THE HELENA SQUIRES FUND

A Brief History.

In 1989 in the April provincial election, a group of women worked on the campaign of Liberal candidate Lynette Billard in St. John's East. This group included campaign co-chairs Eve Roberts & Elizabeth Reynolds, organizer/speech writer Kim Ploughman, and treasurer Susan Adams.

After the campaign (we lost!) we sat down to do our post-mortem. Some of the issues that we felt needed to be addressed by the Party, especially if we were to attract more women candidates, were

1. financial support,

2. moral support, and

3. physical support.

We felt that many women would not have access to an "old girls" (like "old boys") network for fundraising and would need funds for child care and other activities different from male candidates. We thought it important to give moral support to women candidates to see themselves as potential members and cabinet ministers. Finally we wished to provide a group of campaigners who would facilitate the smooth running of a woman's campaign.

Our group decided to form a small organization within the Liberal Party to meet these three aims. We were soon joined by Bonnie Hickey & Rosemary Healey and occasionally by others. We called ourselves the Helena Squires Fund Committee - naming the group after Helena, Lady Squires, the first woman to be elected to the House of Assembly and the first president of the Liberal Party of Newfoundland after Confederation.

The word "fund" appeared because we saw ourselves as a core group to raise extraordinary funds to provide seed money to women candidates.  We did indeed raise money - not a lot but some.

We provided moral support to Bonnie in her winning battle in St. John's East in the federal election of late summer 1993. We continued to campaign wherever possible. However, it appeared there was no formal structure within the Party to support our group and eventually the Board decided we should be subsumed by the Women's Commission.

We were supported in several ways by the late Rosemary Squires Mercereau - the last living child of Helena, Lady Squires, and Sir Richard Squires. In fact she said, our group by its very name served to validate her mother and her mother's contribution to Newfoundland society and she was grateful to the end of her life. She died in the winter of 1995 and her ashes were buried in St. John's that summer.

I was invited to give one of the eulogies which I was very proud to do. If nothing else, the Helena Squires Fund Committee gave Rosemary and her two daughters some appropriate recognition of their family.

It is interesting to note that in this winter of 2003 another provincial political party has formed a group very like the Helena Squires Fund Committee copying an idea which we had 14 years before.

Elizabeth L. (Scammell) Reynolds

First chair of the Helena Squires Fund Committee