The True Story of a Welsh Godfather episode 9
episode 9 of 11
He claimed that J.O. had adhered to the agreement made with the government on 30 April 1934. Williams’ counsel claimed that after years of work; the company had stabilised and had built up an efficient unit of workers who took an interest in their work and respected their employers.
It was also noted that between 1934 and 1939 not less than $800,000 in wages had been paid to Williams’ employees when they might otherwise have been unemployed. Williams’ counsel was putting up a strong case. No-one questioned how much J.O. was making or that he was using government (taxpayers) money.
For their part, the governments did not want to admit their failures to control J.O. or their lack of careful scrutiny of his original proposals and plans. He knew he had outmaneuvered them and they would not want to lose face.
The First of Several Mysteries
In the early hours of 3 February 1940, J.O.’s son, Eric Arthur Williams, his daughter-in-law (Olga d’Anitoff Williams), and their daughter (Erica d’Anitoff Williams) died in a house fire in Port Hope Simpson. The cause of their deaths was never fully established.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Serious Crimes Unit, which suspected foul play, opened their investigations as late as August 2002, 39 years after J.O.’s death.
An investigating officer said in 2003, “Williams…betrayed the people and no doubt this would have stirred the pot enough for someone to have taken drastic measures by their own hands and started the fire at the house that led to the deaths of Eric, Olga, and Erica, his infant daughter.”
They found out very little. No reports on the deaths in the Port Hope Simpson district for February 1940 have ever been found. No medical report from the doctor who apparently attended Olga at the scene of the three deaths has been found. No death certificates for Arthur Eric Williams, Olga d’Anitoff Williams and Erica D’Anitoff Williams have been found.
A consistent effort had been made over the years by Sir John Hope Simpson to keep the Newfoundland Rangers under the jurisdiction of the Natural Resources Department instead of under the Department of Justice.
Claude Fraser, Sir John Hope Simpson’s loyal secretary of Natural Resources, had been appointed to the post of Government Director of the Labrador Development Company Limited on exactly the same day as the deaths in Williams’ family occurred.
According to original correspondence held by the 1945 enquiry, Keith Yonge, J.O.’s store manager, ordered that the bodies should be quickly buried, and a concrete headstone inscribed and erected.
J.O. Williams directed that the original tombstone with Olga D’Anitoff’s name on it be removed. A granite memorial stone, cut from the Preseli Hills of South Wales, and without mention of Olga, was shipped out by Williams, replacing the smaller original headstone.
It is confusing that this newer tombstone shows the family address as Labrador House, Southerndown. This must have been J.O.’s residence prior to The Cottage, Ogmore-by-Sea. An extremely large and impressive house only a few hundred yards from The Cottage but technically in Southerndown and not Ogmore-by-Sea. Labrador House was destroyed before the 1950s when Johnny and I lived in the area.
After the three deaths, J.O. forbade any talk of his daughter-in-law. She was the grand-daughter of a Russian count and, there are letters in the UK national archives stating he considered her to be of poor character.
The fact that the UK government collected so much information on Williams shows how much they were scared of him.
Pritchard had, it would seem, only spoken with the sole surviving family member, John Edward Illsley. When J.O. died in 1963, both John and I were living in Wales. I was 15 and John Illsley was around 14. My friend would not have known anything about the deaths and the mysteries. I certainly did not and neither did the family’s neighbours in the community.
Dominions Office Deceived by J.O.
The Dominions Office claimed they had been hoodwinked by Williams and had failed to get to the bottom of what he was up to. A group of six civil servants at the Dominions Office wanted to show that Williams was an unreliable character.
John Chadwick, one of the civil servants, believed he had seen a way out of the mess via a proposed public enquiry that would enable the government to cut all ties with Williams once and for all despite the blunders of their representative, Sir John Hope Simpson.
The Investigation.
An investigation into the affairs was held in 1945 by Chief Justice Dunfield. He emphasised that J.O.’s personal qualities of drive and persistence were outweighed by his numerous deceptions.
When Chief Justice Dunfield’s report on the public enquiry came out it meant the Dominions Office’s plan to discredit Williams’ character had seriously backfired. The government wanted the report buried after local publication in order to cover up its own involvement.
As J.C.Chadwick of the Dominions Office said on 29 June 1945, “on the whole, I should imagine that the Commission will be content to bury the main bodies of both reports as deeply as their publication locally permits.”
Judge Dunfield found that Williams had run out of liquid cash reserves that were essential to scale up the operations. He considered that the government was also at fault by pressing Williams to cut more timber merely to provide work for the people and to repay the capital and interest on the government loans.
Dunfield’s conclusion was that neither Williams nor the government fully appreciated how much the Port Hope Simpson project would cost and so the company was under-funded right from the start. It found itself in a vicious circle where it did not have sufficient funds to expand and, without the expansion, its overheads could not be carried.
Dunfield clearly implied that he was not exactly confident about the financial health of the company from the outset. His judgment was that the government went from being a supportive partner to being a strict creditor.
Then the Second World War came and stopped the free export of pit props. Dunfield acknowledged Williams’ particular line of skill but thought that he was not experienced in other fields. J.O. had already admitted as much in conversations.
