Focusing a lens on Joey’s development dreams
This is a companion album to Gerhard Bassler’s “Escape Hatch,” and a hefty, insightful picture guide to an under-researched and -studied development period and social policy in provincial history. It includes photographs, government promotions, architectural sketches and blueprints, advertisements, newspaper clippings, and other graphics of people, sites, and production, often collected from personal and family collections.
“Escape Hatch,” which Flanker published this past February, examined the 17 post-confederation, and, not co-incidentally, post-wwii and Cold War-era New Industries ardently pursued by the Smallwood government and largely helmed by German, Austrian, and Latvian entrepreneurs. As industrial strategies go it became highly character-driven and even mythic. The cast included Premier Joseph Smallwood; émigré, economist, and later convicted criminal Alfred Valdmanis; and a cohort of managers, labourers, and their families that was sizable enough that German was, for that time, the third-largest ethnic group in Newfoundland.
It was meant to diversify the N.L. economy, wrest it from the caprices of the international fisheries and channel it into cement and chocolates, and spread prosperity and career choice throughout.
For the Europeans, it was an opportunity to escape their war-ravaged countries, now falling under the shadow of Communist takeover, for a new life, future, and political freedom. There was a wave of optimism, a variety of schematics, and a lot of government funding.
But these transplanted proposals largely failed to take root. Their reputation is of having been completely wasteful, but, as Bassler argued in “Escape Hatch,” this measurement is simplistic and not factual. More than a few of the projects functioned
for more than a little while, and, while most (though not all) of the immigrants associated with them did move on to mainland Canada, their time here was enough to influence the art, culture, cuisine, even the gardens here.
“Develop of Perish” — Bassler explains the title come from “a slogan Smallwood himself introduced to justify the urgency of his New Industries Program” — was compiled as an “extensive visual record” of those initiatives.
The images are divided into three sections: “Smallwood, Valdmanis, and German industry” is “a windfall of photos covering Smallwood’s 1950 and 1951 industrial tours through Germany” and “affords spectacular detailed glimpses of the sightseeing, feasting, and industrial inspections lavished on Smallwood’s travelling party”; “The 17 New Industries, offsprings, and stillborn industries” with an “emphasis is on the construction of the factory buildings and the beginnings of operations” though unfortunately the cache available “resulted in a very uneven coverage” with some of the smaller works “overrepresented”; and “The German and Latvian newcomers,” capturing “the social life and cultural activities of the German, Latvian, and Austrian groups and their activities at the time of their immigration and settlement, and, in the case of a few survivors, until the more recent past.”
There is also a list of abbreviations, sources for the photographs and illustrations, and notes on sources. All the pictures are in black and white, and while many are just accompanied by pithy captions, others are framed with extended explanatory texts. Though obviously crafted in tandem with Bassler’s earlier publication, it is comprehensive and comprehensible on its own.
In one series, “Inspecting MIAG plant in Braunschweig, October 1950” with five pictures, credited as “Valdmanis photos,” Premier J. R. Smallwood is seen evaluating machinery and atmosphere. “Smallwood was deeply impressed by the organization, discipline, and budding prosperity in Germany. On visiting a factory with Smallwood in Hamelin, James Chalker recalled seeing hundreds of workers stop at a blow of a whistle, get up at the blow of a second whistle, and walk out of the factory in a queue. Chalker doubted that ‘we could ever train Newfoundlanders like that.’”
There are photo sequences and montages of installing the rotary kiln at the North Star Cement Company in Corner Brook, renovating 22 Prescott St. to house Atlantic Films & Electronic Ltd., and the Colonial Construction designs of the Burin Vocational School and the ticket counter at Stephenville Airport.
These make for an impressive official record, while he third section is more personable. There are family snaps, a menu from The El Tico, and privately-held papers like William Jenny’s designs for the new Memorial University campus including the Science and Arts Buildings (“too modern”), and Ernst Steinbrink’s Trinity Evangelical Church on Logy Bay Road (“established his reputation as an architect with imagination and savvy.”)
The nature of the material, non-colour photographs, does made the book a little monotone and monochrome. But it’s also an exhaustive and distinct assemblage.