Six Dartmouth Men, One Cattle Boat, June 1910

A 1910 snapshot, a 1959 letter to the editor, and a forgotten Dartmouth tradition.

This week’s jigsaw: https://curioustorian-cattle-boat-1910.netlify.app

Nine men squint at the camera on the deck of a cattle boat in June 1910, somewhere between Boston and London. Six of them are Dartmouth students working their passage to Europe. Two are English cockney crew. The young man behind the camera, Malcolm R. Lovell, had just graduated from Williston Academy and was on his way to see the world before college.

He never learned the six students’ names.

In 1910, signing on as a cattleman was a cheap way for a Dartmouth man to reach Europe. You showed up at the Boston or Montreal docks in your roughest clothes, signed on as an “ordinary seaman,” and for the next ten or fourteen days you fed, watered, and shoveled up after six hundred British-bound steers. The pay was nominal. The point was the passage. Many students did it.

A 1925 Dartmouth man, Charles Haywood, wrote it up for the Alumni Magazine in 1956. His cattle foreman, a “little gray-headed man with a red nose, a lush mustache and a hatchet,” boomed up and down the decks shouting “England this day expects every man to do his duty.” Bunks were coffin-sized. The cattle got seasick at the same time the men did.

Lovell kept his negative for almost fifty years. In December 1959, writing from Coral Gables, Florida, he mailed the photograph to the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine under the heading “Who Are They?” He guessed the six students belonged to the classes of 1912, 1913, or 1914, and asked any reader who recognized a face to write to him. He offered to mail prints to any of the men still living.

We don’t know if anyone wrote back.

Sixteen years later, eight men from the Dartmouth class of ‘27 made the same kind of crossing. Half a century after that, the six still living were all serving as Alumni Fund class agents for their class. Their head agent wrote one line about his old shipmates: “Right fine people, these cattlemen.”

If you recognize a great-grandfather here, the Dartmouth Library would love to hear from you. So would I.

Cameron Cross

Sources:

Photograph by Malcolm R. Lovell, June 1910. Held by Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College.

Charles F. Haywood ‘25, “Cattle Boat,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, February 1956.

Erwin B. Paddock, “1927” class notes, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, May 1980.