3 William Barker, discussing the history of the book in Newfoundland, comments on the changes after 1949: “From Confederation onwards, there was expansion of other media and at the same time a rapidly and vastly developed book-based school system including the university, now extended to all social groups” (Barker, 2010: 22). Barker’s account of post-Confederation development swiftly moves past the 1950s: “The real liftoff occurred around 1967, anniversary of Canadian Confederation” (2010: 43). Doug Saunders questions whether 1967 marked quite such an uncomplicated watershed in Canada more generally, observing:

As they adjusted to new arrangements in Canada, Newfoundlanders certainly participated in some of the “profound changes” that Saunders describes — and they also joined in the “explosions” of creative change that followed the 1967 celebrations. Much of the groundwork for these incipient changes was humble, daily, and largely invisible. By focusing on the structures that supported child readers in the 1950s I explore an unheralded element of civic society.

4 The story of a learning reader has many universal features, but every Western reader masters the challenge of learning to interpret the abstract shapes of letters assembled in written words. That learning takes place in a specific local context, with specific local support structures. I learned to read in St. John’s in the 1950s. To what extent was this achievement a local activity? What specific components of life in St. John’s enabled and/or restricted my reading? What institutional decisions, made by professionals in some cases and by amateur volunteers in other cases, affected how the patterns of my literate life were shaped? To what degree is everybody’s reading local?

5 As I explored my early reading environment, my initial ambition was to collect as many as possible of the materials with which I became literate in my youth, to develop at least a partial replication of the world of specialist children’s books and magazines, school and church mtexts, and mundane household reading that surrounded me. With help from libraries, second-hand bookstores, and family members, I acquired a collection that currently fills eleven 30-inch bookshelves. It comprises picture books, novels, school textbooks, adult and children’s magazines, Sunday school leaflets, Brownie documents, television programs, films, audio recordings, sheet music, knitting patterns, recipes, scrapbooks, diaries, family newsletters, and much, much more. This personal collection is augmented by relevant library holdings in St. John’s and Edmonton.

6 At first, I was content to conduct a textual study, re-reading and reflecting on the kinds of invitations these materials offered to a learning child. In the early stages of the project, I thought it merely incidental background information that I lived on Pennywell Road in St. John’s during the time span that saw my emergence as an increasingly confident reader. But, as I pored over the retrieved texts of my youth, I found that Pennywell Road had seeped irrevocably into my interpretation of these materials. Today, neither can I fully access my childhood readings of these books and documents nor can I subtract my childhood interpretation from my adult awareness. The physical, emotional, and institutional settings of my childhood are wired into the recognition I felt when I reopened books I had not looked at for half a century and more. Some elements of that childhood experience were accidents of geography. Many more were the consequence of deliberate decisions by many different people.

7 What follows is a sampler of the work of agencies supporting child literacy in St. John’s in the 1950s, rather than a continuous account of any particular operation. Like a quilt pieced together out of different fabrics, this article presents an overall pattern of support structures through a series of snapshots, rather than an in-depth probing of any single institution. Its utility lies more in how it points to the complexity of the local setting in which a child learned to read, rather than as a guide to the history of any one organization or as any kind of exhaustive history of literacy support structures in St. John’s.

8 My documentation highlights the mid-1950s and, necessarily, is contingent on available records. For example, the 1956 PWC yearbook, the Collegian, provides the full text of the principal’s report for 1955, offering a wealth of detail about school organization. Provincial figures from 1949 and 1955 provide a context for the report.

9 The church data set is a random selection; for some unknown reason, my parents saved a church bulletin from 30 December 1956. Its resemblance to every other church bulletin of my time in Gower Street United Church is sufficient to use it confidently as a template to outline the church structures in some detail. I supplement the information from this document with references to materials from the Gower Street United Church archives.

10 Some of the best data I could find about the Gosling Library came from a twenty-first anniversary report (Public Libraries Board, 1957), but information from the founding of the library in 1936 also is relevant. In each case, I attempt to draw on the fullest and liveliest data I could locate for any institution. My report is partial, but it offers some sense of patterns of local intervention in children’s literacy development.

