Parents’ Postscript
The following met a request by our oldest child Marita for biographical informa-tion on each of us to tell her children. We thought we’d share with all our offspring. Naval service caused our shift out of an Atlantic culture and scene. Now our children go forth where family background may blur due to distance and time.
Caroline Marie Theresa French was b. 7 Oct. 1928 St. John’s, Nfld. By rights this little port should be called the oldest continuous European community of North America in-stead of St. Augustine, Florida. By folklore it is supposed to have started up 1497 and activity in its snug harbour is recorded early 1500s. Its population 1999 was almost 102,000.
Caroline’s mother, Mary Ellen née Brownrigg, was daughter of a St. John’s mer-chant who went on to hold portfolios in Newfoundland’s responsible and then commis-sion governments. Her father, Douglas Joseph French, was orphaned when parents d. of influenza in St. John’s. A maiden aunt raised him with older surviving brothers and sis-ters. His early job was meeting incoming ships on behalf of Newfoundland Customs. This takes a resolute man since my experience as a shipping reporter on the Halifax waterfront was that these arrivals try their best to get a customs officer drunk to put something over on him. Later he worked for the commission government and ended a civil service career managing at times in all but name Old Colony/provincial liquor control boards. On retirement D. J. acted on behalf of choice distillers and vintners, once landing a shipment of 10,000 cases of Baccardi rum, his #4 son Edward told us.
Douglas Joseph Sr. had other status in the provincial capital, first as pioneering hardball player then as a Knight of Columbus rising to 4th degree. He was a consistent winner at billiards for Knights against Freemasons. Long after on Hylands golf course in Ottawa, I met a son of this main Mason competitor, the son himself winding up an air force career.
Caroline arrived in the world at an unfortunate time, for her mother had not got over the death of her previous child Nellie, a blue baby. Partly for her own sake and part-ly because her parents seemed bored, Mary Ellen passed baby Caroline over to them to rear. This was the ghost of Irish fosterage still hanging on in Newfoundland culture. My wife needed many decades to recover from what we nowadays might consider total rejec-tion. “Auntie Kate” and “Uncle Har” thought being addressed as grandparents made them seem old. Living in their big house must have had some advantages because my wife is connoisseur of sweets from Great Britain, Canada and the USA. When 11 years old Caroline was back temporarily at her parent’s home for the winter while grandparents holiday’d in Florida. When they came back to collect her she flatly refused to return to their house. She proved always a diligent student, having started among 80 in kindergar-ten and one of only seven who finished Grade XI. She was best in math, worst in art, studied piano because a young lady was supposed to. I heard her only once on a piano in a naval nurses’ residence and that was it as far as she was concerned I think. She ap-peared in school plays but much extra-curricular activity was sacrificed as key teachers were taken up with war effort.
Mary Ellen her mother had trained as a nurse for a year when young but varicose veins in her legs cut that ambition short. Now Caroline began training as student boarder at St. Clare’s Mercy Hospital in St. John’s. The nuns scrimped on food though lavish with chores. Treats from her home helped augment meagre fare for her and for outport students far from home. Caroline was happiest as a scrub i. e operating room nurse. An example of further frugality of the nuns: there was no such thing as disposable gloves in the O. R. Rubber gloves were washed and patched when worn. Nurses had to keep a sharp eye in case a patch came loose to be left inside when a patient was sewn up.
In 1950 she headed to London, Ont., to live with her oldest sister Kay, wed to Fred Small, wartime sailor in St. John’s. Much of Caroline’s Newfie accent evaporated in the strict confines of Westminster Hospital even though there hadn’t been much to begin with. Her mother tried always to be careful about her children’s diction but failed utterly with the youngest, Elizabeth. Returning to the Old Colony, Carrie was one of the earlier nurses there to sign up for the Royal Canadian Navy after the province formed part of Canada 1949 and once our recruiters set up over there.
