Arrival of Joseph Baggs in Toronto, Canada, 1874

The following piece is an excerpt from Chapter One of my forthcoming book: Pack your Baggs: a family's journey from Newfoundland to Australia

Toronto, Canada 1874

The train bringing Joseph Baggs to Toronto draws in to Union Station. There is a screech of metal and the wooden carriage gives out an almighty shudder, as if rattling its aching bones. Joseph hears the low hiss of steam and simultaneously feels a sigh of relief for their safe arrival. He has reached his final destination, but the arduous journey has taken a toll on his 54-year-old body and he is exhausted. He draws up the carriage window and puts his head out, only to be hit by a blast of hot humid air. The mayhem on the platform is overwhelming. Porters are loudly touting for business and a sea of strange faces pass by. In the centre of the platform a stout man in a long frock coat stands holding up a sign that reads "Wesleyan Methodist Congregation". 'Maybe they can help,' thinks Joseph.

Joseph turns to his wife, 'Phoebe, will you just look at all these people. I've never seen so many gathered in one place.'

'I suppose most of them have come to meet the new arrivals,' Phoebe says.

'Well no one will be here to meet us,' Joseph says. 'We are strangers in this place.'

That thought gives him pause and he casts his mind back to home.

'If only my brothers could see all this. They'd be astounded,' Joseph says.

'Yes indeed. I wonder what they are doing right now?' Phoebe says.

'Most likely they'll be heading back into the cove in their fishing dories – if the weather was kind to them today.'

Joseph keeps his inner fears to himself as he reflects on the momentous step he has taken in coming to a new country. After years of agonising over whether to branch out on his own, Joseph has acted and arrived in Toronto. Will he be able to find work at this stage of life? Cod fishing, which has sustained his family for generations, is not an option in this inland town. His future is vested in the decision to emigrate, so he has to make it work. Added to that, there is the enormous expense he has incurred – the cost of the steamer out of Saint John's and the tickets for nine members of the family on the railroad.

'That man on the train kept going on about "the Panic",' Phoebe says. 'Whatever did he mean?'

'There is an economic depression and they are predicting rough waters ahead. But I take the positive approach. We are blessed with our seven children and the older boys are behind us in this venture.'

Joseph gathers the younger children to him and pushes open the carriage doors.

'Come along Allan, Arabella, collect your belongings.'

His eyes scan up to the high vaulted roof of the train station.

'Look children, what a grand building this Union Station is! You will never have seen its like before.'

Nothing could have prepared Joseph for this new world. Until now, he had spent his entire life in the familiar surroundings of his close-knit fishing community in Newfoundland, where everyday life had continued unchanged over generations. How will he make the transition to city life in a new country at this advanced stage of life? What work will he find?

Joseph Baggs, his wife Phoebe and their seven children, some of whom are adults by this stage, make their way down the platform carrying a motley collection of bags and boxes from home. When they reach the Wesleyan man holding up the sign, Joseph pauses.

 

The enemy bares his teeth

Northern Ontario near Monteith, frozen lakes and rivers. Photograph taken from the air, April 2016

The Enemy Bares his Teeth

Monteith is hardly the place you would choose to spend a winter. The town is located in the backwoods of northern Ontario, half way between Toronto and Hudson Bay. In the 1930s it recorded the province's coldest minimum ever, when the temperature dropped to 65 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Yet, in November 1942, I was posted there to work as an Army dentist in a field hospital at the Monteith internment camp.

I farewelled my wife Marg in Toronto and, in the company of a few other officers, boarded a steam train for the 400 mile trip north. To keep us from freezing to death in the shaky wooden carriage, rudimentary heating was provided, but the wind still managed to penetrate the cracks beneath the doors. We hunkered down inside our great coats, played cards and smoked to relieve the monotony. It was a twelve hour journey through a snowy Christmas-card landscape pockmarked with frozen lakes, as white as the lunar surface.

Monteith had been chosen as the site of internment Camp 23, because of its remoteness and inaccessibility – there were no roads into the camp and no means for prisoners to escape. The camp was surrounded by forest and had a barbed wire perimeter fence and several watch towers. The place held around 1600 inmates, mostly German prisoners of war or enemy aliens. During the day some of the men were put to work cutting lumber, and hauling the logs to a nearby lumber mill, using horse-drawn carts.

On the first morning at Monteith I met my chair assistant, a bull-headed man, as strong as a Kodiak bear. His name was Fergus and he was one of the inmates.

'What's a chap called Fergus doing in a place like this?' I asked.

