One may be the loneliest number, but according to Newfoundland tradition, 19 is the smelliest.
Number 19 was once slang for an outdoor toilet in many parts of the island, from the Baie Verte Peninsula on the north coast to Bay d’Espoir in the south.
The number had such an unsavoury whiff about it that some residents of St. John’s refused to live in houses numbered 19. To this day, there are older streets in the capital city that skip straight from 17 to 21.
Randy Cooper recalls a family story about what happened when his maternal grandparents George and Jean Gulliver built their home on Smith Avenue in the 1940s.
“He went up to look at the house, see how things were going, and somewhere along the line he learned that the house number was going to be number 19,” he said.
Cooper’s grandfather was flabbergasted.
“I can’t have my house to be number 19!” he said. “That’s a shithouse number.”
According to Cooper, the city relented and the house number was changed to 21.
Smith Avenue still lacks a number 19. So do nearby Morris Avenue and Cashin Avenue, but the phenomenon extended well beyond the Pennywell Road area. The story about his grandfather led Cooper to check the St. John’s City Archives to see if any other homeowners had objected to the house number 19.
Looking over city insurance maps, he found that even more roads were missing a 19 in the 1920s than today, including Mullock Street, Cook Street, Gear Street, and Allan Square. On Cabot Street, the house between 17 and 21 was numbered 17 ½.
Nineteen was added to those roads sometime later.
“I think the city must have had some kind of a program, for want of a better term, to renumber streets,” Cooper said.
When John Woodford was growing up on Whiteway Street near Churchill Park in the 1960s, a new home build caused the road to be renumbered, but the Woodfords’ neighbour wouldn’t accept his new assignment, 19.
“He absolutely refused to forfeit the 17,” Woodford says. “He wouldn’t take it down, but he did paint it over.”
The neighbour also declined to update his address with any of his contacts, resulting in many good-humoured exchanges of mail with the Woodfords, who lived in the official number 17 next door.
Reluctance to be associated with the number 19 upset more than just mail delivery.
Young Newfoundlanders and Labradorians today are eager to turn 19, but a century ago in Head of Bay d’Espoir a 19th birthday was no cause for celebration. Nineteen-year-olds sweated out the year, lying about their age so they wouldn’t be bullied.
Just how did number 19 come to be so strongly associated with number two?
The origins of slang are notoriously difficult to pin down. Slang is a feature of spoken language, so its evolution is rarely tracked in writing.
Slang also tends to start out amongst small groups of people who share common cultural touchstones. By the time a new word or idiom makes its way into the mainstream, even those who use it might have no idea where it came from.
Philip Hiscock, retired professor of folklore at Memorial University, believes the playful term “number 19” originated in an actual game: golf.
“Long before golf courses became so bougie that they had restaurants and bars [which they nowadays call the Nineteenth Hole], they had an outhouse,” Hiscock says. “It was called Number Nineteen first, before the eateries and drinkeries.”
Hiscock mapped St. John’s streets that were missing the house number 19. By dating their construction, he was able to trace the earliest examples to the neighbourhood around Golf Avenue.
This is where, in 1896, the Newfoundland Golf Club opened its doors in a meadow known as Buckmaster’s Field.
Club membership was limited to just 50 people — 25 men and 25 women. All were members of the urban elite, but local boys were hired to work on the course as caddies.
“A generation of children grew up in the area of the old golf course… and took with them the bit of folklore that 19 [equals] shithouse,” says Hiscock. “That phrase, ‘the shithouse number,’ was very commonly known throughout St. John’s [and to some extent more widely] ninety years ago.”
It’s a clever joke — after all, the pit under an outdoor privy would have constituted a literal 19th hole on the course. But here’s where this theory gets into the rough.
The Newfoundland Golf Club had only nine holes. The first 18-hole course in the city was Bally Haly in the east end, which opened in 1908.
Still, if the expression was in common use on 18-hole courses abroad, golfers who had played elsewhere might have brought it to Buckmaster’s Field with them.
Hiscock suspects the term “19th hole” was used as slang for outhouse outside of Newfoundland, even if it wasn’t recorded in writing.
“However, it was here, in St. John’s,” he said, “that the term went from being an esoteric golfing term to have a kind of feral life in the wild, amongst non-golfing people.”
As indoor plumbing spread across the province, the expression “number 19” fell out of use, but, however the term originated, this is one piece of slang that literally rewrote the map.
Download our free CBC News app to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Sign up for our daily headlines newsletter here. Click here to visit our landing page.
