HALLOWEEN BONFIRES IN SAINT JOHN - A TRADITION OLDER THAN THE CITY CHARTER

Christians have long held mixed feelings about Halloween. To allow their boys and girls to impersonate witches as devils for just one night of the year was often beyond the toleration of an olde tyme minister. This year the happy challenge of "Trick of Treat," a thrill which my family still enjoys, will be thin as a vaporous spectre in Saint John's North End. Few churches and few families remain in the denuded Lost Valley. The earliest citizens of Saint John were careful to distinguish their play from their beliefs, but only two things could moderate the fiery spirit kindled on October 31st - very bad weather or the calendar cutting the celebrants short. The greatest pleasure of Saint Johners revellers since the founding of their city in 1783, was the annual lighting of bonfires. It is a tradition stamped out during the period of tragic tenement fires in the 1940s -50s. The oldest tradition for October 31st, or HALLOWEEN in Saint John, was the lighting of bonfires. The practice was also a ritual which marked the feast day of St. John the Baptist, the Christian namesake of a city founded by the British Loyalists in 1783. The French, the Scots and the Irish all venerated their Saint with massive annual bonfires.

While few modern residents of Saint John have any patience for the past, they should not deny that traditions coloured the lives of their ancestors. Political correctness aside, Saint John was a Christian community until very recently, and it was named for St. John the Baptist. It was on the feast day of St. John that Samuel de Champlain located the mouth of a great river which he named Fleuve Saint-John. He mapped the hills and islands at the mouth of the river and though men have reshaped the contours of that harbour, the great name persists. But surely not for another 400 years!

If truth be told, Saint John men and boys needed scant encouragement to light bonfires in open spaces or on Fort Howe hill. They gathered logs and debris at Halloween, they gathered wood for St. John the Baptist, they lit pyres to illuminate election nights and frequently to celebrate Kings, Queens and lesser nobility. In my youth they created the fresh ritual of gathering and burning Christmas trees, as a fire prevention measure.

As this Blog concerns itself chiefly with the old North End, I should quote the Statutes of the Portland Police, which were intended to prevent conflagrations among in the wooden city: "Any person who shall make a bonfire, or set off any rocket, squib, cracker, or any species of fire work in any public street, throughfare, alley, road, or bye road..." was subject to a fine of a few shillings. Of course the police walking their beat in the 1850s rarely caught offenders and could do little more than extinguish the flames.

In the 1880s it was the fashion for bands of youths on all three sides of the harbour to parade through the dark streets and hills for an hour or two, brandishing torches and blowing horns to rouse the spirits. When a desired spot was located, one with a ready supply of fuel, the excited celebrants would have a bonfire piled and lit with only a few minutes of effort. Occasionally the 31st fell on a Sunday and that cruel blow sucked much of the fun out of the cool night air, and confined many families to home and parlor games.

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This cute pair of devils went to a studio to be photographed. Their photo was taken in 1915 but it closely resembles a costume my mother described wearing in the North End in the late 1940s.

By 1900 Saint Johners had begun hosting "elaborate entertainments," by which was meant costume balls and lesser events like house parties and Halloween dances. A local paper noted that sometimes "Men disguised themselves as women, and women as men." Progress toward women's equality included many milestones, not least of which were the vote and access to the industrial wage during World War 1. It is clear that Halloween in Saint John played a part in of trimming back decades of Victorian constraint. Well before WW1 young girls took advantage of the "licence" issued on October 31st which allowed them to play rough. On Halloween night many girls became bold in the darkened streets. One attraction was the chance to be a little "forward" with male strangers on a sidewalk, but there were also instances when police recorded girls in the North End throwing burning newspapers into buildings, tipping over outhouses or rolling heavy barrels down into city streets.

This is a rare night photograph of a public bonfire in Saint John. It was not a celebration of Halloween but rather it marked the of the Succession of King George VI in 1935. There were several notable bonfires in town during the Depression era, and I may describe a few of them in a future Blog article.

Halloween Bombings : Mayor Bob Lockhart examines debris outside the City Jail, November 1, 1971. It was one 0f two Halloween night bombs detonated in Saint John. Compare this photo to the shot of the V.W. Beetle (Police Bug) taken in front of the jail.

Some Lost Valley readers may recall when a new Saint John tradition of sorts, trumped the venerable Halloween bonfire. In the early 1970s there were a series of bombings in the city which were dismissed as "vandalism" because unlike FLQ bombings in Quebec, they were not accompanied by the release of a p0litical manifesto. Similar stunts are today considered a big deal. I recall that one Halloween bomb punched a hole through the wall of a Legion building uptown, just after a dance had let out. The more brazen attack was the planting of a bomb on the steps outside the Saint John City Jail on October 31, 1971. The Mayor at the time was Bob Lockhart, (see photo) one of those who presided over the "urban renewal" bulldozing of the valley neighborhoods. Lockhart was a Militia officer at Barrack Green Armoury, and I always had a sneaking suspicion that local militiamen planted the explosive devices, just to get a rise out of Lockhart. [I did some research and found that two men had been arrested at the time. For that jail bombing they used a stick of stolen dynamite and cap, a length of cable, and a car battery.]
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UPDATE OCT. 28, 2010 - The Telegraph Journal has a short HALLOWEEN commentary today by retired editor Fred Hazel. In the short column Fred admits that he doesn't even really like Halloween, allowing "it's probably my least favorite," time of the year, but he does wax historical and offers some Irish tradition that might be worth a jump over to the article. Give it your usual two minutes. The fact that the newspaper chose to illustrate Fred's piece with a photo taken in Quispamsis says a lot about how depopulated Saint John is today. I grew up in Saint John and "went out to" Quispamsis perhaps three or four times. Nothing odd about that. No, really! When I was making my first attempts at disinterring local history back in the mid-1970s I met an elderly gent on City Road who had lived in Saint John his entire life without owning an automobile. He had never been "over to" the West Side and he saw no need.

LAST WORD NOV. 1, 2010 - I must admit that the prime benefit to producing the LOST VALLEY Blog are the friendly and informative contacts I've made since 2007. Some of you have become friends from afar whom I have exchanged many emails with. The most recent contact is a gentleman living in Quebec who responded after I posted the Halloween article. He turns out to have been a teenage chum of my late uncle Gordon Brown. My uncle was laid out at Brenan's Funeral Parlour on Halloween night 2007 and it's a spooky coincidence that my Halloween article prompted a family specific contact. This new friend of the Blog has offered to answer any question I care to put to him about life in the Valley 50-60 years ago.