The Women of Wabana, Part 1: Women's Work & Social Life

The Women of Wabana
Part I:
Women's Work & Social Life
by Gail Hussey-Weir

A group of Bell Island women waiting on the wharf at The Beach, Bell Island, c.1900. They are about to depart for an "excursion around the bay." Photo courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, MUN Library, COLL-137.

First published June 10, 2018 (edited Nov. 2, 2018) by the website: www.historic-wabana.com.
Email: [email protected] if you would like to comment or add anything on this topic (including your own family stories of women's work and life), or contribute photographs.

Prologue:
My Grandmother Emeline's Story

Before getting into the details of the work and social life of the women of Bell Island during the mining years, I would like to relate the story of one woman who came to Bell Island in the early years of mining, and some of the struggles and hardships she faced in raising her ten children in a mining town. It is the story of my maternal grandmother, Emeline Rideout-Luffman-Dawe. She was born in Robert’s Arm, Green Bay, in 1884 and grew up on Pilley’s Island. Her father, Richard Rideout (c.1849-1928) was a fisherman, ship-builder and lumberman. Her mother, Eliza Shave (c.1855-1896) died from complications of childbirth when Emeline was 11 years old. Emeline was then raised by her eldest sister, Mary, who became “mother” to her eight siblings. It is not known what formal education, if any, Emeline received, but she was able to read and write. Perhaps, like many young girls of her time, she went “into service,” working in someone else’s home as a mother’s helper, or she may have stayed at home to help raise her younger siblings, as her father did not remarry until 1902. No doubt she helped out with the family’s vegetable garden and domestic animals and assisted in the curing of fish.

Emeline married Stewart Luffman of Pilley’s Island in 1902 when she was 18 years old. Stewart, his father and brothers all worked at the Pilley’s Island iron pyrites mine. Emeline gave birth to their third child the same month the mine closed down in the spring of 1908. Stewart, along with some others of the laid-off miners, travelled to Cape Breton each of the next few springs to work in coal mines such as those at New Aberdeen and Caledonia, returning home in the fall to work in the lumber camps. By 1910, Stewart had moved his family to Grand Falls, where he found work on the construction of the new paper mill. Their fourth child was born there that year.

Meanwhile, the Scotia and Dominion companies at Wabana mines were increasing productivity. They were building houses to entice permanent employees, and had agents recruiting throughout Newfoundland. Many men from Pilley’s Island heeded the call, and the companies were pleased to get these experienced miners. Stewart, his two brothers and father were among them, as were three of Emeline’s brothers and their families. They arrived at Bell Island seeking a more settled life with good prospects for future prosperity. Stewart and Emeline had four small children when they came to Bell Island about 1911 and moved into their brand new Company house on Fourth Street on the Scotia Ridge. After so much economic uncertainty and the long train trip through the wilderness of Newfoundland, the permanency of the situation must have seemed a god-send to them.

Stewart was a driller and quickly became a drill foreman with the Scotia Company, driving the new submarine slope for No. 3 Mine. The family settled in, and two more sons were born to them in the next few years. Stewart and his men worked the night shift, blasting the ore ahead of the muckers who came down on the morning shift to shovel it into ore cars. He was generally expected home for breakfast on work days at 7:30 a.m. Emeline had awoken one such morning earlier than usual, with the feeling that there was something wrong. She came downstairs with her six-month old baby to light the fire in the kitchen coal stove and start preparing breakfast. Her uneasy feeling was intensified when her oldest boy, Ned, came down and said he had just passed his father on the stairs and wondered why he had not spoken to him. Emeline believed this to be an omen of death, and it sent a chill down her spine. When a knock came on the door a few minutes later, she opened it to the mine captain and the Salvation Army Officer, and knew before they spoke why they were there. Just earlier, at 6:30 a.m., August 22, 1916, 35-year-old Stewart was killed in a mine explosion, along with three of his men.

Emeline’s two older boys, Ned (13) and Eric (11), were taken on by the Company to run errands and do other work suitable for their ages. This helped support the family and allowed them to stay in their Company house. Emeline received a paltry government widow’s allowance of eight dollars a year. She received compensation from Scotia Company of $25 a month, which would be discontinued after 5 years. To make ends meet, she took in boarders, one of whom was John Dawe, a miner who was 10 years her junior. A few years later, in 1919, they married and went on to have four more children, two of whom died in infancy of childhood diseases. The family continued to live in the Company house on Fourth Street until about 1934, when they purchased a private residence on Armoury Road. The property included several acres of farmland, which they utilized to grow their own vegetables and keep farm animals during the lean years of the Depression. John was now a blaster in the mines but, having come from a farming/fishing family, he longed to leave the mining life behind. In spite of not being able to read or write, sometime around 1950 he became an agent for Chester Dawe Limited building supplier, and set up business on his property on Armoury Road. Emeline developed diabetes about this time and, using a large needle and syringe, had to inject herself with insulin daily for the rest of her life. Other than that, she lived out the remainder of her days in relative comfort.

Emeline’s five sons all grew up to be miners of Wabana iron ore, and her three daughters, including my mother, married miners. Five of her children built their homes within a minute’s walk of her house, and the others were not much farther away. They and their children visited her often. Throughout my eight years at St. Augustine's School, I would take the same route home every day at noon, going down Church Road and in Armoury Road. I would never pass my grandmother's house without stopping in to see her. As always, she would be busy in her kitchen preparing dinner for Pop, but not too busy to ask me what I had been doing today in school. I would sit on the kitchen couch, feet dangling, and wait impatiently as she puttered in her pantry. Before long she would emerge with a sample of whatever sweet treat she had been baking that morning and offer it to me. My favourites were her gingerbread and tea buns. Once I had that gobbled down, I would wish her good day and head off to my own house for dinner. I remember one day as I was leaving, Pop was just coming in for his dinner. Nan had been telling me about something she was hoping to do and was saying, "next year, please God, if I am still here." Pop only caught that last part and said in his dry manner, "Why, Em, where are you going?"

In March 1964, surrounded by her large family, Emeline Dawe died at age 80. For half a century she had lived a relatively secure and settled life at Wabana after the upheaval of moving from northern Newfoundland with her young family, followed closely by the untimely death of her first husband. Her second husband, John Dawe, died in December 1965. They are buried in the United Church Cemetery, Bell Island.

Just two years after Emeline’s death, the Wabana mines closed for good on June 30, 1966. In the same way that she and Stewart had had to leave Pilley’s Island to travel to an unknown place for work, her sons and daughters and many others now packed up their families and left Bell Island for employment elsewhere. In 1973, her youngest, Jessie, was the last of the family to leave.

In the 2005 photo above, Jessie (Dawe) Hussey is standing in front of the Company house on Fourth Street, Scotia Ridge, where she was born and where the Luffman-Dawe family lived from c.1911-c.1934. Photo by Harvey Weir.

Emeline and John Dawe in the front garden of their house on Armoury Road, c. 1960.

Introduction

In the Spring of 2013, I was looking after my 88-year-old mother who was dying, which got me thinking about how hard she had worked for her family back in the 1940s and 50s, and how much harder she had to work after my father died in 1961. By coincidence, at this same time, Reg Durdle's young daughter was doing a Heritage Fair project on women's work and social life on Bell Island during the mining years and he contacted me to ask if I knew of any resources that she could consult on this topic. In my 30-plus years of researching the history of Bell Island and the Wabana Mines, I had found very little published material on the role women played, so I set out to create my own document based on my memories of growing up in a miner's home in the 1950s and 60s, and on interviews I had done with my mother, other miners’ wives, and other Bell Island women.

Mining was carried out continuously at Wabana from 1895 until the shutdown in 1966. Much of what I have written here regarding home life relates to the last 20 years or so of mining, although some things such as food preparation did not change much down through the mining years. There is still much to uncover. As I find more material, I will be adding it to this website: (www.historic-wabana.com).

Regarding published resources, some interesting personal experience stories from Bell Island women can be found in Kay Coxworthy’s books, especially Memories of an Island. Addison Bown’s “Newspaper History of Bell Island” is an excellent source for news of what was happening on Bell Island between the years 1893 to 1939. Sadly, as with most historical documents, there is not a lot of detail about the daily life of the common woman and man. Most of the people who made the news were mining officials, business people, and other professionals, and practically all of these were men. Members of the working class who appeared in the news were usually those who had suffered some tragedy, such as mining or other accidents, or were involved in rare incidents of criminal activity. I have gathered what I could from early Census data and Directories, and gleaned some scattered items from Bown concerning women’s social activities, most of which pertain to charitable work by church organizations. As a background to life from a woman's perspective on Bell Island, I will start with these original sources, then talk a little bit about women’s social life in general, then go into some detail of the work-a-day life of the average miner’s wife.

Records of Women’s Activities on Bell Island, 1706-1936

NOTE: the following information is from Bell Island Censuses and Directories, and from The Daily News as published by Addison Bown in “Newspaper History of Bell Island.” (Phrases in quotation marks are direct quotes. Other comments are my own.)

1706 (pre-mining): The first record of women living on Bell Island (Great Bell Isle) is a 1706 Census which lists 8 fishermen, who had 5 wives and 13 children amongst them. The women are not named, only the men.

1794-95 (pre-mining): This next Census lists 12 men, all but 2 with unnamed wives. Only one woman is named; she is Catherine Normore (widow of Gregory Normore). She is the only one named whose occupation is not given. The census in those days only named heads of households. The male was considered the head. When he died, his widow became the head of the household.

1814 (pre-mining): This Census lists 44 men and simply states whether or not they have family (presumably a wife and children) and whether or not they are employed in the fishery. Only two women are named: Mary Power, a widow “and has no concern with the fishery;” and Hester Kelly, “a widow with children – no fishery.”

1871 (pre-mining): The first Directory we have for Bell Island (Great Belle Isle and Lance Cove) is in Lovell’s Province of Newfoundland Directory for 1871. Only males (mostly fishermen and some farmers) are listed. Sons who were living at home were listed if they were earning. There were no businesses on Bell Island at this time. There were probably some widows, but they are not listed.

1875 (pre-mining): a woman (unnamed) was said to have been teaching Roman Catholic children in her home in the East End of the Island.

1880s-90s: To get an idea of women's work in the pre-mining days, on my website (www.historic-wabana.com) go to "Publications" in the top menu and hover over "Newfoundland Quarterly" in the drop-down menu, then click on "Belle Island Boyhood," a 2-part story by Thomas Power in which he describes some of the work done by women when he was a boy.

1891 (pre-mining): This Census is not nominal, but does state that 46 women were engaged in curing fish, the first time that women’s role in the fishing industry was acknowledged. There is no reference to women’s involvement in farm work.

1894-97: The next Directory for Belle Isle and Lance Cove is in McAlpine’s 1894-97 Directory. Again, women are not named. Interestingly, even though mining work got started in the summer of 1895, there is no mention of the mining company officials (probably because they were not permanent residents in those early years) and no mention of miners or mine labourers. All the men listed still considered themselves either fishermen or farmers even though many of them would have worked for the Scotia Company. The first mention in The Daily News of any business starting up on Bell Island was when “R.J. Costigan took up residence in the winter of 1896 and was building the first hotel, completed at the end of May and called The Terra Nova Hotel” (located on what is now known as Memorial Street but was then part of The Front Road, east of St. Michael’s High School). At the same time, the “new” Roman Catholic chapel and presbytery were built (in the location now occupied by St. Michael’s High School and land to the east of it), yet no clergy are included in this directory. This suggests that the directory was compiled before 1896 and probably before the summer of 1895, and would explain why there was no mention of miners or mining company staff.

1898: The next Directory for Belle Isle (including Lance Cove) is in McAlpine’s 1898 Directory. Again, women are not named, nor are Scotia Company officials. Many of the former fishermen and farmers are now listed as miners. There are also some male businessmen, clergy and teachers.

In May 1900, Mrs. W. English was erecting a hotel and restaurant on Bell Island. (The “W” was her husband’s initial. He was deceased and had been a baker.) On May 30, 1901, her two sons were drowned while fishing. She sold the hotel not long after that as it was owned by James Corran when it was destroyed by fire in November 1904.

1904: The next Directory for Belle Isle, Lance Cove and Freshwater is in McAlpine’s 1904 Directory. For the first time in a Bell Island Directory, three women are named, all widows. Their Christian names are given, then they are listed as “widow of” and their deceased husbands’ names. All the clerks and school teachers are male. Mining Company officials are now living on Bell Island and are named.

In 1906, “the ladies of the Methodist Church held a sale of work (handicrafts) on Sept. 20th in their newly-erected school room, the first Methodist school on the Island.”

In 1910, "Mrs. Dicks" owned a hotel on The Beach and was hosting a birthday reception and dinner for a patron.

