Joey Smallwood and Newfoundland

Photo: The Independent

If Confederation can be attributed to the "Fathers" who made it happen, and Louis Riel can be credited with the political creation of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, then Joey Smallwood definitely gets the credit for joining Newfoundland to the Canadian federation. Smallwood campaigned and cajoled to bring Newfoundland into Confederation, telling his fellow-Newfies they were "not a nation...but a medium-sized municipality...left behind by the march of time." (Canadian Encyclopedia)

Newfoundland joined Canada as a province in 1949, extracting certain concessions from the federal government in exchange, including the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway across the new province. To bring Newfoundlanders along, Smallwood fought the businessmen with vested interests in keeping things as they were -- tipped greatly in their favour.

This former union organizer, journalist and pig farmer became interim leader after the successful referedum, and later Liberal Premier Smallwood of the new province of Newfoundland. He led the government for the next 25 years.

A sense of living conditions in the outports in the early days can be gleaned by reading authors including the controversy-loving Farley Mowat and the brilliant CBC journalist Rex Murphy, or by soaking in the wonderfully lyrical works of novelist Michael Crummey, especially Galore, in which he reveals "the cultural DNA" of his home province.

Another legacy of the old times is a Newfoundland musical group called the Masterless Men. This term is a reference to the time when indentured labourers from Ireland who had been press ganged onto British ships escaped from the fishing company owners, settling in the outports to seek their own survival and become men without masters -- masterless men. Their lyrical ballads songs have strong Irish roots. There were Roses evokes the pointlessness of the violent divisions beween Catholics and Protestants in Ireland.

I have personal ties to Newfoundland. When my mother married my father in Newfoundland in 1945, in order to join him in Alberta, she had to emigrate. For years she kept old Newfoundland stamps and a bit of money in her trunk. Throughout my childhood, Mom used to "get to her trunk" from time to time and show these artifacts to us kids, just to prove that Newfoundland really had been another country when she lived there.

In 2003, the last time we went back to visit "the old rock," we were taken to Trinity Bay to witness the pageant, a paean to the intrepid early fishermen and an expose of the brutality of the owners. The actors played out the scenes where they really took place, and of course there was plenty of music. Many of these people had been retrained to perform after being put out of work by the drastic decline in fish stocks that all but closed the centuries-old Newfoundland fishery.

Bring up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel

Photo from Amazon.com

Bring up the Bodies is a sequel to Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's celebrated portrait of English political machinations under the reign of King Henry VIII. It is told once again from the point of view of her extremely engaging narrator, Mantel's imagined version of the real historical character, Thomas Cromwell.

The son of a brutal ruffian called Walter Cromwell, Thomas has run from home, worked his way across Europe to Italy, and learned languages, art, culture, trade and diplomacy. Under King Henry, he has risen to become one of the most powerful men of the age.

As with the first book of what she now says will be a trilogy, Hilary Mantel with apparent ease brings to life the events, characters and settings of Tudor England five hundred years ago. Even the reader who knows the history is enthralled by the way the historically accurate tale is developed. The Thomas Cromwell seen here is vastly different and altogether more fascinating than James Frain's portrayal of the same man, seen in the recent television series, The Tudors.

There is a great difference, of course, between the two media, arising to a large degree to the novelist's freedom to provide a steady supply of the character's internal thought processes and memories. Movie directors and film stars are of course limited to what can be shown visually and expressed in spoken lines.

The audio book, read by Simon Vance, is suspenseful and absorbing. The book was published by HarperCollins in 2012 and won the Man Booker, making its author the only woman to win this prize twice, and one of very few to win it for a book and its sequel. Wolf Hall won in 2009.

D'Arcy Magee

Photo by D. Gordon E. Robinson, Wikimedia Commons

Thomas D'Arcy McGee has the dubious distinction of being the only Canadian politician to be assassinated. It happened in April of 1868, before the nation he'd helped to build was a year old.

McGee was a talented poet, a brilliant orator and a visionary politician. Irish born, he was a one-time Irish nationalist who became a strong federalist in Canada. One of the Fathers of Confederation, he was elected by the Irish constituents of West Montreal, where a still bears his name. He opposed the Fenians, a rebel Irish group formed in the US who raided into Canada, hoping to further their goal of driving the English from Ireland.

After publishing an anti-violence article in the Montreal Gazette  and condemning secret societies like the Fenians, D'Arcy Magee was shot to death on his own doorstep in Ottawa after a late sitting in Parliament. He was buried on what should have been his 43rd birthday.

Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart has written his death into her novel Away, coming up with a fictitious explanation and assassin for his murder. In real life, the identity of the perpetrator was never satisfactorily proven.

Even though James Patrick Whelan was arrested, tried and publicly hanged in front of a crowd of 5000 for the murder of D'Arcy McGee, some doubts about his guilt remain.

After his death, there were no more public hangings in Canada.

A Town Like Alice, by Neville Shute

Picture: Amazon

In high school, I read On the Beach by Neville Shute. That chilling tale presaged the end of the world through nuclear war and put me off reading any more of this author's work.

