by Linda Smith

There was an unprecedented exodus of young women from Newfoundland to Ontario during the nineteen forties. At the invitation of factory recruiters, these ‘girls’ came to Ontario to find work and perhaps overall, to reach for a better life. Arriving in Ontario must have been a challenging and disorienting new beginning for hundreds of these young women. They bravely gambled leaving the life they knew, for an uncertain future – in the far away, unknown mainland.

This is really an immigrant story as Newfoundland was still a colony of Britain in the forties. They travelled TO Canada. Newfoundland didn’t join the confederation of Canada until 1949. What a daunting adventure for those courageous girls!

The DOMINION WOLLEN AND WORSTEDS MILL operated a huge textile plant in Hespeler, Ontario (now part of Cambridge.) This factory (D.W.&W) began in 1928 and ceased operations in 1959, but in the nineteen forties, production was in full swing. It was the largest such mill in North America at the time, filling fifteen acres of land and employing twelve hundred.

The problem was finding workers to run the place. Even after the demand for uniforms and other war materials was over after World War Two, the country was in a huge production boom in those post-war years. They needed workers! And they weren’t looking for family men tied to the time commitments of wives and children.

What they needed were young, unattached women: seventeen and up – not those who had a family to tend to. They needed single women who could put in the long hours at the mill. A recruiting program began, looking for such candidates in northern Ontario and England, but mostly in central and western Newfoundland. As it turns out, one of the mill executives was a Newfoundlander himself, which is why attention was turned there.

The Mill recruiters scouted in many poorer areas hoping to find young women who might be looking for a change: employment – adventure – wanting to see somewhere new!

The recruiters showed up in these communities presenting seminars about the wondrous jobs awaiting young women in their mill. There were posters and reels of happy looking, stylish young women with trendy hair-dos, laughing with other girls in a nicely furnished room. Often food was laid out with the promotion too.

It probably went something like this: “See, this poster? This can be your life too!”

They didn’t talk about the sweltering temperatures in the dirty, dusty mill, or the long grueling hours. Many girls jumped at the chance!

This was the deal:

“Come to work in our mill in Ontario for a year. The company will pay your way out; by boat and then train to Hespeler. If you stay for the full year and don’t like it – we’ll pay your way back – BUT YOU HAVE TO YOU STAY FOR THE YEAR. Why – we’ll pay you forty-nine cents an hour!”

This was a fortune in those times for women who had never seen that kind of money. Incidentally, that was 40 – 50% lower than wages for a man in the mill at that time.

However, this seemed like a great deal and fabulous money in the 1940’s, especially in remote fishing villages where there were few jobs – especially for women. Money was scarce and hard to come by. Many of these women from the outports were from very modest homes and lifestyles.

In fact, let me describe the life many of those girls came from in Newfoundland. This wasn’t so in some of the bigger cities and towns there, but certainly in the rural areas in the late forties, many lived like the pioneers had a hundred years earlier.

No electricity:  Therefore – no refrigeration. Cooking was on a woodstove. Coal oil lamps were used for night time in homes.

No indoor plumbing: A well in the back yard with a manual pump.

The toilet was the shack out back – a little rough in winter and a ‘honey pot’ under the bed if you couldn’t wait!

Bath night was a small metal tub set up in the living room using hot water drawn from the hot water tank in the kitchen woodstove. Ten could have a bath in the same water. You could hope to be the first one in.

Laundry was done in a big bucket of hot water on a scrub board in the back yard during summer and in the kitchen during winter.

No grocery stores: Their grocery store was the woods providing hunting for moose and caribou. Their fruit counter was the forests and fields. Berries are plentiful in Newfoundland, but you had to go out and pick them – a lot more work than picking up a basket of berries on the Sobey’s fruit counter. The berries they gathered were bottled for winter months.

There was often one small dry goods store in these communities for some staples like flour, sugar, molasses, tea and other such items delivered by boat. But with no refrigeration – the goods on offer were all dry goods.

And of course, the ocean and rivers provided fish. Rabbit snares set in trails across land, provided another source of meat for some good rabbit stew.

