In the first letter from Leonard Budgell in this selection, Len writes from a St. Boniface Hospital room in Manitoba. He has had a “spell,” which eventually would be diagnosed as a heart condition too dangerous for the bypass surgery recommended. If this had been diagnosed when he was a child, he would have been advised to lead a sedentary, careful life, and yet Len would lead a life in which he guided small boats into hazardous waters, wintered in famine conditions close to the North Pole, and hunted in snowstorms in the treacherous Torngat Mountains. He would marry, raise a family of four, and manage Hudson’s Bay Company posts in North Labrador and in the eastern and western Arctic. He would know ships, native peoples, the workings of outports, dogs, the habits of northern animals and birds, and sea animals. He would become one of the pioneers in radio in the North, and in time, be acknowledged as a primary source on the North for historians, with his oral and written resource materials held in The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives.
I met Leonard Budgell in Winnipeg in 1979 when I was thirty-six years old. Len was sixty-three, still employed by The Governor and Committee of The Hudson’s Bay Company, and too close to retirement for his liking. My partner, Thomas E. Brown, and I were hosting a historian from Ottawa for a conference. Len knew her well, and offered to drive her to our home from the airport. After a pot of tea together, it was only natural to ask him to visit again, and so began a long and wonderful friendship that included many hours over countless more pots of tea, walks at Hammock Marsh, and family lunches. In 1981, when I moved to Kingston to pursue a Fine Arts degree, a correspondence began consisting of several thousands of pages, most of them written by Len to me.
Once they began to arrive, in packets written on yellow foolscap and in sets of anywhere from ten to seventy-seven pages, I eagerly checked the mail for each brown envelope. As it turned out, not only was Len a faithful correspondent, he was a marvellous writer. Comments on daily and current events swung easily into adventures and stories from his Hudson’s Bay Company postings, memories of people he had admired all his life in Labrador or on Fogo Island or reflections on Inuit life and the animals of the Arctic. The letters were so interesting I felt compelled to read parts of them to anyone who was around; they begged to be shared. Len was pleased at the thought that his family and others might enjoy his experiences. He supported the project from the start.
Of the 4,000-odd pages I received between 1981 and 1992, over half would keep me up to date with happenings in the family, everyday encounters, comments on current events—the stuff of personal letters. Len was so close to his family; I was kept up to date on how Muriel was, especially once she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; I learned when a grandchild’s new tooth came in, how small fingers planted beans, or of a New Year’s Eve spent enjoying a tiny grandson. In general, such material is not part of this manuscript, but that it cannot be is an injustice to readers. His love for his family, his accounts of everyday life and those friends he kept in touch with, his meetings with other long-time Labrador and Arctic traders, his long walks and travels are every bit as important and entertaining, full of the sadnesses and joys of his life. Despite the severe editing required to keep his letters to a manageable length for publication, despite the removal of personal material and content to preserve the family’s privacy, and mine, what remains is nevertheless an exceptional treasure trove.
Leonard Gordon Budgell was born in North West River, Labrador, a Hudson’s Bay post roughly forty kilometres east of present-day Happy Valley, on the northern shore of Lake Melville. His father, George Budgell, was the post manager for The Hudson’s Bay Company at Rigolet, farther east from North West River. His mother was Phyllis Painter of Dove Brook.
The post journal for the day of his birth is in George Budgell’s standard format of weather, daily projects, and happenings, followed by a list of arrivals: For August, 1917; “Tues. 7, Fine in a.m. One short shower in p.m., otherwise fine. Wind strong, from N. West. Servants packing fish brought in by Mr. Lescadron. Arrivals: One baby boy, born to Mrs. B. in a.m.” The child would be named Leonard Gordon, after Reverend Henry Gordon, an Anglican minister who later established the Labrador Public School at Muddy Bay.
Len would grow up in Rigolet, where George Budgell was the Hudson’s Bay post manager for most of his career, although he was manager at Davis Inlet for one posting and at North West River twice. The family also spent a year’s furlough on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, the island off the northeast coast of Newfoundland where George had been born, and where he had spent his first few years.
Can a love of ships be inherited? Len’s niece Phyllis Fawcett wrote in an e-mail, “Re: Uncle Len’s ship building genes: I think he comes by them honestly.” His maternal grandfather, Silas Painter, and great-grandfather George Painter, who had come to fish, also built boats and schooners for The Hudson’s Bay Company. There are records of Painters employed as fishermen by the Slade Company of Poole, England, that date back to 1784, with John Painter, 1784–9, and Joseph in 1792. Though these early Painters returned to England, it is likely that they, or relatives of theirs, returned to the area in the mid 1800s. Len’s great-grandfather George eventually went back to England. Grandfather Silas continued building boats until the company had no further need for schooners. His brother, Len’s uncle Tom, had a mill at Dove Brook where they sawed the lumber to build the boats and schooners. From family stories, it seems they had tinsmith skills as well, which would have allowed them to work in the fish canneries.
