Married life did not change Wilfred’s routine much at all. Anne was quite capable of keeping things running on the homefront, and Wilfred was free to do his usual round of doctor visits. One project in particular consumed a lot of his time. It was the Seaman’s Institute being built in St. John’s. The institute contained dining halls, bedrooms, and a meeting hall that would seat three hundred. It was a place where fishermen and seamen could find somewhere to stay and eat when they were in St. John’s without having to go to the local hotels and taverns. The institute had been a dream of Wilfred’s for some time, and by 1911 he had raised the 170,000 dollars needed to build the facility, and work on the building was ready to begin.
The official ceremony to lay the cornerstone for the Seaman’s Institute was held in June 1911. Wilfred excitedly attended the ceremony, which was held on the same day that George V, the new king of England, was crowned. The new king had leant his support to the project as patron, which had brought great media exposure for the mission. Following his coronation, George V pushed a button in England that sent a signal over the new transatlantic cable that emerged from the ocean at St. John’s. The signal set a mechanical device into action, raising the Union Jack and moving the cornerstone down a ramp and into the ground. The crowd that had gathered for the ceremony went wild when the flag began to go up and the cornerstone began to move. After the ceremony work on building the Seaman’s Institute began in earnest.
With the building of the Seaman’s Institute under way, Wilfred had another challenge ahead of him. This one had to do with the structure of the mission itself.
For many years now, Wilfred had been aware that his work in Labrador was much wider than the mandate of the original National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen. Most of the money that came in to finance Wilfred’s work did not come directly from the mission in England but came from independent groups operating throughout the United States and Canada. These groups gave generously to the work among the Liveyeres of Labrador and the settlers in Newfoundland.
In his heart Wilfred knew it was time to cut loose from the mission in England and allow his work to stand on its own. In 1912, just after the birth of his second son, Pascoe, Wilfred decided to go to England to sort things out. Just as he was about to leave in April, Wilfred heard some stunning news. The unsinkable SS Titanic had hit an iceberg and had sunk four hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland. One thousand five hundred passengers and crew had lost their lives in the icy ocean. Once again Wilfred was reminded of just how much a captain had to respect the changing moods of the North Atlantic.
England was in shock and mourning when Wilfred arrived. Many people could not accept that a ship like the Titanic, on her maiden voyage, could actually have sunk. Everywhere he went, Wilfred was asked questions about conditions off Newfoundland.
When Wilfred finally got to meet with the mission committee, tensions ran high. Each committee member seemed to have a different idea about what should happen with the work in Labrador and Newfoundland. Despite the tension, agreement was finally reached. The International Grenfell Association (IGA) would be incorporated. Wilfred would be the chairman of the new association, and its board would be drawn from members of the many groups that supported the work. The Royal National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen agreed to contribute two thousand pounds a year over the next five years toward supporting the work among the fishermen.
Wilfred was greatly relieved once everything was settled. Now he could move ahead with lots of new plans. And move ahead he did.
Wilfred arrived back in St. Anthony in time for the opening of the new Seaman’s Institute. The official opening ceremony was held on June 22, 1912. Wilfred got up steam in the Strathcona to sail to St. John’s for the ceremony, but before he could get under way, he was asked for help. The previous year a fishing schooner had sunk off the Labrador coast. In early summer the captain and owner of the schooner and his crew of fishermen had reached the site where the vessel went down. Amazingly they had managed to float the boat again. They patched the leaking hull with bags of ship’s biscuits soaked in water, cement, and planking. They then sailed the schooner sixty miles south, where they put into a small harbor where a number of other fishing boats were at anchor. At the harbor, officials told the captain that he could sail no farther because his boat was unsafe.
The captain of the schooner came to see Wilfred and asked if he would tow the boat to St. John’s, where it could be repaired. Of course Wilfred was eager to be on his way to the opening of the Seaman’s Institute, but he also had compassion for the captain and his crew. If they could not get their boat to St. John’s to be repaired, they would miss the whole fishing season. That meant that the fishermen’s families would be left to face winter without money to buy the necessary supplies to tide them over. Wilfred steamed to the harbor and took the schooner in tow. If he missed the opening of the institute, so be it. These fishermen, whom he had come to Labrador to serve in the first place, needed help, and he would help them.
Fortunately, sailing conditions down the coast of Newfoundland island were good, and Wilfred sailed into St. John’s Harbor just in time for the official opening of the Seaman’s Institute.
The new red-brick building stood four stories high on Water Street, the main street of St. John’s. It sat across the road from the spot where in 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert had come ashore and claimed Newfoundland island in the name of Queen Elizabeth I as England’s first overseas colony.
Wilfred stood proudly as the building was officially opened and letters from King George V in England and President Taft in the United States commemorating the occasion were read.
