And so, on the morning of February 15, 1965, Rennie Slaney sat at his typewriter and started writing down the names. It’s possible to say with some precision when he made his list, because Roche Turpin’s name was there, among the dead. And Roche Turpin had just died that very day.
WHEN Roche Turpin got his death sentence, it would have consisted of just four words: “Abnormality. See your doctor.”1
It would have been a simple notation on an x-ray report. It was a woefully common occurrence those days. For Turpin, it would mark the beginning of an ordeal that was all the more daunting because of its familiarity. He knew what was in store for him.
By 1963, when he got his verdict, Roche Turpin had already seen it many times—the withering of strong men, neighbours, relatives. Men he’d known and worked with. And he would have felt it coming on well before the x-ray, the ebbing energy, the difficulty breathing, the nocturnal terrors. And the private moments of bitterness and grief.
He had become an old man and yet he was just forty-six when they told him. So much life unfinished.
He’d been a miner for more than half his life. He’d started out, as his people had for centuries, as a fisherman. Over the next two years after the dreadful diagnosis, he’d have many moments when he wished he’d never left the sea.
But his fishing days were back before 1938. The fishery, especially on the south coast of Newfoundland, was a dead end. It had been like that since the great tidal wave of November 1929. For years, the catch was a fraction of what it had been before the tsunami. Foreign markets had either disappeared in the Depression or been taken over by Icelanders and aggressive continental Europeans.
St. Lawrence and Lawn were lucky, though, blessed by an accident of geology. They were sitting on great wealth, and as of 1933, bold investors from St. John’s and the United States were determined to exploit that wealth. In the long run, everyone would benefit.
In the short run, though, there would be sacrifices. Mining fluorspar was pure drudgery, but it was steady work, and while conditions were still primitive and the pay insulting, even in the midst of hard times everywhere, there was a future and that was priceless.
And then there was a new mining company in town, American Newfoundland Fluorspar. In 1938, Roche Turpin went to work for the newcomers, who were beginning to develop a major property that would become the Director mine, later owned by Alcan.
FOR weeks, Roche had been fighting a series of heavy, persistent colds and eventually what seemed to be bronchitis. He’d always been a strong and vigorous man, frequently heading off into the bush after a hard day’s work to clear his mind, or fish or hunt or gather firewood, or just walk and think. Now he was feeling weak and listless and struggling with no small amount of frustration over his diminished physical abilities. So he went to see his doctor.2
He might have had a lurking suspicion that the symptoms were more than the common cold. He’d recently returned from British Columbia. He’d come to a major decision—to leave Newfoundland and find work in another mine, preferably in BC, where the perils were more commonplace and there were higher standards for health and safety in the workplace.
He’d flown out to Vancouver, had an interview; he seemed confident. But then his prospective new employers had sent him for a medical, which included a chest x-ray. And he’d failed it, and because he’d failed it, he didn’t get the job.
He should go back home, they told him, get checked out there. Now he was feeling awful, heavy respiratory symptoms. And now he was facing Dr. Hollywood.
DR. Brian Hollywood, chief of medicine at the US Memorial Hospital, had been in St. Lawrence since 1960. He grew up in Ireland. He felt at home in St. Lawrence, understood the culture and the people. He was familiar with complaints like the ailments that brought Roche Turpin to his office. He would have felt a weary sense of despair as Roche sat before him, describing symptoms Dr. Hollywood had heard many, many times before from men who wanted to believe that he could offer some relief.
It’s just a cold, right? Sometimes the symptoms hang on longer than they should. Right? The flu, perhaps. I’ll take some medicine, a bit of rest. All it’s going to take to be as good as new. Right? When can I go back to work?
The doctor would have projected hope, perhaps offered a prescription. Maybe he’d even given Roche a note for his supervisors—the man needs time off to recuperate. Working underground was not conducive to recovery from a respiratory problem. Shortly after that meeting, the company assigned Roche to a surface job.
What the doctor would have known but could not say was that working underground for nearly half his life had already done its damage, and it couldn’t be reversed.
HOPE dies slowly, even in the face of certainty. Priscilla Turpin, who would outlive her husband by more than fifty years, said, “Deep down, I don’t know if he ever convinced himself that he had cancer. He used to say to me a few times, ‘When I get a bit better, you and I are going to go in to St. John’s and I’m going to see a specialist.’ I’d say, ‘Yes.’ [But] I knew.”3
With the normal terror at the prospect of personal extinction, there is the burden of worry about the inevitable hardships the family will face. Roche and Priscilla had six children. The youngest, Ellen, was only four. And yet they were infinitely better off than the family of Thomas Lake, who’d died of lung cancer in 1949 at the age of thirty-nine.4
Thomas Lake left eight kids. He had continued working until two weeks before he died, knowing there would be no steady income after he was gone, except perhaps from welfare. His wife died three months after he did. Their oldest boy raised his seven siblings.
Because Thomas Lake had been forced to stop working two years before the Workmen’s Compensation Act came into effect in Newfoundland, the family’s later claim for compensation was turned down. In any case, lung cancer wasn’t then recognized as a compensable disease. The children survived with meagre help from social assistance and money from their grandfather.