Len remembered this grandfather well, remembered his stories, knew details about ships that would have interested few children. In these letters Len tells of seeing the clipper Saladdin come into harbour at the Turnavik Islands when he was five years old. His account shows how he already knew about, and truly loved, anything to do with ships. He idolized ship captains. In an essay about the ships of the Revillon Frères Trading Company, Len wrote of a journey when he was ten on the Fort James, captained by his idol “Uncle” Isaak Barbour. As Len puts it, “the captain said at breakfast, ‘Take some parritch, bye, t’will put fat on your ribs.’ I would rather have had the new-laid eggs we had brought on board, but hero worship being what it is, I accepted a bowl from the cook, and manfully slathered it with blackstrap while my brother ate eggs and toast and regarded me with puzzled bewilderment.”
You will read of a young boy’s elation, while at the top of a schooner topmast, having successfully replaced a flag halyard at the request of Captain Barbour. Some of his happiest times with The Hudson’s Bay Company after he left the Labrador posts were on Nascopie and Fort Severn, doing repair and renovation, as motorman, and as chief engineer. Shirlee Anne Smith, former Keeper of The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, says she delighted in going upstairs to see Len and the other “old timers” at Hudson Bay House if she needed any information about ships. She says Len “knew everything about ships, of sailing ships and riggings. If I wanted to know [anything about ships] I would just ask Len.”
Len’s parents were not typical of the people of Rigolet, or of anywhere else on the Labrador coast. According to Richard Budgell, Len’s nephew, the Budgell home was filled with books. Doctors and clergymen—Dr. Harry Paddon, Dr. Lester Burry, the Reverend Henry Gordon and Dr. Wilfred Grenfell among others—would stay at the post when travelling, or stop by to visit. George Budgell was a good intellectual match. From this nurturing setting, Len and his older brother Max were sent to the Labrador Public Boarding School at Muddy Bay, started by the Reverend Henry Gordon, when it opened in 1923. Len was, at six years old, the youngest boarder. The Labrador Public School was ahead of its time. Non-denominational, the school encouraged its students to hold on to languages used at hom e, to hone skills learned there, to respect their roots, and to learn new skills relevant to their lives.
One year when George Budgell took his family to stay on the island where he had been born, ten-year-old Len went to school on Fogo Island. When the family returned to Labrador, the children went to the Yale School, funded mainly by Yale University, and built in 1925 by Dr. Harry Paddon for the Grenfell Mission in North West River. When the Budgell family was based in Rigolet, it meant that the children boarded at the school. Later, Max and Len were sent to Newfoundland for schooling, possibly in St. Johns, as Len states in one letter that when he was thirty he had only seen one city. He always returned to Rigolet for holidays.
However, Len learned best, and enjoyed learning most, by watching, by listening, by practising hands-on activities outdoors, or in workshops. He could recall not only the way a hand tool was used, but who was using it, and the way the hand looked itself with its “great knuckles,” and how the stroke should be made. It seems he remembered every single thing he learned from Will Shewak, the Hudson’s Bay carpenter; from John Blake, fur trapper and skipper of the Fort Rigolet and other HBC vessels; James Dickers, the Hudson’s Bay cooper; Aunt Bella; Aunt Mary Harnett; Inuit hunters Albert and Coonera, among others, for these are the teachers he sought out.
The availability of books at home had fostered a love of reading in all the children, inspiring them to go on to further education and successful careers. Perhaps because of books he read at school, or from his personal choice of reading, references are found in Len’s writing to literary characters such as Mrs. Malaprop, from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals. It was natural for him to extend a description with a quote from literature or the poetic canon, or from the Bible. Where in the letters Len seems to misquote, he probably would have done so intentionally.
His younger brother Jack told me that Len had a photographic memory, but he had a great memory for stories as well, inherited from his mother as well as his father. Jack said that Len was content to yarn for hours with his mother, even when very small, and that Len remembered these stories. Len could also recall nuance of language, dialect, and turn of phrase, word for word. Years later, he could retell stories read to him by his earliest school teachers, complete with specific details and dates. Particular traits of many of the local clergy and teachers would come out later in his stories.
When he was twelve, Len started working unofficially for The Hudson’s Bay Company after school and in the summers. He was content, whether helping in the store, doing general chores or working eighteen-hour days on the salmon nets. At fourteen, he started taking nurses and doctors to outlying settlements by dog team in winter, by boat in other seasons. He acted as cook one summer, and as deck hand and engineer for several years, with Skipper John Blake on the Fort Rigolet, which plied the mail run between Rigolet and North West River. They would also pick up salmon, as well as fresh and salt cod. If life had gone as he wished, Len would have preferred a life on the sea, but jobs on ships were scarce. His father introduced him to the experience of being a Company clerk in the store when he was about fifteen.
