The entire neighborhood of Richmond required a complete rebuild. But before the city broke ground, leaders knew they had to sell the neighborhood as a place people would want to live. Given the city’s failed experiment erecting a “tent village” on the North Commons, where no one wanted to stay after the explosion, they learned their lesson: they would have to do more than simply replace wooden homes with wooden homes.
They decided to build the homes and apartments out of a new material called Hydrostone, manufactured across the Narrows in Dartmouth, by blasting bits of granite into cement with water. This produces a very strong, slightly sparkly variety of cinder block.
Next, they decided to eliminate a few streets, rename a large run of Gottingen to Novalea, and add a diagonal artery cutting through it. Taking advantage of the chance to remake the largely working-class neighborhood, with many unpaved roads, Colonel Low’s men created parks; tree-lined, paved boulevards; and added alleyways to make it easier for milkmen to deliver and garbagemen to pick up.
They built at a furious pace “one apartment an hour” aided by the Massachusetts Temporary Relief Fund, which continued to support the project for five years. By March 1, 1918, less than three months after 325 acres of Halifax had been blown flat, Colonel Low’s group had built 328 new homes and repaired 3,000 others. The neighborhood is now called the Hydrostone, a popular, up-and-coming area.
This remarkable restoration moved the normally modest Canadians to produce a poster in 1919 boasting of Halifax’s rapid recovery.
“As though over night, the North End has shaken off its incubus of holocaust,” the poster said. “Ruin and desolation have given place to the new order. A new city has risen out of the ashes of the old. We rub our eyes and look again—but the vision does not fade. The new city remains—and grows, building by building, street by street, amid the tumultuous music of a thousand hammers, the wholesome discord of a thousand saws.”
The very renaissance movement Haligonians had struggled to start before the Great War had now occurred in less than a year.
The most anticipated federal election in Canadian history, which would decide who would be prime minister, had been scheduled for December 17, 1917. But due to the explosion, the government decided to postpone the election in Nova Scotia only, while the rest of the country cast their ballots as planned, delivering Prime Minister Borden’s Conservative Party a ringing victory, and with it, securing the policy of conscription for the remainder of the war. The results rendered Nova Scotia’s postponed ballot moot, but it’s clear that the province would have voted overwhelmingly for its native son and supported conscription and the war it would fuel.
Wilfred Owen, the soldier-poet who wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est” while being treated for shell shock before returning to the trenches, was killed on November 4, 1918. His mother received the telegram informing her of his death exactly one week later, on November 11, 1918—Armistice Day—while the church bells rang out, celebrating the end of the war.
The devastation, even now, is hard to grasp. The Great War cost an estimated 17 million lives and wounded another 20 million, for a total of 37 million, or more than a third of the population of the United States at the time.
While the Americans’ decision to join the Allied Forces late in the war helped end a three-year stalemate, it did not give the Allies a decisive victory—but it did protect them from defeat and strengthen their position in the Versailles peace negotiations that followed.
To say that the ripples of the Great War are still with us today is to understate the case considerably. World War I created a new world order, elevated America’s role in it, and remade modern warfare. Its effects are traceable in a thousand places, but perhaps most significantly, the Ottoman, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires all collapsed, creating a vacuum that the most desperate elements would fill.
When World War II arrived, the Halifax Explosion would play a central role in the war’s conclusion, though it’s been forgotten outside Nova Scotia since. At the time the explosion occurred, no one grasped the full significance of the event, but scientists soon caught up. Even with the low estimate of 2,000 dead, the explosion killed four times more than the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and eight times more than the Chicago Fire of 1871. When experts rank the world’s worst explosions, they generally consider five criteria: the quantity of explosives involved, the force of the blast, the area devastated, the value of property destroyed, and the number of casualties. Taking all these into account, Halifax was the biggest man-made explosion the world had ever seen until August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt put together an all-star team of scientists to build the first atomic bomb, code-named the Manhattan Project, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer in Los Alamos, New Mexico. To estimate the effects of their bomb on Hiroshima, they had only one worthy precursor to compare: Halifax. They knew the weapon they were creating would possess unparalleled power. The trials showed them that. But they didn’t know what it would do to actual buildings and people. For that, Oppenheimer and his team studied Halifax frequently and closely. In 1942, Oppenheimer set up a conference at the University of California–Berkeley, where he extrapolated the data from Halifax to estimate that the atomic bomb would create three to five times more damage, and his calculations would prove roughly correct.
It speaks to the unprecedented magnitude of the Halifax explosion that it would take a full twenty-eight years, 130,000 employees led by a team of world-class scientists, a budget of $2 billion, and the considerable advantage of atomic power to build a bomb that would prove to be only three to five times more powerful than that which a crew of stevedores in Gravesend Bay, New York, had unwittingly assembled in a few days in 1917.
