The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  Dr. Pepper opened Isaac Slaney’s chest with the surgical instruments that were in the package Herb Slaney had picked up in Burin, and he carefully removed tissue samples from Mr. Isaac’s lungs. Rennie described the condition of Isaac’s lungs to his son, who later told his wife they were “coated, flat and black.” The doctor shipped the lung tissue to a mainland laboratory for examination and a diagnosis of what really killed Isaac Slaney. He and Rennie then restored the body and the room. The wake began with nobody but Herb and his father, the doctor and Mary Slaney, Mr. Isaac’s widow, aware of what had just transpired.

  THE expert finding was unambiguous. Mr. Isaac Slaney had definitely been suffering from silicosis. The corporation had a problem. The new provincial government of Newfoundland had an even bigger problem.

  37.

  THE late forties and early fifties were an inconvenient time for controversy, for both the government of Newfoundland and the mining companies in St. Lawrence.

  The Second World War had been a godsend for business and the chronically depressed economy of the island. The bad management of economic resources had resulted in a suspension of responsible government in Newfoundland between 1934 and 1949. But the war created a boom that, in a few years, changed everything—at least long enough to persuade the dominion authorities in London and St. John’s that, maybe, Newfoundlanders could once again be trusted to run their own affairs.

  And so, as of April 1, 1949, democracy was back, with a fledgling provincial government struggling to learn the ropes of statesmanship. It had been a bruising campaign, with Newfoundlanders forced to choose between independent nationhood, Confederation and even joining the United States. The population was roughly split between the townies in St. John’s, who supported an independent nation, and the baymen in outports like St. Lawrence, who saw the practical advantages in being part of Canada.

  Whatever the outcome, the hunger for democratic self-government had been sharpened by self-confidence that was nourished by prosperity. The arrival of ten thousand American service personnel and the construction of two large military bases early in the war had created such a demand for workers that the traditional occupations, like forestry, the fishery and mining, were suddenly competing for a resource that had long been taken for granted: labour, skilled and otherwise.

  Wages in the woods and underground were suddenly increasing. Passive unions were becoming more aggressive. It was not coincidental that in early 1941, the St. Lawrence Workers’ Protective Union started butting heads with bosses.

  THE boom, of course, subsided, and by the late forties, Seibert’s operation in St. Lawrence—now overly dependent on a shrinking US market—was struggling again. But after 1949, there was a “real” government in St. John’s and a real political dynamic. Seibert wasted no time in cultivating cordial relations with the new premier of Newfoundland, Joseph R. Smallwood, who was obsessed with catching up—and quickly—with Canadian prosperity.

  Joey Smallwood was born in a hurry. His parents married on December 21, 1900. Baby Joseph arrived three days later, on Christmas Eve. From early childhood, he aspired to journalism and politics, symbiotic occupations back in those free-wheeling days, and by the age of fourteen, he was a printer’s apprentice at a newspaper in St. John’s. By eighteen, he was (temporarily) writing editorials for the city’s leading paper. Early in his journalistic career, he became a socialist through association with the prominent politician and union leader William Coaker, who also owned a newspaper and was, for a while, politically influential.12 Coaker, who was an admirer of dictators like Benito Mussolini but had failed to find the equal of his Italian hero in Newfoundland, became an early advocate of Confederation with Canada, as did, famously, his acolyte.

  Smallwood was also a great admirer of Sir Richard Squires, and like Squires, he was a strong proponent of change through economic growth, particularly industrial development. His long political career was marked by bold initiatives and costly failures as he struggled to transform the Newfoundland economy.

  And so, it was predictable that Smallwood would view the enterprising Walter Seibert with approval, if not admiration, and shortly after Newfoundland became a democracy again, Seibert and Smallwood established a relationship.

