And I bet you are wondering where this might be. It is in fact right down in the south-east of Newfoundland on the coast of Placentia Bay.
The motel was cold and damp at first, but then again I was the first visitor for 5 weeks and I did appear unexpectedly. But half an hour with the electric heater soon solved the problem.
And Argentia, and Placentia Bay is of some historical significance – it’s a huge deep bay on the south coast of Newfoundland and its historical claim to fame is that it was one of the assembly point of ships sailing from North America during World War II. They would arrive in the bay here and would be marshalled into their appropriate convoys – the Home Fast, the Home Slow, the Arctic Convoys and so on, be allocated a destroyer group to escort them on their voyage, and then they would be sent off into the cauldron that was the Battle of the Atlantic
And not only that, an important wartime conference took place here between Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941 – 5 months before the USA entered the war. The Atlantic Charter, as it became known, set out Churchill and Roosevelt’s vision for a postwar world.
And the one thing that rings any kind of bell about the Bay – the memoirs of Jack Broome or the biography of “Johnny” Walker for example, will be the mists and the fog and the persistent rain of this area. And do you know what? It’s absolutely pouring down – rain I don’t recall ever having seen before – and the fog is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
And that is astonishing because for about 9/10ths of my journey across the south of Newfoundland from leaving my motel at Deer Lake until about Clarenville or whatever, the weather was absolutely gorgeous and I was in shirtsleeves.
The moment I crossed the final mountain range to the east coast, the change in the weather was dramatic.
I’ve also been to another historical site today – the airport at Gander. Before he became the officer in charge of Bomber Command, “Bomber” Harris was the chief of the Royal Air Force’s Purchasing Commission in the USA, charged with re-equipping Bomber Command with medium bombers after the Fairey Battles had been annihilated during the retreat to Dunkirk.
He bought a large amount of Lockheed Hudson bombers but hadn’t thought about how he would get them back to the UK.
A young BOAC pilot by the name of Donald Bennett, who had been seconded to his command, said “why don’t we fly them back?” and the Atlantic Ferry was born.
Bennett, officially a civilian who, in his BOAC days had flown passenger aircraft across the Atlantic in the 1930s, flew first one, from the USA to the civilian airfield at Gander where he refuelled.
On the night of 10th November 1940 as navigator, he led a squadron of Hudsons off for the 16-hour flight to Aldergrove in Northern Ireland, over 2000 miles across the Atlantic. Following the success of the flight, all kinds of planes subsequently flew from North America to Europe with the Atlantic Ferry, and the father of Liz (who reads this blog) was a navigator on some of the Halifaxes made in Canada that made the crossing.
n those days, with primitive navigational aids and unknown climatic conditions the flights could be hazardous and many machines were lost.
Just outside Gander is a Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery with the remains of 100 aircrew who perished at Gander – either exhausted after the long flight from the USA to Gander and becoming disorientated in the fog, or else failing to leave the ground in the planes so heavily overloaded with petrol for the long flight across the Ocean.
But I saw something in the cemetery that absolutely disgusted me. A woman was there with a dog – off its lead – and it urinated on a grave.
The woman did nothing. I did something – I made the woman completely aware of what I thought about all of this and by the time I had finished she got back into her car with her dog and left the scene. It was a thoroughly shameful display.
And so I finished my journey along the Trans Canada Highway down to the south-east of Newfoundland, admiring the scenery and the rather lax traffic laws that allow all kinds of bizarre combinations of vehicles and trailers to take to the road.
Long-gone are they days when this kind of thing would be tolerated in Europe, and if I could obtain a residence permit for Canada I’d be here like a shot.
