INTRODUCTION

"Well Mr Pritchard, what would you say to a reporter who greeted you on your arrival at the start of your year of voluntary service overseas, Labrador with a question about why you had come out to Canada?"

said the interviewer in the Hanover Square office, London, in June 1969.

“Well,”

I said,

““I would politely ask him to come back in a week's time when I would have a carefully prepared statement ready for him."

So after all these years I guess nobody is any the wiser why I wanted to do vso in the first place. Looking back, I can think of at least three reasons. I was highly driven to help people. I wanted to have a break between school and university and lastly I needed experience of teaching to help me decide if it was to be my future career.
I did not express any particular preference about where I wanted to go and I can remember the chair of the interview panel informing me that it would be no bad reflection on me if I was not selected because four out of every five candidates were turned down. I thought how strange it was that people who came wanting to do good should ever be turned away. Did that mean four out of every five people who came to them could not help others? I thought it absolute nonsense at the time and have done ever since.
So there I was in Port Hope Simpson on 30th August 1969, appointed as a paid probationary teacher with my very own handy, pocket-sized Probationary Licence card working for the Newfoundland and Labrador School Board at the Anglican School. One of the first things I did was start a daily journal[1] to help me deal with my own thoughts and feelings as I quickly had to adjust to the way of life in the community. I also took a large number of photographs which I later had developed into slides in the belief that sometime in the future they may be of interest to other people.
As things turned out, I found myself relying more and more on my journal in helping me come to terms with my situation. However, it wasn't until 32 years later that I was able to present it to the people at the town’s Coming Home celebrations from 19 to 25 July 2002, along with my selection of correspondence[2] about a Labrador Development Company based in Port Hope Simpson. To cap it all 19 July was my birthday.
By the time I came out to the celebrations, I had finished word processing my journal and had arranged for colour photographs to be made from my slides. Another effect of Margaret Burden’s most generous offer, was to motivate me to find out more about the history of Port Hope Simpson from 1934 to 1949 to satisfy my own curiosity and to hopefully take out with me anything I might find.
I therefore contacted the public record office in West London in the hope they might contain something useful. But nothing could have prepared me for the gold mine of information that appeared on my computer screen at home; in the form of original correspondence about a public enquiry into the affairs of the Labrador Development Company that reported in 1945. So one Saturday morning I left Bristol for a drive to the public record office. I marvelled at its huge size; I marvelled at the beautiful lake with its heron outside the front entrance and was not at all surprised by the level of security I had to go through before I was even allowed to enter. I was mesmerised by the intricate organization as documents travelled up and down from the basement on conveyor belts to the reading room. There I read every single piece of information I could find about Port Hope Simpson, making my careful selection for photocopying as I went along.
However, it took two more Saturday visits before I was in a position to start analysing the original correspondence about the company. I also read everything else I could get my hands on about Port Hope Simpson, the commission of government and Newfoundland and Labrador. In particular I read two texts by Peter Neary, professor of history at the University of Western Ontario. I became more and more uneasy as I compared Sir John Hope and Lady Quita Simpson's family letters in “White Tie & Decorations”[3] with the original correspondence between civil servants and people involved with the company. There was something seriously wrong and for some time I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Then I realised that in his letters Sir John Hope Simpson took great pains to paint a whiter-than-white, holier than thou picture of himself as acting commissioner of justice and commissioner of natural resources in Newfoundland from 1934 to 1936. (Two years was the normal length of appointment for the commissioners.) I smelt a rat but I was still unsure about what had been going on in Port Hope Simpson. However, I was absolutely sure about one thing. I had to find out the facts.