For a man known to have made so many friends, Len had been a shy child, and was an extremely shy young man. He had not enjoyed being an apprentice clerk in his father’s Hudson Bay store in Rigolet, according to his brother John. Len would do anything to get out of it, to be able to have a more private life outdoors. Though shy, he had a strong temperament, preferring to choose the company he kept rather than having people imposed on him, and associating with those who were like himself. When Len was first posted to Cartwright, he found that training in radio telegraphy suited him. He had to spend a good deal of time on his own in order to master the skills which would be a necessary in later postings.
When he was very young, it took a long time for Len to make the leap into friendship, especially with those his own age. In our long talks over our pots of tea, he shared some of the experiences from his early years, which, he said, contributed to the distance he once tended to keep between himself and others. He was especially sensitive about jokes played on him, and took personal slights seriously. Such episodes drove him further into his own company and away from those who might offend him.
While it took time for Len to allow others into closeness, he remained open to it. He was especially willing to learn everything he could from the Inuit, forming many of his most valued friendships among them. As a child, Len had grown up with aboriginal peoples around Rigolet and North West River. He respected them and their way of life which was interwoven with the life his parents had chosen. Native and part-native trappers and fishermen, komatiks, dog teams and canoes were all part of his early days. Young Len spent as much time as he could with Will Shewak, John Blake, and other Inuit Company employees. He believed that Will Shewak was a genius. These experiences gave Len a life-long sense of the abilities and intelligence, the wit and adaptability of native peoples. Len wrote about many of these men whom he admired. These accounts have been published, for the most part, in Them Days, the magazine of Labrador oral history, as well as in the anthology The Labradorians: Voices from the Land of Cain, edited by Lynne D. Fitzhugh.
In 1935, when Len was eighteen years old, Ralph Parsons, district manager for The Hudson’s Bay Company at that time, hired him as an apprentice at Cartwright for $180 per year. Ralph Parsons, who had once been a clerk under Len’s father at Rigolet, would later go on to become the fur trade commissioner for the company. Len wrote: “He told me that he had refused to allow me to go to sea on one of the HBC ships because, one, I was more valuable ashore, and two, there were certified captains looking for third mates’ berths. He told me he was planning to send me north as I already had a lot of experience.”
Because Len had “some original knowledge from a chap who operated a radio station for the Grenfell Association in North West River, Jack Watts” and from Bill Moores of Cartwright, an arrangement was made so that he would learn the Marconi procedure as well as The Hudson’s Bay Company code. Len spent many hours at Cartwright at the Marconi station when they needed a replacement for one of their operators. In the tapes recorded by Ms. Jocelyn McKillop, Len tells how he had to be sworn to secrecy over the radio, and that he was the first person in the British Empire to be sworn in that way. At the same time, he had a full-time position as HBC accountant, an indoor desk job that he hated. The radio skills were most useful at such later postings as Hebron, Wolstenholme, and other northern posts.
Once Canada entered World War II, even though Labrador was not yet part of Canada, Len was bent on joining the Royal Canadian Navy. The Hudson’s Bay Company, however, felt that with his experience and radio skills he would be more useful on northern outposts. It was “suggested” that he remain with the Company rather than enlist. Loyal to the Company, Len stayed.
On the tapes, he says, “Ralph Parsons sent a telegram saying I was to go to Hebron to establish the first Hudson’s Bay Company radio station on Labrador, and, in addition, to be control station for all the Ungava Bay stations. I was to pick up all traffic and shoot it down to the Marconi people on Labrador. The rest of Arctic traffic went to Nottingham Island to the Canadian Ministry of Transport and went out that way. I was a very happy guy when I went.”
Not only would Len’s radio background be called upon at Hebron—and at his later postings—his skills in accounting, writing, carpentry, maintenance, boats, engines, guns, cooking and survival would also be of great use to him. Sharon Babaian, of the National Museum of Science and Technology, met with Len in 1993 in order to mine his expertise for an exhibit on the early years of radio with the Company. She had the opportunity of having lunch with the “old timers,” the men Len had lunch with regularly after retirement. Several of them had been in the fur trade division, or had been at northern posts. “They were like that,” she says, “the best fur traders of the Hudson’s Bay. They all seemed self reliant, knew how to build things, service things, from ice huts to cleaning and using rifles, repairing, cleaning and installing engines in airplanes, all about radios…. If they didn’t know how to do something, they taught themselves. They understood objects in themselves, were encouraged to do that.”
At Hebron, Len could have stayed mostly in the store, or at the radio, but instead he used every opportunity to further explore the nature of the Inuit. Since he was ten years old, he had been given responsibility. He had been entrusted by his parents with undertaking long difficult journeys, with hunting and fishing, and with taking care of others. By the age of fourteen, he had demonstrated that he had the skills to sustain himself in a difficult environment, and so, though he was only twenty, he plunged headlong into the new adventure
The lessons learned never left him. In The World as the Crow Flies, Anne Marie MacDonald expressed so well Len’s attitude towards others: “It’s simple, really. If you like people, they will probably like you back…” Len’s own take on that could have been expressed as, “…if you place trust in people, you will earn their trust and respect.”
