The Great Halifax Explosion

by John U. Bacon

  The blast also wounded 9,000 people, leaving them stumbling about their leveled city like drunks, bleeding and bewildered, their expressions frozen in blank surprise.

  Chapter 19

  Parting the Sea

  When the black cloud cleared, the survivors could not find Mont-Blanc. The ship, all 320 feet of it, had vanished, reduced in a flash to atoms.

  Pier 6 had been built to withstand hurricanes, but there was virtually no sign of it, the area having returned to the rough, muddy, natural landscape the Mi’kmaq had walked for centuries.

  Seconds after the blast, the tsunami sent several ships near the epicenter down to the sea bottom, then sent them up with the thirty-five-foot waves, snapping thick steel anchor lines like licorice sticks.

  Farther from Pier 6, the USS Old Colony was thrown about like toy boats in a bathtub, but suffered no casualties. HMS Highflyer, anchored in the basin, had been built for battle and survived the explosion, but suffered a damaged hull, with fifteen crewmen wounded and three killed.

  The rowboat of the HMS Highflyer, led by Acting Commander Tom K. Triggs, coming to the rescue of Mont-Blanc, had been blown to pieces. Commander Triggs and all but one member of the crew had been killed.

  Stella Maris, the tugboat captained by Horatio Brennan, had been rent asunder and then launched skyward, landing where Pier 6 had been. Of Brennan’s twenty-five-man crew, twenty were killed, including William Nickerson, who had been sent to fetch the ten-inch hawser. Horatio’s son, Walter Brannen, who had been standing at the entrance to the hold, escaped with cuts, bruises, and a punctured eardrum—about the best he could hope for, given the circumstances. His father, Horatio, had been killed instantly. The photo he had sat for to surprise his wife for Christmas would remain at the studio, unclaimed.

  Curaca, the American ship loading wheat and horses for Europe, had been docked at Pier 8, so there was nothing between her and Mont-Blanc. The blast had snapped off her masts and knocked her stern in like a dented tin can. Of Curaca’s thirty-five-man crew, thirty-two were killed.

  In an irony that would not have been lost on the men crouching in trenches overseas, where the fickleness of fate was an all-too-familiar presence, Edward McCrossan, who had been so desperate for a cigarette that he had gone belowdecks to roll one while Mont-Blanc’s fireworks display entertained his crewmates, was one of the few crewmen not on deck when it exploded. Cigarettes don’t normally save lives, but that one saved his.

  McCrossan was not out of danger, however, as the heavily damaged Curaca, with nothing securing her to the dock and no crew to steer her, was now in the throes of waves emanating from the epicenter and soon headed toward the Bedford Basin. Quickly sizing up the situation, McCrossan jumped onto Calonne, which had been docked at Pier 9 right behind Curaca, and was now also drifting toward the basin. Though shielded, Calonne had still lost seven of her crew. After McCrossan hopped aboard, he looked back at Richmond, where he saw that the hillside was now covered with collapsed homes and women and children “covered with blood.”

  Smaller vessels, so much easier to flip over or break apart, often had worse luck. The tugboat Hilford, for example, which had been tied up on the far side of Calonne, had been partly blown apart by the explosion before the tidal wave tossed her atop the wharf, where she was left lying some thirty feet above the water. Another tugboat had been launched clear over Pier 6.

  Just a few hundred feet farther south along the Halifax Harbour coast, the Halifax Graving Dock Company’s wharf offered some protection, with the dry dock’s high walls providing a buffer against the harbor’s waves. But that wasn’t enough to spare the men on Middleham Castle, docked just off the wharf, including the workers from the marine engineering firm of Burns & Kelleher. They had been watching Mont-Blanc’s barrels of benzol rocket into the air when the foreman sent nineteen-year-old Jack Tappen down below to move a cast-iron pipe to the engine room. After Tappen dropped off the pipe, he stopped to chat with another worker standing against the bulkhead, who put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. While they talked, Mont-Blanc exploded.