Many kept a few animals in small areas in their yards: a cow for milk – chickens for eggs, maybe lamb to butcher and the odd chicken too if it stopped laying eggs. It was a real organic diet!

They tended large gardens and stored vegetables in root cellars dug into a hill to keep food for their large families during the long harsh winter. (turnips/cabbage/potatoes/onion/carrots. Their fertilizer was kelp hauled up from the shoreline when the tide went out. We just open a nice bag and sprinkle it around. They gathered the wet clumps and dragged it off to where-ever they kept their gardens – all very labour intensive.

Just processing hunted meat took a great effort too. They butchered their own meat and many stored it in bottles boiled on the stove for the months ahead. Everybody made their own bread and cooked on a wood burning stove.

No doctors– no clinics: This meant also no birth control or drug stores where you might purchase some.

The result was that most women had a baby every two years more or less – throughout all their childbearing years. The families were big and resources to look after them – meager. Even finding clothes for everybody was a challenge. They used the material from cloth flour sacks and spun wool from their sheep.

It was a hard life; hard on their bodies and hard on their stamina to keep up running a household overrun with the needs of so many children.

My grandmother was a homemade midwife in Newfoundland with no medical training. She herself had seven children and twins in the lot. Mom remembered her mother moaning on the bed for a month after the difficult birth, with no medical help or medicines to alleviate her suffering. Many women just didn’t make it – or their babies. With no medical care, the death rate goes up and life expectancy goes down.

As the oldest of seven, my mother told me she would see her mother crying quietly in the bedroom when she discovered yet another pregnancy.

Folk medicine: But no scientifically based medicines at all. Some of them may have even worked but a lot of folklore was mixed in with any legitimate remedies. Oh, you could travel to a city to find medicines and doctors to prescribe it, but that was far away and a difficult journey. This was not a timely solution when you had something as simple as an ear infection and needed help -now! Few if anyone had a car to even drive there and what for? The only access to some port communities was by sea. Most did have a boat (dory), for small trips up and down the shoreline or to go out on the rivers fishing.

No Dentists: How people suffered with bad teeth! When I visited there in 1962, I was shocked at how many people over thirty had no teeth at all! Mom recalled rolling around on the floor as a child with a painful toothache. We take a lot for granted about our modern standard of living in Canada.

Even so, it cannot be said that Newfoundlanders hated their way of life – not at all. That wouldn’t be true. In fact, I recall a time I visited there in the early sixties as a young girl. I was introduced to a man as someone from Toronto. (I lived in Stouffville – close enough). He said, “Ah yes! Bin dare once – some awful!” Newfoundlanders cherish their homeland and the rugged beauty of their Island and yes, even their rustic lifestyle.

HOWEVER!!!

Many young women of that era brought up this way, wanted something different for their lives. So, they signed up for the promise of a better life at The Mill in the far-off mysterious world of ‘The Mainland.’  The young have all the courage in the world to reach for the stars, and to try something different. The vision of wandering to distant shores can override any fear of the unknown. Doing laundry in a tub in the backyard for your ten brothers and sisters wasn’t too glamorous to a young woman either. An adventure in Ontario was!

And so, the recruiters showed up in Newfoundland communities with their presentations and convinced hundreds of girls to leave it all behind.

“Come on out and see what great opportunities await you in Ontario! A good paying job! A good social life with so many things to enjoy; a real adventure! Tell your friends too!”

The word went out – the girls signed up. So off they went, by boat and then train, full of optimism, landing in Ontario. Just the look of a place like Hespeler must have made them feel like they’d stepped off a space ship onto Martian soil. It was so different than their island villages back home.

There was no ocean around for one thing. Try to picture and hear the sounds and sights that confronted them they were not accustomed to: cars everywhere making noise/fancy dressed people/grocery stores with a selection of foods never before seen/different customs/different food/different language. It was English yes, but spoken very differently; culture shock! They must have felt a blend of excitement, wonder – and fear. How were they going to make it here in this strange land? Was it a good idea they even came to such a foreign place? One can only imagine their thoughts as they took it all in for the first time. As so began one of the greatest exodus of Newfoundland women in its history.

