Tag Archives: wilfred grenfell

Friday 14th July 2023 – MY SAUSAGE BEANS AND CHIPS …

… tonight were absolutely excellent, and cheered me up after another miserable night.

And something rather unusual happened last night. I was in the middle of dictating a dream when suddenly there was silence and I then heard myself snoring. But strangely I was only asleep for about 8 minutes according to the timestamp and in that time I went off on another little ramble

That’s something that has never happened before, as far as I’m aware. I’ve gone back to sleep in the middle of dictating something but usually that has been that for quite a while.

All it all it was rather a mobile night and I was flat out when the alarm went off.

After the medication and checking my mails and messages I had a chat with Liz – the first for a while – and then a listen to the dictaphone to unravel my voyages of the night. It was school holidays so we’d all gone down to Kent. We were in the sea just a little way offshore and there was a girl there but I can’t remember any more about it.

We were then discussing the football. In one of these second legs one team had changed its entire back line and gone with a completely different set of defenders and midfielders. While we were discussing it we learned that one of the football managers who’d been on the park a couple of days earlier had died during the night but we didn’t get round to working out which one it was

There was a group of us who had been to Shrewsbury for something, a concert or whatever. We’d met some Ukrainian refugees. At the end we said goodbye to everyone and set out to walk back to London. I was in charge, showing the way. At one point I took the wrong turning at a roundabout and found that we were going back towards the town centre. We had to turn round and walk back the way we’d just come, re-join our tracks and carry on out of the city into the countryside. As we were doing that a couple of people from our party disappeared. We found them in a restaurant on the side of the street where one of these refugee people was with his family. We had a lengthy chat with them. Just as we were leaving the woman took us aside to ask how many there were of us. She counted and there were 7. She said that it’s because her husband and her friend wanted to buy us all a present. We thought that was strange because we hardly knew them but she was completely adamant about it.

At some point in the proceedings my brother was involved. I had to take something to a town in Scotland in the car. The guy told me where to go but when I arrived there was no-one around. A couple of minutes later he rang me again to ask where I was. I told him that I’d been there but didn’t see anyone. I was sitting in the side of this street for quite a while. In the end he agreed to come to find me where I was. he said something about a red engine but what I had in the back of my van was certainly not a red engine. I wondered if I had the correct thing. There was something in this town that I had to take away. I said to my brother “if I end up not dropping off this engine I’ll need someone else to take away this other thing”. He said that he’d do it for the petrol money. I told him to mark down his mileage. Then I had to sit and wait for this person to turn up.

I’d kidnapped a girl and was going to take her back to my camp. We set out to walk back to my camp. She was complaining that her feet were hurting. With my conjuring trick I summoned up some shoes and socks … fell asleep here … we were walking up the side of this motorway but she said that her feet were hurting so I magicked up a pair of suitable shoes and socks that she put on and said that it was so much better

While I was asleep in the middle of that dream I was kitting out an ambulance. There was an attendant who was rather miserable like Goldstein in The Navy Lark who was always moaning. We were kitting out this second ambulance to replace Caliburn. The idea was to take it for an MoT without saying that it’s mine to see whether it makes any difference and then start to arrange all the stuff. We’d be able to put away the stuff but it was all in some kind of haphazard order. I wanted it tidying out but the orderly guy was rather upset. I told him just to get on with it, we’ll do some and he can do the rest. He didn’t like the order in which I was putting stuff in the van but that was a shame, too bad. He made a few comments but I didn’t really take all that much notice about them

There was more to it than that too but you really don’t want to know about it right now, especially if you are eating your meal.

It was just as well that I’d done that homework last night and some revision this morning because in our Welsh lesson we were thrown straight in. We were hard at it all day but even so we didn’t finish the course. We missed out quite a bit.

Still, I don’t suppose that you can have everything.

It’s over now so I have a couple of weeks to forget everything before my month of full-time education begins. That should be fun on Zoom too and I’ll probably be worn to a frazzle by the end of it.

When it was all over I had my hot chocolate and home-made biscuits and then I relaxed somewhat.

In an on-line library I found the diary of Dr Eliot Curwen so I borrowed it for a read.

There was no Government medical service on the Labrador coast until, would you believe, 1982. In 1892 Wilfred Grenfell had come out from the UK as part of the Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen and he was so appalled by the poverty that he saw that he left the Mission, set up the International Grenfell Association to provide medical care.