  It was a time when Smallwood was cultivating a number of relationships with dubious “entrepreneurs.” The controversial Alfred Valdmanis, a Latvian economist with a spotty wartime record of collaboration with his country’s Nazi occupiers, became Newfoundland’s director general of economic development. Valdmanis was clearly a fan of Walter Seibert and would become influential in persuading Smallwood to provide financial support for Seibert’s mining ventures in St. Lawrence.13

  ON November 7, 1949—a brief eight months after Smallwood had taken office—Seibert drafted a long letter to the premier disclosing that he was facing perilous financial times, and that the jobs of 150 Newfoundlanders and a payroll of $30,000 a month could soon go up in smoke. He needed help from Newfoundlanders. Again.14

  He was under pressure from the Chemical Bank and Trust Co. of New York to liquidate his inventory of finished fluorspar to pay off loans of about $125,000. The bankers were refusing to extend credit to finance winter mining because it would raise his indebtedness by at least another $100,000. The American bank was instructing him to cease production. The Royal Bank of Canada had turned him down two weeks earlier because of his lack of working capital.

  He was in this pickle, he explained to Smallwood, because he’d used all his wartime profits for expansion and had never declared a dividend. (He neglected to explain that much of the “expansion” had been at a facility called St. Lawrence Fluorspar located in Wilmington, Delaware.) Briefly stated, he needed a line of credit for up to $250,000.

  On December 23, 1949, Seibert dispatched a telegram to the St. Lawrence Workers’ Protective Union, now under the leadership of James Cusick, who had replaced the firebrand Aloysius Turpin (temporarily). The telegram was to thank Cusick for agreeing to extend the existing labour–management contract to the end of 1951. Once again, the miners of St. Lawrence were giving Seibert a break.

  And on February 2, 1950, Premier Smallwood sent a telegram to Walter Seibert with the happy news that his line of credit had been approved. The last thing Smallwood needed in these precarious times was static from the miners, and even more alarming, a setback in what seemed to be a promising new economic sector.

  The $250,000 fix tided the corporation over until 1952, when the US government, now anticipating a third world war—this one with either the Soviet Union or Red China—rescued Walter Seibert once again. This time the Americans wanted 150,000 tons of fluorspar, to be delivered over four years starting in 1953. To ensure delivery, the US Defense Materials Procurement Agency advanced a loan of $1.25 million to expand the corporation’s facilities. There was money now for improvements in the workplace, particularly underground, where dust and smoke and water were still major problems.

  Most of the money went instead for a new mill in St. Lawrence and improvements at the fluorspar refinery in Wilmington.

  The Seibert saga in St. Lawrence had been, for twenty years, a story of audacity and luck. Where else on the planet could he have persuaded a population to work for unsecured promises of future payment and job security? He could not have anticipated, or factored into his ambitious plans, the fortuitous calamities of wars, both hot and cold. Nothing less than luck and the patient tolerance of the ordinary people living in Lawn and St. Lawrence had seen him through.

  But luck was running out for Walter Seibert and his St. Lawrence Corporation, and for the men who worked for him. Mr. Isaac Slaney was, in a way, a messenger, bearing news of darker days to come—a canary in a hard-rock mine.

  THE unusual autopsy at Isaac Slaney’s wake would, even in the absence of forensic detail, become an unofficial benchmark in the evolution of official oversight in workplace health and safety in Newfoundland. Though the province had passed its first workers’ compensation regulations i
n 1950 and silicosis was included as a compensable disease, it was rarely diagnosed and hardly ever recognized as grounds for compensation.

  Symptoms were invariably dismissed as evidence of tuberculosis, nothing else. Now there was a case that potentially changed the focus. This was scientific evidence that working in St. Lawrence mines caused silicosis. Isaac Slaney had it. Where else could it have come from? But his case opened up the possibility of a flood of compensation claims from survivors of those miners who had mysteriously died of “miners’ TB.”

  Politicians and bureaucrats now realized that there was a looming problem in St. Lawrence—a health problem, of course, but more significantly, a scandal with potential economic and political consequences.

