The Nones of 1932

NEWFOUNDLAND WAS one hundred million dollars in debt, much of it owing to the cost of fighting on the side of England in the First World War. The interest charges alone equalled half our annual revenue. Over 50 per cent of the country’s population was unemployed.

I devoted an entire issue of the Dog to explaining why the worldwide depression, and not Sir Richard, was to blame. I even went about the city, stump-speaking as I had done in New York, sermonizing those who could not read, trying to explain to them what the word depression meant and how the success of our economy was tied to the economies of other, larger countries where things were almost as bad now as they had been five years ago in Newfoundland.

I became known throughout St. John’s as Crackie, a pun on the Dog, a crackie being a small, incessantly barking dog whose inconsequential tenacity strikes people as hilarious.

I stood one day in early April in Bannerman Park on a kitchen chair while hundreds of unemployed men gathered round me and demanded to know why Sir Richard was letting this “depression” go on. A hundred feet away, inside the Colonial Building, Sir Richard was having this very question disingenuously put to him by the Opposition, who knew the depression had nothing to do with Newfoundland.

I looked out across a sea of sod-tweed caps and suddenly realized that if I delivered my defence of Sir Richard in Swahili, it would have the same effect. I indignantly denied, without having any idea whether it was true or not, an allegation that had been made by Sir Richard’s own finance minister, Peter Cashin, that Sir Richard had falsified cabinet minutes to conceal misuse of public funds. I told those men assembled there in the pouring rain that there was nothing hypocritical about him paying himself, over and above his salary as prime minister, a yearly stipend of five thousand dollars as Newfoundland’s war reparations commissioner while at the same time reducing benefits to war veterans.

They were on the dole, being paid by the government six cents a day, which worked out to twenty-one dollars and ninety cents a year. They stood there in the slantwise driven rain, coughing, shivering, faces fiercely braced against the wind, and they listened to me, and it seems incomprehensible to me now that they did not take me and hang me from the nearest tree. All that saved me, as it had so many times in New York, was my appearance, for I was dressed no better than they were and, if anything, had less meat on my bones.

When I heard that the Tories were organizing an anti-government march on the Colonial Building, I searched the public accounts and set out in detail in a special edition of the Dog the large sums of public money that had gone to opposition leader Alderdice’s firm over the last twenty-five years.

I joined the march minutes before it reached the Colonial Building. The merchants had declared the day of the march a holiday and ordered their employees to attend, an order they had complied with, as I could tell from how well, relatively speaking, some of the crowd were dressed.

But most of the men there were unemployed and Tory henchmen were going about among them with boxes, handing out free bottles of rum. By the time the march reached the Colonial Building, most of the mob of ten thousand were well on their way to being drunk.

I worked my way through the crowd, handing out free copies of the Dog, some of which were thrown back at me. But as most of the men there could not read, they thought I was a Tory handing out anti-Squires propaganda sheets and not only let me through but cleared the way for me.

While Alderdice was speaking, denouncing what he called Sir Richard’s scandal-racked administration, I managed to get within earshot of him and so often and so loudly demanded I be allowed to address the crowd that he gave in and invited me up on-stage, literally gave me a hand up while around me men were telling me what my fate would have been were Mr. Alderdice not such a gentleman.

I thought he was being gracious, but I was not long into my speech before I realized that I had been had, that Alderdice had foreseen that nothing would incite the crowd against Sir Richard like someone getting up to speak in his defence. I told the ten thousand I was facing to beware of Greeks bearing gifts, beware of Water Street merchants giving advice in politics.

“Shut him up,” the crowd roared. “Throw him off the steps.” But Alderdice allowed me to continue. I walked back and forth on the steps as though I were on a stage, wagging the finger of my upraised hand each time I enumerated one of Sir Richard’s successes as prime minister.

I had often envisaged a scene like this when I was under the tutelage of Grimes, “the people” storming the Colonial Building like the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace. I had not imagined a revolution led by businessmen, or that I would be fighting to preserve the status quo.