11 My school, Prince of Wales College (the umbrella name for the K–11 system), was founded in 1860 as the Wesleyan Academy, and its Methodist history was an essential element in the school’s proud identity. It was not the only K–11 United Church system in St. John’s; Curtis Academy and Macpherson School had their own structure. However, PWC board members and alumni considered it the elite United Church institution in the province, fully comparable to the city’s top schools in the other denominations. At that time, there was no secular or state educational alternative in the province (see Stanbridge, 2007, and Kim, 1995, for further discussion of the role of denominational education in Newfoundland’s history).

12 The Methodists and their United Church successors always were a minority in Newfoundland. Census figures of denominational breakdown show the Methodists peaking as a percentage of the total population in 1921, when they represented 28.2 per cent of the whole. By 1951, that ratio had dropped to 23.7 per cent and it fell a bit further by 1961 to 21.4 per cent (Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1988: Table A-5).

13 United Church priorities affected much of my life and my learning. To take one obvious example, United Church schools were coeducational. Most other education systems in the city separated males and females. The Methodist heritage fostered relatively rigorous expectations about girls’ scholarly achievement. As early as the 1890s, the school’s principal, Robert Edwards Holloway (for whom my elementary school later was named), promoted equal opportunities for girls:

14 My education was affected directly by contemporary decisions, but echoes of such past priorities also inflected aspects of my schooling. It was not a completely straightforward form of equal opportunity. Marilyn Porter, in an excellent study of girls’ schooling in St. John’s just before Confederation, presents a set of contradictions that I certainly recognize as lasting into the 1950s and beyond:

15 The denominational school system was a large element of Newfoundland’s cultural and educational framework, but many smaller details of organization and many local decisions by boards and committees also helped to shape the world of an emergent reader. For example, one or more authoritative bodies selected the Dick and Jane whole-word reading series as the textbooks for learning to read. Children’s education was directly affected by decisions reached by the provincial education department and the school board, and also by the church governance bodies, as well as by the provision of books in library and bookstore.

16 Statistics from the year of Confederation demonstrate the scale of the challenge the new province faced in educating its children. The 1949 report on examination results (Table 1) delineates an impoverished system. There was no Grade 12 at this time or for many years thereafter. At the Grade 11 matriculation examinations 1,393 students sat for testing. Of them, 896 passed. The results were broken down according to school size, presenting a portrait that illuminates the educational landscape of the time. Only in the schools with eight or more classrooms did the number passing with honours exceed the number who failed. In the one-room schools, the 117 failures come very close to matching the 120 who succeeded in gaining a simple pass. The achievement of the 19 from one-room schools who earned honours is all the more striking in that setting.

17 I later present the Grade 11 results of one urban school in 1955, so the 1955 provincial figures shown in Table 2 provide useful background information. Unfortunately, there appears to be an error in the headings of the columns in the summary report. Drawing on the more detailed evidence laid out in the report, I have corrected these headings in square brackets.

18 More than twice as many students sat for the exam in 1955 (3,010 as compared to 1,393 in 1949). That tally represents a huge jump in numbers and, undoubtedly, a corresponding doubling of hard work in a very short time span.

19 A note sent from the Deputy Minister of Education to the schools in August 1949 sheds a different kind of light on the challenges facing the education system. He reports on a benefit of Confederation:

Such progress was not completely straightforward, as the following advice shows:

20 A 1958 recruitment leaflet aimed at attracting teachers from Great Britain updates the provincial profile as follows: the province had a total of approximately 1,200 schools, of which 500 were one-room rural schools, with more than 3,250 classrooms serving over 112,000 pupils, a total that was increasing by about 5,000 pupils per year (Department of Education, 1958: 5). Approximately 300 school boards administered these institutions (Department of Education, 1958: 4). Even nine years after Confederation, one-room schools made up 40 per cent of the total.

