With Grenfell on the LabradorWaldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
History
With Grenfell on the Labrador
Waldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir, 1865-1940
Accusations of graft he is accustomed to face, and a commission
appointed by the Newfoundland Legislature investigated him, travelled
with him on the _Strathcona_, and completely exonerated him. Some
persons had even gone so far as to accuse him of making money out of the
old clothes business aboard what they were pleased to term his “yacht.”
They descended to such petty false witness as to swear that he had taken
a woman’s dress with $12 in it. It is wearisome to have to dignify such
charges by noticing them. They are about on a par with the letter of a
bishop who wrote to him: “I should like to know how you can reconcile
with your conscience reading a prayer in the morning against heresy and
schism, and then preaching at a dissenting meeting-house in the
afternoon.”
A vestryman objected to his preaching in the church at a diminutive and
forlorn settlement because “he talks about trade.”
The Doctor is never embittered by his traducers. He knows the meaning of
J. L. Garvin’s saying, “He who is bitter is beaten.” Nothing beclouds
for long his sunny temperament, but his unfailing good-humour never
dulls the fighting edge of his courage.
“I bought a boat for a worthy soul, to set him on his feet,” the Doctor
told me. “She had been driven ashore in North Labrador. I had to buy
everything separately—and the total came to $500. The boat was to work
out the payment. This she did—Alas! later on she went ashore on Brehat
(‘Braw’) Shoals. Only her lifeboat came ashore, with the
name—_Pendragon_—upon it.”
The Doctor put $1,000 of his money into the co-operative store at
Flower’s Cove, and when the enterprise was fairly launched and the
Grenfell Association decided to abstain from lending help to trade he
drew it out, and asked no interest. That store in its last fiscal year
sold goods to the value of more than $200,000, paying fair prices and
selling at a fair profit. It had three ships in the summer of 1919
carrying fish abroad—“foreigners.” The proprietor bought for $50 a
schooner that went ashore at Forteau, dressed it in a new suit of sails
worth $1,250, and now has a craft worth $8,000 to him. Dr. Grenfell has
personally great affection for some of the traders—it is the “truck
system” he hates. “Trading in the old days,” the Doctor observes, “was
like a pond at the top of a hill. It got drained right out. The money
was not set in circulation here on the soil of Newfoundland. The traders
in two months took away the money that should have been on the coast.
1919 was the first year in which the co-operative stores themselves sent
fish to the other side. A vessel from Iceland came here to the Flower’s
Cove store; another was a Norwegian; a third came from Cadiz with salt;
and today a small vessel is preparing to go across.”
At Red Bay is another store to which Dr. Grenfell loaned money, which he
drew out, sans interest, when it was prosperous. It has saved the people
there, as every soul in the harbour will testify.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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