My return to the work after serving
in France was embittered by a violent attack made
upon me in a St. John’s paper. It was called
forth by a report of a lecture in Montreal where I
had addressed the Canadian Club. The meeting
was organized by Newfoundlanders at the Ritz Carlton
Hotel, and the fact that a large number from the Colony
were present and moved the vote of thanks at the end
should have been sufficient guarantee of the bona
fides of my statements. But the over-enthusiastic
account of a reporter who unfortunately was not present
gave my critics the chance for which they were looking.
It was at a time when any criticism whatever of a
country that was responding so generously to the homeland’s
call for help would have been impolitic, even if true.
It subsequently proved one factor, however, in obtaining
the commission of inquiry from the Government, and
so far was really a blessing to our work. In
retrospect it is easy to see that all things work
together for good, but at the time, oddly enough,
even if such reports are absolutely false, they hurt
more than the point of a good steel knife. Anonymous
letters, on the contrary, with which form of correspondence
I have a bowing acquaintance, only disturb the waste-paper
basket.
The Governor, the representatives
of our Council, the Honourable Robert Watson and the
Honourable W.C. Job, and my many other fast friends,
however, soon made it possible for me to forget the
matter. If protest breeds opposition, it in turn
begets apposition, and a good line of demarcation a
“no man’s land” between friend and
foe and gives a healthy atmosphere in so-called
times of peace.
In the year 1915 a large cooperative
store was established at Cape Charles near Battle
Harbour, which bred such opposition amongst certain
merchants that it proved instrumental also in obtaining
for us the Government commission of inquiry sent down
a few months later. After a thorough investigation
of St. Anthony, Battle Harbour, Cape Charles, Forteau,
Red Bay, and Flowers Cove, summoning every possible
witness and tracing all rumours to their source, the
commissioners’ findings were so favourable to
the Mission that on their return to St. John’s
our still undaunted detractors could only attribute
it to supernatural agencies.
My colleague at Battle Harbour, Dr.
John Grieve, who with his wife had already given us
so many years’ work there, and whose interest
in the cooperative effort at Cape Charles was responsible
for its initial success, had worked out a plan for
a winter hospital station in Lewis Bay, and had surveyed
the necessary land grant. Through the resignation
of our business manager, Mr. Sheard, and the selection
of Dr. Grieve by the directors as his successor, only
that part of the Lewis Bay scheme which enables us
to give work in winter providing wood supplies has
so far materialized.
In 1915 also, at a place called Northwest
River, one hundred and thirty miles up Hamilton Inlet
from Indian Harbour, a little cottage hospital and
doctor’s house combined was built, called the
“Emily Beaver Chamberlain Memorial Hospital.”
Thus the work of Dr. and Mrs. Paddon has been converted
into a continuous service, for formerly when Indian
Harbour Hospital was closed in the fall, they had no
place in which they could efficiently carry on their
work during the winter months. Before Dr. Paddon
came to the coast, Dr. and Mrs. Norman Stewart gave
us several years of valuable service, spending their
summers at Indian Harbour and returning for the winter
to St. Anthony, according to my original plan when
I first built St. Anthony Hospital.
An old friend and worker at St. Anthony,
Mr. John Evans of Philadelphia, who had helped us
with our deer and other problems, having married our
head nurse, the first whom we had ever had from Newfoundland,
found it essential to return and take up remunerative
work at home.
The increasing number of patients
seeking help at St. Anthony made it necessary to provide
proportionately increasing facilities. As I have
stated elsewhere, the sister of my splendid colleague,
Dr. Little, in 1909 had raised the money for the new
wing of the hospital for the accommodation of the
summer accession of patients. The clinic which
had now grown so tremendously, due to Dr. Little’s
magnificent work, was maintaining a permanent house
surgeon, Dr. Louis Fallen, who had faithfully served
the Mission at different times at other stations.
We had also regular dental and eye departments.
The summer of 1917 was saddened for
us all by the loss to the work of my beloved and able
colleague, Dr. John Mason Little, Jr., who had given
ten years of most valuable labour to the people of
this coast. He had married, some years before,
our delightful and unselfish helper, Miss Ruth Keese,
and they now had four little children growing up in
St. Anthony. The education of his family and the
call of other home ties made him feel that it had
become essential for him to terminate his more intimate
connection with the North, and he left us to take
up medical work in Boston. The loss of them both
was a very heavy one to the work and to us personally,
and we are only thankful that we have been able to
secure Dr. Little’s invaluable assistance and
advice on our Board of Directors in Boston. This
coast and this hospital owe him a tremendous debt
which can never be repaid, for it was he who put this
clinic in a position to hold up its head among the
best of medical work, and offer to this far-off people
the grade of skilled assistance which we should wish
for our loved ones if they were ill or in trouble.
For Dr. Little offered not only his very exceptional
skill as a surgeon, but also the gift of his inspiring
and devoted personality.
The winter of 1917-18 was extremely
severe, not only in our North country, but in the
United States and Canada also. I was lecturing
during this winter in both these latter countries,
though during the months of December and January travelling
became very difficult owing to the continuous blizzards.
I was held up for three days in Racine, Wisconsin,
as neither trains, electric cars, or automobiles could
make their way through the heavy drifts. Had
I had my trusty dog team, however, I should not have
missed three important lecture engagements. Life
in the North has its compensations.