Oppenheimer’s work must necessarily affect how we look at Halifax. If nothing was learned from Halifax, it could be dismissed as a horrible event, on a par with the Johnstown Flood, the San Francisco earthquake, and the Galveston hurricane—still fascinating, but with little application to today’s world. The Halifax explosion, in contrast, alerted generals and scientists to the potential of building the world’s first weapons of mass destruction, and underscored the obvious need to take every precaution with those weapons, including preventing nuclear proliferation after the war. The need has never been greater, with nuclear security eroding at a time when nations can produce 50-megaton bombs 17,000 times more powerful than the Halifax explosion.
Another concept that World War II would popularize: attacking civilian populations to demoralize them sufficiently to end a war. This was the idea behind carpet-bombing Dresden and dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The irony is this: the first city wracked by the collateral damage of war—Halifax—did not bend but came back stronger and more fiercely patriotic.
But danger in various forms has always been with us, and always will be. For the vast majority of us, who stare out our windows as we sip our coffee in the morning, the bigger lesson of Halifax is how to respond if the worst occurs. The explosion should have shredded the social fabric that kept a civil society like Halifax’s intact. If you wanted to walk into someone’s house or business and take things, there wasn’t much stopping you. But with society’s infrastructure decimated, something more noble rose up to replace it: the primal instinct to take care of one another, especially the old and the young, and give them shelter, food, medical help, and simple kindness—from sending ships and trains from Boston to insisting that needier patients go first to cleaning the scalps of two kids during a haircut—with no thought of being paid back.
When the laws no longer applied, basic human decency proved even stronger.
After the Halifax explosion the survivors demonstrated the incredible human capacity for courage and compassion, reservoirs that we might be able to call upon to save a stranger’s life at a moment’s notice. If that day ever comes, we can only hope to respond as well as the good people of Halifax did.
PART VIII
FACING THE FUTURE
Chapter 41
New Lives
After the wounded returned from the hospitals, the families identified their relatives, and the displaced found new homes, they still struggled to build new lives.
The Reverend William Swetnam and his daughter, Dorothy, moved back from his friend’s home in Dartmouth to Halifax, where they stayed for two years while the reverend served his flock. But Halifax proved too heavy with sad memories, so they decided to move to Truro. There he ministered to a new flock, remarried, and fathered another child. It was not the life they had had, and it never would be. But it was a good, full life, with a family that would sustain Dorothy into a happy adulthood.
The Pattison boys had lost their home, their father, their little brother, Alan, and their sister, Catherine. The three remaining Pattisons—Gordon, James, and their mother—stayed with her parents in Dartmouth. But Gordon felt the need to get away from their history in Halifax, so he moved in with an uncle in the tiny town of Granville Ferry, which sits on the Annapolis River 120 miles away, for several months that spring.
Mrs. Pattison and James stayed in Dartmouth, where James attended Hawthorne School. He could handle the work, and the students were friendly enough, but he missed his friends and family. He never fully settled in at his new school, but he studied hard and excelled in mechanics and technical drawing.
Archie and Millicent Upham had lost their mother and three siblings. Their father, Charles Upham, who worked the night shift at the Richmond Railway, moved into a new house on their old block with Archie. Because it was hard enough to raise one child working the night shift, Millicent stayed with the Rasleys and their children, Reg and Annie, who had also lost an eye. Both Millicent and Annie required additional treatments before they could attend school. In the fall of 1919, the Tower Road School opened a new classroom called the Special Class for Sight Saving, which both girls attended.
The new Richmond School opened in 1919, but Archie decided to attend the equally close and new Bloomfield School, joining his cousin Reg Rasley. With all the changes they faced, it felt good to go to school with a trusted friend.
The Driscolls moved to South Uniacke, about forty-five minutes away. Each morning, Noble and his sister walked half a mile along the railway line to go to a one-room village school in Etter’s Settlement. Noble’s teacher and classmates grew weary of Noble’s frequent observation, “In Halifax, we didn’t do it like that.”
Noble got his wish in 1919 when the Driscolls moved into one of the larger houses in the new Hydrostone neighborhood. He attended the rebuilt Richmond School, still run by Principal Huggins, despite losing his daughter Merle when the old school collapsed.
Noble was doing well enough in school, but one day Principal Huggins, who also taught the upper grades, pulled him aside. “You would be better off getting a job,” Huggins said, giving odd advice for a principal. “I hardly have time to teach, and you are not learning anything new.”
That night, after Noble talked it over with his father, he decided to take a job as a delivery boy for Creighton’s store, the very place where Cam Creighton had warned him not to go any closer to the burning ship—advice that probably saved his life.
Shortly after Barbara Orr moved in with her cousins in Richmond, they had to rebuild the house. Even the new house was crowded, but her uncle found “a place for all of us . . . They were wonderful people, my goodness. My uncle was a wonderful man. A wonderful family to grow up with.”
Her cousins felt like siblings to her, especially Gladys, who was about her age. With Richmond School being rebuilt, the girls decided to attend the Halifax Ladies’ College on Pleasant Street. But the girls had been there for only one month when Gladys confessed to Barbara, “Did we ever make a mistake! I hate this place. Do you?”
“I do, too,” Barbara admitted, “but we made our own choice. We agreed to come here. We’ll just have to stick it out now.”
If there was one thing they had mastered, it was sticking with it, and they did. They eventually grew very fond of the school and got their degrees. Their resilience had paid off again.