Rather than having a hospital to which the people could travel (although there were eventually a couple created) the hospital travelled to the people. It was actually a small steam-boat in which he and his “WOPs” – volunteers who came “with-out pay” – worked up and down the coast

Grenfell was really something of a showman and entertainer and so his published accounts should be interpreted carefully, but Curwen, who came out as a WOP on Grenfell’s second voyage was a naïve, innocent college graduate from a well-heeled background and the distaste and horror of what he saw oozed from every page.

He recounts one occasion where he tried to photograph a family but the father wouldn’t let the children come out of their sod hut. He eventually found the reason – and that was that the children didn’t have one single item of clothing between them.

There’s a story of a father who tramped the countryside for miles trying to find food for his starving family. Returning unsuccessfully, he chased his wife and eldest children away from the house as they could manage independently, killed his three youngest children with an axe and then shot himself.

At roughly the same time as this, Captain William Kennedy, captain of HMS Druid out on Fisheries patrol off the Labrador coast wrote in his autobiography “these poor trampled-down folk, who never see a coin of the realm, are told they are British subjects. It’s an idle mockery. Under the truck system they are ground down and half starved, having often nothing but corn-cake and molasses to eat in the winter, and not sufficient clothing to enable them to withstand the rigorous climate at that season … On our visits round the island, we met with sights enough to sicken us, and make us ashamed to think that these poor creatures were British subjects like ourselves.”

Labrador didn’t become part of Canada until 1949. Prior to that it was a British colony

As I said earlier, tea was delicious. I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I run out of British baked beans because those elsewhere taste totally different. In Canada for example the tins are packed full of corn syrup and taste awful. They aren’t all that much better over here.

Tomorrow I’m shopping, if the weather has improved. It was horrible today with storms, high winds, gusts of rain, just about everything that you don’t really want in mid-July. If necessary I can stay in because I have sufficient to keep me going but I’ll go stir-crazy if I don’t go out.

It reminds me of four years ago when we were on THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR on our Arctic Expedition for 3 months and everyone was developing Cabin Fever by the end of it.

It has to be said that it would have been a much better voyage if a couple of people I could think of hadn’t been on it. But there again, they would probably say the same thing about me.

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Saturday 8th July 2023 – I’VE SPENT MOST …

… of the day reading.

Browing around in the depths of various on-line libraries I came across a pile of interesting books that I’ve downloaded for future reference.

The first one was by Admiral Sir William Kennedy who when he was a young captain was in command of a vessel that was on fisheries patrol around Newfoundland and Labrador in the second half of the 19th Century.

He goes to great lengths to describe the wretched conditions in which the inhabitants of the Labrador coast were living during this period and ends up by saying
“these poor trampled-down folk, who never see a coin of the realm, are told they are British subjects. It’s an idle mockery … On our visits round the island, we met with sights enough to sicken us, and make us ashamed to think that these poor creatures were British subjects like ourselves.”

There was an account of visits to the Labrador coast by people like Wilfred Grenfell, whose voluntary charity was the only medical service on the Labrador coast until 1974. On his first visit to the colony (because Labrador was a British colony until 1949, not a part of Canada) in 1892 he was shocked
“with the ruling terror of poverty and semi-starvation implied by the conditions then prevailing”

After that, there was the report by the geologist Albert Low who explored much of the interior of Labrador in the 1890s which runs to over 400 pages, and includes such delightful entries as “Notes on weather during previous 24 hours – Sandy Lake 14th June 1894 – Thermometer broken”

However he is much more famous for his maps, which can be best described as “misleading”. He was a geologist, not a geographer, but was the first person to create comprehensive maps of the area that led several people, the most famous being Leonidas Hubbard in 1903, to their deaths in the Wilderness.

In fact I’m reminded of a comment of the guy in Cartwright who runs the petrol station who said that many of the place names recorded on the maps are not the names by which they are known locally by the inhabitants and more than one tourist has come to grief by misunderstanding a place name..

And then several other rather inconsequential 19th-Century books on Labrador which are interesting in what they omit that wasn’t known back then.