I wandered too near to the side of the steps and a pair of massive hands reached out and grabbed me by the ankles. I was still singing Sir Richard’s praises as I toppled over onto a canopy of upraised hands. Thus held aloft, on my back and still declaiming, I was passed from row to row all the way to Military Road, where I was dumped onto the pavement and where a man told me he would “stop my gob for good” if I said another word.

I hung back at the edge of the crowd, which soon turned into a mob. They no longer listened to Alderdice. They threw rocks and empty rum bottles at the front of the Colonial Building. A cheer went up each time a pane of one-hundred-year-old glass was broken.

In a last-ditch attempt to restore order, the Guards Band came out on the steps and struck up a shaky rendition of “God Save the King.” Every man in the crowd stood rigidly to attention and took off their caps, some with rocks still clenched in their fists, and stayed that way until the anthem ended, at which point they put on their caps and went back to rioting. The Guards Band struck up “God Save the King” a second time, but they were pelted with rocks and forced to disperse.

Alderdice and his caucus looked about at what they must have known they would be blamed for starting. They shouted and ran about, trying to restore order, but when it became clear that the distinction between government and opposition supporters was becoming lost on the crowd, they fled in all directions.

Government members who had been inside the building also began to flee, and though they were pelted with rocks and denounced as thieves and worse, no one tried to prevent their escape. It was Sir Richard the mob wanted, him and no one else.

They moved forward, hurling rocks and bricks through already broken windows, forced their way through a line of constabulary members on horseback that had just begun to form and proceeded to loot the lobby, dragging furniture out of it, rolling armchairs, sofas, flower-pots and vases down the steps. They piled them in a heap, threw some rugs and paintings on top and set fire to it all.

The grand piano, on which, on formal occasions, “God Save the King,” the “Ode to Newfoundland” and anthems of other nations were played, was sent, keys clattering, down the steps and wound up on its side with a crescendo twang. A cheer went up and soon the piano was ablaze.

I made my way, as inconspicuously as possible, along the iron fence, accepting an occasional kick in the backside rather than fight back and draw even more attention to myself.

“Where are you headed?” a voice off to my left said. Fielding was leaning on the Bannerman Park side of the fence, watching the riot through the iron bars, notebook in hand, frantically scribbling. It was like some tableau of her life: Fielding the critic, aloofly watching a riot from the safe side of the fence.

“If you’re planning to make another speech, I’d choose a different theme if I were you,” she said.

She was wearing a heavy woollen overcoat and a stevedore-style stocking cap, her hair hanging down from beneath it. I noticed that her hair was greying and that it had picked up a yellowish tinge from the smoke of cigarettes. But it was still the thick and full hair of a thirty-five-year-old woman. A strand of it, when the wind blew, clung between her lips. She pulled it away with exactly the same flourish of annoyance as when she was a girl. Her cheeks were pink with the cold, her nostrils raw from rubbing and over her eyes there was a glaze of wind-bidden tears, which she kept blinking back. In spite of her overcoat, her lips were quivering. It made me want to touch them with my fingers. For an instant I saw her as I had seen Newfoundland when I had returned to it the first time. It was as if we had never met and never would, Fielding as she would have been if I did not exist, a person apart from me who would remain when I was gone. The world resumed; the mob roared all around me and a gust of wind that seconds ago had come in from across the water blew hard against my face.

“I didn’t think you actually covered anything,” I said, gulping down a lump in my throat. “I thought you only wrote about what you read in other papers.”

She wryly smiled. “I just followed the crowd,” she said. “They went right below my window.”

“The Squireses are still inside, both of them, Sir Richard and Lady Helena,” I said. “I’m trying to get in there, but I’ll never make it by myself, I’m such a runt. I don’t suppose you’d help clear the way for me.”

“What good will you be able to do once you get inside?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But for all I know, they may be in there by themselves.”