From that time on, Len developed broad connections with many people whom he would call friend, and many others whom he respected. Some were native people, others those with whom he shared history as a Company employee, a Company Servant. If you knew your job, did it well, and upheld the oath that was inherent in Len’s mind once you had agreed to become a “Servant of The Bay,” you became a friend for life. Len always used the capital “S” when writing of that relationship.
From Hebron, Len went to Wolstenholme, where for the first time, he was alone at a post, though there was a Roman Catholic mission nearby. He found the native people around Wolstenholme very different from the people at Hebron. Whereas at Hebron there was work making seal oil as well as hunting, trapping and fishing, people at Wolstenholme relied on hunting, trading fox fur, sealskins and walrus tusks. They were not as well off. Most trading happened at night, as daytime was for hunting and travel. Len knew little about Wolstenholme and learned more about the area, and about the fox or seal situation, when he encouraged the Inuit to stay with him through the night in the warm trader’s house instead of in the unheated store.
Although Len was posted to Igloolik after a year at Wolstenholme, due to changed circumstances he never got there. He ended up doing what he loved best for the next three months: working as motorman on the Nascopie under Captain Thomas Smellie. It was at this time he encountered photographer Lorene Squire. These weeks provided some of his happiest memories.
After a furlough, and then temporary postings on McKenzie Island and at Red Lake, Len was assigned to Cartwright to help overhaul the Nascopie. It was at Cartwright he met Muriel Watson, a quiet young nurse from Saskatchewan, who was with the Grenfell Mission. He would stay in touch with her, court her, and marry her after the war.
Meanwhile, he was once again posted to Igloolik, again rerouted to Lac la Ronge. After the la Ronge posting, when he was finally “allowed” to join the army, Len taught radio communications at the military base in Kingston.
In 1946, while waiting to be released from the army, Len was asked to relieve a trader and his wife at Repulse Bay, at the extreme northwest corner of Hudson Bay near the Arctic Circle, in an emergency situation. The flight in itself was a memorable experience, especially when the four-seater canvas-covered Norseman caught fire at Repulse. That winter, Len was alone on the post with the radio and an old dog, and without firewood, food, furniture or trade goods during famine conditions. The few natives he saw were starving. He had nothing except ammunition to give them, and wildlife was scarce. During these eight bleak months, he met Father Pierre Henry, the Oblate missionary priest from Brittany known as Kabloona. Henry de Poncins wrote of this selfless priest who went out to King William’s Island near the magnetic pole by dogsled, and who lived as completely like the Netsilik natives as possible. Leonard Budgell’s nature was much in tune with that of Father Henry; there was nothing material he wanted or needed. Len’s account of this experience, Mercy Mission, will be included in a future publication.
Len did not seek loneliness, but he did not find it a threat. He was quite happy to be on his own early in life. For the most part, he did not crave companionship, yet he was a young man with normal yearnings and normal passions. Len worked his way through the difficult lonely times in positive ways. In these selections from his letters is a story of an unusual rite of passage from youth to manhood with all its difficulties, particularly acute for a young man who longed for love and companionship, but one who was committed to a life in the North, often alone in the critical years, sometimes for months. What he chose to keep from those experiences was a lifetime of memories to hold and to share with anyone who was interested. It is a unique legacy, the story of the changing era in the Canadian Arctic, its twilight of transition.
Len took up postings for the Company in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario, several of them Arctic postings; a timeline is recorded in an appendix. For several years following these postings to specific communities, the spring, summer, and fall seasons took him to Moosonee in the transportation branch of The Hudson’s Bay Company. After he formally retired from the Company, he continued to manage Moosonee Transport, later known as Federated Shipping, a Hudson’s Bay subsidiary that supplied the communities of James Bay with supplies by barge. In Moosonee, though his home base was St. Boniface, Manitoba, his wife Muriel and the children could join him during school vacations. At this time, he was officially associated with Hudson’s Bay House, the main HBC headquarters in Winnipeg, and kept an office there.
Len was much too interested in whatever life gave him at any particular moment to be a career-conscious employee. Advancement was never his first concern. His career was decided by the Company, and never once, in either written word or in conversation, did he express a wish to be other than a good and faithful “Servant” of The Bay. That is what he signed on for, and as long as he could serve the Company well, he was content. In one of his very last letters, written when he was well over eighty, he quotes the precise words he agreed to when he started with The Hudson’s Bay Company. All his references to the Company letters show how well he took that oath to heart. Len even chose to marry Muriel on May 2, the anniversary of the grant date for The Hudson’s Bay Company’s founding charter!
Some would say he wore the thickest of rose-coloured glasses where The Hudson’s Bay Company was concerned. Len would be the first to say that with the circumstance of membership in the Company family, or with “the birthright,” came the responsibility to speak up when necessary, to take action when the family was threatened in any sense, as well as to defend it when it was unfairly threatened or maligned. Headquarters would promptly know Len Budgell’s views if an employee had not been treated properly according to his lights. He would insist that an elderly Indian who had been an employee receive a fair pension; an article printed with incorrect information in The Beaver would be criticized in letters to the editor; he would condemn the most popular of authors if he could prove that the truth had not been written about The Bay, when facts might have been easily checked.
