The Great Halifax Explosion

by John U. Bacon

  The underwater cable between Halifax and Dartmouth had been badly damaged, probably when Imo landed on it. The explosion knocked down telephone lines, snapped poles like toothpicks, and destroyed the main cable lead and the 800 individual lines running from it. Communication with Halifax’s North End was effectively cut off. This prevented officials from asking other cities for help, and greatly limited their ability to assess the extent of the damage, to communicate what needed to be done next, and to squash rumors when they arose—particularly the widespread belief that the Germans had attacked and were about to do so again.

  What did calm people down—perhaps the only thing—was the sincere work of strangers helping strangers. Rescuers, whether professionals or amateurs, appeared by the thousands all over town, an instant army of mercy reporting for duty—unofficial and unorganized but utterly committed to providing aid to anyone who needed it. It was these spontaneous acts of generosity, courage, and selflessness that did more to reassure victims than any formal communication could have achieved. On December 6, 1917, there were no substitutes for uncommon courage and basic human decency.

  Unfortunately, this vital work all over town was interrupted when officials told everyone to head for higher ground. Some grabbed what they could salvage from their collapsed, burning homes and walked away, knowing everything they owned would be gone when they returned.

  Thousands of people formed a stream of speechless, roughed-up refugees trudging from the harbor to the top of the hill. Those who could walk carried those who couldn’t: the sick, the injured, the very small. Many had lost all their clothes, but were often given something to wrap around themselves from strangers along the way.

  Richmond’s Chebucto Road, Kempt Road, and Quinpool Road “became rivers of bloody and smudged humanity hurrying westward to the safety of open fields,” Raddall remembered, “and through the long afternoon hours they stood in the snow watching the smoke pall over the burning North End, waiting for a blast that never came.”

  The people who had been fortunate to survive with open wounds and glass embedded in their skin were all corralled up the hill. Those left behind included people pinned down in the wreckage. Many could not yell for help, including babies. But with thousands heading to higher ground, the odds of survival for all the trapped survivors went down precipitously as the fires came for them.

  In this, like so many other circumstances that week, the plight of the people in Halifax closely mirrored those of their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers overseas, where cries for help came from the wounded in no-man’s-land every day, while their comrades, desperate to do something, had to wait in the trenches until the enemy snipers abandoned their posts, lest they create more victims. In both France and Halifax, survivors most vividly recalled the shattering screams of the wounded they could not reach in time to help.

  The survivors climbing the hill were following orders—sensible ones, given the information available. While Lieutenant C. A. McLennan’s quick action might have saved thousands of lives by preventing a second explosion, the panic that followed not only stopped what progress had just been made in the rescue effort but added to the suffering of thousands. In the fog of war, such well-intended decisions were made with grave consequences every day.

  When a soldier ordered Joe Glube, the tobacco and stationery store owner, to find higher ground, the twenty-one-year-old took his bleeding mother and sister up to North Commons. When his mother realized she had left behind her new fur coat, Joe dutifully went back through the quiet, empty streets to retrieve it. But when he returned to the North Commons, so many victims had packed the park that he couldn’t find his family.

  While he searched for his mother and sister, the scene he’d just walked through caused him to worry about his store on Barrington Street, not far from City Hall. He wondered if it was still standing, on fire, or being looted. At a time when competing priorities seemed to pop randomly into peoples’ heads, this thought grabbed Glube’s attention and compelled him to hurry back to his store.

  On the way he saw other store owners gripped by the same fears, hurriedly boarding up shattered windows and doors. Glube’s block happened to be far enough away from Pier 6 to have suffered minimal damage and no fires, and no one had reported seeing a looter yet.

  Glube followed the lead of his business neighbors, breaking up crates and nailing the boards to the window frames. As he was completing that task, Deputy Mayor Henry Colwell appeared on the Grand Parade—a military parade square created at Halifax’s founding—with a megaphone to admonish the store owners.