In 1912, “the ladies of the Syrian Benevolent Society were raising funds for the purchase of a new altar and bell for the R.C. Church at the Mines.” (This was St. Peter’s Church on The Green that is depicted in the mural on Hurley’s warehouse.) It was noted later that year that, “the Syrian Charitable Society, under the direction of Mrs. Michael Carbage, were raising money for the needy cases on the Island.”

In 1913: The next Directory for Bell Island is in the St. John’s Directory 1913. This Directory lists hundreds of men but names only 43 women. Of these, 39 have the prefix “Mrs.” with no occupation given, probably meaning they are widows. In most cases, their Christian name is given, not their former husband’s name. Only one woman with the prefix “Mrs.” had an occupation listed: Mary E. Tuma was a general retail dealer and confectioner. Her husband had a separate business. Three women had no prefix before their names; they were probably unmarried. Two of these had an occupation: Catherine Holland was a saleswoman and Priscilla Rees was "caretaker surgery."

In 1914, following the start of World War I, “a Patriotic Association was set up on the Island after the Regiment went overseas, to provide comforts for the boys. The Men’s Patriotic Association was charged with the duty of raising the necessary funds for the Women’s Patriotic Association. The former held a meeting to form the latter. The economic picture was far from bright at that time. In the middle of September 1914, Bell Island was practically deserted, with little or no activity in the mines [because of the war], and the situation did not begin to improve until the winter of 1915.” (“Comforts” would have included knitted socks and mitts, handmade by the women, as well as other treats, including home-made fruitcakes.)

In 1915: The next Directory for Bell Island is in the McAlpine’s 1915 Directory. This Directory names only half a dozen women with the prefix “Mrs,” four of whom are widows with no occupation. Two business women are Mrs. Abraham Basha, a grocer at Bell Island Mines, and Mrs. Mary Tuma, a general dealer at Bell Island Mines. Miss Kitty Fitzpatrick was a nurse, and Miss Effie Goddin was a clerk at Bell Island Drug Store.

In 1917, on September 18, four sisters of Mercy arrived on Bell Island to conduct classes for 100 students at the new St. Edward’s Convent School. They were: Mother Superior Mary Consilio (Agnes) Kenny from Roscommon, Ireland; Mary Cecily (Monica) O’Reilly from Argentia, NL; Mary Alphonsus McNamara from Low Point, Conception Bay; and Mary Aloysius Rawlins from St. John’s, NL. Sister Rawlins became the music teacher, parish organist and choir director. Their school seems to have been located in St. Joseph’s Hall, immediately west of St. Michael’s Church. (None of these women are listed in the 1919 Directory for Bell Island, but 2 of them, Kenny and O’Reilly, are listed in the 1921 Census for Bell Island Mines-Centre Part 2.)

In 1919: While previous Directories had very few females listed, in this Directory there were quite a few. Most were simply listed as “widow of” so and so, with no occupation given. Women who were married were listed as “Mrs.” and then usually the name of their husband instead of their own Christian name. There were noticeably more single women listed than in previous directories. Their occupations were mostly shop clerks and domestics, with a few nurses, post office clerks and teachers, although most teachers and shop clerks at this time were male. The Sisters of Mercy at St. Edward’s Convent do not appear in this directory.

Continuing with the 1919 Directory:

There is a listing for Pearl Harvey, working as a clerk in the DISCO warehouse, but I believe this was actually Harold Pearl Harvey. (It would have been very unusual for a woman to be working in the DISCO warehouse.) Mrs. Elvina Dicks was a shopkeeper with a general store on Bell Island. Mrs. Abraham Basha was a grocer at Wabana. Mrs. Richard Costigan, widow, was the proprietor of Costigan’s Hotel. Mrs. M. Dunn had a general store at Wabana. Mrs. S. Spencer was a nurse. Miss B.B. (Bessie, AKA Elizabeth) English was editor and manager of The Bell Island Miner. (This newspaper began publication in 1912 with William Dooley as managing editor and William J. English as foreman. William English was editor in 1915. He died in 1917, at which time his daughter, Bessie, took over. She continued publishing The Bell Island Miner until the 1940s.)

In 1920, women’s first names were beginning to be given in some news stories, however, in most cases a woman would be reported as, say, Mrs. John Smith, rather than by her own first name. For example, “Mrs. Abel Stone, matron of the Dominion Staff House, passed away on Oct. 18, 1920 and the remains were taken to her former home at Harbour Grace.” So even though she had a paying job, which was very unusual for a married woman at that time, her main role in life was viewed by society as the wife of her husband. Also, the newspaper obituaries for many men usually stated that he was survived by “a wife” and X number of children, without actually giving his wife’s name.

In 1923, “the Church of England Women’s Association was formed the last week of May. Their aim was to raise funds for the building of a new church and rectory at the Mines, which was realized with the erection of St. Cyprian’s Church.” (By the way, when Bell Islanders spoke of something happening “at the Mines,” they usually meant the area around Town Square and where the businesses and services were located. The first post office was located at The Front of the Island, and the first schools and churches were located at the Front and Lance Cove, where most of the original inhabitants had their homes and farms. As the population grew up near the mines, so too did the businesses and services, and people who lived at The Front talked of going “in to the Mines” to do their shopping and business.)

In 1931, at the beginning of the Great Depression, “the Company started leasing land to its employees so that they could grow vegetables to supplement their reduced income. For part of June and all July, all four mines were closed on Bell Island. In November, No. 3 and No. 6 opened, but for only two days a week. Resident miners lived on $10.10 per month after deductions for rent, etc. They survived with the help of the vegetables they grew, and because the cost of living was low. 573 leases of land were issued to employees with a total acreage of 307 at an average size of approximately half an acre. The main crops were potatoes, turnips and cabbage. Spring saw men and women clearing and fencing their plots.”

In 1931, “the Loyal Orange Association supplied Christmas dinners for 56 families. They gave out 270 meals on Christmas Day and also supplied fruit and candy to 300 poor children. The mines closed for Christmas on Dec. 13 and there was much destitution in evidence. Donations of money were also solicited and the proceeds were used to buy materials for knitting and sewing.”

In 1933, “if not for the German market, the Wabana mines would have been closed in these years of the Depression and complete destitution for its people would have resulted. A local branch of the Women’s Service League was set up to collect clothing for the destitute members of the community.” (It should be remembered that there were no such things as Employment Insurance and other social benefits in those days. Welfare payments were 6 cents a day, and all able-bodied men who collected this “dole” were required to do community work, such as pick-and-shovel road building, in exchange for this paltry sum.)

In 1936: This Directory for Bell Island is in Newfoundland Directory 1936. This Directory names only three women with the prefix “Mrs,” all three of whom are widows with businesses. A couple of businesswomen were listed without any prefix, and a couple had the prefix "Miss." For example: Bridget Cummings, Mrs. Moses Dicks, Mrs. Richard Lamswood and Mary Snow were storekeepers; Mrs. William Hammond was a grocer; Katherine Davis was postmistress; Bessie English was “editoress” of The Bell Island Miner (and had been since about 1917); Nellie Forward was manager of the Company Staff House; and Sadie Gosine was manager of M.J. Gosine. 42 unmarried women were listed with the prefix "Miss." Of these, six were teachers, two were stenographers with DOSCO; one was a nurse and one an accountant. The rest were all shop clerks. The use of the prefixes seems to have been a courtesy reserved for women. As with previous directories, the majority of the men listed had no prefix.

The excerpts listed above from the Daily News give only a snippet of some of the social groups that women would have been involved in. You will find more mention of women's activities by going through the daily newspapers, however, much of what was reported had to do with musical events and variety concerts and the like, with rare mention of female sports. Generally speaking, the women who formed and headed up the social groups, put off the concerts and participated in sports would have been the wives and daughters of the community leaders, who were mostly businessmen, mining company officials, doctors, clergy, teachers and other professionals. They formed a very small percentage of the population and, by and large, were well-educated people. The wives and daughters of miners who took part in such social events usually did so through church and school involvement. How housewives went about their daily routine was not recorded.

The Housewife's Social Life in the Mining Years

Throughout the mining years on Bell Island, there was a very active social scene. Orchestras often travelled from St. John's to play for dances. Live theatre, operettas and “concerts” were very popular in the first half of the 20th century. (The term “concert” usually referred to a variety show of individuals singing and performing music, recitations and skits.) It is obvious from the newspaper reports of these entertainments that it was mainly the families of community leaders who had the most involvement in organizing and participating in these affairs. Before they were married and began having babies, young women of all social groups would have enjoyed these events, as well as ice skating and going to the movies.

As a rule, in the first half of the century, drinking establishments, which were usually called taverns on Bell Island, were frequented only by men. World War II saw attitudes about women's place in society start to change as thousands of men went off to war and women stepped up to do some of the jobs that had previously been thought of as male-only work. For example, before the war there were only two women working in the Main Office of DOSCO on Bell Island. By 1958, there were at least nine women working there. As the 1950s progressed, some married women began to accompany their husbands on a Saturday evening to the Canadian Legion or one of the other “clubs” that were becoming popular on the Island. There, they would dance to live music and enjoy a drink or two. Even so, it was still a small portion of the population who socialized in this way and the majority of miners' wives did not take part.

After marriage, most miners’ wives settled into a routine where they spent most of their time at home, on their own, taking care of their families, going out only to do the weekly shopping or to attend church services. Some women with very large families to look after did not do even that. While life for the underground miner was not easy, most did spend their workdays in the company and camaraderie of other men. Work was shared and help and assistance was usually close at hand. This was often not the case for the housewife, especially when her husband was at work and her children were in school. She might spend a few minutes chatting over the fence with the woman next door while they both hung out the wash, but there was no one to help them with the heavy lifting, or to lend them a hand when they were kneading bread or scrubbing muck-laden miner's clothes. For the most part, their days and evenings were spent in the confines of their small kitchens, basically alone except for meal times. The homemaker's social life was often no more than a Sunday afternoon visit with relatives. Occasionally, a neighbour might drop in for a cup of tea and to catch up on news (some might say “gossip”) on their way home from shopping or running an errand.

Local news was also passed around by children. For example, when I left my house in the morning, I would go to a friend’s house to see if she could come out to play. While I waited in the kitchen doorway for my friend, her mother would be sure to ask me what my mother was doing today. I remember that the first few times I was asked this, I did not have an answer because, in my haste to get outside to play, I had not paid attention to what my mother was doing. I soon learned to make note of her activity as I was leaving the house, so I could have my answer ready when asked. I also soon realized that it was always the same thing that my friend's mother was doing: laundry or baking bread, or whatever. In a way, this was confirmation for her that she was not missing out on anything. Everything was equal. Once that was out of the way, she would ask if there was any news. There usually was not, but if someone was ill, or something special was on the go, that information would soon be spread from one house to the other by the children passing through.

Most people did not have telephones until the latter part of the 1950s when Bell Island got dial phone service, so they would not have been chatting on the phone the way people do today. Even then, phones were not as private as they are today, so people did not tend to chat as freely as they now do. The one phone in the house was usually attached to the wall in the kitchen, and conversations tended to be brief because “someone might be listening in on the party line.” As well, there was no television until about that time, and then it was only broadcast in the evenings, not during the day. The radio, which became common in homes sometime in the 1930s, was the most distraction that many housewives had in mid-century and their main source of information from the outside world.

This Rogers-Majestic radio sat on a shelf in our kitchen from about 1950 to 1973. Through the 1950s, it kept my mother company all day while she worked alone in her kitchen, cooking, baking and cleaning. When we finished our homework in the evening, she would turn it on again and we'd listen to serials such as Superman: "Up, up and away!" Then she would put us to bed and we would fall asleep to the music of Kitty Wells, Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline, Faron Young, and many more.

The box of Sea Dog matches for lighting the kitchen stove was the radio's constant companion, up too high for little fingers to reach. The box in this picture is twice the size of a normal box of matches.

Shopping

In his memoire "Belle Island Boyhood" (Newfoundland Quarterly V. 85, No. 2, 1989 & V. 85, No. 3, 1990), Thomas Power mentions a "little store at the crossroads" (probably at the top of Beach Hill), where he purchased candy, but the impression he gives is that any provisions that the farmers of Bell Island did not produce themselves in the 1800s were purchased in St. John's. Prior to the start of mining, people picked up supplies when they went there to sell their meat, butter and vegetables. They got to St. John's either by sailing around Cape St. Francis, or sailing to Portugal Cove and then going overland by horse and cart, although some people are said to have walked all the way from Portugal Cove. It was mostly the men who made this journey, with instructions from the women on what to purchase, which was pretty standard stuff. Thomas Power tells us, however, that "some of the smaller farmers' wives would take passage on the mail packet at nine o'clock in the morning and, with a basket of produce, homespun yarn, eggs, fresh butter, etc, would walk the nine miles to St. John's. After selling or trading their produce, they would walk back to Portugal Cove to board the packet at 4:30 for home. The most famous walker of all time was a little old lady who had legs like spindles and could pass everyone on the road going and coming." The first time any Bell Island businesses were mentioned in the media was in September 1899, when a visiting writer reported in the Daily News that the largest trade being done on Bell Island was by J.B. Martin, who had a shop on The Front Road just uphill from the Dominion Pier. Two other general stores at the time were run by W.K. Murphy and a Kennedy.