Fielding looked at me, then at the Colonial Building, pursed her lips, sighed. “I’m sure there’s a column in it,” she said. She put her notebook and her pencil in the pocket of her overcoat, passed her cane through the fence to me, undid her overcoat, hiked her dress up above her knees, then, with surprising quickness, climbed onto the fence, hoisting herself up onto each of the rungs with her good leg, then lifting the other. I saw the bad leg, or the shape of it, at least — she was wearing longjohns — for the first time. It was not malformed, it seemed, just shrunken, withered, each part in proportion to the others, as much of it as I could see, at least. It might have looked perfectly normal on a woman half her size.

With one leg on either side, standing on top of the fence, she paused to look out over the crowd, shook her head. Then she climbed down, good leg, bad leg, good leg, bad leg, as before. She jumped the last few feet to the ground, took her cane from me and waded into the crowd. She took off her hat and stuffed it in her pocket, shook out her hair, I presumed so the men, seeing that she was a woman, might let her through.

For a while it worked. The more tractable part of the mob, the rear one-third of it, stood aside when she prodded lightly at them with her cane. I followed her, my hand clinging to the belt of her overcoat, hiding behind her lest I be recognized. She tried to make her way to the front steps, but everyone else was trying to do the same, and we were gradually pushed to one side as the mob surged forward.

“We’ll never get in through the front,” Fielding shouted. “We’ll have to try the side.” We doubled back and went along the fence, where the going was easier because the crowd was thinner. We made our way past the west corner. Fielding put her cap back on, tucked her hair up under it, buttoned up her coat. She looked like a ringleader-sized man.

There was a door without a handle on the side of the building. We pounded on it; Fielding tried to break it down. “We already tried it,” said a man who mistook us for fellow rioters. “Someone’s gone off to get an axe.”

“I can go up the drainage pipe,” I said. “It’s not that high.”

“I might as well go with you,” Fielding said. As the two of us, Fielding second, began to scale the pipe, a clump of men still believing us to be of their faction gathered to cheer us on and a couple of them even gave Fielding’s rump a hoist to get her started. I had little trouble shinnying up the pipe, but I could hear it creaking with Fielding’s weight and that of the men who had started up after her.

“Smallwood,” she gasped. I looked down. She was hugging the pipe, leaning her forehead against it, eyes closed, face beet red.

“Go back,” I said. She shook her head.

“Resting,” she said breathlessly, a lit cigarette at the corner of her mouth. I kept going. Just as I was climbing in through a broken window of the main chamber, I was set upon by a member of the constabulary, who tried to push me back out.

“I’ve come to help Sir Richard,” I shouted, clinging to the window sill with both hands, which the constable eyed, billy club raised to strike. “I’m Joe Smallwood,” I said.

“Smallwood?” I heard a voice I recognized as Sir Richard’s say from inside.

“Yes,” I shouted just in time to freeze the constable in mid-swing.

“Let him in, Byrne, let him in,” I heard another man say. The constable pulled me inside.

“The woman behind me is with me, too,” I said, “but the men below her are part of the mob.” The constable looked down.

“They’re all men,” he said. I checked to make sure that Fielding was still there.

“That first one is Miss Fielding of the Telegram,” I said.

A man I recognized as Chief Inspector Hutchings of the ’Stab joined the constable and me as we helped Fielding in through the window, after which she collapsed on the floor, clutching her chest, breath surging from her as if she had been immersed in ice-cold water. I knelt beside her.

“Are you all right?” I said. She nodded.

“Catch … breath … be all right,” she wheezed.

“We’ve got to pry that drainage pipe loose or they’ll all come in this way,” Hutchings said.

As the leading edge of the mob was progressing up the pipe, we looked about for something we could use as a lever and settled on the Speaker’s mace, the narrow end of which barely fit between the building and the drainage pipe. Fielding recovered, and with all four of us pulling on it, the mace dislodged the top joint of the pipe, making it impossible for anyone to climb beyond the first storey. The man farthest up the pipe shook his fist at us. “We’re coming back with ladders,” he said.

All this time, Sir Richard and Lady Squires must have been standing as I saw them now, arm in arm on the legislature floor. Lady Squires wore a maroon cape pinned at the throat with a brooch but was otherwise not dressed for the outdoors; neither was Sir Richard, who wore a black longcoat and a vest.

