IN SEARCH OF PHILIP LITTLE

AND THE ROOTS OF RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT

By Bert Riggs

Christopher and Éamon Little, descendants of Newfoundland’s first Prime Minister, trace their roots to the Colonial Building and Belvedere Cemetery.

In late August 2004, two brothers, Éamon and Christopher Little (left), made their first visit to Newfoundland. The trip resulted from an interest both had developed in family history and, in particular, in their greatgrandfather, Philip Francis Little, the first Prime Minister of Newfoundland.

Éamon (right), who was born and still lives in Ireland, remembers his father, who died when Éamon was only eleven, mentioning that his own grandfather had been Premier (a term interchangeable with Prime Minister) of Newfoundland.

“At that time I was too young to understand exactly what that job might have involved, nor where Newfoundland was and I guess I also wasn’t too clear on how near a relation to me PFL was,” he said. “Great-grandfather sounded like he was shrouded in the mists of antiquity.”

Over the years, Éamon’s curiosity was piqued on a number of occasions, but it was not until the spring of 2004, when attending the funeral of an aunt, that he discovered that his brother Christopher, who had lived in the United States since 1986, had for some time been doing his own research into Little family history. The brothers decided that a visit to Newfoundland would be “essential to our research.”

When not in search of his ancestors, Éamon Little is a film maker in Ireland.

“Going around in my head was the question of whether it might be possible to make an interesting film on the subject,” he said of planning his 2004 visit to Newfoundland.

“Straight documentaries about people long dead don’t interest me so I didn’t fancy the idea of making one. However, at the funeral of my aunt Clare last year was my youngest brother Eoin who, along with being quite a unique character is also highly likely to be the youngest greatgrandchild of PFL. Eoin is difficult to describe so I won’t try, except to say that he has a curious blend of cerebral palsy and Asperger’s Syndrome and he has a huge interest in both history and family. He knows very little about PFL except what we all knew as kids. So I mused that an interesting human interest documentary film might be made of Eoin’s journey to knowledge of the family history, assuming he would be interested.”

This project is still in the developmental stages but has captured the imagination of people on both sides of the Atlantic. Pending the availability of funding, Éamon hopes to return to Newfoundland with Chris and Eoin and a small film crew in the summer of 2005 to begin preliminary work on the documentary.

Éamon Little sums up his short stay in Newfoundland in two ways. He was greatly impressed with the amount of information he and Chris were able to uncover about his family’s history and the contributions of his ancestors to this place in the 19th century. He especially appreciated being able to converse with local historians and visit the Colonial Building where Philip and Joseph were once actively engaged in the business of government.

“Poring over and comparing documents meant that every day we got many new pieces to our jigsaw puzzle,” he said.

“One expectation I didn’t have going out was just how great the Irish influence is on Newfoundland culture. Some of the accents I heard were extraordinarily like those from Waterford or Kilkenny. There was an Irish quality to the general attitude to life, too, which I had never experienced outside Ireland before. It was like Ireland’s only ever (voluntary) colony. It was clear straight away that Newfoundlanders take much more of an active interest in what is happening in Ireland than the Irish do in Newfoundland. St. John’s reminded me of Limerick or Galway in the early 1980s, which made me realise how much the pace of life has changed in my own place in my own lifetime.”

These are sentiments that Philip Little would undoubtedly agree with were he able to visit Newfoundland 150 years after he helped establish Responsible Government in the colony and became its first Prime Minister.