PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Mr. Charles R. Mont, 02 February 1967. MS-2-202 45.40.
Subject HeadingsJust after his novel Hangman's Beach is published, T. H. Raddall receives a letter from one of his Halifax school classmates, Charles Mont. In response to comments from Mont, Raddall relates how he had become interested in writing an historical novel based on the people and events associated with McNab's Island; notes why he had enjoyed his trips to the English port of Manchester when working as a ship wireless operator; and shares memories and information about the Halifax Explosion and their former Chebucto School teachers.
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February 2,1967 Mr. Charles R. Mont,519 Park Avenue, Prescott, Arizona. Dear Charlie: I was delighted to get your letter and find that I had one more living link with my school days in Halifax fifty years ago. When the slump hit Halifax after World War One there was a general exodus of young men and women, and when I came home from a few years of sea wan- dering in the summer of 1922 I could find hardly anyone I knew. I left Halifax myself in the following year, and have lived here ever since. I remember you, of course. My older sister Nellie had a school friend named Annie Mont who lived on Chebucto Road near the present entrance to Simpsons- Sears. Was she one of your family? You certainly had a long trudge to and from school, especially in winter. I remember a boy named Wilfred Ernst who used to walk to Chebucto from Dutch Village, and he had one of the best attendance records in the school. Whereas I, living three doors away from the school, was often late for roll call. I camped on McNab's Island for a couple of weeks in the summers of 1914 and 1915, and heard old tales of the McNab family1 and of the hanged men on the beach. Although I sailed past the island many times in my sea- going years I never set foot on it again until the summer of 1959. I found the forts abandoned and the old camp ground a tangle of young trees and bushes. The old McNab family graveyard, in which Peter and Joanna were buried, with some of their children and grandchildren and several of their tenants and servants, is still carefully preserved. The notion of a novel about the McNabs began to stir in my head, and "Hangman's Beach" went on from there, although I didn't begin the actual writing until 1963. In doing the Melville Island research2 I found in the Archives an exact plan of the old prison made by a British army engineer in 1812, on a scale of forty feet to the inch. He showed everything, including every latrine and sentry box. This was priceless in preparing my story. The character I called "Cascamond" was suggested by the memoirs of a real Frenchman named Bourneuf,3 who was captured aboard "La Furieuse", suffered a long time in the Halifax naval hospital with a bad wound in the thigh, went from there to Melville Island, and eventually escaped to Pubnico. He taught school there and at St. Mary's Bay, married an Acadian girl, became a successful merchant and shipbuilder, and eventually was elected to the Nova Scotia Assembly as the member for Digby County. The memoirs were printed by the Nova Scotia Historical Society years ago.4 They gave some good descriptions of life n the prison, the things the prisoners made for sale, etc. At present I am urging the Armdale Yacht Club, which now occupies Melville Island, to put up a cairn and plaque to mark the lost graves of prisoners of war on Dead Man's Island, just across the channel.5 Tell your wife that I made two voyages to Manchester as a young wireless operator, staying about three weeks each time. The ship lay in Salford Docks but I rambled all over the Manchester area and found a sweetheart, a pretty Irish girl who worked in Woolworth's and lived in Longsight. We corresponded for a few years but I never got back there. I liked the Lancashire people, though not their climate (all that rain!), and of all the ports I visited Manchester stands out as the happiest in my experience. You mentioned Miss Theakston at Chebucto School, also Miss Nichol. Miss Nichol married a Dalhousie professor and I met her there, years later, at a tea-and-cake affair of some sort. In 1949 Dalhousie gave me an honorary doctorate of laws at a special convention in March. It was frightful weather --a drizzle of freezing rain falling on well beaten snow on the sidewalks, so that every step was dangerous -- yet old Miss Theakston made her way there to see the ceremony and have a word with me afterward. That really warmed my heart. This year is not only Canada's centennial year but the 50th anniversary of the Halifax explosion, and the CBC has asked me to write scripts about it for the national radio and TV networks.6 Were you in Grade Nine that morning? If so you may remember how the clock flew off the wall and just missed Old Gander Marshall's head. One girl, Eva Knodell, had her left cheek gashed from ear to mouth by flying glass, but as far as I can remember the rest of us got off with small cuts and bruises. And shock, of course. Like most people in the city at that moment, Mr. Marshall thought the explosion had happened right where he was and nowhere else. I can still hear him saying slowly, "some ... of ... the ... little ... boys ... have ... been ... playing ... with ... dynamite ... in ... the ... basement." Remember Miss Eva Pye, who taught Grade Seven? I called on her in Halifax when my first book was published in 1939, and presented her with a copy. It was a book of short stories,7 one of which ("Winter's Tale") was really an account of my own experiences and observations on the day of the explosions. Among other things I described Miss Pye arriving at the school and finding Old Gander and me standing outside in the snow and watching that mushroom cloud in the northern sky. In the story I called her "Miss McClintock." Miss Pye read that bit, and looked up and said, "Now why did you call me that in your story? I think I know. It rhymes with 'flintlock'. You all thought of me as a sort of musket, snap-flash-bang!'" And so we did. If you come this way on your travels be sure to let me know. I'd enjoy seeing you again and having a yarn about the old times. |
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7. Here THR means The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek and Other Tales (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1939).