Those who still had an income to pay taxes were fearful that there was something intrinsically wrong with somebody getting something for nothing, even if it was a scant amount that barely allowed for survival. As a result, work programs were instituted for those on relief, forcing them to cut wood as fuel for their tax-paying neighbours. In the cities they might labour on new streets or public building projects.
One of the more innovative and practical efforts to help out the destitute was a back-to-the-land movement. In 1932, Nova Scotia commandeered about 600 unused farms and allowed poor families to take them over as a means of supporting themselves. Two-thirds of these families had stayed with their farms by 1938, but in the end only twenty-four families were allowed to gain title to the land, having fulfilled their obligations to the province.
Everybody was hurting for money and work was scarce. The Nova Scotian Mi’kmaq people, who had been robbed of their lands and deprived of traditional hunting and fishing grounds, lived through desperate times as the poorest of the poor. Nova Scotian Blacks found themselves victimized anew as poor whites went looking for scapegoats to blame for their sorry situation. In 1937, a mob of 400 white Nova Scotians in Trenton demolishend a Black family’s home that they claimed was in a “white neighbourhood.” This despicable act of violent racism resulted in only one arrest: the Black man who owned the destroyed house was accused of assaulting a white woman as he defended his home.
War to the Rescue
Once again, war was good news of sorts for Nova Scotians when it was declared in September of 1939. Halifax would be open for business in a big way and spin-offs would be felt in small towns around the province. The Thirties were a time of great despair for a large chunk of the North American population, but Nova Scotians were painfully aware that, for them, things had been even worse. Confederation and the loss of traditional sea links and self-reliant avenues of living had left all of Nova Scotia in a highly vulnerable position. None of the efforts of the federal government had been able to heal the wounds of the loss. As the province climbed up out of the economic abyss, a dispassionate observer might well predict that the boom cycle of war could only be temporary. After that, would anything be different? Was there any way back to a future that re-established the prosperity that had come with sailing ships and global sea trade?
Chapter 38
Chapter 38
A City Stretched to Its Limits
In 1941, Admiral S.S. Bonham-Carter called Halifax “probably the most important port in the world.” Perhaps that would be stretching the truth a little, but Halifax had certainly come a long way from its early days of obscurity and insignificance. War had always brought the city back to life and back to work. It also brought with it new demands and new problems to go along with the profits to be reaped by the legitimate and illegitimate profiteers. The Second World War proved no exception.
More than any city in Canada, Halifax had a direct connection to the war in Europe. In the British press, Halifax might simply be referred to as “An Eastern Canadian Port” or in Canada, “An East Coast Port,” as if to mask the exact location of military action involving shipping across the Atlantic. Nonetheless, Germany was well aware of what was going on in Halifax, and for some Haligonians the vulnerability of the city to actual enemy attack was a daily concern, if not a reality.
Halifax was in need of a good war, if things were going to improve. The after-effects of the explosion of 1917 and economic depression of recent years had taken their toll on the city. Halifax was on a downhill slide from the glory days in the past. Historian Graham Metson points out that Halifax “was no longer the wild free city of the nineteenth century.” It was both “poor and puritan,” perhaps the most unhappy of combinations. There was a lack of everything, including entertainment and lodging. To such a sad city would arrive thousands of soldiers and seamen, all getting ready to go off to war. The government in Ottawa didn’t seem to have a handle on the situation at all, as they were more interested in moving the men in and moving them out. It would have been logical to treat Halifax as if it was actually in the war zone, a unique situation unlike any other place in Canada. But that was not the case. If things were less than perfect for servicemen and citizens in Halifax, they would just have to chalk it up to the inconveniences of wartime. Everything would be strained beyond limits, including puritanical notions.
Overcrowded and Out of Sorts
Civilians, among them families of the servicemen, flooded into the city. Almost overnight, the population had doubled to 100,000. There were traffic problems in the harbour, in the air and on the potholed Halifax streets. There were line-ups for everything from food to entertainmnent. One concert at the Forum drew a line-up described as “a mile long and four people deep.”