He replied in a broad Scottish accent, 'well Captain, it's a long story. The Allies picked me up on the Continent. When I couldn't establish my bona fides, they deemed me an enemy alien and I ended up here.'

'That's rotten luck. OK then Fergus, let's get started. Who's our first patient?'

'He's a wee lad Matrose Bochwoldt. Bochwoldt is one of the German POWs picked up from the Bismarck.'

The battleship Bismarck, the pride of the German fleet, had been hunted down and sunk in the Atlantic by the Royal Navy in May 1941. Only 115 German seamen were plucked from the icy waters – the remaining 2000 perished. Bochwoldt was one of the fortunate few to be rescued and sent to Canada.

Fergus spoke a few words of German and offered to act as my interpreter.

'Can you ask the patient about his symptoms?'

'Bochwoldt is complaining about soreness and swelling at the back of his lower jaw, on the left side.'

I looked into the patient's mouth and his fetid breath stung my nostrils. From this and the angry-red gum line, I could see that he had an impacted wisdom tooth, which had become infected.

'Fergus, can you tell the patient I will need to sedate him, cut into the gum and remove the impacted tooth.'

Bochwoldt's eyes darted and he looked somewhat alarmed at this news.

'Tell him that if he managed to survive the fiery inferno on the Bismarck, and the gale force winds and freezing waters of the North Atlantic, then this mere tooth extraction will be a breeze.'

Walking back to my hut at the end of the first day at Camp 23, I reflected on the strangeness of it all. Here I was, an Aussie, in the frozen wilds of Northern Canada, on the periphery of a war. I had chanced upon a bizarre mix of bedfellows – a Scottish enemy alien and a German seaman, a survivor of the most notorious naval battle of the war, thus far. Finally, I had come face to face with the enemy, and the enemy had barred his teeth, but the encounter was not quite what I had expected.

From the life of Bede James Smith. Based on an interview with Marg Smith in 1998. The names of the Scottish chair assistant and German prisoner-of-war are fictitious.

Remember Henty

Henty B&B. Photo by OZinOH on Flickr 

The following piece about my father Bede James Smith appeared originally in the Katharine Susannah Prichard Past Tense Anthology in June 2016

Remember Henty

Bede woke to the sound of rain pelting on his tin roof. He pulled up the window and leaned out to sniff the air. A plume of steam was rising from the earth, giving off a pungent smell of  eucalyptus. Somewhere from the centre of town he heard voices cheering, so he quickly dressed and dashed down the road to investigate. The sudden downpour had taken everyone by surprise and a group of wild-eyed locals were whooping it up, dancing barefoot in the main street. It was March 1939 in the New South Wales town of Henty. The drought had finally broken. Rain continued all morning and by lunchtime floodwaters were lapping the bridges of nearby Yerong Creek, washing away grim memories of the dry.

My father, Bede, was 29 at the time. He had been in Henty for three years, having bought his first dental practice there. Bede spent his boyhood in the neighbouring Riverina district, so Henty was familiar ground. He was sweet on a girl called Moira, the local teacher and his best mate, Frank, worked for the Commonwealth Savings Bank. Henty had a lively social scene in those days with Bede and Frank at the centre of it. They organised mystery dances for the Henty Younger Set, played tennis and golf and starred in amateur theatre productions at the School of Arts. Bede was captain of the Henty Cricket Team – the tall all-rounder could be relied upon to knock up a classy innings with the bat and take wickets with his medium-pace bowling. He could have remained in Henty, married his sweetheart and lived out his days as a country town dentist. Instead, he was lured to opportunities elsewhere and set sail for Canada in September 1939, breaking at least one heart on the way out.

There were 12 other Australian dentists on the Pacific crossing, all of them venturing overseas to take a postgraduate degree at the University of Toronto. Bede planned to return to Sydney after his studies and start a dental practice there. But two things intervened to alter his best-laid plans – war and love. While the ship was mid-ocean, Prime Minster Robert Menzies declared his "melancholy duty" and committed Australia to the war in Europe. The ship sailed on to North America regardless; there was no point turning back.

In Canada, Bede fell in love with a Toronto girl, my mother Marg Baggs. After finishing his studies he stayed on in Toronto and married Marg in 1941. Their first child, my sister Pat, was born in 1943. Bede enlisted with the Canadian Dental Corps and was posted to the wilds of Northern Ontario before serving overseas from 1943 to 1945, with the Allied Invasion of Europe. After the war he brought his Canadian wife and daughter back to Sydney and by 1950 they had three children.

