RESCUE WORK IN THE NORTH END WAS NICELY UNDER WAY WHEN Evelyn Richardson saw four bareheaded soldiers running toward her. The men shouted that the magazine at the Wellington Barracks was on fire and that there could be a second explosion. She recalled them yelling: “Fire! Wellington Barracks magazine is on fire! Move South into the open! Everybody South!” Dorothy McMurray was alerted to the same threat by police on horseback: “The mounted police patrol came galloping through the streets … calling out we should all go at once to the nearest open space because another explosion was expected.” Civilians in cars drove up and down with the same message, and at least one person used a cone-shaped speaking device so his voice would carry as through a loud hailer. One North End resident remembers that the call to evacuate was an order, not a request: “The form in which the order was generally heard was: ‘Everyone is to leave their houses as there is going to be a second explosion.’”
Because of the order to evacuate, many injured survivors were taken into the open, and many ill people were dragged from their beds. A professor at Dalhousie University, David Fraser Fraser-Harris, who wrote about the medical response to the explosion, says there is no doubt that many people lost their lives because they were moved while injured and were left exposed in the open because of the evacuation. However, to the survivors who had seen their homes torn apart and members of their families killed, the thought of a second explosion was terrifying. Most were not prepared to ignore a warning. Pastor George Adam stopped at the lieutenant-governor’s residence on Barrington Street to watch:
There were nuns who had left the cloistered quiet of their convents. Old bed-ridden women were being carried along in sheets. Half-dressed mothers with babies wrapped in blankets hurried past. Blind men were being helped by little boys. It was pathetic, too, to see the little girls, clutching their cats and pet dogs, hurry past. Chinamen, shaken out of their celestial calm, careered southward. Blue jackets, firemen and sailors of every description left their ships in harbour and were making for safety. Many, many of these pedestrians were streaming with blood from cuts on face and hands. There were motors, too, carts and wagons and perambulators in the flow of frightened people.
Dorothy McMurray had a similar memory: “We ran over to Murray’s fields across from the house. Babies and old people who had not been out of their beds for years had to be carried there, people just home from hospital had to be brought in makeshift shelters.” Alfred Monaghan was there, too. “We were all out on the street talking to neighbours when the order came to leave our homes and go to an open field as another explosion was expected from the magazine [at Wellington Barracks].” He, his mother, his aunt, and his sister joined those leaving the North End: “We bundled up as best we could and headed for an open space at the North End of Allan Street. We were really just following everyone else. I was walking with my aunt and a man stopped us and asked my aunt if she would help him carry his trunk. My aunt tried to lift one end of it but she could not so we left him standing there.”
In a report forwarded to the director general of medical services at Militia Headquarters in Ottawa on 25 January 1918, the chief medical officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Bell, described that flight as panic: “The populace were thrown into a greater panic by the announcement that a second explosion was to come. The victims of the disaster were stunned and stupid, but a large proportion of those injured ran away terror stricken at the prospect of this second explosion and left the whole burden of relief upon the military and the few hundred of civilians who remained.” Bell was almost certainly not in the North End but at his office or overseeing repairs and preparations at hospital facilities in the southern part of the city. He was right that many people did flee. And he was probably right that some were terrified. But he was wrong in suggesting panic. There is nothing panicky about running for your life when you have just been blown up and officials are telling you it could happen again.
In any case, as Pastor Adam, who was there, makes clear, those who were fleeing were also helping others to do so. Many did not leave. Edith Bauld kept driving the injured to hospital. James Harrison remained on board the explosives-laden Picton. The Dartmouth ferries never stopped. Not a single firefighter left the North End. Neither did Jean Groves, who operated the private telephone exchange at the dockyard. When everybody was ordered out of the damaged building, Groves stayed behind. “Risking her life she remained at her post and sent out many calls for doctors, nurses, firemen and other aid. She had eventually to be carried from the ruined building.”
Evelyn Richardson did not leave either—not because she had something to do, but because her father said he would meet her. “My friends obediently started south, down Barrington Street,” she recalls, “but I thought, ‘this is where Dad said he’s to meet me. I must stay.’ I refused to budge.” The family of the harbourmaster also remained at home. Frances Rudolf’s youngest sister had diphtheria and the family was in quarantine. “People shouted at us that we should get out, as there was to be another explosion, but being quarantined, we were unable to leave. You can imagine how doomed we felt.” Harry Ferguson simply ignored the warning. He worked in a billiard hall and spent his time cleaning up the broken glass. “Everybody beat it,” he recalls. “I went to work cleaning up the billiard room. I decided that if another explosion took place, under the heavy billiard tables would be as safe as anyplace.”
