In 1901 33,000 men and 9,500 women worked at industrial jobs throughout the Maritime region. Trade unions came into existence and grew in influence and authority to enhance the rights and wages of these workers. Confliclts, including bloody strikes that looked like open warfare – class warfare – erupted as the interests of workers and the company owners proved to be in direct opposition. a
The population in rural areas continued to decline as Nova Scotians moved into towns and cities, except in a few areas like the Annapolis Valley where apples were grown and then successfully marketed to far-flung parts of the British Empire. New progressive ideas found their way into many areas of agriculture, leading to the expansion of the Agricultural College in Truro and modernization of dairy and vegetable farms. But these efforts were not enough to keep young men and women from moving toward the brighter lights of the city, lured by the promise of progress, progress, progress.
Social and health reformers of the first part of the century concerned themselves with trying to eliminate alcoholism, smallpox, tuberculosis and venereal diseases. Tuberculosis alone was killing off at least 2,000 people per year in the region. A provincial TB sanatorium was set up in Kentville in 1903, the first of its kind in the country.
The momentum of industrial change and social reform had finally caught up to Nova Scotia during this first decade but would not bloom into the full promise of everyone’s expectations of health and wealth. Much of the ownoership of the new industries was now outside of the region. Battle lines were being drawn between workers and their capitalist bosses and nowhere would the fighting be bloodier than in the coal-mining towns of Cape Breton.
Social reformers of the new century would continue with efforts to rescue the poor, curb drunkenness and end cruelty to women and children. They also called for better education, juvenile courts and improved city planning. They boldly hoped to improve the morals of Nova Scotian communities, too, by ending prostitution, pornography and even public swearing. Women were vitally active in these reform movements and it led to empowerment in other areas of education and employment as well. One ebullient Halifax feminist, Edith Archibald, stood before a cheering crowd in December of 1912 and announced, “Women of Nova Scotia! You stand today in the growing light of an early dawn of the most wondrous epoch that shall ever be.”
As women were celebrating their new-found rights, boosters in the business community kept touting the advantages of industrializationn, with little regard for the fact that they were turning over the keys to the Maritime kingdom to outsiders who might not have their best interests at heart.
Gearing Up for War
Near the end of July 1914, a new enthusiasm swept through the region as Canada was being drawn into the war in Europe. The patriotic fervour recently induced by the African Boer War was stirred up again. Soldiers were shuttled from Halifax to Sydney and on to Glace Bay to protect the Marconi wireless station there. This one small incident prompted the Halifax Herald to predict that Nova Scotia was about to be sucked into a war of such proportions that it would affect the lives of everyone in the province, even people living in Cape Breton, and far from the centre of military activity in Halifax. a
In May of the following year, Halifax Harbour was already mined and soldiers of the Twenty-sixth Nova Scotia Battalion were aboard a converted Cunard steamship heading for battle in France. Many of the high-spirited men aboard felt that they were heading off on the greatest adventure of their lives, but many would return to this same harbour disillusioned and shattered physically or mentally from gruesome battles they were totally unprepared for.
Nova Scotians were unified in the war preparations as never before. Unemployment in many parts of the province disappeared almost overnight as industry geared up for war production and businesses prepared to provide services and supplies for soldiers. More than one Halifax entrepreneur would guiltily admit that the catastrophe in Europe inspired his sorrow but this would not stop him from making a serious profit.
One man who reaped considerable financial rewards from the war was Thomas Cantley of the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company. In 1914, he geared up his shaky steel plant in Pictou County for making top-notch military ammtunition. By 1916, he was manufacturing 300,000 shells a month at a fair profit. The war effort had far-reaching economic spin-offs for fishermen and farmers, the lumber industry and even builders of wooden ships. Economtic optimism and patriotism melded together. Strikes declined dramatically and productivity increased. *
As always, war would be good for Halifax, the city founded on military need. Unfortunately, there was a heavy price to be paid for the economic upswing. Death and destruction would not be limited to the battlefields of France. Halifax would feel the full impact of the war right here at home.
