Newfoundland's entry to the Great War

A revised version of an SRBP post from 2007

On August 7, 1914, the Newfoundland cabinet met at Government House in an extraordinary session prompted by the outbreak of war with Germany on August 4.

Britain was at war and while the Dominion of Newfoundland was also at war automatically, how it took part was entirely a matter for the elected Newfoundland government to decide.

The government led by Edward Morris had the benefit of defence plans laid afterthe turn of the century, as Morris well knew from his role in earlier administrations and his long service in the House of Assembly. The government created a local division of the Royal Naval Reserve during the Boer War as the country’s local defence force. It’s Canadian equivalent would not appear until a decade later, in 1910.

There was also an outline defence scheme prepared in 1907 in line with a co-ordinated defence plan for the entire British Empire. In addition to sailors the plan included, if needed a way to create a volunteer militia out of the local sectarian cadet corps - the Church Lads’ Brigade (Anglican), the Catholic Cadet Corps, the Methodist Guards, and the Newfoundland Highlanders (Presbyterian) as well as non-sectarian groups like the Armed Lads’ Brigade in Twillingate and the adults of the Legion of Frontiersmen.

The original version of the idea dated from the Boer War, but the Newfoundland government refused to take part in that conflict. Under the defence scheme developed after 1907, the government bought surplus and obsolete rifles from Britain and handed them out to the youth groups to train with, guided by their own officers who might have had some military experience or by British Army soldiers attached to the Governor’s office.

Memorial Day reminds us how poor our memory actually is.

In these warm days of summer today, it is hard to imagine that 110 years ago our ancestors were embroiled in what would become known as the First World War. For Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, the memorial day has been distorted as an obsessive remembrance of Beaumont Hamel - or rather the popular fiction of that day - and that fiction of one day dominates everything. Much is ignored in the process.

Newfoundland and Labrador's actual memorial day is called Commemoration Day, originally set aside in 1917 as a memorial to all war dead from Newfoundland not just in the Great War or just one battle but for all wars. Since Confederation, the day it is observed on has shifted from the Sunday nearest July 1 to July 1st itself and only for a few minutes in the morning. Not only are the Second World War, Korea and more recent wars ignored, popular talk these days on the post Confederation, invented version of Memorial Day ignores almost all of Newfoundland’s involvement in the Great War that isn't about the Regiment and only one of many battles. The result is that we ignore what happened, good and bad, in favour of one distorted tale of tragedy as if that was all to Newfoundland and Labrador’s experience of the first war and of the ones afterward. It is no longer a national day. It is caricature.

Worse, we believe things that are not true simply because no one has bothered to look for the facts and the evidence. Take the idea that it was the Governor in 1914 - Walter Davidson - who alone decided everything, as if he were a dictator. Simply put, that’s nonsense. Davidson had no more dictatorial powers than did the Governor General of Canada. In 1914 both Newfoundland and Canada were the same, legally and constitutionally. The Governor represented the British government and at the same time he was a ceremonial representative of the King, but nothing more.

All that Walter Davidson did in August 1914 was send the message already decided on and approved by the elected government. He decided nothing himself and influenced less. In the months and years of his time as governor during the war, the self-important and exuberant civil servant would become as much a headache for the government as a help but his diary notes, full of self-congratulatory fiction, have misled the one person - figuratively or literally - who read them first and then wrote a version of the country's war experience that was fundamentally wrong. Everyone else just copied the original researcher’s mistake without question.

Truth is that, consistent with the pre-war defence plan, Britain issued a general warning to the colonies and Dominions on July 25, ordering that they adopt the precautionary stage of the war plan that each had prepared after 1907. Draft orders in council lay waiting - in Newfoundland, in the floor safe of the Colonial Undersecretary - for everything from the imposition of censorship to rationing. All that needed to be filled in on each order was the date and the name of the enemy country.

In Newfoundland, the government directed a paramilitary group called the Legion of Frontiersmen to guard important government buildings alongside men of the Royal Naval Reserve Division who were already in St. John’s or near enough to be called to duty quickly. Others would have to come by train or by coastal steamer, if they could be called away from their work. They took up posts at the Waldegrave Battery on the south side of St. John's harbour, at the telegraph station at Admiralty House in what would become Mount Pearl, and at the main post office on the west end of Water Street in St. John's.

When cabinet ministers met that warm summer's night in August 1914, they had in their hands letters from the heads of each of the sectarian cadet corps offering their members and former members to form a local volunteer contingent for overseas service. Popular opinion lay solidly behind the raising of a unit of soldiers, especially among the St. John's establishment. Volunteers from the sectarian youth groups were part of the government's defence scheme as everyone knew, so the decision was relatively simple.