Nursing Sister
What the Navy got was a devout and sheltered woman, sturdy and a helluva good bedpan nurse. Auntie Kate had shown a bad temper whereas daughter Mary Ellen was quietly persistent although she did fail to get any of her own to take the veil. Caroline’s dad was a typical Irish father, a benevolent despot. In the Second World War St. John’s doubled in population, swollen with lonely Canadian, American and British servicemen. It could be a rowdy seaport at best of times. Except for family outings, this teenager was confined to her property, and obeyed! Although she asked herself sometimes if she was just being “goody- goody” her school friends rallied and came over to her house. [When I called there early in the ‘50s movie houses were still segregating sailors: our padre had a fit while D. J. stonewalled him about such rank discrimination.]
Whenever there was any incident involving a disturbed patient in the Halifax naval hospital, senior doctors liked to have calming Caroline at hand. She served also at the little hospital in HMCS Cornwallis, our new-entry training establishment on the Anna-polis Basin of Nova Scotia. She was to return to Halifax in timely fashion, the officer processing my own arrival back from the Pacific cocked a significant eye at me and murmured, “Hm-m, co-incidental with the arrival earlier this morning of Sub-Lieutenant French.”
Howard Carew Joseph Wallace was b. 20 March 1929 in Saint John, N. B., youngest of four and the only boy. Only in my 70s did I learn a girl was born later on and that Beth never made it out of hospital. Howard Sr. and Rita my mother were operating Wallace Advertising, first a branch operation for oldest brother Frank back in Halifax and then on their own. Saint John was Atlantic terminus of the Canadian Pacific railway, like Halifax a seaport that came to life when winter shut down Quebec and Montreal. Later on it would become a working class city of refineries, mills and, of course, shipyards. Today its population nears 100,000. [For insight on K. C. Irving, see Kenneth in Section 4.]
My birth year of 1929 had the stock market crash in New York that brought on the Great Depression. Our income fell by a third and more as merchants unwisely cut back on advertising that brought buyers into their stores and so went out of business. Dad was put in hospital 1933 for alcohol and wife abuse. In some respects he was a delayed-action casualty of the Great War in which he’d been badly wounded twice. Rita brought us children to Halifax to stay with Grandma Lavinia Carew and begin an advertis-ing column in the daily Mail. Grandma d. 1939 aged 75 on eve of the Second World War.
I read a lot which helped turn school into a breeze after a false start. My later report cards had “annoys others” along with high marks. School did drag compared to life or to worthwhile books. A household of women was cloying so I well earned their caution,“Don’t encourage him!” as I began to be forthright with words.
The Great Depression
This was not long reaching the Atlantic region where the economy was already lower because Confederation had favoured Ontario and Quebec. The Dominion of Newfoundland was hit hardest. Its government coffers shrank and a proud country reverted to colonial stature 1934 with a commission government to cope with deficits. Its labour force was scattered in almost 1,300 communities, mostly coastwise. A narrow-gauge railroad and precious few roads made the Rock hard to administer. Further, it was virtually run by a dozen or so families exceedingly jealous of their privileges. The economy was based foremost on the fishery and also by logging and mining for which markets dwindled as the depression deepened and widened.
Mary Ellen struggled to keep variety in food on the table in a colony producing insufficient milk products and less by way of vegetables. More strain came with knocks on the door daily. Workless men forever on the move were reduced to begging door to door for anything to eat that could be spared. In Halifax our household wondered if some secret sign was on our home to alert these drifting men that we had consciences.
Parents in general insisted that any privations at home stayed inside its walls. Caroline in Newfoundland and I in Nova Scotia were fortunate in a time of bitter poverty, cold water flats, runny-nosed kids perpetually hungry, and rampant infectious diseases. Bring an apple to school in either city and kids would hang around to devour its core. Tuberculosis long was especially rife on the Rock. The climate usually was chilly, blowy, and wet when not worse. Just before marriage, D. J. contracted T. B. Because abundance of fresh air was part of the cure in those days, he signed on as purser in seaborne trade to the Caribbean and even got as far as Venezuela. In Halifax, a backwater between wars, some people prayed war clouds would burst if only to get the economy rolling again. When it came in ‘39, half the kids in Grade VIII at our school were old enough to enlist because they’d been idling in the classroom because of no work.
