The Great Halifax Explosion

by John U. Bacon

  The two biggest general stores in Richmond, Isaac Creighton’s and Constant Upham’s, were both blown away. Constant’s brother, Charles, the yardmaster who had finished his night shift, had eaten a big breakfast, then stoked the furnace and stove before burrowing himself under the covers, figured he had only a few hours to sleep before his father-in-law’s funeral that afternoon. Two of his two older children—Millicent, nine, and Archie, almost seven—were in the bedroom next door. Millicent was sick, but since Archie was almost ready for school, he visited her for a few minutes. When the explosion hit, he had his back to her window, while she was facing it.

  They heard a “huge rushing wind” tear through their house. A second later, a piece of glass shot into the back of Archie’s head but did not penetrate his skull. As alarming as that must have been, he was more shocked when he saw his sister’s face sliced by flying glass, and her left eye wrenched out of its socket.

  Their father, Charles, asleep in the room next door, didn’t remember the explosion jolting him awake, but he did hear his children screaming “in pain and fright.” The blankets had protected Charles from harm, but when he ran from the room barefoot in his nightshirt to find his children, the broken glass strewn about the floor shredded his feet. With his adrenaline eclipsing the pain, he rushed to find his two children in the next room cut and bleeding, and his daughter missing her left eye. Charles identified the more pressing issue: they were on the second floor of a house about to collapse.

  When Charles led them out of Millicent’s room, he discovered that the entire east side of the house which faced the harbor was gone. The stairs had been knocked out—save for the oilcloth that had covered them. It remained attached to the top stair. Mr. Upham used the oilcloth as an escape rope, sliding down to the first floor. He then pulled the oilcloth as taut as he could and persuaded both children to slide down. As he spoke, the beams and walls were caving in, giving them a clear view of the harbor.

  The children, both covered in soot and blood, did as he urged and slid down the oilcloth. No sooner had they escaped than the house went up in flames. From there, Charles picked up his daughter and carried her piggyback, and led Archie by the hand to safety.

  All over town, the strongest, most important parts of buildings—beams, joists, and bricks—often became the most dangerous, while the least important, like the oilcloth, frequently became lifesavers.

  Mr. Upham set his two children on a door lying flat on the ground, telling them to stay put while he ran back into the house to save his wife and three younger children. He tried one entry point, then another, and then a third, but the collapsing house and raging fire wouldn’t let him get close. He would later take some slight comfort in the fact that he’d heard no cries from inside their burning home.

  When Charles saw his boots and trousers had fallen from his bedroom to the first floor and hadn’t caught fire yet, in a moment of practicality he retrieved them and put them on, squeezing his boots over his bleeding feet. There was nothing else to do but hold his son’s hand, carry his daughter on his back, and start walking up the hill to their cousins’ house on Longard Road, where they had scheduled the funeral of Mrs. Upham’s father for that afternoon in the Rasleys’ parlor. But when a heavy piece of a ship smashed through the Rasleys’ roof and destroyed a chair next to the coffin, Annie Rasley, nine, suffered a cut to her eye, another child was also cut, and her little brother, Reg, ran out of the house screaming. They had no idea where he went, and could only hope he would return safely.

  The morning after Grove Presbyterian had celebrated paying off their building loan, the Reverend Charles Crowdis climbed to a higher point on Fort Needham to get a better look at Mont-Blanc burning in the harbor. He would later recall that “Jets of flame and spiral puffs of smoke shot heavenwards.”

  At 9:04, the blast knocked him off his feet. He ran back to Grove Presbyterian and found the church and the manse had both been crushed, but were not yet on fire. His five-year old daughter and four-year old son were standing outside the house and appeared safe but his wife, Jane, and her two sisters, Marjorie and Marie, were still in the wreckage. Frantically digging through the rubble, Reverend Crowdis found Marjorie, who had badly injured legs and feet but was alive. His other sister-in-law had broken her collarbone, and would also survive.

