital on Bell Island in those days. Their daughter, Janet, was in the same class as me at St. Augustine’s, and her younger brother, Michael, also attended there. I have a strong recollection of Bert Stares passing away from some illness or other far earlier than he really should have. It must have been difficult for Rita Stares, left raising the children on her own. I remember my father used to help Rita file her taxes every year after her husband had passed away. The sight of Janet sitting quietly on a swing in their back garden while the wake for her father was going on inside their house was a very sad and poignant moment to witness. One time some thirty years later, Janet visited my folks one Sunday afternoon, appearing out of the blue apparently, whilst travelling over in the United Kingdom. She contacted me once in Halifax several years later, and we got together for a couple of drinks one evening, but that was well over twenty years ago now. That was the one and only time I’d seen Janet since I left Bell Island in 1966. Sadly, she apparently passed away in her sleep in a hotel in Rome several years ago, while travelling alone in Europe.
Playing ball hockey in our backyard on Greenwood Avenue. In the right background is the back of the house that was mentioned above as having been lived in by Fred Rees and family before he was promoted to Manager. That house is still standing today, although it has been renovated to a two-storey. The other two houses are the modern bungalows on East Track that replaced the large house pictured at the top of this article. The boy on the left is the younger brother of classmates of mine, brother and sister Wayne and Maxine Blackmore; the Blackmore family moved into the former Forshner house when the Forshners moved to the bungalow in the middle of the picture about 1962. The boy standing in the middle is Michael Stares, who lived in the house next door, out of the picture to the left.
“ … Hey, you two, come and have a look at this …”
Having walked around the block, and described pretty much who lived where at that particular time, that brings us into our back garden again, accessed by negotiating the wire fence that separated said garden from the Stares’ property next door. Our back garden was nothing to write home about, it being used for numerous ball hockey and hastily-organised football matches, such that there was not a lot of scope left for grass to even attempt to grow on it. Still, we had to have somewhere to play and, as it was reasonably flat and fair-sized at that, not to mention completely fenced, and as nobody seemed to really mind what sort of state it got into, then that was generally where the action took place. There was another patch of grass immediately south of the driveway that could be described as a side yard for want of a better term. This was flat as well and rather low lying, such that it tended to get wet and would freeze over on occasion. It was at this particular spot on the afternoon of Sunday, November 24th, 1963, that Ed Mercer and I were shooting a hockey puck back and forth to each other when my father came to the front door and shouted to us, “Hey, you two, come and have a look at this, they’ve gone and shot Oswald now!” At that point, we trooped into the house to watch Jack Ruby, live on television, shoot dead Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who just two days before had assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Once we’d watched it a couple of times, there was nothing left to do but to go back outside and start shooting the puck back and forth again! Like the Friday when the Kennedy killing occurred, and we got sent home from school early because of it, it was yet another one of those days that you end up remembering for the rest of your life. The back garden, like I’ve said, was an ideal place to play ball hockey or football for hours, either there or the piece of waste ground between the Kitchen’s house on the north side of Greenwood Avenue, across from the high school, and the rear of the Paradise Café and the other businesses on the south side of Bennett Street, an area where we played for endless hours, especially on weekends or on school holidays.
There wasn’t much in the way of grass on our back garden at Greenwood Avenue, and you can easily see why! A serious game of ball hockey was in progress when this photograph was taken. Ivan Tucker, Ed Mercer and I are all actively involved, while at least two other friends standing beside the fence can be readily identified: Gary Ferguson and Gerry ‘Butch’ Forshner. The pool of muddy water beside the fence in the bottom corner in Stares’ yard next door hardly ever completely dried up. Games just like this one tended to go on for hours; there was never any shortage of fun. In the distance at the right can be seen Jackson Memorial School on Davidson Avenue, and Tarrant’s Garage, which was just along the road from it. Connor’s Hill can just be seen in the far left distance, heading up towards the War Memorial.
