The Great Halifax Explosion

by John U. Bacon

One day after workers had restored 200 telephone lines, the blizzard knocked them out again, forcing the workers to start all over—and this time in the worst weather. Underwater cables had been broken by anchors dragging behind distressed ships. Given the bare-bones service available, the phone company asked its customers to place only urgent calls until the emergency passed, though a case could be made that all calls going out of Halifax were urgent.

  An underwater cable between Halifax and Dartmouth had served as Dartmouth’s lifeline to the outside world, but when workers tried to lay a new cable, the storm forced them to abandon the effort. Just a few years into the telephone age, what used to be a luxury was quickly becoming a necessity—and, in a crisis, a lifesaver.

  But if the Haligonians could face the explosion and keep going, the biggest blizzard in a decade wasn’t going to stop them either.

  St. John’s Ambulance Brigade began canvassing the hardest-hit areas district by district. The Red Cross supplied 150 Voluntary Aid Department (V.A.D.) nurses to military hospitals. The Halifax School Board mobilized teachers to help. The Halifax Relief Commission, quick to address unanticipated needs as they arose, created four more committees: Clothing, Medical Relief, Fuel, and Dartmouth Relief.

  The Clothing Committee set up a system to distribute clothes and footwear out of the Green Lantern Restaurant downtown after it had been reasonably cleaned up and repaired. The volunteers there soon saw heavy two-way traffic, with as many people dropping off clothing and shoes as picking them up. The Fuel Committee delivered coal to hospitals, shelters, and homes, trying to unburden the victims from another layer of discomfort.

  The Dartmouth Relief Committee received a generous gift from Imperial Oil, Ernest Barss’s former employer in Montreal, which provided three bunkhouses big enough for 200 people to move into, plus trained caretakers, and $10,000. Relief workers soon set up twenty-one shelters, plus some private homes, which fed about 6,000 people in the week following the disaster.

  The Food Committee added new depots across the city. By Friday afternoon, with the blizzard now delivering snow from the ocean at the rate of an inch an hour with very little visibility, volunteers drove to the North End to persuade the remaining residents there to leave their homes for shelters—not always successfully.

  More than 300 servicemen searched homes for survivors, but the odds of finding anyone alive went down with each passing hour. Their role gradually shifted from rescue to recovery, the dispiriting, nightmare-inducing task of pulling dead bodies and body parts out of broken buildings.

  From its inception, Halifax had been a staging area for war, backing battles on at least three continents. It sent its sons to war and saw some of them return as casualties. But the city itself had never been touched directly by it, until it was hit in the most unexpected way. While Haligonians guarded the front door, the devil snuck in the back—a shock to the system that Raddall, a Halifax teenager when the explosion hit, captured perfectly:

  “Since Indian days no foe had dared attack the town. The strength of the fleet and the fortress for six generations had made the place too formidable. Yet here was all the slaughter and destruction of a modern bombardment concentrated in a single blast; and now in the most populous part of the city the survivors lay besieged by the winter weather, not merely for this night but for many days and nights to come.”

  The frigid temperatures did have one unexpected benefit: the dead could be stored on pallets in the basements of destroyed buildings without embalming fluid, which was in short supply, and preserved for weeks until the deceased could be identified or buried.

  Chapter 27

  Lost and Found

  For the many families who were missing someone, there were few alternatives to slogging through the snow from hospital to hospital—half of which hadn’t existed the day before—and crowding around newspaper offices searching the long lists of the patients at each facility, the missing, and the dead.

  If their relatives’ names didn’t turn up on any of those lists, they placed ads themselves, taking care to include any details that might help find their loved ones, and left their contact information—as incomplete as that often was, with phone numbers and even addresses effectively useless. As the days mounted, they started reading other ads, some of which were placed by good Samaritans who had found someone, usually a child, and didn’t know how to help them find their home.