  The force of the blast shot Tappen backward through an open doorway behind him, and straight down a narrow hallway at full speed. When Tappen regained his wits, he was relieved to discover that he had landed on a pile of something soft. Because it was pitch black, he couldn’t see his hand directly in front of his eyes, let alone whatever it was he had landed on. It didn’t take him long to figure out that the softness, the cloth, and the occasional hard struts and spheres constituted a pile of human corpses—the very colleagues he had been talking to just a few minutes earlier. The bodies had not begun to stiffen yet, but they “bled profusely, and the smell was profound.”

  While Tappen tried to get his bearings, the ship soared upward and plunged down with each wave of the tsunami, tossing him back and forth on the pile of bodies. When the boat settled and his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see that he’d not been hurt, but every button on his vest had popped off.

  Tappen soon realized he was not alone. Two other apprentices, who’d been thrown into the same room, had also survived. They looked around and found the man who’d been talking with Jack in front of the bulkhead a few seconds earlier. The force had slammed him into the bulkhead and crushed his skull.

  When the trio of survivors climbed back on deck, they saw huge round boulders weighing several tons each, possibly from the bottom of the sea, sitting on the deck. Middleham Castle’s hull had been ripped open, and the ship was starting to sink. The three men weren’t eager to jump into the water, which was now swirling with unpredictable currents and undertows, tons of oil and coal, and shrapnel, dead bodies, and drowning men. While Middleham Castle bobbed, rolled, and began sinking, they waited for their chance to jump to the J.C. McKee then slide down its ropes to the wharf.

  From there they could see people floundering in the water, yelling for help, with dead bodies floating among them. The three young men pulled out as many of the flailing swimmers as they could before they realized they had to leave the disconnected wharf before it drifted out to the Narrows. They hopscotched their way across floating debris to get to shore, where they discovered the shed where they’d hung their coats each day had been flattened and was on fire.

  The Dartmouth Ferry started its scheduled trip right at 9:00 a.m.—fourteen minutes after the collision, and four minutes before the explosion. Dorothy Chisholm, a Dartmouth resident who worked at the Royal Bank in Halifax, boarded the 9:00 a.m. ferry, just like she did every morning.

  By the time the ferry departed Dartmouth, Mont-Blanc had been secured to Pier 6. The ferry passengers lined up along the rail to watch the freighter burn. The ferry had made it only halfway across the channel when Mont-Blanc blew up.

  Due to the distance between Mont-Blanc and the ferry, the passengers had a few seconds to dive for cover; Chisholm, however, was slow to react. The blast sent passengers flying across the ferry, with Chisholm landing on top of the pile of bodies. It might have seemed like a break, until the explosion sent debris flying overhead and the black cloud eventually dropped its heavy, hot, and oily debris on her. As the tsunami tossed the ferry up and down, Chisholm thought the Germans had attacked them, and she wished she had been under the pile of passengers to avoid getting shot.

  Confusion gripped almost everyone near the harbor. And why not? This was not peacetime. Fear of the Germans had permeated their lives since the Great War had started three years earlier, so blaming the Germans was their first reaction.

  The stunned passengers gradually sorted themselves out, stood up, and started to assess the damage. Again, contrary to expectations, those sitting belowdecks in the saloon had suffered greater harm, much of it from flying glass.

  Despite the blast, the determined ferryboat captain finished his trip to the terminal in Halifax, got his wounded passengers to safety, and continued his regular routes throughout this horrific day. Although he and his crew were surely as anxious as everyone else to find out what had
happened to their homes and their families, they remained at their posts, knowing that thousands depended on them—a quiet bit of heroism.

  Shortly after the detonation, the displaced water tossed the 5,000-ton, 430-foot-long Imo several hundred feet across the Narrows, where she beached in the shallows of Dartmouth, listing toward the shore and riddled with holes from the shrapnel. Five Imo crewmen, Harbour Pilot William Hayes, and Captain Haakon From were killed instantly. When the authorities arrived to talk to From later that day, they found his loyal dog guarding his body, barking at anyone who tried to come close. To retrieve the captain’s body, they felt they had little choice but to shoot his dog.