21 The Department of Education selected textbook options, sometimes recommending books on the basis of school size, sometimes on religious grounds. A full history of school textbook selection before and after Confederation would be fascinating. Memorial University has an extensive historical collection of such texts as well as provincial curriculum documents. To explore such issues as the prevalence of American, British, and Canadian titles, the percentage of text choices based on sectarian options, the pace of change in implementing recommendations, and the degree to which adopted Canadian books were updated to include reference to the entry of Newfoundland to the country would be illuminating.

22 While one-room schools are reported as representing about 40 per cent of the province-wide total as late as 1958, school systems in St. John’s were larger and more securely staffed and provisioned. Social differentials undoubtedly applied between school systems; the Board of Governors of PWC represented the professional elite of St. John’s, at least in the United Church segment of the city. A photograph in the 1956 Collegian (Figure 1) shows the executive committee of the Board: 11 men, whose names and degrees are listed below the picture. Four more are absent, but their names and credentials are provided (PWC, 1956: 5). Among them, these 15 men cite seven bachelor’s degrees. There is one medical doctor, one chartered accountant, one minister of religion, two lawyers who had been appointed as Queen’s Counsel, and one holder of an Order of the British Empire. The caption highlights values of social status and accrued cultural capital. Little attention is paid to Board members’ economic status, but no doubt such information would have been part of the implicit knowledge brought to bear on this image by many contemporary readers of the Collegian.

23 I serve as a historical witness in a small way to some of the school board’s activities since my father, Sherburne McCurdy, was the principal of Prince of Wales College (including Holloway and Harrington schools) between 1950 and 1962, the time span of my project. Many faces in this photograph are familiar to me. I recall some of the ways they invested their time and energy into the upkeep of the school system. We lived in a rented apartment on land owned by the school (the Ayre Athletic Grounds on Pennywell Road), and one Board member in particular, H.N. Burt, checked regularly on the state of the soccer pitches and other sporting facilities. H.D. Roberts, a busy medical man who served as chairman, telephoned our house nearly every evening to discuss how the day had gone in school. The secretary of the Board, J.B. Angel, was the man my father phoned early in the morning on potential snow days to decide together whether the schools should shut or stay open in the face of bad weather. In such mundane ways, as well as through official meetings, these prominent citizens took responsibility for the management of the school system in their purview.

24 That same 1956 Collegian provides the full text of the Principal’s Address at Speech Night, the graduation and prize-giving ceremony, held on 2 November 1955 (McCurdy, 1956). The formal welcomes convey the level of civic investment in the school system, at least on these official occasions. Attendees acknowledged in this address include the Lieutenant-Governor and his wife (Sir Leonard and Lady Outerbridge), the Acting Premier of the province, the Deputy Minister of Education, the head of the United Church Division of the Department of Education, and a representative of the Presbyterian Church in Newfoundland.

25 A later, undated photograph of a subsequent Speech Night (Figure 2) also manifests a display of social and cultural capital represented by the formal dress of all participants. The furs and the white gloves, the black ties, the academic robes of the vice-principal in the background, and the white frocks and flowers denoting graduating students all make social statements of financial and educational standing unlikely to be replicated in many one-room schools of the province. The stack of prizes and trophies testifies to a complex hierarchy of school successes and rewards. And the microphones of two local radio stations (CJON and VOWR) suggest the local significance of this event.

26 In contrast to those 500 small outport schools, PWC in 1955 educated a total of 1,365 students in 34 classrooms — a total number not far short of the entire Grade 11 exam-writing cohort in 1949. In June 1955, 39 PWC boys and 35 PWC girls wrote the public examinations; 9 boys and 13 girls took honours; 20 boys and 20 girls passed; 10 boys and 2 girls failed to receive diplomas.

27 Trinity College of Music Examinations also were taken by 45 PWC students (McCurdy, 1956: 98). In addition, the principal’s report makes extensive reference to sports activities and lists cocurricular activities such as the school’s Boy Scout and Girl Guide troops and Cub and Brownie packs. There was a newly formed Traffic Patrol, and 16 students (boys only!) signed on for the first-ever driver safety course. The school presented an operetta in April (“Chonita” with music by Franz Liszt).

