IN 1976, WHEN THE DALHOUSIE LAW SCHOOL PUBLISHED A VOLUME of memories from former students, the first three—by Emelyn MacKenzie, Vincent Pottier, and F.W. Bissett—included recollections about the explosion. MacKenzie remembered that a physician refused to treat her because her injury (a cut below one eye) was not serious enough. Pottier recalls the manager being unable to open the door at the Prince George Hotel where he was staying. (Pottier did it for him.) Bissett remembers the explosion took place during morning devotions at the Halifax Academy. Like others at the school, he dashed down the stairs faster than during any fire drill.
MacKenzie’s legal career took her to New York City, Pottier and Bissett stayed in Nova Scotia and ended up on the provincial Supreme Court; all three—like others who were in Nova Scotia that morning—have memories about the explosion. This is because the explosion left its indelible mark upon a generation of Nova Scotians the way Pearl Harbor did on a later generation of Americans, the way the assassination of John Kennedy did on much of the world a generation after that, and the way planes flying into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 imbedded themselves into collective memory nearly fifty years after that.
The phenomenon is known as flashbulb memory, and it relates to events that have seared themselves onto our brains. Those who were alive at the time of such events can still remember what they were doing and how they first heard of what happened. I recall precisely how I learned of President Kennedy’s assassination, and precisely how I learned about the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center. I do not recall Pearl Harbor, however, because by then Canada had been at war for more than two years and my father, like the fathers of most of my classmates, was already overseas.
For this book, I tapped into memories of the explosion in a number of ways. First, my eldest daughter, Lucy, and I visited homes for senior citizens throughout Nova Scotia.2 While in each community, I would also ask local officials, such as town clerks, if they knew of anyone old enough to remember the explosion. Second, at my request, Halifax newspapers and the Dalhousie alumni magazine published letters asking anyone with such memories to contact me. These approaches proved productive. They turned up:
The explosion left such strong impressions that chance encounters often led to intriguing vignettes. A woman encountered during tea at a guest house (bed and breakfast) in Wolfville recalled that her mother had been with her grandfather watering a horse and the horse reared up when the ground shook. They were 36 kilometres from Halifax. A man with whom I played golf in Renfrew, Ontario, recalled that his mother and father met when his home was turned into a hospital; his father, a merchant seaman, was assigned to work there.
Personal memories are only part of the record of what happened at 9:04:35 a.m., 6 December 1917, and in the hours, days, and weeks that followed. There are scores of letters and a number of diaries, one by the official Halifax explosion historian, Professor Archibald McKeller MacMechan. There are original copies of the telegrams that were received in Ottawa and, most important, the detailed typed minutes of the Halifax Relief Committee, starting with its first unofficial meeting at 11:30 a.m. the morning of the explosion.
Many of these records are in the Nova Scotia Archives, many others in Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa. But there are various records at many other locations. The Colchester Historeum archive in Truro, Nova Scotia, has a box containing records of the Truro Central Relief Committee, including correspondence with Halifax. An amateur historian at the New Glasgow fire department has kept council minutes and a report of the relief team sent to Halifax. In Augusta, Maine, there is a report from the man who led Maine’s medical response, and in Boston there are detailed minutes of the relief effort from Massachusetts. In Washington, DC, there are logs from the two United States Navy ships that came with immediate help—Tacoma and Von Steuben—and in nearby Virginia there is an analysis of the response of the American Red Cross.
In addition to these personal and official records, there are newspaper accounts of what happened—some, as chapter XVI relates, rather fanciful, but others quite detailed and, apparently, accurate. The newspapers in Saint John, New Brunswick, for example, carried interviews with people who passed through on their way home, among them students from the Roman Catholic women’s college, Mount St. Vincent Academy. (Many of the students came from Boston.) The newspapers in Toronto carried accounts from businesses concerned about their own losses. Newspapers almost everywhere carried letters from people who had been in the explosion. One in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, published a letter describing how a bank teller organized others into a group that moved survivors along the waterfront by boat.
Newspapers are useful not just for accounts published at the time. The Halifax newspapers have published articles about the explosion, often with new material, on anniversaries of the catastrophe. Others have been less regular but still useful. In 1936, the Evening Standard in London carried an article by Lieutenant-Commander Allan Baddeley, the first officer on the Canadian depot ship, Niobe. He sent a pinnace to take Mont-Blanc in tow, unaware she carried munitions. When the explosion happened, he was standing on Niobe’s bridge with Captain Walter Hose, later appointed to the official Wreck Commission Inquiry. In December 1995, CBC radio interviewed Halifax’s current fire chief; the next day, someone called the program’s talkback line to say that the fire engine used in 1917 was not the first of its kind.
The explosion has also been enshrined in fiction. Two novels set around the explosion reflect their authors’ experience. Lieutenant-Colonel F. (Frederick) McKelvey Bell, who wrote A Romance of the Halifax Disaster, was chief Canadian army medical officer—his hospital scenes are authentic. Hugh MacLennan, who wrote Barometer Rising, was a schoolboy who saw for himself the effects of the explosion. (His personal memories are in a brief article called “Concussion,” published in the Lower Canada College Magazine in 1938.) His book is a Canadian classic and has made the explosion a legend. Anyone writing about the blast needs to be aware that its image was created by MacLennan. Two other novels, by Jim Lotz and Robert MacNeil, understate the role of women and enhance the role of the military.
Then there are the various non-fiction accounts. The most important is Professor MacMechan’s official history. Though it was not published until 1978, it is based on first-hand accounts he collected at the time. Many of those are in the Nova Scotia Archives, in Halifax. In The Town That Died, Michael J. Bird pays more attention to the collision and the immediate response. His work was authoritative enough that it was filed with official government documents at Library and Archives Canada. There is also Janet Kitz’s thoroughly researched Shattered City, which takes a longer-term view using the records of the Halifax Relief Commission, which was established in 1918. Those records too are at the Nova Scotia Archives, in Halifax.
These books are only part of the literary legacy of the explosion. In his autobiography, Thomas Raddall describes how Chebucto School became a morgue. In his autobiography, journalist Kelly Morton describes the scene at his home. Prince’s biographer, Leonard Hatfield, reports that Prince used his Hupmobile as an ambulance. Mary Ann Monnon used records and personal contacts for Miracles and Mysteries. Her often-reprinted book illustrates the endurance of the explosion as a legend. There are shorter works, such as Kitz’s excellent book on child victims, and unpublished manuscripts such as Dwight Johnstone’s “The Tragedy of Halifax: The Greatest American Disaster of the War.” There is even an instant book, Stanley K. Smith’s Heart Throbs of the Halifax Horror, first published in 1918.
Most of these authors wrote from first-hand experience or from information from their families. Raddall was in school in 1917 when soldiers asked him to help turn his school basement into a morgue. Morton’s father was a physician and Morton witnessed what happened at his home. Monnon’s father was one of the survivors. Janet Kitz writes that her husband’s “sister and mother were among the first survivors I spoke with.” Johnstone’s father was chair of the Dartmouth Relief Committee, his sister a secretary with the Halifax Relief Committee, and his brother a physician. His father’s status helped Johnstone learn and report how New Glasgow assisted in the response. The Toronto Daily Star had sent Smith to Halifax to cover the explosion; he arrived during the blizzard that struck the city next day.
There are scores of periodical articles. Two pieces by social-welfare specialists appeared in The Survey within weeks of the explosion. Both deal with the relief effort. There are three articles on the response in medical journals, two written at the time, the other more recently. Two are personal accounts from physicians. One includes statistics on the types of injuries. An article in the Canadian Pharmaceutical Journal profiled the pharmacist who took charge of the Victoria General Hospital. The article revealed Charles Puttner was an unnoticed victim of the explosion: he collapsed from exhaustion three days after the explosion and never fully recovered.
When Saint Mary’s University held a conference on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the explosion, in 1992, the results were published two years later as Ground Zero: A Reassessment of the 1917 Explosion in Halifax Harbour. Ground Zero includes an analysis of the resulting litigation, by a Halifax lawyer; a review of the importance of Prince’s dissertation; an analysis of how professional women were treated; and a delightful account of the experiences of one elderly woman. It has the first look at the explosion by scientists since a Dalhousie University physicist, Howard Bronson, reported his findings in 1918. There is even an analysis of the tidal wave created by the explosion using computer modelling to test contemporary accounts. The endnotes contain scores of references to material on the explosion, including articles on its effects on city planning, on housing, architecture, nursing, education, the tsunami, the impact of the explosion on Dartmouth, and the role of the Dartmouth ferries. The material appeared in such diverse publications as Public Health Nurse, Construction: A Journal for the Architectural Engineering and Contracting Interests in Canada, Marine Geodesy, Canadian Nurse, and Journal of Education. One reference describes two versions of a folk song on the explosion recorded in 1938.
Archivists spend their careers storing historical material and helping others work with it. For the explosion, the most knowledgeable archivists are at the Nova Scotia Archives. As well as the records of the Halifax Relief Commission and other miscellaneous documents, they have carefully kept the documents collected by Professor MacMechan3 and the draft manuscript of the medical response by Dalhousie University professor David Fraser Fraser-Harris. They have also assembled reel after reel of microfilm of letters and other material, including the surviving records from the morgue. And they have acquired hospital records from the former Victoria General Hospital.
Second most important is Library and Archives Canada,4 which has military records from 1917, including those which were secret.5 There are also daily records compiled by the Canadian Army Medical Corps that make it possible to see how those still in hospital weeks later were accommodated.6 Library and Archives Canada has the papers of the Governor General, the link between Ottawa and London, and those of Prime Minister Robert Borden,7 who abandoned the 1917 federal election campaign to be in Halifax. LAC has the full report filed by the chief medical officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Bell, late in January 1918, which included his recommendations on how emergency medicine should be organized for a catastrophe.8 The latter show remarkable insight. Bell grasped the fact that the Halifax blast was that rare event—a catastrophe—and that it called for a different approach to planning.