  An October 1953 meeting about silicosis in the office of Newfoundland’s chief inspector of mines, Fred Gover, left no doubt about the bias of the government. One of the main conclusions of the meeting: “The welfare of the residents of a mining community must be weighed against the possible financial liability of the mine owners should silicosis become prevalent to the point where heavy compensation is necessary.”15

  As late in the discussion as 1954, the Seibert corporation remained defensive. In a letter to the miners’ union, Donald Poynter, with a typical rhetorical flourish, commented that according to his informant, “it would take 197 years” working underground in the corporation mines for a man to breathe in enough dust to cause silicosis. His informant was the chief inspector of mines.16

  It wasn’t surprising, then, that in the beginning, both the corporation and the government had attempted to ignore the diagnosis Dr. Pepper first arrived at in 1949, based on x-rays. Now, after his unorthodox autopsy, he had lab results from tests on actual tissue samples from a post-mortem examination. But still, Mary Slaney’s claim for compensation, based on Dr. Pepper’s evidence that her husband had died from a recognized industrial disease, was rejected by officials.

  It was all too much for Rennie Slaney—until then, a loyal supervisor in the Seibert operation. In 1953, he urged his neighbour’s widow to sue his employer. It was audacious and it was unprecedented—a widow going up against the corporation. And because, thanks to Dr. Pepper, it was so obvious that Mr. Isaac’s widow had a compelling case, the corporation’s lawyers capitulated quickly. They handed Mrs. Slaney a settlement of $10,000. There was now a compelling motivation for the families of dead miners to demand autopsies when their loved ones died after dubious diagnoses of TB.

  IN 1953, Rennie Slaney was only forty-six—the age at which his neighbour, Mr. Isaac, had died—but his own declining health dictated that he could no longer work underground. He became the corporation’s office manager. In 1957, he left mining entirely and became town manager for St. Lawrence. By 1965, he could no longer climb the stairs to reach his office and was forced into an unpaid retirement.

  But after 1952, Rennie Slaney had changed in a deep way that would, inevitably, become political. At about the time of Isaac Slaney’s death, Rennie’s older brother, Arcule, who was fifty-six, began showing symptoms similar to those that had plagued Mr. Isaac for the five years prior to his death. Arcule had been working underground for seventeen years. At nearly forty, he was relatively old when he started out. By 1953, he was too sick to work anywhere. Rennie brought him and another miner to the sanatorium in St. John’s. “At this time,” Rennie later wrote, “there were several miners who had worked under me [as mine captain] already in the San and there were a few others around St. Lawrence unable to work.

  “My brother . . . was at the San for seventeen months. The men received the best of treatment at the San but could not be cured, while cures were being effected in people from other areas in Newfoundland. Those men became fat and healthy-looking but the treatment could not give them back their breath.”17

  He pointed out this anomaly to the director of the tuberculosis hospital, Dr. Raymond E. Bennett. The hospital considered Arcule cured. Rennie noted that his brother could barely walk. What kind of cure was that?

  Dr. Bennett sternly lectured Rennie for his ill-informed impertinence.

  Arcule was aware that like Isaac Slaney, he was suffering from silicosis, and that he was probably facing the same fate as Mr. Isaac. Rennie felt frustrated and impotent. It was now commonplace in St. Lawrence—this peculiar strain of tuberculosis that defied the medical conventions of the day.

  Men like Arcule had largely given up on the medical profession and made hard decisions to cut the TB treatment short. Arcule understood his fate. He had the official diagnosis. He had TB for sure, but also silicosis. He decided to go home and face the music, the inevitable death.

  After he went home, Arcule lasted seventeen more months, during which he faded painfully away, his once massive, powerful body reduced to skin and bones. He died in 1957.

  ARCULE had satisfied the compensation board that he had silicosis, and in his final months he had been receiving compensation. But when he died, his widow, Minnie Slaney, was declared ineligible for continuing support. The silicosis had been the cause of his disability—the reason he couldn’t work—so he qualified for compensation while he was still alive. But the workers’ compensation board declared that the cause of his death was tuberculosis, which didn’t qualify.

