Educated at Mount Allison and the University of Toronto, Pottle was an official of the Department of Education under the Newfoundland commission government from 1938 until 1947. in that year, he was appointed as one of three Newfoundland members of the commission.
He supported Confederation and spoke publicly in favour of Confederation during the referendum campaign in 1948. He was elected to the House of Assembly in 1949 and served as member for the district of Carbonear-Bay de Verde from 1949 to 1956. Pottle was appointed to cabinet in 1949 as minister of public welfare.
Pottle left politics in 1956 in a disagreement with Smallwood over economic development policy. The circumstance was described this way by the University of Toronto newsletter:
Pottle remembers it as a time of patronage and power; moral and fiscal responsibility seemed to be lacking, and there was a division between "promises and performance" and "words and works." He could not support a government that, in his view, had lost its integrity. In his resignation speech, he said that "the economic development programme of the government, in the broad sense, has spread itself too hastily. Time has not been taken to consolidate the programme step by step…. The Department of Economic Development is, in my view, inadequate to carry on the job it has to do, as far as its responsibility toward the 'new' industries is concerned … As I see it, the government has not given the leadership in these matters that ought properly to be expected of government...".He worked with the United Church of Canada during which time he spent a one year term as a United Nations social welfare advisor in Libya. In 1963, Pottle began work for the Department of Health and Welfare. He retired in 1972.
In 1979, Pottle published Dawn without light, an account of his time as a commissioner and later cabinet minister. Pottle died in 2002, aged 95 years. His passing was noted by the Premier's Office with a simple news release that, frankly did not do justice to Dr. Pottle's contribution to the province.
He did do somewhat better than his former cabinet colleague and Confederate Harold Horwood. Horwood enjoyed a career as a nationally known author after an impressive career as a journalist. His death was completely ignored by the current administration.
An anti-Confederate who died around the same time was extensively eulogized. Such is the miserable attitude apparently taken to our history that even in death, appropriate respect cannot be paid to significant figures unless they fit into the current ideology.
The following extract is taken from Pottle's 1979 book. Recent political events - especially the notion that a certain politician has effectively revolutionized politics in the province - make some of Pottle's observations all the more striking.
Here's just one bit. Undoubtedly more will follow.
If Smallwood had been a revolutionary in the historical sense of the term, he would have exercised a directly decisive influence in changing the basic outlook of the Newfoundland people. If he had been responsibly radical, he would have been mainly instrumental in converting their life-values system. In fact, he did nothing of the kind. What he did was to capitalize on the gullibility of politically uneducated people and render them incredibly more gullible still. What he did was to take control of a dependent society that had always asked much of government and ordered it to ask for more. What he did was not to change the course of people’s expectations – he encouraged them to look for more of what they already had. He did not revolutionize his society – it can be more truly said that he parasitized it.
…
Newfoundland politics had always been notorious for the people’s chronic sense of dependence upon their political powers – a feeling which the powers did nothing effectively to dispel, but, in effect, had ingrained it by posing as their terrestrial saviours. In times of extreme adversity, this of course boomeranged, but Newfoundlanders have always been endowed with breasts of more than the normal capacity for the hope that springs eternal, so that a change of government was eternally tantamount to the prospect of a new saviourhood. For the benefit of the typical politician they have also been conveniently gifted with short political memory. If the time should ever arrive when Newfoundlanders had cause to look at their political estate in anything like creation’s light, and their political leadership was mature enough to feel no longer indispensable, then it could be well and truly said that the day of revolution had at last dawned.
Herbert L. Pottle, Newfoundland: Dawn Without Light; Politics, Power and the People in the Smallwood Era, pp. 166-7
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