Farewell to Novascotian Crystal
Even across the digital airwaves a collective moan could be heard last week when the news broke that NovaScotian Crystal is closing its doors at the end of February.
“Gutted,” said one person, “just devastating” another, “so disappointed” another still.
Mostly local people but also a pharmacist from Fredericton, a writer from Victoria, a retired Anglican cleric from Ottawa, an energy consultant from Calgary, tweeted about how sad they felt now that the business is soon to be shuttered.
Such a sentiment is perfectly understandable.
Thirty-seven people now work at the country's only mouth-blown, hand-cut crystal company.
Some of them, for all I know, could be traditional glassworkers from Ireland, perhaps even from the famed Waterford Crystal Company, who immigrated here when NovaScotian Crystal was founded in 1996. We feel for every one of those people.
The operation's closure is also a blow to the Halifax downtown, where the glassblowing facility and retail operation helped anchor the waterfront, drawing in passersby whether from Mumbai or Musquodobit.
From the start, furthermore, the company has been a great ambassador for this province, as demonstrated by the recent video of Saturday Night Live cast member Kenan Thompson receiving a pair of NovaScotian Crystal tumblers from his wife as a Christmas present.
For all of these reasons we mourn this business that fell victim to the economic ravages of COVID-19, which kept the tourists and tour boats away, and made it near impossible for the glass-making artisans to work in the kind of proximity that their craft demanded.
In my view, NovaScotian Crystal's demise will be sorely lamented for something else altogether: for 25 years it brought the magic, in so many different ways.
This after all isn't some generic operation, the kind of business you'd find in a mall in Saskatoon or along the Trans-Canada Highway somewhere up in the Canadian Shield.
The craftsmen who worked there stepped through a crack in time, practising an art that has been around for millennia, doing things the ancient way, using centuries-old tools and techniques unchanged, I imagine, since the Sack of Drogheda.
I spent a morning down there one day, by the glass furnace, the temperature a balmy 1,400 C, where, as I wrote at the time, “it feels like my hair could catch on fire” and the accents seemed as thick as the air.
I saw the boys at work, turning out the nearly 400 crystal goblets, vases, lamps and bowls that they then produced daily.
My guide was a wiry County Waterford man named Brian Tebay, who was 15 and a Grade 10 dropout working in an Irish hotel when his dad — head glassblowing instructor at Waterford's crystal factory — said it was time to follow in the family trade.
At the Waterford glassworks, which employed 3,000 and had been operating since 1783, Tebay did five years as a glass-blower and then another five to qualify as a master craftsman.
Somewhere along the line Denis Ryan, the Tipperary, Ireland-born musician, entrepreneur and investor got to thinking that what Halifax really needed was an authentic Irish glasswork.
As I understand the sequence of events, Ryan called Tebay's dad, Jack. Then the father invited the son to join the handful of Irish artisans bringing this old skill to this new place.
Sixteen years later, there I stood, breathing into a 1.8-metre pipe, at the end of which was a glowing molten blob of glass, blowing the beginnings of a whiskey tumbler “into life” as those who do it like to say.
All around me, I recall, there was a hellish noise, clattering and clanging, the roaring of furnaces, the hiss of boiling water.
The company's website says that “a single piece of NovaScotian Crystal takes from three days to three weeks of production and may be touched by no fewer than 12 craftsmen.”
At the end of all of that blowing, cutting and polishing, something glittering emerged etched with patterns with names like Annapolis, Citadel, Luna, Margaree, Titanic and Windsor. Just like magic.
It is possible that a saviour will materialize between now and the end of February. But their heart had better be in the right place.
What made NovaScotian Crystal singular, and its products a phenomenon, was the craftsmen who toiled down on the Halifax waterfront in the heat and noise, paying exacting attention to detail, doing things the way they had always been done.
It is possible that the market for such a thing is no longer what it once was. On the other hand, the social media comments last week make me think that if you bring the magic, anything is possible.