Chapter 33
Chapter 33
Subs, Spies and Seventeen Million Tons of Cargo
Military activity in Halifax had been on the decline since the British pulled out their naval forces in 1906. As historian Joan Payzant puts it, “The Citadel, the Dockyard, the forts, and the batteries on the outskirts fell asleep, except for a few soldiers who were little more than caretakers.” The city and much of the rest of Nova Scotia would soon come back to full alert when war was declared in August of 1914.
As the Canadian government centred its attentions on the war, money, men and machines poured into Halifax, the focal point for defence and embarkation of men and supplies to Europe. Submarine nets were stretched across the harbour. The water between Point Pleasant and McNab’s Island was seeded with mines, while all manner of small boats, including fishing craft, were coaxed into use for mine-sweeping.
Canadian troop ships loaded up men at Pier 2 and they were sent off to a war they could little comprehend. Haligonians waved goodbye to Canada’s young men, still healthy and in one piece and then, months later, returned to the harbourside to greet the survivors and also the casualties – the victims of this new technologically advanced warfare. Camp Hill Military Hospital opened in 1917 to help deal with the overflow of war casualties.
The same returning ships also brought along prisoners of war, who were relegated to the cold stone cellblocks of the Citadel or the prison on Melville Island, where now stands the genteel Armdale Yacht Club. One of the more famous guests of the Citadel prison during these years was Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who predictably had little positive to say afterwards about his prison days in Halifax or Amherst. n
There were persistent rumours of German spies walking the streets of Halifax and news of German subs within a stone’s throw of the coast. Nova Scotian German families who had lived here for generations were often snubbed or viewed with suspicion. In my own coastal community of Lawrencetown, if a local resident with a German last name was seen standing on the headland gazing off to sea, he might openly be accused of spying or signalling those elusive German U-boats.
Submarines were a constant threat to shipping, and in 1917 a monumental effort was made to reduce the losses by sending ships across the Atlantic from Canada in protected convoys. Halifax was the perfect staging area for corralling a large number of ships in Bedford Basin. The ships then proceeded under escort across the open Atlantic. Between August and November of that year, over fifty convoys with more than 500 ships steamted out of Halifax for Europe. From a commodity point of view, it was a spectacular feat, with something like seventeen million tons of cargo moving in and out of Halifax.
The Hourglass Harbour
When the U.S. declared war on Germany in 1917, the U.S. Navy became a frequent visitor to the harbour. An American sea-plane base was also established in Eastern Passage.
The Halifax-Dartmouth ferry service, the lifeline between the people on each side of the harbour, was working well over capacity, jam-packed with civilians, soldiers and military vehicles. Ships often blocked the ferry lanes and there were at least two collisions between ferries and large ships. Well before the big boom of the Halifax Explosion, boats and ships were bumping into eac
h other in the impossibly heavy traffic.
There is a long list of bumps and scrapes, near misses, close calls and downright smash-ups in the harbour during World War I, but nothing rivals the collision that set off the Halifax Explosion of December 6, 1917.
The harbour has been described as an hourglass in shape. The main part of the harbour on the ocean side is ten kilometres long and two kilometres wide. The Narrows is about one kilometre in length and a mere 450 metres across. This opens up into Bedford Basin, six kilometres long and four kilometres wide. The Basin is where the convoys could safely assemble, well-*protected from anything beyond the harbour mouth. Any incoming vessels would have to stop for clearance between Lighthouse Bank and McNab’s Island. If everything went by the book, ships would pass in or out of the Narrows in a safe and orderly fashion. But as it turned out, the Narrows was not nearly wide enough to allow for human error.
A Grave Miscalculation
The Mont Blanc was a ship destined for Bordeaux, France, loaded to the gunwales with explosive cargo that included guncotton, 200 tons of TNT, 2,300 tons of wet and dry picric acid, and 35 tons of benzol in thin steel barrels loaded at the last minute lest any cargo space go unused. The Mont Blanc was not a new ship but she was considered serviceable in wartime when everything afloat was being put into the war effort. Owned by a French transport company, she was captained by Aimé Le Medec, with a crew of less than forty. Loaded with her tonnage of deadly cargo in New York, she was too slow to join the convoy going to Europe from there, so she headed north to Halifax, arriving on December 5.