While it’s true that these girls made money they had never enjoyed before and there were plenty of social programs, still – the reality of working in the mill was something quite different than the reels and posters showed.

There were night and day shifts – ten hour shifts – often six days a week. The night shift made more money but it must have worn them out. The mill was noisy, dirty, dusty and hot! They were expected to work hard!

And then there’s the heat!

Newfoundlanders weren’t used to the high heat they had to endure working in the mill – often a hundred degrees they say. The machines generated heat and then there were Ontario summers with temperatures, never experienced back home.

Newfoundland has a cool climate stuck out there in the Atlantic at that high northern latitude. A heat wave there in summer was about seventy degrees. Even with global warming, it is a cool province most of the year.

However, those feisty Newfoundland gals sure stood up to the plate performing all the jobs in the mill and really made a good job of it from start to finish, producing textile products. It was even said they did an even better job running the mill than the men who had worked there.

Even though the working conditions could be difficult, still the mill owners wanted to do right by those girls which would keep them working there. An Activity Director provided a social program with such entertainment as:

Dances/Picnics/A Baseball team/A skating rink for hockey and ice skating/Bus tours/A choir.

The Mill also provided an older matron to watch over the girls in their dormitories. There were four Mill Dormitories for the female workers: Winston Hall, Gordon Hall, Hillside Lodge and Nelson House.

For many, it really did turn out to be a better life. Having income was a novel experience. They had the freedom to enjoy their own money, a bank account and a job to keep the money coming in. It also meant they could send money back home to impoverished relatives.

There was a large turnover of employees in the mill. Most women only lasted a year or two – if that, in the difficult factory working conditions. Others left to return home because they were homesick. However, there was a third option and many took it: marriage.

There was such a large migration of young women from Newfoundland to work in the mill, that a historian has called it a historically significant event. One in four people in Cambridge in the 1970’s were descendants of those girls who married local men and raised families in the area.

The young men around Hespeler came around too – like bees to honey, and many of those Mill Girls left factory life to become their wives and put down roots in the area. One Mill Girl told me, “It was either that or go back to Newfoundland.” Many stayed put in Hespeler changing the direction of not only their lives, but all their descendants after them. The arrow of destiny had shifted for hundreds of lives – and thousands to come who would now be born in Ontario.

This is all a deeply felt, heart-story for me because my mother, Ida Davis (nee House) was one of those Mill girls.

She was from a little fishing village in the northwest peninsula called Port Saunders. Even today, Google lists the population of that place at six hundred and forty-seven. At that time, the community had only boat access. No roads into the village existed in those days. It was a small, isolated population of humanity in the woods by the sea. There were nearby hamlets, but with no roads, that meant a walk through a footpath in the woods to arrive there.

This was the world my mother walked away from. Perhaps she saw her own life ahead mirrored in her mother’s difficult existence: a baby every two years, living in poverty. Mom said that growing up, they were poor, but they didn’t know they were poor, ‘cos everyone else was too.

As my mother entered her teenage years, she looked to the horizon. There had to be more. When the Mill recruiters offered their pitch, she left home and hearth in Newfoundland and went to Ontario to work in the Hespeler mill.

It was her brave new beginning to leave family and homeland behind. Adjusting must have been difficult. The Ontario girls looked down on her because she only had a Grade Seven education. This was because as a twelve-year-old, she had to leave school to do housework for other families to bring money back home. Anything more than a basic education had little value in that world.

The locals teased mom about her Newfoundland accent. Have you ever heard anybody talk from those villages?

“Yes b’ye, shore der some ‘ard to figure h’out when dey gets ta taw- kin ‘bout tings if you doesn’t ‘ave an ear fer it.

Moi maid shore, you’d be after tink-kin dey was after tawking some far-rin lang-wige.”

For example, my Uncle Walter came to Ontario for a visit thirty or so years ago. I invited my friend over to meet him and after he uttered a few opening sentences, she look puzzled. After a pause she admitted:

“I don’t know what you just said.”