LAC has the correspondence that revealed the Wreck Commission Inquiry was less than ambitious in determining the real cause of the explosion. A letter from the inquiry’s counsel notes that Mont-Blanc was a French ship loaded in the United States and sent to Halifax by the British, but that it would not be appropriate to have the inquiry examine the role of Canada’s allies while the country was at war.9 Another letter opens up questions of conflict of interest—among the normal clients of the lawyer for the inquiry were the agents who represented both IMO and Mont-Blanc.
There are many smaller but useful archives. The one at Dalhousie University has two diaries kept at the time of the explosion. One records a woman’s trips to the morgue to search for her sister. The other tells how a physician performed emergency surgery on the couch of Professor MacMechan, author of the official history. The Beaton Institute at Cape Breton University has a letter from an American in the Canadian army. He describes, among other things, the conditions at the morgue. The archives in Augusta, Maine, has that state’s official report, telling that the governor acted after consulting with Massachusetts. St. Francis Xavier University, in Antigonish, has a Roman Catholic publication telling how 125 families were wiped out in St. Joseph’s parish.
At many of these locations, those in charge helped me locate other sources. Pat Townsend, at the Acadia University Archives in Wolfville, found material not only in her own section of the university library but in books and theses relevant to the explosion. The minutes of the board of governors showed, for example, that the president had gone to Halifax to assist with the emotional recovery,10 and that the School for the Deaf and Dumb moved to Acadia. The staff at smaller archives had contacts as well as documents: the staff at the Old Kings Courthouse Museum, in Kentville, not only produced railway timetables but tracked down a man who remembered his mother’s experiences.
The staff at the Boston Public Library found the obituary of Abraham C. Ratshesky, who headed the Massachusetts response. He was the owner of a bank, a prominent Republican, and a philanthropist, which explains why he fitted in with the Conservative establishment in Canada. The library at the Massachusetts state capital was a gold mine: it has the records of the Massachusetts–Halifax Relief Committee and shows how discreetly and efficiently Massachusetts helped the survivors.
There is a photo collection in Halifax, another in Toronto, and a third in Boston’s state capital library. One photo shows the Hovland in dry dock. (It is possible to read her name.) At LAC there are maps of the harbour, one with numbers of all the piers as they were prior to the explosion. (Since many eyewitness accounts refer to pier numbers, this map was crucial to understanding.) In Halifax, a helpful archivist suggested another resource: fire-insurance plans showing street addresses for 1914. With those, it was possible to see that casualty treatment centres were in a semicircle around the impact area. The Nova Scotia Archives also has the city directories for 1917, which, when used with morgue and search records, both also at the archives, allows the impact area to be precisely defined. At the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, there are detailed maps of the harbour bottom—no such data was available in 1917.11
Halifax is the political, educational, and business centre of Nova Scotia, so the impact of the explosion was province wide—and the entire province responded. That response is recorded in town minutes. Most are still in vaults or basements. Burrowing among old minute books is a filthy but rewarding task. In 1917, many clerks pasted correspondence in these books. I located several original letters sent by Halifax asking for support for its plea for federal assistance.
Fire departments record their calls and many still have entries from 1917. It seemed strange when three nearby community fire departments—Kentville, Wolfville, and Windsor—had no record of a response to Halifax after the explosion, even though there were records of other calls that month. When it became clear this was not an omission, it also became clear that these communities, all on the Dominion Atlantic Railway, had sent physicians and nurses to Halifax but not firefighters. This was in sharp contrast to communities along the Intercolonial Railway: communities such as Truro, New Glasgow, Amherst, and Moncton all sent firefighters and fire equipment. This was the first clue that led to a major discovery: the response from a community depended on the railway it was on, for railway communications determined the response. Once that was known, a thesis in the Acadia University library proved extremely valuable. It showed that the response on the day of the explosion fitted the railways’ usual style. The Dominion Atlantic was a subsidiary of Canadian Pacific and therefore not inclined to deal with local politicians or the agencies they manage, including fire departments. The Intercolonial was a government railway integrated with the communities it served. Its agents immediately contacted local government officials and sought, and got, their help.
In searching for information about the explosion in small towns, it was possible to develop a simple but effective routine. First, I paid a visit to the town clerk to see if there were surviving minutes from 1917. While at the town hall, I asked about homes for seniors and names of elder citizens. Next, I visited the town library—most towns have some form of clipping service and copies of local histories. At the library, I checked to see if the town had a historical society or archives. Then I visited the fire department. Fire departments are social organizations and are well informed about, and proud of, their histories. In New Glasgow, the chief’s son was a historian: he had the town records from 1917, which he found at a yard sale. After that, I visited homes for seniors. Seniors are delighted to talk to visitors, especially when it is obvious the visitor finds what they have to say valuable.
I found it extremely important throughout all of this process to tell everyone what I was doing: the desk clerk, the hotel maid, the swimming-pool attendant, the parking attendant, storekeepers, and service-station attendants. Incidents like the Halifax explosion are the stuff of legend and everyone is interested in talking. By telling people about my research, I allowed word of my interest to spread. It is impossible to overemphasize how important making one’s interest known can be—information can be found in the unlikeliest places. In March 1996, for example, I met a university classmate at a golf show. After discussing other things, I mentioned I was working on a book on the explosion. My classmate told me—in considerable detail—how in 1968 in a bar in the disreputable part of Tours, France, he had ended up talking to the chef from the Mont-Blanc, the ship that exploded. He remembered the conversation and kept a note about it in his personal diary. This process proved so successful that it led me to write a book chapter on methodology.
In June 1966, a man attending a lecture came up and revealed that some of Samuel Henry Prince’s papers were filed in Saint John, New Brunswick, under someone else’s name. The man lives in a home on what was once the Prince farm and played the organ at Prince’s funeral. In Halifax, the police department has records of who was arrested before, during, and after the explosion. They show that most prostitutes and bootleggers survived. The records were made available after an informal request, probably because I was an instructor at the Canadian Police College. The former Victoria General Hospital has some records from 1917. They were provided after a formal application for their use. The museum and archives at Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt, on Canada’s west coast, has the yearbook from the Royal Naval College with notes about cadets’ injuries. (The college moved west as a result of the explosion.) The museum is open to the public. There are histories of Camp Hill and Victoria General Hospital. There is a history of Stellarton, whose firefighters went to Halifax. Even semi-confidential records are available to legitimate scholars, with the unstated proviso that discretion will be used. One record turned up an account from the morgue that stated a soldier had stolen money and jewellery from unidentified corpses. It seemed inappropriate to use his name.
Many books on seemingly remote topics will touch on a major event. A history of dentistry has information about dental reconstruction for victims. A history of the Canadian Press news agency discusses CP coverage of the explosion. A book on Black history in Canada, by Robin Winks, notes that a new Black school was damaged by fire. Books on fighting ships identify the warships involved. Some of these were located by browsing at book sales and visiting stores that sell used books. One visit turned up Salt Junk: Naval Reminiscences. 1881–1906, the autobiography of Bertram Chambers, the British rear-admiral who ran the convoy system at Halifax in 1917. Unfortunately, his memoir ends after the first part of his career, long before his wartime service. (The idea of going to old book sales came from a neighbour who runs a used bookstore in Ottawa.)
The whistle that was sounded to alert the citizens of Truro is in the firefighter’s museum in Yarmouth. The Lulan, the steam pumper sent from New Glasgow, is restored and on display across from New Glasgow City Hall. The chief of police in New Glasgow provided a tour of the West Side school, used as an emergency hospital. When a document was found describing how the school became a hospital, it was easy to follow. In Sandefjord, Norway, I spent hours walking through cemeteries. In Norway, gravestones carry not just the name and date of birth and death of the deceased, but the occupation—two precisely matched names on crew lists that were found in Oslo. It was possible to work out how old they were in 1917. Despite spending several hours in the cemetery, I missed the grave of the IMO’s captain, Haakon From. I learned only later that From’s body was shipped home to Sandefjord and buried in the family plot. Friends in Sandefjord found the grave and showed it to me during a subsequent visit. I found similar records in various archives in France, allowing me to document the fact the crews of the ships that collided came from various coastal towns in Norway and France.
Statistics can be revealing. A Carleton University colleague, Ross Eaman, suggested looking up US census and immigration figures.12 The results helped explain why New England responded so quickly. The following is from the draft manuscript of my book on the explosion:
In the decade prior to 1917, more than 700,000 Canadians emigrated to the United States, many to New England. U.S. census data shows that in 1920, 1.8 million Americans had at least one Canadian parent. A woman in Ayer, Massachusetts, lost 13 relatives in the explosion: her mother, father, three sisters and eight of their children. A woman in Providence, Rhode Island, lost her sister-in-law and two nieces and nephews. To Americans, the explosion was a catastrophe close to home.
Those who were at least five when the explosion occurred were eighty-five when this book was being researched. Those who were teenagers were ninety-three or more. There were not many alive at that age, but visits to seniors’ homes turned up one or two people at each with a vivid memory of 1917. Having my daughter Lucy with me helped make older women feel more comfortable. Many recalled their own experience. Others recalled what someone told them. All these memories helped flesh out the story. Most were vivid. The explosion was a life experience for those alive at the time. So are memories of things recorded at the time, even though the records may be lost. These memories may seem trivial at first, but they start to tie together. After a number of stories were collected from people who were rescued by someone, it appeared as if most initial rescue work was done by women. That made sense. In 1917, women were at home and men were either at work or at war. This is how that anecdotal information was woven together in the draft manuscript:
The Halifax explosion killed something like a thousand people, critically injured several hundred more, left five to six hundred trapped in burning wreckage and left 8,000 survivors with everything from severe lacerations and burns, to broken bones, cuts and bruises. All through the North End, these survivors tried to assist each other. Usually, the first to help were women like Annie Chapman. They were taking care of their children while their husbands were at work or at war. Next came the neighbours, both women and men. Later, as helpers poured into the North End, the rescuers were mainly men. This included men who came from work to search for their families, visitors who came from the downtown hotels, soldiers, and sailors.13
Annie Greenough Chapman was a young mother who pulled herself out of the rubble of her house and rescued her infant son. She wrote out a detailed account in a school scribbler several weeks after the explosion. Her son found it when she died. It was one of the many private accounts turned up during the visits to small communities.