Roche Turpin would have been aware that, mercifully, his condition qualified for compensation under regulations that had taken effect in 1960. There was no doubt about that. Lung cancer was now covered, if that was really what he had. He also had the comfort of some insurance coverage from the company and a policy he’d taken out and paid for on his own.
He might also have taken solace from the fact that his wife, Priscilla, was relatively well educated. She had attended high school and had completed a course that qualified her to teach, which she had done for several years before taking a job as a file clerk with Newfluor. She’d be all right in the long run, after he was gone.5
Priscilla had worked in the Alcan office until the early fifties, when she married Roche, who was then approaching his mid-thirties and was working for the same company as an underground electrician. And after Roche was gone, she would take a part-time job at the St. Lawrence post office, where she continued to work until she could retire in 1985. Her limited financial security did not, however, reduce the burdens of single parenthood, the loneliness, the coping with the needs of kids who would never fully understand why “poor Daddy” wasn’t there anymore.6 “At first the youngsters, if I couldn’t come up until six o’clock . . . they’d be all up in the window; every pane there had a face in it waiting for Mom to come home.”7
Then Mom laid down the law. They were given jobs. Lucille, who was thirteen, became the cook, and Mom made it clear to all of them that she expected a tidy house and supper on the table when she came home from work. Gradually the anxious faces in the windows disappeared.
THE Turpin story illustrates the private agonies behind each diagnosis—and by 1965, there had been dozens of them and there would be dozens more.
Priscilla Turpin could not forget the slow drift towards the inevitable. A mysterious and persistent illness late in 1963. September 1964, Roche is in a St. John’s hospital. October 1964, Priscilla makes the long and by now prohibitively expensive journey to the city to visit him; she’s shocked to see
him—he’s dropped nearly sixty pounds. He’s in a ward with five other seriously sick and injured people; he’s in despair. His bedside table is stacked with cards and letters that he hasn’t even opened. There has been confirmation of his darkest fears—it is definitely lung cancer. Untreatable. November 1, his brother travels to St. John’s to bring him home, but it becomes quickly apparent, especially to Roche, that the family lacks the strength and physical resources to look after him. December 22, Dr. Hollywood offers him a hospital bed. He accepts.
Priscilla went to see him every day, often more than once. Initially she brought the children but soon decided it wasn’t helpful. “I brought them in a couple of times to see him, but they always made him very unhappy, and he always cried. And the doctor said I’d better not bring them too often. It made him very lonely.”
After less than two months in the hospital, Roche was dead at the age of forty-eight.
WHEN Roche Turpin first went underground, in 1938, it would have been with the sense of achievement of someone who, perhaps for the first time, had steady work and the prospect of a firm financial future. And working underground—for the men who chose what for many would seem an impossibly dangerous, claustrophobic occupation—offered certain psychic rewards that matter greatly to a particular breed of individual: the collegiality that exists among workers who must rely on one another for survival, routinely doing jobs that others couldn’t or wouldn’t even think of trying.
It probably would not have mattered much to him that he was working in an industry that was, for all practical purposes, unregulated, and that his health and safety were dependent on the enforcement of only one law—as would be acknowledged officially many years later—“the law of self-preservation.”8
He was twenty-two years old when he started out. He was strong. He was, as far as he could tell, healthy. So what if the mining regulations that applied then had been devised thirty years earlier and were hopelessly irrelevant to the workplace he now inhabited? So what if Newfoundland was run by unelected bureaucrats who refused to risk industrial development by nitpicking about health and safety in the workplace?
It’s unlikely that Roche Turpin was aware that in 1936, an Ontario mine inspector, who had visited St. Lawrence to assess working conditions, had urged the commission running the government to introduce new regulations that would require the owners of the St. Lawrence mines to meet the kind of industrial standards that applied in other places. There were rules and they were getting stricter in the provinces of Canada and in the United States. The commissioners didn’t listen then, nor would they four years later, in 1940, when he repeated his critique.
The Ontario consultant, A.E. Cave, was ignored until after 1949, when Newfoundland became a part of Canada. By 1951, the new province had put in place protective legislation, including a system for financial compensation for work-related injury or other disability, or death. The new laws stopped short of pre-employment screening for miners, a practice that in other provinces included chest x-rays to identify people with pre-existing problems or obvious vulnerabilities to the perils of working in a damp and dusty environment, like a mine.
In reality, most miners would have quietly approved of such an omission. An x-ray could raise another barrier to a livelihood, as Roche Turpin learned when he looked for work in British Columbia. Most miners smoked cigarettes. Many had survived some contact with tuberculosis. Many miners from the early days of Black Duck and Iron Springs had evidence of silicosis. There were many reasons for a prospective miner to be nervous about having to step in front of an x-ray machine.
Miners, like many industrial workers at the time, faced a commonplace dilemma—weighing the potential risk of illness, disability and death against the very real prospect of unemployment and poverty, a kind of living death with which so many were already only too familiar.
The choice, especially if a man was young and strong and hard up for a job, was easy.