  In this era of already limited communication, made much more onerous by the destroyed homes, the blizzard, and the downed telephone lines, journalists proved to be a tremendous asset. Reporters trudged to the hospitals and all thirty-six official shelters, plus many of the private homes that had taken in survivors, to perform the dicey and tedious work of compiling lists of survivors.

  Jim Gowan, seventeen, watched his father do this work for the Halifax Herald and saw how difficult it was. Many survivors had been sent to surrounding towns like Truro, Amherst, and New Glasgow, which all promised to send the refugees’ names as soon as possible, but that could take days. But when a reporter discovered that someone assumed missing or dead was alive, it brought great relief and joy to the family, and a bit of light to the journalist’s often dark duties.

  Tragedy comes quick and loud, while the small acts of decency that follow come slowly and quietly.

  Gordon and James Pattison woke up on Friday, December 7, at their grandparents’ home in Dartmouth, where they had trekked by foot and ferry after the explosion.

  The boys finished breakfast while watching the snow come down and kept their grandmother company through the long, anxious day while their grandfather and uncle took the ferry back to Halifax to renew their search for the boys’ father, mother, ten-year-old sister, Catherine, and eight-year-old brother, Alan. They bought every newspaper in Halifax that morning to look for any information on their missing relatives, and were rewarded with a notice indicating that the boys’ mother was being treated at the YMCA. They immediately headed off to see her.

  The listing proved accurate, which was not always the case. When they found her, they saw that one of her hands had been cut and crushed, but she was otherwise fine, and very much alive. They were disappointed to learn that she had no news about her husband; her daughter, Catherine, who’d been quarantined at home; or Alan, who’d walked toward the piers with Gordon and James.

  Their grandfather placed an ad in the papers: “Pattison Allan [sic] 8 years old, missing. Pattison Catherine, 10 years old, missing. Pattison, V. J. missing, adv. R. F. Grant, Victoria Road, Dartmouth.”

  When Mr. Grant came home that night and told the boys their mother was alive and would be getting out soon, it gave the boys relief, and reason to believe the others might be found, too.

  That same morning, Friday, December 7, the Pattisons’ friends and classmates Noble and Al Driscoll woke up 60 miles away on an experimental farm in Truro. They felt lonely being separated from their parents and siblings, most of whom were being taken care of at the Truro courthouse-turned-care-facility. The boys had no way of getting information about their missing brother Gordon, whom Noble believed had left for school before him that day.

  Still, it was good to be in the country on the outskirts of Truro, with a fresh blanket of snow outside their window. When Noble got up to look, Al saw that the sheets where Noble had slept had become a black, grimy mess.

  “Nob!” Al shouted. “I thought I told you to get properly clean last night!”

  “I did!” Noble protested. But when he looked back at his pillowcase, he was shocked to see the dark stains.

  When Al sat up, Noble pointed. “Just look at your own side!”

  Al looked behind him to discover his pillowcase was just as soiled as Noble’s. They would have to try again.

  Bertha and Ethel Bond, who had helped Reverend Swetnam rescue his daughter, were staying with distant relatives in the South End. Bertha’s letter to her fiancé fighting overseas summed up the feelings of many: “We can hardly realize what it means. So many of our
friends and relatives are gone,” she wrote, and North Halifax was “burnt to the level, but,” she added, almost quoting Ernest Barss’s letters to his parents verbatim, “we are looking at our trouble with never a waver because there are so many worse off than we are.”

  Dorothy Swetnam and her father, the Reverend William Swetnam, had found safe haven at a friend’s home in Dartmouth. The morning after the explosion, the Reverend took the ferry back to Halifax, where he saw that Richmond’s four churches had all been destroyed. Because so many of their parishioners had lost their homes, health, or lives, all four clergy spent their energies aiding their flocks, despite their own losses.

  In the wake of tragedy, people are often tempted to tell the mourners “Everything happens for reason,” “It will all work out for the best,” or “This is all part of God’s plan.” Reverend Swetnam, a devoted man of the cloth, was having none of it.

  “If this was the work of God,” he said, “I’ll tear off this clerical collar.”

