In the early 1930s, as the price of fish dropped, the fish you caught, salted and dried bought less and less of what you needed to live on. Your debt to the merchant would go up. Some people had debts so high that the merchant "cut them off," or told them that they could have no more supplies. Sometimes people lost things they owned to pay off debts. Some lost their fishing gear. Without it, they had to leave the fishery and try to find other sources of income. Some small merchants were also hit hard. Some found that they had to go out of business.

What would you do if you had to leave your work in the fishery and find another source of income? As many of us know, Newfoundlanders have always gone away to look for work when there is none at home. Before the 1930s, many people from Newfoundland went to Canada and the United States to look for work.

But the Depression of the 1930s was a worldwide crisis. In Canada and the United States, large numbers of people were unemployed. Many people in these countries took to the road. They travelled in search of work that was very scarce. There were many homeless people. Small towns made up of shacks grew up around North America. Many people were hungry. For Newfoundlanders, this meant that there were no jobs to go to in Canada and the United States.

So what would you do if you were a Newfoundlander in 1932? The summer fishery had been bad. You were in debt to the merchant. The merchant said you cannot get any more goods on credit. There are no jobs to go to anywhere else.

The only thing you could do was apply for public relief, the dole. This was something like social assistance. It was government aid given to people who were very poor or "destitute." The dole was a very small amount of support. The amount was based on what the government felt it could give, not on how much a person needed to survive.

How many people needed this support in the early 1930s? While different records give different numbers, between 1931 and 1933 as many as 90,000 people in Newfoundland were on the dole at one time.⁴ This was one-third of the whole population of the country. It included single people and whole families, men, women and children, the very old and the very young. It included people who had been poor for a long time and people who had never needed public relief before.

Today we have a Department of Social Services. In Newfoundland when the Depression began, the Public Charities Department handled public relief. It is hard to get an exact account of how much relief people got. This is because the amount of relief was different from place to place, and from time to time. Local officials could make very different decisions about who got what. As more and more people needed assistance, the government tried to get more control over the rate. They tried to set one rate for everyone.