When hockey on actual skates was on the cards, which it often was, then the likeliest bet was the frozen brook and ground next to it on the west side of East Track, somewhere between Church Road and the Snob Hill houses, but on the other side of the road. This area would, when frozen over, often become a mini-lake, and it was perfect for skating and playing hockey, again for hours on end. Playing there all morning, a quick break at home for a bite of lunch, then back there again all afternoon was the standard format for a sunny Saturday during the winter; it was everything we needed and more.
A good location to skate and have a game of hockey was out along the East Track, where there was a small brook which often overflowed to form a pond, which in turn froze over to make a small rink. This photograph likely dates from late 1963/early 1964 or thereabouts. I got a nice pair of hockey gloves for my birthday in March ’64, and I obviously didn’t have them when this was taken, or else I’d be wearing them in the photo! St. Cyprian’s Church on Church Road is visible in the background, so you can see we didn’t have very far to go to reach this spot.
Eventually, as we all grew up and some of the kids that had been my good friends “around the block” moved away, things began to subtly change. By mid-1965, I had graduated from St. Boniface High School. By September, I was enrolled at the College of Trades and Technology in St. John’s, boarding in the capital city all week and going home just for the weekends. Life and interests took on a different tone, and you didn’t need a crystal ball to see that the mine operations at Wabana were winding down. Ed and I still hung about with each other on the weekends but, instead of riding our bikes and choking on illicit Export ‘A’ cigarettes in the woods behind their house, we were messing about with a guitar that my father had bought me for $25 from somebody on The Green! Ed’s older brother, Jim, was quite a talented musician and could pretty much play anything. He was very patient with us, trying to show us how to play it properly, this being the era of The Beatles and all. In the end, we never did get very far with it but, as I recall, we certainly had a lot of fun trying.
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On the left is Ed, in their house on Church Road, playing around with the guitar that came from a house on The Green, for the princely sum of $25! Brendan "Doc" Byrne, a friend of Ed's brother, Jim, is on the right with me.
By this point, the town itself didn’t have the same feel to it either, that it had at the start of the decade. Exactly a week after St. Augustine’s School had been razed to the ground on December 10th, ’63, a number of businesses on Town Square were destroyed by fire as well, including a small Bowring’s Supermarket, a men’s hairdressers, I believe, and the saddest loss of all, the Lawton’s Drug Store. It had been a fixture on the west side of the Square for decades and, along with the pharmacy, boasted a splendid 1940’s-style soda fountain, with high counter and revolving stools, and a similarly revolving comic rack next to it that I found it very hard to stay away from. Sitting with my mother at that counter when we were still just newcomers to the Island and indeed to Canada, sipping on a strawberry milkshake and idly flicking through a couple of newly-purchased comics is a particularly fond memory of our first few months in Wabana. Something was definitely missing once that drug store and soda fountain had gone, and the resultant hole that its destruction left behind was a constant reminder to me of just what we had lost that December night.
Possibly the last photograph that my father took of Ed and I together is this view from September 1965. I had started a course in basic electronics at the College of Trades and Technology in St. John’s, and this picture was taken on a Sunday evening just before I had to head down to The Beach to catch the ferry over to Portugal Cove, to spend the week ‘in town.’ We’re sat on the rudimentary wall at the side of our front garden at Greenwood Avenue, Ed is stroking Patch and I’m making a fuss of Don and Flo Cameron’s dog, Boy, from around the block. The ‘cesspool’ that I referred to in the text, where my father inadvertently deposited that Company Land-Rover that day that he really shouldn’t have been driving at all, is at the corner of Church Road and Main Street in the left-of-middle distance. The CLB Armoury, the meeting place for the Church Lads Brigade group, is also prominent in the background, as is St. Cyprian’s Anglican Church and Bill Bennett’s ‘Golden Eagle’ gas station, and his residence directly across the road from it. A typical late summer evening view from a fondly remembered period in my life that was inevitably drawing to a close.
