By Roger Bill.
St John’s, Newfoundland.
This is the story of the invention of a tradition.
The date: July 3, 1975.
The place: The Bella Vista Club, at the time the largest nightclub in St. John’s.
The Inventors:
Fred Walsh, the Bella Vista’s Manager and Chief Screecher.
Jim Healey – a bartender at the Bella Vista and part-time tour bus guide.
Joe Murphy – the leader of a band called The Beachcombers and an advertising salesperson for the largest circulation newspaper in the city at the time, The Evening Telegram.
Joan Morrissey – a successful entertainer who also performed at the Admirals Keg, the bar at the largest hotel in the city where she regularly encountered tourists.
Did they ever imagine their Tourist Night and Screech Club promotion would lead hundreds of thousands of tourists over, now, five decades to kneel, repeat what they’re told is an old Newfoundland saying, then kiss a cod fish, and become Honorary Newfoundlanders?
Nope.
On the go for Thursday night.
Jim Healey: “Tuesday was good. Wednesday wasn’t a bad day, but Thursday was kind of a down day . . . Friday and Saturday took care of themselves, of course, so what are we going to do about Thursday night and I said why don’t we try and get some tourists in. So we were trying to find what’s a good way to get tourists in so we figured we’d dress up in old Newfoundland outfits.”
What is it they say about necessity being the mother of invention?
Jim Healey: “Joe, he used to come over every week to get his ads for Friday and Saturday nights . . . so we started chatting about something and I said, ‘we’re trying to get something on the go for Thursday night.”
According to Jim Healey calling the something they got “on the go for Thursday night” a Screech-In was Joe Murphy’s contribution to the invention. He may have borrowed the idea from the title of a popular television program at the time, Laugh-In. Recruiting tour bus operators to add the Bella Vista’s Tourist Night to their itineraries fell to Jim Healey who sometimes worked as a guide on the tour buses.
Jim Healey: I knew a guy, this fellow Merv. I was chatting with him one day and he worked for a tour bus company, and he never had a tour guide one day and he said ‘You know St. John’s?’ I said, ‘I know St. John’s like the back of my hand.’ So he said, ‘I’m going to take the people up Signal Hill’ and it was evening time and I was at the, I don’t know where I met him to, and anyway he said to me ‘Would you take them up the hill and explain St. John’s to them? And I said ‘B’y if they can understand me I don’t mind going with them, you know, because of our accents and he said, ‘No, you’ll be fine.’ So I was in the middle of telling people and I said, ‘Tomorrow night we got a Screech In at the Bella Vista so you should come over because it’s Newfoundland music, great time you know. So they came over the next night. Merv brought his crowd over so he told all the other drivers and the word got around to the drivers that if you’re in St. John’s on Thursday night you gotta go here. And that’s how it started. It snowballed from there.”
That is how the invention appeared from the perspective of the bartender/tour bus guide. The owner of the Bella Vista recalls things differently. Dave Young, the owner of the Bella Vista in the 1970s, says Fred Walsh invented the ceremony and Fred Walsh’s daughter, Linda Doody, agrees.
Linda Doody: They would have tables with bologna and probably some pickles and things on it. I’m not quite sure, but certainly would be bologna there and when Dad began, he had them kiss a squid instead of the cod fish. “He would take his sword and put in on their shoulders sort of like a knighting and they would get a certificate and in order to get the certificate they would have to down an ounce of Screech. And of course, there would have been Newfoundland music and entertainment, and tourists very much enjoyed it. I recall. They had a great laugh. It was a fun time, you know
Linda Doody: “Well, Dad would put on this regalia, too. He loved pageantry and he wore what would have been, I guess, a governor’s hat with a plume and a waistcoat and he had a silver chain with a silver wine tasting thing that he got in California when he did a wine tasting course and he had a long sword. He was very much into ceremony and, you know, something different, always pageantry. When he was in Argentia he would do Octoberfest, shipwreck parties, famous lovers parties, all of this. He was very creative that way. “
Fred Walsh was born in Marystown and he went to work at the Argentia Naval Station in 1943. He started out as a teenager working in the kitchen and eventually became the Manager of the Officer’s Club at the large American military base.
In its day the Officer’s Club was the largest club in Newfoundland which likely meant Fred Walsh managed one of the largest entertainment budgets of any enterprise on the island and would have been one of the most senior civilian employees on the base.
Linda Doody: I mean the people that he would have worked with were the cream of society in Argentia and certainly in the military, I mean, it was brigadier generals and admirals, movie stars, presidents. I mean Eisenhower, he entertained Eisenhower.