  “What are you people doing? Do you realize there have been thousands of people killed or hurt? They’re starving in the North End. We need help!”

  That’s all Glube needed to hear. He dropped his hammer and shouted, “Where do we report?”

  “The Armories!” Colwell shouted back. “Bring transport if you have it.”

  Glube rushed back home, put the tires back on his secondhand Ford, took it off its blocks, and drove to the Armories. As Glube drove north, he was amazed to see that entire rows of homes had been completely wiped out. As he drove through Richmond, the stripped homes, trees, and electrical lines made it almost impossible to discern where the narrow Halifax roads had been, and he became disoriented. He passed dozens of bodies strewn across yards and roads in every imaginable position.

  When he got to the Armories, volunteers who had been on the job for no more than an hour or two loaded his Ford with food, blankets, and other supplies to give to whomever needed them. On his return trips to the Armories to retrieve more supplies, Glube started picking up seriously injured victims and dropping them off at the nearest hospital or makeshift aid station, which were already popping up around town. All were quickly deluged with more patients than they could handle, with thousands more on the way.

  That newfangled invention, the automobile, was suddenly in great demand. As of that morning, the snow and ice hadn’t come to Halifax yet, so those who owned “a motor,” as they called it, got busy taking their cars off their blocks; adding air, oil, and gas; and getting them back on the road.

  Some car owners used them to speed out of town. T. J. Wallace, an optometrist, and his wife and their seven kids lived on Chebucto Road near the West Arm, which seemed a safe distance from Pier 6. But when a big chunk of metal, possibly from Mont-Blanc, landed in their garden, narrowly missing a few of them, Dr. Wallace decided they were leaving. When one of their sons tried to sacrifice his seat so their Newfoundland dog could have it, Dr. Wallace refused. They headed out to Tantallon, about 20 miles away, but Herring Cove Road was clogged with people who had had the same idea and were driving and walking out of town, some of them limping.

  Others got their cars out of their barns, carriage houses, and garages to help survivors, many of whom would owe their lives to these amateur ambulance drivers. The entire city was now in a race against time, which could be measured in pints of blood.

  When Eileen Ryan’s older brother rushed home to get his shiny new 1917 Chevrolet going, his mother had to tell him he had already missed their next-door neighbor, who had come over to their house distraught because his young daughter’s jugular vein had been cut and she was bleeding to death. The neighbor begged Mrs. Ryan to get the Chevrolet out to take his girl to the hospital, but no one knew how to get the car ready, let alone drive it. His daughter died in their home.

  The Ryans were preparing to leave for high ground, as they’d been instructed, when some sailors showed up at their door. If you owned a functional vehicle, word traveled quickly. When the sailors inquired if it could be driven, he assured them it was in fine shape. They asked if he could drive the wounded to the various hospitals, a request that some car owners refused because they feared the blood of the victims would ruin their upholstery. But the young Mr. Ryan, probably still thinking of the girl next door, eagerly volunteered his car and his help. His brand-new Chevrolet would never be the same. But then, nothing else would be either.<
br />
  While he headed out to help, Mrs. Ryan and her four younger children grabbed a few things, including their pet parrot, which could mimic bugle calls from nearby Wellington Barracks, and started walking to the city’s outskirts. After a few blocks, Mrs. Ryan’s handbag felt too heavy, so she left it on a fence post. After seeing the girl next door lose her life, her handbag no longer seemed so important.

  Apparently the other survivors who passed that way felt the same. When Mrs. Ryan came back a few hours later, her handbag was still hanging on the fence post, untouched.

  After Charles Upham had coaxed his wounded children, Millicent and Archie, to slide down the oilcloth staircase cover, he had to execute one of the thousand acts of triage being performed throughout Halifax that day: leave his burning house behind, with his wife and three of his children in it, all presumably dead, and get his two surviving children help as fast as he could.

  But when the panic struck, they had to change direction, joining a crowd walking to a field behind Dean’s Nursery off Longard Road. There they watched the fires raging in their neighborhood below, and another one at the cotton factory behind them, which had quickly become an inferno.

