Beyond discomfort, the brief warm spell made the snow heavier, causing already damaged roofs to leak and occasionally collapse. To the long list of chores local homeowners were tackling, they could now add roof repair.
The worse the roads became, the better the horses looked. The few autos that had survived heavy use during the blizzard were rendered all but useless in the slush and mud. The Transportation Committee wisely secured more horses to get through the streets, lest they create one of the world’s first cases of gridlock.
Halifax normally honored the Sabbath, closing stores and canceling most activities except church and Sunday dinner. But with far too much work to be done the city decreed that Sunday, December 9, would be a working day.
That included the crews repairing telephone and telegraph wires, which had been snapped and severed all over town. Adding to the area’s communication woes, radio operators on the Atlantic coast transmitted only under strict wartime regulations, and wireless communication wasn’t yet good enough to cover the gap, so even the normal channels of communication available in this era were greatly hampered. As a result, several out-of-town newspapers received their first telegrams about the explosion from Havana, Cuba. From certain parts of Canada, cable communication had to take strange detours, with the most effective route to Halifax running through London.
But once again, ordinary people rose to perform acts of generosity, and creativity. One clever man gathered messages from survivors to their relatives letting them know they had survived and boarded a train to Truro to send them out from Truro’s telegraph machine. Then he picked up telegrams that had come in to Truro for people in Halifax, hopped onto the next train going back, and delivered the highly coveted notes. Problem solved.
The linemen worked without rest to establish partial service, which Western Union and Canadian Pacific restricted to official messages only. Knowing people were desperate to reach their families, the linemen continued to work through the wind, the snow, the muck, and the slush to restore some 300 telephone lines. They also hooked up temporary emergency lines to relief centers, where the need to get word to fretful relatives that people were okay, and to give them the sad news of who wasn’t, was at its greatest.
The Western Union station on Hollis Street brought in twelve extra operators to handle the load, but they were still overwhelmed by the volume of 5,000 cables a day for a month. Operator Leo Campbell recalled, “We worked day and night.”
Delivering the cables was harder. Boy Scout volunteers could not get past the soldiers guarding the Devastated Area, who were not letting anyone in without a pass, and certainly not a bunch of teenage boys. When Western Union sent their own employees to do the job, they had a hard time finding the street addresses—provided they could find the street, or a house still standing. If they got past all that, they still needed someone to be home. If they couldn’t, operator Leo Campbell recalled, they talked to any neighbors who might still be there or someone searching the area who knew the residents and gave them the message. The Relief Committee set up an Information Committee that day to create a log listing where survivors had relocated.
“We would deliver to shelters and wherever people were,” Campbell said. “If that did not work, we would put notices in the papers, with the names of the people. The telegrams came for years,” many of them from people who had not heard from a relative, friend, or associate since 1917, who concluded that perhaps their relatives and friends in Halifax hadn’t responded to them because they had been in the explosion. This was often wishful thinking, but if you were trying to ignore someone far away, the explosion was as good an excuse as any.
Bertha Bond, who had helped Reverend Swetnam save his daughter Dorothy, sent a cable to her fiancé, Sandy Wournell, fighting overseas. She said only SAFE WELL BERTHA BOND, a message that reached him in Boulogne, France. Her descriptive letters would arrive later, but for now, that was all he needed to hear.
Thanks to the restoration of those wires and the journalists from Boston, news of the disaster spread fast. Although the explosion happened at the height of the largest war the world had ever seen, and initial information was sketchy at best, in the major papers of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, the story of the Halifax explosion jumped ahead of the Great War for a week.
When Jerusalem surrendered to Britain the same week and the U.S. declared war on Austria-Hungary on Friday, December 8, those stories took a backseat to Halifax. This was probably due to a number of factors: the explosion was bigger than any bomb dropped in the Great War; casualty lists from the battles overseas that week were much shorter than those from the explosion; it occurred at a well-known port far from the trenches of Europe, the first time the horrors the soldiers were experiencing visited North America; and unrestricted American reporters were there to write the stories. If the daily butchery of trench warfare barely qualified as news by 1917, the leveling of a peaceful port town was not.