The Halifax newspapers listed the names of those who were in hospital. The Halifax Relief Committee listed those who were identified at the morgue. Because so many people were affected by the explosion, one way to find relatives of survivors was to note any unusual names in these records and call people with those names in the current phone book. There were a lot of Boutiliers in the explosion. There were two columns of Boutiliers in the current phone book. Likely all were connected to people in the explosion. Since everyone is interested in the explosion, all such calls get a positive response. There were three people named Beiswanger killed in the explosion. The current phone book lists no one by that name, but there are Beeswangers. A call to them produced no direct links to the Beiswangers, but it led to a family history and to a family friend who was in the explosion and still alive. Every person called was friendly and helpful and interested in hearing about the research.
Information was also discovered by following a trail, starting with a person, ending with a record. This was done with help from family, friends, and colleagues. Doing this requires dogged determination and the conviction that any lead is worth following. One search began with my great-niece, who was working in Oslo. (I went there because IMO was a Norwegian ship.) One of her staff was the daughter of a man whose best friend was director of the Maritime Museum. His files included a letter from a relative of IMO’s owner. He suggested the whaling museum in Sandefjord. That led to Tonnessen and Johnsen’s book, The History of Modern Whaling, which revealed that Captain Haakon From, captain of IMO, and IMO’s home port, Sandefjord, were part of Norway’s whaling tradition, which produced some of the world’s most experienced sailors. In Sandefjord, I visited the local newspaper and asked it to run an article, hoping to attract attention. It led to a call from the family of one of IMO’s crew and then, months later, to letters from the two daughters of IMO’s first mate. They were visiting Sandefjord and heard about the research. One lived in Norway, the other on Staten Island.
At the Sandefjord newspaper, someone said a man who repaired typewriters had lost an arm in the explosion and that his grandson was a policeman. He was located with the help of the daughter of a woman from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, who lives in Sandefjord. She married a Norwegian sailor during the Second World War and is a friend of Gillian Osborne’s family. Osborne is a former student and colleague, and co-author of a chapter in Ground Zero: A Reassessment of the 1917 Explosion in Halifax Harbour. Per Hunstok, the grandson of Sigurd Olsen Hunstok, spoke English and produced a pay-book from IMO, a photo of the ship, and a letter from the Canadian government expressing regret at the loss of an arm, with a cheque for $100. He also had a clipping of an interview with another survivor and patiently translated it.
Another document in private hands is the diary of a cadet at the Royal Naval College. It is held by an amateur military historian in Esquimalt on Canada’s west coast. My son, James David Scanlon, a retired naval officer, met him when serving as the base public-affairs officer. Other documents in the library showed that many cadets who were in the explosion became senior officers in the Royal Canadian Navy.
A chat at a Carleton University basketball game revealed that the wife of Carleton’s athletics director grew up in Nova Scotia and her ninety-six-year-old aunt, who lived in Truro, was working in Halifax the day of the explosion. Her boss called her to take dictation, so she was away from her desk by the window when it shattered. (She also drove his team of horses while he dealt with insurance claims.) Another chat at a basketball game, with a wireless operator and wartime naval officer, led to the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island. Its librarian, Maggie Rauch, provided information on US ships involved, and suggested other sources in Washington for their logs. Perhaps similar material might be available in England?
This led to the Guildhall Library, in London, where there are Lloyd’s records of daily ship movements in and out of Halifax for 1917, including before and after the explosion. The librarian said there would be more detailed material at the National Archives of the United Kingdom, in Kew Gardens, London. One document there was from a naval officer who surveyed the damage by travelling by boat along both sides of Halifax harbour, about an hour after the explosion.14 At Guildhall, a written note advises researchers that logs of British ships are stored at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland. This turned out to be correct: in St. John’s are the handwritten logs of the British ships in harbour that day. In Kew Gardens (National Archives), there are the official reports filed to the Admiralty. In Paris, there is a handwritten document listing the crew of the Mont-Blanc as she left Bordeaux. In Oslo and Sandefjord, Norway, there are records of IMO, including the letter from the Canadian government to Sigurd Olsen Hunstok, the sailor who lost his left arm.
Samuel Henry Prince’s papers were discovered after sociologist Kurt Lang mentioned at a meeting in Washington that he had met Prince in Halifax and that Prince had been teaching at the University of King’s College, in Halifax. Gillian Osborne learned that Prince had died, but that his papers were with his first graduate student, the Right Reverend Leonard Hatfield, in Port Greville, Nova Scotia. Hatfield was working on his own book. He kindly sat in his study and read from the Prince papers while Osborne and I scribbled notes. (Some of those papers are now in the archives at King’s College.) Osborne also found that Prince’s most quoted source, the unpublished manuscript by Dwight Johnstone, is now in the Nova Scotia Archives. While at the archives, I asked if there was anything on medical aspects of the explosion. That led to Fraser-Harris’s manuscript, a valuable source on the medical response. Impressed with that, I phoned Library and Archives Canada, where a former classmate suggested other documents. The editor of the Dalhousie alumni magazine (a Carleton journalism graduate) offered to put a note in her publication: it generated a score of letters and email messages, and even a query from some filmmakers in Hollywood.
A former dean at Carleton—an historian, neighbour, and friend—David Farr, dropped off several references. One was an unpublished manuscript by a survivor. He and his family were trapped in their home when the doors jammed, but were rescued by neighbours. The head psychologist with the London (Ontario) Board of Education is a King’s College graduate who knew Samuel Henry Prince. (I met him at a seminar in London.) He referred me to a prominent diplomat in Ottawa who knew Prince. That man’s mother, Carrie Best, was in New Glasgow. She went with her father five days after the explosion when he picked up victims at the train station and took them to the West Side School. She was one of Canada’s most distinguished Black activists—a two-time recipient of the Order of Canada—and she suggested contacts in the Black community in Halifax. Legend has it that only one Black person was killed in the explosion, but I found the names of four Blacks who were killed, and a morgue record that states among the dead were ten “Africans.” The legend was wrong.
Not every trail was productive. Someone mentioned that the Halifax explosion as folklore had been raised by a professor from Maine during a summer course in the Maritimes. That led to a visit to the University of Maine, at Orono, and a search of files at its folklore centre. No such records surfaced. In France, it was possible to discover the exchange of telegrams between the French government and its officials in Washington. It was not possible to locate a similar exchange between Norway and the Norwegian consulate in Canada, though both the foreign ministry and the State Archives in Oslo were helpful. A call to Saint Mary’s University archives revealed that the Christian Brothers who ran the college in 1917 took their papers with them. Yet that call proved productive in two ways: I learned there is a Council of Nova Scotia archives and the attempt to track down those priests at the Jesuit archives in Toronto led to a priest who knew a priest who had lost an eye in the explosion.
For every apparently unproductive trail, there were unexpected discoveries. A man I met while playing golf in Cavendish, the storied home of Anne of Green Gables, took me to a former captain of the ferry between Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. When I mentioned that the prime minister, Sir Robert Borden, had travelled from Charlottetown to Pictou on a vessel called the Avonmore, he said the vessel was the Aronmore and that it saw service as a deep-sea rescue tug during the Second World War. The Aronmore is mentioned in Farley Mowat’s The Grey Seas Under, a story of tugs and ocean rescue. Aronmore was a federal buoy boat and its logs, at Transport Canada in Ottawa, show when the prime minister left Charlottetown and arrived at Pictou. A chat with a man at a seminar for the Steel Company of Canada led to his mother, who was the daughter of John Cranwell, the Salvation Army man in Halifax. She had a clipping of War Cry, a Salvation Army publication, which lead to another useful source, the Salvation Army’s Heritage Centre, in Toronto. There it was possible to identify the key Salvationists who went to Halifax, and to determine when they got there and what they did when they got there. It turned out they arrived before the first Americans and they did the first careful survey of the impact area.
Other connections provided other links. The police officer who found his mother’s scribbled account of what happened called me after seeing a note about my research in a newspaper. The man mentioned that his father, serving overseas, tried desperately to learn if his wife and child were safe. His story confirmed what archival documents showed: after the explosion the bad news was flowing from Canada to Europe, rather than the other way around. Corporal Frank Rickets, who was overseas with the Canadian army, was wired as follows on 17 December: “Regret have to advise you wife injured out of danger boy killed recent explosion. G.O.C., M.D. No. 6.” That telegram is in Library and Archives Canada.15
Incidentally, while people lead to records, records also lead to people. The article on the man who was acting Halifax mayor revealed that he had founded Colwell Brothers, a men’s clothing store in Halifax. The store still exists, and one phone call produced his grandson, who has a family history and recalled his grandfather. A letter to the editor of the Halifax Chronicle-Herald produced ten letters from relatives of survivors in two weeks. One woman told how her father and grandfather went to Halifax to search unsuccessfully for her uncle’s body. He had been best man at her father’s wedding on 3 December, four days before the explosion.
It is valuable to return to a place or a source to check something or to just say thank you. People remember things once they know you are interested. The archivist at Acadia University produced another document when I dropped in to say thank you. When I called another source’s widow to check on background her husband had provided me, she posthumously chided him for not calling an Ottawa woman, Mrs. Evelyn Dakin, who survived the explosion. Mrs. Dakin, then Evelyn Welch, recalled that she and her family were told to flee because of the threat of a second explosion. Her grandfather, George Lovett, refused to go. A veteran of the expeditionary force that suppressed the Northwest Rebellion, he went and got his rifle. Then he sat outside on the front porch steps holding the gun. His daughter stayed with him. Convinced Halifax was under German attack, he vowed, “I am going to stay here and I am going to get the buggers.” He was eighty years old.
The anecdote about George Lovett and his daughter is more than an amusing story. It suggests that when there were warnings of a second explosion some declined to leave. Several other accounts were found of people who worked on despite those warnings, and of those who went in and out, carrying injured and supplies. There are lots of stories of flight behaviour, but it clearly was not universal. It is this step—fitting information into patterns and using inferences to increase its meaning—which takes research away from mere description.