The war changed Bede. When friends invited the family to go boating on the George's River, he found excuses to stay home. Marg pleaded with him to socialise, but he preferred to potter around the garden or listen to his opera recordings. And the last thing he wanted to do was take the children camping. His three years in the Canadian Army, were enough to put him off camping for life. Yet Bede always had time for his Henty mate Frank and the two reconnected in Sydney in the 1950s with their wives and children. They shared a passion for classical music, cricket and Henty.

On one occasion Frank came around to visit, with his newest LP record.

'What have you brought this time?' Bede asked.

'It's my latest, a recording of Heifetz doing the Beethoven Violin.'

Like a treasure hunter uncovering gold, Bede took the vinyl record out of its paper sleeve. Holding it carefully around the edges, he placed it on the turntable, pressed the start button and lowered the stylus onto the rotating disc. There was a small crackle before the opening beats of the timpani, then the woodwinds, and finally the strings took control. The two friends settled back on the lounge for a session of Beethoven.

In summer, Bede and Frank often made their way to the Sydney Cricket Ground, with wives and children in tow. The men retreated to the hallowed ground of the Members' Pavilion to watch their hero Richie Benaud, leaving the women to spend the day in the Ladies' Stand, chasing after bored and restless children. Later on in the evening after a few beers, the conversation inevitably circled back to that small NSW town.

'Remember Henty!'

'Ah yes, what about the time ...?'

At this point the women rolled their eyes. 'There they go again.'

As children we thought it a huge joke. We were sophisticated city kids. What was so special about some one-horse country town we had never even seen?

Those days are long gone. Bede and Frank have passed into history. Looking back I can see that remembering Henty became a shared folklore between two mates, a testament to good times and bachelor days. Bede and Frank didn't have a men's shed to escape the travails of life, but they did have Henty and those memories sustained them for many a year. In the 1960s we moved to Perth, many miles away from the charms of Henty. We never did go camping.

The angel Bede in 1912

 

Bede James Smith, 1909-1965

My grandmother, Alice Smith, was pregnant with twins when she went into labour at her home in the New South Wales bush in October 1909. I don't know if  the doctor or midwife was able to reach her in time, but they would have had to travel by foot or horseback to do so. Many women died in childbirth in those days. Happily, Alice survived but one of her twins, a baby boy, died.
 

Alice and James Smith had been married in Sydney on January 26th 1909 and started life together in Marsden, NSW a small town 466 kilometres northwest of Sydney. My grandfather, James Smith, taught at the local Marsden Public School.

Alice's twin who survived was my father, Bede James Smith. The above photo is of him as a young boy. Dad used to joke about his traumatic start in life, saying of his twin brother: "he took one look at me and passed out".

 

In about 1912, when Bede was a boy of 3 or 4, his mother took him on a long train journey from Marsden. They probably travelled to Sydney and visited a photographer's studio where the photo of Bede could have been taken. In the photo he's standing in a semi-formal pose wearing sandals and a boyish suit. With his angelic face and long curly hair you could be forgiven in thinking this is a girl, except for his outfit. Bede's holding a small ball in his hands – most apt as he grew up to be an outstanding cricketer. 

One family story we heard from Dad's childhood was that my grandmother couldn't bear to cut her little son's curly locks. When I look at the Botticelli angle in this photo I can understand why. It was Bede's father, Jim, who eventually cut the curls, a fact I discovered when I found this message on the back of the photo which was sent as a postcard from Alice Smith to her mother-in-law Cecilia Hession Smith, a pioneer of the Nelson area of New South Wales.

Alice Smith's photo postcard from Marsden circa 1912

 Alice wrote:

"This is Bede's photo. Hope you like it. It was a fair trip. Bede was a bit sick on the way. Jim met us at station. He looks very well. Most of my fowls were gone when we got home, 12 young ones and 4 or 5 hens. They tell us the dogs killed them, but I think it was some two legged dogs. Hope you and father are quite well. Girlie is making big attempts to crawl (walk?) now. Ta ta, love from all, Al.

P.S. Jim cut Bede's curls off on Sat."

I'm not sure who Alice is referring to as being "two legged dogs". Possibly some workers on their property?  Girlie is Bede's sister born in November 1911. She was born Honora Smith, but the family always called her Girlie. We knew her as Nora.

Today, more than a hundred years later, the town of Marsden no longer exists. There is just a rest stop on the Newell Highway, halfway between Forbes and West Wyalong.

Marsden rest stop on the Newell Hwy NSW 2016