As the population grew in the early 1900s, the main shopping area was on The Green, as depicted in the photo above of the mural on Hurley’s Warehouse. This was because many of the first miners who moved to Bell Island from other places settled on The Green where No. 2 Mine and No. 6 Mine were located. During the 1920s, businesses began moving to Town Square and adjoining streets, so that by the 1930s, that area boasted just about every shop and service needed in a community that was then second in size to the capital city of St. John's. There were several clothing stores with plenty to choose from, however shopping was not the leisurely activity it is today. As soon as you entered one of these stores, a saleslady would approach to offer assistance and would show you what was on offer, not leaving your side until you had either made your purchase or had left to shop elsewhere. There, you would be shadowed in the same way. All shops had window displays showing a sample of their goods to entice shoppers inside. For those with little money to spend, a common phrase was, “I was on Town Square window shopping today,” meaning they strolled past the shops, stopping to gaze in each window to see if there was anything of interest. For the housewife who did not have time to window shop, the seasonal arrival of the Simpson’s (Sears) and Eaton’s catalogues was a treat as mail order was a convenient way to shop. One of the children could drop her order off at the catalogue office and she only had to go there to pay the bill and collect the package when it arrived. This saved her some valuable time and also offered a wider selection of merchandise than was available locally.

There were no credit cards then, only cash, although local merchants usually had credit agreements with customers for larger purchases, meaning they could pay off an item with fixed payments over an agreed period of time. The reverse of that system was the “lay-away” plan, whereby a customer put a down-payment on an item, which was then held at the store until the customer brought in the final payment. This was usually done for certain items of clothing or jewellery. Christmas gifts were often purchased this way as well.

There were several larger grocery stores in the Town Square area and smaller ones in each of the neighbourhoods on Bell Island. Most households bought all of their groceries at one store and you might hear one woman ask another, “Which store do you deal with?” By dealing with a store, you could charge small purchases during the week and pay when you picked up the week’s groceries on payday. As few people had cars, the groceries would be delivered by the store’s delivery man shortly after the shopper arrived back home. I can still remember the first time I saw a hula hoop. We “dealt” at Welsh’s Supermarket on Quigley’s Line. When the delivery men brought in the groceries one Friday evening in the mid-1950s, included with them were two hula hoops, one for each of us girls. They were giving them away as a promotional gimmick. The photo below of the Town Square shopping area in the mid-1950s is courtesy of Sonia Neary Harvey.

During the years that the Wabana mines were operating, St. John’s shops were concentrated on Water Street and going there for the day was a major event for many, but had no allure for women like my mother, who suffered from motion sickness and got car sick just driving to the Beach. I was a 17-year old preparing for college before I went to St. John’s to shop for the first time. Most Bell Island housewives would have neither the time to spare nor the money needed to shop “in Town” (as St. John’s was known by those who lived outside it). Cars were a rare luxury that the average miner could not afford and, even if he could, there were no drive-on car ferries as we know them today until later in the 1950s. Today, Bell Island women can hop into their cars, take a short ferry ride and spend the day shopping at a variety of shopping malls and big box stores around St. John’s but, up until the late 1960s, very few Bell Island women would go off the Island to shop.

Education

Until Newfoundland joined Confederation with Canada in 1949, the average Newfoundland child rarely went beyond grade 4 or 5 in school. This was because, in the days before the birth-control pill, many families were large, often consisting of 10 or 12 children, and every able-bodied person had to work to support the family. In fishing families, boys fished with their fathers as soon as they were old enough, usually by the time they were eight or nine years of age. On Bell Island, boys as young as 9 got jobs with the mining company running errands, fetching water or picking rocks out of the ore as it came out of the mines. Girls either stayed home to help their mothers look after the smaller children and help with all the housework and cooking, or else they went to work as “serving girls” in the homes of the “better off” families, doing the same work as girls who stayed at home. Serving girls were paid as little as $6.00 a month and they were said to be “in service.” They usually lived-in and their board and lodging was considered part of their pay. They often had to abide by strict rules and had very little time off.

After Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, families received “the Baby Bonus,” monthly payments of $6.00 for each child under the age of 16. Payments continued as long as the child attended school regularly. This seems like a small amount of money now, but it was probably equivalent to more than $100 in today’s currency and went a long way to help feed and clothe so many children. This monetary incentive changed attitudes about education dramatically. The cheques were made out to the mother of the family and for most women it was the first cheque they had ever received in their own name. Up to this time, they were totally dependent on their husbands for cash, so it must have been a very liberating feeling to suddenly have a cheque for as much as $60 or more for some women to spend each month. Naturally, they were going to make sure their children attended school at least until their 16th birthday. Some less academically-minded young people looked forward to that birthday so that they could quit school, and it was still possible in the 1950s for boys of 16 to get work in the mines and for girls of that age to get jobs as shop clerks. Times were changing though, as young people were now realizing that they would have more job choices if they stayed in school and graduated.

Our Mothers' Occupation: Housewife

The newspaper articles do not give much detail of how hard life was for women of the working class. Growing up in a world where our father went out to work in what could be a dangerous environment and our mother stayed at home in what was considered a safe and warm place can leave us with the notion that women had it easy. Adding to that notion is the name that was bestowed on this most important person in our lives: “Housewife.” When those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 60s were asked by people we met later in life what our mothers had done for a living, how often did we sheepishly say, “Oh, she was just a housewife”? If we think there was no danger and no hard work involved in that profession simply because it was unpaid work done in the comfort of the home, we need to think again. Childbirth itself is a risky business. My maternal great-grandmother died at the age of 39, one week after giving birth to her ninth child, after succumbing to a common post-partum infection that is still a risk factor today. Aside from death, childbirth can lead to other health complications, and this was especially true in the days when women had little or no access to birth control aids or the advancements in health care that are available today.

Our mother gave us life. From the moment we were born, she nurtured, fed, clothed, washed and groomed us, and kept us safe and warm until we were old enough to go out on our own and start our own families. She was our spiritual guide, the carrier of family traditions, our first teacher, disciplinarian, nurse, comforter, adviser, and intermediary in daily conflicts between siblings and friends. When things went wrong, we ran home to seek her counsel, and when things went right, we could not wait to see the look of joy on her face when we got home to relate our latest accomplishments. She was the manager, chief accountant and chief operating officer of her home, keeping her children and husband in line and on track and making sure everything in their lives ran as smoothly as possible. And she did all of this so seamlessly and without fanfare, that the importance of her role in our lives was easily taken for granted.

“Housewife” was a full-time, all-day, 7-days-a-week occupation right up until the general availability of the birth control pill in the late 1960s led to a drastic reduction in the number of children being born. Up to that time, with so many children to keep clean and fed, the average woman had very little time for a social life and there were no holidays, paid or otherwise. She was always on duty, always on call. Even those women who had managed to stay in school and get a “professional” job (secretary, nurse or teacher) before marriage were expected to quit work when they married. This was not necessarily a written policy of employers so much as it was a generally held belief in that society. This was because marriage traditionally preceded having children and that meant staying home and caring for the children and husband and being a housewife.

The photograph below from the December 1958 Submarine Miner is of a group of female office staff at the Company’s Main Office bidding farewell to one of their co-workers who was “leaving work to get married.”

Yes, our father went out every day and worked at a hard, dangerous job in the mines to earn enough money to provide us with the material things of life, but he was only half of the equation. Without his wife, our mother, at home keeping the home fires burning (literally), looking after the children, cooking and cleaning and doing all the other bits of business required to keep the household going, his life would have been a sorry state indeed. The following descriptions of home life on Bell Island in the 1950s and 60s and some of the work done by housewives are partly my own memories of that time with input from women I interviewed.

The Kitchen

Ours was a small family of two adults and three children (until my little sister was born when I was 9). Many families of our acquaintance had 10 or 12 children, sometimes more. Whatever the size of the family, in those days the gathering place in the house was the kitchen, an area of about 150 square feet at most. This was where our mother spent most of her waking hours. (The front room, or parlour, in most homes was reserved for visiting clergy and for special occasions such as Christmas and wedding parties, and for funeral wakes.) There were no wall-to-wall factory-finished kitchen cupboards with gleaming counter tops then. Dishes, pots and pans, canned foods and baking supplies were all stored in the pantry, a small room off the kitchen. The only built-in cupboard in the kitchen was just big enough to hold the kitchen sink, although we did not get running water until around 1953 when I was five years old. We did not have a refrigerator until 1957. Like most Newfoundland kitchens, ours had a kitchen table, a rocking chair and a day bed, which served as a general seating area but was also a cozy spot for a nap. There was a small shelf above the daybed that held the radio and the box of matches for lighting the stove. In effect, the kitchens of those days were precursors of today's kitchen-family room, except smaller.

I do not have a good photo of our kitchen on Tucker Street. This October 1968 photo shows a small corner of the kitchen with the coal stove to the left and the hot water tank behind. I am heading into the pantry where the food and dishes were stored, while my mother, Jessie, in the rocking chair, and my younger sister, Bonnie, admire my new baby, Sharada, who is making her first visit to Bell Island from our home in St. John's. While you do not see much of the kitchen here, you do get the sense of its function as the main gathering place in the home.

The Kitchen Stove

The kitchen was truly the heart of the home. This was because it contained the proverbial hearth, the kitchen stove. The wood/coal stove was where all the cooking and baking was done and was also the main heat source for many houses. Some families were installing a more modern convenience, the oil range, by the 1950s. The oil range was a luxury that did not require constant attention to keep the heat coming. Our wood/coal stove was a job in itself. Getting it lit in the morning and then keeping it going without getting it overheated through the day was an art form. This, of course, was one of the many jobs of the housewife, which is what my mother was for the first 20 years of her marriage. A box of wood splits for starting the fire was kept behind the stove, as was the coal bucket. Cleaning the ashes out of the stove every morning was just another part of the housewife’s routine.

The pile of coal was kept in the unfinished basement in our house. By “unfinished” I mean the walls were partially concrete, but mainly earth and rock, as was the floor. Indeed, only about half of the basement had standing room, enough to hold the furnace and the winter’s supply of wood and coal needed to get us through without freezing. There were cast iron radiators throughout the house and these instilled a warm cozy feeling when you walked past and reached out your hand to feel the warm metal, however, the cast iron coal furnace was used sparingly, being reserved for the coldest nights of the winter. I am not sure why because coal was only $4.00 a ton and was delivered to the Island regularly on boats that came from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where it was mined by the same company that operated the Wabana mines. Each fall a dump truck would back into our yard and dump four tons of coal next to the opening for the coal chute. My father would shovel this into the basement when he got home from a day of working in the mine. As my brother grew, it became his job but, when he left home in 1962 (a year after Dad died), it was down to Mom and us girls to do it.

The kitchen coal stove was where all the cooking and baking happened. Even on hot summer days, the stove had to be kept going so that it would be ready to cook everything from the eggs and porridge for breakfast, through the heating of canned soup, beans or spaghetti for the children’s lunches (which we called “dinner”), to the baking of the bread and the cooking of the full meal for supper, and then the final cup of tea or cocoa for the “mug-up” before bed. Every half hour or so, another shovel of coal had to be added to the fire box and this had to be poked with the poker every now and then to maintain even heat and to prevent the flame from being smothered. The kettle was constantly on simmer all day, ever ready for steeping another pot of tea. (Tea was loose leaf and came in foil-wrapped blocks.) And, of course, hot water was constantly needed for all the washing and cleaning.

The stove served a special purpose at Christmas time: it was our means of sending our letter (our “Wish List”) to Santa Claus at the North Pole. A few days before Christmas, when the anticipation of the big day was getting too much for us young children to bear, and our parents had had enough of hearing us repeat what we wanted Santa to bring us, our mother would sit us at the kitchen table with pencil and paper and have us make out our list of wishes. We would then go to the stove to complete the ceremony. Mom would lift the damper off and we would each deposit our letter into the hot embers. Then we would watch bright-eyed as the paper burst into flames and we could see the last burnt bits rise with the smoke to enter the chimney. We would then run outside to witness the smoke rising into the sky. We were certain it would end up at the North Pole, where it would magically reform itself and Santa Claus would be able to read it. We knew this because our mother told us it was so.

A typical wood/coal kitchen stove of the 1950s with the kettle and tea pot ever on the ready for a strong cup of tea. The hot water tank is behind the stove on the right. Every kitchen had a rocking chair waiting to receive a visitor. Photo courtesy of Gerald Purcell.