The government sent its offer to London through the Governor in a telegram sent on August 8. Cabinet offered their main defence force, the local naval reserve division. Consistent with both the plans laid long before Davidson arrived in Newfoundland in 1913 and the sentiment of the moment, the government also offered to raise a battalion of 500 soldiers. They believed at the time that a battalion numbered 500, rather than the more than 1,000 that actually were needed for a then-modern British Army battalion. Neither the government nor the cadet groups had modern rifles, machine guns, uniforms or anything else like proper training to make up the battalion but they offered 500 anyway.

The British told Morris’ government by return telegram the next day to hold off on the sailors as the land war made soldiers more important. They'd take the soldiers as fast as the government could get them to Britain. In the event, the sailors were the first to leave Newfoundland. They formed part of the crew of HMCS Niobe, a Canadian vessel many had sailed on before during their annual training cruises after the local reserve division was organized during Sir Robert Bond’s first administration. According to some accounts, Sir Robert hand-picked the men who took part in the first training cruise in 1900, their passage on the railway paid for by the Newfoundland government all the way to St. John's where they embarked on a Royal Naval cruiser of the North American squadron.

Almost immediately in 1914, the war would tax the government’s financial resources. It outstripped its administrative ability right away. To sustain political support, Morris created a volunteer group of leading citizens, chaired by the Governor, that would take care of recruiting and administration with volunteers from local businesses to handle the paperwork. A local doctor named Cluny MacPherson and a Frontiersmen and medical doctor named Arthur Wakefield gave volunteers their medical examinations using as a standard the Royal Navy Blue Book, that itself used a physical standard lower than that of the army. All the same the number of men who could not meet the minimum height, chest, and weight measurements even in that first rush of eager volunteers introduced official Newfoundland to the real country as forcefully and as shockingly as official Britain at the very same time met the embodiment of what meagre diets and harsh working conditions produced throughout the United Kingdom. Half as many men in the first rush of volunteers to St. John's were rejected as were sent off to war on October 4. The pattern for the rest of the war was at least the same and as the war dragged on, Newfoundland’s supply of men fit to go quickly dried up.

Despite what some have written, there was nothing odd about the Newfoundland Patriotic Association in the sense that across the empire and especially in Britain, the crush of volunteers at first overwhelmed the army’s recruiting bureaucracy. There just weren’t enough people to process the applicants. Local businesses sent clerks who did the work instead and so sprang up volunteer recruiting committees in towns and cities across Britain and in Canada and Australia as well as in Newfoundland.

The NPA was the same in that sense but very different in another. Some have called it extra-constitutional or unconstitutional, a volunteer group that usurped the government’s power, but that simply isn’t true. Cabinet gave up nothing to the NPA and by putting Davidson in charge, they forced the Governor to report to the elected legislature on the administration of the war effort in every detail. That’s as much the opposite of the popular understanding of Davidson as dictator as one could get.

Events showed the Governor's limited power was not just a show. When Davidson and the NPA tried to recruit an additional and unneeded battalion for local defence, Prime Minister Morris scolded the Governor in a private letter since Davidson knew the government’s policy. Morris threatened to humiliate Davidson publicly if he persisted in his agitation. This was precisely the way Morris’ predecessors had dealt with far more aggressive, troublesome, and stupid governors who did not know their place like Terence O’Brien or particularly Henry MacCallum during the Boer War.

MacCallum came to the end of his term prematurely when he encouraged then justice minister Edward Morris to bring down Bond’s government from inside cabinet. Bond got wind of the scheme - MacCallum had stupidly put everything in writing to Morris - and took the issue up directly with the British government. MacCallum slinked home quietly and Bond was able to pick who the British would appoint in his place afterwards. Julian Byng would make a similar nuisance of himself in Canada in the 1920s but Newfoundland politicians had met and overcome worse problems long before and with far less public drama. No wonder British bureaucrats disliked Newfoundland politicians like Bond and Morris.

There is more to the story of the opening days of the Great War than we can tell here, but for now, that gets us quickly up to a fateful decision. Over a century later, the details have largely been forgotten, but the Great War proved to have a lasting effect on Newfoundland society. In the years since, and particularly since 1949, the popular image of Newfoundland before Confederation that has grown up is simply false. It reduces Newfoundlanders and Labradorians to insignificant victims and hides both their triumphs and failures behind a fairy tale .

But we can start to find the true story, or something closer to the real story than what people popularly believe if we only recall that that fateful decision, one that led to Gallipoli, Beaumont Hamel and Monchy-Le-Preux was taken solely by a cabinet made up entirely of elected Newfoundlanders when they met one summer day in August 1914.

The Unknown Soldier entombed in July 2024 represents much more than the tragedy of one man and one family. He represents much more than one battle and one form of service and one war. And as much as events in St. John’s on July 1 these days reflect a fictional version of our shared past, a distorted perspective on even that Great War, he may spur more to make the unknown history of their unknown country better known to themselves and all those who have come after him.

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