The Victoria Community Development Corporation

Harold Priddle

"I worked with the American Air Force in Greenland."

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I have two brothers: Lionel and Graham. I have one sister: Florence. I was born up on Penney's Hill - the Priddle's up on Penney's Hill. My father was John Priddle. My mother was Clara Butt from down the Neck.. My grandparents were Reuben and Eliza Priddle and Martin and Ellen Butt. My father got killed in Sydney in the mines. I was ten years old. My mother was a Butt from down on the Neck.

When my father got killed we were living with my grandparents which was Reuben and Eliza Priddle. So when my father got killed, my mother decided to build her own house. She wanted to be close to her family, the Butts, so we moved on the Neck Road and built a new house.
In them years, there was no such thing as a working woman. What I mean by working is that they didn't work for pay. They stayed home and did housework. In them year, the men went to the mines in Sydney (Nova Scotia). ‘Course the role of the women then was to harvest the vegetables and cut the hay and get ready for winter.

My grandparents took me to church and they taught me to remember the Sabbath Day and always keep it holy. One thing they taught me was never to do anything on Sundays. You would barely feed the animals. That's all. You would cut your wood on Saturday evening and you cleaned your vegetables on Saturday evening. Your mother would iron your shirts and press your pants for Sunday because you didn't do anything on Sunday unless you had to.
I had my first job when I was 16 years old. I was down on Old Salmon Cove Road with a pick and shove ditching the highway. I then went tot he lumber woods in Deer Lake I was there for a while until I received a call from my mother telling me they were building a prison camp here in Victoria. The camp was being built on our road. So that entitled me to a job. So I came home and went to work there.

I also worked with the American Air Force in Greenland and the Arctic Circle. I came home one Christmas for a holiday and decided to stay and went to work at the Victoria power plant.
The houses in Victoria when I was growing up were usually two-story. I grew up in a two-story house. We had no electricity. We had one little light at the top of the stairs. The only source of heat was a wood stove. When we went to be we had to make sure there was no fire burning. I got my first television in the 1950s.

Well, there were many chores to be done. You would help your parents digging potatoes in the fall of the year, and you helped sawing up wood, and bringing it in for the night because that was your main source of heat - all wood.

The chores that the girls did were somewhat different from the men. They would stay in the house and help their mothers, scrub the floors, wash the clothes by hand. The girls would help more inside than outside.

There were certain days to do certain chores. For example, Monday was wash day but that would depend on the weather.

People in them years grew most of their own food. They grew potatoes, turnip, carrots, beets and parsnip. A lot of people used to grow pumpkins. My grandparents also kept animals: horses, cows, sheep and goats.

As for games, we played hockey in the winter on the pond and baseball and cricket in the summer time. Every Sunday both summer and winter, we went to church.

We used to have Christmas concerts. Also, we had garden parties in May. There used to be Johnny Miller concerts at the Orange Hall once in a while. We would pay 5¢ to get in.

When I was going to school, we used to cut our little hearts to put in the school window. That was to celebrate Valentine's Day. Also, we used to celebrate Easter. We would celebrate Christmas in a different way.

We would celebrate Christmas for two weeks then. I remember we used to go mummering. Jannys or jannying we called it. It had to be awful stormy out to stop you from going jannying.

I lived on Penney's Hill until I was eight. I used to go to a school that had about four or five rooms. After I moved down on the Neck, the east end, I went to a one room school house. We used to take turns lighting the fire. That's what it was like. There was no running water or indoor plumbing. We had nothing but outdoor toilets.

Well, now, I don't remember the exact population but I know no one completed high school - well, not very many, just what we call the rich.

I used to use a slate and chalk. I had a bottle full of water and a piece of rag. When I made a mistake, I'd wipe it off.

The only transportation that we had was a horse and cart in summer and a horse and slide in the winter. If you never had this, you could walk

I can remember the train coming through Victoria. We used to put nails on the track and wait for the train to come and run over the nails on the track. Why, I can remember the train is because my father was killed in Sydney and (his body) came home on the train.

There was one doctor in Carbonear. We used to use homemade remedies if we got sick. There used to be old people around that would charm toothaches. They used to do a lot of the work that the doctors do now. If people had a toothache they would go over and see this man, George Eddie White. He could stop blood and he could stop pain and he had the charm. That's a lot of things doctors and nurses do now. George Eddie White had the gift.

