IF HALIFAX WAS TO GET OUTSIDE ASSISTANCE—AND LOCAL PEOPLE thought that was essential—two things were needed. There had to be a way for outsiders to learn what had happened and what was needed, and there had to be a way for outsiders to send the required help. At first, both of these things appeared difficult to impossible. Communications were in disarray—long-distance telephone and telegraph services were disrupted. Equally important, rail access to Halifax was a shambles. The Richmond railway yards were a wasteland of overturned railway cars, and the North End station was unusable. However, both those problems were soon solved. The key was the railways: the day of the explosion, they were magnificent.
The first message warning outsiders about the situation in Halifax is a Canadian legend. A telegraph operator named Vincent Coleman heard Lieutenant-Commander Murray calling the dockyard to report that a munitions ship was on fire. Realizing the danger, Coleman started to flee. Then he decided he should warn incoming trains. He returned to his telegraph key and wired Rockingham: “A munition ship is on fire and is making for Pier No. 8; good-bye.” It was then too late for him to get away. Coleman died in the explosion, as did Murray, who was still on the phone when Mont-Blanc exploded. By the time Coleman sent his message, the Boston Express was already past Rockingham, and the morning Kentville train had been held up because the Express was late. Coleman’s heroic action had no impact on trains. Nor did his message lead to any other immediate reaction. Since only a few people in Halifax recognized the danger from Mont-Blanc, no one outside Halifax realized the seriousness of the threat either. In a sense, Coleman died in vain.
On a modern telephone system, one party can call another for a two-way conversation. A telephone call from Halifax to Rockingham, for example, would link those two locations. Others would not hear that conversation. The railway telegraph did not work like that. By using the railway telegraph, an operator could direct a message to a particular station (as Coleman did when he messaged Rockingham), but every other station on that part of the line would hear that message. That is because the railway telegraph is not a system connecting two points, but a system connecting all points along a part of the line. Coleman’s message, directed to Rockingham, was therefore heard at Fairview, Bedford, Windsor Junction, Shubenacadie, Stewiacke, Brookfield, and Truro—in short, at all stations from Halifax to the next major town, Truro. When Mont-Blanc exploded, the impact was felt all over Nova Scotia. Those who had heard Coleman’s message realized immediately the munitions ship Coleman mentioned had blown up. Truro immediately telegraphed Intercolonial Railway headquarters at Moncton—a message that was heard at Amherst, Sackville, and Dorchester, and all other stations from Truro to Moncton. It was also overheard or passed to someone from the Amherst newspaper.10
There were a number of official messages sent out the day of the explosion. One went from Major-General Thomas Benson to Militia Headquarters in Ottawa, another went from Rear-Admiral Bertram Chambers to the Admiralty in London. Three others, however, were more important in terms of immediate response. One went from the head of the Dominion Atlantic Railway, George Graham, to his headquarters in nearby Kentville. The other two were sent by an Intercolonial Railway civil engineer, W.A. Duff, to the railway’s management in Moncton, New Brunswick. Duff’s messages were passed on to the government in Ottawa and from Cabinet to the Governor General. They were the basis of the Governor General’s messages to the British government and to Buckingham Palace. (At the time, the Governor General was literally the King’s representative in Canada, the link between Ottawa and London.) Duff’s message left no doubt about the extent of the destruction: “Every building north of the Queen’s hotel is totally wrecked. North Street station is in ruins, as well as our plant at Willow Park, and there is just one mass of wreckage and dead bodies in the North End of the city.” Shared with the prime minister, the Canadian Cabinet, the Governor General, and then passed to London, it led to the federal response to Halifax.
Normally, the railway used its telegraph for two purposes: train orders—messages that allowed the trains to move efficiently and safely—and commercial telegraph traffic, especially at smaller stations. Train orders were not so much confidential as private: if a train was going to be late, for example, that information would be shared with shippers and passengers. However, at a time when many messages reported soldiers injured, missing, or killed in action, commercial telegraph traffic was treated with the utmost discretion. The day of the explosion, confidentiality was tossed aside. This was partly because many of the messages sent were designed for general consumption. They included, for example, calls to municipalities to send help. However, it was also because the information was too dramatic and too important to be kept private. Station telegraph operators told everyone what they heard. Those they told, told others, and the news spread like wildfire.
When the explosion occurred, it made such a bang that Baillie Mackay’s teacher in Pictou County thought a student was hitting the school with a baseball bat. He accused Bob Cameron, who replied, truthfully, he had not done a thing. When Baillie’s mother, Ina, heard the same sound, she thought the gasoline engine on the threshing machine had exploded at the farm where her husband was working. Next, she thought it could be a mine explosion in Westville—not an unrealistic thought, since mine explosions were all too common in Nova Scotia. Like many others, she was soon on the telephone. The phone system she used was the Lovat Mutual Telephone Company, which was created by her husband and other local farmers in 1914. The company’s central operator was the wife of the storekeeper in Salt Spring. Those on the line could talk to each other by cranking the phone and giving the appropriate ring. The ring for Mackay was two long and one short. Everyone could get on at once, thus the name “party line.” Although the operator did not know anything when Ina Mackay called her, she soon learned what happened. The nearest railway station in West River heard the news when it was relayed from Moncton. The station operator passed it on to Salt Spring. The operator told everyone on the line, including Ina Mackay.