The fault was not in his writing; I still carry traces of the image from that story of people planting crops they knew they would never harvest. The courage of these people was impressive, but the story line was just too chilling. For this reason, I never gave Shute's work another chance. That is, until I discovered A Town Like Alice.

When I read On the Beach, the Cold War was in full swing and the Cuban Missile crisis was a recent memory. In school, we discussed the imminent possibility of nuclear war. We feared we would never even have the chance to grow up. And I more or less forgot about Neville Shute.

Last month at the Surrey International Writers' Conference, I was as always, inspired to read and write. In one workshop, both presenters recommended A Town Like Alice, by Neville Shute.

I'd heard the title, and knew it had been made into a movie. Surprised to learn it was a love story with a hopeful ending, I let curiosity get the best of me; I decided to give Neville Shute a chance to make a different kind of impression.

I was glad I did. Originally published in 1950, the novel stands not only as a well-told story, but as a historic document portraying the mentality of the post-war world, which now seems not only politically incorrect but positively antiquated.

The British Empire in Malaya, the rigid construction of class and the casual acceptance of the colour bar in Australia between the whites and "Abos" can cause a contemporary reader to cringe. Yet to fault the book for these reflections of a past that was all too real would be unfair.

Shute gives a sympathetic portrayal of the poor Malayan villagers who help the women prisoners of war. He shows the humanity of their Japanese captors as well. In the Australian scenes, he bestows a poignant loneliness the character of Grace, an aboriginal woman whose neighbours are convinced, even though they don't associate with her, that her husband married her only due to the severe shortage of women in the remote town where they live.

Noel, the old lawyer through whose eyes the story is told, is a kind and sympathetic man who not only smooths the path of the young lovers, but recognizes his all-too-human weakness -- falling in love with someone young enough to be his daughter. Yet with forbearance and humour, he recognizes the futility of this, and manages to preserve his friendship with that remarkable young woman, Jean Paget.

Neville Shute was also ahead of his time in portraying a marriage in which this visionary woman controls her own money and career, and whose marriage to a husband very different from herself is a truly equal partnership. I had no trouble relating to the main characters, and found the book an enjoyable read.

A Town Like Alice was made into a film in 1956 and a TV mini-series in 1981. An interesting detail is that the 2009 Vintage paperback edition contains an Author's Note at the end, in which Shute affirms the historic realism of his story of the women prisoners of war, adding that this is the first time he has "turned to real life for an incident" for one of his novels.

He also praises a real woman, Mrs. Geysel, a survivor of that notorious 1200-mile forced march with her own baby and other women and children prisoners. The march took place not in Malaya, but on the island of Sumatra, and the real Mrs. Geisel was Dutch, while Shute's character is English.

The wording of his tribute to this "most gallant lady" tempts the reader to imagine there may be something of the author in the character of Noel, the aging widowed lawyer who helps Jean and her beloved lost and found Joe Harman so much.

John McCrae and Remembrance Day

Photo of Lietenant Colonel John McCrae from Poemhunter

John McCrae was born in 1872 in Guelph and studied medicine at the University of Toronto. He interned with Sir William Osler at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and returned to Canada to undertake a fellowship at McGill University.

After fighting in the South African War, he returned to Montreal to work as a resident pathologist at the Montreal General Hospital and other Montreal Hospitals. By 1909, he was lecturing in medicine at McGill.

He volunteered for service in World War I, and was a brigade surgeon for the Canadian Forces Artillery. He was at Ypres in Belgium during the notorious cholorine gas attack. In that battle, he lost a close friend from home, and since there was no chaplain available, handled the burial ceremony himself.

It was between treating the wounded on the field, after the death of his friend, that McCrae scrawled the short immortal poem that so many have learned and recited since. "In Flanders Fields" is an apostrophe of the dead soldiers who address the living, passing the torch forward and asking their comrades not to break faith but to carry on. It gained wide recognition in Canada, Britain and elsewhere.

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place..."

Dr. John McCrae treated the wounded at the worst battles of World War I: not only Ypres, but the Somme, Passchendaele, Arras and Vimy Ridge. The unremitting work, lack of sleep and emotional drain of seeing so many wounded, dead and dying took a terrible toll on his health. An asthmatic since his youth, he died in a French field hospital of pneumonia complications and was buried in Wimereux near Boulougne. He was 46 years old.

A century later, his poem lives on in the memories of Canadians, a special element of the solemn Remembrance Day ceremony. The choice of the poppy as a symbol to remember the war dead is also associated with McCrae's poem.

Blackout, by Connie Willis

Cover photo (Ballantyne 2010) from Goodreads

Blackout, by Connie Willis is a brilliant work of futuristic science fiction and also a well-researched historical novel. In the future, circa 2060, three history students at Oxford are preparing to do research, not by reading, but by using a technology that allows them to spend time in the past.

The novel opens as Polly, Merope and Mike race around campus. Before returning to World War II London, they need papers, money and period clothing. They must also have necessary information implanted into their brains.