28 The principal’s report to his stakeholders also includes reference to a “crucial accommodation problem” (McCurdy, 1956: 97) shortly to be solved by completion of a new building (Harrington School) for approximately 240 pupils in Kindergarten and Grade 1. Even in this flagship school system, some makeshift arrangements were necessary. The principal reported:

29 The report lists and thanks numerous volunteer organizations whose work contributes to the achievements of the school: the Ladies College Aid Society (famous for the November College Sale that raised funds for the school — described on this occasion as “substantial”), the Home and School Association (the parents’ organization), the Old Collegians Association (the alumni society), the Junior College Aid group, and the College Guild. These groups provided such amenities as an intercom system in the Prince of Wales building, new curtains for the stage in the assembly hall, and a party for the graduating class of 1955. The Old Collegians, in particular, were heavily involved in funding and building an arena for the school on the Ayre Athletic Grounds; this facility opened in 1955. Such amenities supported a concept of education that fostered arts and sports as well as academic study.

30 A lively social and managerial network was required to fund and look after this intricate educational structure. Yet, the ultimate mission was not managerial. The principal’s address concludes with these stirring words:

The combination of cultural advantages is unmistakable. The noble goals, the managerial complexity, the multiplicity of volunteer organizations, and the intellectual, cultural, moral, and social capital being accrued by those Newfoundland students schooled at the prosperous end of the public education spectrum helped to establish an elite. The more limited educational offerings elsewhere in the province form a contrasting background of disadvantage to these privileged students. Much was expected of students at this end of the system, yet they (we) developed a strong sense of entitlement.

49 Between the ages of 8 and 13, I was a Brownie and a Girl Guide. The photograph above (Figure 6) shows my Guide Company in 1961 or 1962; I am third from the left in the back row. The Guide Captain had been my Kindergarten teacher and Guide meetings took place in the Kindergarten classroom of the new Harrington School.

50 This picture could serve as a manifesto for the significance of implicit literate understanding. The girls in the back row display extra insignia — stripes on the pockets of their uniform dress to signify that they are a patrol leader or a second-in command; lanyards to communicate status and prowess. Where a girl’s arm in that back row can be seen, it sports achievement badges, an addition conspicuously missing on the more visible sleeves of the younger girls in the front row. The sense of hierarchy is imposing, as no doubt it was intended to be.

51 My mother saved my Brownie membership card, and it displays a “Brownie literacy” that was orderly and cumulative. Achievements leading to a Golden Bar were enhanced for the greater glory of a Golden Hand. The requirements for badges were spelled out carefully; a committee somewhere decided what criteria were satisfactory. Literacy requirements simply taken for granted included reading the Brownie handbook and mastering the specifications for badges (and some badges acknowledged reading activities explicitly). Local Brown Owls (adult leaders of the Brownies), Guiders, and Commissioners organized the local scene, according to protocols laid down nationally and internationally. During my time as a Girl Guide, in September 1961, Olave, Lady Baden-Powell visited St. John’s, to be greeted by an enormous rally, which must have absorbed many voluntary committee hours to organize.

52 My mother was a Guide Commissioner during the 1950s, and, along with the girls in her charge, donned her own uniform for any formal occasion. The Guiding organization was hierarchical from bottom to top; and its allegiance to the virtues of uniforms ran through all levels. Rituals of who wore what and on which occasion, protocols of salutes and handshakes, recognition of degrees of seniority made clear to the rawest novice Brownie — to belong to the Brownie world, a child had to master them all in an exercise of reading both words and symbols that was simultaneously abstract and embodied.

53 Many other literacy institutions contributed to my life. Newspapers and radio and then television programs, for example, all fed my developing understanding of the wider world. Each of these formats mixed local and global ingredients. There is not space here to develop a detailed account of the kinds of active decision-making that went into their daily impact on the lives of the people of St. John’s, but they did not materialize by accident or out of any kind of cosmic necessity. They were designed and instantiated on purpose, and the decisions made by their creators inflected how I understood the wider world.