If Fred Walsh invented the Screech-In, then where did he get the idea? The answer may be the Argentia naval base.
During his years working with American naval personnel Fred Walsh would have become familiar with a ritual that bears a striking resemblance to the Screech-In ceremony. The ritual is the Crossing The Line ceremony. This ceremony is performed when a ship crosses the equator and for sailors who are crossing the equator for the first time it represents a rite of passage into a select circle of mariners.
In the Crossing The Line ceremony a person portraying Neptune and others portraying his Court take command of a ship and conduct mock trials where the un- initiated, or Pollywogs, are subjected to a variety of embarrassments, including eating fish parts ordinarily thrown overboard.
Neptune and his court are dressed in costume and at the conclusion of the initiation ceremony the Pollywog receives a certificate declaring them to be members of the “Order of the Deep, Old Sea Dog, or Raging Man.”
Fred Walsh did not wear a Neptune costume at the Bella Vista Screech-In ceremony in 1975, but he did dress in the costume of a 19th century naval officer. The costume, according to his daughter, was borrowed from the wardrobe department of the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John’s.
Kissing a cod fish may not be as sickening as eating glazed fisheyes, but for a tourist from urban Ontario there is an “Oh Shit” moment as their lips near the mouth of the fish.
A third and obvious similarity in the rituals is the receiving of a certificate in the Crossing the Line ceremony into the Order of the Deep and in the case of the Screech-In, into the Royal Order of Screechers.
There is an additional similarity between the two ceremonies apart from the costumes and rituals and certificates. The Crossing the Line ceremony represented for mariners the division between the North Seas and being home and the South Seas and being away. Or between normal and exotic. Or between “here” and “out there” and the island of Newfoundland represents “out there” for many visitors from the mainland of North America.
Screech-In Version II
The version of the Screech-In ceremony that today costs visitors $42.50 at Christian’s Pub on George Street was invented in 1976 by a school teacher at the time from Bell Island named Myrle Vokey.
Myrle Vokey told me he saw the Bella Vista Screech-In ceremony in 1975. A year later he was part of a committee organizing social events for a national teacher’s convention that was being held in St. John’s. He decided to stage a Screech-In ceremony to entertain the visitors.
In 2010, after staging hundreds of thousands of Screech-In ceremonies Myrle Vokey invited me to his home where I recorded an interview with him. I asked him to recall the first ceremony he staged in 1976. He retrieved black and white photos of the ceremony and took a journey down memory lane.
Myrle Vokey: “So I put on the oil skins for that first show and if I have any regrets, I don’t have many, but if I have any regrets I don’t think I would have ever done that because . . .
Roger Bill: It was hot?
Myrle Vokey: Oh, hot! The oil skins, you know are very colourful and is typical of what most people think of Newfoundland, fishing and the sea and so on, but it’s very hot. It’s like a sauna. It wasn’t so bad in the winter, but my gosh, in the summer times I’d almost pass out from heat especially when I would be going for an hour or two with the oil skins on.”
Myrle Vokey recalls asking the visiting school teachers to kneel down as he conducted the ceremony. Each visitor was given a piece of bologna to eat. Vokey characterized the bologna as “Newfoundland Steak.” The visitors were also required to repeat a tongue-twisting Newfoundland saying. The saying is still used in the ceremony five decades later.
Myrle Vokey told the visiting school teachers that at the conclusion of the Screech-In ceremony they would be asked “Are y’e a Screecher?” and when asked that question the visitors had to reply “De’d I is me ol’ cock and long may your big jib draw.”
Myrle Vokey: “It took me a few days to come up with that saying. I wanted something which was unusual and unique. Something that they wouldn’t understand at the first saying. That was a deliberate thing so I could teach them and have a little bit of fun with them, and something that would maybe cause their eyebrows to raise but I didn’t want anything vulgar or anything, but something that was common to the Newfoundland way of life, too.
Roger Bill: This was the word ‘cock’?
Myrle Vokey: Yes. And it’s a derivation of the word cockney from England. As you know much of our ancestry goes back to England and Cockneys were part of the language that seeped into our culture along with a lot of others, Irish and Devon and West Country and all the rest of it.
So, ‘D’ed I is’, well, people tend to say ‘Indeed’ and it was a devil of job to get people to say ”D’ed I I.’ They would want to say “Indeed’, but ‘D’ed I is’ and now ‘Me ol’ cock.’ In many parts of England, the west coast of England, and in many parts of Newfoundland, Upper Island Cove especially, use that saying on a day-to-day basis. ‘Me ol’ cock’ which ‘cockney’, ‘me ol trout’, ‘me old friend’, you know that’s exactly what it meant.