  A full half mile from the explosion Mont-Blanc’s crewmen were knocked down, some unconscious. Captain Le Médec and Pilot Mackey were pinned under a spruce tree. When they regained consciousness, they had to free themselves of the heavy branches on top of them. Neither had been seriously wounded, but Le Médec was so dazed, and everything surrounding him seemed so strange, that he did not initially recognize Mackey, who had lost his cap and the bottom half of his raincoat, which had been torn off.

  Le Médec assessed his crew, finding four wounded, one with a broken arm and severe bleeding. The crew walked toward Windmill Road, where Le Médec flagged down a car. They would get help, but the bleeding crewman would later die of his wounds.

  Mackey walked by himself to the Dartmouth Ferry landing. There he saw Captain Peter Johnston, Nova Scotia’s superintendent of lights and buoys, who had been on the ferry with 300 other passengers when the explosion hit. When Johnston saw Mackey waiting for the ferry by himself, wearing a ripped raincoat and no hat, he knew something must be seriously amiss.

  He asked Mackey, “What caused the explosion?”

  “The ship I was on exploded.”

  Mackey explained what had happened. When their ferry reached Halifax, Mackey walked to the Pilotage Authority to tell his story.

  If it was nearly impossible to predict who would survive, it was just as difficult to anticipate what any one individual would do in the face of such danger. The split-second, spontaneous choice was often irreversible.

  And this is what makes Vincent Coleman’s actions that day all the more remarkable. After he had ordered his men to run and began following them, he turned around, against the tide of people running for their lives, to save others.

  Chapter 20

  Blown Away

  Minutes after the lethal black cloud had deposited its contents back on earth and the sun returned, people looked to the Halifax shore and saw a barren landscape that could have passed for a picture of Ypres. Almost all of Richmond—the factories, businesses, schools, churches, and homes, most of them made of wood—were “smashed to flinders,” Raddall recalled.

  The North Street Station, the city’s main depot, had been crushed, with the stylish glass and steel roof crashing down on the trains, the tracks, the platforms, and the people below. The Richmond railyards ran eight tracks across at their widest along a plateau just above the docks. In an instant, the rails had been tangled up in knots, bending this way and that—or they were just gone, replaced by a muddy slope.

  Downtown Halifax didn’t take the full force, but its stores appeared as if they’d been shaken hard by a vengeful giant, with their goods tumbled in all directions and piles of plate glass covering the floors and streets.

  After the fire on Mont-Blanc started, Frank Burford, the fifteen-year-old plumber’s apprentice working for Hillis & Sons Foundry on Barrington, had been sent by his boss to fetch a parcel at the dry dock when the ship blew up. A moment later, everything was dark, he was choking on plaster dust, and his legs were pinned under a heavy timber. He started struggling to free himself, but a sudden, shooting pain forced him to stop.

  Knowing that the wrong move could upset the pile of beams and trap him forever or crush him, he slowly twisted and turned, careful not to shift the timbers or aggravate his leg wound. Thin and nimble, he worked his way through the scattered beams toward a small opening, a little ray of light. When he finally slithered through, he looked around to see a hellscape of destruction, with not a single intact building anywhere in sight and fires burning everywhere. Having lived in this vibrant town his entire life, he could not recognize this as his home.

  Since it had all happened in a flash, he had to think hard to remember how he’d gotten there. He’d seen a freighter in the Narrows on fire, with men racing over the sides to board rowboats. That must have been it, he thought. Their ship must have blown up.

  While Burford was sorting out what had happened, two sailors broke his reverie.

  “Mister, have you seen our boat?” they asked.

  Frank just shook his head. He was as confused as they were.

  When he got down off the pile that had been his factory a minute earlier, he saw a smashed wagon next to a dead horse, and then the Patricia, driver Billy Wells’s pride and joy, torn apart. It was hard to imagine how anyone anywhere near that fire engine could have survived; Fire Chief Condon, his deputy, and five of the six crewmen had all been killed.

  The Hillis & Sons Foundry didn’t fare much better. Forty-one employees, including general manager Frank D. Hillis, assistant manager James B. Hillis, and his father, had all lost their lives. Burford would soon learn he was one of only three who survived.

  The scale of the disaster is almost impossible to grasp, except in its details.