Under the auspices of the International Grenfell Association, the work in Labrador and Newfoundland grew and flourished. By 1914 six doctors and eighteen nurses were on the permanent mission staff, and the numbers swelled to twenty doctors in the summer. Some of these doctors were world-renowned specialists who came to give their time to the mission. Six thousand patients were treated annually in the four hospitals and six nursing stations along the coast. Over 150 other WOPS came too. Many of them were teachers, accountants, plumbers, and carpenters who worked alongside the local people and taught them valuable skills. A growing number of single women volunteers were coming to look after the thirty children now at the orphanage.
In other ways, though, 1914 was a difficult year for Wilfred and the mission. Lord Strathcona, Wilfred’s friend and leading supporter, died suddenly. His will made provision for the mission to continue receiving one thousand pounds a year from his estate.
Then, in August, England went to war against Germany, and many of the IGA’s staff left to join the war effort. The Moravian missionaries, many of whom were of German birth, were ordered out of Labrador, and the International Grenfell Association took on the responsibility of continuing their work among the Eskimos in the north.
In 1915 Wilfred felt he should do what he could to help with the war effort. Although he was fifty years old, he signed up to be part of the Harvard University medical unit that was going to France to help take care of the soldiers’ medical needs. Wilfred was especially interested in treating soldiers with trench foot, a condition caused by the cold and wet. Within six months of arriving in France, there were more than enough volunteer doctors. Because of his age, Wilfred was discharged, and he returned to St. Anthony to continue his work.
When the war finally came to an end in 1918, an epidemic was sweeping across the world, demanding more of Wilfred and his workers than anything before ever had.
Chapter 15
Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George
Influenza! The word struck fear into Wilfred and the other doctors and nurses at St. Anthony. The Great War had ended, and millions of people came together to celebrate. Unfortunately these great rallies had passed a deadly strain of influenza from person to person until it affected the entire world. Even the remotest regions of Labrador were not spared. Each day grisly reports arrived on Wilfred’s desk. In the far north at Okkak, where 270 people lived, 231 of them had perished from the epidemic. Whole families had died within hours of each other. Their huts, with the bodies still inside, were burned to the ground in a futile attempt to stop the infection from spreading. Not a man was left alive in the settlement, and most of the surviving women and children were extremely weak. Wilfred dispatched a nurse to go and help them.
In one isolated cove a woman watched her entire family die, but she was too scared to leave her hut because ferocious, hungry sled dogs paced outside, ready to attack her. A medical team rescued her eleven days after the last death in the hut.
The doctors and nurses of the mission worked tirelessly to bring what little help they could to the influenza victims. Wilfred stayed in St. Anthony to coordinate the effort, turning the entire settlement into a hospital. Thankfully, no one in his family, including his year-old daughter, Rosamund, contracted the disease.
By 1920 the epidemic was over, and when the numbers were tallied, it was found that influenza had caused the death of over two million people worldwide.
Wilfred and the mission struggled to deal with the aftereffects of the epidemic along the coast. Widows were relocated to St. John’s, and another orphanage was built at Cartwright, on the Labrador coast, to house and care for seventy orphaned children.
There were numerous other building needs, too. The hospital at St. Anthony needed to be rebuilt in stone, and a new hospital was needed at North West River, as well as nursing stations at Flower’s Cove and Cartwright. The mission now owned six ships, which had all been donated for the work. It was up to the International Grenfell Association, however, to maintain, fuel, and equip them. Wilfred did not worry about any of this. He had built the mission with faith that God would provide for their needs, and he believed that God would continue to do so. The IGA council, though, was more concerned with the practical question of how God would do this.
Eventually the council came up with a plan to raise an endowment fund to continue Wilfred’s work long after he had died. To achieve this, the council asked Wilfred to raise one and a half million dollars that it could invest. The interest from this amount would help to pay the costs of running the mission. Wilfred could see the logic in what the council was asking. He turned fifty-five in 1920 and knew he was the mission’s best fundraiser. Still, the idea of spending many months raising money did not appeal to him at all. He wrote to his mother:
It seems almost absurd, but the decision to reconcile myself to the facing of this task was perhaps the greatest effort I have ever made….The long fall cruise I had hoped to make in a renovated Strathcona must be abandoned, and the work on the sea I love must once more for the time give place to the raising of money.
Once he had made up his mind to raise the endowment, Wilfred and Anne had some difficult decisions to make. Their older son, Wilfred Jr., was nine years old now, and Anne wanted him to have a formal education in preparation for attending a good English college. The Grenfells decided to move their family to Brookline, a suburb of Boston, while Wilfred traveled the country to raise money.
A week before they were due to leave St. Anthony, a telegraph arrived at the hospital.
“Dr. Grenfell,” it read. “Do your best to come and operate me I have an abscess under right tonsil will give you coal for your steamer am getting pretty weak. Captain J. N. Coté. Long Point.”