The Kitchen Table

The kitchen table served many purposes and was in constant use. Meals and baked items were prepared on it. As the kitchen was often the only comfortably heated room in the house, all our meals were taken there. We did not wash our dishes at the sink but, instead, brought the wash basin to the table and did the dishes there. The miner’s lunch was prepared (rigged) there. The children did their homework there. And when friends and neighbours dropped by for a visit, they sat at the table and chatted over a cup of tea.

In this photo, Jessie Hussey is having some jam bread with tea at her kitchen table, Friday, December 18, 1965. She was on her supper break from working at Charlie Cohen's Store, where she had to return for the evening shift, it being the busy Christmas season. A tin of Carnation Milk was always on the table when tea was being served. The pantry is behind her in the left of the photo. That is red and green plaid oilcloth on the upper part of the pantry wall, the same as covered the pantry shelves and counter to make them easy to clean. The house west of us opposite this double window was built to the same floor plan as ours and belonged to Jessie's brother and his wife, Ernest and Doris (French) Luffman. From this position at the table, she could see Tucker Street (The Lane), and Andrews' house opposite. Photo by Harvey Weir.

Meals

Pushed against the window, our kitchen table could seat Dad and the three of us children around it. Dad sat at the southern end of the table. From there, he had a view out the window towards the street, and could see anyone passing by or coming into our yard. Mom usually did not sit down to eat with us but, rather, stood by like a waitress, serving us our meals from the stove, pouring our tea, slicing and buttering our bread and passing us whatever else we needed. She would eat when we were finished. I asked her once why she did not sit and eat with us and she said she could not enjoy her meal having to jump up all the time to get things for us. She preferred to wait until we were done and had gone back outdoors to school or play when she could then eat in peace.

The Newfoundland outport fishing tradition was to eat the main meal of the day at noon because that was when the fishermen finished up their morning’s work on the water. The noon meal was called dinner. Having come from the fishing tradition, most Bell Islanders continued to call the midday meal dinner, but it was not actually their main meal because the miners on day shift did not get home until after 4:00. At that time, we had our big meal, which we called supper. Lunch was a name that we used interchangeably with “mug-up” for the late evening snack before going to bed. In the 1950s and 60s, only the school children who came by bus ate a “lunch” of sandwiches at the school. The rest of us walked home for our “dinner.” It was often something made from the leftovers of yesterday’s supper, or else heated from a can, such as wieners and beans, soup or spaghetti. (I was 13 before I discovered one day while visiting a friend’s house after school that “real” spaghetti came dry in a box, not wet from a can.) Even though Dad did not work Saturdays, we also ate our main meal at supper time that day. The only day we had our big cooked meal at midday was on Sundays. (This was probably to allow mothers the afternoon “off” to go visiting or to receive visitors.)

My mother was not an inventive cook. (Cookbooks were not common in those days. The few recipe books available were mainly for baking. Also, grocery stores did not carry the wide variety of prepared meals and exotic fruits and vegetables that they do today.) The food was always prepared in exactly the same way, no doubt just as her mother and generations of mothers before her had cooked it. She did all the day-to-day cooking and baking and, as in a lot of Newfoundland homes, each day of the week had its own menu which rarely varied from week to week. This was really a necessity when you were responsible for preparing what amounted to four meals a day for a houseful of people, plus baking bread and sweet treats, and having it all ready on time while doing all the other housekeeping chores.

The regular main meals for the week were:

Sunday dinner: Either stewed beef and gravy with boiled potato, turnip, carrot and cabbage, or
roasted chicken with savory bread stuffing, gravy and the same vegetables. Salt beef was cooked with the vegetables to add flavour. More often than not in our house, the dinner was chicken, perhaps because chickens were bigger in those days and there was always some leftover for supper.

Sunday supper: To serve with the cold leftover meat or poultry, leftover potato would be mashed to make potato salad for supper. This Sunday evening “cold plate” would be finished off with a piece of iceberg lettuce that was sprinkled with vinegar. Sitting on the lettuce would be a few slices of tasteless, under-ripe tomato seasoned with salt and sugar. (The tomatoes came 4 in a plastic cradle wrapped in cellophane that had come to our local shop from somewhere far away.) Sunday supper was the only meal at which we had dessert, which sometimes consisted of a layer cake made from a mix and covered in icing, but more often than not was jelly with canned fruit cocktail and topped with a dollop of Nestle tinned cream. On rare occasions, my mother would send us to French’s store on St. Pat’s Lane to buy a “brick” of ice cream.

Monday: Stoyles’ sausages, or thick slices of baloney, or blood pudding, or white pudding, with mashed potato and canned peas.

Tuesday: Salt fish with potatoes, brewis and scruncheons; the leftover salt fish and potato were fried up into fish cakes for Wednesday dinner (i.e. lunch).

Wednesday: "Boiled dinner" (even though it was served at suppertime): salt beef, cabbage, potato, turnip, carrot, pease pudding, boiled pudding in a bag, sweet mustard pickles; the leftovers were made into hash for Thursday’s dinner (i.e. lunch).

Thursday: Stewed meat and gravy with mashed potatoes, carrot, turnip and canned peas.

Friday: Fresh fish and brewis with scruncheons.

Saturday: Soup, often pea soup, with doughboys (dumplings); baked beans were another
Saturday treat.

Other dishes that were cooked in season, usually hunted or caught locally by my father, were seal flippers in the spring, caplin in June or early July, stewed fresh fish and fish heads in summer, and seabirds in the fall.

When it was not being used for meals, the kitchen table served many other purposes, such as:

Rigging the Miner's Lunch

The kitchen table was where the miner’s wife “rigged,” or prepared, his lunch, either in the morning before he left for work or the previous night. Common lunch items were sandwiches, which were often made of baloney, since it was the cheapest meat or, instead of sandwiches, buttered bread accompanied by such items of food as small cans of beans or sardines, fried sausages, “black” or “blood” puddings, ham, meat, fish cakes or meat cakes. To top off his meal, there would be a small can of fruit or juice. Instead of a thermos bottle, she would fill a rum bottle with steeped tea and add sugar and Carnation canned milk.

Miners underground in a dry house in No. 3 Mine, August 1949. Their lunches, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string, are hung on the walls in order to keep the ever-present rats from getting at them. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada; George Hunter/National Film Board Photographic Collection.

Baking Bread and Other Baking

Mom baked bread twice a week, usually Mondays and Thursdays. She baked 3 loaves, with 3 buns in each loaf, each time. I remember her mixing the dough in a large round, flat-bottomed, tin pan. After kneading the dough, she would form it into a large mound in the pan, making a symbolic cross mark by drawing her index finger over the top of the dough in the form of the cross of Jesus. This was by way of a silent prayer that the dough would rise as it should to make good bread, for there was no guarantee that the yeast would work properly. Bread was an important accompaniment to each meal. The pride of the housewife was that she would be considered accomplished at making “good” bread, light and fluffy. If the dough did not rise properly, the result would be a soggy, chewy mess. Not only would there be much complaining, but all that time, effort and flour would have been wasted. She covered the bowl with a dish towel and placed it on a chair next to the hot water tank on the right side of the stove, which was the opposite end to the fire box. It was left there to rise away from the draught of the back door, which was on the left side of the stove.

When we came home for our dinner at noon, Mom would cut off handfuls of the dough and fry them in margarine in the cast iron frying pan to make what she called “pancakes,” but which we now call “toutons.” When one side was fried golden brown, she used a fork to turn the pancake over to brown on the other side. As it browned, it became a lovely puffed up slab, which she removed from the frying pan with the fork and placed on the plate. She then sliced it lengthwise, but not all the way through. She spread the two sides open like a book and then slathered on Good Luck margarine, which we always called butter. It immediately melted with the heat from the fried dough. We then had a choice of adding jam (my favourite was raspberry) or molasses. Once that was spread, we folded the two sides together again and bit into what, for us, was a magnificent, hot, crusty, sweet treat. The melted margarine and warm molasses or jam would ooze out the edges of the pancake and drip down our chins as we chewed and supped milky tea from our saucers. Pure heaven. Similarly, a favourite after-school snack would be two slices of freshly-baked bread smeared with margarine and molasses, accompanied by a glass of water.

Until my mother started working full time after Dad died in 1961, we rarely ate “baker’s bread.” My grandmother would sometimes send me to Squire’s store next to the CLB Armoury for a loaf of baker’s bread if she ran out of her own homemade bread. The store clerk would wrap it in brown paper. Everything you bought there got wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string, which was a good thing because you would not want the neighbours see you bringing home baker’s bread. All the bread, homemade or baker’s, was made with white flour. The only variation was when Mom would add molasses to the wet ingredients and then raisins into the dough, but that would be a special occasion treat, such as Christmas time or Easter. We did not have brown or whole grain breads.

Some of the delicious baked goods that my mother made from scratch were: tea buns (with raisins), date squares, blueberry squares, pineapple upside-down cake, a coffee cake that we called “earthquake cake,” and (my favourite) gingerbread. My grandmother used to make something that resembled gingerbread, but tasted nothing like it and was actually salt pork buns. I recall being very disappointed biting into one of these, thinking it was gingerbread, and encountering the disgusting texture of an under-cooked cube of salt pork in the center. I did not know what to make of it and my grandmother did not know what to make of me for disliking it!

Sometime around November every year, my mother would bake two fruit cakes, one dark and one light, in a cast iron bake pot. After cooling, they would be put in round cake tins and placed on the top of the upper cupboards in the pantry, well out of reach of little hands so that they would not be eaten before Christmas. The aroma from those cakes would be intoxicating, and I well remember standing in the pantry and staring up longingly at the cake tins, savouring that wonderful smell.

Washing Dishes

In our house, the laundry detergent was “all-purpose” in that we used it to wash dishes as well as clothes, although I also recall sometimes placing a cake of Sunlight soap in the bowl in which the dishes were washed. The hot water from the kettle was poured on it and it was left in the bowl for a few minutes to create the conditions needed to get the dishes clean. We did not have a dish drainer. The dishes were washed and dried one at a time, although there was a trick we used with the plates and saucers where we would put 3 or 4 into the basin and soak and wipe them clean, then take the stack out sideways, letting the water drain back into the basin. Then we would use the dish towel to wipe the top of the top plate and the bottom of the bottom plate, then move the top one under the bottom one and repeat the process until all the plates were fully dried.

Rainy Day Activities

On rainy or stormy days when we couldn't play outside, we would play cards or board games, such as Checkers, Snakes & Ladders, or Monopoly on the kitchen table, or we'd colour in our colouring books there, or put together a jigsaw puzzle to help pass the time.

Homework or "Doing Our Lessons"

Every evening of the school year, after the dishes were cleared away, we children sat around the kitchen table to do our homework. One of my favourite early memories was of a study session when my older brother was in Grade 4 and I heard for the first time the story of Bunga, who was a Pygmy boy who lived in a very warm place on the other side of the world. I am sure the reason I did so well in my early school years was because I had heard my older brother and sister reading aloud their lessons every evening, so that by the time I got to those grades, it was all review work for me.

There was usually spelling to be practiced, arithmetic to be done, readings from the literature, geography and history books, and those dreaded poems and religious verses to be memorized. During the elementary school years, our mother would sit with us each evening to supervise this work, test our spelling, ask us to say our multiplication tables, check our “sums,” and read our paragraphs or essays for errors. (I should have added "editor" to her list of jobs!) In the higher grades, we continued doing homework at the kitchen table, but we each worked quietly away on our own. Mom would not be far away though, making sure that we kept to the task at hand. She was the main reason we all did well in school. We were willing students and she instilled in us the sense that we needed to go through this process in order to succeed. My younger sister recalls that if she found some aspect of homework difficult, Mom would tell her, "Just do your best."

A page from our Grade 4 geography book, Visits in Other Lands, by Wallace W. Atwood and Helen Thomas Goss, published by Ginn, Toronto, c.1947, and featuring Bunga, the Pygmy boy. This book was used in Newfoundland schools from 1951 to 1967 and was commonly known as "The Bunga Book."

Photo courtesy of Sonia Neary Harvey.

The Mug-Up

The last thing we did every night before heading off to bed was to sit around the table for what we called a “mug-up,” or a “lunch.” This usually consisted of little more than a cup of cocoa or tea and a slice of bread with molasses, or plain Purity biscuits with margarine. There might be a slice of cheese as well. I don’t recall Mom ever baking cookies, but she would purchase a package of Purity sweet biscuits every Friday night when she did the week’s shopping. Sometimes she would allow us one that night with our mug-up and another the next night. If there were no visitors on Sunday afternoon, there might even be some left to be eaten with tea to end off Sunday's supper. At any rate, they would be all eaten by Sunday night and it would be plain biscuits for the rest of the week.