“Smallwood, Fielding,” Sir Richard said, “what are you two doing here?” It sounded as if by “here” he meant “together.”

“God help you,” Fielding said, “but we’re the reinforcements.”

The men we had prevented from scaling the drainage pipe hurled a volley of rocks through the broken windows.

“We’ve got to take cover,” Hutchings said.

“The Speaker’s room,” Lady Squires said, and we followed her to a large door behind the Speaker’s chair. The Speaker’s room adjoined the main chamber, and it was not much bigger than a kitchen, but the door, which we bolted and barred with the Speaker’s desk, was made of heavy mahogany. There was a lamp, but Hutchings advised we not use it, for fear the mob would see the light beneath the door. He said there were constabulary members outside the main chamber and they had so far been successful in holding back the mob.

It was dark in the Speaker’s room and we could only vaguely make each other out. We all fell silent for a while. I looked at Fielding. She was here to help the Squireses if she could, had risked injuring herself to help them, showed no sign now of wanting to let them fend for themselves despite our situation. I could not reconcile this woman with the girl who had been so eaten up with bitterness that she had written that letter to the Morning Post to get me into trouble. It did not seem to me that even when, drunk, she would stoop so low. She seemed now more like the sort of woman who would sacrifice herself for a lover, even one as ungrateful as Prowse had proved to be. The hunch I had had at Sir Richard’s house the night we hatched our own letter-writing scheme did not seem so far-fetched as it had then. She might have confessed for Prowse. I could not stand the thought that she had ever loved anyone but me that much, but perhaps she had. I had known myself what it was like to be favoured by Prowse, remembered how important he had made inclusion in his circle seem to be.

Shouts of “Hurray” from outside, as if some new hurdle that lay between Sir Richard and the mob had just been cleared, brought me out of my revery.

“What in God’s name do they want?” Sir Richard said.

“You,” Fielding said.

“Me?” Sir Richard said, as if this was the first he had heard that the riot had anything to do with him, as if he thought he had just been caught up in some pointless conflagration like everybody else, as if it was inconceivable to him that others might value his well-being less highly than he did.

“Well, this is quite a fix we’re in,” Lady Squires said.

Sir Richard turned to me. “Do you actually think they’ll do me harm, Smallwood?” he said.

“As far as I can tell,” Fielding said, “the only remaining subject of debate is the mode of execution. Several have been proposed and dismissed on the grounds of being too good for you.”

“Miss Fielding,” Lady Squires said, “I can barely hear you above the sound of your knees knocking together Do you always talk this much or only when you’re terrified?”

“My God, Smallwood,” Sir Richard said, “they really do mean to murder me?”

“Nonsense,” Lady Squires said, taking off her cape and fanning herself with her hand, “there’ll be no one murdered here today.” She draped the cape across a chair. “They’re nothing but a crowd of ruffians and cowards. They wouldn’t dare do anything. We should march straight out the front door, that’s what we should do, and face them down.”

“They’re drunk, Lady Squires,” Hutchings said. “They’re not in their right minds; they’re all worked up. There’s no telling what they’ll do. I don’t think we should leave this room.”

“This is a fine state of affairs, I must say,” said Lady Squires. “The prime minister of a country forced to hide out from his own people in some cubby-hole. My God, what is the Empire coming to?” She looked at Sir Richard, but it was obvious that neither the outrage to the office of prime minister nor the unprecedented depths to which the Empire had sunk were uppermost in his mind.

“I can’t believe it,” Lady Squires said. “It’s not like Newfoundlanders to carry on like this. It can’t just be booze that has them so worked up. The Tories started this, you mark my words.”

“I hope no one will stoop so low,” Fielding said, “as to invoke that old cliché about how poverty, chronic unemployment, malnutrition and disease bring out the worst in people. As to what inscrutable impulse causes people to take out their frustrations on the very politicians they voted into office —” She shrugged.

“If booze was their excuse,” said Lady Squires, “you, Miss Fielding, would be out there with them. You smell like a one-woman riot. I can just imagine what they’ll say about us at Whitehall, Richard, when they hear of this. Squires, the man who was prime minister when the Newfoundlanders ran amok, that’s how they’ll remember you. There’ll be no postings abroad for us after this, let me assure you.”