  Swetnam found time to sift through the manse, now crushed, to salvage whatever he could bring back to Dorothy for safekeeping. While almost everything had been destroyed, somehow the Reverend found among the ruins one of Dorothy’s fragile teacups, completely intact, adorned with old English letters: “Remember Me.”

  While family members longed to find missing loved ones, those who were injured often pined for someone to find them.

  Barbara Orr lay in her bed at Camp Hill Hospital, her eyes fixed on the doorway to her ward, scanning every face that appeared there. She watched visitors come in from the cold, stomp their feet, and brush the snow from their coats, looking eager, anxious, and cautious at the same time. She examined them carefully, hoping to recognize an aunt or an uncle or any familiar face. Even after she didn’t recognize them, she would continue to study them as they walked slowly between the beds and stretchers, scrutinizing every patient for a match. Usually they passed through quietly and deliberately, disappointment growing with each step. But once in a while, Orr would hear the happy outburst when someone found someone they loved, still alive.

  She did not hold out much hope of seeing her parents, but one of her aunts had helped her just a couple of hours after the explosion. She had to know Barbara was alive. Of course, that aunt was now consumed with finding her missing husband, brother-in-law, and father-in-law—Barbara’s father and grandfather—but perhaps her relatives would send a neighbor or friend for her.

  But there she was, lying in her hospital bed with her burns, too shy and scared to ask for so much as a glass of water. As it grew dark that first Friday, with the snow showing no sign of letting up, the number of visitors dwindled, and Barbara began to wonder if anyone was looking for her. She concluded that perhaps she had been right from the start: her family was all gone, and she was not a high priority for her remaining relatives.

  Barbara Orr was a mature, quietly self-confident young woman, but she was nearing her breaking point. As the second day dwindled to a close, she was on the verge of crying, of letting it all out, but she “gulped them back,” and closed her eyes, hoping to get some sleep.

  Barbara was unaware of it, but someone had put her name on a list: “ORR, Barbara, Kenny and Alberts Sts., Camp Hill.”

  In the midst of the worst tragedy in Halifax history, Haligonians were uplifted by more than a few heartwarming stories. Rescuers found hundreds of people trapped and badly injured but alive, pleading for someone to find them.

  The rescuers discovered one baby who had been sleeping in his crib when the blast blew the closet door over it. The door shielded him when the ceiling collapsed moments later. When the rescuers cleared the ceiling plaster and beams off the closet door and lifted it, they found the baby as healthy as could be.

  Company Sergeant Major Davies led several soldiers on a rescue mission through the Flynn block, just 200 yards from Pier 6. At about 11:00 a.m. on Friday, December 7, twenty-six hours after the explosion, Private Benjamin Henneberry thought he heard a sound coming from a house cellar.

  Henneberry had more incentive to find survivors than most. He had returned from overseas before the explosion, which blew up the apartment his family rented on the Flynn block. His wife had been pinned under the collapsed structure for five hours before someone heard her cries and came to her rescue. She was now recovering in the hospital with two of their children, but five were still missing.

  The devastation in Richmond was so complete that residents often couldn’t be certain where their homes had been. It was not uncommon for survivors to sift through the ruins, only to discover they were going through a neighbor’s wreckage, not their own. Likewise, victims could end up far from their original homes.

  Thus, when Henneberry heard a baby’s cry, he jumped, shouting to the others to come quickly. They rushed to help him find the source, tearing through the still-smoldering ruins until they unearthed a woodstove, still warm, and found a twenty-three-month-old girl under the stove’s ash pan. She had some burns but was very much alive. Though the combination of soot and tears made her difficult to identify, when Henneberry scooped her up in his arms, he was convinced she was his.

  The little girl became an instant celebrity and a favorite at the Pine Hill Military Convalescent Home, where her sweet disposition cheered the staff.

  A few days later, a woman searching for family members heard the baby girl instinctively cry out, causing the woman to turn around, stare at the girl, and then run over to her to give her a hug. The woman looked down at the tag on the cot, which said “Henneberry,” and told someone at the hospital: “That is not a Henneberry child. That is a Liggins!” As the girl’s aunt, she would know.