  Reverend Crowdis finally discovered his wife, Jane, under the organ on the first floor. A moment earlier, she had been upstairs. Her face was “almost unrecognizable, her eyes in a frightful state.” Reverend Crowdis fetched his wheelbarrow from the shed, loaded his wife and son in it, and, with his daughter running behind, headed to the nearest hospital. Although it was set up to treat infectious diseases, the doctors there managed to remove Mrs. Crowdis’s damaged eye, and she survived.

  When Reverend Crowdis returned to their former address, both his sisters-in-law were gone, with no explanation. He soon found Marie but not Marjorie, whose name would soon appear on a long list of fatalities. She was later found alive, and lived to be ninety-five.

  The disaster played no favorites, conspiring to destroy all four Richmond churches, and a large swath of their parishioners. Grove Presbyterian, which the Orrs, Driscolls, Pattisons, and Uphams all attended, lost 148, while St. Mark’s lost 200 and St. Joseph’s an astonishing 404. The Kaye Street Methodist Church, where Reverend Swetnam presided, lost 91 members.

  That morning, Reverend Swetnam’s wife, Lizzie Louise Swetnam, sat at the grand piano to accompany their son, Carman, who was rehearsing the song he would sing that night at the concert. Their daughter, Dorothy, sat in a rocking chair across the room, while the Reverend leaned against the doorway, taking in the pleasant scene.

  Their next-door neighbors, the Bonds, lived with two daughters in their early twenties: Ethel (not to be confused with Ethel Mitchell, of Dartmouth), and Bertha, who was engaged to a soldier named Sandy Wournell, serving on the front lines in France. In a letter to him, Bertha explained that she and Ethel were just waking up from a late night, when Ethel invited her sister to stay in bed while she went downstairs to make them breakfast, Bertha slept until about nine o’clock, when she stirred, saw the time, and hustled out of bed and into her “underclothes and corsets, stockings and an old pair of boots, which I didn’t button.”

  She wrapped a heavy bathrobe around her and went to the bathroom—and that’s when Mont-Blanc exploded.

  “The first shock didn’t stun me,” she said, probably referring to the ground wave that followed the explosion. But then the church next door collapsed, “and I saw it go. Maybe a shell struck it or maybe it was simply the concussion,” the latter being far more likely. A split-second later the concussion knocked Bertha into the hallway, facedown, and rained plaster on her back.

  “I was sure that was the end of me and all I was thinking of was you,” she wrote, expressing a sentiment familiar to thousands of soldiers. “I remember saying, or rather thinking, your name over and over but when I hit the floor first and for a few seconds I was stunned and if I had never lived I’d never have known what happened to me or felt any pain but as it was I began to move and wiggle out from under the stuff.

  “My face and head was bleeding considerably. I could tell by the look of the floor and also by the way the blood was dripping off my chin but for all that my knees didn’t shake a particle.”

  Bertha then called down for Ethel at the same time Ethel started calling for her while running up their damaged stairs. When Ethel saw that Bertha’s face was bleeding and her two front teeth had been chipped, she never expected to see Bertha’s face “whole again.” But after Bertha cleaned up her wounds, she saw that she wouldn’t need stitches.

  “I had a most miraculous escape and for that we are so thankful,” she wrote. The Great War had turned on itself, transforming the home front into a war zone, with soldiers overseas anxiously awaiting word that their loved ones back home were safe.

  When they saw that the manse next door had been destroyed, Bertha wrote, “I didn’t expe
ct to find a soul there.”

  Next door, when Lizzie Louise Swetnam had begun playing the song on their grand piano, Carman started to sing but was quickly interrupted by a gigantic boom. A beat later, their house imploded, and the floor beneath them gave way.

  The explosion knocked Reverend Swetnam out cold. When he regained consciousness, he saw that all but his underwear had been torn from his body, but he seemed to be okay. Then he saw that the grand piano had landed on top of his wife and son, crushing them both. He stood there in disbelief until he heard Dorothy’s voice from underneath the ceiling beams, now strewn about the floor.

  “Where are you, Daddy?”