Suddenly there was a loud pounding on the door:

“Merciful God,” Sir Richard said, as Byrne and Hutchings drew their billy clubs and I picked up a poker from the fireplace.

“Are you there, Sir Richard?” said a voice from outside. “Are you there? We’ve come to escort you out.”

“Is that you, Emerson?” said Lady Squires. Emerson was a member of the opposition.

“Oh, my God,” said Emerson, “are you in there, too, Lady Squires?”

“Yes, I’m in here, too. I’m an elected member of the House of Assembly and the wife of your prime minister where else would I be? This riot is all your fault —”

“We didn’t think they would take it this far,” Emerson said, his voice quavering. “It’s got out of hand; we can’t control it. We’re afraid they may set fire to the building.”

“You lot should have thought of that when you got up this parade,” Lady Squires said.

“Emerson,” Hutchings said, “how many of you are there?”

“Thank God, it’s Hutchings,” Emerson said. “There are four of us, sir.”

“Well then, you take Lady Squires out and the four of us will stay here with Sir Richard until you get back.”

“I’m not going anywhere without my husband,” Lady Squires said. I whispered to Sir Richard that he should tell her he would be safe and urge her to leave. He nodded distractedly, but said nothing.

“If Richard and I go out together, they’ll leave him alone for fear of harming me,” Lady Squires said. “I’m everyone’s best chance of getting out of here unharmed.”

“I don’t think we can count on them to act like gentlemen at this point,” Emerson said.

“Don’t speak to me about gentlemen. You’re a disgrace, an absolute disgrace is what you are. You and your crowd put them up to this. You’re no better than Guy Fawkes. You should all be shot as traitors —”

“Lady Squires, please —”

“I believe,” Fielding said, “that Mr. Emerson’s main reason for wanting to save your life is to avoid being blamed for your death, which is to say that he will guard you as though you were his reputation, so you need have no fear.”

She was nearest the door and, before Lady Squires could protest, unbolted it, grabbed her around the waist, threw her out into Emerson’s arms, then bolted the door again.

“Let go of me,” we heard her say. “Let go of me, I’ll not be carried from the House by a handful of Tory backbenchers, let me go….”

By the sound of it, Emerson and the others had to lift her from the main chamber by the arms and legs. “If they hurt one hair on his head, you Tories will pay for it,” she shouted between grunts of exertion. “The country will know, the world will know who’s to blame for this….”

“Helena, I’ll be all right,” Sir Richard managed to say, his voice breaking as if it was himself he was trying to convince. I suppose the thought that it might have been more appropriate to assure her that she would be all right did not occur to him.

“Richard, be careful,” she said, though we could barely hear her now. “Don’t make a move without Inspector Hutchings. Inspector Hutchings —” Before she could admonish Hutchings, the chamber doors came to with a bang.

“Miss Fielding goes next,” Hutchings said. “As soon as they get back.”

Fielding lit up a cigarette. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “They won’t want to murder me unless someone tells them who lam.”

We stood about in silence for a while. Whenever the furniture-fuelled bonfires outside flared up, we could see a faint flickering of light beneath the door and were better able to see one another. Sir Richard was wide-eyed with alarm and kept looking about appealingly, almost resentfully, at the rest of us, as if it was not fair, or was even somehow our fault, that in this roomful of people, he was the only one the mob was after, as if he had been randomly singled out for persecution.

Another volley of rocks and bricks clattered against the Speaker’s door and a cheer went up that I feared might signal some new development. I wondered aloud when it would occur to the mob outside to scale the building with the ladders of a fire truck.

“Thank God they’re so drunk,” Hutchings said.

“Speaking of which,” Fielding said and took her silver flask from the inner pocket of her overcoat, drank from it, then passed it to Inspector Hutchings, who, after drinking from it, passed it to Sir Richard, who regarded it, as he was regarding everything now, as though it were a confirmation of his doom.

