Recollections of Placentia
Bay

Berkley Ingram

Berkley Ingram lives in the Golden Years Manor at Arnold's Cove. Except for a few years in St. John's, he lived all his life in Placentia Bay.

I WAS BORN JANUARY 17, 1912 at Woody Island, Placentia Bay. I went to school a short while at Woody Island. At only seven years old I helped my mother trench potatoes.

I remember one very stormy day. It was snowing and cold, but not windy. My father and another man had to go approximately three miles over ice, towing a sleigh to get a lady, a Mrs. Bollard who was a midwife.

They had to wrap the lady in blankets in the sleigh. Then, with ropes over their shoulders, they towed Mrs. Bollard and the sleigh all the way from Bollard's Point to our house on Allen's Point.

I cannot remember much more about Woody Island, as I was not eight years old when I left home. My cousin and his wife came to visit mother, who was his aunt. They had no children and they asked Mom and Dad if they would let me go with them. Mom and Dad talked it over and decided that I could go. They knew I would be well cared for.

My cousin's wife was, I always said, an angel. I was given the best of everything and treated like a prince. Walter Ingram, the cousin who adopted me, was a teacher before taking the job as telegraph operator and postmaster. I learned telegraphy at age ten while helping him by delivering messages around and sorting the mail. I had to be sworn in to use the telegraph at age twelve.

About a year after, we encountered line trouble for three or four days. We had to get a boat and take whatever messages were on hand to Argentia to be transmitted to St. John's. En route a fire started in the engine room. There were two 45-gallon tanks of gas, one on each side of the engine room. We were lucky to have salt in the hold of the boat, and that is what the engineer threw on the fire to extinguish it.