When women went into labour the men would get out of the house and granny would come and do the job. They would come and make the delivery. When they come the would come with a bag.

The Depression was brought on by the falling of the . . . the crashing of the banks. I think it was all over the world. I know that everybody suffered through the Great Depression. Now, here in Victoria, I suppose, there was some people desperately poor. There was more people a little better off than others. There was people here that had horses, cows, goats, and sheep and they raised their own vegetables.

But there was no cash. No one had a dollar. There was no way to make a dollar. So most of the people had to go to the welfare office. There was no work, there was no employment, there was no baby bonus, so there was no income. So, when you used your last dollar, where did you go? You couldn't stay home and starve to death. So people had to go to the welfare office to get what they called the dole. The dole was 6 cents a day per person.

You had to go to the welfare officer and if he was in any doubt that you didn't need it they would send a policeman to your house. He would search around the house to see if you would have any four in the barrel - to see if you had anything in the house to eat before they were able to give you any help. A year or two before the Depression, my father got killed in the mines in Sydney, so we had a income during the Depression of $40 a month.

My mother built a new house out of the $40 a month. She built a big two-story house and I guess we helped out the poor people a lot. I can remember being a young fella with people coming and knocking on our door with a dozen trout and saying,, "Mrs. Priddle, I'll gibe you a dozen trout if you give me a bit of fat pork because we got no fat pork." I can remember people coming up to our door with a gallon of partridge berries looking for sugar to boil up their jam. People suffered. They had riots in Carbonear. They stopped the train and they were going to throw the members over the wharf.

But there were people a little better off than that. Some people had a cow to kill in the fall of the year and people who hunted had their moose. There were people who would salt a barrel of caplin and a barrel of rounders. There was no harm and eggs. There were a lot of people who had no electricity because they couldn't afford to pay whatever it was at the time. I'm not sure what it was but there was a lot of people who had nothing, only kerosene oil.

I can remember going to people's houses around here and there was nothing on the floor. No canvas, no mats, no nothing. Just the wood. Wooden floors. Saturdays they would get the scrubbing brush and scrub that wooden floor and you'd see the knots up through it.

That went on until World War II broke out, I think in September of 1939. In 1940 they started to build the Prison Camp here in Victoria. That was the first beginning of what they called "The Boom." I can remember people coming here in droves. That was before Argentia, before any of the base started.

People came here and they lived in old tent. They lived in cellar houses that belonged to people. Where ever they could get a place to roost because they got work. People was desperate for work. And, i suppose, from then on in, well then the War was on and they started building bases around Newfoundland and the mines opened up. Things got better after that.

There were a lot of people sick. There was a lot of TB at that time. It was called consumption. There were places, not here in Victoria so much, like down in Salmon Cove, when the whole family was wiped out with consumption. The whole family died.

During the Depression when you'd get your dole note, you had a note, you never got any cash. If they gave you a dole note, you gave you a note, and that now was itemized. There was only certain thing you'd get on it: sugar, flour, butter, tea - whatever the case might be. Then they came up with this brown flour. People on the dole could get no white flour. They would give you whole wheat. They figured it was better for your system, I suppose.

(BEATRICE: In the Depression, we were a bit different. My Father went to Labrador. He bought a building down on the Labrador and he went fishing. Then in the spring of the year, he'd get his supply of food and everything, and then catch his fish. He'd come home and sell the fish. In the fall of the year, he'd get out supplies for the winter. So, I must say, we had lots of food. You know, it was different all together. We used to get boxes of biscuits and the big bolognas and the tubs of butter.)

But there were people here who wasn't all that bad off, either. There were people who sold vegetables, caplin and everything. In the wintertime, of course, there were no cars. There was the doctor, I think and there were a couple of cars around in the wintertime. There were no snow plows. In the spring of the year, the people on dole would have to go shovel the Barrens. They would shovel the road because. . . . Maybe there'd be hundreds of men on the Heart's Content Barrens and shovel the snow. They would pile it as high as they could on each side of the road. The slush from the snow would come and be around in May. I can remember seeing down around Forest Pond, maybe hundreds of men shoveling the snow.