54 A consolidated history of the institutions conveying information and entertainment to Newfoundlanders would make for very rewarding reading. Fragments of that history are currently available and they provide fascinating insights (see, for example, Moore [2007] on early films in Newfoundland, Webb [2008] on pre-Confederation radio service in Newfoundland, and Riggs [2005] on the history of Dicks, the bookstore).

55 Other institutions were shifting the literacy landscape in Newfoundland in different ways that affected children rather more indirectly. Gillespie (2016) discusses the impact of union organization on Newfoundland society over many decades, including the period I have examined. Webb (2016) outlines the development of different disciplinary approaches to the academic study of Newfoundland culture and economics. Such developments contributed to shifts in the tacit literacy climate of Newfoundland society. During the time I have considered — 1950–62 — the changes were nascent, inchoate. By the time of the centennial year of 1967 that Barker regards as an important turning point in the history of Newfoundland literacy, conditions were in place for the explosion of cultural self-expression that now distinguishes Newfoundland society.

56 Conditions of literacy are complex, and much more is out of sight and hidden in depths than cannot be perceived except with mindful and focused inspection. In order to reflect on the scale of such a story of literacy, I conclude with a singular, telling example: some elements of the history of one book that came into our family’s possession in 1957.

57 The paper book, with its coded marks on the page and its particular history as an object owned and shared by readers, moves in and out of local life while representing something broader in terms of time and space. To sum up the complexity of the book and its readers and the unseen efforts of the people who make that reading possible, I take one small example of a book currently located in my home in Edmonton, Alberta. Titled Milton’s Poetical Works on the spine, with a slightly longer wording on the title page, it is bound in a thick layer of handsome purple plush, now somewhat faded. The front cover, shown in Figure 7, is embossed with a “JM” monogram. On the endpaper are two names: written in pencil, “Effie M. Horwood Xmas 1913”; and, on a sticker adhering to the top corner, “The McCurdys,” followed by an address that was my parents’ last independent home in Victoria, BC.

58 From 1910 until her sudden death in 1957, Effie Horwood taught in the school system eventually known as Prince of Wales College. She had been a student in the Methodist College from 1896 onward and she trained as a teacher in the same institution. Overall, her connection with the school lasted 61 of her 67 years.

59 Miss Horwood left two books of poetry to my father, who then was the principal of Prince of Wales. The second was an equally sumptuous leather-bound copy of Tennyson’s poetry, signed by her in 1908. I inherited those books from him. The Milton volume contained clippings of two different newspaper obituaries of Effie Horwood, cut tight around the text and with no provenance provided. One of them comments that she was educated “at the Old Methodist College, Long’s Hill, under Dr. Holloway and Mr. Harrington” (source unknown).

60 Gough’s biography of Robert Holloway provides the further information that he, as a pupil teacher at the Wesleyan Training College in England, had his classes inspected by Matthew Arnold, who he remembered well. Arnold “praised the staff for their efforts to diversify the curriculum and to provide for the pupils’ individual needs. . . . Mat-thew Arnold envisaged universal compulsory education as a way of producing cultured citizens of a new democracy” (Gough, 2005: 14).

61 This Oxford edition of Milton’s poetry, published in London in 1912 and purchased by or for Effie Horwood in 1913, offers an embodied example of the local and the larger world, all in a single object that can be held in the hand. Miss Horwood did not provide a location with her signature on the flyleaf, but she was already teaching at the Methodist College on Long’s Hill in 1913, so the book existed in St. John’s and was very possibly purchased there as well. The book presents an authoritative version of the works of one of the greatest poets of the English language, a man who lived between 1608 and 1674, and who was himself a robust champion of the significance of reading and the rights of readers (Aereopagitica, 1644). The Preface to my volume says, “This edition of Milton’s Poetry is a reprint, as careful as Editors and Printers have been able to make it, from the earliest printed copies of the several poems” (Beeching, 1912: v). The earliest poems in the volume are reproduced from a book first published in 1645.