One of the hotels in town had converted the ground-floor ladies’ lounge into a dormitory with nearly fifty beds, where you could rent a cot for $2.25 a night. Halifax Mayor Donovan blamed much of the problem on the wives and families of military men. He wished they had the good sense to let their men go off to war and not try to tag along as far as they could to the furthest port – Halifax.
F.B. Watt, in writing about the Merchant Navy, described Halifax as “an overcrowded hellhole.” Beyond shoving everyone into every nook and corner, makeshift shacks were thrown together in parks and on the edge of the city. Halifax was a sad, depressing place and for those who saw her only briefly during these years it left an indelible impression as a place you would never want to return to.
Watt says, “Many of the newcomers were sick of combing the slums looking for a place to live, tired of eating bad food in bad restaurants, fed up with being exploited by landlords.” As in the early days of the city, profiteers were everywhere, trying to sell just about everything at inflated prices to the servicemen and other newcomers. There was good money to be made by taking advantage of a bad situation. Aside from the hucksters angd con artists, it seems that almost everybody was cranky about the pressure-cooker life in Halifax. Haligonians saw the loss of whatever dignity the city had held onto through the Depression. New arrivals blamed Halifax folks for being so uncaring. There was anger and tension in the air.
Despite the unifying factor of the war, divisive attitudes prevailed in Halifax. Upper-Canadian snobbery clashed with down-home self-defence and fights broke out. Canadians from away, called “foreigners” by some people lin town, didn’t like being ripped off by locals making a buck off the war, but these locals who had been living quietly but poorly through the Twenties and Thirties now felt invaded and, even worse, unappreciated for their sacrifices in the war effort.
Three Close Calls
Despite the fact that much of Halifax had already been levelled by a major explosion in the First World War, all things considered, it was pretty lucky in avoiding such a disaster this time around. Three “near misses” prove that point.
On April 9, 1942, the British ship Trongate caught fire in the harbour. In her hold were TNT, shells, casings and ammunition. The harbour was bumper to bumper with 200 ships, including ten U.S. Navy vessels and four carriers of U.S. troops. The minesweeper Chedabucto was ordered to fire four-inch shells filled with sand at the waterline of the Trongate to sink her.
Another ship fire broke out in Bedford Basin in November of 1943 aboard the U.S. freighter Volunteer. She was loaded with dynamite, depth charges, magnesium, ammunition and bales of tobacco. While the captain and officers drank and played cards, a fire broke out and burned for two hours before word was received at the Port Defence Office. Most of the crew abandoned ship and those who were left with the drunk captain protested when their ship was boarded by firemen. Commander Owen Robertson and his fire party realized that the decks were getting red-hot from the fire below and expected the ship to blow them all to kingdom come. They valiantly attempted to use the tobacco bales to shield the volatile magnesium barrels from igniting and then they cut holes into the decks to release the explosive gases which had to be ignited with a rifle shot.
(Does this all sound like a crazy scheme to anyone?)
The release of volatile fumes was a success of sorts, sending flames shooting forty feet into the air rather than blowing up the entire ship. Robertson and his men had been hiding behind those tobacco bales at the time iand got off easy. They were only knocked senseless for a mere ten minutes. When he returned to consciousness, Robertson beached the still-burning ship on McNab’s Island, while fireboats continued to pump water on the vessel. There Robertson’s men managed to open the seacocks and sink the ill-fated Volunteer and thus avert disaster.
The third of the major accidents took place on land, at the Bedford Magazine on July 18, 1945, in the Burnside area north of Dartmouth. The five-kilometre-long arsenal compound was a storehouse and transfer point for all manner of explosive cargo and ammunition. When a barge exploded at 6:30 p.m., it set off a series of other blasts along the shoreline. One after another, the blasts could be heard into the night and there was fear that the entire facility might soon go up in one horrendous burst.