Newfoundlanders have their own way of speaking English on their terms.

Mom clammed up and wouldn’t put herself out there. No talking meant no ridicule, so she made herself scarce in conversations with others so they wouldn’t tease her. It’s hard to think of my mom being bullied just for being who she was.

On a brighter note, Mom was filled with wonder by the massive food choices available in Ontario. Can you image this young outport girl walking into an Ontario grocery store for the first time? There were fruits and vegetables she had never even seen before, bread already baked, refrigerated food – ice cream! Amazing! She got her teeth fixed, permed her hair, and bought some trendy clothes. She also sent clothes and money back home to her family remembering that she hardly had shoes on her feet most of the time growing up. She didn’t forget about them and how they lived.

Mom returned to her home for a visit after she’d been in Hespeler for a while, but the mainland experience had changed her. Mom said she just could not return to that lifestyle after living in Hespeler. Or, as the old song says,

“How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm – after they’ve seen  Par-ree!”

She’d ‘come up from down the shore’, and she wasn’t returning.

I heard all her Mill stories growing up and there were a few pictures of that time in her life that always fascinated me. One work day picture standing outside the dormitory – Winston Hall, in her mill overalls. She’s so cute! Mom told me she was ‘a spinner’ in the mill.

Well, my dad (Howard Davis) was pretty cute too and he came ’a courtin.’ I can see looking at his RCAF photo, why he sent her heart a flutter. Eventually, mom accepted my dad’s proposal of marriage and settled down in the area like so many other Mill Girls. It would be much later when I would realize how much mom gave up leaving her homeland and family behind. You know how it is when you’re young. You don’t really count the cost of your decisions beforehand. Did you?

Mom was from a very large extended family of brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Now she was here and as she said, “I had nobody up here.” It was a sorrow she carried in her heart all her life. I think this was something that always stood between her and true happiness. She was not with her people.

I was witness to the fact that she spent the rest of her life pining for her family. Yes, there were visits home from time to time, but when it was time to say goodbye at the end of a trip – the great sorrow of separation began all over again. They just were not a part of her everyday life anymore. Travel was not so easy back then and communication was by letters and the odd telephone call. Newfoundland seemed – and was – a long way away.

Mom’s wedding pictures tell the story. Not one of her large extended family were able to attend. There is nobody from her side of the family in the wedding photos. People did not travel freely as they do now and there would never be money for such a journey. In fact, my father said he didn’t fully realize at the time, what a sacrifice it was for my mother’s parents to send one hundred dollars as a wedding present.

So instead of going back home and having ten kids, my mother married my dad and had one child – me.

My mother was the oldest of seven and the ONLY one of her siblings to leave Newfoundland. She was about seventeen at the time she took the plunge coming to Ontario to work in the mill.

I asked my dad (now 97), about that time in his life. He said he and his friends would go up to Hespeler on weekends to drive around to see what’s up. This means my dad went cruising for chicks with the other guys in a car – too much information. But, one thing he said about those Newfoundland Mill Girls – “They sure could fight!”

If locals teased certain of those Newfoundland girls about their accents, I’m sure the Ontario bully got a fist in the gob. That was probably also entertaining for those guys cruising in the cars. My mom was too shy to punch anyone, but many were not!

Mom often spoke of that time in the Mill and what it was like for, her but I don’t think the penny really dropped for me until she was on her deathbed in 2021.

About the time that my mother’s life was fading away, I received an excited call from my friend Anna Moller.

“Linda! Quick! Turn on CBC Radio. Heather Barrett is doing a show on the Mill Girls of Newfoundland and they are interviewing some of those women – right now!”

I eagerly listened to their stories. They had such a familiar ring. I felt like I was stepping into my mother’s nineteen forties world.

As I sat by my mother’s bed in her last days, all her stories and that interview tumbled around in my heart. I asked her a few more questions about life in the mill. She spoke again about her loneliness leaving her loved ones behind in Newfoundland. Her words ring in my ears: “I had nobody at all up here.”