45.
THE day Roche Turpin died—February 15, 1965—was the day that Rennie Slaney was transformed from a silent witness (or in special cases, quiet advocate) for the dead or dying. Because of what he did that day, he would become the public face and voice for a story that could no longer be ignored.
He had nothing left to lose. He was fifty-eight years old, but the years he’d spent working as a miner had so severely compromised his health that he could no longer work, not even in a relatively easy office job.
He was by then town manager for St. Lawrence, but he could barely climb the stairs to his office and would soon have to retire from that position. His lungs were shot. He was suffering from chronic bronchitis, obstructive emphysema, infective asthma and cor pulmonale, a usually terminal heart disease caused by lung failure.9 He’d had his first serious heart attack in 1952, when he was forty-five. That was when he had to stop working underground. The corporation gave him an office job, but in 1957, when Seibert’s company started to shut down, Rennie Slaney, after twenty-three years in mining, was out of work.
For most of the years he spent working for the Seibert outfit, he was a boss—an underground shift boss and eventually a mine captain, which is a kind of general foreman. He’d started out the hard way, at the Black Duck mine, and on many days in that brutal place, he’d have asked himself why he gave up working on the coastal steamers.
But he was married then and the kids were coming quickly. In his peak working years, he had twelve of them still living at home. And now he knew his working days were over. He could not have known he was starting something that, even if it didn’t pay much, would energize the last years of his life.
ON that day, he typed up five single-spaced pages and set out for an appearance before a special committee appointed by the Smallwood government to review the provincial Workmen’s Compensation Act. In his written presentation, he mentioned that Roche Turpin had died that day, and that another miner, Harry Clarke, was in the same St. Lawrence hospital “just awaiting his time.” Harry Clarke, in fact, died three days later.
It was a brief and pointed statement, but he started with an apology: “You may ask why I did not take an active interest in the situation long before. Well, I was not a member of the local union, and was not protected by it, and I was raising a family of twelve children, and one did not have to do very much to be expelled from a position.”10
He explained that he had spent twenty years underground as a supervisor and knew almost all the men who had died or were dying. He gave a brief history of the mining industry in St. Lawrence—how local fishermen and merchants pitched in to get it started, how they endured hardship and poverty through the early years. “The work was pure slavery,” he said, “made all the harder because of lack of good equipment and material and because the miners were ill-clad and ill-fed.”
And the situation didn’t improve much when the corporation started earning profits. The pay was minimal and paydays were irregular. Working conditions improved slowly—it would take years to get amenities like hard hats, proper lighting, workwear that was waterproof. The mines never got proper ventilation until the rising death toll made it unavoidable in 1960.
He spared no graphic detail. “From Sunday night to Saturday night the mine was full of dust and smoke, and myself and the men would have to leave the drift and come to the station, where we would throw up for as long as an hour, and then some. After a while the throw-up would be mostly blood.”
And then the fatal sickness started.
In my neighbourhood alone, around twenty young men have died in the worst of agony only a matter of months after they had to quit the mine. Some of the men who died had difficulty to get compensation . . . I did see a fisherman ex-miner who was receiving partial compensation trying to fish. He was brought in from the fishing grounds and hauled up over the wharf with a rope.
This is not human treatment, after a man worked in the mine under the conditions that existed here for ten or twelve years, when everyone knows that he was exposed to dust a
nd the curse of radioactivity.
But the main point that he had to make was about the living, the survivors of all those dead miners. There were hundreds of children and widows struggling to get by on stingy, hard-won compensation benefits or welfare. The system was too adversarial. Government officials were denying compensation arbitrarily.
The most powerful section of his brief was at the end: a list of names, ninety-one men he knew personally—men he had worked with, neighbours and friends—now dead from mining accidents or illnesses they had contracted in the workplace. And the names of twenty others—men so sick they couldn’t work.
And then he tabled his list.
He went home, unsure if anybody had been listening to him. He reviewed his own words. Maybe he felt he had said too much, or maybe not enough. But he kept his five typewritten pages handy and, in his own handwriting, continued adding to the list. Sylvester Edwards. David Joseph Clarke. Jack Fitzpatrick . . .
It took two years for the committee to report its findings to the legislature. But when it did, Rennie Slaney’s words reverberated across the land.
46.
AFTER 1959, it was no longer speculative that for the previous twenty-five years, St. Lawrence miners had been working in unsafe levels of dust and radioactivity. The scientists who’d gathered proof published what they’d found out about the St. Lawrence mines in a British journal in 1964. Their paper would eventually turn up in Newfoundland, and one of the first Newfoundlanders to read it was Rennie Slaney. He would pass it on to Aloysius Turpin, who was once again at the helm of the St. Lawrence miners’ union.
Slaney and Turpin were aware that the investigators, Windish and deVilliers, had established beyond any doubt that there was significant radioactivity in the mines, and that poor ventilation had caused frequent lethal spikes in radiation levels. They went further in the scientific journal and spelled out the consequences. The health profile presented in their paper made grim reading for the former senior supervisor.
The Wake Page 25