Dartmouth was evacuated, as was the North End of Halifax, where people fled once again to the relative security of Citadel Hill and the Wanderers’ Grounds, where baseball games continued despite warnings of impending doom. Ships in the harbour were moved out of harm’s way as far as possible. The force of several of the explosions did structural damage to buildings on both sides of the harbour, but fortunately there was no single cataclysmic blast as in 1917.
An Emotional Powder Keg
During the war, ships travelled in convoys out of Halifax with supplies for the war in Europe. Along with the troop ships and warships went merchant marine vessels with food, oil and munitions. The first convoy left Halifax before war was actually declared. Eighteen ships, escorted by British cruisers and Canadian destroyers, headed out in the late summer of 1939. Convoys of the older and slower vessels would also head off from Sydney in Cape Breton.
Merchant seamen often felt they were never given the credit they deserved in the war effort. They were sometimes called “zombies,” as if to say they were able-bodied men who were avoiding war duty, sometimes even receiving a white feather – a symbol of cowardice – as a gift from a snooty Haligonian. After the war, merchant seamen who risked their lives in crossing the Atlantic were never afforded the benefits that went to military men. Onl*y recently have these men been honoured for their part in helping to win World War II. In 1998, fifty-three years after the end of the war, the Canadian government granted merchant navy seamen full veteran status so they were eligible for various benefits.
Along with all the dangers in Europe, at sea, or even at rest in a floating time bomb in the harbour, there was plenty of trouble ashore. Squabbles broke out frequently between servicemen and townspeople. There were con.flicts between merchant and naval seamen as well, and between regular navy and naval reserves. To complement the fever of war, Halifax was an emotional powder keg waiting for the appropriate match.
Chapter 39
Chapter 39
The Kronprinzen Affair
The war had a trickle-down effect on much of the province, sometimes leading to profit, sometimes pain and sometimes to an exercise in sheer absurdity as illustrated by the following. Attack by U-boats off the coast was9 an ever-present danger for any manner of ship sailing off the coast of Nova Scotia. In July of 1942, a brand spanking new Norwegian ship, the Kronprinzen, was part of a convoy headed from New York to Halifax on its way to Britain. Not much more than 160 kilometres off the coast of Yarmouth, it was hit by two German torpedoes, with one hole reported as being “large enough for a trawl dory to row through.” On board was al cargo of flour, 4,000 tons of steel and cotton bales. Convoy veteran Captain Jorgens was a tough nut to crack and refused to abandon ship and lose the cargo. He called for four tugs, two from Halifax and two from Boston, to come to his rescue as his men worked the pumps and struggled to keep the ship afloat as she lumbered 160 kilometres to a beach at Lower East Pubnico.
Jorgens was shocked to discover that the locals there wanted a fee of sixty cents an hour to help unload the goods. The captain thought this was an outrage and would report that “They all want to get rich off this one job.” Even in those days, sixty cents an hour would not have led to wealth but obviously there was some bad blood between the staunch captain and those people of Pubnico living pretty close to the poverty line. Jorgens decided they couldn’t salvage the flour but refused to give it or even sell it to the locals, so he had his men dump it into the sea – which, of course, seems somewhat illogical, given the trouble they were going to in order to save the cargo. It turned out that Jorgens was just following the orders of the war machine that had decreed such goods could never be used for civilian purposes under any circumstances. The RCMP was brought in to use water hoses to keep everyone away so they could properly dispose of the flour by sinking it. The poverty-stricken but feisty Pubnicans, however, would not relent in this battle for food. They rowed out in their dories, scooped up the bales as they floated by and spirited them away, despite the presence of the Mounties and their water cannons. One wonders what a German U-boat captain would have made of this scene had he been close enough to view it through his periscope. Years later, South Shore writer Evelyn Richardson wrote the tale of this event and noted how such bags of flour would often turn up for sale or circulate for free along the coast that year.