“Take a drink, Sir Richard, sir,” Inspector Hutchings said, and Sir Richard looked around as if he was trying to read in our faces what we thought his chances were. Sir Richard took a drink, tipping the flask back too quickly, so that the Scotch went down the wrong way and he gagged and sputtered. Byrne looked away, embarrassed. Sir Richard dropped the flask and some of its contents spilled onto the floor. Fielding recovered the flask and, after offering Byrne and me a drink, which we declined, put it back in her pocket. Hutchings slapped Sir Richard on the back. After a while, Sir Richard nodded to indicate that he had recovered.

“I don’t think Emerson will get back inside again,” I said. “We’ll have to get Sir Richard up in some disguise.”

“Sir Richard and the constable here could switch clothes,” Hutchings said.

“But Byrne is twice his size,” I said.

“Then Byrne can give Sir Richard his helmet and his constabulary jacket,” Hutchings said. “They should at least buy us some time.”

Byrne had not spoken a word since we had locked ourselves in the Speaker’s room. He was about my age and was awed into silence, I dare say, by his close proximity to the prime minister and Lady Squires, as well as Hutchings, at whom he kept darting nervous glances.

“It’s worth a try,” Hutchings said. Byrne took off his helmet and his jacket, wordlessly handed them to Hutchings, who gave Sir Richard the jacket first after Sir Richard had removed his own. The constabulary jacket was much too big, less obviously so with the sleeves tucked in, but even then the corporal’s chevrons, which should have been at Sir Richard’s upper arms, were almost at his elbows. The helmet was an even worse fit. It was a London bobby-type helmet and all but enclosed Sir Richard’s entire head, the front of it well down past his nose.

“All you need now is a suit of armour and a horse,” Fielding said.

“We need to line it with something,” Hutchings said. I gave him the sweater I had been wearing inside my jacket. Hutchings stuffed the helmet, then put it on Sir Richard. It was still too big, but at least he was just able to see out from beneath the brim.

It was decided that Byrne, Fielding and I would lead the way. Fielding gave Byrne her overcoat so he would not look conspicuously underdressed for the time of year, and so there would be no doubt even in what was left of the rioters’ minds what gender she was, and put on Lady Squires’s cape. Hutchings and Sir Richard followed close behind us. Hutchings unbolted the door, peered out and, satisfied there was no one in the chamber, motioned the three of us ahead of him and Sir Richard.

We left the chamber by way of the cloakroom, and the building by the cloakroom door, which opened only from the inside — it was the one Fielding and I had pounded on with our fists — onto a set of steps that faced the park. To our advantage, it was dark and we were a good distance from the nearest bonfire.

The men who were jammed up against the steps begrudgingly made way for us, though we were jostled and sworn at.

“Where’s Squires?” they said. “Where is the bastard? Is he still inside?” They recognized Hutchings first; several men shouted his name. They must have assumed that he and the “constable” were escorting three minor functionaries from the building. Then they recognized me as the man who had hours earlier spoken in Sir Richard’s defence.

“That’s Crackie Smallwood, how did he get in there?” someone said, and someone else speculated that I was short and scrawny enough to have crawled beneath the door. Byrne and Fielding stood on either side of me. I was barely able to resist the urge to look back to see how far behind Sir Richard was.

We had moved beyond the mob and were almost to the fence when Sir Richard, his vision impaired by the helmet, tripped over an iron gate that had been torn down. The gate clattered loudly on the pavement, and as Sir Richard stumbled and fell forward, the helmet toppled from his head.

“There he is, the bastard,” the cry went up from the mob. “It’s Squires dressed up like the ’Stab.”

They came after us with a roar, wielding clubs and rocks and torches.

“Hutchings,” Sir Richard said despairingly as he tried to disengage his feet from the bars of the gate. Fielding, Byrne and I went back to help them. Fielding raised her cane above her head and some of the men stopped in their tracks. But most did not, and all five of us were bowled over by the mob.

