CHAPTER XV
DEALING WITH THE DEAD
A LITTLE AFTER DARK ON THE DAY OF THE EXPLOSION, Thomas Raddall was home with his mother and three sisters huddling around the kitchen stove when there came a knock at the front of the house. Raddall’s mother took the candle and went to see who it was. A sergeant asked, “Does a boy named RAD-all live here?” His mother said, “It’s rah-DALL not RAD-all,” and asked what he wanted. He said they needed someone who knew Chebucto School to help them find light switches, water taps, toilets, etc. He said the headmaster told them Raddall lived just a few hundred yards away and that he would help. Born on Friday, 13 November 1903, Thomas Raddall had just turned fourteen. He was in school when Mont-Blanc exploded and helped his headmaster check the building right after it happened. Now he went back with the soldiers. He tells the story in his autobiography: “I led the way down concrete steps into the basement that seemed to be the main place of interest, and we made a tour of it with the sergeant striking matches as we went along. All the windows and doors had gone, of course, and the fire in the big furnace had died long ago. The sergeant declared, ‘Hold a thousand, easy.’ He produced a bottle of rum, took a swig, passed the bottle around.” There would be a lot of rum swigged in that basement over the next few weeks. Chebucto School was to be a morgue and there would be nearly two thousand bodies to be identified,17 many badly burned.
Emergency plans make many of the same assumptions about bodies as they do about casualties. They assume that they will be at a single location that can be controlled by emergency agencies, so their plans call for the site to be carefully staked out with grid lines and the location of each body to be marked and tagged and photographed. Anything with the body or anything that might help identify it is also marked. It will also help with efforts to determine the cause of death or cause of the incident that led to the death. Those assumptions may be valid for something such as an air crash that takes place on land. They have little relevance to mass-death incidents like the explosion. After such events, bodies are often moved, sometimes by families, sometimes by strangers. This happened in Texas City, Texas, after a ship explosion; in Darwin, Australia, after Cyclone Tracy; in Rapid City, South Dakota, after a flash flood; in Kobe, Japan, after the devastating earthquake; and all over Asia after the Indian Ocean tsunami. It also happened much earlier in Halifax.
In Halifax, many people moved victims to places where they hoped they would receive medical care. When these victims were picked up, they were still alive. However, many died en route to medical help, so people like Charlie Greenough, who had seized a cart to transport victims, dropped the dead on the road to make room for the living. Because the people who moved the victims were strangers, no one knew who they were or where they came from. In addition, the explosion blew the clothing off many victims. By the time their bodies were picked up and taken to the morgue, there was no way of identifying them. In other cases, people carried bodies to funeral homes or to shelters like St. Paul’s Church. Although family members carried some of those bodies, strangers moved others. Bodies were also pulled out of burning homes and left on the roads. Later, soldiers took those bodies and stacked them in piles to clear the roads. Finally, while there were extensive efforts to identify the dead in Halifax, there were no efforts to determine cause of death. It was assumed.
A few minutes after Raddall and the soldiers found their way around the school, a police officer showed up to say that the first wagon would be right along. A freight wagon arrived with a tarpaulin covering six bodies, bodies Raddall describes as “six black men and women, some clad in rags, the rest naked.” He concluded that they were from Africville, the black community on the shores of Bedford Basin. There were ten people described as “African” killed in the explosion, but it is more likely that the bodies were black because the black rain turned many things black. At the most, four people from Africville were among the dead. Moving stacks of bodies soon became normal. One young woman whose father ran a hauling business recalls seeing carts of bodies going by. Although there would be a tarpaulin covering the bodies, feet would be sticking out. One of the drivers quit—he could not handle it.
Raddall had lots to do the next few days. His father was overseas and his mother was injured in the explosion. She went to Camp Hill, was patched up, and then sent home from the overcrowded hospital. Raddall found himself shovelling plaster, glass, and slushy snow out of his house and running errands. He occasionally stopped by Chebucto School: “Eventually the whole floor was covered with bodies and a crew of professional morticians, most of them from other Canadian cities, took over the care of them. The soldiers hated it. I remember one young soldier, serving his first turn at washing the gashed and awful faces, running outdoors to vomit.” One of those soldiers was the American who had been in Halifax one week:
Monday was spent at the morgue. A gruesome nauseating job, trying to identify those poor victims by arranging any little scrap of evidence that could be found on them, so the relatives and friends who continually filled the morgue would have a chance to recognize their belongings…. To witness those relatives and friends as they walked along the long lines of victims stretched out in rows, and eagerly awaiting those that were being constantly brought in, was a sad sight. There would be a scream here, a moan or a sob there, then someone would have to be carried away from that horrible scene. The only stimulant we got was a table-spoonful of brandy at the end of the day. There were times when we felt pretty “blue” but we kept on at our unpleasant task trying to arrange the poor creatures in such a way that they could be placed in wooden boxes to await burial later.