In a letter written early in the year 1999, he told me that some of his experiences were included in a recent history of Labrador, which included the writings of many Labrador people. He liked Lynne Fitzhugh’s The Labradorians very much, but disagreed with some of the conclusions reached by its editor about the handling of the welfare of trappers and hunters in Labrador by the HBC. Len wrote: “…I don’t dispute that some traders may have dealt unfairly with their customers, but some traders were very fair. Many HBC store managers, my father included, shared their income with any who needed it. I remember Mr. Ralph Parsons saying to my father once, when the Company was losing a good deal of money on the salmon fishery, “Skipper Garge, so long as you and your fishermen did their best, then HBC will bear the loss.’” Len made the same comments in an unpublished letter, almost word for word, to Doris Saunders of Them Days magazine. He continued, “I hope my remarks…don’t offend Ms. Fitzhugh…She can write me off as hopelessly indoctrinated by the HBC.” Doris Saunders, the originator and then editor of Them Days, became one of Len’s close friends.
And to me, Len wrote: “…I know, Claudia, that it is the policy of the HBC not to reply to unjust criticism, but I hope the facts are made public. I have access to some very old records in the Archives, and it is astonishing how much credit was given to customers over a period of time and how little was ever paid. For the ex-Moravian posts alone, there were practically no profits, and losses were made year after year…For the Great Company survived the hard depression years, and in doing so helped native people to get through those years. The trappers’ incomes had been almost completely wiped out by the decline in fur prices, and for the fish, and seal products such as seal fat. They knew they could come to my father.”
John Michelin, a trapper from the area, agreed, telling Len’s brother John that “…The Hudson’s Bay Company took care of you, but eventually trapping died out. Many trappers were left with debts at The Bay, which it carried for years, eventually dropping them, but not forgetting in all cases.” That it was so is proved by the fact that, according to John, “The Hudson’s Bay was in charge of the commissary when Goose Bay was being built. Many from North West River worked on that project, and when they came to the Hudson’s Bay to cash cheques, the old books were brought out, and the workers were asked to start paying the old debts…” It was probably felt to be a fair request. It should be no surprise that the then-retired George Budgell, who had been asked to run the commissary, was the man who decided to open the old books.
And to Len, it seemed only natural and right that the Company should be paternalistic. Walter Dickers wrote in his article “Christmas at Rigolet,” published in Them Days magazine, that “…Old George Budgell was going around with his Hudson’s Bay black rum, having a few drinks, then moving on to the Will Shewaks and the Jesse Flowers, HBC employees.” which meant every family, as only HBC people lived at Rigolet at that time.
Len was not always pleased with decisions the Company made, or impressed with every Company Servant. He did feel that the best Servants were those who upheld the oath they took when they signed on with the Company, and that if every Servant, from the administration on down, had always acted in good faith, The Hudson’s Bay Company would have remained one of the most important corporations ever to have existed in Canada.
Len handled his own positions of trust in the Company with the same clear-sightedness as when he drove a dog team in the snows of a winter Labrador, with the needs of passengers, fellow travellers and employees uppermost. The Hudson’s Bay subsidiary that Len managed in Moosonee consistently made a lot of money for the Company, which was continually surprised that so much money could be made with so little investment. Len was an excellent businessman, but it was mainly his manner of working with people, of choosing the finest for the job, and then trusting that they would do their best without his poking his nose into every operation that got those results. To Len, that was the tradition of the Company he had grown up in, but based on his upbringing, he would likely have held the same views whether or not he had stayed with the HBC.
Len, like George Eliot, strongly felt that the growing good of the world is greatly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that the reason things are not as bad as they might have been is “half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.” Len was fascinated by those who lived these hidden lives, how they acted, what motivated them; he believed that it was these men, especially the native people, who were the guardians and strength of the North. He was impressed by the direct interaction native people had with their world, their acceptance of life as it was.
In the natural wisdom of native people he found answers—specifics about hunting, survival skills shared over a kudlik* in an igloo, or common sense responses to the white man’s way of life. He thought about the concept of time, contrasting ours with the aboriginal’s. To his list of things to ponder, Len added contemporary culture: bureaucracy, experts, managers, politics, TV announcers, clothing styles. Somewhat puzzled by a world gone crazy for material things, by people who seemed to have no common sense or sensibilities, by those who seemed to have little sense of morality, or who let others lead them, he agreed that there was much he did not know. To the lasting benefit of others, he knew how to express his thoughts.
