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Newfoundland Constabulary
Circa 1941
St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada


Credits:
Gary Browne
Jacquey Ryan
2007-2008 Album, Crow's Nest

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Policing Downtown St. John's and Naval Censorship

And I remember my dad and them talking about that the navy patrol were tremendous guys, they had there own vehicles, now they couldn't arrest civilians, but they were there because there were so many naval ratings in St. John's that they even set up their own lockup and they would have a vehicle going around and they would be helping the Constabulary. Any time they would see service men who were probably drinking too much and fighting and it was an understanding between the police and the constabulary "okay guys if their yours and their in trouble you take them back to the ships", and I think that was another thing a lot of the servicemen remembered. Now there were some tough times, there was some pretty rough fighting going on at the time and the police would be involved, and there would be people hurt and there would be policemen hurt and there would be soldiers and there would be navy men hurt from the fighting but I know the majority of what I heard, the feedback for, these were young navy men who were coming in here, they had a tremendously stressful job and even the police officers knew when they went through the narrows in St. John's to go out in the North Atlantic, that they saw all kinds of horrendous things. They saw death constantly. They were under a lot of stress, that the police even knew that when they came back to town after that,, they were looking for places to go, looking for recreation, looking for women and looking for drink and often times that is an explosive bunch of things to put together. So there were trouble with a certain elements but the police tried to understand but yet at the same time it was dangerous, I can go on at length giving you examples of what police officers got hurt and split open and stuff like that, cut up in fights and stuff like that but I guess it was wartime, it was part of what had happened. Iit was only a certain small amount, but St. John's from that side, a lot of people didn't hear about it or see about it because there was censorship going o. If a naval rating got in trouble they would never be allowed to say from this ship or from that ship, there was heavy censorship rules then and so all they would say would probably be, servicemen got in trouble or there was a fight among service men and police on New Gower Street which New Gower street was probably the most infamous street because it was in the old downtown close to the waterfront. As the police officer said there was a number of watering holes there and that's where the trouble broke out and a sergeant I recently talked to who is in his eighties, some great memories, told me, "Gary we would have four and five fights a night".
Gary Browne