  Rennie Slaney couldn’t overlook the unfairness, the twisted sophistry. He first persuaded and then helped his brother’s widow to fight the system. Once again, the lawyers and the bureaucrats backed off. Minnie got her husband’s pension. It was another incremental gain, another precedent. But the future loomed as a long, exhausting struggle, case by case, to prove the legitimacy of claims to compensation for having sacrificed health and quality of life in a potentially lethal work environment.

  Rennie knew that his own health was failing, and that he, too, probably had silicosis (which would later be confirmed). Struggling to breathe was crippling his heart. He’d lost a brother, close friends and neighbours. He was a former boss with an acute feeling of responsibility for the men who had worked for him—men who were now dying hard deaths and leaving families in poverty.

  Circumstances would, inevitably, force him to go public with his private outrage.

  THE suffering of the miners of St. Lawrence was exacerbated by a system weighed down by rules and regulations and rigorous bureaucracies set in place to prevent abuse of public money and resources. Viewed from within the system, each claim was a potential rip-off, someone else looking for a free ride at corporate or government expense.

  It was an attitude towards public oversight not unlike the official disapproval of needy people who, years before, had requested six cents a day in dole. The need for public assistance was, per se, evidence of deficient character. In the opinion of one senior British bureaucrat, P.A. Clutterbuck, in 1939, there really was no excuse for hunger in rural Newfoundland. The dole, while skimpy, was adequate considering the availability of fresh fish and wild berries, the abundance of free firewood and the fact that most rural Newfoundlanders owned their homes and so didn’t have the added burden of paying rent.18

  The English poor, he noted, lacked such fortuitous advantages.

  THE story of the mining industry in St. Lawrence—as well as the attitudes of politicians and public servants in St. John’s and London—leaves little doubt that with few exceptions, bureaucratic principles of “numerical validation” consistently placed the burden of proving the merit of claims for compensation on the shoulders of people who lacked the resources to respond. In many cases, these were people already defeated by the awareness that they were about to die.

  Rendell Turpin was one of the first miners to receive compensation for his silicosis. Unlike Isaac Slaney, he didn’t have to die to have his lungs examined. While Turpin was at the St. John’s sanatorium, doctors removed a part of his lung and discovered silicosis, and on the strength of that biopsy, he got compensation based on his earnings at the time that he became ill. But there was no provision for escalation as living costs increased. He would live out his rem
aining days in tightening financial straits, and as in Arcule Slaney’s case, the authorities would try to cut off the compensation as soon as he was gone.

  Turpin died at the age of fifty-two.

  LEO Loder, one of the miners first on the scene at the Chamber Cove shipwreck on February 18, 1942, died in 1958 at the age of fifty-four. He had been off work, having been diagnosed with silicosis, when he died suddenly of a brain aneurism, and so his family was ineligible for compensation of any kind.

  He left his wife, Lillian, and thirteen children. The family struggled for years and survived with the help of the American James Seamans, who never forgot the kindness and the heroism of the Loders when he was a twenty-three-year-old naval ensign.

  BY 1953, Isaac Slaney, were he not in his grave, might have taken certain satisfaction that, in part because of his death and its dramatic aftermath, officials were now diligently gathering and recording dust measurements in the St. Lawrence mines. But dust conditions in the mines were, by then, relatively mild compared to when Isaac toiled in the strangling dust at Black Duck and Iron Springs in the thirties and the forties. It would have been cold comfort to Mr. Isaac to know the monitoring revealed that dust pollution in most working areas was, by 1953, well within existing statutory limits.

  BY 1953, doctors in St. John’s were dealing with a three-prong question: Did miners who developed silicosis have pre-existing tuberculosis that increased their vulnerability to the disease? Or did the silicosis, even in its early stages, make them more likely to get tuberculosis? And when they died, which of these diseases should be listed as the cause? Silicosis created a corporate and government financial liability. Tuberculosis didn’t.