One of the strongest reasons to make a selection from the letters of the late Leonard Budgell is that their content is of compelling interest to such a wide variety of readers. According to Shirlee Smith, “Leonard was a man of many facets, the kind of man who, because of his background and upbringing, we will see no more. He had a wealth of information on so many different subjects, and total recall…of things that were so important, especially of his early days in the fur trade.” His story and experience, his insights about places and people and a now disappeared way of life make a book for historians, for those interested in the North or Labrador, but also a book for readers of adventure, for those interested in nature, in human nature, in the sea, in ships, in the business of the fur trade, for those who like to read humour, or simply enjoy writing that sparkles.
As he was not writing for publication, there is none of the stiltedness that comes with self-conscious writing. They are wandery things, these letters. Describing a fine fall day at a nature reserve near Winnipeg will lead to a fall day in Labrador; a child on an airplane will bring a story of a native child; visiting an elderly friend in hospital will remind him of an old Inuit woman dying of hunger and cold, then to watching muskrats with a Nascopie child. When he tells of Coonera and Albert, Inuit hunters at Hebron, of the hours spent travelling with them, hunting with them, or just sitting and taking in the world of the day, we become part of that long-ago world.
From his early years, Len treasured the women in his life. His memories of his mother, of the older women who birthed babies, of his sisters and of one particular young girl, were memories of warmth and sharing. He loved to be with them, talk with them, help them in any way possible. While the men he met were suspect until they proved themselves, women, simply by virtue of being women, were immediately on what he considered to be well-deserved pedestals.
Len was used to the women in his life being strong and independent. His own mother capably fed and clothed her large family, as well as the Company employees, with help from local women. The “grans” of his childhood “borned” babies, and spent every moment in useful, community-oriented activities. His wife, Muriel, came to Cartwright from a Prairie farm to nurse fishermen, ship builders, hunters, and trappers at Cartwright. It must have felt to her like the edge of the world. Len knew how trappers’ wives were left on their own every year, often in complete wilderness during long winter months. Max McLean, in a tribute given when the first bronze statue in Labrador, The Trapper, was unveiled in North West River in 2004, spoke of the trappers’ wives as being at the heart of the trappers’ culture, “…strong women of British, French and Aboriginal heritage who kept the home fires burning when the men were away.” These women had to hunt, cook, keep a woodstove burning, bear, feed and clothe their children under the most difficult circumstances. And Len also knew how important it was for Inuit men to have women in the family group in order to survive. These experiences gave him a great respect for, and at times fear of, women he encountered, especially when he was younger.
It’s interesting that in later life, Len had difficulties appreciating the “new woman” who paid for a man’s meal and opened her own doors. Some things should be sacrosanct; to Len women always were so. Women were to be respected and encouraged, and though he often thought them to be wiser, stronger and more capable than he, he felt that for reasons not of their own making, they were to be protected and taken care of. On the other hand, constantly amazed by women’s abilities, he chafed at the awareness of how women were viewed in the “man’s world” of business. Len made it his mission, whenever possible or necessary, to make sure that women were given their due, and if possible, were well paid for it.
In Creating Minds, Howard Gardner explores qualities found in the makeup of great people, insisting that they, in varied ways, value children and childhood. From Len’s point of view, time spent with children was never considered wasted, whether they were his own, the offspring of co-workers, those he met on planes or in the supermarket. Edited from this manuscript are hundreds of pages of what exactly a child had said or seen, or asked about. Children were treasures. He was astonished by them, and the small ones could instantly steal his heart, especially his own children and his own grandchildren. He was fascinated by how the world looked through a child’s eyes. While rejoicing in their spontaneity, he took them seriously, and would do anything to please, interest or entertain a child, to better a child’s life.
Len’s love for children was illustrated perfectly by his reaction to the children that employees at Hudson’s Bay House would sometimes bring to the office. Len loved it when employees or former employees dropped in to his office with babies, though the practice was not universally appreciated. He wrote, “He [one executive at Hudson’s Bay House in Winnipeg], as executives go, is okay, but short-sighted. He doesn’t say anything when I invade his domain with the latest baby to visit Hudson’s Bay House, but he looks disapproving. Can’t understand that people go back to work happier and more productive if they’ve just held a tiny warm baby and felt its gossamer hair on the top of its head….”
From his own childhood, Len kept a great sense of whimsy and fun. As his “Aunt Bella” had done when he was small, he sent leprechauns to watch over friends and to carry messages on moonbeams. He believed in believing in leprechauns. In an unpublished letter he wrote:
Do you believe in leprechauns? They have the gift, the gift of magic. They are small and merry and will repair shoes. The forest daisies grow where they walk and you can follow them but they never allow you to see where they live. I know one personally. Dear old Aunt Bella gave him to me when I was little. He helped me through many a night when my dog was sick or I had a problem at school.
Once I thought he was Will Shewak during the day because Will’s hands were so gentle and yet so capable. Smooth sensitive hands, that could do anything, even sew. Nothing was too difficult for him to try: men’s work, women’s work. If it could be done and needed doing, he would do it. I was hit in the face once by a dog whip, which is a terribly cruel weapon, and Will put his hands on my face and turned it to the light because he feared for my eye. His hands were as tender as my mother’s would have been. We were not near home and he put a little spruce balsam on the cut to stop the blood and he took the whip from the boy who had accidentally hit me and hung it in a tree. It never came down. All he said was, “Don’t touch it.”
