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FOWKE, FREDERICK LUTHER, businessman, politician, and office holder; b. 27 May 1857 in Harmony, East Whitby Township (Oshawa), Upper Canada, eldest child of Job Wilson Fowke and Adeline Perkins Stone; m. 28 June 1911 Flora Ann Wheeler (1878–1956), widow of Alfred Hyacinthe St Germain, in Toronto, and they had two daughters and one son; d. during the night of 24–25 Aug. 1939 in Chester, N.S., and was buried in Union Cemetery, Oshawa, Ont.

After attending public school in Oshawa and the British American Commercial College in Toronto, Freddie Fowke went into the family business in Oshawa. His father, Job, originally from Port Hope, was a successful distiller, general merchant, and exporter of foodstuffs. After his father’s death in 1896, Freddie took over and expanded the enterprise, establishing branch offices in Bowmanville, Whitby, Newcastle, and Port Hope. In addition to operating a general store in Oshawa, he retailed coal and exported apples to Europe.

Political career in Oshawa

A combination of family prominence, business success, and public-spiritedness induced Fowke to enter municipal politics, as his father had done before him. Freddie served two years on the Ontario County council and fifteen on the Oshawa town council, seven of those as chair of the finance committee. He was elected to his first one-year term as mayor of Oshawa in 1898 and held the office again from 1900 through 1906.

A progressive reformer who was committed to building infrastructure, Mayor Fowke introduced sewers, concrete sidewalks, and harbour improvements. His family’s unimpeachable Liberal credentials enabled him to attract funds from Sir Wilfrid Laurier*’s federal government, which also took over responsibility for administering the Oshawa harbour. By far Fowke’s greatest achievement as mayor was the city’s public waterworks system, on which construction began in 1904. It is fair to say that he helped bring Oshawa into the 20th century.

Fowke’s mayoralty so enhanced his prestige and popularity that in the federal election of 26 Oct. 1908, he stood for the Liberals in Ontario South and defeated Peter Christie, the Conservative incumbent. During Fowke’s three years in the House of Commons, he neither spoke often nor strayed much beyond local concerns; he was an assiduous constituency mp. He served on several committees, including public accounts and railways, canals, and telegraph lines. In June 1911 the 54-year-old bachelor married Flora Ann St Germain, a childless widow and heiress 20 years younger. Their wedding was one of Toronto’s grand social events of the season. In the snap campaign that preceded the general election of 21 September, Fowke supported Laurier’s policy of reciprocity with the United States, even though he personally opposed it, as many Ontario businessmen did. He lost Ontario South to William Smith, a former Conservative mp, and Laurier’s Liberals were defeated nationally.

Though Fowke never ran for office again, he remained active politically. During the First World War he deserted Laurier over the issue of conscription and backed the Union government of Sir Robert Laird Borden. In Ontario South, Fowke threw his support behind the Unionist candidate, Smith, who handily beat his Laurier Liberal opponent in the general election of 17 Dec. 1917. After this modest foray into federal politics, Fowke returned to his business in Oshawa. He could not have anticipated that the Borden government would soon appoint him to a position of great responsibility and national significance, helping Halifax to recover from an unprecedented catastrophe.

The Halifax disaster and its aftermath

During the war Halifax, a city of 55,000 people, was Canada’s chief naval base, and the harbour was extremely busy. On the morning of 6 Dec. 1917 the French munitions ship Mont-Blanc exploded after colliding with a vessel in the harbour’s narrows. The massive blast devastated the densely populated, heavily industrialized Richmond district of Halifax’s North End – some 325 acres – and much of the northern part of Dartmouth, across the narrows. In an instant, nearly 2,000 people were dead or dying, 9,000 were injured, and 20,000 were left homeless.

Within hours, leading residents constituted the Citizens’ Relief Committee (CRC) – officially named the Halifax Relief Committee – which subsequently oversaw the plethora of specialized committees that were formed after the explosion. Premier George Henry Murray* soon convened a meeting of interested parties, who recommended the creation of a “suitable authoritative body” to coordinate the relief effort. Two weeks after the disaster, a panel chaired by mp Fleming Blanchard McCurdy* was appointed, and on 10 Jan. 1918 it called for the Borden government to establish a commission with full powers to take charge of the situation. The prime minister was already thinking along similar lines, having announced on 20 December “that a commission may be appointed for the purpose.” On the 26th he decided that a permanent commission should be created to “rehabilitate and restore Halifax.”