Sir Richard, now free of the gate, was first to his feet. “Run, Sir Richard, run,” Hutchings said. Sir Richard, helmetless, with the now-unrolled sleeves of Byrne’s jacket flapping at the ends of his arms, did as he was told. He dodged the leading edge of the mob and lit out across Bannerman Park with the mob behind him, our prime minister surreally pursued by his constituency. Had there been only five or six in pursuit of him, they would have run him down in seconds, but as every man in the mob wanted to lay hands on him, they moved as one for a while, impeding each other’s progress, and the bottle-neck at the gate was such that Sir Richard got a good head start.

Field Day, April 7, 1932

We were cheered to see such a marvellous turnout this past Thursday afternoon for what may well become an annual event. The Nones, once a widespread custom in Newfoundland, has regrettably all but died out, though it persists in the more remote outports, where it is held on what I am told is still referred to in such places as “the Nones of April,” April 5.

According to Judge Prowse, the earliest mention of the Nones in the literature is in a book published by one Wiliam Douglass in 1755: “The custom is called the Nones [pronounced like bones] after the day in April on which it is held. Likewise the person chosen to be pursued throughout the settlement is called the Nones. In some places the leading citizen is chosen, in others the fleetest of foot male adult, who repeats as the Nones from year to year until he is caught. One old gentleman boasted to me, whether truthfully or not I cannot say, that in his young manhood he had been the Nones six years running. (I believe the pun was not intended.)

“Everyone chases the Nones, shouting at him all manner of abuse, calling him names and even threatening to murder him. On the night of the Nones, once the chase is over, a kind of anarchy prevails throughout the settlement, with citizens wandering the road and setting one another on to acts of mischief, while consuming great quantities of liquor. It is a strange custom and a strange spectacle to witness.”

Prowse refutes Harvey’s theory that the Nones has its roots in the English fox-hunt. Harvey believed the Nones to be a kind of poor man’s fox-hunt, saying that Newfoundlanders unable to afford horses or hounds had to settle for chasing one of their own on foot. But Prowse argues, convincingly, in our opinion, that the Nones is a form of scapegoating, “which was a ritual communal cleansing whereby the sins of the tribe were laid upon a blameless goat who was taken to the wilderness and there released, never to return. (See Leviticus, XVI.)”

The Nones fell out of practice in St. John’s in the mid-nineteenth century, by which time the city had become so large that it was simply impossible, in the judgement of the authorities, to conduct a chase involving the entire population. The Nones is still practised in some of our more remote outports, however, where a ballad perhaps no longer known to those of us too long in cities pent is still sung. By way of augmenting Sir Richard’s attempts to revive a custom unique to Newfoundland, and like so many such customs on the brink of extinction, we here repeat in full the nineteenth-century ballad “The Nones of 1823”:

He hid himself beneath the wharf,
’Twas in April, on the Nones.
On April 6 found they his scarf,
In ’33 found they his bones.

Before nor since was there a chase,
Like that which took Pierce Fudge.
He coopied down, he hid his face:
“From here,” swore he, “I will not budge.”

They searched the bay, they searched the shore,
No sign found they of Pierce.
Back home that night they paced the floors
Their grief ’twas something fierce.

A week went by, a month went by,
The Nones went on and on,
Till even Mary Fudge did sigh,
“’Tis sure, poor Pierce is gone.”

In six months all were of one mind
’Twould be pointless more to search:
“His body we will never find,
For his soul well pray in church.”

On the Nones in eighteen thirty-three,
In the morning at low tide,
A woman from her house did see
Poor Pierce, where he did hide.

Ten years, you say, by kelp concealed
Looked they not beneath that wharf?
His secret now can be revealed:
Pierce Fudge, he was a dwarf.

He hid himself beneath the wharf,
’Twas in April, on the Nones.
On April sixth found they his scarf
In ’33 found they his bones.

All this is by way of preamble to yesterday’s events, and to an advertisement that ran a week from yesterday in all the papers, surely one of the most unusual advertisements to appear in this country in quite some time: “Sir R. A. Squires, P.C., K.C.M.G., K.C., prime minister of Newfoundland, invites the citizens of St. John’s to a revival of the old Newfoundland custom the Nones, which will begin at the Colonial Building on the afternoon of April 5. Sir Richard Squires himself has volunteered to be the Nones. All are welcome to take part in what, it is hoped, will become an annual event. (Participants will be encouraged to make a small donation to charity.)”

