The Great Halifax Explosion

by John U. Bacon

  As Halifax’s homegrown historian Thomas Raddall remembered it, “With splendid heart and quick efficiency the State of Massachusetts sent by sea a complete relief expedition—food, clothing, bedding, medical supplies, doctors, nurses, trained welfare workers, together with a fleet of motor trucks complete with drivers and gasoline and loaded with carefully selected supplies—all ready to move off as soon as the ship came alongside. It was a perfect example of American generosity and quick-wittedness, and the city greeted it with a gasp of relief. And this was only the beginning. Financed entirely by American funds, the Massachusetts Relief Commission continued its clinics and its housing and welfare work in Halifax long after the disaster, a memory cherished by Haligonians to this day.”

  The Boston Evening Globe had a reporter on board who told of the “huge crowds who cheered the ship, the captain, the crew and her precious cargo.”

  The day after Calvin Austin left Boston Harbor, Northland followed her up the coast with more medical and reconstruction professionals, plus $100,000 worth of supplies and $25,000 worth of trucks, plus the gas and chauffeurs needed to operate them.

  The rest of New England followed Boston’s lead. Tiny Calais, Maine, sent its Red Cross unit, consisting of two doctors and nine nurses. The State of Maine hospital shipped thirty-six medical professionals to work in a temporary hospital, and the Rhode Island Chapter of the American Red Cross sponsored more than 100 who made house calls in the Devastated Area until a temporary hospital opened up.

  With all these doctors and nurses coming into Halifax, the Halifax Relief Committee felt comfortable letting the first exhausted group head back to their towns across the Maritimes, Canada, and New England.

  On Wednesday night, Nova Scotia’s lieutenant governor and his wife held a reception at Government House to provide official recognition of Boston’s contributions. The Boston doctors pulled up in the flatbed trucks that had arrived that day from Boston on Northland. According to the report of Boston’s Major Giddings, all present enjoyed “a delightful and informal dinner,” followed by a toast by His Honor the Governor to “the President and the King,” which might have been a first, and the singing of both national anthems.

  “Thus,” Giddings wrote, “the event assumed a certain international significance. In fact, Governor Grant during the course of his remarks expressed what we all felt, namely, that, lamentable as the disaster was, it had undoubtedly furthered the cordial relations between Canada and the United States.”

  Subsequent reports and correspondence confirmed this transformation between the often-uneasy neighbors.

  As Halifax’s Dr. Harris reported, “A terrible catastrophe had been the occasion for that expression of practical sympathy which the quick-witted American is always ready to display. . . . One of the chief features of the medical aspect of the Halifax disaster is the extreme promptness with which the great Republic to the south sent, all unsolicited, the resources of its own preparedness to the help of our stricken people.”

  The help didn’t stop with the healing. Governor McCall’s relief committee would send a complete warehouse of household goods—everything from new stoves, bathtubs, and beds—so hundreds could replace what they’d lost and feel like they were shopping while doing it. The help received felt less like a national handout than a gift from a neighbor. This respect for the victims’ dignity was not lost on the locals.

  To explain Boston’s “splendid outburst of help and sympathy for this city,” the Halifax Herald outlined the history of “ancient ties of blood and kinship,” emphasizing all the two nations had in common, instead of their differences.

  On December 13, 1917, before the Boston contingent returned to Massachusetts, R. T. MacIlreith, chairman of the Halifax Relief Committee, sent a copy of a formal resolution to Boston’s Major Giddings, which expressed the Committee’s

  deep appreciation of the prompt and humane action of the authorities in Boston in dispatching your corps to Halifax, and of the professional efficiency and noble spirit which you and all members of your unit have exhibited since coming to our stricken city. We shall always bear you in grateful remembrance, and wish you a safe journey home.

  Yours Truly, R.T. MacIlreith, Chairman, Relief Committee.

  Massachusetts’s contributions to Halifax totaled more than $750,000—$15 million today—and that was probably conservative. So surprising was the overwhelming help from Boston that what most survivors mentioned first when being interviewed years later was the “instant and unstinting aid from the State of Massachusetts.”

  After Major Giddings returned to Boston, he sent the following telegram to Lieutenant-Colonel McKelvey Bell: “At Hospital you will find packages of cigarettes, chocolates, etc., from Colonel Brooks who wishes you to accept it with his compliments for personal or any other use you see fit. We arrived home safely and all so glad of opportunity to contribute our bit. —H. G. Giddings.”

  Just six years earlier, Canadian Conservatives were portraying Americans as “a corrupt, bragging, boodle-hunting and negro lynching crowd from which Canadian workingmen and the Canadian land of milk and honey must be saved.”

  Six years later, the American response to the Halifax tragedy inspired Clark Hall to write a poem titled “Record of Halifax Explosion,” which includes this stanza:

  “God bless our neighbours to the South,

  God bless them one and all

  Who responded so magnificently

  To humanity’s urgent call. . . .

  It sounded like the start of a great relationship.

