It seems like yesterday...

This week in NL history

August 4, 1914 was a Tuesday.

Ned Morris was the Prime Minister. Edward Patrick Morris. Later Baron Morris of Waterford.

Edward Patrick Morris.

Germany invaded Belgium that day on the way to France. The idea was that a huge German army would pivot on the Swiss border and move in a giant line, the right foot of the furthest soldier to the north, that is on the German right flank, sloshing the surf of the coast of the English channel as the great army swept all in front of it. They would envelop the French who were the main target, defeating them and encircling Paris. The war would be over in a few weeks at most as the French, inevitably, collapsed and then surrendered.

Things didn’t turn out that way. The stubborn defence by the French and British halted the advance and before a month of fighting was over, the armies faced each other all the way from the coast to Switzerland in trenches.

By the end of the week, the government had offered the British government volunteer sailors from the local Royal Naval Reserve Division on HMS Calypso and 500 volunteers to be drawn from religious paramilitary groups like the Catholic Cadet Corps, the Newfoundland Highlander’s, and the Church Lads’s Brigade. This was the Newfoundland defence scheme worked up after the Boer War. The government focused on the sailors but gave the boys brigades obsolete rifles, bayonets, and webbing to let them train as best they could to form the core of a volunteer battalion if needed

As part of the imperial defence preparations of which Newfoundland was a part, the government mobilized the naval reserve division on July 29 and put them to work guarding key parts of St. John’s as well as the cable landing places at Heart’s Content and Placentia. War wasn’t a surprise and the country was prepared, albeit not as extensively as others. With the outbreak of war, volunteers were plentiful and, as in many places across Britain and other parts of the empire, a local patriotic association sprang up to handle the administration of raising a battalion where no bureaucracy existed to meet the demand. In Newfoundland and Labrador, what the patriotic association was and how the country prepared for and responded to the outbreak of war remains wildly misunderstood and misrepresented.

August 4, 1925 was a Tuesday.

Walter Monroe was the Prime Minister.

For your two cents worth that day, the Daily News told you that Greece was readying for a war with the Bulgarians. Knowling’s advertised the latest food shipment from Liverpool and on another page, the arrival of new shoes from England. Knowling’s was one of Water Street’s largest department stores, next to Ayre and Sons. George Knowling had come from Devon and took over the dry goods business on Water Street owned by his uncle. It was next to the Ayre’s premises, a space now occupied by Atlantic Place.

Ayre’s would eventually take over Knowling’s before selling the whole building for development in the 1970s, keeping their other retail space in the Pitt’s Building further west on Water Street. It too would disappear to become the Scotiabank tower but in 1925 both were among the largest retailers in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Knowling was a member of the Legislative Council from 1897 until his death in 1923 and served as minister without portfolio in Robert Bond’s administrations between 1900 and 1908. He and his wife, Elizabeth Upham, also from Devon, supported giving women the right to vote and their daughter Fannie was a leading member of the local drive for women’s suffrage. Knowling - a Liberal - was at odds then with the 1920s Liberals led Richard Squires. Hypocritically, when the House of Assembly gave women the vote, it would be Squires’ wife who was the first woman elected.

The Daily News also carried ads that day in 1925 for a regatta dance to be held Tuesday night while on Wednesday night, there would be a band concert. The Daily News ads said the two events took place at the C.C.C. - the Catholic Cadet Corps’ building - but the rival Evening Telegram called it the Gaiety Hall, the new name it had with the winding up of the Corps in 1924. The Catholic Cadet Corps had been one of the country’s religious paramilitary groups that formed the basis of the original military volunteer draft 11 years earlier. A decade later, it was gone. The Evening Telegram also carried an ad for a Grand Dance at Prince’s Rink, promised as a “real, old-time Regatta Dance with Irish Lancers, Quadrilles, One-Steps, Waltzes, and Foxtrots.” Buried in the paper, among the many reports of international news, the death of a local cab driver, or cases at Magistrate’s Court was a note that children picnicking and swimming were breaking glass bottles for fun along the path that led along Rennies River to Long Pond and leaving a dangerous mess.

August 4, 2015 was a Tuesday.

Paul Davis, the oldest constable in NATO, was Premier.

The Pea Seas were sliding toward defeat. Dwight Ball and the Liberals had only to let them fall.

The two parties agreed in the winter to cut representation for people in the House of Assembly, conspiring to make it easier for either to win a majority government.

The Pea Seas were quitting one after the other. Easier to take the pension than risk defeat.

In the spring, the Liberals and Pea Seas both nodded and winked as the Pea Sea budget started what would become an endless string of massive cash deficits. The guv’mint fought with judges over pay, just as they are still doing a decade later.

The Pea Seas saw the polls but looked at the Opposition benches and saw nothing but the apocalypse for the province. Dullards and dimwits the lot, they said, and a decade later the roles are switched but the words are the same. Ins still think the Outs are morons. Different Ins. Different Outs.

There’s no accident that debate on the election budget will happen in May. That’s when Corporate Research Associates is in the field. The Conservatives seem to hope that if they keep going the way they’ve been going, the polls will turn in May. People will be happy that news is good. The NDP are playing their predictable part. And so far Dwight Ball has been playing along with the Tory script as well.

Squires and Alderdice.

Alderdice and Squires.

Dunderdale and Ball and Furey.

Davis and Hogan.

Fearful symmetry.

Again.

History repeats first as tragedy, then as farce.

What is the umpteenth go-’round besides not so merry any more?

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