  The Liggins family had rented an apartment near the Henneberrys when Mr. Liggins was called to fight overseas. On the morning of December 6, the girl’s mother and four-year-old brother had gone to the window to watch Mont-Blanc burn. When the blast leveled their home, they were killed. But the concussion sent little Annie Liggins shooting across the kitchen and under the stove, next to the ash pan, which protected her when the house collapsed, and kept her from freezing during the blizzard.

  Before Liggins’s father returned to claim his daughter, the legend of “Ashpan Annie” had already spread.

  Private Henneberry was not Annie Liggins’s father, but he might have saved her life. Ashpan Annie’s story inspired thousands to keep searching for survivors, which might have saved more lives. That the story of Ashpan Annie spread so quickly showed how thirsty all of Halifax was for some good news, and a little hope, to keep everyone going during this dark time.

  The blizzard also seemed to be working against the doctors, nurses, and other volunteers who packed the four train cars from Boston, and the dozens they picked up along the way in Maine and New Brunswick.

  After covering almost 500 of the trip’s roughly 650 miles in less than twenty-four hours, the engine broke down in Moncton, New Brunswick, the last stop before the tracks turned to the southeast into Nova Scotia and toward Halifax. The relief workers ate their Friday-night dinner while the mechanics hustled to get the train moving again.

  As soon as the mechanics fixed the engine, the tracks were covered in snow. The blizzard had moved inland, slowing the train down with each passing mile. The train had to grind through as much of the snow as possible, then pull back and slam forward again until it broke through the drift blocking its path, and repeat the process over and over. Instead of setting a record for the fastest train trip to Halifax, the Boston & Maine was now in danger of setting a record for the slowest.

  Outside the appropriately named Folly Mountain, the drifts were finally too deep for the train to go any farther. The conductors found Ratshesky to give him the news. Ratshesky was no hothead, but he was not about to let this mission be aborted on the tracks of Folly Mountain. He reasoned aloud that if the blizzard was this bad for them, sitting on a heated train with all the food and supplies they could want, what was the storm like for the victims in Halifax? After his shor
t sermon, Ratshesky recalled, “I pleaded with them to do everything in their power known to railroad men to clear the track.”

  Ratshesky stepped off the train to address a band of men with shovels, telling them everything he had heard about the Halifax tragedy: the crushed buildings, the thousands of wounded, the children, and how the blizzard was making everyone that much more miserable. “The men, realizing this,” Ratshesky said, “and knowing that every moment was precious worked like Trojans.”

  Each time the diggers cleared some track, the engineer would send the 135 tons of train smashing into the next layer of snow and release the steam to help melt it, and the diggers would start again, sweating so hard that they took their coats off. About an hour after they started, with the passengers urging the shovelers on, the train finally broke through the drift.

  The passengers cheered, and the train crawled ahead, with the diggers running to grab a rail and hop back on.

  Chapter 28

  The Last Stop

  To help with the massive task of collecting, identifying, and storing the bodies, Halifax benefited from having an embalming professor and an undertaking expert come in from Toronto.

  But the man put in charge of the grim work was Halifax’s own provincial civil servant Arthur S. Barnstead, the son of Dr. John Henry Barnstead, the local doctor who had created the first system for handling mass casualties when Titanic victims had arrived by the hundreds just five and a half years earlier. Inspired by his father’s work, Arthur became one of the world’s first licensed coroners, while assuming the position of Nova Scotia’s secretary of industries and immigration. His father offered to work under his son as he took on this immense task, and he accepted.

  Under the junior Barnstead’s directions, sailors and soldiers combed the area looking for corpses. Some of them carried big wicker baskets to pick up body parts—arms and legs, hands and feet, ears and fingers—on the chance that these might help someone construct a final answer about a relative. They put the bodies and their parts into the body bags the senior Barnstead had introduced during the Titanic recovery.