I asked Aunt Bella if Will might be a leprechaun and she said no, but I was never sure.
The Irish, but also the natives, believe in spirits, grand and small: the Inuit in Labrador feared the torngaks, after whom the mountains were named; there were fairies that were frightening…
Len gave me a leprechaun of my very own named O’Halloran, and I have come to know how precious the gift of a leprechaun can be, and what one can mean to a friendship. Certainly if the poet and artist William Blake could witness a fairy funeral at the bottom of his garden in West Sussex, then an O’Halloran can exist to take messages to a friend faster than trains, planes, or Canada Post, at midnight or at dawn.
Len innately understood the value of myth in our lives, of fantasy. He particularly enjoyed anyone who was “fey” or anyone who would be brave enough to express a different view of the world. Len had such a way of stepping back into his own childhood, into his “child shoes” and of speaking in that voice filled with a child’s refreshing wonder.
That same wonder, combined with the sense of responsibility and initiative built into most of the youngsters from that environment, cemented the foundation of the man he would become. Though, as Len’s niece Anne Budgell put it, Len was confident, capable, comfortable at many levels of authority, and not easily intimidated, the ability to reach deep into fantasy would help keep him going on many a long Arctic night; it would also lighten the heavier parts of life, sustain him when he realized that some of the wishes closest to his heart would never be realized.
For Len always wanted to return to the Labrador. Some part of his heart was always there. When I spoke with his daughter Shelagh while editing the letters, she said, “To me, my dad is Labrador.” She knew how he had longed to go back, not just to North West River where he was born, or to Rigolet which he felt was his home, but to Hebron especially, and a valley near there called Tororak, back to Saglek Harbour, to Natchvak Fiord, to the Torngats, to Cape Mugford, to Watch (Watchman’s) Island. If there was to be a hereafter, and Len was not so certain that there would be, these are the places, he wrote, that he would liked to haunt. His letters are full of North Labrador, especially the fall, spring and winter seasons. In twenty years of letters to me, the only stories and descriptions he repeated were these seasons in these places. Len did get back to visit his brothers in North West River, as the last letter shows, but he never got to revisit the more northerly shores that he longed for.
Len stayed in contact with many people, not through personal need, but because he truly valued his family and friends. Friends were the only commodity, he wrote, on which he would willingly pay tax, and old friends were the most precious. Len agonized especially with those who were coping with memory loss and illness. He was there for them until the end. He visited and wrote volumes, letters of twenty or thirty pages, to those he knew from Labrador and the northern posts, or from any other of the places he travelled and worked, perhaps with the exception of the army, but he also kept in touch with secretaries, their children, people he met no matter how casually, especially if children were involved. He knew they contributed so much to his life.
It was comforting after all these years for me to meet with two of Len’s brothers, and to talk again with his daughters. All I had known of him in twenty-five years, all I had proof of, had made him, in my mind, impossibly faultless. His children enlightened me, saying that their father had strong opinions, had prejudices common to many of his generation or background, and that he wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with. He was a parent like many others, who felt he always knew the best for his family. It was also a relief to hear from his brothers that he had a temper, that he could use language unsuitable for ladies’ ears, that he was considered to have been overly eager to please his father. Len, after all, was human.
Some of his brothers did think that he only saw the good side of his father, not the overbearing man that his father could be, and against whom some of the boys rebelled. But he wrote, “I do know my father had a sharp tongue, and if a thing had to be said, he said it.” He told the story in Them Days of how his father had bodily thrown a stubborn trapper off a wharf. Len saw all sides of his father, as he saw all sides of most things, but chose to overlook certain of them, tolerate others, and only tell and commemorate him in the areas in which he was great, or in which he was a guide, and loving. It’s true that he did follow his father’s path completely where the Hudson’s Bay was concerned, and he stayed with the Company until the end, as his brothers did not; it must have appeared as if he looked at his father and HBC issues in a rather haloed light.
Like his father too, Len claimed, and was fiercely proud of, his Scots and Irish heritage. There is a preponderance of red hair in the family, and the Irish in his language, whether written or spoken. He admits to an Irish temper like his father’s. Emma Jane Foote, who married Len’s grandfather John at Wild Cove on Fogo Island, came from the Outer Isles, the islands between Ireland and Scotland, home of the Scots-Irish. The surprise was that while Len revered his father, and wanted so much to become like him, he never took up two of his father’s enjoyments which were common to traders who spent long solitary months on faraway posts. He loved the smell of pipe tobacco and associated the smell with his father, and fondly remembered the example of his father taking a small drink with each employee at Christmas, but he never smoked, and he didn’t like the taste of alcohol.