When the doctors at Camp Hill Hospital saw Barbara’s ankle, they told her she would never play sports again, or do much of anything on that joint. She quietly set out to prove them wrong. “For a long time, I’d walk along, and zoom, I’d almost fall. [But] it got better.
“The one thing I could do was dance,” she said. “I’ve got balance that you wouldn’t believe! I’ve gone figure skating, played tennis—every game—soccer.”
From her family’s estate, Orr received $10,000. In 1920, when the Halifax Explosion Memorial Bell Tower was unveiled at Fort Needham, Orr donated her $10,000 to pay for the bells.
With all four Richmond churches destroyed, they had to make do. When the United Memorial Church opened in 1921, the Orrs, the Driscolls, the Uphams, and their cousins the Rasleys all attended, occasionally joined by the Pattisons, who took the ferry over from Dartmouth.
Barbara Orr donated a carillon for the church in memory of her family, and had their names engraved on the bell. When the church was formally dedicated in April 1921, Barbara was asked to play a hymn on the bells.
“Suppose I make a mistake?” she worried. “It will be heard as far away as Dartmouth.”
She played anyway—and it was beautiful.
Chapter 42
The Accidental Doctor
A few days after the explosion, Ernest Barss returned to his parents’ home in Wolfville a changed man.
After witnessing two of the greatest tragedies in human history within a year, and getting the chance to provide real help to the victims in Halifax, he knew that was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life: help those who needed it most by becoming a doctor.
It was a big decision, but doing it would be much harder.
When he shared his dream of going to medical school with his father, John Howard Barss said, “I have put you through college and do not intend to put you through medical school.”
Ernest Barss had three problems: prerequisites, health, and money—not a great place for a twenty-five-year-old to start. More than a year after getting hit by a German shell, he still could not walk without a cane and a lot of pain, and he dragged his left foot behind him. His parents thought this once vibrant, confident, athletic man would be an invalid spending his days in their home, minding their grocery store, which looked the most likely outcome when he first returned.
Ernest’s solution to all his physical problems was a very Canadian one: keep going anyway. The winter of 1918, his first back in Nova Scotia, he made himself go down to the rink every day, put on his old skates, and then skate “until the tears ran down his face,” his mother told a friend. When the ice thawed that spring, he took up golf to force himself to walk up and down 5 miles of hills. Despite his lame leg, Barss soon achieved a golf handicap of two, just a couple of strokes from the top echelon. Barss’s ability to walk improved day by day.
On March 9, 1919, almost three years after getting hit by the shell, Barss reported to Camp Hill Hospital for a checkup. On the Consultant’s Report, the examining physician, Dr. Birt, wrote, “I am of the opinion that he is in fair condition. Complains of insomnia, nervousness, and discomfort . . . There is some tremor of his hands, some exaggerated knee jerks [and] ankle jerks.” His spine had healed fairly well, but he still experienced numbness in his foot and leg.
Dr. Birt added this note: “Some residual ‘Neurasthenia,’ ” a condition characterized by physical and mental exhaustion, often including headaches, insomnia, and irritability, believed to be caused by depression, emotional stress, or conflict—what we would probably call post-traumatic stress disorder—“which,” Dr. Birt concluded, “resulted from being buried in explosion.”
Barss’s solution to his psychological problems would be the same: keep going anyway. And so he did, focusing on medical school as his next mission.
D
uring the last year of the war he continued selling Victory Bonds, then took another government job trying to match handicapped veterans with potential employers, of which there were thousands. That group included Barss, but he was looking to help others.
For fun, he took singing lessons from a Boston woman who escaped the city’s summer heat in Nova Scotia, like many Bostonians. A favorite was “I’ll Sing Thee Sweet Songs of Araby,” which finished with “And all my soul shall strive to wake / Sweet wonder in thine eyes.” He was good enough to be invited to join the notable Chautauqua circuit, which gave concerts from town to town, but he had to decline. Because of the chlorine gas he’d inhaled during the war, he “couldn’t raise a note before noon.”
Barss didn’t have the prerequisites to go to medical school, nor the money to pay for it. Here, Barss got lucky, as his uncle Andrew Townson, the man Barss had written about the Halifax explosion, decided to help out. Townson had arrived in the new country a poor, eleven-year-old immigrant from England and worked his way up from stockboy at Sibley, Lindsay & Curr, a major department store in Rochester, New York, to become its president by age thirty, in addition to serving as chairman of the Rochester Board of Education and as a trustee of Vassar College, while living in an impressive home he’d bought from George Eastman, of Eastman-Kodak fame.
Family lore has it that Uncle Andrew gave Ernest $100 to enroll at the University of Michigan in 1919, back when that was enough to get started. How Ernest Barss picked Michigan, however, remains a mystery.
“Darned if I know why he went to the University of Michigan,” his son, Dr. Joseph Andrew Barss, told me in 1999, “but it’s always been a first-class school.”
Perhaps Ernest’s American cousin Harold Barss, who graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1914 and became an instructor in surgery, persuaded him to come.
The Great Halifax Explosion Page 33