All over Nova Scotia, the news was spreading the same way. Station operators listened to the messages flowing along the railway telegraph and told local authorities, and the authorities passed that information to others. Soon, the news reached the general stores. The storekeeper or, more likely, his spouse—women usually ran the switchboard—got on the phone and told those who were listening. On Thursday, 6 December 1917, that was just about everyone. That day, the rural phone systems were more like radio stations than a device for two-way conversation. Of course, those passing the news by phone could only tell what they knew. What they knew came from the railway telegraph. The day of the explosion, it was the crucial link that spread news of what happened, and allowed an effective response from Nova Scotia and neighbouring New Brunswick.
When people are really excited about something, they cannot resist telling others, and the more excited they are, the more people they tell and the faster they tell them. In fact, some researchers say the importance of an event can be determined by the speed at which news about it spreads. On 22 November 1963, the day President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, more than half the American public knew within half an hour. All Americans knew within four hours. While radio and television were important, most people learned first by word of mouth. Incredible as it may seem, the speed with which the news of the Halifax explosion spread through Nova Scotia was even faster than the spread of news about the Kennedy assassination. It was so important that everyone had to tell everyone else they saw or could contact. The news literally spread like wildfire.
Most of those who now remember the explosion were children in 1917. They recall that they learned of the explosion, at the latest, when they came home for lunch. By then, their parents already knew. The explosion was at 9:05 a.m., and lunch was at noon, thus three hours. This is an hour faster than the time it took for news of the Kennedy assassination to spread across the United States. One of the last to know was Alice Clarke. She was at school in Beaver Brook, outside Truro, and had brought her lunch. She learned of the explosion when her classmates came back from lunch and told her “Halifax is all blown up.” This was still less than four hours.
One reason the news spread so quickly was, of course, that almost everyone in Nova Scotia knew someone who was in Halifax—a sister or brother or child at school, a son in the army, or a relative in hospital. Another reason for the rapid spread of news was that the explosion could be felt through much of the province. Eileen Mackay was at school in East River St. Mary’s, Pictou County: “It was a rural school. All of a sudden, just after school opened, there was this awful … the building seemed to tremble a bit, the floor seemed to shake a bit. The teacher turned absolutely white and one of the boys was bright enough to get her a mug of water. And this was 36 miles [58 kilometres] from Halifax.” At Truro, roughly 100 kilometres away, windows shattered at the Learmont Hotel. Even further away, in New Glasgow, the windows shattered in Anne Thompson’s class at the Temperance school, where Carrie Best was a student. In fact, the explosion was so powerful that the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, felt its impact at his home in Baddeck, 320 kilometres from Halifax.
Most people who were alive when Kennedy was assassinated remember precisely how they first heard the news. The same thing is true for the Halifax explosion. Eileen Mackay learned from her mother when she got home for lunch. Her grandparents ran a store and it had a phone. They told her mother. John MacVicar heard from his father. MacVicar was working between Merigomish and Woodburn as a section hand on the Intercolonial Railway, earning seventeen and a half cents an hour. “Father was the foreman. He went into MacEachen’s store in Edgerton. They had a phone. He came out and the first thing he told us was, ‘Halifax is all blown up.’” Art Faulkner has a more vivid memory. He was at school in Truro, the nearest town to Halifax. “The teacher had opened all the windows and they all came down. The vibrations brought them down. We knew something was happening. The vibrations—it was something I’ll never forget.”
Shortly after, Faulkner’s teacher told them of the explosion and class was cancelled. Faulkner went to the number 9 siding near the Intercolonial Railway station, where volunteers were getting free rides to Halifax. Although he was just ten years old, he wanted to go, but the conductor said he was much too small. He tried twice more, but was refused. Eileen Mackay also went to the station, to see the trains go by. She remembers seeing injured people covered in bandages. Carrie Best from New Glasgow also has a memory connected to the railway. A few days after the explosion, her father used his horse and wagon to move victims from a special train to an emergency hospital in New Glasgow’s new West Side School. She can still recall the smell of chloroform.
Once people heard what had happened, they were anxious to know more. In 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated, they turned on their radios and television sets. That was not possible in 1917: there was no commercial radio and no television. So people did what they could. In Sydney, Cape Breton, people gathered on Charles Street where the Sydney Record posted bulletin boards. It was the same elsewhere. Emily Hillcoat had moved to Amherst two months earlier. “At that time, there was no TV, no radio. We would go up to the newspaper office and stand outside and they would give the news out the window.” In Neil’s Harbour, near the tip of Cape Breton, where there was no newspaper, people gathered at the general store. Cassie Hurst recalls, “Archie Maclean had the store, the post office and the telegraph.” Hurst said everyone flocked to the store to hear what Maclean could tell them. “He would just hear the ‘tap, tap, tap.’ I suppose he would get it that way,” she said. “He would have been connected to somewhere else.” In Joggins, Ada Trask heard the news over the telephone party line. Her husband was in the army and she was living with her husband’s parents. “Everybody was talking on the telephone,” she said, “about an explosion on the ship.”
