A short time ago, a man who had been living in a very poor house I often pass, told me he could not get his landlord to repair it though he always paid his rent, and that one morning last winter he found his young child covered with snow that had drifted in during the night.4

While he was mayor, Gilbert Gosling tried to make things better for the poorer people in St. John's. For three months in 1918 he donated the money he made as mayor so that the city could pay a public health nurse. His city council also built the very first public housing in Newfoundland.5

Milk
Miss Rogers, a public health nurse, came to St. John's from New York city in the summer of 1918.6 Her salary was paid with the money Mayor Gosling donated. Miss Rogers was not happy with the way that milk was kept in corner stores in St. John's. She found the milk in open containers. In warm weather, flies were always around the milk.7

There were so many problems with fresh milk that some mothers were afraid to feed it to their children. Miss Rogers said that many mothers "feared to trust the milkmen" and that their children got rickets and scurvy because they were not eating properly.8 (Rickets and scurvy are explained in the next section.)

Miss Rogers was not the only one to notice dirty milk. The public health inspector for St. John's was a man named Mr. O'Brien. In 1916, he wrote a report about how milk was sold in the city.9 In those days, there were two ways to buy milk in St. John's: you could buy it at the corner store, or straight from the farmer, who delivered it house to house. (See Picture Three.)

Inspector O'Brien began checking the milk in corner stores in 1916. Like Miss Rogers, he found that the milk in these stores was often dirty. He said in his report that he had to speak to the shopkeepers in just about every store he visited about keeping dust and flies out of the milk.10

Most dairy farms were quite small. In fact, there were 956 small dairy farms in and around St. John's. Inspector O'Brien said that most of these farms only had two cows.

4 Armine N. Gosling, William Gilbert Gosling: A Tribute, New York: The Guild, 1935, P.104. This is the book that Mrs. Gosling wrote about her husband after he died.
5 Public housing is built, owned and maintained by the government of a city or a province.
6 We know what Miss Rogers did because her report was published in the newspapers in St. John's.
7 J. Rogers, "Child Welfare Report of Community Nurse Rogers," (St. John's) Daily News, 14 September 1918, p.2.
8 J Rogers, p.2.
9 The report that Inspector O'Brien wrote for the government of Newfoundland was published in the Journal of the House Of Assembly, 1917, pp. 520 to 522.
10 Inspector O'Brien's report, Journal of the House of Assembly, 1917, p.522.