by Greg Malone
Many royal commission reports sit on shelves gathering dust once they are completed, but the drastic recommendations in the Amulree Report were acted on in London with all possible haste. The Newfoundland Bill was put before the British Parliament on December 13, 1933. Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, disputed the need for the bill and, indeed, the need for dismantling democracy in Newfoundland. Echoing Magrath’s objection, he observed: “all the best countries default nowadays.… It is about time the Government faced the fact that the world cannot stand the interest demanded by the money lenders.”26 The main objection from the opposition ranks in the British Parliament was the lack of any cutoff date for the Commission of Government. Morgan Jones, the MP for Caerphilly, wondered how the Newfoundland legislature would be restored in the future, what the phrase “on request from the people of Newfoundland” might mean, and how such a request would be made: “As I see the position,” he remarked, “there will be no machine of government. There will be no vocal expressions of the opinions or desires of the people of Newfoundland, no elected assembly or organization.”27 Nevertheless, this clause, deliberately vague, was left to allow Britain the option of delaying, even reneging on, its promise to restore responsible government to Newfoundland. The word “revoke” was objected to and replaced by the word “suspend,” in relation to the Letters Patent that established the Newfoundland legislature. No definite cutoff date was ever included, but J.H. Thomas, the dominions secretary, assured the House that “temporary is written all over the Bill.”28
On December 15, 1933, after an all-night session, the Newfoundland Act was finally passed and the clock turned back one hundred years on the British Empire in North America. Newfoundland again became a British colony. Once in control, the British rescheduled the Newfoundland debt for themselves along the lines that Alderdice had earlier requested and been denied. “In short,” historian Peter Neary writes, “a rescheduling of debt that would have been anathema while Newfoundland was a self-governing Dominion would be perfectly acceptable should she forego that constitutional status.”29
The debate on the Amulree Report continues. In the April 28, 2003, edition of The Globalist, an online magazine devoted to the global economy, politics and culture, David Hale, writing about the International Monetary Fund, gave this perspective of the Newfoundland crisis of 1933:
The most extraordinary debt restructuring of the pre-1945 era was not in Latin America. It was in a dominion of the British Empire, the country of Newfoundland. During the early 1930s Newfoundland experienced a form of political punishment and national humiliation for its debt problems which is unsurpassed by any other country since the emergence of government debt markets in the 17th century.
… The [Royal] commission’s proposed solution to the crisis … has no parallels in any other sovereign debt restructuring … The notion that a self-governing community of 280,000 English-speaking people should give up both democracy and independence in order to avoid debt and default was unprecedented.
… If the IMF had existed in 1933 it would have granted emergency debt relief to Newfoundland and the country would have never given up democracy or independence. Indeed, democracy is now a pre-condition for IMF aid.
… [The story] is a reminder of why, in the aftermath of World War II, the nations of the world created the International Monetary Fund. They did not want nations to ever again confront a choice between debt and democracy.30
In 1933 Great Britain chose to humiliate Newfoundland and drag the country’s reputation, and that of its people, through the mud. It did so not because Newfoundland deserved such singular condemnation, but as a pretext to gain full control over the country while it was temporarily broke. Clutterbuck, the author of the report, was rewarded by a grateful government at Whitehall with a silver salver and a promotion to head officer in charge of Newfoundland affairs at the Dominions Office. He was offered a silver inkwell, but he requested the salver instead because he already had received an inkwell from another commission.31 Presumably his reward betokened the success of his mission to annex Newfoundland, not to saddle the empire with a liability.
In St. John’s, the Newfoundland Legislative Chamber was dismantled and taken over as offices by British civil servants. The furnishings and artifacts of one hundred years of parliamentary democracy were cleared out, put in storage or destroyed. This act of official vandalism, combined with the lack of any time limit on the new Commission of Government, added to the growing suspicion that the country had been annexed and that the British were there to stay. In 1935, one year after this takeover, Frederick Alderdice, the former Newfoundland prime minister, wrote these bitter words to Lord Amulree: “To you alone I would say, if I had had any idea the present plan of government was to turn out as it has, I am afraid I would not have been so ready to accept it.”32
2
FOR ALL MANKIND:
THE COMMISSION OF GOVERNMENT
Lord Amulree and Alexander Clutterbuck were not the only important visitors touring Newfoundland in the summer of 1933. Charles Lindbergh was travelling around the Island as well, scouting out the best locations for aerodromes for Pan American World Airways. He would settle on Botwood, which became a refuelling stop on the Great Circle route six years later. Lindbergh also attended an international conference in St. John’s involving Pan American, Imperial Airways and government officials from the United States, Great Britain, Canada and Newfoundland, where agreement was reached on establishing a transatlantic air route in Newfoundland. As Jim Halley put it:
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of aviation in the ’20s and ’30s. It was equal to the space race and the Internet today. The world was being connected faster and faster, and everyone was excited about it and Newfoundland was at the centre of all the activity. After World War I, airfields sprang up around St. John’s and in Harbour Grace, and we had a steady stream of famous aviators coming to the Island with their entourages. When I was just a boy my father took me by the hand and pointed up to the sky to see Lindbergh fly over. When the Graf Zeppelin came across from Europe it flew down low over St. John’s and we all waved up at the passengers. All the boys had balsa planes with the propeller powered by a rubber band. Since 1919 everyone who was trying to cross the Atlantic non-stop came to Newfoundland to take off. The reason was obvious of course. Newfoundland is a thousand miles farther out in the Atlantic, and therefore a thousand miles closer to Europe than New York is, so my generation had great expectations for aviation in Newfoundland and so did Great Britain.”1
By the end of the First World War Britain realized that the supremacy of its great cruise ships was over. Air travel would replace steamer travel, and if Great Britain wished to retain its superiority it must somehow take the lead in aviation. In 1919 the English team of John Alcock and Arthur Brown, flying out of Lester’s Field in St. John’s, was the first to make the transatlantic hop successfully. Their prize of £10,000, or $50,000, was put up by Lord Northcliffe, the owner of Britain’s Daily Mail, though it was presented by Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for air in Lloyd George’s government. Britain had its eye on Newfoundland, and once the Commission of Government was in place in St. John’s in 1934, it immediately began to construct the largest aerodrome in the world at Gander.
