7 PROTAGANISTS' DIFFERENT MOTIVES FOR DEVELOPMENT

J O Williams held the purse strings to the Labrador Development Company in the relative security of his home at Castle Court, Cardiff, Wales. He made sure that unless any building or construction was necessary for supporting the success of his Labrador venture at Port Hope Simpson it simply was not built. The only conclusive evidence that points towards his contribution in terms of making the pioneer settlement a better place in which to live was six houses pictured in the company’s own brochure that were used exclusively for company staff accommodation. As well as a staff house, a shack bunkhouse for 80 loggers, a company store and a bridge. It is unclear whether by the winter of 1935 he had contributed anything towards the cost of building the community hall (also used as a church and a school) and a medical clinic. What is now clear is that unless J O Williams saw a financial profit then he contributed as little as he could towards the well - being of the loggers and their families. The fact that his pattern of responses showed him to be somebody who never gave up on his dream to develop the Labrador is explained by the simple reason that he was allowed to get away with pretty much anything he wanted to under the guise of development.
Keith Yonge with Ranger Clarence Dwyer were jointly responsible for trying to develop a more cooperative spirit between the company and the loggers in 1942. But since the company was shutting down when this initiative was tried it suggests Yonge was clutching at straws as the men were leaving the place for work elsewhere. In his official capacity, Yonge essentially had to do as Williams told him, although Yonge's actions also showed him to be somebody who was fully capable of taking care of himself. He had negotiated "The Yonge Contract", which meant that even whilst employed as its manager, he was contracted to sell wood to the company at very favourable prices. His lucrative contract was successfully completed after the death of Eric. The fact that Eric Williams had removed so much of the surplus stores to St John’s, away from Port Hope Simpson, also points the finger of suspicion at Yonge for pocketing earnings from the sale of excessive supplies at the company’s store.
Sir John Hope Simpson and the other commissioners wanted to reduce the island's burden of debt in as many ways as possible. One of the ways was to get as many people into work and off government relief payments as possible. But the decline in government payments at Port Hope Simpson from 1940–1943 was paradoxically matched by less, instead of more, company work being available as the people tried to make Port Hope Simpson a better place in which to live.
The other commissioners in St John’s were effectively ruled by Simpson and Lodge in the early days of the commission and they never managed to fully regulate what was going on at Port Hope Simpson even when their own nominees sat on the Labrador Development Company's board in St John’s from 1940. As a body of civil servants they mainly adopted a bystander's role in relation to the company's activities, and either ignored or did not know what the local management and the owner were up to all along. It was not until the men in Port Hope Simpson had withdrawn their labour for good that the departure of J O Williams from the scene later in 1948 had become inevitable. But Williams still harboured thoughts about developing into fishing, and he used the threat of making a claim for compensation against the government as a powerful bargaining chip in securing an unusually profitable final timber contract in 1946. In 1947, Williams bemoaned the fact that he found a derelict township on the site of Port Hope Simpson when ironically he had been mainly responsible for its decline in the first place.
It had taken a public enquiry that reported in May 1945 on the affairs of the company from 1934–1944 before the actions of officialdom were seen to be done. The motive behind the enquiry from the dominion office's point of view, where Chadwick first came up with the idea, was to discredit Williams’ character as much as possible. But from the British government's point of view they made it well known that they considered Judge Dunfield had exonerated him. In fact Dunfield blamed Williams and other parties for his company's unsatisfactory state of affairs. That is what the dominions office resented.
The response by the civil servants at the dominions office had been to keep on throwing good money after bad as Clutterbuck and his men sought to extricate themselves from the bungled business relationship with J O Williams that Sir John Hope Simpson had first built. One year after J O Williams first arrived in Port Hope Simpson they realised that he could not be trusted. But they were up against something of their own making, something the civil service held very dear: their own tradition that they must never break ranks. Even when fundamental mistakes of judgment had been made by one of their own, the golden rule still applied: never go public. They were caught in a Catch 22 situation. There was simply nothing they could do to break that treasured mould that had worked so well for so long, and now it was working against them as it covered everybody's tracks including the man they were after.