A Remarkable Man

In our pre-trip reading, one of the names that came up again and again was Dr. Grenfell. There are streets and buildings galore named after him. As St. Anthony was his hub, this is the right place and time to talk about this man.

statue in front of Grenfell Museum,
St. Anthony

Dr. Wilfred Grenfell was one of those men who have the good luck of being the right man to live in the right place at the right time. He was sorely needed and he gave more than what could have even been dreamed of. 

Born in a English fishing village, in Cheshire, and educated at a sporty old-school boarding school in the 1870s. Being a young man of financial privilege, he spent a bit of time trying to find his purpose, and settled on medicine. He trained at London Hospital, which was located in one of the poorer neighbourhoods. This was a sign.

Sent off to Newfoundland in 1892 to treat the poor, he found his calling. Devastated with the extreme poverty he found in Newfoundland and, particularly, Labrador, he made it his life's mission to treat as many people as possible in the short season his medical boat could travel before the ice came. He built hospitals and clinics up and down the coast (his first was in St. Anthony, near the top of the Western peninsula of Newfoundland), and recruited other doctors and nurses to add more capacity than he himself could. 

Seeing children orphaned and abandoned because of Tuberculosis, he built an orphanage. He built schools. He started a fishermen's cooperative to help these families built their own security rather than having to suffer the horrific debt and treatment that the British merchants imposed. He treated the Inuit along Labrador's coast, otherwise neglected. 

He wrote books. Lots of them. He was a religious man, and preached, apparently kindly and effectively. He had pithy sayings, like this one:

There was a famous event that secured his heroic star even more, when he raced out with his dog team in a storm to try to save a young boy's life and got caught on an ice pan that broke away and started to float out to sea. Knowing he would die otherwise, he sacrificed three of his beloved dogs to make a warm coat for himself (In the dark! In a snow storm! With just a knife!) until, days later, he was rescued. And yes, he went on to successfully operate on the boy.

He founded the International Grenfell Foundation to further his work, and went all over the world giving talks about Labrador and Newfoundland and seeking donations to build more and hire more and train more. We went on book tours, which he loathed, because he knew it would help. He was knighted for his work, has a feast day in his honour and inspired fictional characters. There is even a Grenfell cloth brand, a hard-wearing cotton gabardine.

Dr. G in stained glass, next to J,
in the Physicians window,
Washington Cathedral, Washington DC
(Louis Pasteur is on the other side)

In his 40s, he met his wife on a transatlantic boat and proposed to her before he knew her name. She gave up her life in Chicago to join him in the wilds, and was his partner in all things. She hid her own illness (cancer) to help him, and died in 1938. He died shortly after. Their ashes are together up in the hills behind their lovely house in St. Anthony, even though they worked so hard they hardly ever spent time there. 

You can imagine how excited we are to be staying in one of the Grenfell Nursing stations in Forteau, Labrador! 

our Labrador home, the Louie A Grenfell Hall B&B