There is a myth that when news spreads rapidly by word of mouth, the message will be distorted. Research done by the Emergency Communications Research Unit, at Carleton University, established that this is not true. It is very different when the messages are of great import, as they were the day of the explosion. The evidence available from Halifax shows that the messages about what happened were—at least until they reached the media—generally accurate. There were also very few persistent rumours about what happened. This was because people who had seen the collision and the fire and the explosion told others, and that spread quickly by word of mouth. Rumours die quickly when there is accurate information, as was the case after the explosion.
Although it is not all that easy to trace the initial flow of information years after an incident, enough accounts survive to show how the news got around. For example, one of the people who knew Mont-Blanc’s cargo was Joe Cogan, a sailor on Hilford, the tug carrying Lieutenant-Commander James Murray. Cogan heard Francis Mackey shout to Hilford that Mont-Blanc was going to blow up. He knew that Murray went into the station to report that. Cogan was worried enough that he tried to get Hilford’s captain, Arthur Hickey, to move to a safer location than Pier 9. Hickey declined.
When Mont-Blanc exploded, Hilford was picked up by the resulting wave and then dropped into the wreckage on the pier. Hickey was killed, but Cogan survived. Later, Cogan walked over to the railway tracks, where he came across a yard engine. He hailed its driver and climbed into the cab. Later, he and the driver were joined by an injured woman who was helped into the cab by Edward McCrossan, the sailor from Curaca who had seen IMO and Mont-Blanc collide, the Mont-Blanc catch fire, and Mont-Blanc’s crew abandon ship. Because he had then gone below deck for a smoke, he escaped injury in the subsequent explosion. McCrossan had also walked up to the tracks. The yard engine was the same one George Graham, head of the Dominion Atlantic Railway, commandeered to send Major C.E. Avery DeWitt, a military doctor, to treat the wounded on the Boston Express. It was also the one that made a trip to Bedford to ask the Sisters of Charity for bandages for the wounded. In the space of an hour or so, the engineer on that train had met a sailor who knew Mont-Blanc’s cargo, another sailor who had seen what had happened, the head of the Dominion Atlantic railway, and a physician who was on his way to help the injured. He had also seen that the devastation had not reached Bedford. When he passed on the news of what he heard, he was able to provide a detailed and accurate account of all that had happened.
People sometimes play a party game where a message is passed from one person to another. When it reaches the end of the line, it is usually vastly distorted, sometimes in an amusing way. This sort of distortion does not occur after an event like the Halifax explosion. The information being passed is just too important. The morning of 6 December 1917, news about the explosion spread quickly and accurately. People who knew part of what happened shared what they knew with others. Soon, most people in Halifax had heard the entire story. There were some rumours, but they did not last long. There were too many people around with accurate information. For example, Margaret Mooney was at her desk in downtown Halifax when someone yelled, “Zeppelin. Go to the cellar.” Instead, she went to the street outside her office. There, she met the chief postal clerk. He told her that a ship had exploded. Howard Glube was at morning prayers at the Halifax County Academy when the windows shattered in the third-floor auditorium. After running down the stairs with his classmates, he felt chilly, so he went back for his coat. Then he was allowed to leave. As he headed toward his brother’s store, he could see a huge mushroom cloud—“the only cloud in the sky”—and he met some people who told him there had been an explosion. Thomas Raddall’s mother had been cut on the breasts and on the forehead. When her son got home, she told him, “The Germans—those beasts—they are shelling the city.” A neighbour—one of the few survivors from the North End station—corrected her. She told them a munitions ship had exploded.
Although the Intercolonial Railway’s messages were passed to Ottawa and shared with the world, the first specific call for help was sent by George Graham, who ran the Dominion Atlantic Railway (DAR). He was in the Richmond yards in his three-bedroom private car, named “Nova Scotia,” when Mont-Blanc exploded. With him were his daughter, Helen, and his chef, George Clarke, who was serving breakfast. When the explosion rocked the car, Graham got out for a look. When he saw the devastation and the downed telegraph lines, he left his slightly injured daughter behind and set out on foot for Rockingham. (Helen Graham’s cut became infected while she assisted at one of the hospitals. She was later treated by an American Red Cross Unit.) As Graham walked along, he counted twenty-five bodies. When he reached Rockingham forty minutes later, he wired DAR headquarters in Kentville: “Organize a relief train and send word to Wolfville and Windsor to round up all doctors, nurses and Red Cross supplies possible to obtain. No time to explain but the list of casualties is enormous.” Graham’s message was not a complete surprise. The operator at Rockingham had already advised Kentville that something terrible had happened. He had also ordered the Kentville train to reverse its direction to protect it from another explosion.
George Graham was born in Markham, Ontario, in 1870. After learning telegraphy, he became a night operator at Havelock, Ontario. Then he left the railway to attend business school and learn shorthand. After he rejoined the railway in June 1889, at age nineteen, he became, thanks to his combined skills as a telegrapher and a stenographer, secretary to M.J. Haney, the man building the Crow’s Nest mountain pass of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). Later, he was chief clerk to Thomas, later Lord, Shaughnessy, general superintendent of the CPR. After postings as CPR superintendent in Winnipeg, Brandon, Fort William, and Vancouver, Graham came east for the first time on 1 November 1915, as general manager of the DAR.