Second World War
A neighbour boy passed the Army medical. A friend in the big line-up grabbed him and hissed: “Piss in my bottle so’s I can pass too!” That was resolved in good time and the Army acknowledged that many Nova Scotian recruits had malnutrition scars but proved far hardier than average. A high proportion was as small as Reg Adams, long our Newfoundland neighbour in Ottawa. [He died 13 September 2000 aged 91, outlasting Ethel May née Manning by seven years.]
On outbreak of war Canada had a population of 11 million. During hostilities a million went into uniform and our nation industrialized as never before. I left Boy Scouts a seconder in ’39 for a mushrooming Army Cadet movement where I made lieutenant the following year. I switched to Royal Canadian Sea Cadets in the fall of ’41 as an ordinary cadet and over several years reached the subordinate officer rank of midshipman.
From the start we were preparing as best we could for war. I also was part of Air Raid Precautions. We were issued British Tommy helmets, hand-pump hose and bucket of sand. We kids with loose adult supervision patrolled our neighbourhood calling out to homes showing light in regular blackouts. We were told how to extinguish one make-believe little incendiary bomb but not how or where to get more sand or water for any others! In St. John’s, Caroline’s dad was also A. R. P., his equipment ready inside their front porch.
In Army Cadets all we had was a piece of wood carved into the shape of a rifle with which we drilled and paraded sheepishly. As a Sea Cadet later came 22-calibre marksmanship and I devoted three nights a week and part of weekends to armaments scraped together for Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships. In the DEMS gun battery in the dockyard we made notes in grease-soaked scribblers and learned to strip and assemble a revolver, a 303 Lewis light machine gun and the heavier Vickers water-cooled 50 calibre MG. [This was still used in the Korean War to hold off massed Chinese troops; its crew reduced to saving urine for coolant as attacks wore on.] We were drilled on the anti-aircraft 20-mm Oerlikon but not allowed to tinker with its magazine, and on high-angle/ low-angle four-inch guns. We even manned a Great War Yankee submarine gun with 5-inch bore, powder bag and projectile. No quick-firer this! From square bashing my feet grew to size 12 and a half. After all this effort we weren’t allowed to “ship” our layer & trainer badges because Commodore Ulysses “Useless” Brock feared we’d look too much like sailors. This when Sea Cadets joining the Navy were made able seaman next day!
My main sports were boxing and swimming, both of which I later taught, and varieties of English, Canadian and American football. As a Sea Cadet welterweight I joined a Navy boxing team sent to Cape Breton to put on exhibitions. In Sydney, North Sydney and Glace Bay smallish coal miners on the sidewalks wanted to try us out right on the spot, a kind of High Noon. I was too shy to take in the high school dance we were invited to. For a couple of summers I served on the recreational Northwest Arm of Halifax Harbour in a Sea Cadet lifeguard patrol launch, rising to coxswain of patrol and petty officer. Soon I grew to light heavyweight and five-foot-eleven, three inches taller than a national average just lately risen to 5 foot10 inches.
It was galling not to be in the Real Fight. When I underwent cadet medical examin-ation through naval auspices I was classed “RCN – good” when only 14. Fat chance of sneaking in under age though, my sisters had naval husbands or boyfriends to find and flush me out. Wartime food rationing did have some adverse effect: a physiotherapist of late questioned why my legs were bowed just below the knee as if we’d been poor and eating much worse than we actually did.
Naval Service
I had hoped to go to Naval College in Royal Roads, B. C., even though the Navy League of Canada offered only one scholarship for all the Maritimes. I wrote an entrance exam while in Grade XI but a colonel’s son was accepted instead and flunked. I tried in Grade XII and made the mistake of taking junior matric math over again to be better grounded. The Navy upped its entry requirements to senior matriculation level while neglecting to tell the Navy League until three weeks before entry exams. So I wrote with misgivings and failed again to nail that scholarship. With all this studying, at least my finals in high school were respectable.
My profile was good enough at least in local naval circles so that I was taken into the RCN Reserve as a midshipman. By day I was by now a shipping reporter with The Herald & Mail where first my Dad and then Mom had worked. A naval public affairs officer asked me to go on fulltime duty with him to help handle publicity concerning the Navy’s outstanding contributions to the Halifax bicentennial celebrations of ’49. When I turned up in uniform I was shanghaied off to basic courses instead so it was several months before I could turn up at Atlantic Command headquarters to work for the officer who had wanted me in the first place.
