That still left a great demand for adoptive parents, both temporary and permanent. If the mother had been debilitated or killed while the father was off at war, family or friends often took their children, with a catch: they had to be of the same religion. This stipulation precluded Protestants and Catholics from adopting children of the other faith, with some heart-wrenching results.
The registration form of one soldier’s family read as follows: “Daniel, soldier, killed. Mary, his wife, missing. Anna, 9-1/2, O.K. Kathleen, 11, missing, Helen, 7, missing. Ethel, 5, killed. Gerald, 3, killed. Michael, 1, killed. Everything destroyed.” This left nine-and-a-half-year-old Anna by herself. When relatives from another town offered to take Anna in, the committee performed a basic background check, and determined it would be a good fit. Anna moved in with them, and all seemed well until the local church objected that Anna was not the same religion as her relatives. The committee brought her back to live in the orphanage in Halifax, adding another disruption to an already interrupted childhood.
A month after the explosion, the committee published a list of eighty names in local papers of children who were still missing, with few or no signs of their fate. Headed INFORMATION WANTED REGARDING MISSING CHILDREN, it assured readers that all communication would be confidential. A few of those children were actually found, but most appeared later on a list of the dead in the 1918 Halifax City Directory.
If the mother had been badly injured or killed while the father was fighting overseas, the military would not grant compassionate leave quickly, if at all. When no parents were left to care for their children, the committee took over, assuming the role of in loco parentis while working to find suitable homes for as many orphans as possible. The committee was blunt in its assessment of its new wards: “Coloured or feeble minded orphans,” the committee believed, constituted a “special problem.” Likewise, the committee stated that “disobedient or incorrigible” boys or girls would need to be considered in a different light.
But the committee members also seemed sympathetic to what the children had just endured. “It is of great importance to fully realize now, before it is too late, the tremendous change which this disaster has wrought in the lives of so many Halifax children, and to provide, in so far as human wisdom can, every safeguard, every advantage and opportunity for the children.”
The committee didn’t have to look very hard for takers, with more than a thousand offers coming in from across North America, though some were more suitable than others. Some writers had no qualms about expressing a preference for blue-eyed, fair-haired children. One man went so far as to say he would like to take in two healthy children, a boy and a girl, aged ten to twelve, who had good family backgrounds, dispositions, and manners, while hinting that children with red hair, upturned noses, or “weak chins” would not be welcome. The man received a response, but no orphans.
But his was not the crassest request they received. An official from a state in the Deep South wrote, “Send fifty colored girls at once.” His wish was not fulfilled.
Committee members replied to each and every letter or telegram—no matter how offensive, apparently—including those asking for strong boys, because the writers were probably looking for cheap farmhands. The worst sides surfaced, but once again, simple humanity ultimately won. The vast majority of correspondents were sincere in their desire to help.
From Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, a telegram said: HAVE SIXTY PRIVATE HOMES FOR CHILDREN MOSTLY PROTESTANT / SOME FOR PERMANENT ADOPTION / REST WILLING TO HOME INDEFINITE TIME. Charlottetown authorities offered to send a committee to handle the transition.
Some were touching, including this letter from a Dutch immigrant near Edmonton, Alberta, who wrote, “I hope you excuse mine writing but I am only four year in Canada . . . and I cannot explain myself the way I wanted, but I do feel sorry for all the poor little ones. Please let me know, I was an orphan child myself and know what it is, to be without a home.” Due to the distance, he was not given a child, but thanked sincerely for his heartfelt offer.
One of the nine nurses sent by the Calais, Maine, Red Cross gave a speech when she returned, telling her neighbors what she’d seen and how Halifax was recovering. When she finished, a dozen families approached her, offering to take in some of the Halifax orphans. The nurse promised to help them navigate immigration.
Despite the flood of offers from afar, the committee decided it would be best to place the orphans in Nova Scotia homes whenever possible, because it would be less disruptive for the children, easier to keep an eye on them, and Nova Scotia would not lose more of the next generation—an important consideration for a province that had already lost so much of its younger population to Quebec, Ontario, the Great War, and the explosion itself. For all the heartbreaking situations the children faced, most of them were taken in by caring families, usually relatives, and often had the chance to choose among several good options.
But even a good match couldn’t guarantee a successful transition. The newly orphaned children had been deeply affected by what they had seen and lost, but there was no grief counseling in 1917. Some children were placed with relatives they barely knew who lived far away or already had more children than they could care for. If behavioral problems surfaced, children were often moved from home to home or separated from their siblings—the only people who might truly understand what they were going through. If these matches failed, they ended up back in the orphanages.
As a result, some children’s lives were filled with a flash of tragedy followed by a lifetime of sadness, where they couldn’t settle in anywhere, hold down a steady job, or maintain a healthy relationship. In these cases, perhaps, they might have been better off bypassing the closer options for one of the warm invitations from farther away.
Barbara Orr was one of the “explosion orphans.” Her story seemed to unfold like so many war-child tales that tell of the long, hard struggle to piece a normal life back together. She often worried that her two youngest siblings, to whom she loved to read, had been found somewhere but could not give their names. Because their house had burned down, she knew it was unlikely, but the thought still troubled her.
