by Julie Lawson
Response from outside the city was equally swift. Within hours of the explosion, relief trains from towns in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were on their way, bringing surgeons, nurses and supplies. Money began to pour in from as far away as Britain, China and New Zealand. Although half a dozen hospitals were performing operations immediately after the explosion, they were scarcely able to cope with the large number of wounded. The recently opened Camp Hill Hospital, for example, designed to accommodate over two hundred convalescing soldiers, was overwhelmed with some fourteen hundred victims. Patients who were there at the time were turned out of their beds to accommodate the more urgent cases.
Shelters were desperately needed too, especially in light of the fierce blizzard that hit the city on December 7. The storm, one of the worst in the city’s history, not only hampered rescue efforts, it slowed down the arrival of relief trains and repair crews. Still, by the night of December 9, telephone and telegraph repairmen had managed to restore some three hundred telephone lines, and had connected emergency lines to all the relief centres. Some of the telegraph lines were up and running the very night of the explosion.
The people of Massachusetts, particularly the citizens of Boston, gave unstintingly in volunteer medical assistance, money and goods. Since 1971, the province of Nova Scotia has sent an annual Christmas tree to Boston to show its gratitude.
In early 1918 the Dominion government appointed the Halifax Relief Commission to oversee the rebuilding of the North End and to compensate people for injuries and property loss. The program continues to help the remaining survivors.
Reconstruction took place with astounding speed. By late January 1918, three thousand repair orders had been completed and hundreds of people were able to return to their homes. Temporary apartment buildings were erected on three separate sites, and by mid-March, over three hundred apartments were ready to be occupied, complete with furnishings and household goods provided by the Massachusetts–Halifax Relief Fund.
In the fall of 1918, construction began on an extensive new development — shops, offices and houses — built from cement blocks called hydrostones. Wide streets and green spaces were incorporated into the design, and, within three years, about two thousand people were living in the “Hydrostone.”
Gradually, the demolished areas in Halifax were put back together. Life went on, but nothing could compensate for the lives which had been lost. Within two months of the Explosion, over fifteen hundred victims had been buried. Many of those were unidentified. More victims were discovered in the spring. Some were never found. Hundreds of children were orphaned.
Who was to blame for the disaster?
Six days after the explosion, an inquiry opened at the Halifax courthouse. Two months later, the Justice ruled against Mont-Blanc, stating that the ship’s captain and the local pilot were wholly responsible for the collision and, ultimately, the explosion. Both men were found guilty of neglect of public safety for not warning the city of a probable explosion. The acting commander of the Royal Canadian Navy was found guilty of neglect in performing his duty as chief examining officer. All three men were arrested and charged with manslaughter, but the charges were later dismissed because of insufficient evidence.
The owners of Mont-Blanc and Imo appealed and cross-appealed, and each party filed for damages against the other. In May 1919, the Supreme Court of Canada found the two ships equally responsible. A further appeal was made, this time to the Privy Council in London, England. In February 1920, it ultimately declared Imo and Mont-Blanc equally to blame.
As Halifax set about rebuilding, news of the Great War once again claimed the front page of local newspapers. Canadian forces, commanded by General Arthur Currie, continued to distinguish themselves with courage and determination on the battlefields of Belgium and France. In the fall of 1918, they took part in offensives that eventually crushed the retreating Germans. On November 11, Germany surrendered.
“The war to end all wars” proved to the world that Canada was an independent nation in her own right, and no longer just a part of the British Empire. It marked Canada’s “coming of age,” but at a terrible price — out of some six hundred thousand Canadians who went overseas, almost one out of ten did not return.
And the Halifax Explosion? That single disaster brought the ravages of war to the heart of Halifax, causing the deaths of more Nova Scotians than were killed in four years of war. Until the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, it was the largest man-made explosion in history.
The tragedy has not been forgotten. Although few survivors remain to tell their stories, a memorial service is held every year to remember those whose lives were lost or shattered. It takes place on Fort Needham, beneath a massive bell tower, on December 6 at 9:05 a.m. And, as a daily reminder, the north face of the city hall clock is permanently stopped at 9:05 a.m.
Images and Documents
Image 1: A touring exhibit of war items, including shell casings, recruiting posters, guns and saddles.
Image 2: The smoke cloud from the blast was visible from far away, as seen in this photo taken from a distance of almost 21 kilometres.
Image 3: The steamship Imo, beached on the Dartmouth shore after the explosion.
Image 4: Many buildings were flattened into rubble, as this dockside image shows.
Images 5 (top), 6 (middle) and 7 (bottom): The explosion made headlines at home and abroad. Top to bottom: The Toronto Daily Star, The Times of London, England, and Ottawa’s The Citizen.
Image 8: Whole neighbourhoods were flattened or damaged along Campbell Road (later Barrington Street).
