The exact origin of this two-handled,
splint style lunch basket design is unknown but research has pointed to a
couple of possibilities. In her article, “The Multiple Roles of the
Millworker's Lunch Basket in Central Newfoundland”, Jane Burns suggests the
baskets were originally factory made imports that resourceful Newfoundlanders
deconstructed and learned to make themselves. Research also suggests that the
lunch baskets were sold right out of the pulp and paper mills, possibly
starting in Corner Brook and carrying over to the others. The mill in
Corner Brook opened in 1923 and the oldest lunch basket documented so far is
dated 1928, belonging to Doris O’Dell of Corner Brook. O’Dell inherited the
basket from her father who used it when he worked in the mill. The basket is
factory made, purchased from the Peterboro
Basket Company in New Hampshire. This company dates back to 1854 and it's
possible the mill in Corner Brook purchased these baskets to sell to
employees.
Others, like Wayne Green,
also of Corner Brook, feel the baskets may have been originally designed by
female basket makers of the Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq tradition. He recalls a woman
and her two daughters who would stay with his family when he was a child. Green
recounted that the women would come from Nova Scotia, riding the Newfoundland
Railway, stopping where the trains did in order to sell baskets of all sorts.
His father would take orders from this basket-maker before her arrival and
Green remembers the mill lunch basket was always a very popular item.
One thing we know for sure is that there were Newfoundlanders who eventually began making the baskets themselves. One of the most prolific and
well-known mill lunch basket makers was Angus Gunn Sr. of Grand
Falls-Windsor. He began making baskets in the early 1950s and is said to
have made hundreds of lunch baskets for local mill workers.
This coming March we're coordinating "Tea n' Baskets", an
event to bring together those who have a mill lunch basket of their own.
Whether you worked in the mill yourself or the basket was handed down from a
family member, we welcome you to come out and show your basket and share your
stories.
A mill lunch basket belonging to Kevin Gunn, which was made and used by his father, Angus Gunn
A mill lunch basket belonging to Julie Rideout, handed down from her father, Gerald Crawley. This basket was made by Julie's grandfather, Angus Gunn
A mill lunch
basket, belonging to Bob and Tina Houston. Tina acquired it from a former
employee of the Abitibi Mill in Stephenville. Tina cleaned, repaired and
painted the basket, added the fabric lining and repurposed it as a potato
basket
Join us on Sunday, March 18th from 1-3pm at the Glynmill Inn in Corner Brook and on Sunday, March
25th from 1-3pm at the Mount Peyton Hotel in Grand Falls-Windsor.
The
Intangible Cultural Heritage Development Office is currently working
on a collection project focused on baskets and basket makers in
Newfoundland. We are particularly interested in Mi'kmaq root baskets,
trout baskets and mill lunch baskets. We will be putting photos and
descriptions of these baskets on the online archive, the Digital
Archives Initiative, which can be found athttp://collections.mun.ca/.
We
are very interested in collecting photographs and reminiscence of mill
baskets, the distinctive two-handled splint style lunch baskets used by
the paper mill workers in central Newfoundland. The paper mill in Grand
Falls-Windsor was open for operation from 1905 to 2009 and was quite
literally the backbone of the community. It was a regular sight to see
men walking to work carrying large woven lunch baskets, laden with home
cooked food. Whether they be rectangular or oval, made from juniper,
birch, or even steel, these baskets were a symbol of hard work and
financial security. Many men worked in the paper mill their entire lives
to provide for their families and these baskets were often generational,
passed down to a younger male member of the family, if he became
employed with the mill.
It
seems a number of these baskets were made by the same people so many
looked very similar. In order to personalize their
baskets, the mill workers would etch their names, doodle, or affix
stickers and photographs on them. The baskets were also used for
practical joking and initiation into the mill. If a new worker was too
eager to leave at the end of his shift his basket may have been nailed
down or filled with rocks so that when he grabbed it the handles would
come right off!
The
mill basket was also a way for young children to get a glimpse inside
the paper mill, which for most was a mysterious, even scary, place. Many
children delivered their father’s mill basket when they worked shift
work. Don Taylor, whose father worked for the mill from 1956 to 1992,
remembers that you would lay your baskets “in the front porch of the
mill...no one was allowed to go in unless they worked there”. Often
young boys of the community could be seen walking proudly with their
father’s mill basket, putting on an act as though they were a mill
worker. I recently met with Don and have included some photographs of his basket.
Some
of the best known mill basket-makers were Angus Gunn of Grand Falls
Windsor and Ray Osmond and Ken Payne, both of Botwood. All three men are
no longer living, but as of 2001 Clarence White of Botwood was still
making mill baskets.