Barbara moved in with the aunt who found her and her husband. Later her uncle had to tell her most of her family had not yet been found and that it was assumed they were dead. When their bodies were later discovered, Barbara had to identify them at the Chebucto Road School morgue.
Barbara received offers from three related families to move in, and she was old enough to choose for herself—two silver linings. After careful consideration, she decided the quiet of the Dartmouth home, which had no other children, was too much for her to take. She missed the constant noise of five siblings in one house, and liked the idea of living with her aunt Edna and uncle William MacTaggart Orr, who had children about her age, including lifelong friends Gladys and Bill.
This left Barbara with the difficult task of telling her Dartmouth aunt and uncle that she wanted to move back across the harbor to Richmond. Though it’s clear Barbara made the right decision, it’s hard not to feel something for her Dartmouth relatives.
For someone who had lost almost everything, however, it’s even harder to judge Barbara for this simple preference.
Chapter 38
“Don’t Stare”
Of the many doctors who traveled to Halifax to help, 102 were Canadian out-of-towners, usually from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and 120 came from the United States, most of them New Englanders who set up shop at Bellevue, Halifax Ladies’ College, and the USS Old Colony. The number of out-of-town nurses, both Canadian and American, who worked incredible hours for days was even more impressive: 459.
Lieutenant-Colonel McKelvey Bell later reported that the suddenly robust medical staff in Halifax had performed 250 eye removals and 25 amputations over about two weeks. But even these figures are low, as they do not include house calls or patients treated in doctors’ offices, homes, and any number of impromptu operating ro
oms, some of which converted back to dinner tables a week later.
The doctors and nurses gave generously of their time, expertise, and effort. Some paid a price for it long after they returned home, unable to shake the sights they had seen. The Halifax Herald told the story of one doctor from Sydney, Nova Scotia, at the northern tip of the province, who could not reconcile all that he had witnessed, and probably experienced something similar to the shell shock Barss and others experienced. Back in Sydney, he talked incessantly of the horrific scenes he had encountered. When he concluded he could not shake them, he committed suicide.
The gratitude shown to the Boston doctors from the Canadian prime minister and the patients was sincere and well earned. But eventually it threatened to obscure the vast and vital work of the “first responders,” those doctors who lived in Halifax, Dartmouth, and nearby, and came running without being called to administer to thousands of victims—presumably the worst of the worst, since they were in the most urgent need of help—a full day or two before most outsiders arrived.
This habit of heaping praise on the foreigners eventually made many Halifax doctors bristle, some of whom reached a breaking point when an article appeared on February 2, 1918, in the Halifax Evening Mail crediting local doctors with merely “materially helping with the wounded.” This outraged the local doctors, who felt compelled to write letters to the editors of the Halifax Herald on February 16 and the Morning Chronicle on February 18.
“Some of the medical men of this city have resented this manner of describing the part played in the surgery arising out of the explosion,” they wrote, correctly pointing out that local doctors and nurses “bore the whole burden” of medical work for the first forty-eight hours, when the majority of victims were first treated and before the Americans showed up on Saturday morning.
“The splendid work done by the American surgeons is hereby not in the least minimized,” the Halifax doctors continued, “but the local practitioners naturally resent being described merely as helpers during a period in which, unquestionably, they and their provincial brethren were the chief performers.”
This tendency to discount the contributions of local doctors continued for decades, but it’s worth clarifying that they had no quarrel with the American doctors themselves, just the journalists and historians who too often diminished their efforts. Quite the opposite—the Canadian and American doctors performed one of the great acts of international cooperation, putting aside recent national politics and petty egos in the service of a greater good. They departed exhausted but exhilarated, with a profound sense of shared purpose and respect.
“The best traditions of the medical profession gained greater glory during the calamity at Halifax,” Dr. Thomas A. Foster of Portland, Maine, said. “The heroic devotion of the Canadian physicians” was a “stimulant to their willing and eager American counterparts.”
Perhaps the final word is this: of the hundreds of doctors and nurses from near and far who helped the 9,000 explosion victims, all of them were necessary. Years later, when the doctors and nurses who helped out began passing away, their heroic work in Halifax decades before was often highlighted in their obituaries.
With the advantage of a century of hindsight, we can add this: the moment people had the luxury of weighing who contributed how much, the crisis had passed, and the business of returning life to normal was well under way. The truth was simple: all the doctors and nurses did everything they could, and they did it remarkably well.
The soldiers continued exhuming human remains from the ruins until January 11, 1918—a full thirty-four days after the explosion. As doggedly as they had worked, they finished with hundreds of people still unaccounted for.
Coroner Arthur Barnstead could not solve all the mysteries the explosion had created. While Barnstead is credited with identifying about 60 percent of the estimated 1,951 victims, 242 could not be identified because they were too disfigured, or no family members were left to claim them. Another 410 were listed as missing, but their bodies were never found—entire lives erased in less time than it takes to blink.