Purity was the only brand of sweet biscuits that ever came into our house. They were, and still are, made at a factory in St. John’s. We dipped them in our hot tea before sucking the softened sweetness into our mouths. Today many similar sweet biscuits, made by Dare and Christie and other brands, are available in the cookie aisle of the supermarket. Girl Guide cookies are a good example as well. Our local Purity Factories, however, seemed to be the only ones marketing these to us in the 1950s. They also sold us Jam-Jams, two cake-like layers enclosing a layer of glutinous red jam, and Tea-Vees, a smaller, harder cookie with a red jam center, and chocolate or coconut-covered marshmallow cookies.

We looked forward to the mug-up ritual every night. It was one final coming together of the family before sleep, and brought closure to the day. These days we gather in front of the tv at bedtime and munch on snacks, and the mug-up has become a thing of the past, just another fond memory.

The kitchen was not just for cooking, eating and homework. When it was the only room in the house with running water and a stove to heat it, it was also used for bathing and doing laundry:

Bathing

For many families, the kitchen had the only sink and running water in the house. When we were very young, on Saturday nights our mother would put the large, enamel washing tub in the middle of the kitchen. She would bring water in buckets from the tap and then add boiling water from the kettle. Then she would give us our weekly bath. The kitchen was also where we washed before going to school in the mornings, at least when we were younger and not self-conscious. As we got older, we would carry water in an enamel jug to a basin in the bathroom. Many people had begun incorporating bathrooms into their homes in the 1950s, so the Saturday night baths then took place there, although water was precious, so we were only allowed a few inches of it. The bubble bath we got for Christmas helped make it seem like it was deeper than it actually was.

Our kitchen sink on Tucker Street in 1967. These were the only cupboards in the kitchen itself and were used to store detergent, toiletries and things you would find in a laundry room and washroom. The food and dishes were stored in the pantry. On top of the upper cabinet is a plastic Humpty-Dumpty bank. Photo by:
Gail Hussey-Weir.

Chamber Pots and Outhouses

Many homes did not have flush toilets until the 1950s or 60s. Until then, the toilet was a small outhouse in the backyard, as far from the house as possible for sanitary reasons. It was often only a little wider than its door, although the outhouses built by the Company for their miners' houses were usually double in size with two doors. One side was the toilet and the other side was for coal storage as the Company houses did not have basements. Inside the outhouse, there was a bench-like structure containing a round hole with a wooden cover.

Back in the house, beneath each bed was a chamber pot. This was a bowl-shaped pot with a handle and (sometimes) a lid. Some were ceramic and others were enamelled metal. They could be plain white or painted in colourful flowers. These were used at night and first thing in the morning, and it was usually the housewife’s job to empty them into a slop bucket in the back porch and then dump that down the hole in the outhouse. As well, she had to keep all of this clean. It was a nasty job, but somebody had to do it.

This 1980 photo of a former miner's Company house shows the 2-door outhouse in the back of the yard. Photo by Richard MacKinnon, courtesy of the MUN Folklore & Language Archive, Memorial University.

Wash Day in the 1950s

The photo above is of a typical galvanized wash tub with the scrubbing board that was used when washing the miners' clothes. The ribbed part of the board was made of heavy glass. There is a little "ledge" above the glass where the cake

of Sunlight soap was placed after it was rubbed into the dirty clothes.

The photo on the right is of a typical electric wringer washer. To drain the tub, the black tube would be unhooked and turned down into a bucket.

Sometimes lightweight items would adhere to the wringer and become wound around it. When that happened, you pushed the blue bar above the wringer to part the rollers so you could unwind the clothing and start over.

Until my father died in 1961 and my mother had to go out to work full-time, every Monday was the same for her. She, like all housewives, did the wash that day. She had a wringer washer, which was quite a step up from the old wash tub and scrubbing board that her mother had used when her children were growing up. These two old standbys were still in use though because some stained items had to be hand scrubbed to get the dirt out.

Our washing machine was stored in the porch in an alcove to the left as you came in the back door. When we first moved to Tucker Street, the source of water was a hand pump located in the backyard, not far from the back gate. A few years later, the pump was moved to the back step, and a year or so later into the back porch alcove. Mom had to prime the pump with a dipper of water from the bucket that was always sitting beneath the spout of the pump. She then worked the pump handle to bring the water up from the ground and into the waiting bucket. In order to do the laundry, a large boiler was placed over the two main dampers of the wood/coal stove to heat.
She had to pump the water, bring it in buckets to the boiler on the stove, heat it and then carefully ladle it into the cold water that she had poured into the washing machine, which had been wheeled in from the porch.

The machine had an agitator, which was a real convenience as it eliminated the need to scrub each item individually on a scrubbing board. The machine could not be left unattended while it was washing though because it was on wheels and, if the clothes gravitated all to one side, the machine could suddenly propel itself across the kitchen floor. The wringer attached to the top of the machine consisted of two rollers, which she had to feed the items of clothing through in order to extract the water from them. If the items were bulky, the rollers would break apart and then there would be a bit of work trying to get them back into their proper place. Operating the wringer could also be a safety hazard, as illustrated by a May 20, 1941 item in the Daily News: "Mrs. Charles White of Bell Island met with a painful accident last week when she had her hand caught in the clothes wringer of an electric washing machine. Seven stitches were required to close the wounds."

There was also the potential for a mess of water over the floor if the hose slipped while the water was being emptied into buckets, which then had to be dumped outside. After a few years of this pumping, lugging and dumping, my father installed a kitchen sink and taps, so laundry day was a little less strenuous, but there was still a lot of work to be done.

The clothes dryer was a long piece of rope tied to two sturdy posts in the back yard. The clothes were hung over the rope and attached by wooden clothes pins. There was a clothes line pole that had been cut from a relatively straight alder branch. It had a nail driven into the wood at an angle a few inches from the top, or else there was a notch carved across the top. The bottom end of the pole was carved into a point. When you finished filling the line with the wet clothes, you poked at the line about midway along to hook it with the nail or the carved notch of the pole. Then you pushed upward and brought the bottom of the pole down so that the point would dig into the ground. This kept the line from sagging so the clothes did not touch the ground.

If the wash had to be done on a rainy day, or if the weather changed and the clothes were brought in while still wet, they were hung on a wooden dowel or piece of pipe that was hung from the ceiling by two wires above the kitchen stove. The heat from the stove would eventually dry the clothes. In the winter, when the furnace was lit and the cast iron radiators were hot, clothes would be laid over the radiators to dry. Also in the winter, even though it would be freezing outside, clothes would still be hung out if the sun shone. There they would usually freeze stiff but, by a miracle of nature, would often dry out in those harsh conditions.

A frustrating irony of getting the perfect, sunny, dry weather for hanging out clothes was the dust that would be flying because most roads were not paved. Besides regular traffic stirring up dust, the Company trucks were going back and forth from the mines at the north side of the Island to the Scotia Pier on the south side all day long. Then there was the heavy equipment working on the ore stock piles. A lot of red iron ore dust would be stirred up on good drying days. With our prevailing westerly winds, and the majority of the population living to the east of the Company’s property, it would be necessary to shake the red iron ore and other dust from each piece of clothing as it was removed from the clothes line. (This red dust was also the reason many houses were painted dark red in those days. It was an attempt to hide the effect of the dust as it settled on the houses.)

Wrinkle-free fabrics had not yet been invented so, once the clothes were dry, some of it had to be ironed. A flannelette sheet would be folded several times and laid out on the kitchen table for this job. Electric irons were not in common use until about the 1950s, followed shortly after that by steam irons. Before that, irons were made of heavy cast iron (hence the name “iron”) and were left face down on the surface of the coal stove where they would absorb the heat before they were ready to be used to iron clothes. Some people had two irons so that one would be heating while the other was in use.

Needless to say, washing clothes, hanging it out to dry, taking it off the line, and then doing the ironing was a full day’s work all in itself. Those with large families and babies (diapers were cloth, not disposable) would have to wash more often.

A colourful line of clothes with two poles for support, on the Jackman property on Lighthouse Road in October 2014. Photo by Harvey Weir.

Washing the Miner’s Work Clothes

One of the toughest jobs of being a miner’s wife was washing his work clothes, which were called pit clothes in reference to the common name for a mine. The iron ore was called “muck,” and the men who shovelled it were “muckers.” This was an appropriate name because muck was exactly what the mixture of damp air and iron ore dust would form on the miner and his clothes. His overalls were made of heavy fabric, not only to keep him warm in the cool air of the mines, but to withstand the rigors of the work, the stress of accumulated layers of muck, and the harsh scrubbing required to get the muck out. After a week, the iron ore dust on a miner’s clothes would be the texture of cake icing, red and greasy. These work clothes could not be washed in the wringer washer because the muck would ruin the machine for regular washing.

My mother had to bring the water to the stove and heat it in the large boiler. She dissolved Gillette’s Lye, a harsh cleaning agent, in this water, added the clothes and swished them around with a wooden stick to loosen up the dirt. She then had the tricky task of lifting the clothes out with two wooden sticks (rubber gloves were not yet on the market) and transferring them into a large galvanized tub. Then she poured water over the clothes to rinse the lye out so that her hands would not be burned by it during the washing. The lye was, nevertheless, still strong enough to damage the clothes, so it was very hard on her hands. She had to dump the rinse and wash waters outside the house because the iron ore residue would clog the drains. She did the wash “with her knuckles,” using a scrubbing board and a bar (also called a “cake”) of Sunlight laundry soap. This was a large, yellow, strong-smelling soap that is still sold today and is purported to have stain-removal qualities. Following this, the clothes would be slick and mucky. She would use three changes of water, all of which had to be carried from the pump or tap to the tub and then dumped again. The wet clothes would be very heavy and stiff and were a real chore to scrub and wring out.

Scrubbing Floors, Cleaning Walls and Ceilings

Most roads and paths on Bell Island were not paved asphalt as they are today. They were dirt roads composed of flattened gravel. When it rained, mud would be tracked into the kitchen, so several times a day the floor had to be swept using an old-fashioned straw broom. Saturday was floor-scrubbing day. On that day, every floor in the house was scrubbed, on hands and knees, using a galvanized bucket of hot water, a scrubbing brush, a cake of Sunlight soap and a cloth. The baseboards would be wiped of dust in the process. Most houses had canvas floors, while some had linoleum, which was a little more durable. Today’s equivalent flooring would be vinyl, except the canvas and linoleum were not as easy to clean as the vinyl is. With no rubber gloves to protect the hands or knee pads to cushion the knees, floor-scrubbing was an arduous task. Once the floor was scrubbed clean, rinsed and allowed to dry, paste wax was applied, again on hands and knees. After a few minutes of drying, this had to be polished using a dry cloth, again on hands and knees.

Just about everything we purchased at the shops would be wrapped in brown paper, so every household would have a good supply of it on hand. Mom would use this to spread over the newly cleaned and waxed kitchen floor and back porch to absorb all the dirt and mud we would track in on our shoes. She would then remove the paper on Sunday morning, the hope being that Sunday afternoon visitors would find her floors sparkling clean.

There was also the periodic dusting and washing of walls and ceilings, which needed more attention in those days because the coal stove created black soot that settled on every surface over time. I remember one time when there was an unusual “boom” sound that was quickly followed by a spewing of a cloud of coal dust that settled on everything in the kitchen. (I think it was said that this was caused by a back draught.) Fortunately, that only happened the one time. But what a mess!

Painting and Wallpapering

Many women did their own interior painting and wallpapering. Because the kitchen was the gathering place for most visitors, and because Christmas was when the most visiting took place, late Fall was the usual time when the kitchen would be given a new coat of Matchless high-gloss white oil paint. It was popular to paint the lower half of the kitchen a bold colour, with the two halves separated by a strip of chair rail moulding. Ceramic ornaments were used to decorate the upper half of a plain wall. We had one neighbour who had three ceramic Canada geese "in flight" across her kitchen wall. One year when she painted the lower part of her kitchen a lively pink colour, she decided to spruce up the geese by using the same paint on them. She had style! When wood panelling came on the market, my mother, who was now a widow, could not afford to cover our front room in it. She did find “wood panel” wallpaper in Eaton’s catalogue though and used that instead to “update” the room. The bedrooms were all done in flowered wallpaper. Wallpaper was not pre-pasted then. You had to mix paste and brush it onto the back of the paper before hanging it, a messy job to say the least.

Mom and I are placing gifts beneath the tree on Christmas Eve 1965 above. On the right is my little sister Bonnie at Christmas 1966. Mom's faux wood-panel wallpaper, as well as her painting skills, are on display in both pictures.

And Other Things

The foregoing were only some of the jobs the average housewife executed. They made the beds daily, sewed and mended clothes on an ongoing basis, knit winter scarves, caps, mittens and socks seasonally. Many crocheted and embroidered “fancy work” to add decoration to their living rooms and bedrooms. They made jam, bottled beet and other foods, and on and on. In families that had kitchen gardens, a cow and hens, they had more jobs to perform or supervise. It was a never-ending cycle. As an old rhyme goes:

A man may work from sun [up] to sun [down] but a woman's work is never done.