It was with that thought firmly in mind that I later interviewed Lemuel Penny in Port Hope Simpson in July 2002.[4] Lemuel told me that he was one of the first people on the scene at the time of two mysterious deaths in Port Hope Simpson. He said that nobody could ever understand why there had never been a proper police investigation into what he and many other local people considered were horrific deaths. Lemuel thanked me profusely when I was able to offer a partial explanation that no proper police investigation ever took place because I believed certain people wanted to avoid any sort of scandal at the time around J O Williams who was the owner of the Labrador Development Company and the father of Eric, his eldest son who apparently, had died with his daughter in the house fire. I explained to Lemuel, that I had found out that the dominions office in London who was responsible for governing Newfoundland at the time, had also instructed their contacts in Cardiff, Wales to collect as much evidence against J O Williams as possible. As a way of getting rid of him to be brought out at an independent public enquiry in 1944 they had themselves engineered in the first place into the affairs of his company.
After the Coming Home celebrations I spent the rest of my summer holiday 2002 avidly researching Port Hope Simpson. For instance, I learnt that Harold Horwood, an authority on the Newfoundland rangers force was of the opinion that it was departmental jealousies that caused a long running battle for control of the Newfoundland Rangers between the department of natural resources headed by Sir John Hope Simpson and the department of justice. I was surprised how such a long-running struggle that lasted from 1934 to 1949 could possibly have been initiated and maintained by different commissioners for a 15 year period. On their own, "departmental jealousies" didn't seem to provide a sufficient explanation although they may have played their part.
When I flew into St John's from Port Hope Simpson I wanted to establish whether a ranger’s report existed about the two deaths. Therefore, with the assistance of the excellent staff at provincial archives, colonial building, all possible locations were searched yet no report was found. When I was also told that many other rangers’ reports from Labrador were also missing, I became more and more convinced that I might be looking at the tip of one almighty iceberg of a cover-up that ran from those in government office to ordinary folk going about their daily lives.
I took my concerns about the deaths in Port Hope Simpson to the department of justice who referred me to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in St John's. I was relieved more than pleased when my story was not only carefully listened to by the RCMP sergeant-on-duty but then by one of the officers who made an audio recording of everything I had to say.
Back in Bristol, England by September 2002, I made another search of the previously secret original correspondence I had uncovered. This time I focused around the deaths on 2 February 1940. I also made a comprehensive search of The Times newspaper articles using a wide range of criteria but could find no record at all of a forest fire that was alleged to have claimed their lives. I was particularly struck by what I considered to be the sanitised version of the newspaper reports of the deaths. From my recent experience of reading original correspondence written mostly by British civil servants, I thought the newspaper reports may have been written by a civil servant or edited by one for public consumption.
Throughout my preliminary research work into the history of Port Hope Simpson I kept on thinking about why Sir Wilfred Grenfell had been so angry with Sir John Hope Simpson. Why had Grenfell disliked what Sir John was doing so much? This contributed to my suspicions about what had really been going on in Port Hope Simpson from 1934 to 1949.
By 2003 I thought I had sufficiently strong evidence to convince others that a huge cover-up had taken place about the deaths and about other matters. I was pleased that my allegation about a possible double homicide had now been referred to the RCMP serious crimes unit in Gander who had decided to open up their own investigation.
Subsequently, Tombstone was written from the research report that the RCMP received on 18 February 2003. Although this book is my attempt to use the report for the people of Port Hope Simpson, its inception lies more than anything else in the innocent curiosity of an 18 year old boy.
It has come about because I first saw the granite tombstone of an Arthur Eric Williams and his daughter Erica in August 1969 when I worked in Port Hope Simpson, Labrador as that young teacher. A fellow Welshman and his 18-month-old baby girl lying in Port Hope Simpson in Labrador had seemed so odd. What were they doing there? How had they died? Their burial had been in Port Hope Simpson instead of Wales. Had somebody been trying to hide something? As the son of a Welsh collier, I had a feeling that one day I would become involved in trying to find out what had really happened. The trouble was that nobody in Port Hope Simpson had ever been able to tell me a coherent story about what really happened when a logging operation had started their settlement that led to it been called The First Company Town in Labrador.
It was most strange that nobody seemed to understand how and why Port Hope Simpson had developed and there still seemed to be an underlying resentment among the people towards the first industrialist in their place, which made me feel uneasy as well. What had been going on from 1934 to 1949? There was a great deal that did not seem right somehow or other.