Even with that shortcut, they still need much preparation to plunge into the past. Unfortunately, between busy professors and campus bureaucracy, time runs out and they find themselves cutting corners.

Polly has a young admirer. As she makes the rounds of Oxford seeking necessary permits and equipment, young Colin, a precocious historian with a big crush on her, determines to help her with research and preparations. Though he is five years younger than Polly, he also promises that if she gets in trouble, he will come to her rescue. At the time, Polly has no idea how soon she'll find herself stuck in London in the middle of the Blitz, praying he can do just that.

Meanwhile, once the supervising professor has approved the assignments, each student is inserted at the proper time and place using the "drop." The lab is also expected to collect them back for their check-ins, to provide additional resources as needed, and to send in a "retrieval team" if something goes wrong. Mostly, the time machine works perfectly, but as the book opens, there have been a few incidences of "slippage," both in time and location.

Polly, Mike and Merope each have their own specific assignments, but all go to separate locations as they are researching different aspects of the war: Dunkirk, the child evacuees, and the behaviour of those who sheltered in the tube stations during the Blitz.

Back in the past, the students must be careful. They have to report in regularly, so the lab techs know they are all right and how to find them in case of emergency. While observing and interacting with the "contemps," in the past, Polly, Merope and Mike must live and work in their assigned areas, and be careful to fit in. They cannot know any history or technology the contemps do not.

 Above all, they must keep away from anything on the "forbidden list." It is critical not only to avoid situations that could endanger themselves, but to keep well away from "divergence points," situations where small actions on their part could change the future in unpredictable and catastrophic ways. The obvious danger is that they might affect the outcome of the war so that Britain does not win.

The system does have flaws. Even though in theory, the time continuum cancels out small changes, and disallows travel to the past that can change the future, the technology is imperfect. Drops get damaged and retrieval teams fail to show up. And as the young protagonists soon realize, nobody can function as a calm observer; nobody can go to the past without getting involved with the problems of the contemps who live and die there.

Their efforts are conscientious, but how can the three historians be sure to avoid altering the future as they try to survive in the past? Unintentionally entangled in the events of Dunkirk, has Mike rescued the wrong person? Or failed to rescue the right one? How serious is the injury he sustains at the chaotic scene? Enough to oblige the contemps to resort to that primitive treatment, amputation?

Will Merope (Eileen in the past) cause the death of her evacuee charges by returning them to their mother with tickets for the City of Benares? She knows it will sink in mid-Atlantic while attempting to carry British children to North America for safety?

Will Polly get her job at the wrong department store, or at the wrong time, and get herself blown up in the bombings of Oxford Street?

As the reader entertains these questions, each chapter ending drives forward to the next cliff-hanger with another young historian. The story strands are woven together to create a flawless coherence. Author Connie Willis slips in just enough snippets of scientific chaos theory and philosophical speculation to make her premise perfectly believable.

This book needs to be read with its sequel, All Clear. I can't wait to get my teeth into that one.This time, I'm trying the audio book.

Sir Sandford Fleming, engineer and timekeeper

Picture from McCord Museum, Montreal

In 1885 with the driving of the last spike in the BC interior, the CPR, the Canadian Pacific Railway, was complete. A shining ribbon of steel stretched from Atlantic to Pacific, ready to carry passengers wherever they wanted to go, and deliver freight back and forth across a vast new nation.

Just one little problem. What time would the next train arrive? Nobody knew for sure, and somebody had to figure it out. That somebody was Sandford Fleming. He was instrumental in building Canada's railways, and he called them, with the telegraph lines that followed, "the twin agencies of civilization." (Dictionary of Canadian Biography.)

In the 19th Century, Fleming was Canada's top railway engineer, and he had an idea about how to ensure that people would know when to expect the trains. As different places still kept local time, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of schedules and trains.

During the railroad building era, the American Society of Civil Engineers was dominated by railwaymen. In 1881 it made Fleming chair of the Standing Committee on time. He carried out surveys, created proposals and achieved consensus. In 1883, North American railways adopted the one-hour time zones we still use, but there was still no international standard.

The Meteorological Society and the ASCE persuaded the US Congress to call an international meeting to decide the location of the Prime Meridian. As a member of the British delegation, Fleming alone arrived with a position paper, which was endorsed for the most part. By century's end, most major countries had accepted the standard time zones with Greenwich, England as the Prime Meridian.

After her retired from railway design, Fleming became Chancellor at Queen's University in Kingston, where he worked at scientific projects and wrote.

During his lifetime, Fleming was given many honours: Columbia University in New York, St. Andrews in Scotland, the University of Toronto and Queens and all awarded him honorary doctorates. Fleming College in Peterborough, Ontario and Sir Sandford Fleming Elementary School in Vancouver are two schools that bear his name. He was also a Member of the Royal Society, and was knighted in 1897. Fleming died in 1915 in Halifax.

In 2010, Michael Enright of CBC blogged from the train as he retraced some of Fleming's 1872 journey on the Ocean, the train that runs from Halifax to Montreal.