Others were more concerned with the injured than with their own safety. Roy Laing of the Royal Bank had left the downtown area and headed for the dry dock. En route, he passed the magazine at the Wellington Barracks and he saw sailors warning everyone. “Every minute it was expected to blow up. They were warning all the people to get out of their houses and make for the open places.” Despite that warning, Laing kept going until he reached the docks. That is where he found the soldiers who appeared unable to decide what to do. “To tell you the truth,” he wrote a friend, “I had to take charge of the whole thing.” Another man left his home and then remembered that he had forgotten to stoke the furnace. “He came back after we were all gone,” Hattie Burrill wrote, “to take the ashes out of the base burner and fill her up again, in case we don’t have to leave for good.”
He was not the only person going in and out of the North End. Sergeant K.H. Goudey, a member of the Halifax Rifles who had been assigned for duty at the district headquarters offices in the Dennis Building, was dispatched on his bicycle by Lieutenant-Colonel Bell’s staff immediately after the explosion to relay instructions to the doctors at Camp Hill Hospital about emergency arrangements. That done, he headed to the North End. “I rode on my bicycle as far as the fire would permit assisting several men and women lying near the ruins of their homes, gathering clothes and wraps to keep them warm. One woman was lying on a couch, moaning. I approached her asking what I could do and she said her left thigh was broken. I called a boy to help me turn her over on her right side and placed a board on the thigh to keep her leg straight. Her husband, a petty officer from the Niobe, then appeared and I went home. Asked a neighbour for his horse and truck in which I loaded chairs, rubber blankets and bedding. Then, gathering neighbouring women and children and, as warned of another explosion, drove to a vacant lot near the Arm. I made several trips to and from this place with food, clothing, etc., until despatch riders notified us it was safe to return to our homes, which we did.” Teenager Thomas Raddall, who would later help set up the morgue, did the same. After he, his mother, and his sister fled, he went back to get bread, jam, a knife, a blanket, and a quilt. Even a woman who described those fleeing as terrified said that many were carrying children. She observed this while she herself was walking toward, not away from, the North End.
Cora Balcom often told her children about what happened that day: “Somebody said there could be another explosion so we packed up our little suitcases and headed up toward the Citadel. Halfway up, my suitcase came open and everything went onto the sidewalk. I couldn’t stop laughing. It was so funny. My girlfriend said, ‘Don’t be so crazy. This is serious business.’ We did go to the Citadel and were put up there overnight. The next day there was a train leaving for the Annapolis Valley and I managed to get on it and get home to Middleton.” A few, such as Evelyn Welch’s grandfather, George Lovett, simply refused to go. A veteran of the expeditionary force that suppressed the 1885 Northwest Rebellion, Lovett went and got his rifle. He sat on the porch steps holding his weapon. 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.
Many who fled ended up huddled in the open on the Commons. Most were women and children who had managed to escape their damaged homes. They had little clothing and no protection from the cold. An officer at the Armouries ordered his soldiers to take blankets to some on the Commons. Soldiers from a Quebec regiment handed out blankets without orders. Many victims kept those blankets when they finally found accommodation—it was all they had to keep them warm. This became a major issue later, when Militia Headquarters in Ottawa demanded an accounting of all military material that had been handed out.
Samuel Henry Prince suggests that the evacuation lasted for many hours, and some stories suggest victims spent the night huddling in their torn clothing, afraid to return home. In fact, most people remained out, at the most, for a few hours. Kelly Morton recalls coming home around mid-afternoon. Dorothy McMurray says her group was told it was safe at one o’clock. Willet Brock says the group that evacuated consisted of “old men and women, children, girls and men,” and says they were in the open for “nearly two hours.” Since the evacuation began around 10 a.m., that matches the reports of the students at Mount St. Vincent Academy, who said they were back at noon.
The sad part of the evacuation—the fright, the exposure—was that it was unnecessary. There was never danger of a second explosion. The soldiers, sailors, and police warning everyone were doing so because they heard others yelling. They had no idea what was really going on. Lieutenant C.A. McLennan of the Composite Battalion was at the Wellington Barracks when the flight began and he wrote a detailed account of what happened:
I then found that a piece of steel had ripped a hole in the magazine fence…. The entrance was badly smashed: the Entrance roof had collapsed and the doors were kindling wood…. All the buildings in the vicinity were burning and, as the wreckage lying around the magazine would catch fire very easily, I decided to clear it away. A party of sailors, under several Officers [one of the Royal Navy parties from Changuinola], had just gone up the square. From them I obtained a detail of about 20 men, under an Officer, as a working party. They were put at work clearing the debris from the magazine. There were no lights and all the work had to be done by feel. Moreover none of us had ever been in the place before.…
When I reached the back of the magazine, I found that an opening, that led into the magazine, had been blown open. I placed another sentry on this. I then investigated the small building on the lower side and found it was a heater house.