According to Halley, everyone knew what Britain was up to and why it wanted Newfoundland. Amulree had foreseen a great British rebuilding of Newfoundland, and the Commission of Government announced many lofty development plans. By and large these plans came to nothing. In fact, unemployment and poverty increased under British rule. The Newfoundland Airport at Gander, however, was completed and operational by 1938, at a cost of £900,000, or almost $5 million, despite the Great Depression, and it gave Britain instant superiority in transatlantic civil aviation. The imperial gambit had worked.
As important as Newfoundland was to Great Britain and civil aviation before the Second World War, after 1939 it became absolutely vital to the war effort. When Fr
ance fell to the Nazis in 1940, Britain, cut off from the rest of Europe, faced blockade and isolation. Overnight the North Atlantic Convoy Route became Britain’s only lifeline. Everything it needed, from flour to bombers, now came from North America, and the western end of that lifeline was the island of Newfoundland—which, by a stroke of amazing good fortune, was under British government control.
By then, both Canada and the United States were abundantly aware of the Island’s strategic importance to them as well. Any eventual attack on North America from across the Atlantic would first encounter Newfoundland. Once again the oldest colony, now the newest, proved an invaluable bargaining chip for the United Kingdom as Newfoundland became the Gibraltar of North America. In 1940 Britain signed the Leased Bases Agreement with the United States for the defence of the Island, by means of which Britain obtained fifty American destroyers that it badly needed for continuing the war in return for leases for US bases in Newfoundland and the Caribbean. The agreement for the bases in Newfoundland, the largest outside the United States, provided that:
His Majesty’s Government will secure the grant to the Government of the United States freely and without consideration of the Lease for immediate establishment and use of Naval and Air Bases and facilities for entrance thereto and the operation and protection thereof on the Avalon Peninsula and on the Southern Coast of Newfoundland and on the East Coast.… All the Bases will be leased to the United Sates for a period of 99 years, free from all rent.2
The British government’s assertion of the right to lease large tracts of Newfoundland territory to foreign powers for close to a century without any reference to the local people raised strong objection across the Island and became a cause for further embarrassment to the Commission of Government. Lord Cranborne at the Dominions Office “recognized that very real hardship to the inhabitants of the territories and Newfoundland might well be involved.”3
Prime Minister Winston Churchill was worried that Newfoundlanders would consider the “extremely harsh” American terms, which included total jurisdiction for the United States on its bases, as a “surrender.” He met personally in London with two of the visiting Newfoundland commissioners, L.E. Emerson and J.H. Penson, and pleaded with them to accept the deal. To help them win public support for the agreement back home, he wrote Emerson a letter in March 1941 intended for publication in Newfoundland.
I would only ask the people of Newfoundland, on whose loyalty we have, in this testing time as throughout her long and eventful history, had ample proof, to bear in mind the wide issues which hang upon this agreement.… It is with these considerations in our minds that, recognizing to the full the considerable sacrifices made by Newfoundland to the cause which we all have at heart and her splendid contribution to the war effort, we ask her to accept the Agreement. It will be yet one more example of what she is ready to do for the sake of the Empire, of liberty, and of the welfare of all mankind.4
The commissioners had no choice but to bow to Churchill’s eloquent appeal and accept the agreement. They could do no more. But as Peter Neary records in his monumental work on the Commission of Government years, Emerson and Penson “were to leave the British capital fearful and bitterly disappointed men.”5
The agreement in fact set a bad precedent for Newfoundland in terms of the British government’s right to make a long-term disposition of Newfoundland territory while holding only temporary authority on the Island as a government without appropriate local representation. Churchill’s patriotic and moving letter, which was actually written by Sir Charles Dixon, the assistant under-secretary of state, imploring Newfoundland to accept the US bases, was printed in the local newspapers and the deal went through.6 The historic meeting between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill five months later at Placentia Bay off the south coast of Newfoundland underscored the Island’s strategic significance to both allies. There the leaders signed the Atlantic Charter, proclaiming the rights of all peoples to self-determination. The irony of those two great champions of democracy plotting to save the free world as they met in the recently re-colonized Newfoundland was lost for the moment under weightier concerns. It was fortuitous also that Newfoundland, which had been stripped of its democracy for failure to pay its First World War debt to Britain and Canada, was now able to facilitate the arming of Great Britain and the defence of Canada and the United States at such little cost to each empire, and with only such residual benefits to the people of Newfoundland as could not be conveniently avoided.