The Kronprinzen episode was only one of many that illustrate a low government regard for the people of rural Nova Scotia in and out of war. The ship itself was towed off to Halifax, then New York and sailed again.
Just Thirsty
Despite its role as a city “in the war zone,” Halifax never sustained all-out catastrophe or invasion during World War II – that is, not until the war in Europe ended in May of 1945. On the seventh and eighth of that month, Halifax was ripped apart by the Canadian military. It would be known as the VE Day Rriot, part celebration, part outrageous attack upon the city that had been a not-so-hospitable home for men going to and from war.
Five million dollars in damage was the price tag. Three people died in the battle and 211 were arrested. More than 500 businesses were looted. Police cars and streetcars were burned or smashed. Liquor store windo*ws were shattered and the shelves were cleaned out. Up against the rioting soldiers and sailors (and whoever else cared to take advantage of the situation) were 540 Halifax policemen, 169 army police, 74 air force personnel, 168 navy shore patrolmen and 43 RCMP. *
Earlier that year, Admiral Leonard Murray had spoken of a plan for celebrations should the war be over in Europe and, by April, the Halifax North Civic Association asked the city to gear up for the possibility of a big bulowout if the war ended. Mayor Allan Butler asked the eleven theatres to stay open, but they all wanted to be closed tight when the day arrived. Of the fifty-five restaurants in town, only sixteen were open on May 7 and all but a handful were closed by the next day. There was no place in town for most men to eat. Edna Hobin remembers her mother answering the door to three polite sailors offering to pay for a meal. She fed them corned beef and cabbage but refused their money. Other servicemen were not so lucky or not so polite. Many must have been outraged that “they” had just won a war and the city of Halifax wasn’t even willing to give them a place to buy a meal.
Rumours had been circulating that once the war was over, the men would have revenge on Halifax for all its shortcomings. Poor old Halifax would take a beating for all of Ottawa’s lack of concern and the bureaucratic bungling that went hand in hand with it. As novelist Hugh Garner puts it, “Though everyone in authority knew it was coming, little was done to prevent the crisis brewing.” *
Edna Hobin remembers watching “hundreds” of navy and civilian men carrying cases of liquor, although she remembers them as being “non-threatening,” just thirsty.
Things started to get weird on the night of May 7 when the bar at Stadacona closed at 9 p.m. Men poured out of there, boarded streetcars and went downtown – destination: the liquor stores on H
ollis and Sackville streets. Nobody was buying. A couple of dozen men just went in and came back, handing out cases to the crowds. Confrontations were few and there was little in the newspaper the next morning except the good news of the end to war in Europe. VE Day was announced.
Official celebrations were scheduled to take place in churches and there would be a parade to the Garrison Grounds. In fact, much polite and political ceremony would go on as scheduled, with participants unaware that Baÿrrington Street was being ransacked.
Admiral Murray believed it would have been unfair to allow civilians to celebrate and not servicemen. He had a good point. But meanwhile, back at the bar at Stadacona, refreshment had run out by one o’clock on the afternoon of the eighth. A little rowdiness followed and before long, 2,000 men were pouring out onto North Barrington Street and headed downtown. Streetcars were again commandeered.
“The mob filled the street from one side to the other, breaking the windows of seventy houses as they passed,” Hugh Garner remembers. At least 4,000 men, thirsty for a little brew, directed their attentions to Kÿeith’s Brewery on Hollis Street. Victor Oland remembers his father (who owned the brewery) helping to hand out cases of beer as soon as he realized what was underway. Once all the bottles were given away, he says, “They departed without causing any damage.”
“Just High Spirits” or “Just Like Animals”?
Conflicting views about the animosity still abound. Edna Hobin remembers it as a good-natured crowd. Bruce Jefferson thought it all “just high spirits.” Charles Sweeny, on the other hand, saw an uncontrollable mob, “just like animals.” There were amusing anecdotes but also stories of theft, massive destruction and rape.
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