  Volunteers from St. John’s Ambulance Brigade, the Salvation Army, and the Red Cross roamed the parks and open fields where survivors had gone to avoid the second explosion they’d been told was coming. The volunteers handed out food, clothing, and blankets; provided basic first aid; and tried to identify and deliver the most seriously wounded to hospitals. But, being badly outnumbered, the volunteers couldn’t get to all the victims quickly enough, and some died waiting.

  On this day, it only made sense that a prison built to keep criminals in became one of the safest places for innocent victims to keep danger out. A savior emerged in the form of George Grant, the governor of Rockhead Prison on Gottingen Street near Bedford Basin, where the day before the prisoners had been breaking rocks to make gravel and stone chips for roads. After the explosion, the inmates took advantage of the confusion and escaped.

  Instead of trying to chase down the escapees, Grant realized that their departure presented an opportunity. With the weather turning colder by the hour, and so many people with serious injuries in need of proper clothing, shelter, and first aid, Grant opened his prison to some seventy survivors, many of them fellow parishioners at Grove Presbyterian Church.

  Charles Upham knew Grant, who agreed to take Archie into the prison so Charles could take Millicent to the Cogswell Street Military Hospital, where the wounded soldiers gave up their beds to the explosion victims almost as eagerly as the prisoners gave up their cells. Charles Upham’s children were hurt and scared but safe enough in their new temporary homes for him to board a sleigh to search for his relatives.

  Rockhead Prison’s newest little inmate, Archie Upham, was comforted to find one of his aunts, Mrs. Rasley, whose family had expected to host his grandfather’s funeral that day. Although her son Reg, Archie’s playmate, was still missing, and two of her daughters had already gone to the hospital, one with a cut eye, Mrs. Rasley devoted herself to Archie’s immediate needs. When she saw that his head wounds had produced so much blood they had glued his shirt to his back, she found clean water, soaked his shirt, and peeled it carefully off his body. In the process she discovered the source of all that blood: a serious cut on the back of his head from the glass that had shot toward him and Millicent while they played. No one had noticed how much blood Archie had lost because he had dark hair, and his head was already so black from the grunge that it was hard to see.

  Aunt Rasley did her best to clean the wound, and then George Grant gave Archie some of his older son’s clothes. They were much too large, but fashion was even less important at Rockhead Prison on December 6 than it had been on December 5. If you had something to cover your torso, you qualified as one of the best-dressed people in Richmond that day.

  At 9:04 that morning, Mrs. Rasley’s son Reg had been in the storeroom off the kitchen where Mrs. Rasley kept the jars of preserves she bottled so her family could eat fruit each winter. While Reg examined the tempting goods on each shelf, a piece of hot, heavy metal came crashing through the roof and smashed a chair a few feet away from him. He assumed it was a German shell, and that German soldiers would be busting through the Rasleys’ front door at any minute, guns blazing, looking for captives. Reg’s unproven theory was confirmed in his mind when a few heavy jars of preserves shattered on the stone floor behind him. He didn’t need to wait any longer for the Germans to come barging in to get him. He ran out of the house and kept running.

  When he eventually slowed down, he met one of Governor Grant’s sons, who told him, “Come home with me.” When they ran into more of the Grant boys, they decided they should check on their aunt at her bakery on Tower Road, a few miles away. When they finally got there, Reg’s considerable energy had fizzled, and he was exhausted.

  Mrs. Grant asked Reg a lot of questions about his family, but, like so many dazed kids that day, he didn’t have many answers. The Grants’ aunt surmised enough, however, to send one of her nephews to find Reg’s mother to tell her that her son was being looked after at her home. When Mrs. Grant put him to bed, Reg dropped right into a deep sleep.

  Years later, he recalled that being with strangers who cared had a profound effect on him, “I wasn’t afraid anymore.”

