William Hubert Rompkey

Biography

Mr. Rompkey entered national politics in 1972, interrupting studies for a PhD at the University of Toronto. He was elected Liberal member of Parliament for Grand Falls-White Bay-Labrador and was subsequently re-elected four times. In 1988, he was elected member for the newly-formed riding of Labrador.

In the 1970s, Mr. Rompkey held appointments as parliamentary secretary to the ministers of Environment, Fisheries, and Manpower and Immigration. On the retirement of Don Jamieson from federal politics in 1979, he became the senior Liberal member of Parliament from Newfoundland and Labrador and, beginning in 1980, held cabinet portfolios of National Revenue, Small Business and Tourism, and Mines and Transport.

With the defeat of the Liberal administration in the 1984 general election, he became opposition critic for Consumer and Corporate Affairs, Secretary of State and National Defence. In 1990, he was official observer from the International Democratic Institute for International Affairs for national elections in Bulgaria.

Mr. Rompkey was chosen as the Memorial University Alumni Association's Alumnus of the Year in 1989.

In 1995, Mr. Rompkey was appointed to the Senate of Canada, representing Labrador.

Mr. Rompkey will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree.

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Oration honouring William Hubert Rompkey

Musical compositions of any great length contain within themselves a multiplicity of thematic ideas. Some of these may share a clear motivic relationship, others a more subtle one, and still others seem to bear no discernible commonality. Yet these materials combine to create a coherent, dynamic entity. Of course each thematic strand adds its own character and development to the whole, but the interplay among the individual elements bestows a deeper level of intricacy and growth to the work.

Just so, in the life of Senator William Hubert Rompkey many strains, some sustained and preeminent, others shorter or less to the fore, combine into the euphonious opus we celebrate today. Successful ventures in sports, journalism and student government in the still new Memorial University of Newfoundland set the tone. A role in the theatrical production Dear Brutus gave early lessons in addressing large audiences (but clearly not in political procedure.) The first major theme is Bill Rompkey's work as an educator in both Newfoundland and Labrador. As principal of Yale School, a boarding school in Northwest River, he was responsible for the education of many future leaders of coastal Labrador. His influence expanded as he became the first district school supervisor for Labrador. An important supporting theme is provided by Bill Rompkey's wife, Caroline, whom he married in 1963. She moved with him to Labrador shortly thereafter and became an active member of the community there. She later accompanied him even to deepest, darkest Ottawa. A dominant theme since 1972 has been Bill Rompkey's career in federal politics. His resounding victory over the Conservative incumbent that year was echoed in six subsequent elections. This unprecedented feat is testimony to his efforts on behalf of his constituents and the community at large. In 1995 he was named to the Senate.

A final subsidiary but recurrent theme bears mention: Bill Rompkey's musical career. His pianistic skills were the backbone of the Memorial Music Makers, a popular dance combo which also featured our Marshall, Noel Veitch, on trumpet. Later, many a political rally was enlivened by his presence both at the speaker's podium and at the piano. He sang bass in the St. John's Cathedral choir and served as chorister, church organist and recording producer while in Labrador. In fact Dr. Donald Cook, first director of the School of Music and longtime director of the Cathedral Choir, claims Senator Rompkey as one of his early successes.

Bill Rompkey's love of music, loyalty to Memorial and dedicated service to his constituents commingled in an exciting development for the School of Music. For its first nine years the school was housed in what then President Leslie Harris generously referred to as a rat-infested shed, unfit for human habitation. But in the harsh economic climate of the early 1980s prospects of raising the funds needed to build a proper facility were bleak indeed. The Music School seemed destined to remain in its cardboard box until it fell down around them. Undaunted by the scale of the task, Bill Rompkey laboured long and hard, finally persuading the federal government to make a substantial financial contribution to the building project. The opening notes had been sounded, and new voices quickly joined. The provincial government granted approval for the project, and the university initiated a campaign to raise its portion of the funding. In the fall of 1985 the School of Music moved into one of the finest facilities in the country, enabling it to continue its steady growth in both size and scope.

This accomplishment is but one of many which have benefited Memorial University, and the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. (And this is not the first time Memorial has recognized Senator Rompkey's efforts; previous accolades range from the Birks Medal for student leadership in 1957 to Alumnus of the Year in 1989.) But it is one that resonates in our Music graduates and will echo in their own students and audiences. In recognition of his distinguished political career and long record of service to Memorial, the province and the nation, it is with great pleasure that I present William Hubert Rompkey for the degree of doctor of laws, (honoris causa).

