The Strangers' Gallery (13 page)

From the Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds: unedited version of “A Letter to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,” read to the Prowse Society, at the Travers Tavern, on February 15, 1984; edited version published in “Letters to the Editor,” the
Evening Telegram
, February 16, 1984.

Before Miles began
,
someone dressed like an anthrax handler or a bomb defuser entered dramatically from the wings—the men's washroom, to be more precise—and laid a steel box on the table in front of “the distinguished assembly,” as Miles sometimes referred to the oft-times obstreperous Travers Tavern regulars—when he wasn't calling them a bunch of Newfoundland dogs. These dogs, however, untamed though they were, were forever loyal to “the Prime Minister of the Indignation.” Miles acted as if he hadn't even noticed this mysterious, glass-masked attendant, covered from head to foot in a heavy white canvas suit, who vanished as quickly as he had appeared. Miles simply lifted the hinged cover of the box, removed his mauled-looking copy of the Amulree Report, gave it a quick contemptuous look, dropped it on the floor at his feet, and planked a shoe upon it as if it were some verminous creature that might attempt to escape.

The Editor
The Evening Telegram

Dear Sir:

(I enclose a copy of a letter to the Rt. Honourable Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain, in the hope that you will publish it on February 16, 1984, a significant anniversary date for the country, of which, no doubt, you are aware.)

The Rt. Honourable Margaret Thatcher
Prime Minister of Great Britain
House of Commons
London, England

Dear Prime Minister:

I write you today not on my own behalf, and certainly not on behalf of that “small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about,” who no longer seem to care, perhaps never cared, but on behalf of that “most obscure of all classes, our ancestors…the democracy of the dead.” I thank your great countryman Chesterton for those fine words. He was talking about tradition. Tradition, he said, means giving votes to this much larger and greater constituency. Of course, our last prime minister, Mr. Frederick Alderdice, was not a big fan of the vote, either for the living or the dead. It was only a theoretical thing, he said, not all it was cracked up to be. This was in November 1933, during the last session of the House of Assembly of the independent country of Newfoundland, just before he and his fellow members used their own votes to do away with the country forever.

I think your fellow countryman Sir Oswald Mosley—for every Chesterton there's a Mosley—head of the British Union of Fascists, was saying the same thing around the same time, and so were his supporters, the Harmsworth boys, Lords Rothermere and Northcliffe, who built the Great Paper Mill and town of Grand Falls in the middle of the Newfoundland wilderness, circa 1909, to provide a safe supply of newsprint for their papers, the
Daily Mail
not the least among them, the most widely read newspaper in the world at the time. In January 1934 an article appeared in the
Daily Mail
entitled “Hurrah for the Blackshirts,” written by none other than publisher Lord Rothermere himself. In it, he encouraged his readers to support a political party with the same purpose and drive as Hitler's and Mussolini's. Anti-democratic sentiment was in the air, in Britain and elsewhere.
The Fascists were calling for the barring of Jews from the British public service. They had been barred from service in the perfect little English-country-garden town of Grand Falls twenty-five years earlier! And in February 1934 democracy came to an end all over Newfoundland.

I write you on the fiftieth anniversary—not a golden one, needless to say—of this the darkest day in our history. On February 16, 1934, when I was only ten years old—and you were nine, I believe, according to your
Dictionary of National Biography
—I saw my father leave the house and walk out to the flagpole in our garden. Now, he hadn't erected the flagpole, not being a political man; it was there when he bought the house. I watched through the window as he lowered the Union Jack, our official flag, and raised our unofficial flag, the Tricolour, the Pink, White, and Green. It was the one and only political act of his life. No…it wasn't a political act, or a nationalist act, but a private patriotic act. He never said a word to anyone about it.
He died three years later
,
but that flag—the very same one, in fact—still flies above
the house
I inherited from him.
I inherited the land as well.
And I don't just mean the land around the house.