Graham was so enthusiastic about Nova Scotia that most people assumed he was born in the Maritimes—he even commissioned a short history of Nova Scotia. The well-known Evangeline Trail was his idea, as were the golf course at Digby and the park at Grand-Pré. He was also an avid supporter of amateur theatre. Doreen Roberts says in her thesis for Acadia that Graham was accustomed to giving orders. “George Graham was not a man who would seem likely to engender affection,” she wrote. “He was a dictator. He was impatient and domineering.” On 6 December 1917, there is little doubt that when he reached Rockingham he told the operator to get out of his way and sat at the telegraph key himself. He was well aware that Wolfville and Windsor were listening to his message to Kentville.
In 1917, Kentville was an important centre. As DAR headquarters, it had paint shops, repair shops, and a roundhouse with turntables—enough to employ about 120 men. Trains coming from Yarmouth and Digby stopped there for fifteen minutes so that passengers could get lunch. Kentville was also the station for Aldershot, where 1000 Canadian troops were waiting to be shipped overseas. It was also a manufacturing centre. In 1910, Kentville had become home of the Nova Scotia Carriage Co., which over the next few years produced ten different models of automobiles, 115 styles of carriages, and twenty-two different sleighs. Finally, it was the home of the Kentville Sanitarium, an excellent hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis. With all of these facilities, Kentville had the resources to respond to the needs of Halifax.
When Graham had walked by the Boston Express, he had seen passengers desperately trying to assist the injured. As soon as he completed his message, Graham hopped onto a yard engine and had its driver take him to the morning train that had been held up. He wanted to know if there was a physician on board. He found Major Avery DeWitt, a medical officer at the Aldershot camp, who was on his way for a meeting in Halifax. Graham told him his services were needed, put him on the yard engine, and sent him to help on the Boston Express.
The superintendent of Atlantic Canada’s other main railway, the Intercolonial, was also in his private car in the Richmond yards when Mont-Blanc exploded. However, J.T. Hallisey was badly cut about the head and in no condition to call for assistance. The Intercolonial’s first response came from the assistant chief engineer, W.A. Duff (a civil engineer, not a railway engineer), who borrowed a car from Cook Construction to check out the damage at North Street station. When Duff realized how bad things were, he started for Rockingham. He did not make it. The need for ambulances was so desperate that he loaded his car with injured and took them to the Victoria General Hospital. He then headed for Rockingham a second time:
I … arrived there probably about 10 o’clock or shortly afterward. At Rockingham, I found that I could get in touch with our despatcher at Truro on our own wires and I gave him a message for Mr. Hayes, General Manager, and stating what occurred at Halifax, and giving him also approximate damage done to property and my estimate of the number of wounded and killed asked him to send all doctors, nurses and relief supplies possible be sent to Halifax from places in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
When headquarters received Duff’s wire, it passed the news—once again through Truro—to other stations in Nova Scotia. That is how the news reached Stellarton, New Glasgow, and stations all the way to Sydney, in Cape Breton. By then, everyone was listening, or was asking those who understood American Land Line code to explain those dots, dashes, and spaces.
Small wonder that the London Times, in its very first report, acknowledged the significance of the railway on Saturday, 8 December: “This is the information which reached the Government in Ottawa this morning from Intercolonial officials in Moncton (in New Brunswick, about 120 miles from Halifax). The direct wires from Ottawa to Halifax are all down.”
Before either Graham or Duff sent their messages, Truro was already organizing the first response. The operator in Truro had heard Coleman’s message and had felt the explosion, so he had little doubt about what happened. He informed the mayor, William Dunbar. The mayor ordered the fire alarm sounded—it blew ten whistles for an emergency—then started calling his colleagues.11 Dunbar was a physician. Truro’s physicians, nurses, and volunteer firefighters were on their way in less than an hour, the mayor among them. Because of the explosion, no train orders could be issued from Halifax, so the special had to work its way from station to station. As it did, it picked up passengers. At Shubenacadie, for example, a local physician and the Presbyterian minister, Hugh Upham, got on. So did several people whose relatives had gone into Halifax that morning. Despite the slow travel, the Truro special reached the outskirts of Halifax at 12:20 p.m., three hours and fifteen minutes after the explosion. That was ten to fifteen minutes before the relief train from Kentville.
While the Truro special was en route, members of the Dominion Atlantic Railway staff in Kentville were rounding up physicians and nurses. Bill Collicutt, who was a patient at the Kentville Sanitarium, could not recall if any physicians at the sanitarium left for Halifax. “All I remember,” he said, “is terrific excitement, that a special train was leaving for Halifax with as many as they could possibly spare at the Sanitarium.” Collicutt had come back from overseas with tuberculosis, which had long been cured—he was ninety-seven when interviewed in 1994. Dr. W.B. Moore of Kentville recorded what happened that morning. He was about to start his rounds when he received a call from the DAR asking him to round up some nurses and board a special train for Halifax: “At once I prepared to do as requested, and was gratified shortly afterwards to find that willing response had been made by all available medical men and nurses of the town and vicinity, who were at the station and entrained for Halifax.” Another physician who went along was Percy McGrath, the physician who later recorded his impressions of his visit to Halifax.
