A fellow who cleaned up well
By Ivan Morgan
If your ancestors were on the barrens above Holyrood on a hot, sunny, windy July morning in the 1930s they may have been witness to a spectacle not seen before, or I imagine, since. This story was handed down to me through my family. It was a classic that my grandmother loved and told many times. Let me set the scene.
I had an ancestor named Fraser Bond, the nephew of the only relative of mine who entered politics, Sir Robert Bond. (That’s a story for another day!)
Fraser’s mother died when he was young. His father, a travelling Christian missionary, sent him off to school in England. After that he was educated in the States and Canada earning a B. Lit., M.Sc. and a law degree. In 1914 he started his professional life as a reporter with the Toronto Daily Star, joined the editorial staff of the New York Times in 1920, and in 1926 became a Professor of Journalism at Columbia University in New York, a position he kept until he retired in the 1950’s. While teaching his always popular courses, he also found time to write and publish a number of books, all which earned great reviews and brisk sales. My grandmother adored him. All accounts indicate he was a great guy.
His tie to Newfoundland was every summer, no matter where he was or what he was doing, he spent a month at his uncle’s home in Whitbourne, an old Victorian house on a hill surrounded by acres and acres of gardens called The Grange. He loved the place, and he loved Newfoundland. When Sir Robert died in 1927, he willed the place to Fraser.
Everyone adored him. Witty, kind, and sophisticated, he was known for his playful personality. Among other things, he was a very natty dresser. He enjoyed an active social life in New York. I was told many times I may have never existed but for Fraser: my grandparents met in New York at a party hosted by one of his friends.
It is fashionable these days to speculate on the private lives of people from the past. Fraser Bond never married and lived for over 30 years with his lifelong companion, Donald Fraser, in an elegant apartment at an exclusive address on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
The high point of his annual month in Newfoundland was the Governor’s summer garden party at Government House in St. John’s. It was the social event of the season; Fraser never missed it.
One summer in the early 1930s, he got up, breakfasted, and carefully dressed for the occasion, which in those days required white tie and tails, and a top hat. Pulling up to the Whitbourne train station he saw, to his horror, the train to St. John’s pulling away. He panicked. Long before the TCH, he realized the old car he drove wouldn’t have made the bumpy, winding trip to St. John’s. Looking about frantically his eyes landed on a rail hand car on side tracks by the station, the kind workmen use to ride the rails. It’s a flat cart on railcar wheels with a two-handled pump lever which propels the machine.
He leapt to action. He ran over, jumped on the cart and in minutes he was zooming down the tracks. Family lore claims he was planning to catch up with the train he’d missed, possibly at Avondale or Holyrood. It wasn’t to be.
On a sunny morning in mid July, anyone along those tracks was treated to the spectacle of a formally dressed man in a top hat furiously pumping the cart lever, whistling along. As a boy I imagined farmers in their fields, kids walking the rail line, mothers hanging out wash in the wind, all stopping what they were doing to watch him fly by.
It’s every bit of 90 kilometres from Whitbourne to St. John’s, and family lore has him making it in just over four hours. He made very good time. My grandmother remembers him showing up at the party, a bit flushed and sunburnt perhaps, and his hair a little unruly, but immaculately dressed and “nothing a few gin and tonics didn’t fix.” She recalled he cleaned up well and, with a hell of a story to tell, was the centre of attention, the place he liked to be.
Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com