At about the same time that my father was lowering the flag, about a mile from our house, in the ballroom of the Newfoundland Hotel, the final documents were being signed that would consign the country of Newfoundland
to
oblivion—suspend our so-called Letters Patent, our one-hundred-year-old constitution, our elected legislature, the vote, our democracy.
Nations
have fallen into disrepute, I know
,
but I am not a nationalist,
just a poor, foolish patriot like my father
.
Your greatest political writer, Mr. George Orwell,
seems
to have been the only one who knew the difference
.
“Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism,” he said. “Patriotism is an inoculation against nationalism”—and I have the cicatrices to prove it.

He was talking about devotion, you see, and as an old lapsed Catholic doomed to my devotions, I write to you today to demand an official apology for the disgrace, the humiliation, the egregious injustice that England inflicted upon us fifty years ago.
I ask you, the present prime minister of the Mother of Parliaments, to state unequivocally in the House of Commons that stripping us of our democratic rights in 1934 was a mistake, a morally and politically unjustifiable act. If, as more than one historian has suggested, the British Empire in the East came to a moral end at Amritsar, India, in April 1919, then in the West it came to a moral end at St. John's, Newfoundland, in February 1934. You may not have shot us out of cannons as you did your sepoys in
Inja
, but you shamed and demoralized us to such an extent that we still get a perverse pleasure out of shooting ourselves.

In
A History of Newfoundland
—
the
history of Newfoundland—Daniel Woodley Prowse, the Father of Newfoundland History, our Herodotus, our Gibbon, our Macaulay, said: “Our treatment by the British Government has been so stupid, cruel, and barbarous that it requires the actual perusal of the State Papers to convince us that such a policy was ever carried out.”

Now I have perused the State Papers myself, along with a lot of other papers, and here, for your enlightenment, are a few of the stupid, cruel, and barbarous things I found:

1. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, “the Great Appeaser,” in a Private and Confidential letter to Royal Commission chairman Lord Amulree on August 31, 1933, instructed “Our Right Trusty and Well-beloved Counsellor,” as King George referred to him on his appointment in February 1933, to see to it that our prime minister and his government agreed to accept all the recommendations in his report
before
it was tabled in the House. Now I wonder what the price was for securing that kind of collaboration. What did it take to buy them off?

2. The Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, J. H. Thomas, afterward to be known as “Leaker” Thomas, officially tabled Lord Amulree's Royal Commission Report in the House of Commons in November 1933, but he'd tabled it among his family and friends a few days before that. His government's plan to guarantee Newfoundland's bonds meant that they would soar in price, and fortunes were made by unscrupulous speculators as a result of this leak. This skullduggery was never investigated, though allegations were made in
Time
magazine. In England, these allegations were actually cut out with scissors from newsstand copies. I have my own personal uncensored copy that I could send to you.

3. And now we come to the Right Trusty Lord Amulree himself, the third member of this Unholy Trinity, a sort of bumbling moral anthropologist who rediscovered fiery Friar O'Donel's “howling moral wilderness,” the new ecclesiastical territory of New-founde-lande, 150 years after the man who would become its first bishop. Amulree looked and dressed like an undertaker, appropriately enough, considering the job he'd been sent out to do—arrange the death and burial of the Newfoundland state, no less, not to put too fine a point on it. While accusing us of the worst kind of waste, extravagance, and corruption, he was extravagantly indifferent to a memorandum sent to him by our finance department explaining that almost 40 percent of our $100 million debt was incurred raising a regiment to help fight the mother country's battles in the First World War, a regiment that was decimated on the fields of France because of callous, incompetent swine like General Haig, a regiment that helped make the
world
safe for democracy but not, alas, the country that raised it. It only made Newfoundland safe for the bondholders.

In view of all this, and much else besides, I ask for nothing less than an official public apology in the House of Commons and posthumous diplomatic recognition of
the independent country of Newfoundland
.

Yours truly,
Brendan Harnett

As I said, there was no reply from Mrs. Thatcher, but Miles did get a rather pointed and undiplomatic response from someone else.

From the Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds: “A Letter to the Prime Minister of the Indignation,” a reply to Brendan Harnett from “Anon.” (letters were still being published under a pseudonym at this time), in
“
Letters to the Editor,”
the
Evening Telegram
, February 22, 1984.

The Editor
The Evening Telegram

Dear Sir:

(I would like to respond to a recent letter from a Mr. Brendan Harnett, published in your issue of the 16th of February.)