And the last part of the saying, I wanted to put in some sort of a good wish, a salutation, and ‘Long may your big jib draw’ and again that’s very common in Newfoundland. In fact, Art Scammell wrote a song, Long May Your Big Jib Draw, a very beautiful song and it’s the same thing a ‘Bon Voyage.’
And when I put it together and I run it together as a Newfoundlander would say “De’dIismeol’cockandlongmayyourbigjibdraw,” (Vokey speaking very quickly). “What did you say?” You know, “What is it?” And then, this wasn’t deliberate, but as I went through thousands and thousands and thousands of them, they would get the words intertwined and mixed up. Hoist up the sail and don’t let your cock go too long and all kinds of things that would cause laughter and I didn’t realize it was as difficult as it was, but my gosh, many Mainlanders we would have to repeat five, six, and some would never get it, would never get it, And, of course the pressure of being in the spotlight and people listening to them that added to it, but I thought that that saying was a Newfoundland type saying that would cause them some difficulty and some laughter and be acceptable.
Little did Vokey know that decades later the expression “Long may your big jib draw,” which regardless of Vokey’s claim was not “common in Newfoundland,” would become a signifier for Newfoundland in the 21st century.
Little did he or Jim Healey know the staying power of the ceremony. They and others who followed them though sensed the market for it.
Jim Healey: “I used to do tours and I had a woman with me from Toronto and she said ‘I don’t know what I’m doing in this shit hole’ . . . and this woman, when she came to the Southern Shore with us and she spent a night in Calvert, because we were all, we had had too many beers to drive back and we stayed at this woman’s house and this woman made us welcome, she said, ‘you know, you Newfoundlanders are unique people,’ she said. She said, ‘I hated you, I was here for two weeks cursing and swearing on you and now I gotta go back tomorrow and I don’t want to go.’ That’s what it’s all about. They know what we’re all about. We’re a good people, an honest people, and they like it . . . something peaceful about it. You know, it’s not the rat race here it is in Toronto . . . and that’s why they want to be screeched-in. They want to be part of it. They want to take this back with them.”
Myrle Vokey suggests one reason visitors want to be Honorary Newfoundlanders is that there is an element of crossing the line or going from “here” to “out there” when crossing the Gulf of St. Lawrence which separates Newfoundland from the mainland of Canada.
Myrle Vokey: “You wouldn’t believe, I said maybe I screeched-in 400,000 people, I’ve heard it thousands and thousands and thousands of times the comment, ‘Well I’ve been to every province in Canada and at last I got to Newfoundland.’ This was the last point of destination and they looked upon it, their travels from a North American or Canadian perspective was complete if they had arrived in Newfoundland. That gulf is more than just a gulf. It is a separation.”
Shelia Williams, who performs Screech-In ceremonies for the St. John’s-based Spirit of Newfoundland theatre company describes the ceremony as “hugely popular.” The week before I interviewed her in 2011 she screeched-in 400 visitors. She started preforming Screech-In’s 25 years after Jim Healey and Myrle Vokey began, but she believes visitors are drawn to it for the same reasons.
Sheila Williams: “I think the whole desire comes from, I think when people come to Newfoundland and Labrador they realize that we are inherently different from anywhere else in Canada and that’s true. We are different and I think people are endeared to our culture. I think they are endeared to our community, our sense of hospitality. I think those are all things that people think, ‘My gosh, this is like a trip back in time.’ And, I think people want to become part of that and so the Screech-In ceremony is sold so that people will become honorary Newfoundlanders. . .and, why would they? Because I think people want to say, ‘We experienced it all. We got screeched-in and everything.’ You know, and that’s proof. We have a certificate.”
Version III and On It Goes
Fred Walsh did not copyright the Screech-In ceremony that was staged at the Bella Vista Club in 1975. Myrle Vokey borrowed heavily from it and made some modifications, but he didn’t copyright his version of either. So, the Screech-In ceremony continues to evolve and some of the variations address the reason some people hate the ceremony.
In an interview several years ago MUN English professor Pat Byrne, described the Screech-In as being part of a “Newfieland” created for tourists. What is “Newfieland?” Lin Jackson, one of the authors of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, described it as, “nothing but the hodgepodge of popular caricatures, potted traditions and stereotypes which have already reduced the Newfoundland personality and environment in the minds of many Canadians to a kind of cartoon.” It was a cartoon where Pat Byrne says Newfoundlanders play the derogatory Uncle Tom role, or the Black character one academic describes as being, “hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless, and oh-so-very kind”
On Premier John Hogan’s Instagram page there is a has a photo of him holding a cod fish for a visitor to kiss during a Sceech-In ceremony. It is reminiscent of an earlier Premier who shared Hogan’s enthusiasm for playing the “Newfieland” card. That Premier was Brian Peckford. The provincial Director of Cultural Affairs at the time was John Perlin. There was no mistaking his displeasure, also, during an interview several years later.