If
you have a mill basket please contact us. We would love to get photos
and with your permission add your basket to our online collection. You
can reach us at ichprograms@gmail.com
Don Taylor imitating the way his father carried the mill basket
In this edition of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Update from Newfoundland and Labrador, Memorial University's Department of Folklore will be hosting the the launch of the Dr. Peter Narvaez book Sonny's Dream: Essays on Newfoundland Folklore and Popular Culture; ICH Development Officer Dale Jarvis explores the revitalization of the Christmas Hobby Horse tradition in Newfoundland and Labrador; we meet the new public folklore intern, Nicole Penney; and notes on our ongoing basket and basket makers project.
One of the traditions that we are working to document is basket making. After I did an interview with CBC's Weekend Arts Magazine on basket making (listen here to that interview), I got a call from Frances Barnable about a woven bassinet that she had bought in 1959.
The crib was made as part of a craft training program run by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) and was purchased at the CNIB shop which was located in the building which now houses Coffee Matters, across from the Newfoundland Hotel. If you have any information on that training program, or on other Newfoundland or Labrador baskets, email me at ich@heritagefoundation.ca.
Ethnology at the Crossroads CALL FOR PAPERS, Workshops or Roundtables May 26-28, Waterloo, Ontario
The FSAC/ACEF 2012 conference will be held with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Science, in Waterloo, Ontario and co-hosted by Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo. The theme for this year's Congress is Crossroads: Scholarship for an Uncertain World.
Building on the Congress 2012 theme, the theme for our meeting will be Ethnology at the Crossroads. Ethnologists and Folklorists are committed to engaging with topics that fall at the crossroads and margins of our societies. As our discipline has developed, we have often found ourselves as lone members in diverse departments, and therefore have brought our unique methodologies and theories to interdisciplinary research groups. We have often studied the practices that occur when cultures cohabitate and influence each other (or purposefully remain uninfluenced by each other). We work with populations who are confronted with their own crossroads; facing changes in the economy, family composition, social constructs, and technology.
Suggested paper topics include: * The future of Ethnology and/or Folklore in Canada * Canadian responses to the UNESCO 2003 convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage * Cultural "crossroads"; both past and present * Disciplinary intersections; experiences and best practices
Proposals dealing with other topics will also be considered as space permits. Applications for Panels and Workshops are strongly encouraged.
PLEASE NOTE, IN ORDER TO BE CONSIDERED: 1) All applicants are required to fill out the attached form-fillable PDF form ONLY and email it to Jodi McDavid. Please adhere to the space provided for your abstract. Please indicate any AV needs in the space provided on your form. Be sure to include your strict maximum 100-word abstract for your formal presentation (in English and French if possible, or simply in your first language) along with your name, department, institutional affiliation, and contact information by February 15, 2012.
2) Hard copy/surface mail submissions of abstracts will not be accepted.
3) Only current members may participate in this event or have their submission considered (see membership form). Your abstract will not considered until the Secretary-Treasurer has received your membership fee, preferably via Paypal, although cheques are also accepted.
NEW THIS YEAR: The Association no longer charges a translation fee, to avoid varying quality in supplied translations, and unnecessary pressure on our administration.
We are attempting to move into a fully-electronic system of membership payment, abstract submission, and communication. Please join us in this endeavour!
FSAC CONFERENCE FEES will be collected by Congress, and is $30 for all delegates, however, when meeting with Congress, you also must pay Congress fees. 2012 fees have not yet been set, for comparison, in 2011 early registration fees were $55 Congress fees + $30
FSAC fees (unwaged, student, underemployed, etc.), regular member $150 Congress + $30 FSAC fees.
The poster above was one designed by Target Marketing for the 2011 Mummers Festival. It bears the caption "Terrifying and delighting children for over 400 years" and the image of a handsome mummer (yours truly) peeking out from inside a great grey horse's head. This is a hobby horse - and not the child's riding toy hobby horse most North Americans are familiar with. The hobby horse of Newfoundland's mummering tradition is much more fearsome beastie, with big eyes, and a wooden jaw with nails for teeth, which snock together as it nips and bites at the people it meets along its route. It is an archetypal figure associated with chaos, unpredictability, fertility, and, as the poster suggests, even a little terror.
When we started planning the very first
mummers festival in 2009, we went looking for hobby horses. Chris Brookes, who
started the Mummers Troupe in 1972, had a couple, one of which, "Old Ball" is shown to the right. Local actor Andy Jones had one. One was found tucked away in the MUN Folklore and Language Archive. The Kelly family in Cape Broyle had another, made of styrofoam to replace an older, wooden head.
But other than those few models, very few
existed outside of reminiscences. Andrea O’Brien contributed memories of hobby horses from the Southern Shore, and a man from Bonavista Bay remembered a hobby horse made out of an old cardboard beer carton.
