The Second Time A-round: Growing Up in Bay Roberts

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views of
Canada, 1880-1914.

The time: mainly in the 1940s. The place: one of the prettiest and
oldest seaports in Newfoundland, whose English settlers, from the late
17th century, had prosecuted the inshore fishery and later became the
merchants and fishermen who sent their fleets to Labrador.

In Jack Hambling’s memory, however, it is not the fishery or its
merchants that dominate; it is the Western Union Cable Company, of which
his father was an employee. “During the fifty years that the Company
was a going concern in Bay Roberts, its namesake, Cable Avenue, was in
many respects like a little community unto itself ... as much a part of
our town as Mercers Cove, Flings Hill, Lodge Lane, Cross Roads or the
Cosh. Roughly a quarter-mile of uniform, buff-coloured picket fence ran
the entire length and breadth of the Avenue, enclosing such things as a
Company tennis court, icehouse, two lighted sidewalks shaded by chestnut
trees, individual vegetable gardens, a cricket green, and seven
Company-owned and -maintained houses.”

Hambling’s is, then, an unusual Newfoundland experience, being
unfamiliar to most readers, and therefore of unusual interest. But
Hambling rambles beyond the confines of the Company enclave, and
enhances his tale with numerous memories of people and events that are
sure to delight many readers. The writing is sometimes quite
pretentious, and too much space is taken up with trivial (or quite
personal) events; but the whole is well worth one’s time, and the book
is a valuable addition to Newfoundland social history.