Creation of the Halifax Relief Commission

Choosing the three commissioners was a politically sensitive matter. Following the advice of Halifax mp and cabinet minister Alexander Kenneth Maclean*, Borden picked two of the city’s residents: Tecumseh Sherman Rogers, a prominent Conservative lawyer (who was named chairman), and William Bernard Wallace, a county judge and former Liberal mla. Fowke was apparently chosen by Borden himself. The appointment may have been a reward for political services rendered in 1917; the prime minister may also have felt that appointing someone from outside Nova Scotia would help show that Halifax’s relief was a national priority. In addition, by selecting a Conservative, a Liberal, and a Unionist Liberal, Borden had struck the requisite political balance. Fowke was unique in another respect: he was the only non-lawyer in the highest echelons of the commission’s administration.

The Halifax Relief Commission (HRC) was established by a federal order in council on 22 Jan. 1918, under the authority of the War Measures Act. Two days later Rogers and Wallace held a conference with the CRC along with the leaders of its smaller committees. On the 25th Fowke arrived in Halifax for the first time in his life (his family would join him four months later). Soon after registering at his hotel, he met Rogers and Wallace at a conference of local clergy chaired by Anglican archbishop Clarendon Lamb Worrell. According to a local newspaper, Fowke gave an “eloquent address” in which “he declared that no report of the disaster exaggerated its awful reality when seen by the bodily eye.”

Early actions of the commission

On 1 February the HRC formally assumed control from the CRC. “The big three – the men who will reconstruct Halifax,” as the headline in a local newspaper christened them, lost no time establishing their authority: that same day they appeared before the Dartmouth town council to outline their policy for the administration of relief. The following day, four “important notices” appeared in the newspapers, one of which heralded the impending creation of an appraisal board to investigate property losses suffered in the devastated area. Six days later another notice announced the appointment of the appraisal board, as well as a small-business claims court, a landlord and tenant commission, and a motor-vehicle claims adjuster. By 11 February the HRC’s newly built administration offices were ready. Public relations loomed large. Rogers, Wallace, and Fowke addressed the Rotary Club, the Commercial Club, and a public meeting of residents of the most-affected wards (5 and 6) on a Sunday afternoon at a cinema in the north suburbs. The commissioners also made themselves available to the public Monday through Friday between noon and one o’clock to hear oral representations from persons directly affected by the disaster. Early on, the commissioners were reportedly working 15-hour days.

The HRC’s immediate task was short-term “rehabilitation,” which involved rehousing survivors who had lost their homes, rather than long-term “reconstruction.” The commission was responsible for administering some $13 million that the CRC had received from government and private sources. There was, moreover, a parallel entity over which the HRC initially had no control: the Massachusetts-Halifax Relief Committee, set up by the state’s governor, Samuel Walker McCall. Not until May would its Halifax branch be provincially incorporated as the Massachusetts-Halifax Health Commission. Although the HRC was given two seats, which Rogers and Wallace proceeded to occupy, the inevitable overlap led to turf wars that created tension between it and the other commission during the 13 years of its existence.

The commission’s incorporation

On 1 March the HRC submitted its first report to Ottawa, and in response the Borden government raised its allocation of federal funds from $5 million to $12 million. Long-term reconstruction, however, could not proceed until the commissioners knew the precise powers with which they would be invested. To that end Premier Murray introduced Bill 82 in the Nova Scotia legislature. Within the devastated area, the bill gave the commission paramount power over expropriation, infrastructure renewal, and town planning. The HRC could establish courts and boards of inquiry, and even impose regulations that protected overholding tenants from eviction. Organized labour and many North End residents opposed such a sweeping grant of authority, and Halifax city council, incensed at the usurpation of its powers, passed a resolution asking that the bill be withdrawn. Nevertheless, on 26 April it passed easily, with support from both political parties. In May the provincial act was confirmed and ratified by an act of the federal parliament.