One story about the explosion is that a railway telegrapher, Vincent Coleman, who started to flee and then returned to warn incoming trains—a decision that cost him his life. The message was recorded by operators down the line. What is not known is how Coleman knew about Mont-Blanc’s volatile cargo, which was a military secret. It seemed possible Coleman handled a telegram reporting either the departure of Mont-Blanc from New York or her arrival outside Halifax. Both telegrams mentioned the ship’s cargo. The problem is, Coleman was a railway telegrapher, not an employee of Western Union or Canadian Pacific. The next logical step was to ask: Who knew about Mont-Blanc’s cargo, and, of those, who had contact with Coleman? The people who knew included the examining officer, Mate Freeman; the chief examining officer, Commander Wyatt; the convoy liaison officer, Lieutenant-Commander Murray; and the crew of Mont-Blanc. Murray’s boat, Hilford, was tied up at Pier 9, where Coleman worked, and Murray used a phone to report the collision and the fire. It seems likely Murray told Coleman. Certainly, Murray talked to others. Sailors on Hilford knew Mont-Blanc carried explosives. One urged his captain to move.
Information about how the railway telegraph works was acquired from former telegraphers, one of whom had a telegraph key in his basement and used it to keep his touch. They said railway telegraphers did not use Morse code, but American Landline instead. A copy of that system was found in the Old Kings Courtroom Museum, in Kentville—its significance was recognized because of those conversations. After learning how the system worked, I concluded that messages from Halifax were relayed by Truro to Intercolonial Railway headquarters at Moncton. In a railway publication discovered later, the man who sent those messages says that is exactly what he did.
Once links are established, inference may suggest their significance. Many people arrived in Halifax in private railway cars. These included the heads of the Intercolonial and Dominion Atlantic railways, the prime minister, the head of the Massachusetts relief expedition, the head of Canada’s largest department store (Sir John Eaton), the head of an American railroad. These cars were parked close together: the head of the Massachusetts relief expedition saw Prime Minister Robert Borden out for his morning stroll. One can infer that these people would talk to each other. This may help explain why Massachusetts got continuing concessions from Canada, such as no duty on goods shipped across the border. Inference must not be confused with observation. Thomas Raddall describes the first bodies received at the morgue as Blacks from Africville. The “black rain” that followed the explosion turned many things black. Survivors took weeks to get the black out of their skin. It is conceivable Raddall saw Blacks, but it is more likely they simply looked that way.
Inferences can also be made from a railway pass issued to a Methodist minister who arrived in Truro the day after the explosion: it allowed him to continue to Halifax. The existence of the pass confirms that passes were issued and that some form of checking was going on. Since the man was both a minister and a trained member of St. John Ambulance, it helps indicate what sort of credentials would allow someone to continue. Another kind of pass was issued to Dwight Johnstone, Samuel Henry Prince’s friend. It allowed Johnstone access to the impact area in Halifax itself. That suggests there were levels of passes—one would allow you to enter the city, another to access certain locations. The existence of passes—especially one issued the day after the explosion—reinforces the impression there was a fair amount of organization very quickly and that it took place before the Americans arrived. That contradicts Prince’s dissertation, which suggests it took the Americans to bring order out of chaos. The minister’s pass was discovered when his daughter wrote me after hearing me interviewed on a CBC radio program in Halifax. Johnstone’s pass is in the Nova Scotia Archives.
Sometimes the use of modern digital analysis makes it possible to get archival records to reveal more than they show, or more than was known when they were created. It took more than three days to type morgue records into a computer, but the results made that time well spent. One diary mentioned visiting the morgue to look for two different missing persons. The information in the diary was sufficient to establish who these persons were. By using the dates in the diary, which show when the bodies were identified, it was possible to date those two morgue entries and, from that, to start to figure out how quickly the identification process moved along. Equally important, it showed how the process worked, something not clear from other records. Once the data was digitized, it was possible to find an address. By adding the search records and information about unidentified bodies found at specific locations, it was possible to figure out the probable names of the dead. For example, one woman’s body with a wedding ring was found where the children were dead and the mother missing. The body was buried as unidentified. That again helped indicate how the morgue worked. Often data pointed in new directions. The morgue record says that the body of the captain of the IMO was embalmed and shipped home to Norway. This was not done with many bodies. That would have led me back to the Sandefjord cemetery, where I had missed From’s grave during my first visit.
Records are created by people and the same rules apply for testing validity. Does the material have internal consistency? Is there any corroboration? Is the account something that reasonably could have been known to the person who created the record? (Sometimes people will provide information about things they did or saw and information about what they heard. The first two are much more likely to be reliable then the third. If it is not evident, it is important to ask, “How do you know that?”) Is there anything to suggest that a person is being less than truthful? Is there reason to suspect bias? Finally, one must pay attention to when an account was recorded. As time passes, members of organizations are likely to recall better organization than actually existed. They are likely to recall decisions were made at a higher level than was the case.
There are accounts about what happened on the Boston Express from the conductor, passengers on the train, and the physician who came to assist. Accounts also appear in the Truro paper and in Canadian army records. In addition, there are reports about the yard engine that was travelling back and forth between the Boston Express and Rockingham from the same physician, from a sailor from Middleham Castle, and from a crew member off Hilford. There is also an official damage report from the Intercolonial railway. All these fit together. Other stories make sense because of what is known about the way things worked. The statement that the railway telegraph message was relayed by Truro to Moncton is credible because that is how the system worked. If the man who sent it had said he used some other method, it would have been necessary to search for evidence as to why he deviated from standard procedure. Some stories are easy to verify.
Other accounts are credible because one meshes with another. The woman who wrote me after hearing me on CBC Halifax said her father was a Methodist minister who left for Halifax by train the day of the explosion. She said he met a minister who had lost his wife and a child. There was such a minister. His name was William Swetnam and he, too, was a Methodist. I met his surviving daughter, Dorothy, at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. Similarly, the diary of Archibald MacMechan, which mentions a naval cadet receiving surgery on his living room couch, connects to the diary of a naval cadet who recorded bringing the wounded cadet to MacMechan’s home. The first diary was in the Dalhousie University archives, the second in private hands in Esquimalt on the west coast.
Other accounts don’t mesh so easily. Shortly after Mont-Blanc exploded, sailors and soldiers rushed through the city shouting there was going to be a second explosion. They said the magazine was on fire at the Wellington Barracks. Archibald MacMechan collected first-hand accounts from a sentry on duty at the magazine and from the young officer in charge there. They said there was no fire. Their version is supported by Major-General Benson, who went to see for himself. At first, this seems to be a conflict. A closer examination shows it is not. Soldiers and sailors did rush through the street shouting a warning and many people fled to safety; but there was, in fact, no danger. (MacMechan himself is not a primary source: his personal diary makes clear he was not present when the warning was given.)
Some material is credible because the source has no apparent or conceivable reason for bias. The artist Arthur Lismer records that his arrival at Rockingham occurred when a trainload of injured was heading out. Only one trainload of injured left that day and the time fits. Sometimes material is useful because it helps establish the credibility of other accounts. There are enough stories of telephone messages to indicate that some phones were working. A story that mentions a phone call is, therefore, credible as long as it doesn’t suggest someone was talking between Halifax and its sister town, Dartmouth. The link across the harbour was out. The fact something is not credible does not make it useless. There were rumours after the explosion. Some died quickly, others persisted. Many people thought the explosion was an attack by German subs, a German warship, or by German Zeppelins. That was not true, but the way these rumours stopped is relevant to a discussion of how rumours die. When talking to people, it is important to remember that first impressions stick longer than impressions formed later. It is important to sort those things they experienced from those they were told.
Before this research began, the broad outlines of the story were well established. Two ships collided. One, Mont-Blanc, caught fire and then blew up. Thousands of people were injured, dying, or dead. Most of the North End of the city was in ruins. There was an enormous relief effort from the surrounding area (that was not well documented) and from the United States, especially Massachusetts. One serious problem was eye injuries caused by flying glass. No evidence has been found to discredit this basic story, though it was possible to add a great deal. Most published material about the explosion deals with the situation in Halifax and Dartmouth. There are fewer accounts of the response from the region, on the role of the two railways, or on the background of the ships involved—for example, that the IMO was normally involved in whaling. There is nothing on how the news spread or how the newspapers, especially the Boston press, treated the story.
The research for this book fills in some of those gaps. The story of first-day response by rail can now be told almost minute by minute. Some medical data can be fleshed out: I have a list of names of persons whose eyes were removed—a list that already has more names than the number in existing medical statistics. It is also possible to take existing material and look for a new interpretation. There is lots of evidence about the two ships blowing their whistles before the collision. The reason why Mont-Blanc’s whistles were blown was confirmed by the captain and the pilot; but those on the bridge of IMO died. The Wreck Commission Inquiry assumed why IMO’s whistles were blown. Perhaps those assumptions were wrong. Once that idea surfaced, it was possible to review data, including inquiry transcripts. Bit by bit, that led to a much clearer explanation about what happened.
Much of the memory of the explosion is anecdotal. There are stories of how a father rescued his children or a mother rescued her child, and accounts of the response by one nurse or one physician. These show up as interviews in a newspaper, as letters, or as private notes. They are also part of living memory. In addition, there are accounts of specific organizations, the role of the Massachusetts or Maine relief expeditions, or the activities of St. John Ambulance. One framework for tying this material together is the story as told by people like MacMechan, Bird, and Kitz. It could be retold with more detail. Another framework is offered by nearly eighty years of sociological research. That was the one I used. That framework, the one developed by my mentors Charles Fritz, Henry Quarantelli, and Russell Dynes, and their students like Tom Drabek and Bill Anderson, enunciated in books like Organized Behavior in Disaster and Human System Responses to Disaster, did not exist in 1920 and was not known to most of those who have written about the explosion. I was able to examine both new material and existing data from this perspective. When some authors reported “panic,” it was helpful to know that flight behaviour is not panic, and thus to examine the evidence rather than accept the impression. Similarly, when it was discovered how well the railways performed the day of the explosion, it was helpful to know that in 1917 there were so many troop trains, supply trains, and munitions trains that running specials was routine. Organizations do better at familiar tasks. One might say there was a “special” subculture on the railways in 1917.