The wooden boxes were the coffins hastily assembled in Amherst by Christie & Bros. Co., coffin manufacturers for Atlantic Canada. The Christie men were among the visiting morticians. They had lots to eat—the Christie women packed coffins full of sandwiches—but they, too, found the work depressing. For them, it was routine to deal with one or two bodies. Dealing with hundreds of blackened, scarred bodies was emotionally draining. One returned from Halifax quite morose, his former good humour gone forever.
FIGURE 15.1 | Empty pine coffins stacked on Argyle Street. Christie & Brothers Co., coffin manufacturers for Atlantic Canada in Amherst, N.S., shipped 3,000 coffins to Halifax and supplied morticians. “A gruesome nauseating job.” Nova Scotia Archives. W.G. MacLaughlan, December 1917; NSA, Halifax Relief Commission, accession no. 1976-166 no. 64 / negative no. N-4273.
While work at the morgue carried on, the survivors searched the wreckage and then walked from hospital to hospital, shelter to shelter, searching for lost loved ones. Finally, they stopped at the morgue, read the notes, sometimes went from body to body, lifting the sheet, trying to find missing family members. One visitor was Jenny Heisler, a twenty-year-old nursemaid. Some members of her family were missing. “My cousin and I went through all the morgues and all the hospitals; and we lifted up all the sheets to see if we could find them,” she says. As it turned out, her relatives had survived. But she has never forgotten the experience and still prefers not to talk about it. Mrs. M.T. Orr had a similar experience. Her husband was manager of the Richmond Printing Company, which was destroyed and where thirty women employees were buried in the wreckage. She searched for him all through Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Each time she went to the morgue she expected to see his body. On Monday, a man stopped her and asked if she had heard from her husband. She said no. The man said there was letter from her husband at St. Paul’s Church Hall. Mrs. Orr found the letter and discovered that her husband had been rescued by American sailors and taken on board Old Colony.
Many were not so fortunate. One young woman went to the morgue the day after the explosion. She had seen her brother’s body pulled out of the wreckage. Now she wanted to identify it. At first, the soldiers would not let her in. Finally, one did:
The dead were packed like sardines and it was very dark and cold in there. The soldier had a lantern and we went looking through the bodies. We couldn’t find him but I knew he was there someplace. There was a hump of canvas lying against a pillar. It looked like the canvas that had covered the bodies when they had taken away my brother. We went over to have a closer look. The soldier lifted up the canvas and there was my little brother Arthur. I can’t remember what happened next; my mind went completely blank.
She may not remember, but Private Donald Angus Morrison of the Halifax Rifles, who let her in, never forgot: “Her face lit up and she gave out a cry, ‘I found you. I found you.’ She threw her arms around the lifeless body and hugged it to her. Then she cried as I have never seen anyone cry before or since. Finally, she stopped crying and became quiet and she thanked me and said she would come back soon for her brother…. I never knew her name.” Morrison found out her name in 1971 when his story was published in the Halifax Mail Star and Mrs. Elizabeth Rafter of Windsor Junction wrote to say she was that girl.
Annie Andrews came to the morgue to identify her husband, Norman, 37. James O’Grady identified his wife, Mary, 26. Harris Boutilier, 25, was identified by his brother; Elsie Allen, 16, by her sister; James Kirby, 56, by his mother-in-law, Martha Cunningham; one-year old Frederick Heffler by his grandfather. Others identified two bodies. Arthur O’Connell identified his stepfather, Herman Weiss, 52, and his mother. Thomas Cochrane identified his wife and his 11-month-old daughter, Dorothy. Many visitors identified several bodies. George Thomas identified four: his 60-year-old wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his granddaughter, Bernadette.
W.B. Williams of 61 Union Street identified five: his wife Florence, daughters Margaret, 7, and Gladys, 4, and sons George, 8, and Gerald William, 2. One of Williams’s neighbours, Marshall Le Fort of 53 Union Street, also identified five—his wife, Cecilia, three daughters—Katie, 21, Annie, 8, and Mary, 3—and one son, John, 7. James Gough identified six family members: his wife, Elizabeth, 37, and five sons—James, 11, Gerald, 9, Edward, 7, Gordon, 4, and Ralph, 2. Even that experience pales beside that of Ada Moore and Vincent MacDonald. Both identified ten people. Mrs. Moore identified the Hinch family: Clara, 20, Lena, 18, Thomas, 16, Mabel, 12, Joseph, 10, Freddie, 8, twins Annie and Margaret, 6, Ralph, 4, and Jean, 2. MacDonald identified his mother-in-law, Mary Squires, 60, his wife Margaret, 37, and his six children—Ethel, 18, Annie, 15, Charles, 12, Arthur, 6, Allan, 3, and Carroll, 1—as well as his sister, Mary Boutilier, and her son, Carroll Jr.
