Thursday, December 29, 2016

Arrival of Joseph Baggs in Toronto, Canada, 1874

The following piece is an excerpt from Chapter One of my forthcoming book: Pack your Baggs: a family's journey from Newfoundland to Australia


Toronto, Canada 1874

The train bringing Joseph Baggs to Toronto draws in to Union Station. There is a screech of metal and the wooden carriage gives out an almighty shudder, as if rattling its aching bones. Joseph hears the low hiss of steam and simultaneously feels a sigh of relief for their safe arrival. He has reached his final destination, but the arduous journey has taken a toll on his 54-year-old body and he is exhausted. He draws up the carriage window and puts his head out, only to be hit by a blast of hot humid air. The mayhem on the platform is overwhelming. Porters are loudly touting for business and a sea of strange faces pass by. In the centre of the platform a stout man in a long frock coat stands holding up a sign that reads "Wesleyan Methodist Congregation". 'Maybe they can help,' thinks Joseph.



Joseph turns to his wife, 'Phoebe, will you just look at all these people. I've never seen so many gathered in one place.'

'I suppose most of them have come to meet the new arrivals,' Phoebe says.

'Well no one will be here to meet us,' Joseph says. 'We are strangers in this place.'

That thought gives him pause and he casts his mind back to home.

'If only my brothers could see all this. They'd be astounded,' Joseph says.

'Yes indeed. I wonder what they are doing right now?' Phoebe says.

'Most likely they'll be heading back into the cove in their fishing dories – if the weather was kind to them today.'



Joseph keeps his inner fears to himself as he reflects on the momentous step he has taken in coming to a new country. After years of agonising over whether to branch out on his own, Joseph has acted and arrived in Toronto. Will he be able to find work at this stage of life? Cod fishing, which has sustained his family for generations, is not an option in this inland town. His future is vested in the decision to emigrate, so he has to make it work. Added to that, there is the enormous expense he has incurred – the cost of the steamer out of Saint John's and the tickets for nine members of the family on the railroad.



'That man on the train kept going on about "the Panic",' Phoebe says. 'Whatever did he mean?'



'There is an economic depression and they are predicting rough waters ahead. But I take the positive approach. We are blessed with our seven children and the older boys are behind us in this venture.'



Joseph gathers the younger children to him and pushes open the carriage doors.

'Come along Allan, Arabella, collect your belongings.'

His eyes scan up to the high vaulted roof of the train station.

'Look children, what a grand building this Union Station is! You will never have seen its like before.'



Nothing could have prepared Joseph for this new world. Until now, he had spent his entire life in the familiar surroundings of his close-knit fishing community in Newfoundland, where everyday life had continued unchanged over generations. How will he make the transition to city life in a new country at this advanced stage of life? What work will he find?



Joseph Baggs, his wife Phoebe and their seven children, some of whom are adults by this stage, make their way down the platform carrying a motley collection of bags and boxes from home. When they reach the Wesleyan man holding up the sign, Joseph pauses.




 

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

The enemy bares his teeth

Northern Ontario near Monteith, frozen lakes and rivers. Photograph taken from the air, April 2016



The Enemy Bares his Teeth

Monteith is hardly the place you would choose to spend a winter. The town is located in the backwoods of northern Ontario, half way between Toronto and Hudson Bay. In the 1930s it recorded the province's coldest minimum ever, when the temperature dropped to 65 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Yet, in November 1942, I was posted there to work as an Army dentist in a field hospital at the Monteith internment camp.

I farewelled my wife Marg in Toronto and, in the company of a few other officers, boarded a steam train for the 400 mile trip north. To keep us from freezing to death in the shaky wooden carriage, rudimentary heating was provided, but the wind still managed to penetrate the cracks beneath the doors. We hunkered down inside our great coats, played cards and smoked to relieve the monotony. It was a twelve hour journey through a snowy Christmas-card landscape pockmarked with frozen lakes, as white as the lunar surface.

Monteith had been chosen as the site of internment Camp 23, because of its remoteness and inaccessibility – there were no roads into the camp and no means for prisoners to escape. The camp was surrounded by forest and had a barbed wire perimeter fence and several watch towers. The place held around 1600 inmates, mostly German prisoners of war or enemy aliens. During the day some of the men were put to work cutting lumber, and hauling the logs to a nearby lumber mill, using horse-drawn carts.
On the first morning at Monteith I met my chair assistant, a bull-headed man, as strong as a Kodiak bear. His name was Fergus and he was one of the inmates.
'What's a chap called Fergus doing in a place like this?' I asked.
He replied in a broad Scottish accent, 'well Captain, it's a long story. The Allies picked me up on the Continent. When I couldn't establish my bona fides, they deemed me an enemy alien and I ended up here.'
'That's rotten luck. OK then Fergus, let's get started. Who's our first patient?'
'He's a wee lad Matrose Bochwoldt. Bochwoldt is one of the German POWs picked up from the Bismarck.'
The battleship Bismarck, the pride of the German fleet, had been hunted down and sunk in the Atlantic by the Royal Navy in May 1941. Only 115 German seamen were plucked from the icy watersthe remaining 2000 perished. Bochwoldt was one of the fortunate few to be rescued and sent to Canada.
Fergus spoke a few words of German and offered to act as my interpreter.
'Can you ask the patient about his symptoms?'
'Bochwoldt is complaining about soreness and swelling at the back of his lower jaw, on the left side.'
I looked into the patient's mouth and his fetid breath stung my nostrils. From this and the angry-red gum line, I could see that he had an impacted wisdom tooth, which had become infected.
'Fergus, can you tell the patient I will need to sedate him, cut into the gum and remove the impacted tooth.'
Bochwoldt's eyes darted and he looked somewhat alarmed at this news.
'Tell him that if he managed to survive the fiery inferno on the Bismarck, and the gale force winds and freezing waters of the North Atlantic, then this mere tooth extraction will be a breeze.'
Walking back to my hut at the end of the first day at Camp 23, I reflected on the strangeness of it all. Here I was, an Aussie, in the frozen wilds of Northern Canada, on the periphery of a war. I had chanced upon a bizarre mix of bedfellows – a Scottish enemy alien and a German seaman, a survivor of the most notorious naval battle of the war, thus far. Finally, I had come face to face with the enemy, and the enemy had barred his teeth, but the encounter was not quite what I had expected.

From the life of Bede James Smith. Based on an interview with Marg Smith in 1998. The names of the Scottish chair assistant and German prisoner-of-war are fictitious.