  Reverend Swetnam followed the voice and found his daughter so severely trapped that she could not get through the tiny gap between the beams and wall slabs piled on her. Swetnam searched frantically for his saw to cut the timbers, but when he started ripping through one of the beams it shifted, and Dorothy screamed. He stopped, unsure of what to do.

  At that moment, Bertha and Ethel appeared. They could see Dorothy was “completely hemmed in” by pieces of a broken wall that had fallen on her. Reverend Swetnam was immobilized, afraid that if they tried to pull the wall off her, Dorothy could be crushed.

  By this time the fires were “blazing in pretty good shape,” Bertha said. “I’ll never forget Mr. Swetnam’s look when he saw us.”

  He seemed catatonic, and might have been in shock. With the back of the house on fire, the sisters recognized the impending danger faster than he did. They pleaded with him to keep sawing until they pierced his paralysis. He told Dorothy she would have to be tough and brave while Daddy rescued her. He clenched his jaw and sawed through the beam with a strength his neighbors never suspected he had.

  Swetnam’s saw stirred up a swirl of smoke and plaster dust that gave Dorothy a violent bout of coughing, but this time he didn’t stop until he had cut out a small opening. With the fire now consuming what used to be their home, Swetnam dropped the saw and waved Ethel and Bertha to join him so all three could leverage a board sticking out of the pile. With all the force they could muster, they lifted the load just enough for Reverend Swetnam to pull her out.

  “Then it was time to run,” Bertha wrote, “so we ran to our place and grabbed what clothes we could. We got upstairs and I thought of my ring. It had been in my jewel box on the bureau. I found it among the plaster but the tray had gone. In a minute I located it, but no ring. I just had to get it,” and after more hurried searching, she did.

  The sisters gave the Swetnams some clothes to cover themselves and were about to leave when Bertha remembered their safe. She dropped her load, ran into the ruins of their home, and raced around looking for the safe, while the fires came for her. She found it and, on the first try, opened it. She tore up two cushions to create “rude bags” and stuffed them with the safe’s most valuable contents: her letters from her fiancé at the Western Front. She grabbed them, then ran from the ruins before the fires caught her.

  The sisters started looking for their “dear dad,” who had walked down to the mill to get some sugar from a barrel inside the door. “There we found his body,” she wrote. “I can’t describe the sensation I had . . . Our greatest comfort is that his death was instant and that he was ready to go. You know, Sandy, that neither Ethel or I are of a collapsing nature, so, as hard as it was, we had to cover the body and leave it.”

  The schools fared no better than the churches. The explosion blew in the windows of St. Joseph’s Catholic School and caved in the ceilings. Four girls were killed, and four later died in the hospital.

  Missing school didn’t improve the chances of surviving either: fifteen girls who had been absent that day were killed in or near their homes. Boys who would have attended St. Joseph’s school that afternoon due to the split schedule they had adopted while the boys’ school was under construction might have been safer at school. Fifty-five lost their lives.

  Precautions were often pointless. Behind the Acadia Sugar Refinery’s tall brick tower, which had snapped off “like a carrot” and tumbled onto a nearby dock, the Protestant Orphanage stood right in the path of the blast. The school’s matron knew they were in peril well before Mont-Blanc blew up, so she ordered their twenty-seven children into the basement to be safe. When the shock wave thrust their building down upon them, they were flattened, killing all twenty-seven orphans and the matron herself.

  When the Richmond School building collapsed, school had not started yet, and the building was largely empty—but not completely. When the ship exploded, Mr. Huggins was knocked to the ground and injured, but his first thought was “At least Merle would be safe.”

  When Principal Huggins rushed to the school, he discovered that the concussion had crushed the building, with his daughter inside. No one could find her.

  There was simply no predictably safe place to be in Richmond that morning. Eighty-six students died on their way to school or in their homes, where they had stayed to get well and to keep their classmates from getting sick.

  In the first two hours after the explosion, the normal order was breaking down quickly, with people, even children, left to rely on their instincts. In the schools that survived largely intact, usually those far from Pier 6, most teachers dismissed their students, leaving them to walk home unescorted despite the obvious risks. Many children returned to their neighborhoods to discover their parents and homes had vanished, although it often took them some time to confirm they were looking on the correct street.