Since Cap Ratshesky and company had walked all over Halifax for twenty-four hours, they could give the people back in Boston a better idea of what was needed most. The day after Calvin Austin set sail for Halifax, the three-day-old Massachusetts-Halifax Relief Commission loaded Northland with more supplies for Halifax.
Henry B. Endicott asked H. J. McAlman, the president of the Massachusetts Automobile Dealers Association, to buy $25,000 worth of trucks to load onto Northland—more than half a million dollars’ worth today. It was a sizable request, with nothing in it for McAlman, but a few hours later McAlman returned to Endicott’s office with this news: “We bought the trucks, we hired ten first-class chauffeurs to go with them,” and, if Endicott was willing to bypass a few regulations, McAlman promised to throw in enough gasoline to “run ’em for a while.”
Massachusetts sent ten trucks whose names even car buffs would not recognize today: five Republics, three Whites, and two Stewarts, adorned with signs that said MASSACHUSETTS TO HALIFAX, plus ten drums of gasoline.
Back in Halifax, Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden went to see how the visitors from Boston were making out, then issued the following statement: “This afternoon I visited the hospital established at Bellevue by the Massachusetts hospital unit. They took possession yesterday . . . and within a few hours had every arrangement made for receiving patients, of whom nearly 75 are being accommodated.” He concluded, “The hospital is a triumph of organization ability!” If Barss’s views of Americans had changed, it seemed Borden’s had, too.
On Saturday, the New York Times ran a story headlined “OUR BLUEJACKETS HELPING IN HALIFAX. Warship Furnishes Aid to Police and Establishes a Hospital. PRESIDENT SENDS MESSAGE.”
To “His Excellency, the Governor General of Canada,” President Wilson wrote an unwieldy but unequivocal message of support, in which he underscored the admiration the people of the United States had for “their noble brethren of the Dominion” and expressed “their heartfelt sympathy and grief.” He then reinforced “the ties of kinship and community of speech and of national interest” the countries shared, in addition to “the strong bonds of union in the common cause of devotion to the supreme duties of national existence.”
It wasn’t poetry, but it wasn’t a threat to annex Canada, either. Far from it—President Wilson might have delivered the clearest statement of unalloyed respect any American president had yet given to Canada.
That next day, Sunday, December 9, the New York Times released the response Canada’s governor general, the Duke of Devonshire Victor Cavendish, sent to President Woodrow Wilson:
Canada’s Governor General Thanks the President, Hailing His Message of Sympathy As Sign of Unity.
OTTAWA, Dec. 8—The Governor General [Duke of Devonshire] has sent this reply to the message of sympathy and offer of assistance from President Wilson to the City of Halifax:
I desire to thank your Excellency for your message, which the Canadian Government and I have received with profound appreciation and gratitude.
We recognize in it and in the gene
rous offers of assistance to the stricken City of Halifax, which have been received from many quarters of the United States, a further proof of that community of feeling which unites the two peoples in a bond of mutual sympathy and interest, so particularly appropriate at the present time, when both are engaged in a common purpose to vindicate the principles of liberty and justice upon which the foundations of both Governments rest.
The contrast of these unqualified messages of respect, gratitude, and peace to the animosity and suspicion that separated these governments in 1776, 1812, and 1911 is striking. It came from the top, and echoed throughout both nations.
Wilson’s administration then offered $1 million in relief aid, but Halifax did not need it after so many individual Americans had given so much to Halifax. The people beat him to it.
If the disaster brought out the “better angels” of the Canadian and American character, it didn’t transform Halifax into a haven of forgiveness that week. Haligonians’ immense, unnecessary suffering fueled the very human emotions of fear and anger, and the desire for justice. The impulse to blame someone was great, and the object of that impulse was obvious: the Germans.