In this building the door was blown in and smashed, the window frames were smashed on the floor, the roof were half off, the smoke pipe was blown from the heater. The hot water heater itself had all its doors blown open and the coals scattered over the floor among the smashed woodwork. This was smouldering. From this building, a duct about two feet square ran into the magazine, seeming to be very dangerous.
I hailed two sailors and ordered them to dump the coals out of the furnace into a bucket while I went in search of water. In the meantime, the sailors had the magazine cleared out as far as the inner doors. These doors were still on their hinges so I told them to shut the doors and get at the stuff lying at the entrance. I found two chemical fire extinguishers in the magazine and went to the heater house. The sailors were carrying out the first bucket of coals when I got back. I turned the extinguisher on the woodwork and on the coals in the furnace. This caused a cloud of steam, which went up and out the damaged roof. Just then someone yelled that the magazine was on fire.
McLennan said he learned later that it was a civilian who yelled fire. The sentries said that person stood in Barrington Street in the middle of a crowd, pointed to the roof of the magazine, and yelled that it was on fire. Whether the first to call fire was a civilian or a soldier is irrelevant. In either case, that person caused a lot of people to start running through the streets telling everyone to evacuate. Most were in uniform. The British sailors, having been ordered back to the relative safety of the dockyard across the railway tracks, were first. McLennan was right behind them: “When the alarm came the natural impulse was to run. I started but when I reached the hole in the fence found that the entire naval party was running out and had it blocked. I started back and passed one of my sentries who was running on the outside of the magazine fence. I asked him where the fire was and he said on the roof. I had thought it was inside because the sailors were running. I ran up the side of the roof. There was no sign of fire though it was badly damaged. From the roof, I could see the crowd that had been on the street, running in every direction.”
The sentry who stopped the panic was Private W. Eisner, also of the Composite Battalion. He was on duty outside the fence. When the sailors departed, he waited patiently and then squeezed through the fence the other way. In his official report, McLennan wrote, “I can not comment too highly on the actions of Private Eisner…. He was outside the magazine fence when the alarm came and had a chance to get away. He did not do so but came straight to the magazine.” Another who showed courage that morning was Major-General Benson. He came directly to the magazine to find out what was happening, and commended McLennan, telling him to carry on, which he was able to do with some CEF troops who had come from the Common. Also on the scene, was Lieutenant-Colonel A.W. Duffus, commanding officer of the 1st Regiment, Canadian Garrison Artillery, who had come from his headquarters in the Citadel. When he learned there was no threat, he did everything he could to tell people it was safe to return home. Meanwhile, another naval party arrived, “an act of Providence,” as McLennan told the historian Archibald MacMechan soon after the event. This was a group of seamen under Engineer Lieutenant Ninian Bannatyne, Royal Naval Canadian Volunteer Reserve, who came up from the dockyard with buckets of water and proceeded to douse the interior.
Although the army knew what actually happened at the Wellington Barracks magazine, this was never made public. In his official report, Benson praised military personnel, implying that the public panicked: “In view of the terrible explosion and the panic caused thereby and the mad rush of citizens on the street adjoining the magazine, I consider Lieutenant McLennan’s action and work most commendable.” He did not quote McLennan’s report, which not only admitted that the soldiers on duty had left their posts, but excused it: “Regarding the actions of the sentries in running when the alarm came that the magazine was on fire, I may say that everyone was shocked, nervous and on edge. Having, within an hour, experienced one terrific explosion, the fear of another one occurring in the immediate vicinity was enough to start anyone.”
One of those who fled from the vicinity of the magazines was Clarence Delaney, an American sailor who was likely a member of the landing parties from the Morrill and Old Colony. He wrote home for another crucifix and told his mother how he lost the first one: “I gave mine to a fellow who was at the point of death. His throat was cut and he was lying along the roadside. I left the crucifix with him and ran for safety myself. I was unable to carry him…. All the time we expected the magazine to blow so we had to run for the woods. I trust and hope the poor fellow was spared. He said he would hold the crucifix beside the gash and pray. His name was Foley.” This was almost certainly Arthur M.S. Foley, a stoker in Niobe from Montreal. Although initially reported “missing believed killed,” he later turned up in hospital.