We must admit we were concerned upon first seeing this ad, given that Sir Richard is fifty-two years old and surely not capable, we assumed, of running at the speed expected of the Nones without doing himself harm. To the extent of our underestimation of Sir Richard, the following attests.

The enthusiasm shown by the crowd of ten thousand that turned out was remarkable. Who would have blamed them had they all stayed home, given how careworn they must be in such troubled times as these.

“We want Squires,” they chanted, outside the Colonial Building. When a spokesman for Sir Richard came out onto the steps and told them that the fee for participating in the Nones would be one day’s dole, every man present flung six cents at him and seemed unanimous as to where Sir Richard should keep the money before dispersing it to charities.

How tickled they were when they realized, some time later, that Sir Richard had tricked them by sneaking past them in disguise, slipping through the crowd dressed like a member of the ’Stab, his hat pulled low, his glasses off, his collar turned up to hide his face. Not until he intentionally tripped over an iron gate did they recognize him, and then the cry went up. “There he is, God bless him, it’s Sir Richard.” And the Nones was on!

Merrily they set out in pursuit of him, shouting jestful imprecations, hurling stones. Was ever such a sight seen before in the Commonwealth, the citizens of a country chasing their elected leader through the streets? What a pleasant diversion it must have been for men who have been unemployed for years to chase Sir Richard through the city shouting, “Drown the bastard!” “Down to the harbour with him!” “Lynch him for the thief he is!” as if they meant it.

So completely did Sir Richard get into the spirit of the Nones, so determined was he to lighten the hearts of his pursuers, if only for one day, that a member of the Newfoundland Constabulary was later heard to say he could not keep up with him on horseback. If you could have seen, dear reader, the expression he wore as he went by me, his eyes fair popping with delight, on his face a smile of mischief so pronounced that a person not well acquainted with him might have mistaken it for a rictus of despair. He ran, dear reader, your prime minister ran so fast that soon the heels of his shoes were bouncing off his backside. You could see in him the boy he must have been, running flat out for the joy of it, all inhibition cast aside, his knighthood, King’s Council membership and law degrees forgotten. He dashed across Military Road and onto Colonial Street, then further incited his pursuers to delight by ducking into a house uninvited and sending out the other side a decoy dressed like him, who was pursued and caught by the crowd. When they realized he was not Sir Richard, they gave him a mock thrashing, then set after the real McCoy, who by this time had left the house, jumped the fence behind it and begun a successful dash for “freedom” down Bannerman Street.

But back to the “mob,” without whose spirited involvement the revival of the Nones would have been a failure. I doubt that any of them had ever run a Nones before, yet how well they played their parts. Just when it seemed his age and the “mob” were catching up with Sir Richard, some new “threat” would be announced that would set him running even faster. Among the methods of execution recommended by some, and by others rejected on the grounds of being too good for him, were hanging, drowning, shooting, stoning, crucifixion and castration. At various times throughout the Nones, Sir Richard was told he would soon be:

Swimming with the fishes
Floating arse-up in the harbour
Hanging by his ankles from a lamppost
Sorry he was ever born
Wishing he was dead
Begging for mercy and forgiveness
Drawing his last breath
Dying like a dog
Aware that all the money in the
world couldn’t help him now

Such inventiveness! By nightfall, Sir Richard had still eluded capture but was too fatigued to take part in the post-Nones revelry. Upon being made aware that a large contingent of the “mob” was waiting outside his house, he decided to spend the night elsewhere, lest the sight of him so run ragged dampen their spirits.

The next day, when Sir Richard went to his office, a crowd of a couple of hundred gathered and waited for him to leave. He walked through the crowd, accepting their congratulations on a Nones well run. Just as he was about to get into his chauffeur-driven car, a man reached out his hand, grabbed the pipe from Sir Richard’s mouth and put it in his own!