Childbirth

Until about 1965 when a hospital opened on Bell Island, most babies were born at home. There were a number of midwives who assisted with home births. Because of the mining company, we were fortunate to have several doctors at any one time during the mining years. By 1900, there were two mining companies and they each employed a doctor. By the time the companies amalgamated in 1922, the population had increased so much that there continued to be at least two Company doctors.

Unless illness prevented her from doing so, the pregnant housewife continued doing all her usual daily chores right up until she went into labour. When she was ready to deliver, a midwife would attend her, with the doctor only arriving for the actual birth if it was considered necessary. Sometime around the 1940s, the government introduced a 3-month course in St. John’s for midwives. Before that, they would learn their trade the traditional way, by learning on the job from another mid-wife. Women usually stayed in bed for nine days after the baby was born. Of course, they would need the help of other women in order to do this, and some did not have that luxury. All women breast fed their babies for the first few years of their lives until the trend moved to bottle-feeding sometime in the 1960s when canned baby milk came on the market.

Child Rearing

Until the 1970s when it became more common for mothers to work at paying jobs outside the home, all the child-rearing and child-care duties were the responsibility of the housewife, with help in larger families from older daughters still living at home. Even then, the mothers were the managers who oversaw everything and ensured it all ran smoothly. As described above, mothers shopped for and prepared the food, and made sure it was ready and on the table at the prescribed meal times every day. They then cleared and cleaned up and started preparing for the next meal. They washed and dressed their little ones and made sure the older ones groomed and dressed themselves appropriately. They cleaned the clothes and the house so that everyone had what they needed, when they needed it, and had a clean and comfortable home to come back to. The only thing the mothers asked of their young children was that they play nicely outside all day so that she could do her work in peace and quiet. Outside, older children were expected to keep an eye on the younger ones. In large families, older girls were expected to help with the housework and cooking and older boys were expected to help their fathers with outside jobs, such as shovelling coal into the basement or shed and chopping wood for kindling. If there was a vegetable garden or farm animals, they would also help with that. In larger families, older girls were sometimes kept home from school to help with the inside jobs and boys would often leave school by their mid-teens to work odd jobs with the mining company to help support the family, but mothers did their best to keep them in school as long as possible.

Along with keeping the children's bellies full and their clothing and grooming needs up to snuff, it was usually their mothers who guided their spiritual needs. She taught them from a young age to say grace before meals, and to kneel by their bedside each night to say the Lord's Prayer and ask God's blessing on friends and loved ones who were ill or otherwise in need. On Sunday mornings, she got everyone up and ready to head off to church, whether they wanted to or not. She had the special Sunday dinner cooked and ready for them when they returned home, then turned them right around and back to the school or church basement for the afternoon Sunday school. Some women attended Sunday morning church services, of course, but many preferred to attend the evening service because the Sunday evening meal was a lighter one that did not require as much preparation or clean up.

Care-Giving

Women were the care-givers for the sick and elderly of their families. Nursing homes did not exist and most elderly people remained in their own homes until they died. Family groups living near each other was the norm in small Newfoundland communities and this was also true on Bell Island. My maternal grandparents lived next door to us. When my grandmother was dying, my mother would take turns with her sisters (who also lived within walking distance) tending to their mother. If an elderly parent was living alone and could no longer cope on their own, they would move in with a daughter, or daughter-in-law, who would look after them until they died. Younger women who became ill would be cared for by their older daughters who were still living at home. If there were no daughters to do this, the husband would pitch in as best he could with help from female relatives and neighbours, who might bake extra bread for the family or help with the meals. When my paternal grandmother became ill and could no longer care for her family, her eldest daughter took on the role of “mother.” Besides nursing her mother, she cooked the meals, baked the bread and washed the clothes for her parents, four younger brothers and a sister who was not yet a teenager.

Widow / Widower

When a woman with young children became a widow, she rarely had any other choice except to remarry because her source of income was then cut off. Many people could not afford life insurance premiums and those who did have insurance often did not have enough to support a large family. Widows, being older than most single men, usually married widowers in their own age group.

In those days before the common use of birth control pills, it was not unusual for women to die of pregnancy complications. When a mother died leaving children too young to look after themselves, it was necessary for her widower to remarry as soon as possible, to have someone to look after him and his children. Thus, it was mutually beneficial for a widow to marry a widower, and that was a very common occurrence. Of course, her workload might then be doubled with the addition of his children to her family.

Death

Traditionally in many Newfoundland communities, the work of preparing the deceased for burial was shared by family and friends, men preparing a man, and women, often midwives, looking after a woman, and that was also the case on Bell Island up to about the 1960s. The wake usually took place at the deceased's home in the parlour or “front room” as it was commonly called. If you noticed a house with the blinds pulled down during the day, you knew there had been a death in the family and a wake was taking place there. For three days, friends, relatives and co-workers would drop by during the afternoons and evenings to view the body lying in its coffin and to pay their respects. Women close to the family would bake extra bread and sweets and bring meals to help the family out in their time of mourning. They would also help with the household chores. Young children of the stricken family would sometimes be farmed out to relatives until the funeral so as not to be underfoot with all the goings-on. The coffin would be transported to church for the funeral service and from there to the cemetery. Horse-drawn hearses were in use into the 1950s. The mining company had an enclosed, horse-drawn hearse which was stored in a small garage on the St. Cyprian's Anglican Church property on Church Road. It was mainly used for Protestant funerals. From about the mid-1930s through the mid-1960s, a teamster with the Company, Bill Andrews (c.1915-?), would be taken off his usual work to drive the hearse, which was pulled by a Company horse to the church and cemetery. He was not an undertaker as such.

The Company-owned horse-drawn hearse, pulled by a Company horse and probably being driven by Bill Andrews, is seen here transporting Ronald Rees' coffin in May 1953.

Photo courtesy of
Sherrie Rees Rodgers.

Several men served the Bell Island population as undertakers during the mining years, usually along religious denominational lines. Undertaking seemed to have been a side-line, as several of the ones mentioned here listed their work as being mining-related in census returns. No one gave "undertaker" or "mortician" as their occupation. Andrew Murphy (1872-1953) of The Front was a Customs Officer and farmer who served the Roman Catholic community for many years as the driver of the Roman Catholic Parish hearse, an open carriage, which was stored at the Star of the Sea Hall (located on Memorial Street, just opposite the Roman Catholic Cemetery). Walt Jackman and William Stone also drove the hearse on occasion. Andrew Murphy is seen below driving Dean McGrath and the Bishop. This would have been sometime before 1939 as Dean McGrath died in 1938. Photo from John W. Hammond, The Beautiful Isles, 1979, p. 16.

Andrew's son, James Murphy (1904-1970), took over from him after his death in 1953, transitioning from a horse-drawn to a motor hearse. The younger Murphy worked for DOSCO as a traffic controller, directing Company drivers and their vehicles to wherever they were needed. He was also a partner in the Wabana Motor Supply Co. on Bennett Street, which was listed in the telephone directories in the 1950s through to 1966, but he had no listing for funeral or undertaker services, which seems to have been on a word-of-mouth basis. As with his father, there was no funeral parlour; people were still being waked in their own homes. He sold caskets out of the basement of his residence; there were four models for people to choose from. His brother-in-law, William J. Stone and, subsequently, nephews, Harry, Angus, Jim and Dan Stone, all worked with him in preparing bodies for burial and driving the hearse.

In the photo below, William Stone is driving the Roman Catholic horse-drawn hearse.

Florence (Bown) Pendergast (1925-2014): Owner-operator of Pendergast Funeral Services.

In 1969, a year before his own death, James Murphy sold his undertaking business to Frank and Florence Pendergast. Frank had begun providing the ambulance service to the mining company in 1965 and now he and Florence set up a funeral and ambulance service out of the former Fleming's Drug Store building on Town Square at the corner of St. Pat's Lane. After Frank died in 1980, Florence developed Pendergast Funeral Services with her son Frankie, who was the first undertaker on Bell Island to use embalming fluid to preserve the corpse. When he died in 2006, his brother, John, joined the business with his mother, operating their funeral home at East No. 1. Florence died in 2014 and John continues the business today. (Source: obituary for Florence Katherine (Bown) Pendergast, The Telegram, July 17, 2014.)

The two photos below are believed to be of the funeral procession for the victims of the September 5, 1942 sinking of the ore carrier S.S. Saganaga by a German U-Boat in The Tickle. Of 29 victims, only four bodies were recovered. They were buried in the Anglican Cemetery. The bodies had been laid out for viewing at the Police Station and are seen here being transported east on Bennett Street, then south on Main Street towards The Front of the Island. Three-horse drawn open carts, each transporting a coffin, can be seen in the first photo. The second photo shows a close-up of one of the open carts. Photos courtesy of Sonia Neary Harvey.

The Company Ambulance

For the first 33 years of mining activity on Bell Island, injured mine workers would be transported to the Company Surgery in the back of a horse-drawn, open, 4-wheel wagon with a box about eight inches high, filled with hay. The stretcher with the injured miner would be placed in the wagon and covered with blankets, but otherwise all open to the elements as it went over the unpaved roads to the Surgery. When the mines were going through a particularly turbulent time in 1925, the Union was threatening strike action over several grievances. One of those was dissatisfaction over the manner in which injured men were conveyed from the mines to the Surgery. The open cart was likened to "the tumbrels of the French Revolution, rumbling over the cobblestones of Paris on their way to the guillotine." The Union demanded that a covered ambulance be provided. Relief did not come for another two years when, on December 15, 1927, a horse-drawn covered ambulance arrived on Bell Island "replacing the eye-sores of the open carts." Sources: Addison Bown, Newspaper History of Bell Island, V. 2, 1925, p. 9 & 1927, p. 21; and Harold Kitchen, personal interview, 1984; John Skinner, personal interview, Nov. 8, 1991.

Arthur Clarke, who drove the Company ambulance for many years, likened the new 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.

Arthur Clarke (1911-2004) moved to Bell Island from St. Thomas, CB, when he was 17 and started working as a miner in 44-40 Surface Pit. He eventually got a job in the East Barn (of No. 2 Mine) teaming horses. When there was a mine accident, one of the 16 teamsters would take the horse-drawn ambulance cart 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. Al O'Brien of Topsail often drove the ambulance. Around 1935, when Al became ill and could no longer work, Arthur Clarke moved into his job on the day shift. There was a "dressing station" in each of the underground barns and that's where injured workers 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. Sometime in the late 1940s, 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. (Source: Arthur Clarke, personal interview, July 15, 1991.)

Bert Rideout (c.1906-1988), who was a mine superintendent, began operating his ambulance service on Bell Island about 1948. As well as driving the ambulance, he was an undertaker who also sold coffins and had a small parlour for visitations in his private residence, although right into the 1960s, the wake usually took place at the home of the deceased person. Harold Kitchen, a foreman in No. 3 Mine, assisted Bert in this work. They mainly served the Protestant community. Rideout's ambulance service was listed in the Bell Island telephone directories in the 1950s, through the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, although the service to the mining company ceased in 1965 when that contract was taken over by Frank Pendergast. Bert stopped working as an undertaker about then as well.

In this photo, undertaker Bert Rideout is on the right standing beside his ambulance with James Peddle and Roy Rees. They were all members of the Bell Island branch of St. John Ambulance. Here they were standing by at the Sports Field during the annual Sports Day track and field championships. Source: Submarine Miner, Aug. 1956, p. 5.

My Memories of 3 Family Deaths of the 1960s

I had just turned 13 and was in Grade 7 at St. Augustine’s in the winter of 1961 when my father became too ill to continue working in the mines. He had no health insurance, so my mother had to go to work as a saleslady to make ends meet. Somebody had to stay home to keep the fires burning, fetch things for my father and keep an eye on my 4-year-old sister. My older sister and brother were both in high school and my mother felt that their lessons would not be as easily learned at home as mine would. I was content to do it, so it was decided that I was the best one to stay at home. (Besides, I had already proven that I was capable of home-schooling myself three years earlier when I had spent over a month at home with Asiatic Flu and finished the year at the top of my class.) As luck would have it, my teacher lived in the East End and had to walk past our house on her way to and from school. She agreed to stop in with homework assignments each afternoon and then pick up my completed work each morning on her way in to school.

