ROCKLAND ROAD FIRE - Dec 1977 - "A doozer of a fire Uncle Fred would have loved"

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Since 2007 I have received email from a dozen or more people suggesting that I write about Rockland Road and other streets on the Fort Howe side of the Lost Valley. While I do have plenty of material, I have always wanted to build articles around specific families. Thousands of families have lived on the massive stone face of Fort Howe hill, and in the 19th Century "Fort Howe" was an accepted address with the Post Office and the local newspapers. A few times I have come close to finishing articles, but did not publish because the person spurring me on at that particular moment sent anecdotes but no photos of family.

Working with a PC has spoiled me, and I rarely dip into my old Saint John clipping files. (The old yellowed clippings fill a banker box I lugged to B.C. in 1981.) Yesterday I came across a Charles Lynch story which I had filed under "Urban Renewal" instead of the slightly more appropriate "Saint John Fires". I'll get to that later.

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Charles Lynch was an accomplished and well travelled Saint Johner. Long ago, when I did a minor in Asian Studies at U.N.B., I acquired a copy of his 1965 book CHINA: One Fourth of the World. During two months of research in that country Lynch argued down every Maoist cadre who attempted to slip him a bill of propaganda, or to bash the Americans. His assessment of why the Chinese would fail in attempts to export Maoist revolution to the Third World was accurate: "...the Chinese system of communism is non-exportable, if only for the simple reason that no other people in the world, underprivileged or otherwise, will work as hard as the Chinese do, or submit so readily to regimentation."

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In 1977 Charles Lynch was awarded the Order of Canada, and was producing a bi-weekly column for Southam Press. In December he visited family in North End, Saint John and filed a couple of breezy columns from his hometown. I was a freshman at U.N.B.S.J. when his account of the Rockland Road fire of Dec. 5, 1977 was published.

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This Ian MacEachern photograph, taken a few years before the fire, shows tenements on west end of Rockland Road. The structures here were well below the crest of the hill, but the fire was further east (to the right of the photo) and the flames could be seen in the Rifle Range.

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"A Doozer of a fire Uncle Fred would have loved"

[headline given to this Lynch column by one Ontario newspaper]

Charles Lynch was a correspondent during WW2. Before leaving Saint John he was a cub reporter for THE CITIZEN. I have never read any of those stories, so cannot confirm that he actually covered fires.

Percy Clark was the Fire Chief in the 1970s, and I remember that he got almost as much press as Saint John's "hip" mayor, Bob Lockhart. The conflagration on Rockland Road was the worst of a string of sixteen arson fires which were lit during one week. It started at the rear of 301 Rockland Road on the night of Dec. 5th and spread to 299 - 309 Rockland Road and also burned 10 Parks Street. The blaze persisted for 12 1/2 hours.

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Charles Lynch understood better than most, the mind-set of Saint John bureaucrats and do-gooders. In the column he seized the opportunity to describe the total devastation of the neighborhoods in the Lost Valley, comparing the area to post-war Berlin. "...the resemblance to post-war Berlin is heightened by the new throughway that cuts the city in two, having mowed down everything in its path, including our old family homestead, the site of grandfather's old shipyard, and numberless business enterprises including the plant that made plywood veneer for the Mosquito fighter-bomber in the Second World War. " I was in my first year at university and not yet versed in the politics of urban development or public policy, but I already recognized the significance of this famous ex-Saint Johner coming home and firing a broadside into the hull of our powerful local planners ... they who were gutting our city, and who would never have to account for a crippling of the city fortunes, so thorough that its effect is still felt. And that is why the clipping was filed under "Urban Renewal".