Image 9: Eighty-nine students from the Richmond School on Roome Street were killed in the explosion. Two students died at the school, but eighty-seven of their classmates were killed on their way to school or at home.
Image 10: Soldiers who were ready to go overseas to fight in WWI were held back in order to assist with the rescue work.
Image 11: People searching for personal effects, three days after the explosion.
Image 12: A house lies in ruins following the explosion.
Image 13: Residents were only allowed into the devastated Richmond area with an official pass.
Image 14: Haligonians tried to give orphaned children a happy Christmas.
Image 15: Children collecting boxes of food from a relief station.
Image 16: In the winter of 1917–1918, the only recreation left to many children was sledding.
Image 17: A newspaper notice advertising temporary housing.
Image 18: HMS Olympic (sister ship to the Titanic) bringing soldiers back from Europe in 1919. Note the dazzle patterns painted on it.
Image 19: Canada in 1917, when Halifax was a city of 50,000 people.
Image 20: Halifax and Dartmouth, on either side of Halifax Harbour. The North End of Halifax (shown by the shaded area) was almost completely destroyed.
Acknowledgments
Every effort has been made to trace ownership of visual and written material used in this book. Errors and omissions will be corrected in subsequent updates or editions.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:
Cover Portrait: Detail, from Girl Holding a Basket of Grapes by Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau, courtesy of Brian Roughton of the Roughton Galleries.
Cover background: Detail, lightened, from Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management/NSARM, N-138.
Image 1: War Trophies Exhibition, Library and Archives Canada, LAC, C-010166.
Image 2: National Archives and Records Administration, 165-WW-158A-15.
Image 3: Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management/ NSARM, N-138.
Image 4: Detail from W. G. MacLaughlan/Library and Archives Canada, LAC, C-019953.
Image 5: The Toronto Star Archives.
Image 6: The London Times.
Image 7: The Ottawa Citizen.
Image 8: Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management/NSARM, N-201.
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p; Image 9: Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management/NSARM, N-1263.
Image 10: Canadian Dept. of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada, LAC, PA-022744.
Image 11: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 1196.
Image 12: Wallace R. MacAskill, Library and Archives Canada, C-001832.
Image 13: Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management/NSARM, MG27, Vol. 2, no. 5.
Image 14: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 626.
Image 15: Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management/ NSARM, N-7081.
Image 16: Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management/ NSARM, Robert S. Low Collection, 1992-524.
Image 17: Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management/ NSARM, MG20, Vol. 530, no. 2, p. 40.
Image 18: Canada, Patent and Copyright Office, Library and Archives Canada, PA-135768.
Images 19 and 20: Maps by Paul Heersink/Paperglyphs. Map data © 1999 Government of Canada with permission from Natural Resources Canada.
The publisher wishes to thank Garry Shutlak, Senior Reference Archivist, Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management, for checking of images and captions; and Brian Roughton of the Roughton Galleries for his generosity in allowing us to use a detail from Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau’s painting Girl Holding a Basket of Grapes as the cover image.
For Wendy
Author’s Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Janet Kitz, author of Shattered City and Survivors: Children of the Explosion, for sharing her knowledge and offering valuable comments from the very beginning of this project; for reading an earlier version of my manuscript; for giving me a tour of the once-devastated Richmond area; for introducing me to her exuberant Brittany spaniel, Kirsty; and for sharing the harrowing stories of several children who survived the explosion. One such story is that of fourteen-year-old Barbara Orr, who was blown half a kilometre to Fort Needham but lost her entire immediate family — mother, father, three brothers and two sisters.
Thanks to Janet, I was able to interview Edith Hartnett in 2003. Edith, then ninety-four, was nine years old at the time of the explosion. She not only gave me an account of her experiences on December 6, but also painted a vivid picture of her life in Richmond before and after the disaster. Her recollections inspired such story elements as the milk run, Billy the Pig, and the unfinished velveteen dress (in Edith’s case, a coat).
Thanks also to the following: Dr. David Sutherland of Dalhousie University, who read the manuscript with an eye to the Explosion and its aftermath; Dr. Desmond Morton, historian and author of such books as Marching to Armageddon and When Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War, who answered my questions about the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the Great War; CWO Ray Coulson CD (Ret’d), Curator of the Nova Scotia Highlander Regimental Museum; Rosemary Barbour, Archivist, and the staff of the Nova Scotia Archives and Records; Dan Conlin and staff of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic; the exceedingly helpful reference librarians behind the “Ask a Librarian” service at Spring Garden Road Memorial Public Library, Halifax; Barbara Hehner for her careful checking of the manuscript; and an enormous thank you to my all-round wonderful editor, Sandra Bogart Johnston.
