BELL ISLAND: A NEWFOUNDLAND MINING COMMUNITY (1895-1966)
Peter Neary
The Canadian mining towns that came into existence around the turn of the century can be roughly divided into two groups: those in which the new industrial workers were drawn from a surrounding traditional and mercantile world, and those in which a large part of the work force was recruited outside the country and was immigrant navvy in nature. The mining community of Bell Island, Newfoundland, was decidedly of the former type - the type which predominated in Canada east of the Ottawa River. For several generations company towns like Bell Island, have been primary Canadian social units. Yet the social and cultural mores of such places have been little explored by Canadian historians, though a significant advance in the study of single enterprise communities was made on both the sociological and historical fronts in 1971 by Rex A. Lucas in his highly original book Minetown, Milltown, Railtown (Toronto, 1971). Lucas defined single enterprise communities as follows: "communities of single industry with a population of less than 30,000 in which at least 75 per cent of the working population serve the single industry and its supporting services" (p. 17). Using these criteria, he identified 636 such communities across the country with a combined population of 903,401. No two company towns have, of course, ever been the same and in its hey-day as a mining community Bell Island was a unique place indeed. Yet from its industrial history, which extends from 1895 to 1966, generalizations can be drawn which have wider application.
Bell Island is situated in Conception Bay, with its long axis running in a northeast to southwest direction. It is the largest of many islands in the Bay. Six miles long and two and one half miles wide, it is separated from the surrounding mainland to the north and west by the great expanse of Conception Bay. South and southwest of it lie two smaller islands Little Bell Island and Kelly's Island; local lore holds that "Kelly'' was a seventeenth century pirate. To the east the Island is separated from the adjoining coast by a "tickle'' approximately three miles wide. Across this capricious body of water lie the two mainland centres which have been its principal transportation links - Portugal Cove and St. Phillips, formerly Broad Cove. The side of the Island facing the tickle is known as "the front" (probably because it faces towards St. John's); as might be expected, the opposite side of the Island is known as "the back". St. John's is approximately nine miles from Portugal Cove and the road joining the two was one of the first highways built in Newfoundland and certainly one of the first to be paved.
Geologically, Bell Island presents a striking contrast to the surrounding coast. It appears as a huge rock raised suddenly and cleanly from the deep. Except in a very few places its massive cliffs drop precipitously into the sea. At some points these awesome cliffs slope dangerously and deceptively inward from top to bottom. The surface of the Island is furrowed; the soil is surprisingly fertile and generous for Newfoundland. At almost every point on the island there is a commanding view of the surrounding mainland. From the seaward half of the Island the entrance to Conception Bay is, on most days, clearly visible, guarded on one side by the grand promontory of Cape St. Francis and on the other by the great sweep of the North Shore and by Baccalieu Island. The climate of the Island, like that of Newfoundland generally, is one of violent contrasts. Seen on a pristine summer day from, say, Beachy Cove Hill near Portugal Cove, the Island has a dreamy, ethereal appearance. But when in the autumn the wind begins to blow ever more savagely from the northeast, its essential northern character is clearly revealed. Once viewed, the setting is not soon forgotten.
The Island entered the stream of Canadian history at an early date. It was probably frequented by visiting European fishermen of many nationalities during the sixteenth century. Its strategic position in the Bay, its proximity to rich fishing grounds, the cosmopolitan character of the place names on the surrounding coast, and indeed the very name Conception Bay itself, give strength to this assumption. Certainly Europeans and, later, their Newfoundland-born descendants were visiting Bell Island from the early sixteenth century as Conception Bay gradually acquired a resident population and began the rise which for long made it the rival of St. John's in Newfoundland life. There are many references to the Island in the documents relating to the history of the settlement established by the London and Bristol Company at Cuper's Cove (Cupids), Conception Bay, in 1610 under the leadership of John Guy. By 1628 Bell Island was already associated with the product which would one day make it famous - iron ore. John Guy himself sent rock samples taken from the Island by a visiting fisherman to England for analysis. But the best known publicist for the Island in the Guy colony was Henry Crout. Crout reported to Sir Percival Willoughby, one of the backers of the venture, that "the like land is not in Newfoundland for good earth and great hope of lrone stone." Confident of the mineral potential of the Island, Willoughby attempted unsuccessfully over many years to have it included in the lot he obtained out of the original grant to the London and Bristol Company. His confidence was not misplaced, but the mining boom he hoped for did not materialize for nearly three hundred years. In the meantime Bell Island remained an integral part of the fishing economy of Conception Bay and the unique outport way of life which that economy fostered.
Bell Island arose as a mining centre in 1895 just as the traditional fishing, outport, and mercantile economy of Conception Bay was in a serious state of decline. Indeed, had it not been for the rise of Bell Island as an industrial community, Conception Bay's fall from economic grace would, doubtless, have been more severe. In combination with a quickening pace of emigration to the United States and Canada, which reached its height in the 1920's, the mining boom on Bell Island gave Conception Bay a badly needed economic crutch. In return the Island inherited attitudes and values that derived from and were appropriate to a maritime and mercantile economy. Many Conception Bay people moved their households to Bell Island while retaining close kinship ties in their former communities; but there were others who, following an age-old Newfoundland pattern, travelled back and forth from the Island to their outport homes on a seasonal, monthly, or, at times, even weekly basis. This pattern of commuting persisted right down to the collapse of the mining operations, a process that began in 1959 and ended in 1966. The ready access to the outports constantly reinforced the attitudes brought from the old mercantile culture by the first generation of wage workers to come from the Conception Bay communities. The "ancient ways" of Newfoundland persisted with amazing vitality on Bell Island, and an industrial culture only slowly and imperfectly emerged there. As a mining community, Bell Island was influenced above all else by an easy interplay with the outport world around it and its twentieth century history can only be understood in terms of this social and cultural duality. Like many company towns across the mining and forest frontier of the mid-north, it was an industrial community shaped in the bosom of the past and it always cast a lingering backward glance.