  Chapter 21

  They’re All Gone

  Where there had been a vibrant shipping town abuzz with some 60,000-plus people all starting their busy day, just a few seconds later there were no piers, no train station, no factories, no schools, no homes, no people, and no sound—a desolate, silent moonscape. The explosion and its aftereffects had left only a few standing walls, some trees ripped clean of leaves and most of their branches, and fires burning everywhere.

  A few moments later, survivors put to use every siren that still worked, racing around Halifax and Dartmouth to find their loved ones and help strangers, who filled the air with their agonizing wails.

  One witness predicted, “The real nightmare is just beginning.”

  After one victim’s building had been flattened, he recalled, he “crawled out through the windows and everything was black. Can’t begin to tell ya of the awful sights. Dead bodies laid out in rows, arms and legs sticking out of the debris, burned to the bone. And the whole North End, nothing but charred embers. The whole thing just turns your heart sick.”

  On Russell Street, survivors saw a naked man walking down the street, his skin falling off his body “like wood shavings.” Bewildered victims walked, crawled, and dragged themselves out of their destroyed homes like zombies, with horrendous injuries: arms and legs blown off; faces burned, lacerated, or smashed beyond recognition; and some whose bodies had been cut in half but who kept breathing for a few minutes with shocked, helpless expressions, too stunned to speak.

  The survivors who could walk stumbled about aimlessly, hoping to find anyone who could lend a hand. On their directionless searches, they kept encountering symbols of their naïveté: the shattered bay windows they had rushed to so they could watch the ship burn; the fire alarms strategically positioned around a city now ablaze; and the small-bore hoses and buckets at each station that everyone had assumed would be enough to keep them safe.

  To get a better view of Mont-Blanc burning at Pier 6, hundreds of people had climbed the stairs of the harbor’s substantial new concrete-and-steel pedestrian bridge, which spanned the eight tracks of Richmond railyard. An instant later, the only evidence that the bridge had ever been built was the concrete moorings and deformed steel beams that had been thrown about Halifax and Dartmouth. The people who had been standing on the bridge had disappeared.

  The Patricia, the gem of the Halifax Fire Department’s fleet, had been transformed into a twisted hunk of metal. The blast ejected the driver, Billy
Wells, from the Patricia’s driver’s seat and shot him up the hill. He was still clutching the steering wheel, which he had apparently ripped from the vehicle. The explosion, the shock wave, or a combination of the two also snatched Wells’s clothes off his body, tore the muscles from his right arm—probably the result of his clenching the wheel—and injured his right eye. But he was alive—for now.

  Just a few seconds later, the thirty-five-foot wave picked up hundreds of people, including Billy Wells, and washed them up to Fort Needham. When the water reached its zenith, it came rushing back down, bringing with it everything it had just carried up the hill.

  On Wells’s return trip, he became tangled in telephone wires, which fortunately were no longer live. Still, Wells knew he had to free himself or he would die there. Using only his left arm, he got loose, then saw that most of the people he had been trying to save seconds earlier with his fire engine were in worse shape.

  “The sight was awful,” he recalled, “with people hanging out of windows dead. Some with their heads missing, and some thrown onto the overhead telegraph wires.”

  One sailor felt he was being squeezed on all sides by the whirlwind, then picked up and pulled through the air until the wind’s energy was exhausted. Fortunately for him, that occurred when he was atop a hill, shortening his fall to earth after it released him. Another sailor recalled watching Mont-Blanc burn at close range, then lying on top of Fort Needham a quarter mile away, in shock but not critically injured. He, too, would probably have died if the slope had not softened his landing.

  Fourteen-year-old Barbara Orr had been standing on the hillside of Mulgrave Park. When it exploded, Orr felt herself moving strangely, as if in a dream, riding a great wind while twisting and turning along the way.

  “I was thinking that I was going down in deep holes all the time,” she said. “Almost like an unconsciousness.”