  Gordon Pattison, fourteen, and his brother James, thirteen, found themselves on their own—a common predicament for Halifax children that day. With nowhere to go, they joined the other “instant refugees” walking to North Commons to avoid a second explosion. On the way, a stranger gave both of them coats and James a stocking hat, which he appreciated until he discovered it was crawling with head lice. He was amazed the lice could get through all the oil and tar on his head to his scalp, but that was the least of his problems. They could only hope their younger brother, Alan, whom they had not seen since they had all been watching the ship together, had survived.

  The crowds of refugees filling the parks and open fields endured almost two hours of cold, pain, and gnawing uncertainty. Shortly before noon, the Seventy-Second Battalion of Ottawa flooded the magazine at Wellington Barracks, then carried most of the ammunition to the harbor, where they dumped it. (Protecting the environment was not a priority in 1917.)

  With that, officials decided the threat of a second explosion was over, and told everyone they could return to their homes—if they still had them. The survivors left the parks and fields of Halifax as slowly and silently as they had arrived, but many weren’t sure where to go.

  Gordon and James Pattison tried to make their way back to their home on Barrington Street, but the fires had grown so big that officials there turned them away. With few options, they headed for their grandparents’ house across the Narrows on the Dartmouth side. They planned to board the Ragus, which shuttled Acadia employees back and forth between the refineries on both sides of the channel (Ragus is sugar spelled backward), but the boat never showed up.

  When the captain of a government boat patrolling the harbor saw them, he told them to hop on, and dropped them off at the agency’s wharf in Dartmouth. The captain might have been breaking the rules, but by then just about every societal norm had already been suspended, leaving the survivors to rely on their common sense, innate decency, and each other.

  The superintendent at the dock in Dartmouth “gruffly ordered them to clear out,” they recalled, which might have been because the captain had broken the rules, or because the boys were covered in black grease. The boys had to walk another mile and half along the railroad track and through the fields of the Mount Hope Lunatic Asylum to get to their grandparents’ home.

  It was already getting dark when their grandmother opened the door. “She could hardly believe her eyes,” James recalled. She was so relieved to see them that she didn’t care that they were covered in dark muck, scooping them into her arms for a big hug.

  The boys had hoped to see the rest of their family at her home,
but no one else was there. Their grandfather and uncles had gone to Halifax to find them, their siblings, and their parents. While their grandmother tried to clean them up, she asked them what had happened, but the still shaken boys could not tell her much, and could offer no clues as to where their parents and siblings might be.

  The windows of their grandparents’ house had all been smashed, but fortunately their grandfather had not yet installed the storm windows. His procrastination was rewarded when the boys found the storm windows safe in the basement and installed them, making theirs one of the few warm, dry homes in the area that night.

  Their grandmother made them a hot dinner and then sent them to bed. Tired as they were, they could not fall asleep, too worried about their mother, father, brother, and sister. Hours later, their grandfather and uncles returned. Their grandfather hurried upstairs to see his grandsons, probably as much for his sake as for theirs. The boys sat up when their grandfather came in, hoping for good news, but he didn’t have any to share. They had not learned anything on their search, except that the Acadia Sugar Refinery, where their father worked as the mechanical superintendent, had been reduced to rubble.

  Their grandfather explained that the sugar refinery shuttle boat, Ragus, had not picked them up because it had been close to Mont-Blanc and was ruined, her crew of five killed. It was a sobering report for the boys, who had started the day happily saying good-bye to their parents and sister at their home before walking to school with their little brother. It would end with the brothers not knowing if any of them were still alive.

  Barbara Orr was grateful for Mrs. Moir’s help and hospitality, but lying in her guest bed on the second floor brought Barbara no peace. Her mind raced with the day’s incomprehensible events.

  Outside Mrs. Moir’s home, the horse-drawn Boutlier’s Fish Truck came through—not to deliver Atlantic salmon on its normal route but to pick up people to take to the nearest hospital. Some of the wounded on the truck were still and quiet, while others moaned softly.