Nevertheless Bell Island quickly acquired the appearance of a typical mid-northern company town of its vintage. In time it had a "company store", a "staff house" and a "shacktown". Some of the place names in use on the Island predated the industrial era, but names drawn from the new world of work predominated. There was a west mines, an east mines, and a compressor hill. There were residential areas known simply as Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Even the bodies of water that were created by the great unfilled surface excavations retained their engineering designations in popular usage. Children on Bell Island did not go skating on ponds, as did other Newfoundland boys and girls; instead they skated on places with names like "15", "25" and "44-40". The name of one street, the Wack road, was a grim reminder of how the fortunes of the mining industry could shift. Built during troubled times, it was named after a government official; but it was almost universally known for the "wack" or "doe" which had been paid in lieu of wages to those who had built it. But not all was novelty even in the popular usage of the mining population. Significantly, each underground mine had a "Captain", almost always a Newfoundlander steeped in the ancient ways of his people. And children on Bell Island were still threatened with "being taken by the fairies", a common outport expression, if they misbehaved. In many ways Bell Island's history exhibits great continuity as well as change.
Unionism arose naturally out of the conditions of work on Bell Island, as it did elsewhere in the industrialized world. That it arose imperfectly and painfully and with limited success owed something to the outport heritage of the Bell Island population. A union, after all, was but one of a number of institutions competing for the loyalty and attention of Bell Islanders. Throughout the whole history of the mining operation, the community of Bell Island had two sets of institutions. One derived from the world of work, the force of urbanization, and the growing contact of Newfoundlanders with the North American world; the other from old Newfoundland. The first set was represented in union, town council, cooperative store, and service club; and the second in lodge, order, society, sodality, association, and worldly church. It is not possible to say definitively which tradition dominated, but it is perhaps significant that in the wake of the collapse of the mining operation Bell Island has an Orange Lodge but no union.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the vitality of old Newfoundland on Bell Island than the endemic weakness of local government there. Indeed, the paternalistic activities of the mining companies in the provision (albeit in a rudimentary form) of at least some of the services that are elsewhere associated with local government suggests that the patronage relationships of rural Newfoundland may also have been transferred intact to the new industrial world. On March 9, 1910, J.M. Kent, the senior member for St. John's East, presented a petition to the House of Assembly from a group of Bell Islanders asking that the people of the Island "be permitted to govern and control their own local affairs." Specifically, the petitioners sought local "handling of the three grants available to the Island, namely road, marine and poor grants." On December 2, 1962, Sir E.P. Morris, the Prime Minister of Newfoundland, held a public meeting on the Island to discuss the possible formation of a local council. His visit was followed by the election of a nine-man council in January, 1913. But by 1917 this arrangement had broken down. Subsequently, there were two councils on the Island - one for the Front and one for the Mines area; in the latter area the Wabana Council was, by 1919, providing street lighting and a public water system. But this arrangement also proved unstable; in 1922 the members of the Wabana Council resigned in a body. The following year a petition was circulated calling for the Island to be administered once again by one council. In February. 1924, new Front and Mines' councils were elected but a 1927 petition for street lighting was brought to St. John's by two members of the clergy - Rev. J.J. McGrath and Rev. I. Parsons. An incorporated municipality that could raise local taxes and attempt to deal systematically with such problems was not established on the Island until 1950. By then population growth and the force of urbanization had created massive social problems. By 1945 Bell Island's population had advanced to 8,171; six years later it stood at 10,291. In 1961 it reached an all-time census high of 12,281 - and this in a town that did not have a water and sewage system.
Yet a movement that began on the Island in the mid-1940's to establish a new town council met with the same opposition that similar efforts have frequently encountered elsewhere in Newfoundland. Until recently the initiative for local government in Newfoundland usually came from above and usually met with great local resistance. On August 28, 1947, the people of Bell Island were asked in a plebiscite whether they favoured the establishment of a town council. They rejected the suggestion by 1,135 votes to 685. Eventually a council was established on the Island but it was grudgingly accepted by many who preferred the individualism, clientage and patronage of the past. Moreover, opposition to its creation was so strong that the incorporated area took in only part of the Island which was designated the town of Wabana. To this day a sizeable part of the Island's population has never known the benefit of local government. Clearly. social attitudes and economic and demographic realities were ironically and paradoxically juxtaposed on Bell Island.
But perhaps this is to be expected in an industrial town in a non-industrial setting. What is true of Bell Island and Newfoundland may be true of other areas of eastern Canada; certainly the cultural dichotomies portrayed in Claude Jutra's film Mon Oncle Antoine strikingly resemble those found in the history of Bell Island. Historians can too quickly conclude that where the objective conditions of urbanism and industrialism exist there will necessarily follow "an urban and industrial" outlook. Where there is foreign ownership, foreign control, dependence on external markets and cultural and economic duality - and all these were characteristic of Bell Island - the new urban and industrial man may be slow in appearing. In these circumstances the social effect of urbanism and industrialism may be cumulative. The attitudes and institutions of the past survive long into the new economic era, gradually becoming weak and hollow and finally standing as nothing but forms. Then in rapid order ancient ways are suddenly and dramatically swept aside. Quebec's `quiet revolutions' might fit this pattern, while Newfoundland seems to have entered such a period of rapid change around 1966. As for Bell Island, its industrial economy fell apart before fully realizing the cumulative effect of social change. To the end Bell Island remained in the grip of old Newfoundland.