Dear Mr. Harnett:

Do you think it's going to rain?
In the Name of God, why can't you give it up? Why can't you let go of it? The People voted to surrender the Country. They themselves voted in July 1948, and their elected Government voted on their behalf in November 1933. They cut the painter themselves, you old fool. I suppose you'll be writing sour, indignant letters to the Prime Minister of Canada fifteen years from now on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Greatest Event in our history? Yes, CONFEDERATION. But go back into the archives and have a better look. Our first Premier, the Father of Confederation, the Only Living Father of the Canadian Confederation, the Honourable J. R. Smallwood, issued Progress Reports on Confederation, on 16 mm film, in the early 1950s. And he'd written Progress Reports on Newfoundland long before that—
The New Newfoundland,
written in 1931, and the great
Book of Newfoundland
, in 1937.

Now let me give you a Progress Report because you have obviously been living in a root cellar or some other kind of a hole in the ground since 1949. Our People are educated, they're healthy, they're happy, they're well fed, they have jobs, and they don't need a passport and a TB clearance to go off to the mainland to find a job if they don't have one. Go back into your hole, will you, and ignore the sunlight next February if perchance it happens to penetrate deep enough to unthaw the frozen turnip of a brain you have in that numbskull of yours. If you come up, you'll see a shadow, but it's your own. You're casting it yourself, if you know what I mean.

It started in 1833 and ended, thank God, in 1933. As Mr. Edgar Bowring said at the Royal Commission hearings that year, we weren't fit for it, we weren't fit to govern ourselves. One hundred years of trouble was enough. An exercise in political futility. “An embittered Little Ireland,” one historian called us. And aren't you just like one of those old Irish harpers who prided themselves on stealing the tunes from the British army pipe band when they were out on parade. The soldiers might have shot them on regular duty the next day, but, no matter, they had the tunes. Now, I'm half Irish myself, but will you please stop singing those sad old tunes.

You want “posthumous diplomatic recognition,” do you? Well, here's Recognition for you, with a capital
R
. I know you're a man of letters, Mr. Harnett, so perhaps you'll recognize this. If Newfoundland history is a tragedy—and I'm sure even you wouldn't deny that—what were the signs, the Recognitions, as Aristotle called them? Well, I'll tell you. What hope could there be for a country whose government began its sittings in a tavern—and was even kicked out of there for not paying the rent—and then moved to an orphan asylum. What hope could there be for a country whose legislative building was built on a bog; whose members sat on the wrong side of the Speaker—the left hand of God; whose “Founding Father,” as you call him, your Dr. Carson—who failed medical school, by the way—couldn't even get himself elected to the first Assembly? What hope could there be? And here's the clincher for you. The so-called architect—an Irish stonemason—who built the Colonial Building used as his model a neoclassical Italian villa—
La Malcontenta
, they call it—that was said to be haunted by an aggrieved spirit. Do I need to go on? No wonder the whole thing came to naught.

I'm sure you will be coming up out of your hole for the fiftieth anniversary of Confederation, just as you came up in 1974 for the twenty-fifth, prating and harping on about Smokescreens and Conspiracies. The Amulree Report was a Smokescreen. The National Convention was a Smokescreen. The Referendum was rigged—a Great Conspiracy that your friend from the University uncovered. We voted 52 percent against Confederation instead of 52 percent for it. They reversed the result and burned the ballots out on the barrens. Well, where's the evidence? Preserved in the peat bogs, perhaps. Well, why don't you go out and dig it up? Take it to Court. Get those Terms of Confederation annulled. Let's become a glorious sinkhole, sanatorium, poorhouse, graft shop, dole house of a country once again, an International Exhibition of poverty, unemployment, disease, illiteracy, corruption, bankruptcy, and misery, the sort of dark hole only a bitter, querulous old groundhog like yourself would want to live in, to preside over, and I hereby nominate you for First Minister, Prime Minister of the Indignation. I will personally install you in
La Malcontenta
, no doubt a House you'll be happy living in, though it's clear to me that, metaphorically speaking, you've been living in it all your life.