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Convocation address by Dr. William Rompkey

Al Purdy, when he was 17, while illegally riding boxcars in Ontario, was apprehended by a railway official. To avoid landing in prison he fled to the woods, but spent two nights there, lost, confused and terrified. On the third day he had a flash. He had passed a bridge while heading south. He was able to find the bridge and get back on the road. When asked why this story was so important to him in the latter stages of his life, he replied “because I was 17 and I found a way out.”

Not all of us know where we're going when we're 17. I didn't. I was like the Beatles' Nowhere Man: “knows not where he's going to.” Perhaps that's why I didn't do well enough in Grade 11 matriculation. I was working at a hotel in Quebec for the summer when the marks came out. Realizing my opportunity to enter Memorial was in jeopardy, my mother put on her hat, grabbed her handbag and headed down Merrymeeting Road to plead the case before Monnie Mansfield, the registrar. But she need not have worried. It was Monnie who helped me find my way out by finding a way in. She provided me with Al Purdy's bridge. So it is my mother who deserves any credit coming to me this evening, and I want to thank her and my father for all they did for me.

The responsiveness and generosity of Monnie Mansfield was typical of Memorial in the '50s. When I entered in 1953 there were about 300 to 400 students; when I graduated in 1957 there were only 1,000. Art May, later to serve with distinction as president of Memorial, was with me on the students' council that year, and will remember that with a student fee of $13 our budget was $13,000. The simple numbers were ready made for someone like me, who was never very good at math. Today Memorial is almost 20 times that size. Yet, its challenge in the knowledge society is clearly 20 times as great.

In that old building on Parade Street on a given day you probably passed most of the other students going to and coming from classes. As the numbers grew the auditorium soon became an engineering lab, where Stan Carew and Jack Facey presided. As an English major I remember feeling right at home wandering past the drafting tables to the small room at the back, where Stan and Jack usually had the kettle boiling and the tea steeping. That's the kind of place it was. Nothing was very far from anything else and nobody was very far from anybody else. You were free to be yourself; but you understood that a high standard was expected of you, no matter what endeavour you chose.

My wife, Carolyn Pike, was a star in campus sports. I understand that the Sea-Hawks drifted through the Maritimes this past year and sank everything in sight. I want you to know that Carolyn Pike was captain of the Memorial University Ladies Basketball team that, with Doug Eaton coaching, accomplished that feat in 1957. Evidently, Memorial regularly beats the Maritimes every 40 years or so whether we need to or not.

Mose Morgan is vivid in the memory of many of us who were at Memorial in the '50s. To those of us who were not in his classes, he nevertheless gave something profound: attitudes, beliefs, values. He was always a man with power; and yet he was just Mose. Although he knew what he wanted and how to get it, he never lost that profound sense of who and what he was. I never ceased to ask his advice from time to time. And underlining his response was usually Polonius' advice to Laertes:

“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Mose would always ask Carolyn to dance during those special evenings under the silver chandelier in the old USO Building. But Mose was not simply being sociable. My wife's uncle, Alan Gillingham, had been Mose's highly respected teacher; and Alan Gillingham, a Rhodes scholar, and professor of classics at Memorial, had, in his turn, been a protégé of John Lewis Paton, Memorial's first president and an icon of the university. So the ties of my generation, halfway through the last century, to Memorial's early culture were very real. We were as restive as any other generation; but we knew Memorial's history and understood its values. I hope and believe those ties and those values are still alive today.

Those first four years at Memorial are forever etched in my memory. I was free to be whatever I wanted. What I wanted was to write. One of these days I'm going to be a writer just like my brother. Then, when people meet me they might say: “Are you related to Ron Rompkey, the author?” Literature was my passion. But there was so much else to do and I did. I have no regrets. Because I think what I learned from those activities outside the classroom were every bit as important as the lectures and the papers. President of the Students' Representative Council is not a bad training ground for a Member of Parliament.

My experience in Labrador reinforced my belief in the value of extra-curricular activities. In 1963 my wife and I went to North West River, Labrador, where the Grenfell Mission had operated a boarding school for students on the Labrador coast. I discovered that what those students learned in the Grenfell dormitory — cooking, waiting on tables, looking after your laundry, looking after each other — these experiences prepared them for life, for finding the way out. Many of them are leaders in their communities today. Judge James Igloliorte, from Hopedale, the first Inuk judge in Canada, himself a Memorial graduate, was an excellent student; but I'm sure he would agree that his duties in the dormitory were perhaps as important to him as the classroom.

Like the years at Memorial, those years in North West River were unforgettable. We became part of the community, a community about the size of Memorial in the '50s, where, like Memorial, doors were always open. The doors were those of the descendants of Scottish/Inuit settlers who had come to Labrador in the 17- and 1800s, many with the Hudson's Bay Company, for a new life in the new world. For some it was Al Purdy's way out. If you can imagine living in an immensely beautiful sub-arctic environment, back of a long, sandy beach, in a picturesque northern village at the edge of a lake ringed by snow-capped mountains, where on a crisp winter night the northern lights shimmer and crackle, you will know why we look back on those years with great joy and affection.