Is it possible that this framework acted as a blinder, blocking the possibility that Halifax was different, that points were missed because of a mindset? It seems unlikely. The material does fit the model. When I went to Darwin, Australia, after Cyclone Tracy, I went because, having heard a talk about what happened, I was convinced Darwin was different. I discovered the data did not fit that theory. Darwin was not different. But Halifax was what Henry Quarantelli labels a “catastrophe,” and the evidence suggests it fits with what we have learned since then. The tragedy of Halifax from a research point of view is that this evidence was available for decades and that, in the intervening period, some was lost. Particularly sad is that some lessons from Halifax, especially the lessons about emergency medicine, were buried in government files, forcing others to learn from their own experience. However, enough evidence remains to make this century-old disaster a fruitful topic for research.
The notes that follow touch only on references that apply to a specific chapter. The main sources have already been covered.
The material on Samuel Henry Prince is drawn from his personal papers, now in the archives at the University of King’s College; the letter of application he wrote to Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto; Leonard Hatfield’s book, Sammy the Prince; the vestry minutes (which he kept) at St. Paul’s Church of England; his dissertation and books; and a conversation with Kurt Lang. Among those papers is the often-used sermon on Titanic. The material on Prince and his thesis supervisor, Franklin Giddings, is drawn from Giddings’s published articles and inferred from Prince’s later career. In his thesis, Prince relied heavily on an unpublished manuscript by his friend Dwight Johnstone, though he left out all references to the response by women. His involvement with Titanic and the anarchist attack in New York City are both mentioned in his thesis. Samuel Henry Prince is now widely recognized as the pioneer scholar in the field of disaster. Those who are interested in learning more about him can read Susan Dodd’s recent book, Leonard Hatfield’s biography, two chapters in Ground Zero: A Reassessment of the 1917 Explosion in Halifax Harbour, or two articles by me—one co-authored by Gillian Osborne. (See bibliography.)
The comments on Prince’s theory about catastrophe and social change have been treated at much greater length in an article published in the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters. The material on human, group, and organizational behaviour in disaster is drawn from the general literature in the field, especially Russell Dynes’s book Organized Behavior in Disaster and Thomas Drabek’s excellent summary of the literature, Human System Responses to Disaster. A summary of the key findings can be found in a handbook I authored, Disaster Preparedness: Some Myths and Misconceptions, published by the British Emergency Planning College.
The information on the ships in harbour was pieced together using a number of sources. The most important was the record of shipping movements produced by Lloyd’s of London and kept in the Guildhall in London. By tracking arrivals and departures and reviewing the ships that travelled in subsequent convoys in Admiralty records in the British National Archives at Kew Gardens, it was possible to work out which ships were in harbour the day of the explosion.17 Additional information was acquired from the son of Lieutenant Donald F. Angus—his father was in charge of the Canadian Army Service Corps vessels that supplied the forts and outposts on the outer harbour. The material on the submarines is in the archives at Canada’s west-coast naval base, Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt. The story about the report of the National Bureau of Fire Underwriters was published in the Bangor Daily News (11 December 1917), p. 11, under the headline “Says City of Halifax Real Fire Trap.”
The material on Mont-Blanc’s cargo is drawn from the personal files of Canada’s Governor General, the Duke of Devonshire, in the Library and Archives Canada. Devonshire was kept well informed about all the events in Halifax. The other material on the Mont-Blanc is drawn from existing published sources and from the files of the Services Historiques de l’Armée Maritime at the Château de Vincennes, in Paris. The files there included the names and hometowns of the ship’s crew. Some additional details were found in parish records in places such as Saint-Malo and St. Nazaire. It was rumoured that Captain Aimé Le Médec later received France’s Legion of Honour: no such evidence could be found at the home of the Legion in Paris.
The material on the IMO is drawn from a number of Norwegian sources. The files of the Oslo daily newspaper, Aftenposten, were most helpful, as they contain the names of the crew of the IMO. While some of these names were not spelled correctly, the files did include many of the hometowns, making it possible to track down further information in Sandefjord, Tansberg, Larvik, and other towns.
Material was also acquired from the files of the Maritime Museum in Oslo and the whaling museum in Sandefjord. Finally, with assistance from Sandefjords Blad, the local newspaper, conversations with residents of the town (including old whalers), and a visit to local cemeteries, it was possible to piece together the story of the IMO. Especially helpful was an English-language edition of a history of whaling. The description of how the ships entered harbour was pieced together from the records in London and from other material, including a list of ships that were damaged. The material on Norway and its problems is partly from contemporary newspapers, partly from material acquired in Oslo. The ages of the crew and their hometowns were in some cases taken from gravestones in the cemetery in IMO’s home port of Sandefjord. Edward McCrossan’s account was published 1967 in the fiftieth-anniversary edition of the Halifax Mail-Star, an excellent source for several other parts of this book.
The data on the pre-explosion response is drawn from Allan Baddeley’s memoirs and from Bird’s informative book, The Town That Died. Also used were the personal papers of Samuel Henry Prince, then with the Right Reverend Leonard Hatfield, now in the University of King’s College Archives. The interpretation that the report reflects inaction is mine. The data on the collision itself is drawn from dozens of contemporary accounts, all of which agree: the most important one is the excellent eyewitness account by Edward McCrossan, mentioned above. The analysis of collisions is from an Admiralty document in the British National Archives at Kew Gardens.18 The material on the reaction at the Royal Naval College is from the college’s magazine in the archives at Esquimalt. The Salvation Army material comes from Cranwell’s family as well as from War Cry and other documents in the Salvation Army archives in Toronto.
The stories about Vincent Coleman losing his life when he went back to his telegraph to warn incoming trains puzzled me for some time. Since Mont-Blanc’s cargo was a secret, how did Coleman know the ship was going to explode? It was certainly not part of his duties as a railway telegrapher to handle military traffic about harbour movements. The answer was worked out by figuring out who knew, who could have told Coleman, and by looking at the layout of the harbour. That led to the conclusion that when Hilford docked at Pier 9 and Lieutenant-Commander James A. Murray left the tug to go to a phone, that phone was in the office where Coleman worked. The fact that Hilford ended up in the railway yards confirmed that location. Although Coleman’s message did not—one of the myths—stop any trains (the Boston Express was already past Rockingham), the message did play a role in starting the initial response, especially from Truro. Another myth is that Coleman would have sent the message using Morse Code. In fact, railway telegraphers used another system known as American Landline. A copy of that code was found in the Old Kings County Courthouse Museum, in Kentville.
The details of what happened are fleshed out by dozens of individual accounts that have survived, many of them published, others collected by Professor MacMechan, and others located in letters to the editor in various newspapers. Added to those were the stories my daughter, Lucy, and I obtained in interviews with scores of survivors, most of them living in homes for seniors scattered throughout the province. The three best stories of the explosion are from Mrs. A.C. Pettipas of Dartmouth; Fred Longland, who was on Niobe; and the captain of the Wasper B. They represented three different vantage points—Dartmouth, Halifax, and the middle of the harbour—but all make clear that there was a series of explosions, presumably shells and barrels of aviation gasoline blowing up, prior to the major blast.
The anecdotes about how the various individuals learned about the explosion are from personal interviews: these people were alive when this book was being written. Among those interviewed were Willena O’Connor (the blind music student), John MacVicar (the section hand), Art Faulkner (the man who saw the windows fall), Carrie Best (who smelled chloroform), Jenny Heisler (who was looking after the baby), and Philip Westbury (whose aunt tucked him under the stairs). It was these seniors who showed me the explosion was a living story as well as something that happened many years ago. At the time of the interviews, Art Faulkner and John MacVicar were in Truro, Cassie Hurst and Joe Walker in Sydney, Carrie Best in New Glasgow, and Jennie Heisler in Mahone Bay.
Some of the information was acquired second-hand from accounts of individual experiences; from the exhibit at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, which opened in 1995; from individual accounts collected by Archibald MacMechan while doing research for his book; as well as from his personal diary, which is in the Dalhousie University Archives. Other information was taken from Michael J. Bird’s book, The Town That Died.
The various descriptions of the impact of the explosion differ greatly, especially in terms of identifying the number of dead. While much of the material in this book comes from primary sources—minutes of municipal councils, letters written at the time—the data on impact is drawn largely from material published in Halifax newspapers or in earlier accounts of the explosion. In addition, individual church records were reviewed, as was material on Halifax’s Jewish community, some of it located in the excellent resource centre at the Jewish Community Centre in Ottawa. There is now of course scientific verification of the black rain.
Since the precise number of dead is not crucial to an explanation of what happened, I have used sources like Janet Kitz’s Shattered City and Michael J. Bird’s The Town That Died without giving credit in the text. The difference between this and other accounts, in short, is not in the originality of the material but in the way it is woven together into a coherent account of the multiple impacts. However, this chapter is not entirely drawn from other research. The story of what happened to St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church is taken from The Catholic Register. The details about the deaths on the IMO and Mont-Blanc are from Norwegian and French records and from newspapers in those countries. Howard Bronson’s description is taken from his paper delivered at an academic meeting.
The data on the collision, in addition to Edward McCrossan’s account already mentioned, is drawn from dozens of contemporary accounts, including those of many persons interviewed for this book. One interviewee was Edward Davis, who was at the School for the Blind, as was one of his classmates. Other accounts were taken from interviews published in newspapers. The data on the response is drawn from Allan Baddeley’s memoirs and from Bird’s informative book. Also used were the personal papers of Samuel Henry Prince, then with the Right Reverend Leonard Hatfield, now in the University of King’s College archives.
The details about damage to the railway come mainly from the accounts filed to the Intercolonial Railway by a civil engineer. The story of what happened at the Royal Naval College is taken from the college magazine, which is in the archives in Esquimalt. A few of the details are taken from accounts of what happened published much later. The impact on the Mi’kmaq community is from Ground Zero: A Reassessment of the 1917 Explosion in Halifax Harbour, the book published by Saint Mary’s University. The impact on the Black settlement was pieced together by searching morgue records and from the material in the archives in Truro.