The train left Kentville at 11 a.m., roughly an hour after the one started from Truro. When it arrived at Wolfville, physicians and nurses were waiting. These included physicians George DeWitt (Major Avery DeWitt’s father), M.R. Elliot, and J.J. Allen; and nurses Mrs. Grace Andrews, Mrs. C.A. Patriquin, Miss Ethel Brown, Miss Jessie Parker, Miss Georgie Miner, Miss Nellie DeWitt (Major Avery DeWitt’s sister), and Mrs. Greta Harris. In addition, three members of the university faculty—W.L. Archibald, W.A. Coit, and Acadia’s principal, George B. Cutten—got on board. More physicians and nurses and another pharmacist boarded at Windsor. When the train reached Windsor Junction, two people—one physician and one nurse—got off to wait for the Boston Express. When it arrived, they got on. However, they boarded at the end opposite to the one where Major Avery DeWitt was working, so they did not know he was on board.
Because he knew that a trainload of injured had gone to Truro (the Boston Express had turned around), George Graham was convinced he could arrange for another one to leave for Windsor, Wolfville, and Kentville. When the Kentville special reached the Richmond yards, his agent held it there. It sat there until 4 p.m., when the idea of a second outgoing train was dropped. Meanwhile, the passengers from that train, mainly physicians and nurses, walked into the city. Percy McGrath remembered that walk all his life, especially the sight of “bodies piled on each side to the height of 3–4 feet like cordwood.”
The general manager of the Dominion Atlantic Railway, George Graham, had seen for himself what had happened. The general manager of the Intercolonial Railway, C.A. Hayes, had no similar first-hand knowledge, but he had several sources of information. The first was Vincent Coleman’s last message. It had mentioned a “munition ship” and “fire.” Next came Duff’s wire with details of the impact of the explosion. Hayes advised the minister of Railways, J.D. Reid: “Halifax is on fire. Sending special trains out of Moncton and any other city with fire apparatus and auxiliary outfits and picking up all fire apparatus between Moncton and Sydney and rushing them to Halifax.”
Soon Hayes had more information because Duff had met Henry Colwell, the acting mayor, and, at his request, sent another message stressing the need for doctors, nurses, and medical supplies: “I again went to Rockingham and got in touch with our dispatcher at Truro and asked him to get messages from the Mayor of Halifax to the different towns of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. After sending these messages for the mayor, I arranged that the telephone company get a wire working for us between Rockingham and Halifax Ocean Terminals in order to bring trains in to Halifax on their arrival.” When Duff’s second wire arrived, Hayes got his staff to call Moncton City Hall. At a hastily called meeting at the Intercolonial offices, it was agreed that a special train would be sent to Halifax carrying doctors, nurses, Intercolonial safety-first men, and medical supplies. Bandages and surgical equipment would be supplied by local firms. Those in on that decision were Hayes, three members of his staff, the city clerk, J.A. Magee, and one member of council, Alderman A.C. Chapman.
The first Moncton train left for Halifax at 11:05 a.m. Hayes had his private car hooked onto it: he had decided his place was in Halifax. At Sackville, it picked up supplies. At Amherst, Mayor Harvey Pipe told it not to leave until it hooked on a flatcar with firefighting equipment, including hoses and a hose cart, and until physicians and nurses had arrived from the hospital. Even while that train was en route, officials at Moncton got more supplies ready. At one o’clock, a second special left Moncton. It was pulling flatcars loaded with a fire engine, hose wagon, and cranes. Also on board were firefighters and a wrecking crew from the railway. (The crew would be needed to clear the tracks.) There were also three military hospital cars attached to the train. (Hayes sent the first train immediately because he knew it would take time to round up and load this equipment.) At three o’clock, a third train was ready. On board were another physician, P.M. Atkinson and six nurses: Peters, Hannah, Young, Jamieson, Cunningham, and Marion. Also on board were Alderman Chapman and other officials from the city of Moncton. The first Moncton train reached Halifax at 11 p.m. The others arrived during the night. All trains carried nurses, physicians, and medical supplies. Some also carried firefighters and fire equipment. All made it before the fury of the morning’s snowstorm.
There was a similar response in New Glasgow. The operator told the local superintendent and he passed the news to the mayor. By 11:45 a.m.—forty minutes after the first train left Moncton—New Glasgow had a train ready. It consisted of two flatcars—one loaded with a steam fire pumper (it can still be seen on display in New Glasgow), the other with 900 metres of hose—and two passenger cars. In the passenger car were firefighters, five physicians—Evan Kennedy, John W. McKay, M.R. MacDonald, John Bell, and G.H. Cox—and eight nurses (six females, two males). Also on board were provisions and a chef. In Stellarton at the Intercolonial Railway’s mechanical shops and yards, some of the running crew—several were volunteer firefighters—decided to do more than put a train together. By the time the New Glasgow train was assembled, twenty-five Stellarton firefighters were ready to leave for Halifax. The train picked up three more physicians: one in Stellarton (Clarence Miller), one in Westville (A.A. Ross), and one in Hopewell (W.A. MacLeod). It reached the Richmond yards at 4 p.m., after the trains from Truro and Kentville, but seven hours before the first Moncton train. Those on board made it downtown by 5:40 p.m.