When my father was taken to hospital in St. John’s in mid-April, I went back to school, certain that he would be cured of his illness and soon would be returning home to us, a well man again. I remember vividly the day my mother returned from visiting him in hospital in St. John’s and asking her why she had purchased black stockings, which were only worn by widows. I can still feel my sense of shock when she told me she was going to be needing them soon. I suppose her forewarning helped prepare me for the dark Thursday evening of April 27th when I answered the phone to a nurse calling long distance from the General Hospital. I handed the receiver to Mom and then sat in the unlit front room listening to her side of the conversation. It was a brief call and I knew from her responses that it was not good news. When she hung up, she told us that the nurse said Dad had “taken a turn for the worse.” I was not familiar with this expression and said hopefully that perhaps there was a chance he could still pull through. “No,” she said, “it means he is dead.” At this point, what I had considered an idyllic family life came to an abrupt end.

For the next 3 days our house was a makeshift funeral parlour. There was no such thing as fresh flowers as you would see today. Instead, funeral wreaths made of plastic decorated the open coffin. The sickly odour from them was over-powering in our small front room. My mother spent much of that time sedated in bed. Her mother and sisters saw to her needs, tended the kitchen duties and served up tea to visitors. I stayed on the sidelines of the scene while extended family, friends, neighbours and co-workers streamed through our little house. (Other than the odd warm day in summer, this was the only time the front door was wide open all day.) It was felt that it was no place for a 4-year-old, so my older sister took the little one to our aunt’s house and remained there looking after her until the funeral. Meanwhile, one acquaintance, who believed that children needed to face the realities of life and death, brought her little 4-year-old daughter into the front room and lifted her up so that she could touch my father. Appalled, I asked her why she would do that. Her response was, “so that she will not dream about him,” which, seeing as they were not family, made no sense to 13-year-old me. I learned later that this was a superstition of the time.

In the summer of 1961, my mother began working full-time at Charles Cohen’s store on Town Square. I found out years later that she could have stayed at home and received more money in Welfare payments than she earned as a sales clerk, but "living on Welfare" was considered socially unacceptable if there was any way to avoid it. The traditional thing to do would have been to remarry, but she was not inclined to do that either, so we all “tightened our belts,” as the saying goes, and knew not to ask for things we could not afford.

Throughout the remainder of our schooling, my older sister and I came directly home from school most afternoons to light the fire in the stove, keep an eye on our little sister, and prepare supper, which was pretty plain cooking and often just a matter of heating up something Mom had prepared the night before. With Mom now working Friday evenings, we also took over the weekly grocery shopping at Welsh’s Supermarket, where the handsome boy working in the meat department had a crush on my sister and would always make sure we got a nice cut of stewing beef.

On Saturdays, besides scrubbing the floors at our own house, we took turns scrubbing our grandmother’s kitchen floor, as she was no longer well enough to do that herself. When my sister went off to university in the Fall of 1963 to study Education, I was on my own in these after-school activities. I remember the first cold afternoon that Fall when I decided the house was so chilled that it was necessary for me to light the furnace all on my own. I guess I got a little over-zealous with the wood and coals and was quite pleased with the lovely, raging fire I had going, until a neighbour from across the street came running to tell me that there were sparks rising from the chimney! Luckily, it was not serious and everything was okay once I eased off on the coals. I was expecting my mother to be upset with me when she got home for supper, but she did not say a word. I suspect she was too tired to be upset and was just glad I had not burned the house down. We were all just doing our best to get by at that point.

The next death in the family came in 1964, just three years after my father’s, when my grandmother, Emeline, died on March 10th. Sometime after Christmas 1963, she had become too ill to get out of bed and it was feared she would not last much longer. During the school year, Mom would come home at noon and light the fire in the stove to have a hot meal ready for when my little sister and I arrived home. On this particular day in March, there had been a light fall of snow during the morning. When I came into our yard shortly after noon, I was surprised to not see my mother’s footprints in the snow, just undisturbed snow right up to our back door. I knew without having been told that this was a sign that something was wrong. I went directly to my grandparents’ house, where the family were all gathering. Nan was the matriarch of a large family who all lived close by, so her house was pretty well filled to bursting by this time. As with my father, she was waked in her front room for three days before the coffin was transported to the United Church, which also was packed with mourners for the funeral service. From there, she was taken to the United Church Cemetery for burial.

This c.1961 photo shows John & Emeline (Rideout-Luffman) Dawe in the kitchen of their home on Armoury Road, where they lived from c.1934 until their deaths in 1964 & 1965.

After finishing her year at university, my sister returned home and was fortunate to get a teaching position at St. Augustine’s. I graduated from St. Boniface RHS in 1965, the year before the mines closed. I left for studies in St. John’s that Fall, not realizing that I would never return to Bell Island to live. Meanwhile, my grandfather, who was alone for the first time in his life following grandmother’s death, found himself unable to cope, so he did as many widowers did, and still do, and married a widow in hopes of finding companionship. This was short-lived, however, as it was not long before his health began to deteriorate. He died a year and a half after Emeline’s death on December 31, 1965, at which time the three-day wake at home, funeral service at the church, and burial were repeated.

Women in a Man's World:

The Superstition Regarding Women in the Mines

Down through the years of iron ore mining on Bell Island, there was a superstition surrounding the fear and taboo of a woman going underground into the mines. Many former Bell Island miners have told me that women were not allowed in the Wabana mines and were not wanted down there. They were not saying that women were not allowed to work in the mines, as the idea of a woman working in the mines would never have occurred to them. Instead, they were referring to the superstitious belief of miners world-wide that accidents happened whenever a woman was allowed to visit the mines. Because of attitudes about women and their place in society during the Wabana mining days, women in the male-dominated workplace were so rare, their presence would have been a distraction. In an all-male occupation, as mining then was, a woman suddenly coming into the work space would certainly cause heads to turn and take minds off the job at hand. When the job was a dangerous one, this could conceivably cause an accident.

The most likely reason for a woman wanting to see the workings of the Wabana mines would have been if a mainland journalist were writing an article for a newspaper or magazine, or when the wife of a visiting mining or government official was accompanying her husband on a tour, that sort of thing. In the incidents cited in my book, The Miners of Wabana, on pages 147-149, some miners viewed the idea of a woman being in the mines as a bad omen. Thus, even though nothing bad may have happened while she was being shown around the workings, if there were an accident in the days following, some people would blame it on the fact that a woman had been allowed down in the mines earlier. It has to be remembered that these were very superstitious times. When something bad happened, people needed someone or something to blame. An easy target would be an anonymous woman of the upper classes, someone the miners would have felt had no business to be in the mines in the first place. To quote one former miner:

  Years ago, it was strictly taboo for a woman to go underground. The older mine
            captains had this belief built up in their minds that if a woman went underground,
            there was sure to be an accident. It usually happened that if a woman came down,
  probably a week or a month after that someone got killed. Then they’d say,
            “That’s what happened. He brought that woman down. He shouldn’t have had her
            around here at all.” It wasn't until about 15 years before the mines closed down
            that women were given permission to go down underground. Even when I worked
            down there, if you saw a woman coming, my God, that was terrible. Most of the

            women you would get going underground was probably women who worked on a
magazine or some newspaper. She’d come down to see what the mines were like
            and probably get a story on that. But it was strictly taboo. It didn’t matter a darn
  what she was working on. It was still the same thing. They didn’t like to see her there.

Regarding the notion of actually working in the Wabana mines, women would never have considered the possibility in those days. Mining was men’s work and, until about mid-century, the lines were very clearly drawn as to what men and women did. As a general rule, men worked outside the home and women worked inside as has been illustrated. Educated women were starting to move into some occupations that were previously held only by men, but these were the more genteel professions such as health, education and office work. In the last decade or so of the Wabana mines, engineering and geology students from Memorial University would be given tours of the mines. There may have been some female students in these groups, but they would have been rare, as females were still not yet entering those professions in any number. It never occurred to me as a child in the 1950s and 60s to want to go into the mines to see what was going on there and I am fairly sure that most miners’ wives had no interest in such things. As school students, we were never offered the opportunity to tour the mines, neither the boys, nor the girls. Certainly from a girl’s perspective, mining was dangerous, dirty work and not something we aspired to do. Times have changed, of course, and women are now encouraged to try out for whatever job they feel they are capable of doing, but the job of miner in the Wabana mines likely would not have been on any woman’s wish list of possible careers.

The caption beneath the photos above of visitors to Bell Island in August 1955, as published in the Submarine Miner, August 1955, p. 7, read: "a group of ladies from Fort Pepperrell Air Force Base visited Bell Island on Sunday, July 24th, and while here made a tour of the surface operations." Meanwhile, the male visitors from the same group are shown aboard the man-rake cars prior to being lowered underground to No. 6 Slope.

Girls in a Boy's World:

The Wabana Boys’ Club

The Wabana Boys’ Club was part of a Canadian movement that started in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1900. The Bell Island club was formed May 4, 1955 at a meeting of mine company officials, union leaders and members of the Kiwanis, Lions and Canadian Legion clubs. The Manager of DOSCO operations on Bell Island, H.P. Dickey, is credited with making the club a reality. Its main goal was to help curb male juvenile delinquency. Not that the original members were delinquents, of course, but the Club was a way of keeping boys occupied so that they did not go down that path. The Baby Bonus was keeping a lot of boys in school, the same as it was doing for the girls. With the modernization of the mines, young boys were no longer needed the way they had been in the past. These were the “baby boom” years, so there were a lot of boys on the streets once school was let out for the day. Without things to keep them busy, they sometimes got up to mischief. At the Club, the boys could play such physical sports as basketball and floor hockey to help release some of their energies. They also played board games, read books and did school assignments. It is interesting to realize that this was an ecumenical club in a community where sports and other activities for children were normally run along denominational lines.

By 1960, there were 571 (all-boy) members. In 1961, a half dozen or so girls in Grade 8 at St. Augustine's School wrote a letter to the Kiwanis Club "demanding" that girls be allowed to join the Boys' Club. The day following the weekly Kiwanis meeting, the girls were called to the office of Principal Lester Clarke and given a mild lecture in which he reminded them that they had their own girls' organizations, such as the church-affiliated Girls' Auxiliary. This totally missed their point that the Boys' Club had a physical presence in the community and had year-round daily activities, whereas they had only once-a-week evening meetings during the school year of the girls' groups in which they were involved. Their demand fell on deaf ears though, as it was pointed out to them that none of the other Boys' Clubs in Canada accepted girls.

Girls were not perceived to be a problem as far as delinquency went, so this young group of budding feminists were not taken seriously and there was no special effort made to organize extra activities for them other than the church and school groups they already attended. It is only since the Women’s Movement of the 1970s that men and women have welcomed each other into their clubs. Before that, most seemed to accept the fact that males had their exclusive clubs and females had theirs, just as there were clear lines on what was deemed men’s work and what was women’s. In 1974, Boys' Clubs of Canada became Boys' and Girls' Clubs of Canada, and girls soon became a bit part of the Wabana club. Our world has changed a lot in the past 50 years, and our ideas and attitudes about women and girls and their place in it are a big part of that change.

(Sources: Submarine Miner, V. 2, No. 6, June 1955, p. 7, and V. 3, No. 12, Dec. 1956, p. 5; Ruth Archibald, email, June 16, 2018.)

The Wabana Boys' Club Christmas Party, December 1957. Photo from Jim Hearn.

The Changing World of the 1950s-60s

The 1950s-60s was a period of big changes for women everywhere and these changes shifted the whole dynamic of how women lived and how they saw themselves. As mentioned earlier, the necessity during World War II for women to take over some jobs that previously had been thought of as only being open to men now began to blur the line between what was considered men's and women's work. When that war ended, all things seemed possible in the western world. The proliferation of media such as newspapers, women’s magazines, movies and television depicted women living in dream homes, raising small families with husbands who worked in offices doing white-collar jobs, where they made enough money to provide all the necessities of a good life plus extras such as big cars, television sets, mink coats, and evenings out at fine-dining restaurants. If the women in these media presentations were not going out to glamorous jobs of their own, they were playing a major role in helping their husbands get ahead in the corporate world. For the first time, we saw women taking on new roles in a man’s world and, in some cases,
making it on their own in that world. Magazines featured new and unusual recipes to try on the family and talked of exotic things such as cocktail parties, “apres ski” parties and new ideas for celebrating Christmas and other calendar events and holidays. There was a whole other world out there, and girls and women of the 50s and 60s were learning all about it through the new forms of media that were becoming part of their lives.

For Newfoundland women in particular, a high-school education and beyond was becoming a more accessible possibility. With Newfoundland’s entry into Confederation with Canada in 1949, the Baby Bonus encouraged parents to keep their children in school until they completed their education, and this in turn allowed them access to higher-paying jobs and a much broader range of occupations than was previously thought possible. Women now had the ability to earn “their own money.”