For those of you who are nurses, I can tell you our daughter, Hilary, was born in the Grenfell hospital at North West River with only a midwife in attendance. Later our son, Peter, was delivered in the same way at the Paddon Memorial hospital in Happy Valley. Shortly after this our present Lieutenant Governor, Dr. Max House, led Memorial's pioneering development of telemedecine on the Labrador coast.

Lured by Dr. Tony Paddon, who would later become our first Labrador-born Lieutenant Governor, my wife and I had gone there in 1963 for a year. But seven years later we were still there. Before getting into politics I was involved in the ferment of self-help and self-realization that had taken root in Labrador in the 1960s. In 1970 we organized Labrador in the '70's, the first of a series of conferences on the future of Labrador and its people. We brought together for the first time representatives from all over Labrador and from the island to assess the present and the future. To help organize the conference I turned to George Lee and Memorial Extension. Later Don Snowden, a former director of Extension, would chair the Royal Commission on Labrador. In fact, the Extension Department, through Tony Williamson, had already been active in community development on the coast of Labrador, employing the internationally-renowned Fogo Process, which used film as a tool in the raising of community consciousness. That first conference was followed by Labrador in the '80s and Labrador in the '90s. Memorial was involved in organizing all of them. As well, through initiatives such as the program for the training of aboriginal teachers, and notably through the prism of the Northern Institute, Memorial has played, and continues to play, a key role in Labrador development.

Those conferences set the agenda for much of my work as a Member of Parliament. Ed Roberts and Mel Woodward get the blame for talking me into that job, and Ed was a most valued friend and provincial partner throughout my political career. Labrador in the '70s had a lot of catching up to do, particularly in transportation and communication. The early bush planes on floats and skis are now replaced by twin engine craft landing on about 25 airstrips along the Labrador coast. A highway will soon span Labrador from Quebec to the Strait of Belle Isle. Resources are being developed, although there is still much to be done before that development is fully realized.

But there is much to be done, as well, in accommodating all the parts and the peoples of Labrador, particularly those who were there first. Like Al Purdy and me when we were 17, the Innu and the Inuit are still looking for a way around the challenges that confront them. They have forged strong organizations in the Labrador Inuit Association and the Innu Nation. They have developed admirable business ventures. The pressures of industrial development have turned some of them into skilled archivists, archaeologists and environmentalists. They have some of the best carvers and craftsmen in Canada. But they need to find the way out. They need to find Al Purdy's bridge. They know they have to break that debilitating cycle of dependency and gain control over their lives. Their land claims are being negotiated; but it is urgent that they move as fast as possible towards a settlement.

When we arrived in North West River we discovered that we were Newfoundlanders and that the people we had come to live among were Labradorians. The Labrador identity is still strong: Labradorians have their own history, their own songs and stories. Geographically, Labrador is part of the Ungava Peninsula, sub-arctic, the near north; politically it is joined with the island of Newfoundland.

Of course there is more that unites us than divides us. In the early decades of the 19th century islanders sailed their schooners down on the Labrador, and many of them settled. The children of these hardy mariners moved to Goose during and after the Second World War. Later others would make their homes in Labrador West and Churchill Falls. The island of Newfoundland has a very strong identity, reflected ever more ably in song and story. But the island and the province are not one and the same. We are Newfoundland and Labrador. Together we're better.

Today I realize the truth of Plato's dictum: “The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future.” And I realize the wisdom of Joe Smallwood's admonition to the National Convention: he said we needed a university that would be a “dynamo” for the province. It has been, and is, the most important institution that we have. In the arts, business and industry, labour, health, law, education, politics and government — almost every occupation in our province has drawn its leaders from Joe Smallwood's dynamo. It has enriched our life, nourished our soul, made us the people we are. Paton, Hatcher, Gushue, Taylor, Morgan, Harris, May, Meisen — these are the master builders. Let us not fall into the trap of taking for granted a Memorial that is now so big and so pervasive. Hold it in your mind. Cherish it. It has made us what we are. It will continue to be the dynamo that drives our society.

Because the university has meant so much to me, the honour Memorial has done me today is perhaps the greatest I have ever had. I am deeply grateful. Thank you.

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Dr. Michel Chrétien
Jean Chrétien
Monique Bégin
Andy Jones
Cathy Jones
Mary Walsh
Greg Malone
William Hubert Rompkey
John David Allison Widdowson
Craig Laurence Dobbin
Dr. Peter Francis Neary