The detailed account about the various phases of impact was pieced together using information in published sources, such as the paper by Dr. Bronson, and in scores of anecdotal accounts. Many of these accounts—most of them recorded at the time—describe people taking various kinds of protective action after the first blast. A number described the black oily dust that descended later—the existence of this black rain has now been verified scientifically. The stories about a tidal wave are based on anecdotal evidence, the fact that IMO was driven ashore, and that Hilford was dumped in the railway yards. Most important, no account contradicts any other.
The details about the various ships were found in the logs of the British ships located in the archives of Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and in other records, including those in Washington and London. The fact that all but one of those onboard Mont-Blanc survived was verified by official records in Paris. The story about the Canadian submarines was located at the naval archives in Esquimalt. The record of damage was pieced together using various accounts, mainly those in Library and Archives Canada, plus the maps of the docks that allowed the various accounts to be woven together. Rear-Admiral Chambers’s reports of the damage are part of the Admiralty records in the National Archives at Kew Gardens, in London. The details about who died were worked out using published records of those who died and comparing them to records of those who played various roles prior to the explosion.
The material in this chapter is based on interviews with people like Jennie Heisler and Doug Rutherford, who were alive when this was written, and from an unpublished account by Alfred Monaghan, who died in June 1994. Kelly Morton’s story is in his autobiography. Other quotes are from people like Pastor Adam or Annie Greenough Chapman, who recorded their memories. Some of those memoirs, such as the one by Dean Llwyd, were collected by Archibald MacMechan, others by the Canadian army. The first set is in the Nova Scotia Archives, the second in Library and Archives Canada.19 The other material about the military response is in the military records in Library and Archives Canada. The story from Janet Kitz is from my notes of a talk she gave at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic on 6 December 1994. Dorothy Swetnam Hare, the child who survived, was sitting in front of me that night. Much of the material about the Boston Express is in the Colchester Historeum archives in Truro. One of the passengers on that train, A.S. Goldberg, chatted with reporters at every stop along the way as the train returned to Boston without ever reaching the North End station.
The material on the Niobe is largely from Alan Baddeley’s published account, written years later, also in Library and Archives Canada. The interviews with the railway clerk are from the Bangor Daily News, although the stories were filed from Saint John. Students from Mount St. Vincent Academy, for example, were sent home after the explosion—some came from Boston and were interviewed as their train passed through Saint John. The Maine papers were located in the state library in Augusta, Maine. Some of the information about the Old Colony is taken from Eben Putnam’s account of Massachusetts’s role in the war. Clarence Delaney’s letter to his mother, Mrs. Bridget Delaney, of Fitchburg, was published in the Boston press. The letter from James Harrison is in the Nova Scotia Archives.
The material on medical aspects is from the Militia Headquarters and MD No. 6 files on the relief effort. The report from Rear-Admiral Chambers and his other dispatches on the relief effort are in the National Archives of the UK. So too are the reports from the British warships in port on their response, including close co-operation with the US warships and the Canadian navy and army. But one of the most interesting accounts is by James Harrison of how he had the steamer Picton towed to safety. He did not talk about his heroic actions the day of the explosion, but he did write them out for his boss, who gave the letter to MacMechan for the official history.
It is now well documented by disaster scholars that the initial response after a widespread destructive incident is by the injured and uninjured survivors. They can look around them and see what needs to be done, and they do it. Others farther away, no matter how good their plans and no matter how well trained they are, take time to respond. They also suffer from the disadvantage that there is too much to do—but all of it needs to be done at the same time. This model of normal post-impact behaviour was the starting point for this chapter. Of course, the model would have had to be abandoned if the anecdotal evidence did not support it. However, all the various accounts of individual actions support that model. Except for those on Niobe, who left the ship to search for their loved ones, and the few soldiers from the armouries who headed to the North End on their own, almost all those whose stories were recorded told of assisting others in their own vicinity.
The official historian, Professor Archibald MacMechan, collected a number of accounts of the initial response, but those were almost entirely from people in the upper levels of society, not from residents of the North End. However, there are some accounts from North Enders, including a few recorded at the time in the form of letters, including one by Annie Greenough Chapman, which surfaced only recently. There are accounts from people who arrived somewhat later—in some cases their accounts were recorded by the military and are now in Library and Archives Canada, and in some cases their accounts were written down and preserved by MacMechan.
The story about George Lovett and his rifle came from his granddaughter, Evelyn Dakin (née Welch), who was living in Ottawa. She was coming in the door when the Mont-Blanc exploded.
As the records now show, there was never a danger of a second explosion. The smoke rising from the roof of the magazine at Wellington Barracks was from steam, not explosives. Nevertheless, even the officer in charge started to run before he realized that his behaviour was inappropriate. That story was easy to document because it is told in detail in the records of Military District No. 6 at Library and Archives Canada.20 The story of the flight is also told in detail in a number of places, including Dwight Johnstone’s unpublished book. But the best description is by Pastor George Adam, who described in detail how many of those fleeing were assisting others. Fraser-Harris said this flight probably put some of the injured and bedridden at risk and thus may have increased the loss of life. That may be true, but it indicates that the flight behaviour was not senseless and uncaring, but deliberate. Others, such as Evelyn Richardson and Dorothy McMurray, recorded what they saw, and that supports the perception that the flight was not panicky. However, many accounts make clear that those involved saw the warning as official, not a rumour.
The material on the medical response is drawn from the records of the Halifax Relief Committee and from reports by Lieutenant-Colonel Bell, now in Library and Archives Canada. Once again, this is fleshed out with material from individual interviews, from the material collected by official historian Archibald MacMechan, and from newspaper accounts.
The most important source on the medical response is the material collected by David Fraser Fraser-Harris, which he hoped would become a book. The various accounts, which are not woven together, are in the Nova Scotia Archives. The scenes at the hospitals are especially dramatic. There is a great deal of material drawn from the regular reports to Ottawa from Bell, the chief medical officer for Military District No. 6, and other military records. There is material from the various hospitals, including some private papers from Victoria General Hospital that were made available, and there is material on St. John Ambulance. The material on Truro and New Glasgow is from newspapers in the Colchester Historeum archives in Truro, and from an unpublished report on the response from New Glasgow. The material on the US response was obtained in part from archival records in Maine and Massachusetts.
The basic source, however, is the minutes of the Halifax Relief Committee. They constitute a richly detailed record of the response. The material on the outside response from Truro, Kentville, and Wolfville is in part from the daily and weekly newspapers from those communities. The material describing what happened at Wellington Barracks is mainly from military records.
In addition, there are a number of individual stories—such as the one about a mother sewing her son’s finger back on—from books and diaries, including the diary of Archibald MacMechan. Material was also obtained from US sources, especially from the logs of Tacoma and Von Steuben, and from British material at Kew Gardens. Finally, there are the individual accounts, some published, some collected by MacMechan. Some of these appeared in newspapers, some were obtained from private collections. The material from Mount St. Vincent was obtained from university records with the help of Sister Mary Martin, whose father, John Martin, wrote The Story of Dartmouth, with its account of a physician operating on the street, using a pile of fur coats as an operating table.
One of the first casualties in a disaster is the keeping of records. It is not surprising, therefore, that there are no medical records from the various hospitals—not even lists of patients who were admitted. There were far too many casualties for that to be done. In any case, many of the injured were treated in physicians’ homes and offices where, again, there was no time to keep records. Some of those who arrived later, notably a military eye surgeon, did keep notes, and these make it possible to give a sense of what went on in the hospitals.
The story of the creation of the Halifax Relief Committee is drawn mainly from the minutes that were kept by Henry Colwell, the deputy mayor and a local clothing merchant. The minutes are probably the best-kept record of the initial unplanned response to a catastrophe. The details on those involved were also found in the Nova Scotia Archives and in the records of Fort Massey Presbyterian Church. The comments by Rear-Admiral Chambers are found in his reports at the British National Archives. The comments by Percy McGrath are quoted in Janet Kitz’s Shattered City. Howard Glube’s story is from a personal interview. Glube, though living in California, was interviewed when he was in Ottawa for a family wedding. He was one of many persons located with the help of June Davidson and the alumni publication at Dalhousie University.
The response by the various utilities was more difficult to document, but there are excellent records maintained in the archives of what was once Maritime Telegraph and Telephone. A few interviews helped to flesh out the story, especially the story of the registration and inquiry. Other material on Colwell was located in an article in Maritime Merchant and from a brief conversation with his grandson. Detailed information on other participants was drawn from the files on prominent persons at the Nova Scotia Archives. The material on Dartmouth was taken from the Dartmouth Heritage Museum archives. The data on crime is from the Halifax police archives.
The story of the railways had to be pieced together from newspaper accounts in Truro, New Glasgow, Moncton, Sackville, Amherst, Wolfville, and Windsor; from the town-council minutes in New Glasgow, Sackville, Amherst, and Wolfville; by talking to survivors; and by examining the few reports that exist. But the best information was a report by Thomas Cantley of New Glasgow—a copy of it was supplied to me by John T. Rogers, historian for the New Glasgow Fire Department.
Vincent Coleman’s telegraph message from Halifax—intended for Rockingham—was heard at Bedford, Windsor Junction, Shubenacadie, Stewiacke, Brookfield, and Truro—in fact, at all the stations between Halifax and Truro. When the Richmond station in Halifax’s North End was knocked out, Truro informed Intercolonial Railway headquarters at Moncton about Coleman’s message. That message was heard at places like Amherst, Sackville, and Dorchester. In short, Coleman’s message started a chain reaction; and while no one knew precisely what had happened, it seemed a safe bet the munitions ship he mentioned had blown up.