While I’d been in the throes of instruction, a naval friend of the family dropped by for tea and smirked to my family, “We’ve got Howie whittled down to a mere shadow of his former personality!” This kind of conditioning certainly was of no help when I wound up for some difficult months as sole Atlantic Command spokesman. Being a mere snottie, certain officers bullied, blustered or hung up on me and or seldom returned a phone call. As a lowly apprentice officer I could not be all that persuasive. I suppose it didn’t help either when I broke my arm swinging from a rafter at a press club function in historic Cambridge Library, Royal Artillery Park. With cast on, typing of press releases was achieved with only one finger, other elbow operating shift key, and therefore striv-ings late into the night. It was a point of pride to get work out … and then some.
Rear-Admiral Rollo Mainguy, Flag Officer Atlantic Coast, took an interest in me and strongly implied I think of a career in the special branch doing public relations rather than hoping to dash about in command of a warship. This was of course echoed by his chief of staff to whom I reported day to day. While in the training establishment perhaps I had been damned by faint praise in spite of the Cold War intensifying and Naval ex-pansion. I decided reluctantly that the pen could be mightier than the sword after all and perhaps I could help both the Navy and Halifax forget VE Day riots there when hostilities ceased upon the Atlantic early 1945.
Word must have got around the fleet about my dilemma for one day Lieutenant-Commander Tommy Pullen, 5th generation naval officer, bummed lunch money from me at Admiralty House and sat me down beside him. “Snottie, I don’t think very much of the people you’re getting mixed up with…whenever you think you’ve had enough, come see me and I’ll find a place for you in my ship.” It was comforting to have this standing offer in the back of my mind. This particular Pullen reached the four-stripe rank of captain and after commissioning the arctic patrol icebreaker Labrador finished a career, shortened by ill health, as our internationally acknowledged arctic expert.
I was shanghaied again, this time to be quarterdeck midshipman, to assist the officer of the watch, the close-range gunnery officer, the boats officer, and the fleet training officer on board the aircraft carrier Magnificent. When she entered and left harbour it was also my chore to note down in a special notebook every helm and engine order given by Commodore Kenneth F. Adams in command on the bridge. On the quarterdeck I once grabbed the end of a 15-and-a-half-inch manila rope and bowled half a dozen of our sailors over. Our lads from inland were smallish as well, thanks to the Depression. It was thrilling sometimes to con of a ship a city block long, and to see snarly fighter and anti-submarine aircraft take off and land, sometimes not so well. A former Sea Cadet from my old corps ditched hard by in a Fairey Firefly but couldn’t get his seat belt undone in the seconds before it sank. He was one of our administrative writers rewarded the flight for good work.
The Korean War was straining our tiny public affairs branch so I was hauled un-ceremoniously ashore 20 minutes before our departure on a show-the-flag European cruise, my hastily gathered personal effects blowing about on the jetty. I was to man the Atlantic Command P. R. office until someone some ranks higher made it back from the Korean theatre. But not before I worked a whole bunch and got singed a few times.
Moth to a Lamp
Meanwhile I was living in barracks and casually dating a Newfoundland naval nurse who sometimes mentioned getting me together with another Newfie she was sure I’d like. She eventually introduced us and I was quite struck with the warmth of Sub-Lieutenant French’s contralto voice. She invited me to the RCN Hospital annual dance. The drill in such cases is for a nurse to invite an officer, point him at the beer keg, and dance her heart out with all the sailor medical help. Caroline latched onto me instead and, when depositing her at their residence door, I planted a soft, chaste kiss on her cheek. Like many Newfoundland girls she had lovely skin. A veteran of tussles with five bro-thers, she riposted with a friendly growl and solar plexus punch. Soon it was known we were going steady. Gin soaked old dears from the nurses quarters, holdovers from the war, accosted me about Caroline. With Irish exuberance she’d been roughhousing: one passed out briefly while held over a second floor railing. They earnestly wanted me either to pummel her for them or form some outlet for her vigour; so we were wont to exchange friendly wallops. As furniture fell in dignified old Admiralty House, an exasperated colleague exclaimed: “Oh for God’s sake, why don’t you two get married. Then you can skylark all you want in your own home!” A nickname for Ad House was Sad House.