  Amelia Mary Griswold lived on Needham Street with her three daughters, one of whom, Edna, had two daughters of her own. After the shock wave raced up the hill and crushed their house, the remains soon caught fire. Although Amelia had received a serious cut on her face, she managed to pull Edna out of the house and lay her on the ground. But she couldn’t find Edna’s two-year-old daughter, Sadie.

  Edna’s other daughter, Vera, survived, but the trauma left her speechless for years afterward, and “extremely nervous.” In the tumult, Edna’s body, which Amelia had just left on the ground outside the house, somehow disappeared, and its resting place remains a mystery.

  Amelia’s oldest daughter survived unscathed, but her youngest, Rita, fifteen, was burned and blinded. Amelia’s two sons, Alfred and Frederick Griswold, both worked at Hillis & Sons Foundry and were among the employees killed that day. Frederick left behind his wife and four children, aged eleven years to seven months.

  Alfred Griswold’s home, just a few blocks away, was destroyed. Inside, his wife and five-year-old son were both killed. When St. Joseph’s School was destroyed, their six-year-old daughter was also killed. Her sister, Mary, eight, also attended St. Joe’s, but somehow survived—only to discover her entire family had been wiped out.

  If you had survived the explosion, the shock wave, and the tidal wave, you were not yet out of danger. Because this was the era of wooden stoves and clapboard houses, and the explosion had occurred just after breakfast, fires started everywhere at once, while survivors were still trapped under bricks and boards.

  Jack Tappen, the nineteen-year-old apprentice who had survived the explosion by landing atop a pile of dead men, made it back to shore with the two other surviving apprentices, all of whom were told to help anyone they could. They walked until they reached the Richmond Printing Company, owned by the Orr family. The once proud, strong structure, built to last of granite, now looked like a pile of blocks a baby had knocked over during a temper tantrum.

  The trio walked toward the rubble, now burning rapidly. The building’s collapse had killed thirty employees, most of them women, in an instant. The fire that followed threatened to burn to death those still trapped by the stones and beams.

  Barbara Orr’s grandfather, Samuel Orr Sr., was one of the lucky few. Although more than seventy years old, when he saw his bookkeeper trapped under a granite block, he summoned the strength to heave the block off the man, and save him. But when the senior Orr heard his youngest son, David, thirty—Barbara’s uncle—yelling for help, pinned under another huge granite block, the elder Or
r could not reach him before the fire did. Samuel Sr. would never forget his son’s desperate screaming.

  Barbara’s other uncle, William MacTaggart Orr, could not be found inside the building either. He had last been seen standing near the Lorne Rowing Club, probably watching the fire.

  Samuel Jr., Barbara’s father, had been late to leave their new home that morning, and did not seem to have made it to work. Samuel Sr. assumed his son had stopped to see the commotion near Pier 6, but no one could be certain.

  When Jack Tappen and his fellow apprentices stumbled onto this tragedy in progress, they hurried to rescue a few women before the fire took over. They did not realize until later that the women they were carrying out were already dead. Such adrenaline-fueled decisions were commonplace that morning.

  In the midst of Tappen’s recovery efforts, it suddenly occurred to him that he should check on his mother and grandmother a few blocks away. When he got there, he found that every window and most of the doors had been blown in, but the building was still standing. He searched for his mother and grandmother on the first and second floors, but didn’t find them until he looked in the basement laundry room. Before the explosion, they had gone downstairs to watch their cat having kittens. After the explosion they stayed there, fearing that the Germans had attacked and more was coming.

  At twenty-one, Joe Glube already owned a successful tobacco and stationery store, not far from his home on Gottingen. Thanks to Christmas sales, he did brisk business that Wednesday, and worked late.

  He returned home beat, and fell into a deep sleep. But when his mother and sister came through his bedroom door, both covered in blood and screaming, he jumped to attention. Their roof had caved in, and outside he saw the black cloud to the north. Like others, he assumed the ammunitions magazine by Bedford Basin, on the Dartmouth side, might have blown up. Then he watched a coal driver stop next door, leave the coal in his truck, enter the house, and return with a dead body to put on his truck. Glube realized they had been fortunate to survive.