The link between the train going to Truro and the one going to Halifax from Kentville is mentioned in the records of Military District 6, held in Library and Archives Canada. Details of the New Glasgow response are in a report written at the time by Thomas Cantley, Nova Scotia’s leading shell manufacturer. That report and the detailed town minutes have been located and are held by John T. Rogers, historian for the New Glasgow fire department. The material on Stellarton was collected by Stephen Kirincich, who wrote a history of Stellarton. The Lulan, the steam-powered fire engine that was shipped to Halifax after the explosion, is on display in the fire museum in New Glasgow. It has been restored to perfect condition. The hose cart shipped from Amherst has been substantially restored and is at the Amherst fire station.
The two most important sources for this chapter, however, were John Corbett of Amherst, who was not around at the time of the explosion, and Baillie Mackay, who was. Corbett is a walking encyclopaedia on the Intercolonial Railway and how it worked in 1917. He not only patiently explained the system—from memory, he listed in order every station along the line—he agreed to review the draft of this chapter to see if it contained technical errors. Mackay was a student at the time, but he became a physicist and studied with Howard Bronson. Mackay was able to provide support for Bronson’s account of what happened, and explained the way the rural phone system worked in 1917.
Many of the elements of this story have been told in newspapers published at that time and in books about the explosion. The story of the final message from Vincent Coleman has become a Canadian legend. The story of the first message sent by the manager of the Dominion Atlantic Railway is in all accounts of what happened. Until now, however, the story has not been put into a context. The material in this chapter comes from many sources. Part of it is from newspapers in Sackville, Amherst, Moncton, Truro, Wolfville, and New Glasgow, though unfortunately not Kentville. Records of the Kentville Advertiser for December 1917 no longer exist. This material was verified with material extracted from the minutes of councils in these towns and with fire department data where it exists—for example, in Windsor. Finally, the information about the move of the School for the Deaf and Dumb to Wolfville was in the minutes of the Board of Governors of Acadia University, dated 21 February 1918.
A few people had first- or second-hand memories. A woman in Amherst, for example, worked for Mayor Pipe and recalls his ordering the train to wait. (Her account was confirmed by what was published in local media.) One of those who got on that train was the father of a later mayor. The wires back and forth between Maine, the Governor General, and R.T. MacIlreith are in the Governor General’s papers in Library and Archives Canada. The fact it was the Dominion Atlantic Railway that organized physicians in Kentville, Wolfville, and Windsor was recorded by one of those physicians, Dr. Percy McGrath. The fact so many responded is recalled by a soldier who was in Kentville at the time. That soldier, Bill Collicutt, trained as a railway telegrapher in 1911 and can still recall how the system works and can rhyme off both the Morse and Continental code systems, the former used by the railway, the latter by commercial telegraph companies, such as CPR and Western Union. Two others, John Campbell of Wolfville and John Clark of Kentville, showed me how the telegraph system worked. Clark has a working key in his basement. Ralph Muggah of Sydney was another gold mine of information about the railway.
A great deal of the material on the Dominion Atlantic Railway comes from the archives, particularly the Kirkconnell Collection, at Acadia University, where Pat Townsend was incredibly helpful; and from the files at Mount Allison, where Kathy Margeson kept finding material. While the railway response was magnificent, it was also, to some extent, understandable. As Russell Dynes has shown in Organized Behavior in Disaster, some organizations, even in disaster, continue to do what they have always done. That usually means they do it very well. Because of the war, the railways were running frequent specials carrying both soldiers and supplies. Running special trains in the wake of the explosion was, therefore, normal rather than usual. This story has been told in greater detail in my article in Canadian Rail magazine.
Convergence (over-response) has been described in two major academic publications, the first by Fritz and Mathewson, the second by the author. Fritz and Mathewson concluded there are three kinds of convergence: material convergence, personnel convergence, and informational convergence. In simple terms, that means too many supplies, too many people, and too much communication. Fritz and Mathewson argued that convergence was caused by the media: a media blackout would reduce the problem. My research showed the media were not the sole problem. Convergence occurs even without media. Halifax illustrates this. News of the explosion spread through the railway telegraph and party telephone lines just as fast as it spread after President Kennedy was assassinated, even though there was no radio or television in 1917. How that happened was pieced together through interviews with people throughout the province. All remembered when and how they first heard.
Most of the documents relating to the over-response are in Library and Archives Canada and the Nova Scotia Archives. However, some of the material about specific responses was obtained from newspapers and records in the various responding communities, such as New Glasgow, Sydney, and Charlottetown. The arrival of the VIPs shows in various accounts, including telegrams sent from Ottawa warning of their arrival. The interaction among those VIPs is in some records (for example the records from Massachusetts) and can be inferred. The details of what was sent were found in newspapers throughout the Maritimes and in the neighbouring US states. The material about responses from US states is from the newspapers in state capitals and from state archives. Some, like Maine, listened to what was being requested. Others, like those in Toronto, simply went ahead collecting items, such as used clothing, that were not wanted and never sent. The impressive response from Sydney, Nova Scotia, was found in local newspaper files and in the firefighters’ museum. Many of the telegrams survive in Library and Archives Canada. Some of the specific examples were acquired through interviews or from letters sent by people who recalled what happened. For example, the Parker family wrote about their experience and even recalled that sometime after the explosion a wedding present arrived from Harvey Parker, whose body was never located.
The initial US response is documented in papers at the National Archives in Washington, DC, but much of the material in this chapter is drawn from American newspapers, especially in Augusta and Providence. These papers were obtained at the Maine State Library and the Providence Public Library. Some data was also obtained from the Providence chapter of the American Red Cross, and from a 1919 report by the adjutant general of Maine, George McL. Presson: Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Maine for the Period of the World War, 1917–1919. It was found at the Maine state archives in Augusta. The material on the 1877 Saint John fire is from George Stewart, The Story of the Great Fire in St. John, N.B.: June 20th 1877, in the library of the University of Delaware. The information on Canadians in the United States was found in a book located with the help of Carleton University journalism professor Ross Eaman, but mainly in US census and immigration data. The material on the Massachusetts response is from Boston newspapers, but mainly from original records held in the library of the state house in Boston, especially material obtained from special collections.
The people of Massachusetts have a special fondness for their history and it was a pleasure to find that original material was available to scholars. I am especially grateful to Mary Ann Mears for her thoughtful assistance in finding documents I did not even know existed. I am also grateful to Jim Fahey at the US Navy Dockyards Museum in Weymouth, who found me material on the Old Colony and put me on to other sources, and to Maggie Rauch at the Naval War College Library in Newport, Rhode Island, for finding material on the Von Stueben and the Tacoma. She found documents describing the Von Stueben’s previous life as an armed raider. The anecdote about women in Boston donating their fur coats was in a letter written to a woman in Truro. The information about the acting governor of Rhode Island, Emery San Souci, was found in a book on the governors of Rhode Island in the state archives.22 (San Souci went on to become a governor of Rhode Island.) Finally, some of the material comes from the work of David Fraser Fraser-Harris, the man who intended to write a book on the medical response but abandoned the task when his first draft was rejected by the Halifax Relief Commission.
The material on looting is based on a few individual comments, all recorded, and on the unsubstantiated newspaper report. Research shows that media accounts of looting are not uncommon, but usually turn out to be inaccurate. Since Prince relies on Johnstone, and Johnstone was a journalist, it is reasonable to doubt the accuracy of Prince’s version of what happened.
In the wake of the explosion, scores of medical personnel, including physicians, nurses, and orderlies, poured into Halifax by train. The first medical responders came from nearby communities such as Truro, Kentville, and Wolfville, and most of them joined the physicians already desperately trying to assist the injured at the existing hospitals. But in the days that followed, they were joined by Americans, first from Maine, later mainly from Massachusetts. Instead of assisting in the existing medical centres, those arrivals staffed their own nearly created facilities. The story of that response is found partly in the records of Military District No. 6, in Library and Archives Canada, but mainly in the reports in state archives, especially in Massachusetts, and in newspaper accounts of the response. There are also a few anecdotal accounts from people who visited those hospitals. Eventually, there was pressure to shut down those hospitals, but, as correspondence from Victoria General Hospital shows, that was resisted. There were still so many victims that they would have filled the existing hospitals, preventing them from serving their normal function as provincial health-care facilities. The story of the gradual shift also shows up in the reports filed by the chief medical officer, Lieutenant-Colonel F. McKelvey Bell.
In addition to the services provided in existing facilities, and the emergency hospitals, patients were cared for on Old Colony, a US Navy ship turned into a hospital ship, as well as in Truro and New Glasgow. The material on Old Colony comes from a number of sources, including material in Library and Archives Canada, the Nova Scotia Archives, and, most important, material located and sent to me by Maggie Rauch at the United States Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. The records of what happened in Truro are in the Colchester Historeum archives. The story of New Glasgow is in the report describing its response—and its many attempts to persuade the medical committee to ship patients out of Halifax. The decision of the Americans to open their own facilities and publicize what they did irritated the local medical community. That showed in a letter to the editor and in Bell’s novel. As the information from Rhode Island showed—especially what was published later—the Americans were not interested in carrying out what they saw as menial tasks or in doing routine medical care. They wanted to do disaster medicine, and then they wanted to leave.
The most interesting data—based on an analysis of the limited records that exist—is the data that shows the City of Halifax virtually doubled its hospital-bed space over the first weekend. That is an amazing achievement.
The information about Edmonton is drawn from studies of the tornado by the Emergency Communications Research Unit (ECRU) at Carleton University. The individual accounts come from interviews with people like Howard Gibbs; documents in Library and Archives Canada; and, in some cases, unpublished manuscripts, such as the material on Alfred Monaghan and Harold Connolly, the latter provided by Senator Sharon Carstairs. The details on individual victims show up in the data collected both by the women canvassers and the teams from Rhode Island. Some of the background was obtained from the Salvation Army archives in Toronto. Frank Loomer’s story is taken from a letter he sent to his family. The material on New Glasgow is from the report of the response team and the local weekly. The information on Truro came from the Colchester Historeum archives, which included some correspondence with the Truro Central Relief Committee, and the Truro Daily News. The Halifax newspapers reported some of the complaints of the victims, but did not give the stories much play. Much of the material about orphans showed up in advertisements.