  PART VII

  REBUILDING

  Chapter 34

  The Missing and the Dead

  Thursday, December 13

  A week after the explosion, the searchers digging through the Richmond ruins continued to find survivors, badly damaged but alive. Most of their work entailed shoveling charred remains into baskets, buckets, and washtubs, then passing them on to the corps of undertakers who had arrived from across Canada, to sift the remains for rings, dentures, and other clues that might help a relative identify them.

  And yet for weeks afterward, families, friends, and colleagues continued to fill the Halifax newspapers’ newly created “Missing” sections. These entries didn’t require many words to affect the reader, including this one about Noble Driscoll’s family:

  “Walter Driscoll, 1549 Barrington Street, his wife and several children are in hospital in Truro. Wife and children practically uninjured. Driscoll’s injury is severe. Enquiring for Gordon Driscoll, 11 years old, reported to have been seen by several people. If any information is received I will be pleased to have it communicated to me. H. O. McClatchy, Truro.”

  In just fifty-four words, Mr. McClatchy touched on the family’s blessings, their injuries, and their painful uncertainty, without mentioning Art Driscoll’s mute state, brought on by trauma.

  “Missing: Donald Cameron. Answers to Donnie, 4-1/2 years, fair hair, dark grey eyes. Wore red sweater or nightgown. Was moved on first ambulance from Roome Street on Thursday morning. Father anxious.”

  “Would the soldier who rescued baby from unconscious woman’s arms on Longard Road the morning of the explosion return baby to its parents, 9 Longard Road.”

  Stories like this no doubt gave hope to the thousands of people missing loved ones, but it would almost always prove a false hope.

  The page included a less-common “found” notice: “The owner of the girl baby about 2 months old which was handed to a young lady on Gottingen Street, being previously picked up on Almon Street by a soldier, in a pasteboard box covered with an older child’s check coat, can get same by applying at 1461 Shirley Street.”

  Except for the increasingly rare cases of people being found in another home in Halifax, Dartmouth, or an hour away in Truro, Amherst, New Glasgow, or another outpost, a week after the explosion getting news of missing loved ones was almost always bad news. But even finding out they had died provided some closure.

  On December 12, Gor
don and James Pattison learned that their missing eight-year-old brother, Alan, who had walked with them to the dockyard en route to Richmond School, had been identified by Mrs. Pattison’s brother at the morgue. A day later, the same uncle identified the body of their ten-year-old sister, Catherine, which had been exhumed from the wreckage of their home. That left only Mr. Pattison still unaccounted for, but since he had been working at the Acadia Sugar Refinery, whose ten-story tower had been “snapped like a carrot,” Mrs. Pattison had to face the fact that she had probably lost her husband along with two children, and sank deeper into despair.

  But with her parents, her brother, and her sons Gordon and James all surviving, Mrs. Pattison had more motivation than many. After ten days “in hospital” at the YMCA, she joined her sons at her parents’ home in Dartmouth.

  On December 16, Bertha Bond wrote another letter to her fiancé, Sandy, in which she described one family that now had to live in the kitchen, their only sound room. She mentioned one friend was “grieving dreadfully” because her son, who had been working at the Richmond Printing Company, had not yet been found. Another friend had just received the great relief that her daughter was alive and well in Truro.

  Her note then turned to her fiancé. “Those little things you sent me for safe keeping, and all you had given me but my ring are gone, and I did prize them so much.”

  But when her fiancé replied with a Christmas card from the Western Front, she replied that it now ranked as one of her most cherished possessions.

  In 1917, fingerprints and dental records were not commonly used to identify corpses, and DNA hadn’t been discovered. Furthermore, the military knew within days that it had lost hundreds of servicemen, but it didn’t know how to account for them, and the Royal Canadian Navy decided not to publish a list of its deceased.

  Some sailors could be recognized by the documents they carried, including military paybooks and leave passes, indicating they had been in Halifax to enjoy a few days of rest and relaxation before heading back to the trenches. A crewman from the British Calonne, who had just received his honorable discharge from the service and was now free to do whatever he liked with the rest of his life, was labeled victim No. 209. His name, John Hurley, was on the certificate in his pocket.

  Some could be distinguished by their tattoos, like the sailor from the British Picton who had one of Buffalo Bill’s head on the back of his right hand, and another of a serpent and a butterfly on the top of his right arm. These helped to determine that he was twenty-five-year-old Charles Dunn from Scotland.

  But even such direct means often fell short. Another sailor had a flag of Norway tattooed over his heart, alongside a female figure. On his right arm, he had a horseshoe and the words “Sailor’s Grave” and “Good Luck.” Despite such telling marks, he was never identified, perhaps because anyone who might have seen those marks had also been killed.

  Even with the new vulcanized asbestos dog tags British soldiers had been issued in 1916 and 1917, identification could still be difficult, and identifying civilians was much harder. A boy of about seven had carried a Canadian soldier’s coat button, another marked “N.S. Forces,” and a shoulder insignia, CANADA, the kind of souvenirs Halifax boys loved to collect during the Great War. The young boy was never identified, which had to be agonizing for his parents—unless the reason was a wider tragedy: there weren’t any relatives left to search for him.