I can remember when there'd be days and days when we would half a dozen, we used to call them bums. People with bags on their back, knocking on the door asking for a bit of flour or a bit of sugar or bit of butter. People had no other choice. Starve to death or do nothing. You had no heat, no light, nothing to eat. Six cents a day - how could you manage?

In 1902 they stared to build the Victoria Power House in there. In 1904 Victoria Power Pant went on stream and supplied electricity to the towns of Harbour Grace, Carbonear, Heart's Content, and Bay Roberts.

There were four operators there. I guess anybody working in Victoria at that time would be the Power Operator, the Post Master, and a few merchants. They had two staff housed in there for the operators. In fact, at one time they had a staff house in there with two families living in it. There was a time when there was three operators and they were housed in a company house in there for 25 years, when I went to work in there.

When I went to work in there, used to be five of us. Five operators. After being there two years, they made the plant semiautomatic and they cut it down to one operator. I was there for 25 years all alone.

I don't remember the first people to operate the Power House, but I know who they were. There were Joe Stanford, his brother and a Benny Cooper. They lived in there in the company house. They come from Grate's Cove.

At that time, when I went to work, before I went to work there was no holidays. People in there worked seven days a week right around the clock. They had three eight-hour shifts.

In 1945 they got a union. The union got them to working six days s week. Three operators. They had to get another operator and I got the job. I went to work in there in 1955 as the operator because they cut back on the three eight-hours days.

There was a lot of maintenance. You'd get a lot of ice stuck in the winter time. There was a lot of old such and it wasn't like it is now. In those years if Victoria plant closed down there was no electricity in Carbonear, Harbour Grace and Bay Roberts. Everybody went in the black. This is why you had to go all out to make sure that the plant was running because there'd be complaints from factories in Carbonear and Harbour Grace.

We lost the power a lot. It wasn't like it is now. We never had big poles, high wires, heavy wires. A lot of times we used to get bad lightning storms and a lot of times the power used to get knocked out with the heavy lightning in the summer time and in the winter time, you'd get a bad storm, heavy snowfall. There was no way to get around. A linesman would have to walk.

The house and the residence were well kept up. Two-story houses, most of them had electric heat because the company supplied them with electric heat. They had the water and sewer even though it wasn't the town's water and sewer. The water came from the main flume source. They were very comfortable houses to live in. We lived in a house in there that had four bedrooms and three big rooms downstairs.

Sundays nobody did anything. You didn't cut up wood. You didn't make kindling. You didn't peel vegetables. Everything was done on Saturday. The only thing you did was sneak up in the barn to feed the cows. One Sunday morning they figured they would have to close the power plant. Everyone would have no electricity. Mostly this was because the factories were closed on Sunday. Anyway, there was a church service in the United church. Some old got up and made a motion that they'd walk down to the Power Plant and make them get out. They weren't allowed to work in Victoria on Sundays. And that happened. They all left the church and paraded down to the Power House. The men had to pack up and get going and wait until Monday to came back and do the job.

One time Rocky Pond Dam washed out. All the water came down and took the fence off, and washed out the trestle. At that time the train used to be going down the North Shore and when the burst everything came down over the hill - the rocks wood, water and everything washed out the trestle. At the same time, the train was down the North Shore and here was
passengers on the way up. Of course, they couldn't get up because everything was washed out. They made a road up underneath the hill and walked up as far as the Power Plant. Then they had a bridge across in there by the Power Plant and they had to come up to Victoria and get on the train. There was another train in Victoria waiting to take them.

The old boss, this man Stanford, he was going with a girl down in Broad Cove and he was the chief operator. He was down there with his horse and carriage. That's the way you would go courtin' then: you'd bring your horse and carriage. Anyway, he was down in Broad Cove in his horse and carriage when the dam broke. He couldn't get back up and he was the boss. So the old fellow came out from St. John's. Old man Murphy came from St. John's and fired Stanford because he wasn't on the job.

They started to build this new dam in to Rocky Pond. This man Murphy was the owner of the company then, and he built a shack in there when they started to build the dam. He had a big window in there and he used to open a wooden window and he'd put his elbows on the window. He was watching the men on the mixing board. They were all up on a big mixing board, a big old mixing board. The first time a man would straighten his back to take a spell, he would fire him. "You're not strong enough to be working here," he'd say.

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