This book represents the twelfth volume of what will ultimately be twenty-five volumes in a series of verbatim transcripts of the diaries of Howard Leopold Morry, written by him starting in 1939 and concluding with the last known volume in 1965.
Howard was a raconteur and oral historian cast in the same mould as dozens of other men and women in Newfoundland in those days who carried forward the history of the small outport villages in which they lived. In many cases, their knowledge, gained by word of mouth from generation to generation, is our only record of the events that took place in these tiny villages for many decades and even centuries.
Howard was 54 years old when he took up pen or pencil to write the first of his many diaries in December 1939. What motivated him at that time was the belief (wrong, as it fortunately turned out) that he would not live much longer, as a result of a bad heart condition resulting from diseases he endured during his time in the trenches in Gallipoli, on the Somme and in Ypres during WWI. He was worried, and in this he was justified, that many of the stories of the old days that he faithfully retained would be lost forever if he did not record them in writing. The younger generation even then had lost interest in such things and the race of community oral historians of which he was one was coming to an end.
The first four volumes in this series together constituted a serialised version of Howard's life story in four parts. The current volume is more of a traditional daily diary, with day by day observations on current events, the weather, the fishery, births, marriages and deaths, and normal and unusual occurrences. But it also includes some reminiscences of Howard's earlier life and stories he had told to him by his elders concerning significant historical events and life in Ferryland in the years before his birth.
Now in this twelfth volume we see Howard approaching his 70th birthday, a milestone he never believed he would reach. The diary covers a relatively brief period between June 22, 1954 and March 11 1955, a period during which Howard was now more of a village elder and no longer in charge of the Morry fish business in Ferryland. Indeed, during the 1954 fishing season he has not outfitted his own cod trap crew for possibly the first year since he returned from his service in WWI. To a reduced extent, he has continued functioning as a small scale farmer and livestock owner and also continues his work harvesting wood from the surrounding woods and groves for a variety of purposes. At the age of 69 there is only so much physical work a man of those years can be expected to do.
By far the most important element of this diary comes toward the end, when Howard becomes contemplative and tells stories and anecdotes of his and Ferryland's past. But there is also information on a devastating storm combined with higher than normal tides in mid-January 1955 that destroyed most of the fishermen's waterside premises in Ferryland and that barely attracted any attention in the rest of Newfoundland at the time, let alone in the history books.
As in previous volumes, in order to provide readers not familiar with the "cast of characters" or the local and international historical events mentioned in the pages of the diary a clue to their identity, an extensive set of endnotes has been provided as an assistance in reading and fully understanding the context of the diary.