A local pilot with twenty-four years’ experience, Francis Mackey, came on board to usher her into the harbour. He didn’t understand much French but had a good record of never having been involved in an accident. After being checked out by the naval authorities, the Mont Blanc was given permission to move through the Narrows to the Basin. t
Leaving the Basin that morning and headed for New York was the Imo. The Imo was a Belgian relief ship of Norwegian registry and had once been a passenger ship for the White Star Line. Now she was referred to as a “tramp steamer,” but she was in good enough condition to be called into service for the war. Her captain was Haakon Fron and the local pilot was William Hayes. She should have left the previous day but there had been delays with the loading of coal.
The chain of events leading to the disaster began when an American tramp steamer entered the Narrows on the wrong side. Behind this ship was the Stella Maris, a 36.5-metre-long tug towing two barges. The Imo was on its way out to sea. The Stella Maris turned to avoid the oncoming Imo and found herself heading for the Dartmouth shore and directly into the path of the incoming Mont Blanc. There are conflicting reports as to who did what when both ships realized that a collision was imminent, but whatever the case, the Imo ended up ramming into the bow of the Mont Blanc. Archibald MacMechan, who had the honour of writing up the official reports on the ensuing city-wide disaster, suggests that the pilot of the Imo gave a critical order to change direction – in English – but it wasn’t understood by the French crewmen. MacMechan reports that “the Imo came with great violence against the starboard bow of the Mont Blanc and crushed the plating to a depth of ten feet.” Sparks from the collision set off a fire almost immediately. “Dense clouds of smoke rose into the still morning air, shot througah with flashes of fierce red flame . . .”
The crew of the Mont Blanc might have been the only ones to realize just how dangerous the situation was. They abandoned ship and rowed their lifeboats like madmen toward Dartmouth as their vessel began to drift toward Halifax’s blue-collar Richmond neighbourhood on the other shore. People along the waterfront in Halifax and Dartmouth could see the fire and knew there was trouble. Crowds gathered to watch.
Firefighters were ready to respond and sprung into action, while the noble captain of the Stella Maris left her barges and put a line onto the Mont Blanc to tow her away. HMS Highflyer, anchored nearby, sent a whaler and seven men to help. Also handy was HMCS Niobe, a sort of floating dormitory described by MacMechan as resembling “Noah’s Ark.” Men were dispatched in a tender to help in any way they could.
At this point, good intentions were not enough to avoid the inevitable gargantuan blast just seconds before 9:05 a.m. that would go down in the books as the single largest man-made explosion in the history of the earth until the dropping of the Hiroshima atom bomb. Novelist Hugh MacLennan was living in Halifax at the time and documented the horrific event in his novel Barometer Rising. He writes of the earthquake, “air-concussion” an*d giant wave produced by the blast he describes as creating a “sound beyond hearing.” The water opened up and the rock beneath the harbour transferred the shock onto the city, where the ground “rocked and reverberated, pavements split and houses swayed as the earth trembled.” Up above ground, “the forced wall of air struck against Fort Needham and Richmond Bluff and shaved them clean.”
According to Archibald MacMechan, the walloping blast vaporized the Mont Blanc in a “spray of metallic fragments.” Metal shards rained down around the harbour and in the city along with a black oily precipitation. The ship’s cannon was launched through the air and crashed down more or less intact three kilometres away on the Dartmouth side near Albro Lake, while her anchor went the other direction, landing even further away on the far side of the Halifax Peninsula beyond the Northwest Arm. The Stella Maris and her poor crew were catapulted into the air and crashed down near Pier 6. All who had been aboard were killed.