Taken broadly, this conclusion was entirely right and fair. It was the Germans, after all, who had started the war that was killing Canada’s sons, often by ignoring international conventions of warfare. Without the Germans, Halifax would not have reprised its role as the conduit for soldiers and supplies heading to Europe—and that would include ships loaded down with 6 million pounds of high explosives.
But we know the Germans had no direct role in the collision on December 6, nor in the explosion that followed—all unintended accidents between Scandinavians and Frenchmen. But that answer was not particularly satisfying.
On Sunday, December 9, sixteen people of German birth, who had been reporting to the local police once a month since the war started, were arrested. Following a military inquiry, some were released immediately, and others in a few days, but anti-German sentiment still ran high. Locals smashed the windows of a few houses whose owners had German-sounding names, but for the most part, Haligonians were too busy putting their city back together to pursue revenge, especially uninformed revenge.
While some officials were trying to find the culprits, soldiers sorting out the rubble of the dispatcher’s former office discovered Vincent Coleman’s body, and near it, his tele-key.
They cleaned up the device that had probably saved hundreds of lives, and presented it to his wife.
Chapter 31
“It’s Me, Barbara!”
Monday, December 10, 1917
On Monday, December 10, Halifax was hit with yet another violent snowstorm, continuing a ridiculous run of bad weather.
Now four days after the explosion, Barbara Orr remained in her bed at Camp Hill Hospital, largely ignored by doctors, nurses, and the steady flow of visitors. Barbara’s hope waned by the hour, but her mother’s other sister, who lived in Dartmouth, had seen Barbara’s name in the newspaper and came down to find her.
When Barbara saw her aunt at the doorway, her heart raced. But when Barbara called out, her aunt turned around and stared at her for a long moment, puzzled. It was not the reunion Barbara had imagined.
“It’s me! Barbara! Barbara ORR!”
Barbara’s bright red hair was still black from the “black rain.” She had suffered so many cuts, scrapes, and bruises that her face was discolored and swollen—all of which rendered her unrecognizable to her aunt.
“I’m Barbara Orr!” she repeated.
But her aunt still didn’t believe her. “Oh, no, no,” she said. “You’re not Barbara, because she has red hair.”
But Barbara persisted, telling her aunt things only a family member would know until her aunt came to her bedside for a closer look. When she realized it really was Barbara, she was elated, and gave Barbara a gentle but heartfelt hug. She arranged to take Barbara back to their home in Dartmouth, which was still in decent shape. Barbara could not walk very well by herself, but that night, she was back in a familiar home, surrounded by caring relatives.
Having spent four days in a hospital with no visitors, however, Barbara was even more convinced that she had lost her entire family. Picturing the scene from her block over and over, she concluded that no one could have survived that explosion, or the fires that burned what was left to the ground.
Using the same logic, she couldn’t imagine how her father, two uncles, and grandfather could have lived after the printing factory fell in on itself. Without any word from anyone, she decided she had been right from the start: they were all gone, and she was her family’s sole survivor.
Her aunt had to tell her that there had been no listings from shelters or medical centers for her father, her mother, her three brothers, and her two sisters. One of her uncles, the owner of the nearby home she had first visited after the explosion, had also died in the printing works. And yet, somehow, the imploding building had spared her grandfather, and her uncle William had happened to be outside the building watching the ship burn when it blew up. He had been injured, but survived. The day after her aunt had found Barbara, she read his name on a list in the paper, and they went back to find him.
Barbara Orr’s premonition, however, had been largely correct. Her once robust family had been reduced to an uncle, a grandfather, two aunts, and a few cousins. Of the eight people in their happy home Thursday morning, she was the only one who was still alive.
Millicent Upham was moved to a hospital that had been set up in St. Mary’s College by some of the American doctors and nurses. They removed her left eye, and her cousin Annie Rasley’s, too. They were in the same ward and talked often, sharing visitors.