An idea had certainly taken root so when I returned from a Pacific training cruise to South America I spoke vaguely and carefully to Caroline about commitment. As I headed next morning for breakfast in barracks all sorts of people were stopping to con-gratulate me for popping the question.
She and I had fun in, believe it or not, a low-key way. I’d take her to dinner and a movie and she’d sometimes insist on reciprocating. There were occasional mess func-tions. Mostly I drank a lot of tea in the nurse’s residence and at the hospital when she was on break. I strutted her among my Halifax friends, introducing her with, “Meet my girl friend with the child-bearing hips.” She took all in stride and once married had to be released from the Navy. Oops – 10 pregnancies in 12 years!
Our engagement period originally envisioned in two years rapidly dwindled and we planned a quiet marriage that very June since we couldn’t afford a naval wedding with the requisite glitter, archway of swords and scores of guests dressed to the nines. We persuaded our padres not to publish bans and Chaplain (RC) Joseph Whelly of Saint John, my birthplace, agreed to tie the knot for us. Saint Joseph’s Church 14 June 1952 long had been a basement place of worship in a street bordering our barracks because its superstructure had been blown off in the great Halifax Explosion of 1917..
The bulk of my intended’s relations were at the other end of Newfoundland or deep into Canada and she could turn to no one in residence. At the 11th hour she made an exception with Lt. (Medical Nurse) Louise Corriveau who before joining the Navy had nursed the famous Dionne quintuplets Annette, Emily, Yvonne, Cecile and Marie born 1934 northern Ontario. Caroline confided in her so warm-hearted Louise raised her spirits and threw together the traditional “something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue”.
Early on the morning of our marriage, I telephoned Caroline at Russell House, one of two nurses’ residences beside the naval hospital. “Haddo” said I and “haddo” answer-ed she. Both of us had awakened with tension head colds that soon evaporated. My #3 sister Isabel attended my bride at St. Joseph’s along with Lt. George Emerson of Bath-urst, N. B., who slipped away briefly from his officer-of-the day post by HMCS Stadacona’s main gate to be best man. I walked to church from Stad’s B Mess, pausing at a convenience store on Gottingen Street to load up on cigarettes. Arriving in church I looked down to see a broadly grinning Caroline and an obviously fretting George at the foot of the steps. In younger days my punctuality wasn’t quite as sterling as it later became. We were duly married by Father Joe Whelly of Saint John and hied off to Mother’s and Isabel’s tiny apartment for wedding breakfast. It was hard to avoid the bed word when most of our wedding gifts when unwrapped turned out to be blankets.
We took a taxi to Glen Haven in St. Margaret’s Bay where a naval officer near retirement had been readying a small hotel for the tourist trade. On our arrival unan-nounced on his doorstep it had yet to open so he obligingly drove us off to Mullock’s nearby whose proprietress Jessie turned out to be a marvelous cook. Exigencies of the Service being what they were in those distant days, Sub-Lt. (MN) C. M. French was entitled to marriage leave whereas Lt. (SB) H. C. Wallace was not. However, enough naval officers commuted daily to Halifax from the Bay to kindly motor me back and forth.
The rest we reckon is your history – yet how can we possibly forget the marvel-ous celebration all of you staged in Ottawa during our 50th wedding anniversary week.
Love, HCW & CMW
© 2008 All Rights Reserved
I SOMETIMES THINK ONE WRITES TO FIND GOD IN EVERY SENTENCE.
BUT GOD (THE IRONIST) ALWAYS LIVES IN THE NEXT SENTENCE.
Roger Rosenblatt essay in Time magazine 6 Nov. 2000
Narrative history is the kind that comes closest to telling the truth.
You can never get to the truth, but that’s your goal.
Shelby Foote d. 2005 aged 88, Southern U. S. author and Civil War historian.
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