His official name was Joseph R. Smallwood, but his boyhood friend and my grandfather, Mac Morgan, called him Joey. By the time Newfoundland joined Canada, almost forty years later, everyone in the country also called him Joey.

Mac and Joey met in the busy business district of St. John’s, the capital of the Dominion of Newfoundland. They were both the same age as the year, so this would have been around 1912 and they sold newspapers outside the tobacconist on Duckworth Street to lawyers running to Court and businessmen buying pipe tobacco.

Joey, a boarding student at Bishop Feild, picked up his papers after school from either The Evening Telegram or The Daily News, or one of the weekly papers. Today, St. John’s has only one newspaper, The Telegram, a thin publication that is printed six days a week. In my grandfather’s adolescence the town had at least two dailies, and several weeklies, often five or six newspapers, each representing different sides of vigorous debates on a wide range of civic issues.

While Joey came from rural Newfoundland, Mac was a townie who, after attending the small Seventh-day Adventist school run by Miss. Pippy, took his grade eleven at Prince of Wales Collegiate – the preferred alma mater for Protestant merchant class scions. It was unusual for sons of tradesmen to finish high school, Mac’s friend never did, instead Joey parlayed his contacts as a newspaper boy and, I suspect, typesetting skills learned in the basement of Mac’s family’s house, into a job as a Printer’s Devil for the Plaindealer.

A Printer’s Devil is what they called apprentices who cleaned the shop, melted yesterday’s articles into lead slugs for tomorrow’s linotype, and sorted headliner type back into a job case. By 1919 Joey had worked his way up to being a cub reporter at the Evening Telegram accompanying Billie Murphy to Trepassey to cover the first successful (but not unbroken) crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by the Americans. He even had his own byline on an article about the Naval Wireless Transmission Station in Mount Pearl, currently home to the Admiralty House Communications Museum, next door to the Annex where I’m doing my art residency this winter. Joey used his Evening Telegram portfolio to get reporting jobs when he moved to New York the next year.

Family lore says that when he first arrived in the Big Apple, Joey slept on the couch of his friend Billie Newhook, who was courting Mac’s sister, Cynthia Morgan. Cynth married Bill in 1922, which may have forced Joey to find a place of his own. At the time he was a freelance journalist for at least three New York newspapers.

In the post-war era most New York working class intellectuals were socialists. In 1924, Joey worked on the Socialist Party of America’s presidential campaign, while writing for the socialist paper The New York Call. When he returned to Newfoundland, Smallwood imitated his hero, Sir. William Coaker, becoming a union organizer and founding two newspapers: the Labour Outlook, and then the Humber Herald. He was living in Corner Brook at that time with his new wife, Clara. He also joined the Liberal Party (again, like his hero Coaker) working as campaign manager for Sir. Richard Squires in the Humber valley, and running, unsuccessfully, for Bonavista a few years later.

I don’t know if it was politics, or geography, or just the busy life of a job printer with a growing family, but Mac lost touch with Joey. Then, everyone in St. John’s was reading a column in the Daily News called the Barrelman.

The Barrelman is the sailor stationed in the crow’s nest. He is the first to sight land, or danger, and to communicate that to the crew. In his column, Joey Smallwood took advantage of his personal knowledge of the island to promote (he would say create) Newfoundland nationalism.

When the Barrelman appeared on radio VONF (the Voice of Newfoundland) in 1937, Joey’s fifteen-minutes of patriotic anecdotes and cultural gems became required listening across the Dominion. But the Depression was in full force in Newfoundland and, needing to support his family, Joey returned to his birthplace in central Newfoundland to run a pig farm.

But Newfoundland didn’t forget Joey and, when he left the farm to enter the confederation debate, Joey remembered the power of radio. As the Barrelman, he had developed a relationship with his listeners by reading their letters on the radio. He had his generation’s trained memory, and never forgot the name of anyone he met. He had the gift of persuasion, the ability to read the room, and he told stories that pulled on people’s heartstrings. His speeches were not wordy treatises, written to be read, but filled with repetition and short sound bites. Joey Smallwood wrote for radio.

But it is interesting that in this, the fight that history remembers him for, Joey also created his last newspaper: The Confederate. Why would he do that? Maybe it was because radio was ephemeral. In that era words on paper built credibility and legacy — especially if you controlled the medium. Or maybe it was that newspapers were something that Joey understood from a lowly Printer’s Devil up to being a newspaper publisher. And yet…Joey had witnessed radio’s power during the Depression, when populist politicians used radio to win elections in the United States and Europe. In World War II, like everyone else, Joey heard Winston Churchill use radio to rally the Western democracies against Nazism.

I suspect that the St. John’s Protestant merchant class never tuned into VONF, or attended rallies in the small towns where fans showed up to meet the Barrelman. The final vote was 51 to 49 in favour of confederation. Some say the referendum was rigged. But, even if that is true, rural Newfoundland and working-class St. John’s and Corner Brook, showed up in strength to vote for Joey.

The photograph above, also on display at Admiralty House Museum, shows Joey Smallwood signing the agreement that made Newfoundland a province of Canada. The museum caption says that Joey barred all members of the press – with the exception of radio – to the event. What the newspapermen didn’t hear, when the sound of Joey’s signature was broadcast across the country, was the cry from the Barrelman signalling the death of print media, and the arrival of radio. The day was March 31, 1949.

–Jennifer Morgan, February 5, 2024