Sweep You Across for a Penny, Ma'am: Stories from St John's and Beyond

Melvin Baker is an archivist and historian at Memorial University of
Newfoundland, and the co-editor of Dictionary of Newfoundland and
Labrador Biography.

Although prepared more than 20 years ago as brief popular radio and
newspaper accounts, the reminiscences in this collection, which
chronicle many of the social and economic changes in everyday life in
20th-century Newfoundland, have a timeless quality. The author, a
94-year-old resident of St. John’s, vividly creates aspects of St.
John’s (particularly pre-Confederation St. John’s) in a clear,
well-written style with humour, humility, and wit. He describes the
1920s when “carmen” dominated city streets, following behind
horse-drawn carts for a living. He also describes the ambulance wagons
used by the local hospitals to transport patients, and what it was like
to be a patient in those hospitals. Other stories feature the business
auctioneers, whose flags and voices were once a colourful part of city
life. Then there are his informative anecdotes about the region’s
amateur sports, traditionally organized in clubs along denominational
lines and passionately followed. Travel in Newfoundland by rail and
road—before the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway in 1965—is
also vividly portrayed.

Anyone interested in the history of St. John’s, and not just the kind
of history found in tourism brochures, will find Sweep You Across for a
Penny, Ma’am an interesting and entertaining read. The book takes its
title from the cry shouted out by youths who charged pedestrians a penny
for sweeping mud from flagstones for them in the days before city
streets were paved—“Sweep y’across for a penny, ma’m?”