CONTROL OF MORGUE
One of the first to recognize the need for a morgue was the dean of the Anglican Cathedral, J.P.D. Llwyd. After spending four hours working with a rescue team, he took the lead in suggesting that bodies be taken from the smoking ruins. However, as the stacks of bodies grew larger, he realized that something more needed to be done. He asked a sergeant to drive him to City Hall, where he had a chat with the acting mayor, H.S. Colwell. By then, Colwell had arranged with the army to assist with the handling of the dead. Later, however, Colwell decided that there needed to be civilian control and asked the chief of police to send one of his officers to take charge.
The policeman sent to Chebucto School was Leo A. Tooke. Tooke was in Kentville when the explosion occurred. He suffered from tuberculosis and was being treated at Kentville’s famed sanitarium. Because his wife and children lived in Halifax, he left the sanitarium when he heard about the explosion and took the first available train to Halifax. After learning that his family was safe, Tooke decided he had better inform his chief he was back in town. Chief Hanrahan told him that he was not needed that night but that work would be available next morning. That is when he was sent to the morgue. When Tooke arrived at Chebucto School, the bodies were being laid out on the wet concrete floor. He got the soldiers to get some lumber and nails to construct building forms 1.8 metres long and 60 centimetres wide, one for each body. (The lumber cost $156, the bill for installing everything, $399.15.) Then he set the soldiers to work cleaning the bodies. One sergeant was assigned to take notes on where a body had come from. Two others tried to find anything that might help identify it. This had not been done for the first arrivals. If a body was identified, arrangements were made for one of the undertakers to remove it for family burial. Undertakers were told that all unidentified bodies should be sent to the school.
Later that morning, the relief committee assigned control of the morgue to Arthur Barnstead, the province’s deputy registrar general. (Barnstead’s father had done the same job for Titanic’s bodies.) When Barnstead arrived, Tooke offered to step aside, but Barnstead told him to carry on. He would open an office upstairs and deal with the paperwork. Tooke could supervise the handling of the bodies in the basement. Tooke stayed on duty at the morgue from 7 December to Christmas Eve, often working from dawn until midnight or 1 a.m. Sometimes, all he had for sustenance was a glass or two of milk. Badly in need of a break, he was told he could have Christmas Eve off and report for duty at noon.
Early Christmas morning, Tooke got a phone call from the chief of police. He was needed immediately. Someone had broken into a box containing money recovered from the bodies at the morgue. “On my arrival, I investigated and found that it was one of the soldiers that was left in charge of the property, whose name was…. He had burst the trunk open and stolen about $200.00 belonging to the dead bodies and had gone into town.” By the time police located the soldier at the Armouries, the $200 was gone. He had used it for a Christmas Eve binge. It turned out he also had been reopening the bags belonging to the dead and stealing valuables. Although one record says Halifax police arrested him, it is not clear what happened—his name does not appear in police arrest records or in court records. Tooke himself, hurt by the cold and damp conditions in the morgue, was forced to return to the sanitarium.
SEARCH CONTINUES
While some survivors went to the morgue to identify their relatives, others continued the search. Margaret Mooney spent two days searching for her missing relatives:
She went to Gottingen St., enquiring of all whom she knew. She inquired at the YMCA, the Infirmary, the YWCA, and the YMCA again. Then she went to Camp Hill where she had to wait her turn going in…. She located her brother and two sisters. She next went to Miss Vail’s, a friend, on Robie Street, and rested for a quarter of an hour, then went on to the Victoria General Hospital, the School for the Blind, the City Home, the YMCA, St. Paul’s Hall, St. Paul’s Church, Knights of Columbus Club, the YWCA…. Started out again at 8 a.m. Went to Dr. Mader’s, Camp Hill, the tents on the Common, the Armouries, the 85th huts, and the Citadel …
Later on Friday, she heard a rumour that her brother, Jim, had been blown out a window and that his body was at Snow’s undertakers. The tentative identification was made by things found in the corpse’s pocket. She went and opened the body’s mouth. It had false teeth—it was not her brother. She was ready to start searching again on Saturday when another brother, Harry, called. He had gone to the burned ruins at 15 Russell Street. On a bedspring, he found three skulls and a little hand clutching a rosary—a hand that crumbled when he touched it. It was his mother, his brother, Jim, and his sister, Susan. They had been upstairs in the bedroom watching the fire engine Patricia on its way to the docks. While Harry was calling Margaret, soldiers moved the skulls to the morgue. They were improperly labelled and Harry never saw them again. Later, Harry found more charred remains. He waited until he found a team to take them to the morgue, where they were placed in a single coffin.