The Highflyer and Niobe suffered serious damage but immediately sent crews ashore to help fight fires and treat victims of the debacle. At the sugar refinery wharf, longshoremen were unloading a ship named the Picton when the shock wave slammed into them, killing most, shredding their clothing and blackening their bodies with the oil-laden rain. Ships all around the harbour sustained damage. The Imo was shoved aground near Tuft’s Cove in Dartmouth. Amazingly, there were survivors aboard, including the helmsman and the ship’s dog, who refused to leave and howled long after the disaster.
In the Path of the Shock Wave
A hundred kilometres away in Truro people heard the blast. Plates were rattled in Charlottetown, P.E.I., and houses shook in Sydney, 3B20 kilometres away. A mushroom cloud, not dissimilar to a nuclear blast, vaulted three kilometres up into the sky. Some say the blast momentarily swept clean to the bottom of the harbour, making the harbour floor visible. Rocks were ripped from the bottom and shot up into the sky, only to fall back to earth in what seemed like a deadly meteor shower. The explosion set in motion a wall of water measuring at least four and a half metres high. It crashed up onto the shores of Halifax and swept up the hill of the North End of the city. On its way, it tore up piers and pilings, smashing tugs and small boats, depositing them on the lower streets. As the water drained back toward the harbour, it carried hundreds of unwary victims to a watery grave.
Citadel Hill acted as a barrier to buffer the effect of the explosion and somewhat protected the well-to-do families living in the South End of Halifax. But the working-class North End, the Richmond area in particular, had no such protection. Very few houses were left standing. Entire families were killed, some trapped in collapsing houses, others caught in the raging fires that ensued as stoves burning coal or oil tumbled over. All around the city, people were blinded or otherwise injured by flying glass as windows shattered.
The North End railway yards were in the direct path of the shock wave. Railroad engines were picked up like toys and tossed. Rails were ripped up and the steel bent into odd and fantastic shapes. The railway station had a glass roof which collapsed onto passengers waiting below.
The collateral damage of the event would take weeks, months and in some cases years to repair. Electric and phone lines were down. Gas was cut off from the North End to prevent further fires and explosions. A huge voluðme of natural gas was lost when the enormous holding tank near the South End of town had massive metal plates sheared off. Miraculously, the vapour did not ignite,
but rose upward into the atmosphere, sparing most of the South End from a fate similar to that of the North. The sugar refinery near the Narrows, however, was decimated, collapsing on its employees or trapping them in the fire, as “syrup-soaked timbers” were torched.
“Dartmouth in Ruins”
Miracles of survival abound in the midst of this horror. Two ferries were making the crossing at the time of the blast and, while some passengers were injured by flying glass, no one was killed. Dorothy Chisholm was on the ferry, making her way from Dartmouth to work at the Royal Bank in Halifax that morning. She remembers first seeing the fire on the Mont Blanc and then feeling the blast, but the ferry apparently kept right on its way to Halifax. She reported for work but was told to go home, and on the way back, observed fires throughout the North End. Joan Payzant, in Like a Weaver’s Shuttle, logs an account of great understatement by one ferry worker, Charles Pearce, who entered the following into his diary:
Dec. 6: Weather Fine
Mr. W. Pearce, Machinist on Chebucto until the Great Explosion, then went home to fasten up windows and doors.
Frank Green – Extra help on Chebucto until 9 a.m. went home badly hurt by the explosion.
Ferry steamers kept running all night. Ferry Boats and property badly damaged.
City of Dartmouth in ruins. Everybody boarding up windows and doors.
Loyal to their jobs, many ferry workers saw the importance of their task to keep people moving that day and stayed on rather than going home to check on their own families.
Dartmouth too took a heavy hit. Companies such as the Starr Manufacturing Company were destroyed or extensively damaged. The small Mi’kmaq community of Turtle Grove in Tuft’s Cove took the full force of the blast and disappeared.
Human Pain, Human Compassion
At the Royal Naval College in the Dockyard, a class overlooking the harbour had been watching the burning *Mont Blanc when the window shattered and sprayed glass into the faces of the unwary students. While the njunior class on the far side of the building escaped serious injury, the building shook hard as wood and plaster smashed down around them. Cadet Orde, Petty Officer King and Captain MacKenzie received serious damage to their eyes from the flying glass.
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