  After holding these corpses for eleven days, pushing the limits of safety, officials decided they needed to bury ninety-five of the unidentified, badly charred bodies. They scheduled a mass funeral for Monday afternoon, December 17, 1917, at the Chebucto Road schoolyard. The weather that day was similar to that of Thursday, December 6: cold, clear, and calm, with the addition of snow-covered streets and a haze that settled over Halifax before the service.

  Three thousand mourners gathered, standing a block deep on each side of the school. Those who still had missing loved ones had to wonder if they were in one of those caskets. The thought might have even brought some peace.

  They needed a funeral to gather as a community and acknowledge all those losses and pay their respects to the dead. This was the first of many, but perhaps the most important. The service they witnessed echoed the kind a platoon of soldiers received overseas after a costly battle.

  Soldiers carried the wreath-covered caskets from the mortuary and laid them in rows on the snow-covered ground, placing the children’s small white caskets closest to the crowd, while the Princess Louise Fusiliers band played the funeral march.

  Each coffin included a plaque recording where the body had been found; the victim’s likely age, sex, hair color, build, distinguishing marks or tattoos, and clothing; the contents of their pockets; and any jewelry they might have been wearing. There was an optimistic decency in this final extra effort. Everyone involved, from the soldiers recovering the bodies and effects to the people recording all they could before burying the remains, had to know that the odds of the corpses being identified were slim, and yet they went to these lengths, outside in cold, miserable conditions, instead of simply bagging the body and moving on, for a simple reason: someone, somewhere was missing this person, and one more scrap of information could make all the difference in identifying a loved one. Those present could take some comfort in knowing everyone had done all they could for the dead and for their families.

  Still, no one could mitigate the sadness of the event. One deceased mother had been found clasping a baby so closely that they could not be separated, so they were placed together in one coffin.

  Even in death, the mourners maintained the divide between Protestants and Catholics as best they could. The Protestant service was conducted first. After the band played “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” with the crowd singing, the Anglican archbishop of Nova Scotia delivered his sermon.

  “It is not by the hand of the Almighty these unfortunate human beings have suffered, but by the mistakes of others,” he said, echoing the sentiment of Reverend Swetnam. The Bishop urged his audience to take care of the children still with them, then ended the service with “Abide with Me.”

  When other helpers fail and comforts flee

  Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me

  The soldiers lifted the caskets onto large trucks, with the Protestant victims sent to the Fairview Cemetery off Windsor, where most of the Titanic victims had been buried, and the Catholic remains heading to Mount Olivet on Mumford Street. Both caravans were preceded by a band playing “The Dead March in Saul.”

  The dead march in Saul

  Blood must be shed

  Now time for eternal rest

  The reign of terror is coming to an end now

  They loaded the caskets on trucks and flat wagons. When they realized they had too many caskets and too few motors, a policeman commandeered horse-drawn sleighs, whose drivers were hard-pressed to decline. With caskets stacked two and three high on trucks and sleighs, the dignitaries and citizens walked solemnly behind to the cemeteries.

  The Morning Chronicle reported, “No such procession had ever trod the streets of this city, and the prayer of all people here, of all creeds and no creed, must be, ‘God grant so sad a sight may never be witnessed here again.’”

  Wherever the unidentified were interred, their stories were buried with them.

  The ninety-five unidentified victims were only a fraction of those the Mortuary Committee had to address. For two solid weeks fifty soldiers were assigned the task of burying the dead, right up to Christmas Eve. On the chance that the unidentified victims might be identified later, they used the same numbers to hold the victims’ effects to mark slabs at the head of the graves and inside the coffins, with a chart recording all the information they had.

  Thus, by Christmas, hundreds of lives had been reduced to numbers.

  Chapter 35

  The Inquiry

  December 13, 1917–February 4, 1918

  Haligonians still wanted to know what happened in the har
bor that day, and to to hold people to account.

  The Canadian and British legal systems pursued this question over the next two and a half years during four judicial tribunals: the Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry, which convened on December 13, 1917; a trial in Halifax, starting in April 1918; an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa in March 1919; and finally an appeal to the Privy Council in London in January 1920.

  The first of these, the Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry, was automatically opened whenever a serious accident occurred in the harbor. Its mission was to determine what caused the collision and to provide recommendations to ensure it didn’t happen again. But because Mont-Blanc’s attorney and the judge assigned to the case perceived it as a dress rehearsal for the trial that was bound to follow, they approached the Inquiry as a practice trial, less interested in discovering what went wrong and how to fix it than in assigning blame.

  The objective pursuit of truth was impeded by the fact that Imo’s captain, Haakon From, and Harbour Pilot William Hayes had both been killed when the tsunami tossed Imo toward Tufts’ Cove, and that the captain and crew of Mont-Blanc were French. The tension between British-Canadians and French-Canadians goes back to the first European settlers and came to a fever pitch in the 1910s, with the French Liberals campaigning for Reciprocity and against conscription, and the English Conservatives opposing them on both issues, which threatened to tear the country apart. Add to this the persistent rumors that Captain Le Médec’s last-second decision to cut across Imo’s bow was actually intentional, designed to create the collision, fire, and explosion that followed, and the men of Mont-Blanc clearly had their work cut out for them when it came to public opinion.