Diaries of Howard Leopold Morry - Volume 18 (Paperback) | Released: 19 Aug 2022

This book represents the eighteenth volume of what will ultimately be twenty-five volumes in a series of verbatim transcripts of the diaries of Howard Leopold Morry, written by him starting in 1939 and concluding with the last known volume in 1965.

Howard was a raconteur and oral historian cast in the same mould as dozens of other men and women in Newfoundland in those days who carried forward the history of the small outport villages in which they lived. In many cases, their knowledge, gained by word of mouth from generation to generation, is our only record of the events that took place in these tiny villages for many decades and even centuries.

Howard was 54 years old when he took up pen or pencil to write the first of his many diaries in December 1939. What motivated him at that time was the belief (wrong, as it fortunately turned out) that he would not live much longer, as a result of a bad heart condition resulting from diseases he endured during his time in the trenches in Gallipoli, on the Somme and in Ypres during WWI. He was worried, and in this he was justified, that many of the stories of the old days that he faithfully retained would be lost forever if he did not record them in writing. The younger generation even then had lost interest in such things and the race of community oral historians of which he was one was coming to an end.

In his diaries, he spoke of his own personal experiences, at home in his youth and in his later years, his adventures in western Canada as a young man, and overseas with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment in WWI. But he also recorded observations on the significant and insignificant (to most historians) events of daily life in a small outport village on the Southern Shore of Newfoundland in the early to mid-1900s. And he also recounted events from the history of his village as passed down to him by earlier generations of oral historians.

This diary is unlike all the others because it only exists in the form of a photocopy of a transcript. The original diary has been lost. It is believed that the transcript was prepared at Howard's request by a staff member at the Provincial Library who saw value in having his memoirs made available more broadly, but this is not certain, as there is no identification given on the transcript as to the identity of the person who prepared it.

The period covered in this transcript is shorter than most of the diaries - less than nine months.

At the beginning of the transcript, there are two pages of reminiscences which have been seen previously in earlier diaries and which were perhaps transcribed by the typist from one of those diaries.

The only section of the diary that is completely new is the traditional type of daily diary beginning on July 14, 1957 and finishing on April 3, 1958. It seems clear that the transcriber did not complete her or his task and finished at April 3, 1958 rather than at June 16, 1958, when the next diary in chronological sequence begins. So we are, unfortunately, never to know what events were recorded in the intervening two months unless the original diary should eventually be found.

As in previous volumes, in order to provide readers not familiar with the "cast of characters" or the local, national and international historical events mentioned in the pages of the diary a clue to their identity, a set of endnotes has been provided as an assistance in reading and fully understanding the context of the diary.