In 1939, despite the rectitude of the Commission of Government, Newfoundland was even worse off than it had been in 1933. After five years of the benevolent dictatorship, 50,000 men were still on relief, and poverty had only increased. These and other criticisms appeared in a series of articles written in London’s Daily Express by Morley Richards, who charged that the UK government had exploited the Island and done nothing to improve conditions. Alexander Clutterbuck was assigned the task of rebutting Richards. In an April letter in defence of the Commission of Government, he completely reversed himself on the drastic conclusions he had earlier drawn about Newfoundland in the Amulree Report and, in particular, about the justification for suspending Newfoundland’s legislature in 1933. Now, he argued, the disappointing conditions that prevailed in Newfoundland despite the performance of the Commission of Government were due to “a depressed world market which no Newfoundland government could control,”7 not even the government of the much reviled Sir Richard Squires.
The justification and pretext for the dismantling of the Newfoundland legislature might be knocked down, but no thought was given to restoring it; nor was there any apology. The Commission of Government would remain at the helm in Newfoundland. What Clutterbuck wrote was for English eyes only. That same year Thomas Lodge, one of the first British commissioners, published a book, Dictatorship in Newfoundland, about his experience in the Commission of Government. Lodge wrote: “No one inside the British Administration had a positive sincere desire to make a real success of this bizarre experiment in dictatorship.”8 Disillusioned by the failure of the Commission, he concluded: “to have abandoned the principles of democracy without accomplishing economic rehabilitation is surely an unforgiveable sin.”9 The Dominions Office, although stung by the criticism, did little beyond public relations to improve the situation on the Island.
The arrival of the American troop ship the USS Edmund B. Alexander in St. John’s harbour in January 1941 signalled the end of the long depression in Newfoundland and the beginning of prosperity. By 1944, after just three years of American activity on the Island, not only was there full employment but the Commission of Government was running surpluses—an astonishing turnaround. The Canadian banks in Newfoundland were also making millions from the large volume of American dollars now coming through their accounts, adding significantly to Canada’s foreign currency reserves. Public criticism of the Leased Bases Agreement receded with the enormous financial benefits resulting from the aircraft-base building boom. Geoffrey Shakespeare, on a whirlwind fact-finding mission for the Dominions Office in 1941, reported on the need to capitalize on the quickly changing state of affairs: “I … suggest we really make a bold and comprehensive effort to repair the deficiencies of years of unimaginative government. I may add that Americans and Canadians, who are pouring millions of pounds into the Island for war purposes, are shocked at the general state of its development.… The housing conditions in St. John’s are a disgrace.”10
The level of development on the Island was not commensurate with its strategic importance, Shakespeare argued, and in view of the American and Canadian investment, Britain’s could be no less. As Lord Amulree had before him, and others would later on, Shakespeare outlined a bold plan for reconstruction to justify the continuance of the Commission of Government. He presumed, albeit wrongly, that Canada and the United States would lose interest in Newfoundland after the war and proposed that it once again be granted dominion status—making it a British bulwark in the North Atlantic.
He saw federation with Canada as a possibility in the future. The policy he proposed would remain essentially unchanged in Britain until 1945.
In the meantime, the Americans got the bases they wanted in Newfoundland for the defence of North America. The British got their ships and planes from the Americans. And the Newfoundlanders got the Americans and immediate relief from British thrift. Britain did, however, succeed in having the Americans reduce the salaries they were paying the Newfoundlanders to something more in line with British pay. The Americans were big spenders, but the American “invasion” was more than a great economic success in Newfoundland—it was a huge social success too. By the time Pepperrell Air Force Base closed in 1960, approximately 20,000 American service personnel stationed there had married Newfoundland women, producing 60,000 American-Newfoundland children and few recorded divorces. Ironically, the arrival in Newfoundland of thousands of American and Canadian personnel to fight the war in Europe would finally turn Newfoundland’s focus away from Europe and towards North America. However, if the American–Newfoundland connection was a marriage of the heart, the same could not be said of the Canadian–Newfoundland relationship. As Governor Walwyn wrote to Sir Eric Machtig, under-secretary of state, at the Dominions Office in 1944: “The behaviour of the Americans, except in isolated incidents in the early days, has been infinitely better than the Canadians, and is so today.”11