At Toronto I was unfortunate enough
to contract bronchitis and pleurisy, and I understand
from competent observers that I was an “impossible
patient.” Be that as it may, so much pressure
was brought to bear on me that at last I was forced
to obey the doctors and leave for a month’s
rest in a warmer climate.
Owing to ice and war conditions we
did not arrive in St. Anthony until the first of July.
In arriving late we were all spared a terrible shock.
The previous day some of the boys from the Orphanage
had gone fishing in the Devil’s Pond, about
a mile away, and a favourite resort with them.
Unfortunately that afternoon they were seized with
the brilliant idea of kindling a fire with which to
cook their trout. Greatly to the astonishment
of the would-be cooks, the fire quickly got beyond
the one desired for culinary purposes, and, panic-stricken,
they rushed home to give the alarm. Every man
ashore and afloat came and worked, and the obliteration
of the place was saved by a providential change in
the wind and wide fire-breaks cut through few and
ill-to-be-spared trees. Everything had been taken
from our house even furniture and linen and
dragged to the wharf head, where terrified children,
fleeing patients, and heaps of furnishings from the
orphanage and elsewhere were all piled up. Schooners
had been hauled in to carry off what was possible,
and the patients in the hospital were got ready to
be carried away at a moment’s notice. Only
the most strenuous efforts saved the entire station.
Now all our beautiful sky-line is blackened and charred.
All day long the gravity of the debt was in our hearts,
for if the wooden buildings had once had the clouds
of fiery sparks settle upon them, the whole of those
dependent upon us would have been homeless. Surely
in a country like this, the incident of this fire
puts an added emphasis upon our need of brick buildings.
Gratitude for our safe return, for all God’s
mercies to us, and joy over the outcome of the at one
time apparently inevitable disaster, made our first
day of the season a never-to-be-forgotten event.
Mr. W.R. Stirling, our Chicago
director, who had personally visited the hospitals,
insisted that a water supply must at all costs be
secured both for hospital and orphanage. This
was not only to avert the reproach of typhoid epidemics,
two of which had previously occurred, but also to
better our protection for so many helpless lives in
old dry wooden buildings, and to economize the great
expense of hauling water by dogs every winter, when
our little surface reservoir was frozen to the bottom.
This water supply has only just been finished; and
now we cannot understand how we ever existed without
it. But it is an unromantic object to which to
give money, and the total cost, even doing the work
ourselves, amounted to just upon ten thousand dollars.
According to the Government engineer’s advice
we had a stream to dam and a mile and a quarter of
piping to lay six feet underground to prevent the
water freezing. It is only in very few places
that we boast six feet of soil at all on the rock that
forms the frame of Mother Earth here. Hence there
was much blasting to do. But the task was accomplished,
and by our own boys, and has successfully weathered
our bitter winter. The last lap was run by an
intensely interesting experiment. The assistant
at Emmanuel Church in Boston brought down a number
of volunteer Boy Scouts to give their services on
the commonplace task of digging the remainder of the
trench necessary to complete the water supply.
When they first arrived, our Northern outside man,
after looking at their clothes of the Boston cut,
remarked, “Hm. You’d better give
that crowd some softer job than digging.”
But they did the work, and a whole lot more besides.
For their grit and jollity, and above all their readiness
to tackle and see through such side tasks as unloading
and stowing away some three hundred tons of coal were
real “missionary” lessons.
The ever-growing demand for doctors
as the war dragged on made it harder and harder to
man our far-off stations. The draft in America
was the last straw, doctors having already been forbidden
to leave England or Canada. Dr. Charles Curtis
had taken over Dr. Little’s work at St. Anthony,
and stood nobly by, getting special permission to do
so. Dr. West, who had succeeded our colleague,
Dr. Mather Hare, at Harrington, when his wife’s
breakdown had obliged him to leave us, had already
given us a year over his scheduled time, for he had
accepted work in India at the hands of those who had
specially trained him for that purpose.
We had been having considerable trouble
in the accommodation of the heavy batches of patients
that came by the mail boat. They were left on
the wharf when she steamed away, and only the floors
of our treatment and waiting-rooms were available
for their reception. For all could not possibly
go into the wards, where children, and often very
sick patients, were being cared for. The people
around always stretched their hospitality to the limit,
but this was a very undesirable method of housing
sick persons temporarily. Owing to the generosity
of a lady in New Bedford and other friends, we were
enabled to meet the problem by the erection of a rest
house, with first and second class accommodation.
This was built in the spring of 1917, and has been
a Godsend to many besides patients. It makes people
free to come to St. Anthony and stay and benefit by
whatever it has to offer, without the feeling that
they have no place to which they can go. Moreover,
this hostel has been entirely self-supporting from
the day that it opened, and every one who goes and
comes has a good word for the rest house. It
is run by one of our Labrador orphan boys, whose education
was finished in America, and “Johnnie,”
as every one calls him, is already a feature in the
life of the place.
Among the advances of the year 1918
must also be noted that more subscribers and subscriptions
from local friends have been received than ever before.
Our X-ray department has been added to. We have
been able also to improve the roads, a thing greatly
to be desired.
Look where we will, we have nothing
but gratitude that in the last year of a long and
exhausting war, here in this far-away section of the
world, the keynote has been one of progress.