About the Author
Julie Lawson’s Nova Scotian roots on her father’s side go back to the 1700s. It was her dad who first told her about the Halifax Explosion. His father had been there when the explosion happened. “My grandfather, then eighteen, was in Halifax on December 6, 1917, in Victoria General Hospital, waiting to get his tonsils out,” Julie says. “When the explosion occurred, the nurses began running down the corridor, holding up their long skirts for greater speed. Grandpa’s most vivid impression? The sight of the young nurses’ ankles!” (You have to remember that this was in the early 1900s, when women’s skirts were quite long.)
“Grandpa died when I was nine, so I was never able to ask him what else he remembered,” Julie goes on. “But my curiosity was piqued. I learned as much as I could from my dad, but no mention of the Halifax Explosion ever came up in school, not even in high school history courses. The first book I read about the Explosion was Barometer Rising, a novel by Hugh McLennan.”
Julie’s first trip to Halifax was on an author tour in 1997. A visit to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic led her to the exhibit Halifax Wrecked, which contains numerous photographs, stories of survivors and artefacts. The experience was a potent one. “I was moved by the display of mortuary bags — cloth bags which contained the personal possessions of unidentified victims. Small, everyday things, like a comb, a key ring, a schoolboy’s chewed-up pencil, a marble.”
One of Julie’s library readings on the tour was at the Halifax North Branch, which had on display the Halifax Explosion Memorial Book — an enormous book containing the names of the 1953 known victims. “For the first time I was struck by the scope of the tragedy on a human scale,” Julie says. “The number of victims sharing the same last name was heart-breaking.”
A number of things stand out for Julie in the writing of No Safe Harbour. One small but surprising research discovery was that between 1917 and 1978, the Halifax Relief Commission had accumulated 60 metres of records! (“No, I did not access them all!” she says.)
But research for the book was often much more poignant. The personal accounts of the survivors were heart-wrenching at times, “but always mesmerizing,” Julie says. She would turn to a book to double-check on something, “and find myself still reading an hour later.”
Julie was surprised at how quickly the city responded to the disaster, and how fortunate it was that so many soldiers and sailors — in Halifax waiting to be shipped overseas — were not only available, but trained to respond to emergency situations. She was revising the manuscript when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the southern United States during the late summer and early fall of 2005, and found it strangely fascinating to see how the people in another severely devastated area, including soldiers and police forces, handled such a massive catastrophe.
One of the saddest things Julie learned while researching was that the warnings of a second explosion at the Wellington Barracks — an explosion which was feared but never happened — caused both wounded and rescuers to flee from the devastated area, leaving countless victims trapped in burning houses. The result was an even greater loss of life.
Equally tragic was the fact that many Halifax schools were on “winter hours,” and school began at 9:30 rather than at 9:00 a.m. Had students already been at their schools, fewer of them might have died, because the schools were more strongly built than most houses. And had students needed to be at school by 9:00 a.m., fewer would have had the opportunity to run down to the harbour for a closer look at the burning ship.
Julie was also horrified to discover that years after 1917, during the development of the atomic bomb in World War II, scientists went to Halifax to study the effects of the explosion. Their decision to detonate the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in mid-air, in order to produce a greater range of devastation, was influenced by what they had learned in Halifax.
Writing the diary entries following the disaster was emotionally challenging for Julie, especially since she had grown so close to Charlotte and her family. “I became so immersed in Halifax in December of 1917, that one morning I looked out my office window overlooking the city and saw that all the windows of the buildings had been blown out, leaving empty black holes,” she says. “I was stunned, until I pulled myself back to Victoria, 2005, and realized that it was merely a trick of the light.”
Julie is the award-winning author of many books for young readers. Her first Dear Canada book, A Ribbon of Shining Steel, was nominated for both the CLA Book of the Year for Children Award and the Hackmatack Award. No Safe Harbour won the Hackmatack Award and was on the shortlist for the Chocolate Lily Award. Her other novels include White Jade Tiger (a CLA Honour Book and winner of the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize), The Ghost of Avalanche Mountain (nominated for the Silver B
irch and Red Cedar Awards) and Ghosts of the Titanic (nominated for the Chocolate Lily and Diamond Willow awards and selected as an Honour Book for the OLA Silver Birch Award). It was while researching No Safe Harbour that Julie discovered the Halifax connection to the Titanic tragedy. Details of the cable ship Mackay-Bennett having to recover the bodies, the burials in Halifax’s Fairvew Lawn Cemetery, and the cataloguing of the victims’ personal effects — using the same methods set up following the Halifax Explosion — all made their way into Ghosts of the Titanic.
Among Julie’s acclaimed picture books are The Pirates of Captain Mckee, The Dragon’s Pearl, Emma and the Silk Train, Bear on the Train, Arizona Charlie and the Klondike Kid (nominated for the Christie Harris Award) and Whatever You Do, Don’t Go Near That Canoe! (winner of the CNIB’s Tiny Torgi Award).
While the events described and some of the characters in this book may be based on actual historical events and real people, Charlotte Blackburn is a fictional character created by the author, and her diary is a work of fiction.