A song about all this began to gel in my mind. It came together quickly as I rushed to get the lyrics down on a scrap of paper from my purse before I forgot the ‘download’ that was pouring out of my heart.  The song came together quickly and as fate would have it, my husband and I sang it at her funeral a few short weeks later. It helped me understand my mother. I called it: I Sailed Away (Ida’s song.)

For the benefit of Mainlanders as few explanations of the lyrics are in order:

Lassie Buns – Molassis buns/Jigg’s Dinner – corned beef with cabbage and vegetables all boiled in a pot with a bread-type pudding on top/A crackie – a little dog/ Homemade Brew – A potent homemade island brew that will knock you under the table with one glass.

I Sailed Away
By Al and Linda Smith

I miss lassie buns and Maum’s homemade bread
I misses Jigg’s dinners that we were fed
When I think of your faces – no more in my world
Brings a tear to the eye of this Newfoundland girl
But I sailed away – now I’m here to stay

Maum dey tawks fonny ‘eer in H’Ontario
And dey laughs when oi tawks – dey tink it’s a joke
Ders no kitchen pardees and no homemade brew
No root cellars here – for da gardens dey grew
But I sailed away – Now I’m here to stay

There’s many a reason I cannot return
Here there’s dentists – doctors – there’s the money I earn
And a Hespeler boy with blue eyes and curls
Wants to marry this Newfoundland girl
Oh I sailed away – Now I’m here to stay

So goodbye mother, father, cousins and friends
Brothers, sisters and my wee crackie Ben
Destiny called shore – she stole me away
I sailed! I sailed! And I’m here now to stay

I wanted adventure so I took a chance
Leaving the shores of my dear Newfoundland
But wherever I travel – there’s one thing for sure
I’ll always be – a Newfoundland girl
Oh I – sailed away – guess I’m – here to stay

My husband and I recorded the song and sent it off to Heather Barrett at CBC Radio as a follow up to their Mill Girls broadcast. She kindly put it on air for CBC’s Newfoundland and Labrador Mother’s Day Program a few short weeks after my mother died. She also interviewed me on air about mom being one of The Mill Girls. (Shore maid, me nerves was rubbed right raw – but I did ‘er!)

It was my final tribute to a wonderful mother and an acknowledgement of her lifelong loss over leaving her homeland. I understood my mother in a deeper way and what it took for her to bravely step into a new world in the years when the mantle of youth and hope were upon her. “I came because I wanted an adventure,” she told me.

In the following years, many Newfoundland men followed the example of those women and came to the same area looking for work in other manufacturing jobs.

The mill closed in 1984, but those Mill Girls have carried the history in their hearts all these years and have imparted them to daughters like me.

Mill Girls interviewed about this exodus are surprised by the interest in their stories but in the end, the decisions they made to immigrate, affected thousands of people downstream. It is a nugget of Canadian history and a play was even produced and performed in Newfoundland about it called, “The Girls From Away.”

I did actually have a thoughtful moment standing in front of that old Hespeler mill building during a trip there about fifteen years ago. I remember thinking I could almost reach out and touch the spectre of my young, pretty, mother, walking right by me on her way into the mill for a shift, hair braided tightly over her head walking quickly in her mill overalls. I possess no time machine to go back, but I am the time-keeper of her memories. The Mill building had been turned into an artisan mall at the time I saw it. Now I understand it has been slated to become upscale condos; fancy that.

We are a country of immigrants. If you are not personally from another place, probably you don’t have to go very far back in your family tree to find a brave woman who did what my mother did. And you may even be the beneficiary of a better life today, because someone back there had the guts to reach out for something higher, and paid a price to do just that. Because they were brave – you and I have a better life.

As we sit in our comfortable homes of plenty, in a beautiful country, we should remember those girls and all adventurers like them who took a big risk to find a better way of life, not only for themselves, but for all of us descendants who came after them.

Unless you’re of First Nations origin, I guarantee you that there is a brave woman back there in your family tree, who did just what my mother did. Who was it in your ancestors?

Ida Davis (1929 – 2021)