The one book that I wanted to find though is unavailable. George Cartwright, after whom the town of Cartwright was named, was a trader who worked the Labrador coast in the 1770s and 1780s until his enterprise was looted by pirates. He kept very comprehensive diaries about his activities and it’s thanks to them that much of the early life out on the Labrador coast and that of the Innu and Inuit is known.

However in 2013 a dramatic discovery was made. When he was back in London in retirement he wrote a series of books about his stay on the Labrador coast and they turned up in the collection of someone in South Africa.

They have passed into the hands of an academic at McGill University who has written a report on their contents and in what can only be described as Incestuous Academia, will make copies available to private researchers for a fee of $115

I spend hours, days, weeks, months, researching stuff and it all goes on-line free gratis and for nothing, and if anyone ever uses one of my Amazon links to buy a product and generate a little commission for me as a reward, I’m absolutely delighted. But I’m obviously doing it wrong.

As, obviously, are everyone else who make their work freely available to anyone and everyone and spread the knowledge pool around.

You’ll probably gather from the foregoing that I’ve not been to the shops today. Stocking up with stuff at Lidl on Friday meant that I didn’t really need anything and if I did, then it’s rather too bad.

It was a horrible night and I don’t think that I had much sleep at all. You want to see the distance that I travelled during the night. There were 3 of us, me, someone else and a young girl going somewhere by sea. We were actually in the water walking, pushing some kind of floating device in front of us and carrying some things on our backs so we had to be very careful. At times it was OK but occasionally we’d go round a headland and have the full force of the wind. I’d always go first and the young girl would come second. When we had to get into the water where there was all this wind, I’d stop to make sure that everyone was in the water and bunched up tight before we set off to walk through the stormy bits. We all had woollen gloves because it was really cold. every time she kept on dropping hers. I would make remarks like “I see that you’ve dropped one” etc. We pushed on against the storm all the time making progress although it didn’t seem as if we were actually accomplishing anything.

There was something else involving battleships. They all had names that they’d inherited from other ships and were allocated several colours. The names were written in that colour and that was the official colour of things on the boat etc. They were used along the south coast to defend the south coast against some kind of attack. They undertook quite a considerable amount of rehearsals and preparation that many people thought was pointless but nevertheless they did them all the same on board the ships just in case.

I can’t remember much about this but I was in a car with a boy I knew from school. It was his birthday. Someone had bought him a tape player. We stopped and he bought a couple of cassettes. We listened to them while we were driving to wherever it was that we were going. We went inside for his birthday. His friends were there. Some girl bought him some more cassettes. later on while we were washing up he was humming a tune. I vaguely recognised it. I asked him if it was a song off one of the albums that he’d bought to play in the car. He said “yes”. There was a discussion about the music. A girl with us thought that we were talking about some that he’d received as a present and wanted to know when we’d been in the car since we’d had them. While I was polishing some really dirty stained glasses he was talking about playing some kind of puzzle that he’d be doing at about 03:00 tomorrow. Everyone was really surprised that he’d be up and about at that time but he seemed to think that it was a fairly normal thing to do.

On the subject of school I was in school, but it was a different school than mine – pretty much the same but modernised and an extension had been built on it. I was on the top floor and had to go down to the ground floor for something. I went downstairs in part of the new building down to the ground floor to do what I had to do. To come back I had to climb up this kind of tower so far. There was a telephone box at the bottom with all kinds of lists in there of courses that were taking place virtually to which you could sign up. I was extremely interested in this even though I was no longer a student. I tried to work out how i could join some of them. I was climbing back up this tower. There was a guy climbing up there too, a student. We were talking. he was saying that we climb the tower so high and then go inside and up the steps. You can’t go to sleep while you’re climbing up. I said “that’s a shame. What if you wanted to?”. we had a joke. It turned out that for some reason or other coaches weren’t allowed to use the tower for radio. He had an exemption because there was something the matter with his connection service so he was allowed to have an aerial on the tower and could use it. We kept on climbing. The extension on this school was really expensive and luxurious. While I was walking through it there was a crowd of people having some kind of lecture on art, all standing around. I had a quick look in there and a quick look in the toilets. It was clear that someone had spent a lot of money on the place. It was never like this when we were students there

Finally there was something else about a blood test someone had had. It was a huge test and they were told to file it away. They said that they hadn’t read it yet. The other me who was there then said “that’s why you have a smaller place where we can file away the documents that we’d read. In order to do that, just read it now and file it away. That way you’ve done everything that you need to .