One gift came naturally from his father. Len’s nephew Richard read George Budgell’s Company journals from Rigolet, finding them beautifully written; I agree. Len’s older brother Max also inherited this talent, writing of his travels in the wilds of Labrador under unusual circumstances. Len wrote as if he were simply there in the same room as his correspondent. The words flow like water onto the foolscap in beautifully phrased passages, in language that can be spare, specific and genuine, and is at times quite poetic. Landscapes are so particularly described, the wording so exact, that images are transmitted without interference from one brain to another. Since the letters were not written for publication, there is no sign of the writer’s agony, of editing, re-editing or rearranging.
Determining the final form of this book was a challenge. Len and I began to plan this book in 1991. His support meant that we received a Canada Council grant so that the letters could be entered into a computer. He was familiar with early drafts, and comfortable with publishing the material in this book. Muriel died in 1999, and Len passed away on December 21, 2000. Though illness, shock, and grief slowed the momentum of the book project, all members of his family have been wonderfully supportive of this celebration of his life.
The selections here are from letters written from 1981 to 1991, though we corresponded for nine years more, and are only from letters written to me. After that time, his pages were more concerned with the joys and upsets of family, small babies and grandchildren particularly, and Muriel’s health, as those in his family were the most precious to him. I also saw him fairly often, considering that I was living in southern Ontario, while he was in Winnipeg and Moosonee. He travelled to Ontario to visit family, and to Montreal for Company reasons. We would link up whenever possible. I was fortunate enough to visit with him in Moosonee. We spoke more frequently by phone. Even so, thousands of pages had to be whittled down to a manageable size.
Len’s letters to me were usually more than twenty pages long, written in a small, tight, readable script. The longest was seventy-seven pages. Every letter included family happenings and personal matters that Len, or I, was not comfortable with publishing. Therefore, in the majority of cases, just partial letters are reproduced here, along with enough material for smooth transitions. It was important, at times, to include his stream of thought, to know how he arrived at a story; it was equally important that a reader would not be left hanging after an abrupt ending.
However, I have tried to keep the essence of Len by including certain threads and themes to which he returned again and again over the years concerning family, friends, work and work partners, each of whom Len considered equals, never simply employees. In the very first excerpt, Len is in the hospital, yet by some fortuitous accident, he can see the Hudson’s Bay flag flying over Hudson’s Bay House from his window. In a novel, such a device would seem all too precious, but it was only natural to Len that the Company flag should be there for him, neglected as it appeared, in this ridiculous health-related situation, that it was visible and flying for him as it had in so may other spheres of his life.
These stories encompass a lifetime. Many are serious; many are full of fun. Some are expressions of anger or frustration. To some extent, there is a sense of “what comes, will come, what happens will happen. No need to worry. Aingnamut, things are as they are.” In general, these are relaxed and easy-going letters meant for the pleasure and for the information of the reader, which fortunately for me, happened to be me. Some of Len’s stories that do not appear here will be in a future publication. They are a pleasure to read, but seem somewhat more formal than the letters.
Everyone in Labrador can tell a good yarn, but few have the skills to write about their experiences in so explicit a manner. Few had as many correspondents and contacts and connections. Very few cared as much about the whole picture, about the traditions and reputation of the Company, about how a way of life can be was saved through yarns. Len had the ability to perfectly remember words, phrases, colours, details, feelings, faces, expressions, dialects and languages, directions, personalities, sounds, motors and engines, tools, stories, moments, a quality of light. In praise of writers such as Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said that the best of writers make us see how other people are “dangerously like us…(giving)…voice to the voices of their regions” and Len does this so well, whether those he writes of live by the sea, survive famine, build igloos or live next door.
After an evening of listening to and telling stories when he returned for a few days to North West River in 1993, Len wrote, “I realized what the yarns mean to the people, and to me. Times change so fast. Where are the capable hands, the sensitive minds to capture these whispers from the past? Perhaps after I am gone, my child or grandchild…Perhaps the tales will die with those who can remember them. If so, something will be lost that can never be replaced or recovered.”
The same could be said of the places he loved, that can never be recovered. Today the battles for mining rights continue. The new park in the Torngats will bring tourists, and oil will be drilled at Hebron; it would have broken his heart. He would not go back to Rigolet. Too much was lost, especially after the army was stationed there during the war. But he had them in memory, could return whenever he wished. He could share them with words. In writing so perceptively of their humanity, Len has made the people in his letters come alive again, ensuring that they will not ever die. The more people who read of them, the more alive they will be. In giving his people and places to us, we, his friends, his family, his readers are granted the gift of knowing Leonard Budgell, Servant of The Bay.
October 22, 2008
Carleton Place, Ontario
* A kudlik (qulliq) is a crescent-shaped lamp carved from stone and fuelled by the oil from animal blubber. A wick made of moss or Arctic cotton draws the oil to make a type of liquid candle, and the open stone lamp was used by the Inuit to light and heat tents or igloos, melt snow for water, dry clothing, and cook food.