While these responses were being organized, Major Avery DeWitt was on his way to the Boston Express. If he had doubts about the seriousness of the situation, that trip ended them. The man driving the yard engine was the fireman—his engineer had been killed. The man was dirty and shivering—he had used his coat to cover an injured child. Although the passengers had done their best, DeWitt, when he reached the Boston Express, found hundreds of injured desperately in need of medical care. He continued to work alone until nearly noon, when the train’s conductor, J.G. Gillespie, finally got permission from someone to move the engine to a roundhouse for water and fuel. He worked for another hour before the engine was back and the train slowly left Halifax. It reached Rockingham at 1:27 p.m. and Truro at 3:30 p.m., nearly six and a half hours after the explosion. DeWitt was so busy for that entire period that he never noticed that a physician and a nurse boarded at Windsor Junction.
Those on the Boston Express would never forget that journey. The train’s windows were shattered and 250 of the 300-odd passengers were injured, some seriously. The body of the yard engineer, Wiley B. Canning, hastily had been pulled into the train’s cab. DeWitt moved slowly along the cars performing emergency surgery even though he had limited equipment. (He performed some surgery with a pair of scissors.) Eighteen of the passengers had eye injuries. Five had to have one or both eyes removed, including five-year-old Frances Simmons, who had both eyes removed, and seven-year-old Delonora McLellan, who had one eye removed. Two other children—three-year-old Henrietta Smith and Laurie Clancey, not quite five—died before the train reached Truro. Others survived but were in serious condition. Billie Baker and Mrs. William Conrad had severe scalp wounds. (Mrs. Conrad remained unconscious for three weeks.) George Little had a fractured leg and burns, Kathleen Drake had a fractured arm, Mary Johnson a fractured wrist, George Ryan a fractured ankle, and Florence Carter a fractured thigh.
Many families were on board. Kathleen and John Drake were with their mother. Delonora McLellan was with her parents, two brothers and a sister. One brother, George, died the next day. The others, including her mother, who had facial cuts and injuries to both eyes, survived. Laurie Clancey was with her mother and father, her brother Robert, and three sisters—Florence (no age available), Anna, nine, and Elizabeth, ten. Also on the train were ten sailors from Calonne. All ten—Gardath Raynos, Jack Halliwell, Gadiot Bains, Joseph Gauci, William Hayes, Arthur Moyse, William Hinds, Albert E. Slade, Samuel Flack, and C. Whitcombe—had minor injuries. There was also a sailor from Curaca, the other ship that had been loading horses. One child could not be identified. When the official list of injured was released, she was described as: “Child unidentified, about two years old, one eye removed, seriously wounded in head, body, eye injuries, burned.” She may have been the daughter of a Canadian sailor, as she matched the description of his daughter and was the right age. There is no record of whether she was reunited with her father, though someone claimed her. Several days later, there were only two unidentified in Truro. Both were adults and both were dead—one male and one female. Their bodies were shipped to Halifax for possible identification and for burial.
Somewhere along the way, the Boston Express must have met the incoming train from Truro, but there is no record of this. It is known that when the Boston Express reached Truro at 3:30 p.m. (just before the train from New Glasgow arrived from the other direction), the two physicians and one nurse on board got a surprise and a shock. The surprise was that the physician and nurse who had boarded at Windsor Junction were Major Avery DeWitt’s father, George, and his sister, Nellie. They had come in on the Dominion Atlantic special had changed trains at Windsor Junction. The shock was that all the Truro physicians and nurses had gone to Halifax. Thus, Avery DeWitt, along with his father and his sister, would have to deal with 250 to 300 patients, many severely injured, using only their own skills and volunteer help.
However, the people of Truro, warned by the railway that a trainload of injured was coming their way, had rounded up forty automobiles and set up emergency hospitals in the Truro Academy (sixty-three beds), the courthouse (sixty-one beds), and the fire hall (twenty-five beds), all hastily furnished with cots. Some opened their homes. As one of those on the train observed, “In less time than it takes to tell about it all the survivors who were on board were carried to some place of comfort and safety.” (The town’s one ambulance made thirty-four trips from the station to an emergency hospital.) The sight of the injured was shocking: “Their faces were blackened until their features were indistinguishable. Their clothing was torn and, in some cases, almost burned to cinders … small school children with their school bags still on their shoulders being led from the train, many of them blinded and otherwise crippled. One little fellow had his arms blown off at the shoulder.” One scene was particularly poignant. A young woman, holding her baby, stood in the backyard of the home by the number 9 siding, where the train had stopped. The baby was dead. The youngster who lived in that house cannot remember much else, but he can still recall the lady, standing in his backyard, holding her dead baby, and crying.
For the next few hours, the three DeWitts worked with the few skilled people available and with volunteers. One was a nurse named Fanny Coffin. She had come from Fall River, Massachusetts, to stay with her sister in Truro. She pitched in immediately. Two physicians, Cox and Reynolds, came in from Upper Stewiacke. (Even Great Village had sent its physician, two nurses, and two ambulance attendants to Halifax.) That left the volunteers. Doug Rutherford was a youngster in school at the time and he had wanted to join others flocking to Halifax. His mother told him not to—if he did, he would catch it from his father—so he headed to the Truro station, where he climbed into the first car to take an injured person to the courthouse. He spent the afternoon assisting the nurses while they bandaged injured patients: “When the nurses wanted something I went and got it. They were washing up the sick and putting bandages on their cuts and bruises. I remember one fellow. He was about my age. He was bad. I kind of kept an eye on him. Whenever he wanted something I got it.”