It’s no wonder that I had a hard time leaving the bed before the second alarm went off, and why I had such difficulty actually doing anything this morning.

My mushroom and potato soup with crusty bread was delicious though. It was the usual onion and garlic fried in olive oil with cumin, coriander, turmeric and chervil. Then the mushrooms were fried in, a couple of small diced potatoes, a stock cube and some water to cover it.

After it had simmered away for half an hour I added some vegan soya yoghurt and whizzed it up. And I’ll do that again.

Tea tonight was a breaded quorn fillet – one of the batch I bought a couple of months ago. And it was really nice too cooked in the air fryer with the chips and a salad on the side

The radio notes are finished so I’ll dictate them before I go to bed.

Here’s hoping that I have a nice lie-in tomorrow because there’s a lot to do. There’s no pizza dough so I’ll have to make some more, and I’m pretty low on biscuits so I’ll have to bake some more tomorrow while I’m at it. I reckon that I’ll go for honey, ginger and oatmeal biscuits tomorrow. They should be delicious.

There is a big pile of digestive biscuits, I know, but I fancy having a go at making another batch anyway and see what that brings me.

One other thing that is going through my mind is to go back to making my own drinks. Since I’ve had the sodastream I’ve stopped doing that because fresh fruit juice with fizzy water is so much nicer, but I ought to make more of an effort. I enjoyed my little drinks production line when I did it before

But I’ll worry about that tomorrow. Right now I’m going to finish off the radio stuff and go to bed.

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Saturday 18th March 2017 – LAST NIGHT …

… was something of a restless night for me. For a start, I wasn’t hungry and so I didn’t have anything to eat. And then I couldn’t go to sleep for ages either. By 06:00 I was wide awake and working on the laptop.

Nevertheless, I did manage to go on my travels during the night. I’d been to some kind of city where the railway lines had been moved out of the centre to the edge of the place, and the interior where the rails and the stations had formerly been was now all overgrown and being used by the locals as a kind of park. There were some arches over where the railway lines had been – brick arches of the kind that might have been built by the Romans and in very poor repair. I kept trying to take a few photos of them but people kept on getting in the way and it was just so difficult to have a clear shot.

Anyway, I had breakfast, in company with plenty of other people and a pile of dogs – it seems as if there was some kind of Canine Convention going on here just now. And then, as usual, I had things to do on the laptop.

Having survived the initial attempt to turf me out of my room, I decided not to push my luck and by 10:00 I was on my way. First stop was the LeClerc supermarket for bread and a few other bits and pieces to set me up for the next few days. I had a chat with Ingrid on the telephone too and we arranged to meet up on Monday for a chat and so on.

And then – I’ve put this off for so long but I can’t keep on doing it. I headed for home. It’s been a long time since I’ve been down these roads. For the last 18 months or so I’ve been something of a disciple of Wilfred Grenfell, who sais that “when two paths are open, always take the more venturesome”. But I have to go home sometime.

When I finally arrived, I could see that it was clear that the gales and tempests that have battered the centre of France have given here a pretty good battering too. But there’s no real damage or anything and, to be honest, it was good to be back. The good news is that the rodent-proofing that I carried out here in December seems to have worked and there’s no obvious signs of any damage. It was 16.1°C in here too so that was good – saved me having to light a fire.

But the bad news is that the storm has done something to the internet connection and that is down. It looks as if I’ll be taking Ingrid to Montlucon on Monday to swap my Livebox over for a new one. Anyway, I had a nice sit-down and relax for the afternoon, and kicked my mug of coffee all over the floor breaking off the handle of the mug, as well as washing the floor..

One of my plans for tonight was to go down to Pionsat to watch the football. But to my astonishment, not only is Pionsat running just one team this season (instead of the two last season and even three a couple of seasons ago), the team has declared a general forfeit and abandoned all of its matches. I don’t know what to make of this. It’s all rather astonishing as far as I’m concerned.

So anyway, I made myself something quick out of a tin to eat and then settled down on the sofa tonight, trying to sleep amid the sound of the animals scratching away in the roof.

As Golden Earring once famously sang, “You know it’s good to be back home” but I have been realising day by day while I’ve been away that with my declining health (because I can see it declining every day) my long-term future lies away from here.

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