I can’t remember the exact date, nor can I recall many of the details, but by the end of June, 1966, we had left behind the house on Greenwood Avenue and our life on Bell Island. My father was transferred to the DOSCO-owned Halifax Shipyard in Nova Scotia and our eight-year tenure as citizens of Wabana was over. Patch, our dog, was supposed to join us in Halifax once we had gotten settled, but I’m sad to say that, due to circumstances unforeseen at the time, it never did happen, a situation which bothers me still to this very day, more than 50 years later. I can in all honesty say, however, that although we had some tough times on the Island now and then, dealing with fierce winter storms on occasion, and long stretches without electricity in the aftermath of those storms, things we simply hadn’t been used to until going there, having lived fairly sheltered lives, by comparison, in the heart of industrial Yorkshire, I look back on the years I spent on Bell Island with a great deal of affection and longing. Although it was with some reticence that my parents went there in the first place, I know with a fair degree of certainty that, if they were both alive now to be able to read this, they would be the first people to agree with me when I say that we wouldn’t have missed the time we spent on Bell Island for anything in the world.
A cropped version of one of the V.J. Southey photographs, copied from Gail Hussey-Weir’s ‘Historic Wabana’ website. The block that I’ve described in the text is prominent in the middle of the aerial photo, which shows the houses bordered by the East Track, Church Road and Greenwood Avenue, as mentioned. There is no official date for when the picture was taken, but the two new bungalows at the corner of the East Track and Greenwood Avenue can be seen, opposite the water tower, and St. Augustine’s School, which burnt down in December ’63 is still standing, so if I were to hazard a guess, I would date the photograph to either late 1962 or possibly the Spring of the following year. Ed Mercer’s small blue house on Church Road can be seen on the far right, just within the photograph, and the waste ground where numerous games of ball hockey and football were played, for hours on end, between the backs of the businesses on the south side of Bennett Street and Max Kitchen’s house on the north side of Greenwood Avenue, next to the High School and directly adjacent to the air raid siren can easily be seen. Patch himself will no doubt be on there somewhere, but the lens on the camera was simply not quite powerful enough to pick him up!
On an ore carrier at Scotia Pier, circa 1960. I’m not quite sure what I was doing there, but there I am, on the bridge of the S.S. Dalhanna, with my mother and several other Wabana notables! I forget the name of the gentleman on the extreme left, but next to him are Kay and Dick Clarke, (their daughter Elizabeth was a classmate of mine), Brenda Wilson, my mother Jennie Careless, Dr. Jim Wilson, in typical ‘one too many’ pose, and the ore carrier’s Captain! In my pocket might well have been my copy of Ian Allan’s British Ocean Freighters in which the Dalhanna would have been listed; I was just that sort of kid.
Footnote:
Almost all the photographs in this memoir were taken by my father, Tom Careless, who developed (no pun intended!) quite an interest in amateur photography in his forties that he retained throughout the remainder of his life. I mentioned in my description of the layout of the Greenwood Avenue house we lived in that it had two separate bathrooms; the upstairs one, which contained a toilet and a sink, but no shower or bath, would, my father decided at some stage, make an excellent darkroom, and on many nights, particularly in the winter months, he and I would spend hours in there developing film and making prints from the resultant negatives. At some stage we even acquired an enlarger for making oversize prints.
Looking back, my mother must have been extraordinarily tolerant. That small bathroom reeked of photo chemicals a lot of the time, and there were often strings of prints hanging drying. The novelty wore off eventually, and my father graduated to slide film, which brought an end to the darkroom exploits, but it was fun while it lasted. I doubt there are, but I do sometimes wonder if there are any lingering unexplained smells in that area of the house today, caused by all that photo/chemical activity all those years ago.
Sounds, as well as smells, can, for me at least, conjure up many memories. The stairs in that house included a landing, where the stairs turned through 180 degrees for the final few feet of the ascent to the second floor. At the landing was a window hinged at the top that you could push out to let some air in. If the window wasn’t closed tight and properly latched, the wind blowing through the opening would cause a moaning sound, almost a keening, that could be quite loud. If you were unaware of what was causing it, it could be rather a disturbing noise. Patch never liked it, that much I know. Again, I’ve often wondered if that sound still occurs today, if that window isn’t closed properly, if indeed that type of window arrangement is even still in place. Memories are very powerful things; they never really go away, do they. They’re just lurking in a corner of your mind, waiting for something like a smell or a sound to come along and dredge them all back up again.