Students from the Truro Agricultural College did the same. Sue Chase held a man’s leg while it was amputated. Marylee MacAloney assisted at the Court House:
At five o’clock went to the Court House. Injured were there. They were in horrible condition. Faces and clothing blackened. Some had been hastily bandaged, some not at all…. The first thing they did was letter the doors of the rooms so that the building might be divided into wards. Afterward, they attended to the patients, washing faces and hands, cleansing as well as possible the hair and combing it…. Later, they cut the clothes off patients, took off bandages in preparation for operation or dressing, and held flashlights for the doctors to operate by…. After this they cleaned out the wards, burning old bandages and clothes…. The smell was horrible.
MacAloney worked four consecutive nights then was ordered to stop. She had been ill for four years and the principal of the college was afraid she would collapse.
Despite the assistance of people like Rutherford, Chase, and MacAloney, and the best efforts of the DeWitts, ten more victims died within twenty-four hours. Among them were five children: a baby named Galbraith, the son of Harry Galbraith; Clara Carter, ten months; Reta Levy, age three years and nine months, daughter of Harvey Levy, a railway brakeman; Jacquelan Hills, age six; and Joseph Latham, age two years and four months. Reta Levy died in the home of Mr. and Mrs. A. Davidson. Her mother was with her. Latham died in the home of Principal Cumming of the Agricultural College. The principal had also taken in his parents and they were with the child when he died. Not all victims were children: Mrs. John Walsh, who lost an eye, was sixty-eight. Mrs. David Murray, who had an eye injury, was sixty-four. When one victim, John Lovett, could not wait for surgery, he was sent by train to New Glasgow. He was later reported to be making an uneventful recovery. Josephine Bishop wrote home to her mother: “Pitiful sights they are, black as Negroes with a black that won’t come out. Three of the little ones died last night and it is a great pity some of the others haven’t been taken. One tiny infant has both eyes out. Why should the children suffer thus?”
As was the case in Halifax, the physicians who did show up operated with the help of volunteers. One of them commented later: “Too much praise can not be given to the ladies who assisted us. They were totally inexperienced and yet they assisted at the most gruesome operations and gave anesthetic the whole night though there was not one accident.” The “ladies” were students and staff at the normal school. (They were the people Doug Rutherford assumed were nurses.) While some staff and students helped the injured, the domestic science staff from the Truro Academy provided a food service for the physicians and their patients. When Mayor Dunbar returned from Halifax Friday afternoon, he found three smoothly running hospitals. In his annual report, he praised the town for what it had done in his absence: “We were proud of the way the people in Truro had grasped the difficult task of caring for nearly 200 injured citizens of Halifax, at so short notice, and equipped and managed three Emergency Hospitals in so thorough a manner as to elicit the highest praise from those in charge of the hospitals in Halifax. I am especially proud of the way in which the ladies of Truro and those from beyond Truro, who gave so freely of their time and energy to help those stricken people.”
Major Avery DeWitt kept going day and night for five consecutive days, ignoring the fact his own hand was infected. As his commanding officer reporter later, “He should have immediately gone sick but he struggled on with his work, narrowly escaping the loss of his arm.” DeWitt was not alone in his devotion. Two passengers on the Boston Express, James Whitely of St. Stephen, New Brunswick, and John Clark of Saint John, New Brunswick, stayed in Truro for twelve days helping with the injured. So did one of the sailors from Calonne, Samuel Flack. When his ship inquired about him, Truro replied that Flack was available when required. It added, “His services here as an orderly … have been of considerable service to us.”
Although both railways recognized that Halifax needed help, the two responded differently. The Dominion Atlantic Railway rounded up physicians and nurses at Kentville, Wolfville, and Windsor, and did so without consulting any of the three municipal governments. It ignored the possibility that firefighters might be wanted. This is surprising, because the Windsor fire department, one of the best equipped in Canada for its size, was assisted by Halifax when Windsor’s downtown core was largely destroyed by fire. In contrast, officials from the Intercolonial Railway consulted local officials in every community. As a result, Intercolonial relief trains carried not only physicians and nurses, but firefighters and fire equipment and, quite often, mayors and other officials.
There appear to be three reasons for the differences in the response. First, the Dominion Atlantic was responding to orders from George Graham, who had seen the devastation along the railway and the injured being cared for at the Boston Express, but not the fires in the North End. In contrast, W.A. Duff of the Intercolonial had driven back and forth through the part of the city that was on fire and had taken injured to hospital himself. Further, unlike Graham, he had consulted with civic officials in Halifax. His second wire—which asked for more physicians and nurses—was a request from the acting mayor. The second reason was a matter of style. The Dominion Atlantic was a Canadian Pacific Railway subsidiary and therefore was used to doing things its own way. The Intercolonial, by contrast, was a government railway used to involving communities in its service. Barry Moodie, a historian at Acadia University who studied the two railways, observed:
I think they are very different railways and they interacted with the communities in different ways. The Intercolonial railway was a publicly owned railway and was seen as a service to the community rather than a moneymaker. Decisions were made not just on a broad basis but in the interest of that individual community, whether that was Stewiacke or Amherst. On Intercolonial if you were a clergyman you got a pass. The Intercolonial took kids every day to school. It had a flexibility you wouldn’t find in a private company, for example the ability to negotiate with a local businessman for freight rates, not the kind of things you have with Dominion Atlantic. You have a publicly owned railway and a privately owned railway, the publicly owned one having been operating for forty years in intimate connection with the community in a far different way than the Dominion Atlantic ever operated or even intended to operate.