While Millicent’s father and brother Archie were visiting her, her father asked the doctor to look at Archie’s head, which had bled so much the first day that his shirt had stuck to his back. The doctors discovered his wounds were more severe than they first appeared. They operated on him for eight and a half hours, removing twenty-two pieces of glass from his head, and inserted a silver plate to reinforce the back of his skull.
Frank Burford, the fifteen-year-old plumbers’ apprentice at Hillis & Sons Foundry whose boss had sent him to fetch a parcel when the ship blew up, incurred only a deep cut on his leg from a falling timber, while almost everyone back at the foundry was killed.
The Burfords had the misfortune of living on Richmond’s Flynn block, which had been all but wiped out by the blast, killing an estimated sixty people. The Burfords listed three family members as missing: Frank’s father, who worked at the foundry, and his younger brother and sister. His mother had survived and was being treated by the Bostonians at Bellevue.
Eventually the two children were identified in the morgue, and on that Monday, December 10, Mr. Burford’s body was recovered from the Hills & Sons Foundry.
A few days after the explosion, the local papers’ thick obituary sections started listing funerals, including one for “Coleman, Vincent, funeral Sunday Dec. 9, 2:30 from home of H. E. O’Toole, brother-in-law, 126 Edward Street.”
The Monday, December 10, edition of the Evening Mail included the following obituary:
VINCE COLEMAN, 31 RUSSELL STREET.
“A hero in death as in Life”
After describing Coleman’s heroic deed that summer, when he had leapt onto a runaway engine to stop it before it collided with a suburban train, the article explained Coleman’s selfless actions minutes before the explosion, followed by a letter to the editor: “I would appreciate highly if the relief Committee will ascertain whether or not any of his family are left alive and if so to give them special attention. Supervisor CGR [Canadian Government Railways] Truro.”
The editors answered: “Mr. Coleman’s wife was badly injured; their five children only slightly injured.”
That week, it might have been tempting to call that lucky.
Chapter 32
Small Gifts
Tuesday, December 11
The Great War didn’t take a minute off, with the Canadian troops overseas in as much danger the day after the explosion as they had been the day before. Troops, munitions, and weapons from across North America and beyond would soon be massing in Halifax again, then shipping across the Atlantic, just slightly delayed.
None of these things had changed, but their purpose had become much clearer to the Haligonians. Instead of viewing the Great War as an abstraction, something happening far away that Haligonians knew very little about, the actual point of the exercise—tearing apart more of the enemy’s people than they could of yours until one side quit—was now at their doorstep, the full costs of the conflict everywhere apparent.
The bootleggers who had been doing brisk business out of the YMCA were pushed out when the Y was converted into one of a dozen temporary hospitals. But even when they relocated, bootleggers and brothels found demand for their services dramatically reduced. It wasn’t due to the lack of a client base—volunteers and soldiers were coming to town on every train—or the fact that just about every building had smashed windows, but a cultural shift: the hedonism the speakeasies and brothels offered now seemed trivial or even offensive while thousands of people were sacrificing their comfort to help others. The prostitutes who had come from all over Canada soon left because business bottomed out.
While many landlords generously allowed their unoccupied properties to be used free of charge, with some even advertising this fact, a few others, recognizing a sellers’ market if ever there was one, started demanding exorbitant rents. Likewise, many merchants gave away their goods freely for the cause, while some cranked up their prices.
These less-noble impulses infected the recently formed unions, too, which had been established to give the common man a better chance at a good life. Yet after the explosion, some bricklayers refused to allow plasterers to help repair chimneys, as that was bricklayers’ work by union rules. Other tradesmen stubbornly insisted on overtime rates for extra work. If the thousands of volunteers, from the local girls knitting balaclava helmets to the Boston doctors, had taken a similar stance, the cost to Halifax would have been many millions.
The Great Halifax Explosion Page 27