The recently published book, The
Labrador Memoir of Dr Harry Paddon, 1912-1938, is a medical
saga, recounting the story of the Paddons in Labrador.
The memoir is edited by Ronald Rompkey, a
research professor with the Department of English at Memorial
University, and published by McGill-Queen's University Press.
Henry Locke Paddon (1881-1939), the son of
an Indian Army officer, was raised by his aunts in the London suburb
of Wimbledon. While still a boy at Repton School, he declared his
intention to become a medical missionary after hearing an address by
Wilfred Grenfell in which Grenfell described his work in Labrador.
After taking the BA at Oxford in 1906, he studied medicine at St.
Thomas's Hospital, qualifying MRCS, LRCP in 1911 and sailed in the
North Sea as a physician under the auspices of the Royal National
Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen. In 1912, he accepted an invitation to
work at Indian Harbour, Labrador, as physician-in-charge of the
RNMDSF hospital established by Grenfell 10 years before. That
summer, he met Mina Gilchrist, a nurse from New Brunswick, and the
two were married the following year. In 1915, they occupied the
first cottage hospital at North West River, the village that would
become their home and that of their four sons.
When Paddon died, he was succeeded by his
eldest son, Dr. W. Anthony (Tony) Paddon, later Lieutenant-Governor
of Newfoundland. Harry Paddon's memoir, written in the 1930s and now
edited by Mr. Rompkey, constitutes the last element of the story of
the Paddons in Labrador. Other elements have already been published
by two sons and by the American author Elliott Merrick.
Paddon realized he was documenting the
decline of a way of life. Thus, in view of the rapid social change
that has taken place in Labrador since the Second World War, his
memoir has acquired added significance as a picture of a world now
virtually lost. The population of Hamilton Inlet during his lifetime
consisted of a mixture of Innu, Inuit and Hudson's Bay Company
workers (mostly Scots) who had sustained a seasonal economy quite
different from that of Newfoundland, one requiring extreme physical
labour and dependence on the fluctuating price of fur. But during
the period under review, the small Labrador population began to
witness the arrival of the mining, paper and hydroelectric
industries, and it later experienced the introduction of wage labour
during the construction of the Goose Bay air force base.
Paddon arrived in Labrador as a physician
but quickly transformed himself into a kind of colonial
administrator in a region where no elected official existed, and he
became deeply interested in movements for the development of
northern regions. He was magistrate, farmer, child welfare officer
and educator. His influence ran deep, and he could truly be said to
have been Labrador's principal resident apologist and promoter. His
reputation was such that if he had survived, he would undoubtedly
have represented Labrador at the 1946 National Convention that
debated whether the colony would enter Confederation. He writes in
his introduction: "A great meat belt north of the wheat belt
may yet extend across the great moss tundras on the northern limits
of timber lands from the Pacific to the Atlantic, including
Labrador. Almost in a night this God-forsaken wilderness, unfit for
human habitation, has become a Land of Promise, beckoning to Capital
and challenging adventure."
While this sounds a trifle optimistic, it
represents the state of affairs prior to the onset of war and
Confederation. Few people could have known Labrador as intimately as
Paddon, and few works of the same magnitude could have documented
daily life in such detail. Apart from Grenfell's own promotions, it
is a unique record of the demands placed on medical staff,
particularly during the Spanish Flu epidemic, and of the problems of
an emerging society.
The book launch for The Labrador Memoir
of Dr. Harry Paddon, 1912-1938, edited by Ronald Rompkey, will be
held on Thursday, October 23, at 7 p.m. at Bennington Gate Bookstore
in St. John’s.
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