The commission after its incorporation

Incorporation did not materially affect the HRC’s modus operandi; the basic principle remained rehabilitation before reconstruction, and the commission exercised full control over the disbursement of funds. By May 1918 relief money from all sources stood at $20 million. On the 23rd of that month, while Rogers was meeting with Halifax’s building contractors with a view to promoting cooperation, the local Evening Mail reported that Fowke and Wallace were visiting survivor-claimants in their homes, “wishing to get into friendly sympathetic touch with their needs.” On 31 May the HRC issued a formal notice defining the “devastated area,” with a view to inaugurating the reconstruction phase of the recovery. By then all relief activities were operating at maximum capacity. In early June Rogers announced “the plans and policy of the Halifax Relief Commission for the rebuilding of the devastated area on modern lines.” The following month Thomas Adams, town planning adviser on the federal Commission of Conservation, submitted to Rogers his preliminary report on the planning of the devastated area. In September the HRC applied to Nova Scotia’s commissioner of public works and mines, seeking the authority to prepare a plan for the devastated area further to the Town Planning Act. Between March and November 1918 the commission submitted four substantial reports to the federal cabinet.

For almost two years Fowke was in the thick of things. Aside from the fact that only Rogers dealt directly with Ottawa, there seems to have been no specific division of labour among the commissioners. They collectively set policy, made the big decisions, and issued binding orders. Fowke was in demand as a public speaker: in March 1919, for example, he addressed the Young Men’s Civic Club of Amherst on “Young Canada and the new era,” and the following month he presided at a child-welfare conference convened by Halifax’s Local Council of Women [see Edith Jessie Archibald].

In October Fowke was the keynote speaker at the third annual meeting of the Halifax Welfare Bureau. In what the Halifax Herald deemed a “powerful address” that displayed his vigorous social conscience, he provided a retrospective on the work of the HRC, stating, “The Commission began entirely without precedents, they had to make their own; they were surrounded from the beginning with a maze of difficulties, and the greatest of these was to find a way to administer $26,500,000 in 20 months.” The city’s slum landlords were not pleased to hear him declaim, “There are people living in Halifax in conditions in which no man in the audience would think of keeping his Newfoundland dog. There are whole streets of houses in Halifax that should come down.”

Life after the commission

As a disinterested outsider Fowke could afford to take the long view, and in any case the October speech was his swansong. Days later he left Halifax and returned to his home and business in Oshawa. Though his appointment was without term, he considered his mission accomplished. By November 1919 the HRC’s work was well advanced, and by June 1920, when he formally resigned, it had spent nearly $27 million on relief, urban planning, reconstruction, and personal-claims adjustment. By December of that year the reconstruction of the devastated area was nearing completion.

In 1920 Fowke had purchased a property at Fredas Point in Chester, on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. He and his family spent summers there in a cottage he built and named Bonnevie, and from 1930 onwards it appears they lived there more or less permanently. Fowke died at Bonnevie in August 1939, in his 83rd year.

Assessment of Fowke and the commission

Accountable to no local authority, and a law unto itself in the eyes of its critics, the Halifax Relief Commission was a turning point in the city’s history. A virtual second government as far as the devastated area was concerned, the HRC may be said to have inaugurated rational town planning in the city. The commission was a powerful administrative tribunal at a time when few such federal bodies existed and the regulatory state lay largely in the future. A unique exercise in domestic emergency management and disaster recovery, the HRC was a direct application of the War Measures Act and an indirect product of Canada’s wartime mobilization.

As the only commissioner “from away,” Freddie Fowke played a decisive role in helping the HRC gain the credibility and public trust it needed to get its job done. An accomplished municipal politician, he had the insight, wisdom, and practical knowledge to ensure that the HRC’s work was as forward-looking as his stewardship of Oshawa had been. After Fowke resigned in 1920, Chairman Rogers fittingly remarked, “Those affected by the disaster had in him, though a complete stranger, a sympathetic friend who did everything in his power to alleviate the suffering which the citizens of Halifax were called upon to bear.”

Barry Cahill