HAPPY DAYS AT THE ORPHANAGE, ST. ANTHONY.
HAPPY DAYS AT THE ORPHANAGE, ST. ANTHONY.
“Once when I was travelling with him, at Pine’s Cove we found a family had left because the woman had seen a ghost. The Doctor prayed with her, and offered to go and live in the house himself to prove that she was the victim of an illusion. At Eddy’s Cove there was hard glitter ice which would have cut the dog’s paws. We thought we couldn’t go on. While we debated what to do there came a snowfall that spread the ice with a glorious soft blanket, ideal for travel. That’s just the way Providence always seems to favour the Doctor when he goes abroad.
“That man never came to the parsonage and went without leaving me with the desire to do better and be better. Every single time it was the same.
“Once we were on the go with the dogs and the komatik four days from St. Anthony to Cricket (Griguet). Much of the time the Doctor had to run beside the komatik. He struck out a new way, deep in snow. ‘Don’t you ever get tired, Doctor?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know that I ever was tired in my life,’ was his answer.
“A day or two after that dreadful experience on the ice-pan which he described in a book, he was at Cricket, and I went to see him. He was still suffering from the effects of the frost-bite. ‘Will you come to the mass meeting of the churches tonight?’ I said. He didn’t hesitate a moment. ‘Yes—send a dog-team and I’ll come.’ He not merely came but delivered an address of an hour’s duration, and I never heard him speak with greater fervour. He seemed spiritualized by the experience through which he had so recently passed.”
XIVNEEDS, BIG AND LITTLE
It is high time to give Dr. Grenfell’s great work the broad, sure underpinning of a liberal endowment. It may be true that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man”; but the one-man power of Grenfell’s personality is not immortal, and the work is too important to be allowed to lapse or to languish when he no longer directs, inspires and energizes all. To endow the work now, when many concerns of lesser moment are claiming their millions of dollars and their thousands of devotees is to relieve the Doctor of the ordeal of stumping the United States, Canada and the British Isles to keep his great plant going. Despite the volunteer assistants, despite the aid of good men and women banded in associations or toiling in groups or as individuals at points far from Battle Harbour and St. Anthony, despite the economy practised everywhere and always, there is ever a need, a haunting need, of funds; and a few insular politicians and traders may talk as elaborately as they please about Grenfell as an interloper, with a task that does not belong to him, but as long as Newfoundland does not provide a sufficient subsidy, most of the money must come from somewhere off the island. I have heard some “little-islanders” say that Dr. Grenfell ought to get out, and that Newfoundland should take over his whole business, but as long as Newfoundland does not move to that end, and there is a woeful want of doctoring and nursing at any outport on the map, somebody with the flaming zeal of this crusader has a place. Grenfell is doing the work not of one man but of a hundred. Could his cured patients have their say, there would be no doubt about that endowment. If grateful words were dollars, Grenfell would be a multi-millionaire.
It should not be necessary to explain in circumstantial detail the constant and pressing need of funds to carry on an enterprise that covers so large a territory and involves so many and such various activities. A chain of hospitals and dispensaries, manned in large part by eager and devoted volunteers, an orphanage, an industrial school, a fleet of boats—including the schoonerGeorge B. Cluett—a Seamen’s Institute, a number of dwellings for the staff personnel, the supplies of food and coal and surgical apparatus and medical equipment—all these items impose a burden on the overtaxed time and strength of the Doctor so considerable that it is not even humane or moral to expect him to speak two or three times a day as he does when he ought to be taking a well-earned vacation. Countless thousands are eager to hear the man himself describe his work, and there is usually a throng whenever and wherever he appears, but to let him wear himself out in appealing for the means to carry on is a waste of the enormous man-power of a great leader of the age. He does not cavil or repine, but he ought to be saved from his own willingness to overdo.
“I never put up a building without having the funds in hand,” he declared. “But when it comes to work—I believe in beginning first and asking afterwards. The support will somehow come, if there is faith, but faint-heartedness means paralysis of effort.”
One of the most important producers and consumers of all Dr. Grenfell’s institutions is the King George V. Seamen’s Institute at St. John’s. The cornerstone of the four-story brick building was laid in 1911. Sir Ralph Williams (the Governor), Bowring Brothers, Job Brothers, Harvey and Company, MacPherson Brothers and other loyal and forward-looking citizens got behind the plan: and when the stone was swung into place by wire from Buckingham Palace as King George V. pressed the button, the sum of $175,000 was in hand. The site contributed by Bowring Brothers was valued at $13,000.
The enumeration of beds occupied, meals served, baths taken, games played, books loaned, films shown and lectures heard does not begin to tell the story. Fishermen and sailormen ashore are traditionally forlorn. Men from the outports who drift into St. John’s are like country lads who come wide-eyed to a great city. It is not morally so bad for them as it was ere prohibition came and clamped the lid upon the gin-mills. But still, these are lonely men, friendless men, with very little money: and the Institute has a helping hand out for them, to befriend them from the moment they set foot on shore. Moreover, there is a dormitory given over to the use of outport girls: since it is seen that hard as things may be for Jack ashore they are harder yet for sister Jill, who knows even less of the great round world outside the bay and needs even more protection than her brother.
The Institute at last is able to show a small balance on the right side of the ledger. Since the first thought of those who ran it has been service, they are satisfied to come out only a little better than even. No charge of graft or profiteering lies here: and those who are fed and housed and warmed find it “a little bit of heaven” to be made so comfortable at an expense so small.
At the start, less than a decade ago, there were croakers who said there would be but a slim and scattering patronage: but now nearly all the beds are in use every night. In the dread influenza year, 1918, the Institute was invaluable as an Emergency Hospital, which treated 267 patients. The city hospital at St. John’s is small and always overcrowded. If the Institute had not been available the results of the epidemic would have been still more terrible. When in February, 1918, theFlorizelwas wrecked on the coast between St. John’s and Cape Race the survivors were brought here, and the Institute also prepared the bodies of the dead for burial. And on other occasions it has done good service.
Demobilized men of the Army and Navy coming into town from the outports use the building as a clubhouse.
Since the high cost of living has not spared Newfoundland, the rate for the young women who are permanent boarders has had to be raised to $4.00 a week. In parts of Newfoundland that is a good deal of money, but it is not much compared with what these girls would have to pay in the absence of the Institute.
The successful operation of the Institute is an outstanding object-lesson, and a source of particular satisfaction to its founder and chief promoter. It has triumphantly answered and silenced the objections of those who at the start declared that the only possible result would be calamitous failure. It has survived the shock of the discovery that some of its earlier administrators were unworthy of their charge; it has outlived the era of struggle and set-back; it has so clearly proved its place and its meaning in the community where it is established that if it were destroyed the merchants themselves would be prompt to undertake its replacement. It is as impressive a monument as any to the enduring worth of the devoted labours of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, and as conspicuous a proof as could be offered that his great work by land and sea deserves an Endowment Fund.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Obvious punctuation and typesetting errors have been corrected without note. Some illustrations have been moved slightly to keep paragraphs intact.
[End ofWith Grenfell on the Labradorby Fullerton Waldo]