The Diaries of Howard Leopold Morry - Volume 19

This book represents the nineteenth 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.

In his diaries, he spoke of his own personal experiences, at home in his youth and in his later years, his adventures in western Canada as a young man, and overseas with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment in WWI. But he also recorded observations on the significant and insignificant (to most historians) events of daily life in a small outport village on the Southern Shore of Newfoundland in the early to mid-1900s. And he also recounted events from the history of his village as passed down to him by earlier generations of oral historians.

This diary is almost, but not completely, identical to the diary transcribed in Volume 17 of this series and bears a close resemblance as well to the first four volumes in the series which together formed a serialised account of Howard's personal memoirs. All of these three similar diaries or, in the case of the first four diaries, series of diaries, focussed mainly on Howard's retelling of his experiences in WWI. Volume 17 was previously transcribed by the late Jamie Morry, my cousin, and Volume 19 was previously transcribed by Glen Morry, my brother, with some assistance from me in the preparation of explanatory note. Glen and I had not known at the time when we made this transcription that Jamie had completed a transcription of an almost identical diary years before.

One might wonder why Howard would have gone to the trouble of repeating in closely similar versions three complete records of his experiences in the war. Howard had concerns that some of his diaries might not survive him and he believed that his experiences in the war were ...