Almost all the photographs in this memoir were taken by my father, Tom Careless, who developed (no pun intended!) quite an interest in amateur photography in his forties that he retained throughout the remainder of his life. I mentioned in my description of the layout of the Greenwood Avenue house we lived in that it had two separate bathrooms; the upstairs one, which contained a toilet and a sink, but no shower or bath, would, my father decided at some stage, make an excellent darkroom, and on many nights, particularly in the winter months, he and I would spend hours in there developing film and making prints from the resultant negatives. At some stage we even acquired an enlarger for making oversize prints.
Looking back, my mother must have been extraordinarily tolerant. That small bathroom reeked of photo chemicals a lot of the time, and there were often strings of prints hanging drying. The novelty wore off eventually, and my father graduated to slide film, which brought an end to the darkroom exploits, but it was fun while it lasted. I doubt there are, but I do sometimes wonder if there are any lingering unexplained smells in that area of the house today, caused by all that photo/chemical activity all those years ago.
Sounds, as well as smells, can, for me at least, conjure up many memories. The stairs in that house included a landing, where the stairs turned through 180 degrees for the final few feet of the ascent to the second floor. At the landing was a window hinged at the top that you could push out to let some air in. If the window wasn’t closed tight and properly latched, the wind blowing through the opening would cause a moaning sound, almost a keening, that could be quite loud. If you were unaware of what was causing it, it could be rather a disturbing noise. Patch never liked it, that much I know. Again, I’ve often wondered if that sound still occurs today, if that window isn’t closed properly, if indeed that type of window arrangement is even still in place. Memories are very powerful things; they never really go away, do they. They’re just lurking in a corner of your mind, waiting for something like a smell or a sound to come along and dredge them all back up again.
One more closing memory regarding sounds. Patch slept in the basement, on a blanket in a box near the furnace, which meant he stayed warm plus he had access to the coal storage box if he needed to relieve himself during the night. In the mornings, when he woke up, he would scratch determinedly on his side of the furnace room door to be let out and, upon hearing him, I would go down there and unlatch the door. He was invariably upstairs and stretched out on my bed before I had even got myself out of the basement.
Back upstairs and lying in bed again, with him on top of the covers beside me, on quiet early Sunday mornings in the summer, with the bedroom window open, it was possible to hear the unmistakable sound of the engine of the Kipawo steadily idling away alongside the wharf down at The Beach, and out on the Tickle, making its way over to Portugal Cove on the first crossing of the day. An enduring memory from a period of my life that I will undoubtedly cherish forever.
Back upstairs and lying in bed again, with him on top of the covers beside me, on quiet early Sunday mornings in the summer, with the bedroom window open, it was possible to hear the unmistakable sound of the engine of the Kipawo steadily idling away alongside the wharf down at The Beach, and out on the Tickle, making its way over to Portugal Cove on the first crossing of the day. An enduring memory from a period of my life that I will undoubtedly cherish forever.
If it happened to be a particularly pleasant evening, my father and I would often drive from Greenwood Avenue down to the end of the roadway at the top of the ore pocket at Scotia Pier to watch a ship being loaded with iron ore perhaps, or just to look at the infrastructure and the stockpiles of ore, for no other reason than sheer curiosity. It’s hard to imagine in this day and age of heightened security everywhere, and the requirement these days for ‘personalised protective equipment’ for just about anything you want to do, that such excursions were even possible, but they were. There was nobody around to stop you, or even question what you were doing there; it was an enlightened age in many ways. This photo, which I’d guess dates from about 1961, was taken on one such evening excursion; the stockpiled ore is prominent, as is a pile of what was known as ‘fines’ in the distant background, which was ore retrieved from the crusher and which more or less had the consistency of gravel verging on dust! A percentage of these ‘fines’ were thrown in with every shipment of ore in order to simply get rid of it; it would supposedly burn or melt in a blast furnace just the same as regular iron ore. Somebody’s arm is just visible on the right of the picture, likely Ed along for the ride as well; perhaps we’d get lucky on the way home and my dad might just stop at the Imperial Grocery on Bennett Street and buy us each a bottle of pop.