The third reason was that each railway has its own telegraph system. Messages along one line were not heard by operators working for the other. Vincent Coleman’s original message and W.A. Duff’s call for further assistance did not reach the Dominion Atlantic. George Graham’s orders were heard only along Dominion Atlantic’s network. The behaviour of the railways was, at least in part, a result of their independent communications systems.
Late in the evening on the day of the explosion, a telegram reached Halifax from the Nova Scotia seaport town of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Yarmouth asked if it should send a special train with physicians and nurses. The newly appointed Halifax Relief Committee replied at 10:02 p.m.: “Doctors not now required. Send nurses by regular train report to Camp Hill Hospital.” Just thirteen hours had passed since the explosion, but the desperate need for medical help was over. There were hundreds of railway cars and five engines damaged in the explosion. The tracks to the North End station were blocked with debris. The railway telegraph was down from the North End station to Rockingham. The chief dispatcher was dead. Yet from noon on, the railways moved train after train into Halifax. The First World War was in its third year and the railways were moving so many troop and supply trains that another day of specials was not unusual. This may explain part of what happened, but the fact remains that on the day of the explosion the railways were magnificent—and the reason for that was, in part, that they controlled the most important communications system: the railway telegraph.
Though trains from Truro, Kentville, New Glasgow, and Moncton were the only trains to reach Halifax the day of the explosion, other relief trains were on the way. Some set out from Canadian communities like Saint John, New Brunswick, and Sydney, at the tip of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Medical staff also came across from Charlottetown to Pictou, and on by train from there. Others started in the United States. All those trains—the ones from Sydney, Saint John, and Pictou, and the ones from various US centres, including Boston—were delayed for hours by the storm that hit the Atlantic coast on Friday morning. By the time they reached Halifax, the medical situation had changed dramatically. The city needed tarpaper, beaverboard, nails, glass, putty, and other building materials, but it was no longer desperate for physicians and nurses. The Dominion Atlantic and the Intercolonial had seen to that.
For many of those on the trains stalled in the snow, the delays were irritating. For some, they were excruciating. The sleeping-car conductor on the first train from Saint John, W.D. Ross, knew that his wife and two children were at his home in the North End, where the explosion hit hardest. He had no idea whether they were alive. There was still no word as the train reached Truro several hours late. However, when Ross stepped out onto the platform in Shubenacadie, a woman jumped into his arms and started hugging him. It was his wife. Although she and the children were at home when their home was destroyed, they were all safe. Even the baby, who had been sitting on the kitchen floor, was missed by the flying glass and debris. Ross’s brother-in-law, worried about his sister and knowing Ross was away, had hopped on the first special from Truro, found his sister and her children, and brought them home. Mrs. Ross had been waiting ever since to intercept her husband’s train so she could tell him the good news.
Although the main railway movement the day of the explosion was toward, rather than away from Halifax, some trains in addition to the Boston Express did get out. One train, which made it to Saint John, carried fifty injured children. It also carried many of the soldiers who had been in Camp Hill. Though they were all recovering from war wounds, they voluntarily left their beds when they saw the victims coming into the hospital. The train also carried students from Mount St. Vincent Academy. The Sisters decided to suspend classes and encouraged their out-of-town students to go home. Because of the enormous volume of telegraph traffic moving out of and into Halifax, most students headed home without sending messages to announce their arrival. Parents learned that their children had survived the explosion when they turned up at their door or at the local railway station. Once again, the Intercolonial provided emergency service. W.W. McPherson said he was ordered to carry “any refugee, fare free … to any point on the line. I was instructed to stop at any point where a passenger might want to get off.”
The relief train from Sydney reached Truro at 7 a.m. the day after the explosion. On board were firefighters from Sydney and Glace Bay; physicians from Sydney, North Sydney, and Sydney Mines; and Dr. H.H. McKay and seven nurses, picked up in New Glasgow. By then, Mayor Dunbar was back in Truro, but most other Truro physicians and nurses were still in Halifax. Dunbar told the physicians from New Glasgow that Truro desperately needed medical help. Several, including Dr. McKay, agreed to assist. Most operated all day. As soon as one operation finished, another would begin. Dr. W.J. Egan from Glace Bay recalled: “At 6:30 [p.m.] when the last operation had been completed, I started to go downstairs when a man met me … his first question, ‘Will that boy live?’ I hadn’t the heart to tell him I didn’t think so. I said, ‘I think he’ll have a chance.’ He said, ‘Thank God. I lost everything, my wife, four other children, my home. That boy is all I have left.’ I went around the corner of the hall and cried like a baby. I couldn’t help it.” Despite his pessimism, he learned later, to his surprise and great relief, that the boy was doing well.