Initially, social assistance was provided by the Halifax Relief Committee, and it was handed out with no questions asked. That information comes from the committee minutes. Later, however, as a result of US intervention, all those seeking assistance were carefully screened. The rationale for this approach is found in the writings of Prince’s thesis supervisor, and the details of its application in the reports from Massachusetts. There is no doubt the driving force was the head of the Massachusetts relief expedition.
Much of the material in this chapter comes from individual accounts, including the private diaries of Harold Connolly (later Senator Connolly). But the material on the response from Massachusetts comes from the archives at the state capital. The protests were documented—though not very well—in the Halifax media. The admissions by the Red Cross were found in documents in the archives of the American Red Cross. These were secured for me by Jane Kushma, then with the University of North Texas and later with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. The material on the canvass showed up in the minutes of the Halifax Relief Committee and in the records of the Salvation Army in its archives in Toronto. Staff at the Salvation Army archives was extremely helpful to me when I was doing this research.
The information about the amazing turnabout by Massachusetts comes from the documents in the state capital archives in Boston. This is an extraordinarily detailed resource and is well maintained. The information on Abraham Ratshesky comes largely from material located in Boston newspapers with the assistance of busy but amazingly helpful staff at the Boston Public Library. The comments on the perceptions the Americans brought to Halifax are partly based on the work by (the late) Dr. Enrico L. Quarantelli of the Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware,23 who defined the differences among incidents, disasters, and catastrophes. The changes in the structure of the Halifax Relief Committee show up in the minutes of the committee.24
The approach the Americans used was developed by people like Prince’s supervisor, Franklin Giddings, and supported by people like J. Byron Deacon of the American Red Cross. Dwight Johnstone’s manuscript noted the inhumanity of the American approach, but Prince was trying to satisfy Giddings. Lieutenant-Colonel Bell was another who began to chafe at Americans’ blowing their own horn, even when the work had been done by others. But the first public criticism did not surface until John Crerar MacKeen wrote an article about his experiences at Camp Hill, published in 1967. However, as the records in Boston show, the real hero of the response was Fred Pearson. He recognized that things had gone wrong and convinced his superiors to change. The result was miraculous and explains the American legend. Pearson’s criticisms never became public and it is only recently that it became evident others had similar concerns. These concerns show up, for example, in documents in the archives of the American Red Cross. These were secured for me by Jane Kushma.
The most important sources of information about the morgue were Thomas Raddall’s autobiography, In My Time, A Memoir, the letter written by the American who joined the Canadian army (it is at the Beaton Institute, Cape Breton University), and the various accounts collected by Archibald MacMechan. Members of the Christie family in Amherst were also helpful. There are also the accounts by the police officer who returned from Kentville, Leo Tooke, and by Dean MacRae. The material on the role of funeral directors came from those associated with professional education in this field in Ontario. Many of the ones who went to Halifax later got involved in mass fatalities after forest fires in Ontario. There is also the account in the archives at Dalhousie University from the woman who visited the morgue with a friend. The material on Chief Petty Officer King comes from the archives at Esquimalt. Finally, there are search records left by the military, who eventually took over searching for human remains.
At the time this was written, I was paying little attention to the problems of mass death. I knew that Halifax was one of the few cities to have had experience with two mass death incidents—Titanic and the 1917 explosion—but I had not focused on the limited literature available on how mass-death incidents were handled. Since then, with the assistance of funding from the US National Science Foundation and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I and some American colleagues have done a major study of the handling of the dead from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami,25 and have started looking in detail at Canadian mass death incidents. Many of the ideas for that research flowed from the material uncovered for this chapter.
Much of the material in this chapter was obtained by reading newspapers located in libraries and archives in Ottawa, Halifax, Paris, London, and Oslo. The material on the response from Boston, however, was obtained with assistance of staff at the wonderful Boston Public Library. Another critical source was Dwight Johnstone’s unpublished manuscript. In it, he includes the original Canadian Press dispatches.26
Most of the material was drawn from Canadian newspapers, especially the ones from Toronto—The Daily Mail and Empire and the Evening Telegram—and Truro. After a while, it became apparent that while these newspapers—especially the Truro Daily News—had their own sources, the bulk of the news was being collected and filed on a co-operative basis by the Canadian Press. Some material was also obtained from Aftenposten in Oslo and the Sandefjords Blad in Captain From’s hometown. The information about the Governor General is from the Governor General’s correspondence in Library and Archives Canada. The material on New Glasgow is drawn from town records assembled by John T. Rogers and Stephen Kirincich, both mentioned earlier. In addition to these secondary sources, some of the information was obtained from people like Willena O’Connor (the blind music student), John MacVicar (the section hand), Art Faulkner (the man who saw the windows fall), Doug Rutherford (who worked as a nurses’ aide), and Jennie Brenton (who watched the trains of injured pass by Stewiacke); all were interviewed in 1994.
The inquiry into the collision between Mont-Blanc and IMO made no real effort to gather detailed information about what happened: the judge had made up his mind before the inquiry started. Nor was there any real attempt to discern the details at the Supreme Court of Canada or at the Privy Council in London—which would have been difficult, since the evidence needed to reach a conclusion was never collected. The information on specific individuals comes from various accounts collected at the time. In the case of Josephine Clark, she was interviewed at her home in Truro. Most of the information in this chapter comes from the transcript of the Wreck Commission Inquiry (which was loaned to me by Janet Kitz), and from the records at Library and Archives Canada, including the letters of inquiry counsel W.A. Henry.
It is not surprising that many people initially thought the Germans had attacked: there had been rumours of German submarines attacking Halifax for months. It is also not surprising that some thought the explosion was a result of German sabotage, though most people abandoned that idea very quickly. Blaming the French (no one distinguished between France and French Canada) was also a natural reaction. Strong opposition to conscription, led by Sir Wilfrid Laurier, prompted many politicians to desert the Liberal Party and agree to form a Union Government. Since the prime minister, Sir Robert Borden, had long represented Halifax in the House of Commons, it was not surprising that those sentiments were very strong in a city so much involved in the war effort. Blaming the French was also made easier when word spread that the crew of Mont-Blanc had abandoned ship and, the rumours went, had failed to convey a warning. It was more difficult to blame the Norwegians, since all the key players on IMO had died in the explosion. In any case, a community filled with patriotic zeal was not going to blame the Americans, who had responded so quickly, or the British, since much of the population was of British descent.
As far as I know, no one except for Captain Robert Power, the harbour pilot, who hinted at the conclusion reached in this book, has tried to analyze the cause of the collision by reviewing in detail all that happened in Halifax harbour that fateful morning. Initially, it was not my intention to examine why Mont-Blanc and IMO collided. Nor was I initially inclined to blame IMO, partly because the judge running the Wreck Commission Inquiry was so biased against Mont-Blanc, and partly because IMO was inarguably on the wrong side of the harbour. However, after talking to Power, whose analysis is presented in a chapter in Ground Zero: A Reassessment of the 1917 Explosion in Halifax Harbour, and after reading the transcript of the inquiry, I changed my mind.
After reviewing the “rules of the road” for maritime traffic, looking at the shape of Halifax harbour, and comparing the size of the two ships, it became apparent that the story of what happened was quite different from the one the inquiry and various legal proceedings suggested. It was possible to analyze the sequence of events and come up with a very different interpretation. It was, of course, much easier to puzzle out what happened far removed from the atmosphere of the time, including the commitment to what was seen as a just war and the antagonism toward the French, who were identified with French Canadians. Critical to the analysis was the correspondence of inquiry counsel W.A. Henry, which was not available to earlier scholars.
The reports of Rear-Admiral Chambers can be found in the National Archives at Kew Gardens, as can the discussions in London about the situation in Halifax. The initial reports to Militia Headquarters in Ottawa are in Library and Archives Canada. The record of movement of convoys is both at Kew Gardens and in the Lloyd’s shipping movements at the Guildhall archives, both in London.27
The material about the medical response is drawn from Lieutenant-Colonel Bell’s correspondence in the Department of Militia and Defence files in Record Group 24, Library and Archives Canada, and correspondence from the superintendent of the Victoria General Hospital, which is in a private fonds at Nova Scotia Archives and was made available by the hospital. The material about the Halifax Relief Committee is from the committee’s minutes, also at the Nova Scotia Archives. The materials describing the aftermath of the explosion, including the return to patronage politics, and how the Canadian army tried to account for, or recover, its missing supplies, including bandages, stretchers, and blankets, are drawn almost entirely from Militia Headquarters and Military District No. 6 files at Library and Archives Canada. They deal with the problems of Major-General Benson and his successor Major-General Lessard in the light of increasing uninterest in the situation in Halifax.28 The Department of Militia and Defence in Ottawa was concerned with the problems of war in Europe. The British were concerned about Halifax only as a port. Neither had much interest in the problems of the civilian residents of Halifax.
This chapter is largely self-explanatory and builds on earlier chapters. The story of the Halifax explosion confirms much of what disaster experts now know. Halifax shows that no matter how ill-prepared people are, they respond well when a disaster happens. It confirms that behaviours like panic and looting are myths. It shows that individuals and emergent groups are the first to respond to what they see around them. Halifax also confirms that disasters are not large accidents but something very different—and that catastrophes are something very different again. Planning for catastrophes is not the same as planning for accidents or disasters—catastrophes undermine a community’s ability to respond, local emergency services themselves can be victims, and emergency planners are never fully prepared to deal with thousands of dead.
Whether naturally occurring or the consequence of human failure, devastating events will happen. People have been living in some areas long enough that less frequent events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are increasingly likely. Added to this is the growing impact of human activity. Despite the inevitably of disaster, many governments and individuals fail to plan. When incidents do occur, they seem to come as a surprise. The Halifax explosion, like other devastating events, is a reminder that disasters can strike anywhere, anytime, and that governments and individuals need to do more to plan and prepare.
Finally, the many stories recorded in this book show there is much to be learned from the individual accounts of disasters. Together, their accounts offer a greater understanding of events and the human response. They also show the inspiring resilience of people even in the face of devastation.