62 Miss Horwood (1890–1957) lived — and presumably looked at this book — in St. John’s, and her personal history invokes a chain of connection back to Robert Holloway (1850–1904), an educator of high esteem whose impact on Methodist education in Newfoundland still resonated in my lifetime. Through Holloway, we can follow that chain back, away from the Dominion to the “mother country” and the educational inspiration of Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), poet and inspector of schools. After 1957, the book lived in a place of honour on my parents’ bedroom mantelpiece on Pennywell Road. It ultimately moved with them, first to Edmonton, and then to Victoria, and has now returned to Edmonton with me.

63 The obituaries of Effie Horwood make some associations explicit that, otherwise, I would not have been able to articulate — but those associations belong to the book, whatever its current owner’s awareness may be. This grand little volume reaches from the twenty-first century back to the seventeenth. It belongs to St. John’s and it belongs to the large world of arts and letters, both at the same time. Its plush covers manifest a certain attitude to learning and poetry redolent of a different era. It stands as a physical connection to a very particular historical sequence of events and priorities in the history of Methodist and, then, United Church education in St. John’s. And, for me, it brings back strong personal memories of that bedroom mantelpiece on Pennywell Road, where my parents displayed a small set of especially valued books. It is a memory that incorporates a distinctive attitude to education that permeated my home as well as my school. In addition, the name-and-address label on the endpaper vividly reminds me of the apartment in Victoria that my parents occupied in a late stage of their lives.

64 I elaborate on the resonances of this single artifact because I think this story, so insignificant in many ways, encompasses many of the aspects of literate development that I have attempted to describe in this article. The decisions and actions of four dedicated educators (Mat-thew Arnold, Robert Holloway, Effie Horwood, and my own father [1924–2007]) are linked to this object through associations that are relatively easy to establish and that adhere to the book as a physical object containing two distinctive marks of ownership. In a different way, the contents of the book connect to a great seventeenth-century thinker and poet, whose ideas crossed the world of his time and travelled as far as the Dominion of Newfoundland. Somewhere, possibly at Dicks on Water Street, a bookseller acquired this title and made it available for sale.

65 As a child, I was hugely impressed by the lavishness of this volume, and curious enough to look inside — though I cannot say I was won over to Milton’s poetical diction at the age of nine. I was, of course, oblivious to how it might be possible to focus, through the material existence and historical aura of this single book, on so many manifestations of active engagement of human beings committed to enabling literacy. But even as a nine-year-old, I was vaguely aware that this plush hardback connected me to a larger and grander world, and that reading was the key to entering that world. The book links Pennywell Road in 1957 to the building then known as Holloway School on Long’s Hill, all the way back to 1896, and to the educational values and efforts of people like Matthew Arnold even further back in the nineteenth century. It incarnates the words of Milton from as early as 1645, edited with care and attention in 1912, and its portability meant it could cross the Atlantic Ocean and then the full breadth of Canada. It has a global history and a local provenance.

66 My copy of this book is one kind of private legacy of the efforts to support literacy in the 1950s — a legacy that at once looks backwards and outwards from the mantelpiece on Pennywell Road. Another inheritance from that era is more public. Just as bringing Milton to Newfoundland involved specific efforts and decisions, so the educational work done in the 1950s led to the explosion of artistic representations of the city and the province that followed improved federal funding after 1967. Many contemporary Newfoundland novelists, poets, artists, playwrights, satirists, filmmakers, and musicians similarly benefited from the care and attention of numerous boards and committees, volunteers and professionals, working hard through the 1950s to turn the assets of Confederation to the advantage of the new province’s children. Today, these artists represent Newfoundland and Labrador to the world, and to the citizens of this province. When I think about the blank spaces of the 1950s where descriptions of my own world should have flourished, and then look at the contrasting wealth of representation available today, I value the genius and creativity of the creators, but I also acknowledge the debt of gratitude owed to their elders and mentors who made such efforts to scaffold better forms of learning.