John Perlin: “I find that the most offensive, one of the most offensive things we do, is the Screech-In. It is not Newfoundland and uh, Peckford was participating in it as the Premier and I was at some events, you know, we had some national conference or something like that here and Peckford was at and I would cringe and I would say to myself, ‘Oh my God’ you know and they’re saying that this is typical of Newfoundland. It’s not. . . I mean to me it’s the most revolting thing.”
The late John Perlin may never have seen Shelia Williams’ variation of the Screech-In and if he had he may have been less offended if offended at all. For example, the veteran St. John’s actor plays the role of a well-dressed host of a television talk show shedding the Newfie stereotype. When she tells Canadian tourists that there are no cod fish left in Newfoundland and the way she knows the frozen, gutted cod fish they are going to kiss came from Canada is because it is “gutless” then a different message is being conveyed.
Sheila Williams conducted her first Screech-In ceremony in 1999 and onstage Williams’ character is Ruby Brace, a sharp-tongued television program host. She does not imitate, as Myrle Vokey did, a “queer talking” fisherman. She speaks with a St. John’s east end accent. She does not use bad grammar and she wears a bright red dress and high heel shoes rather than oil skins and rubber boots and sou’wester hat.
Williams reminds visitors that they are on one of the largest islands in the world. She reminds visitors that they are in St. John’s, a city older than any other in North America. Apart from the details when Williams tells visitors “You are in the motherland now” she is saying you are not in a look-alike post-World War II suburb, but instead you are in a special place with deep roots. She made it clear in an interview several years ago her character Ruby Brace is no Uncle Tom.
Sheila Williams: “I am true to the feeling of what it is I want to portray Newfoundlanders as and that is as clever people who would never do this. We would never do this. No, no, no. This is for you because you weren’t lucky enough to be a Newfoundlander . . . I tell you; you know what, I love it when it’s done in a clever way. I love it when it doesn’t personify all peoples’ negative images of Newfoundland and Labrador or our people. I love it when it portrays us in an imaginative and intelligent manner. If it doesn’t, I don’t like that.”
WWW.SCREECHRUM.COM
The Newfoundland and Labrador Liquor Corporation, the provincially owned alcohol and cannabis distributor, is one of the primary beneficiaries of the invention of the Screech-In ceremony. Credit somebody at the corporation years ago for recognizing a great marketing gimmick.
Not surprisingly, the NLLC registered the screechrum.com internet domain name where its products are promoted. The site also provides a step-by-step, do-it-yourself guide for staging a Screech-In ceremony and downloading an honorary Newfoundlander certificate. Plus, the NLLC has introduced its own subtle variations to the ceremony.
For example, under the heading “Pucker Up” the NLLC site says, “kissing the cod meant a simple bon voyage to those sailing South and returning with the rum!” Total PR BS, but it is tourism advertising so what harm is being done? Presumably none, unless as Elizabeth Batstone says someone believes it. Ms. Batstone succeeded John Perlin as the province’s Director of Cultural Affairs and discussed the Screech-In during an interview several years ago.
Elizabeth Batstone: Screeching-In is not a Newfoundland tradition. It’s a modern tradition. It’s a tradition, but it’s a modern tradition. When I was growing up in outport Newfoundland, I mean, nobody knew what Screech-In was. It didn’t exist in fact. It did not exist . . . So if a person believes that going back to time immemorial in Newfoundland this was a traditional way of greeting and embracing outsiders, that is simply not true.
In addition to adding the “Pucker Up” ingredient to the Screech-In story at www.screechrum.com the NLLC also provides a “Screecher’s Creed” saying which the Chief Screecher asks the visitor to repeat. Gone is Myrle Vokey’s tongue-twisting Newfoundland saying and its “cock” reference. Instead, the visitor repeats something guaranteed to offend no one.
“From the waters of the Avalon, to the shores of Labrador,
We’ve always stuck together, with a Rant and a Roar.
To those who’ve never been, soon they’ll understand,
From coast to coast we raise a toast we love thee Newfoundland.
Plus, at screechrum.com you can download a Royal Order of Screechers certificate or book a Screech-In. Details on the Screech Room Facebook page. Advertised as “Family Friendly.”
3:00 PM in the summertime.
$25.
-30 –
~~~
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