About a hundred years ago Winston Churchill referred to the fishermen of Newfoundland as,” the best small boat men in the world”. I can’t recall there being in our community, at least in the 1950’s and 60’s, a loss of life from a small boat. Considering that the motor boats or dories were often loaded and sometimes overloaded with either fish or fishing gear, that statement was made with good reason. Therefore it should not be unusual that a memory from those times didn’t involve boats directly or fishing. A few years back motor boats, or punts as we called them, seldom moved in the summertime for any reason other than work related to fishing. So it was that one late summer’s evening in the early 1950’s when I heard the Lathrop engine, and knowing by the sound that it was Wadman’s skiff, I waited for it to come into view on its way out the harbour. This was before they had their first boat the Golden Rocket or Golden Comet as she was later called. What I saw in the first five or six seconds after the skiff came into view is to this day one of my most vivid memories. Since this is a word picture, a few definitions might be in order depending on your vintage. A skiff is an overgrown motor boat of about thirty feet or so; a man dressed all in black and wearing a black hat is a priest; a thwart, usually pronounced “tawt”, is a crosspiece in a motor boat sometimes used as a seat, a skiff might have had three of these; a tiller is the mechanism used to steer. So the picture as it developed was this: a man dressed all in black in the front and obviously paying attention to someone or something not visible to me; a man jumping from tawt to tawt towards the front of the boat with an obvious sense or urgency and finally a man at the tiller. All were indications of something serious that we would later learn to be a construction accident that would in a similar circumstance today be referred to as life threatening. The injured man was being transported to the Come-by-Chance hospital. Since communication by telephone with the nurse in Woody Island was time consuming the boat had to stop along the way to pick her up and continue the two hour trip to Swift Current where the doctor, would be waiting, having been contacted from Woody Island. When they arrived at Swift Current no time was lost as the doctor quickly decided that what could have been done was done well and the priority was to get the patient to hospital. All that was left for the boat’s crew was to return home. One can’t imagine the family’s anxiety and fear as they waited for the news that the men in the skiff would bring back. Fortunately for all it turned out to be good news. What made the good news possible? No doubt the strength and courage of the patient but in no small way the response of all involved including the following public figures in the order I saw them as they came into view, plus the medical professionals involved. The man in black: Father William Collins, newly minted Bar Haven Parish priest, who attended to the patient until they reached Woody Island. The man rushing forward and the man at the tiller: Jack Wadman and Kevin Wadman of the firm Wadman and Sons I think it was named at the time, both only one side and the other of twenty years of age . In those times twenty year olds would know as much as there was to know about boats, engines and navigation. Joining the crew at Woody Island was Nurse Ethel Williams, well known and admired in Placentia Bay and after many years of service deservedly named a Member of the Order of Canada. Dr. M. G. Coxon, the first, well respected and long time doctor of the Walwyn cottage hospital at Come-by-Chance. The patient recovered and went on to lead a long and productive life thanks to the above mentioned and others who may have been involved before I saw the skiff that unforgettable summer’s evening.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 17:57:28 +0000
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