On February 4, 1918, the Mortuary Committee reported that it had interred some 1,400 identified victims, and 150 more who had not been identified. But even this figure is low, because hundreds of bodies never reached the Chebucto Road School morgue. Some of the victims, like Captain Brennan, were so close to Mont-Blanc that they literally vanished, like the ship itself. Other bodies weren’t discovered until the spring, when construction workers clearing sites for new buildings found more bodies in the rubble, mud, and dirt. Clearing away the wreckage of Hills & Sons Foundry, the Acadia Sugar Refinery, the Richmond Printing Works, the cotton factory, Exhibition Hall, and the other Richmond buildings took months of steady work, which produced the remains of hundreds more victims.
The recovery crew removed the bricks, blocks, and broken glass that had been the sugar refinery well into the hot summer months, finding corpses throughout. When they finished, they moved on to Exhibition Hall, which they had thought was empty when the explosion hit. But, in the summer of 1919, a year and a half after the disaster, while clearing out one of the cattle sheds they found the shattered bones of a presumed vagrant, the last victim of the Halifax explosion to be found.
All told, officials determined that 1,953 people were killed in the explosion and its aftermath, about 400 more than Titanic had claimed, more even than the entire province of Nova Scotia had lost during four years of fighting the Great War. But this almost certainly underestimates the total, as it fails to count those whose bodies couldn’t be found, those who died weeks and months later from injuries and illnesses caused by the explosion, and those officials simply failed to count.
If this is hard for us to imagine today, when authorities can definitively identify victims with just a few strands of hair, it’s worth noting that fifteen years after the attack on the World Trade Center, the remains of 1,113 victims—some 40 percent of the 2,753 who died—have still not been identified. After such a cataclysm, even modern science can do only so much.
This brings us to a final accounting. No list was ever compiled of all the victims known to have died, let alone the unknown and those who died weeks and months after the explosion. Although the figure most commonly used is 1,953, almost every researcher I’ve encountered believes the actual figure to be much higher—perhaps as high as 3,000, which would represent about 5 percent of the population of Halifax. While there are no hard numbers to back that figure up, given all the considerations above, it cannot be discounted as absurd.
While none of the respectable Halifax scholars claims to have the final number, a consensus has developed that some 1,600 people were killed instantly, and probably 400 to 800 died afterward, in addition to 9,000 wounded and 25,000 homeless. These numbers will likely stand as the best estimates we have.
With most of the 9,000 wounded still living in the city—fully 15 percent of the population—the sight of cripples, amputees, and victims of facial disfigurements passing on the street would be a familiar scene for decades. Many victims never sought treatment for their wounds, with shards of glass emerging from their skin years later.
Haligonians born after the explosion learned to recognize the trademark scars, tinged in black and blue from the soot and TNT, and avert their glance without comment.
“Don’t stare,” their parents taught them. “It’s the Explosion.”
Unlike hundreds of other victims, there was never any doubt about Vincent Coleman’s fate. But in the personals of January 7, 1918, this notice appeared: “The many friends of Mrs. Vincent Coleman now with her mother Eleanor O’Toole 126 Edward Street will be gratified to learn that she and her children are rapidly recovering from the injuries received in the explosion. Mrs. Coleman speaks in terms of deep gratitude of the many kindnesses of friends.”
A few years later, Mrs. Coleman married a Mr. Jackson, who had also survived the explosion, which had permanently injured his arm. In 1923, working in the r
ailyard with his weakened arm, he fell between moving cars and was killed.
Surviving the tragic death of two husbands, Mrs. Coleman Jackson lived past ninety.
Gordon Driscoll was never found or identified, and the family could only conclude that he had been killed. His younger brother, Art, five, who had been unconscious on the train to Truro, recovered, but took months to regain his ability to speak. The family stayed together, which proved a great help to all of them. In 1919, Mrs. Driscoll gave birth to a baby girl.
In April 1918, workers clearing out the rubble of the Acadia Sugar Refinery found the remains of James Pattison’s father, Vincent, among his many coworkers buried there, and returned his effects to his wife. These included the pocket watch the Pattisons had given to James the week before the explosion, which he had set five minutes fast. He had lent it to his father that day because his father’s watch had stopped and was being repaired. When they found it, the face had been smashed and the hands torn off, but they had left a clear imprint on the face, the shadow of two hands stopped forever at 9:10. James saved it as one of the few keepsakes he had of his previous life.
Millicent Upham stayed in the hospital past Christmas, but never took off the little gold ring her mother had given her the previous Christmas. When a doctor thought the ring was getting a bit tight and wanted to take it off, Millicent refused. Her finger’s swelling went down, and the ring stayed on.
While Millicent Upham recovered in the hospital from losing an eye, Archie and their father, Charles, moved in with an uncle and aunt. A couple of months after Millicent rejoined them, spring had arrived, so Charles Upham decided it was time to search the foundation of his house, knowing that his wife, two of his daughters, and a son had been buried there. He did not want soldiers to find his family and possibly damage remains or heirlooms they might come across. So he steeled himself to perform the hard but necessary task, a final expression of the awful labors of love.
The Great Halifax Explosion Page 31