The
hobby horse was a Newfoundland Christmas tradition which, not particularly widespread in the twentieth century, had seemed to have faded from both the cultural landscape and popular memory in the twenty-first. It was a shame, for hobby horses have a long and complicated history.
Hobby horses (along with their colourful cousins hobby cows, hobby goats, hobby sheep, and hobby bulls) have been here on the island
of Newfoundland for a long time. In 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert wrote in his "Voyages and Enterprises":
Besides for solace of our people, and allurement of the Savages, we were provided of Musike in good variety: not omitting the least toyes, as Morris dancers, Hobby horsse, and Maylike conceits to delight the Savage people.
"Hobby horse" and "Horsy-hops" both get their own entries in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, and folklorist Dr. Joy Fraser has included references to hobby horses in her stellar research on mummering and violence in nineteenth century Newfoundland. Fraser includes one account, where a complainant in a legal case describes how “I heard some person running and turned round I was struck on the head with something like a horses head and knocked down I rose on my knees to get hold of the man who struck me and he kicked me on the breast”.
A 1913 Christmas engraving by John Hayward includes, in the background, what can only be a hobby horse (detail below).
Folklore research in the 1960s and 1970s uncovered many stories and references to hobby horses and bulls, but by the time the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador instigated its first Folklife Festival in 2009, very few hobby horses existed, no one had made any for years, and most people had never heard of the tradition.
Mummers Festival coordinator Ryan Davis, working with long-time Lantern Festival organizer Kathleen Parewick, designed a cardboard template to make a hobby horse head, and the hobby horse workshops which were first offered in 2009 have since become a firm part of the annual festival.
The hobby horse workshops have been taught outside of the festival, as part of ICH workshops, community centre outreach programs, and workshops for high school teachers.
Ron Delaney of Bay Roberts has made his own
hobby horse from wood, based on his own memories. In December of 2011, Delaney wrote,
“As a child , growing up in the 70’s and
early 80’s I was mortified of Jannies, I use to hear my relatives talk about
good and bad Jannies , as a result , in my mind they were all bad, especially
the hobby horse. The hobby horse usually was the last Jannie to enter the
house; I could remember scooting in the room as fast as I could when I heard
the SLAP of its mouth.”
One of the participants in a hobby horse
building workshop I taught in Bay Roberts, Delaney brought along Meggie
and Kaegan, who now represent a new generation of hobby horse owners. Another horse foaled that day made its way back to Ontario, to take place of honour as Bottom's Head in a Grade 8 student production of Midsummer's Night Dream.
One of the participants in a 2011 Arts Work Conference hobby horse making workshop I taught in St. John's was teacher Amanda Gibson, who teaches at Amos Comenius Memorial School in Hopedale. She made her hobby horse, then went off to Labrador armed with her new skills. Horses not being common along the northern Labrador coast, Gibson adapted the template, adding hobby polar bears to the list of hobby animals now made in the province.
"The kids had a fun time making them and loved choosing the colors for their 'bears'" she wrote me. "It took a few hour-period classes, but it was a great way to end the unit in Grade 8 NL history on 19th Century Lifestyles for students that are hands-on learners."
This year, 2011, there were hobby horses galore at the Mummers Parade. Everywhere you turned, a gaudily-decorated horse's head was poking up above the sea of mummers and janneys, including one devilishly fine, black and red steed, crepe paper fire billowing from its nostrils.
For me, it was a particularly moving sight, and proof that tradition is sometimes more resilient than we give it credit for. For whatever reason, hobby horse making has struck a chord with a new generation of janneys, and I look forward to new additions to the herd in 2012.
And next year, I think the parade needs at least one hobby goat...
Here are some of the YouTube videos that have been put up from the Mummers Parade this past Saturday. If you know of more, email me at ich@heritagefoundation.ca
The exact origin of this two-handled,
splint style lunch basket design is unknown but research has pointed to a
couple of possibilities. In her article, “The Multiple Roles of the
Millworker's Lunch Basket in Central Newfoundland”, Jane Burns suggests the
baskets were originally factory made imports that resourceful Newfoundlanders
deconstructed and learned to make themselves. Research also suggests that the
lunch baskets were sold right out of the pulp and paper mills, possibly
starting in Corner Brook and carrying over to the others. The mill in
Corner Brook opened in 1923 and the oldest lunch basket documented so far is
dated 1928, belonging to Doris O’Dell of Corner Brook. O’Dell inherited the
basket from her father who used it when he worked in the mill. The basket is
factory made, purchased from the Peterboro
Basket Company in New Hampshire. This company dates back to 1854 and it's
possible the mill in Corner Brook purchased these baskets to sell to
employees. 