New inventions were also making it easier for women to consider a life outside the home. These included such conveniences as electric kitchen stoves and oil-fired furnaces that provided central heating, eliminating the need for women to be at home all day tending to the fire. It also meant there was no soot in the air, so less cleaning of walls, ceilings and other surfaces. More and more convenience foods were coming onto the market, so that women no longer needed to spend so much time preparing and cooking meals. Automatic washing machines and clothes dryers meant less time and work keeping clothes clean and getting them dried. The one invention that topped all the others in freeing up time and housework for women was the birth control pill, which came on the market in the United States in the late 1950s, but was illegal in Canada until 1969. “The Pill” meant that women could now decide if and when they wanted to have children and allowed them to have only as many children as they desired. Regulated child daycare centres were still unheard of, but some women who wanted to stay at home with their young children began setting up home-based daycare services where they would look after a few other children to supplement the family’s income. Thus, women no longer saw marriage and raising children as an end to their earning careers.

While all these new worlds were opening up to the girls and women of Bell Island, things were also changing for the miners, simply because the iron ore industry was changing. Between 1950 and 1956, DOSCO invested 22 million dollars into an expansion and modernization program of the Wabana plant. These were boom years and optimism was high for a bright future. Alas, at the same time that DOSCO was investing in upgrading Wabana ore, new iron ore deposits that were cheaper to excavate and contained fewer impurities were coming on the market. Steel manufacturers began adopting new methods for using the less expensive ore and Wabana’s markets started to disappear. A.V. Roe Limited acquired the majority of DOSCO’s shares in 1957 bringing a change in ownership that would spell the end of the Wabana Mines. In May 1959, the closure of No. 6 Mine resulted in the layoff of 573 men. After such a large investment in improvements, residents were confused when No. 4 Mine closed in 1962 and shocked at the closure of No. 3, the final mine, on June 30, 1966.

Epilogue:

My Mother Jessie's Story

Jessie Dawe-Hussey, was born in a Scotia Company house on Fourth Street, Scotia Ridge, Bell Island in 1924. Her father, Jonathan (John/Jack) Dawe (1894-1965) was a blaster with DOSCO, and an agent for Chester Dawe Limited building suppliers. Her mother, Emeline Rideout-Luffman-Dawe (1884-1964), was a miner’s wife. (See her story at the beginning of this article.) Jessie attended the United Church school which, at that time (the 1930s) was located on the west side of Davidson Avenue, just south of where the United Church is located today. When the family moved from Fourth Street to Armoury Road east of Town Square about 1934, Jessie attended a private one-room school on the north east corner of Town Square. This school was one of two private schools on Bell Island at the time. It had about 20 or so pupils and was run by Mary Hughes, in a building that had formerly been a shop owned by her father, John A. Hughes. Tuition for this school was 25 cents a week. Another pupil of the school at the time was Patrick Mansfield. In recalling his and Jessie’s time at the school, he said that “Your mother was the only girl in the school. She used to sit in the front row so that the teacher could keep an eye on her so that the fellers wouldn’t be tormenting her by flicking things at her and things like that.” Jessie did Grade 5 there before moving to the Roman Catholic Convent school on Town Square for the next three years, completing Grade 8 in 1939.

In the 1943 photo above are sisters, Helen and Jessie Dawe. In the left photo, Jessie Dawe at about 18 years is on the right, with her niece, Jean Luffman. Both photos are in the front garden of the Dawe residence on Armoury Road.

Women of Jessie’s generation who had not finished high school, but who had Grade 8, could get work as shop clerks or as unskilled office staff. In 1940, at age 16, she went to work as a switchboard operator at the Avalon Telephone Company on Main Street. She had wanted to continue with her education, however her parents did not see the point in a woman spending time in school when she could be working and helping them with household expenses. The way they saw it, she would be getting married in a few years and would then be staying home to raise her children. She would cook and clean for them and her husband, who would support her for the rest of her life, so further education would be a waste of time better spent earning money.

The Avalon Telephone Company erected their new building just south of the Orange Hall on Main Street in 1937. Prior to this, they had operated out of a small building at the north end (bottom) of Town Square. When Jessie was working at the telephone company in the early 1940s, Allan Tilley was the manager. Laura Normore worked in the office “doing the books,” (i.e. accounting). Two of the girls who worked with Jessie as Telephone Operators were sisters Dot (Dorothy) and Ruby Shave. Two girls would work from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Another girl would come on at 8 a.m. and work until 1 p.m. Another would come on and work from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Aside from the busy daytime hours, there would be at least one person on the switchboard around the clock. The operators sometimes had to deal with unpleasant calls. If the power went out, people would call and demand to know why it was out and what was being done about it. There was an expectation from the public that the operators would know the answers to such questions. There were 3 switchboards. The main one consisted of the DOSCO Company lines. To the side of it was a switchboard for other local lines. Located above these was the long distance switchboard.

Before dial phone service was installed on Bell Island in September 1958, most private homes did not have phones as it was considered an unnecessary luxury. Apart from DOSCO listings, the 1949 Telephone Directory for Bell Island had about 500 listings, which included businesses, schools, offices, etc. Those individuals who did have a phone only had one and it was probably located on a wall in the kitchen or in the back porch. You had the choice of a “party” line or you could pay extra and have a private line. While a party line was cheaper, there might be up to 10 households on it. If you had a party line, each of the phones on that line would have a distinct ringing signal, such as a long ring followed by a short one, or vice-versa, so you knew when a call was for you or for another household. Everyone on a party line would hear the rings coming into that line so that, when a call was for one of the other parties, anyone else on the same line could lift their receiver and listen in on the conversation. Likewise, the telephone operators could listen to private conversations if they chose, although this was against the rules, of course.

Before 1958, the phone was basically a wooden or metal box with a bell which rang, a mouthpiece to speak into, a receiver on the left to place to your ear, and a little crank on the right, which you turned to signal the operator when you wished to make a call. To place a call, you picked up the receiver and placed it to your ear, turned the crank and waited for the telephone operator at “Central” to connect to your phone. She would say, "Number please," and you would tell her the number you wished to be connected to. She then plugged your line into that line.

Pictured above is the Avalon Telephone building on Main Street where Jessie worked for 3 years until, at the age of 19 in 1943, she married Stanley Hussey. Stan was the son of Winnifred Belle Jones (1897-1943) and John Arthur Hussey (1893-1948) of Upper Island Cove. In 1928, John moved his family to Scotia No. 1, Bell Island, where he worked as a timekeeper in No. 4 Mine. Stan was 22 years old at the time of his marriage and was a member of the Newfoundland Militia, patrolling Bell Island following the two German U-boat attacks that had killed 69 men in the Tickle the previous year. When the war ended in 1945, he obtained work in the Wabana mines.

Stanley and Jessie Hussey on their wedding day, October 28, 1943. Stan is in the uniform of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment Militia, in which he served during WWII. They are in the front garden of Jessie's parents' house on Armoury Road, where the newly weds lived for the next 3 years. Notice that the mothers of the bride and groom are not mentioned in the wedding notice, and that the married bridesmaids are identified by their husbands' names only.

For the first few years of their marriage, they lived with Jessie’s parents in their 2-storey house on Armoury Road. They had their first child there. Several years earlier, when Jessie’s brother-in-law shipped overseas to serve in the war, her father had built a small house on the northwest corner of his property for her sister and their two small children to live in while he was away. It was about the size of the small miners’ bungalows built by the mining companies and, like them, consisted of two bedrooms, a kitchen and front room. There was no plumbing. When the war ended, her brother-in-law returned and built a new home for his family at The Front of the Island. Jessie, Stan and their infant son then moved into the little house on Armoury Road. I was born there in 1948. A few years later in the early 1950s, the bungalow was moved around the corner and halfway down Tucker Street, where my parents had purchased a plot of land. Once there, the house was added to, making it a 3-bedroom with a front (living) room, a good-sized central hall, a bathroom, plus a back porch and panty off the kitchen. A cellar was dug beneath the back half of the house. This provided space for a coal-burning furnace, and wood and coal storage for the furnace and the kitchen stove.

Our house on Tucker Street c.1952. It was a center-hall plan, with a bathroom at the opposite end of the hall from the front door. The three bedrooms were on the east side of the house (the left of the picture). The double window on the front right of the picture is the living room (what we called the "front room"). Behind that was the kitchen, with the back porch at the left of the kitchen and the pantry at the right of it.

With DOSCO pouring millions of dollars into upgrading the mine infrastructure on Bell Island, life was good during the 1950s. With only Grade 5, Stan was steadily employed as a labourer in the mines and, even though he did not earn a large pay cheque, because of Jessie’s frugality he was able to indulge his dream of owning a series of second-hand cars. He built a garage in the backyard and spent his spare time there, tuning up the engine, changing the oil and doing whatever needed to be done to keep his car in good repair. In 1957, they had their fourth child.

Stan Hussey on August 2, 1960, posing with his guitar and car on what is now Hussey Street, Scotia No. 1, where he grew up. On the right is his brother Ted's house. Out of the shot on the right is his brother Alvin's house and then his brother Charl's house. When he was not spending his spare time tinkering with his car, Stan enjoyed writing country and western songs, one of which, The Shores of Wabana, was sung in clubs and on VOCM Radio by Alvin with his band "The Bell Islanders." Reg Crane, an early member of that band, and Clayton Kennedy, a later member, recorded the song on their 2007 CD, "Old Country Favorites."

Every spring, the arctic ice moved into the bay bringing seals with it. Every man who was able would go out onto the ice to hunt for a seal to help feed his family. This was a tradition passed down through the centuries since Europeans first settled Newfoundland. No opportunity was missed to add much-needed protein to the bland diet. Jumping from the shore to the ice and then maintaining your footing while traversing the ice to get to the seals was a tricky business. Sometimes the ice would break into pans as the wind and tide moved the mass off-shore and back again. On one such fateful hunt in the late 1950s, Stan fell through the ice into the freezing ocean. His buddy was able to pull him out, but there were no emergency rescue helicopters to whisk you to safety back then. He had to make his way to shore, then walk soaking wet in the freezing wind for about a mile before reaching home, where he could change clothes and get warm.

The news item on the right is from the May 1955 issue of the Submarine Miner, p. 2. It gives a snapshot of life in Newfoundland in the last century, and how resourceful our parents were during the long winter months when fresh meat was a luxury for most people.

Stan had had what he called “kidney problems” all his life and this misadventure worsened his condition. He began missing time from work. There was no employment insurance or sick leave then. If you were off work, you did not get paid. Jessie began working part-time at the new Chester Dawe furniture store that was built on her father’s property on Armoury Road. This helped supplement Stan’s lost wages when he was too sick to work. After he had a few days rest, he would begin to feel stronger and would go back to work for another while, but his health got so bad in the winter of 1961, he was forced to take to his sick-bed for a number of weeks. Then, in mid-April 1961, with the ice again packed into Conception Bay, he was air-lifted by helicopter to the General Hospital in St. John’s. Jessie herself took the helicopter a week or so later to visit him there. She suffered so badly from motion sickness that, when she arrived at the hospital, she had to be given a bed to rest in until her equilibrium returned. When she returned home a few days later, she brought with her a pair of black stockings. When asked why she had purchased them, she said that she was going to need them soon, and she did. Stan died at the hospital on April 27th. He was 39. Jessie, at 36, was a widow and the mother of 3 young teenagers and a 4-year-old.

Being a relatively young man who thought he would live to an old age, Stan had opted out of the Company’s insurance plan, so Jessie now needed full-time work. She found employment at Charles Cohen and Son’s clothing store on Town Square, earning $25 a week. She did not feel the need to remarry because my older sister and I were teenagers who could help out after school, and our little sister was soon starting school, so only needed looking after for a year or so by our grandmother, Emeline, who lived next door. Because she herself had not received enough education to get a higher-paying job when her husband died, Jessie was determined that all her children would not only finish high school, but would “get a trade,” as she referred to it, so that, should the need arise in the future for any of her daughters, they would have the means to earn a living.

Almost three years after Stan died, Jessie's mother, Emeline Dawe, died in 1964 at age 80. Less than two years later, her father, John Dawe, died at age 70. Six months after he died, the Wabana Mines shut down on June 30, 1966. By this time, Jessie's three eldest children had moved off Bell Island to continue their studies. In short order, her siblings and their families and many of her friends and neighbours had moved to Ontario or other parts of Newfoundland to find work. Strangers moved into the newly-vacated houses on her street. Her support network was collapsing all around her but she still had her job. She worked at Cohen’s until the summer of 1973 when her youngest finished high school. She was the last of her family to leave Bell Island when she sold her house and they moved to Ottawa, where her son was then living. There she found work in the kitchen of a seniors’ care home run by Catholic nuns. When she retired from that job at age 65, she moved back to Newfoundland to live in St. John’s, where her two other daughters were living. She enjoyed good health and visited Bell Island several times a year till she died in 2013 at the age of 89. She is buried next to her husband in the United Church Cemetery on Bell Island.

* * *

Email: [email protected] if you would like to comment or add anything on this topic (including your own family stories of women's work and life), or contribute photographs.

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