This book represents the twenty-fourth 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 1966.
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.
The current volume is, slightly different than other volumes in that it includes an almost equal proportion Howard's reminiscences and anecdotes and daily diary entries which are mostly comprised of accounts of his several visits to Scotland during this time period.
In this twenty-fourth volume, the diary transcribed nominally covers the years from March 27,1964 to September 9,1965. But in point of fact this is not really the case. The days on which current events are recorded are spread widely over this time period with many gaps in coverage
Of the portions of the diary that constitute reflections on the past, many are a repetition of thoughts recorded in earlier diaries. This is useful as it serves to pick up accidental errors in dates and names that have entered into some of these accounts.
At this time in his life, Howard is very definitely feeling his age and the weight of those years weighs heavily upon him, not just physically, but also in terms of his mood and his disdain for improvements in the human condition brought about over his eighty years.
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.