Margaret Mooney was the woman who had met a neighbour the day of the explosion and was told her family was injured had been taken to hospital. Mooney now realized that was not true: the woman who told her that her family was safe had not been able to bring herself to tell Mooney the truth. Too much had happened too quickly. Like Mooney, many people made several trips to the morgue hoping—or perhaps not hoping—that they would finally find the body of a loved one. Catherine (Murray) Creighton, for example, visited the morgue several times in the hope of finding the body of her sister. She also went to the morgue with a friend named Winnie Tummonds. Tummonds was trying to find her sister. Eventually the bodies of both Creighton’s sister, Mary, and Tummonds’s sister, Gertie, were recovered, brought to the morgue, and identified.
With so many bodies to deal with and none of the current aids such as computers, the identification work at the morgue was not sophisticated. The workers made no attempt to gather information about missing persons and to tie that to the locations where bodies were found. For example, one body not identified was a woman, estimated to be about thirty years old, found at 14 Duffus Street. She was fully dressed with one black and one blue petticoat, light ribbed pink underwear, and long black stockings. She was wearing a gold wedding ring and a plain gold band, as well as a gilt brooch with a heart centre and a blue stone in the centre of the heart. Presumably she was Mrs. Barkhouse, because Amos Barkhouse and his children were found at that same address and Mrs. Barkhouse was missing. However, without the benefit of modern indexing and computers, the staff at the morgue could not do that kind of analysis. The woman’s body was buried at Fairview cemetery as unidentified. Since her family was all dead, no one was left to identify her.
Other bodies also seem—by today’s standards—to have with them enough information to make identification possible:
Tattoo marks on right arm with heart. Norwegian flag horse shoe and female figures also, “Sailor’s Grave” and “Good Luck” On left arm the figures of a sailor boy and girl and the word, “farewell.” One enamel button with the letters B R J Dark coat and pants Blue overalls and brown overalls. Khaki shirt with blue collar. Heavy underwear No. 8141 Grey woolen socks. Black low cut shoes. Note: Probably a Norwegian sailor, a native of Bergen, who was on the lake steamer, “Emery L. Ford” last summer.
However, it was listed as body number 142 and buried unidentified in Fairview cemetery on 21 December.
Inevitably, there were some mix-ups. When a list of dead soldiers was compiled, army staff prepared telegrams signed by the officer commanding Military District No. 6, Major-General Benson, and sent them to known relatives. The telegrams followed the standard wording typical in those days when Canadians were dying every day on the Western Front. One went to Mrs. G. LeCain of Moschelle, Nova Scotia: “Regret to inform you of the death of Corporal Clarence LeCain as a result of the explosion in Halifax yesterday. General Benson.”
In fact, Corporal LeCain, of the Composite Battalion at Wellington Barracks, had a severe head injury, a neck wound, an injured eye, and was cut with glass, but he was alive. Because the Americans had taken him on board Old Colony, the army had lost track of him. Two brothers from the Composite Battalion, privates Felix and Charles Muise, were also on Old Colony and reported dead. Both had been severely injured and were later shipped to New Glasgow, but both recovered. The army had lost track of them, too. A sergeant was reported dead when a body was found covered with a coat in whose pocket was a letter addressed to, it was assumed, the sergeant. It turned out the coat belonged to another soldier who had used it to cover an injured woman.
With a few persons missing, bodies might have been easy to identify. With hundreds missing, it was difficult. One body found at the Lorne Club Pier was a man wearing a gold monogram ring showing the initials “H G B.” Among the dead were Havelock Baker, Lieutenant Harold Balcom, Herman Baugill, Hiram Beck, Horvad Bungay, and two people named H. Boutilier. The two Boutiliers were identified. So was Lieutenant Balcom. That left four others who might be “H G B.” One of the biggest problems was that even bodies received from the various hospitals days, even weeks, after the explosion still had no information that might help with identification. The hospitals had no record of where they came from, had burned their clothes (they were usually filthy from the black rain), and no one had identified them while they were still alive.
Another problem was similar names. Among the dead were Alex Bond, fifty-nine, from Kaye Street, and Alexander Bond, thirty-three, from 113 Water Street. There was an eighteen-year-old Howard Johnson and another one aged twenty-seven. Even with computers, it would be easy to get these mixed up. Sometimes these problems were solved. One of the Harris Boutiliers was twenty-three and from 340 Oxford. He was identified by his father. The other was twenty-five and from 1402 Barrington. He was identified by his brother Norman. One body had a belt with an unusually large buckle. It was identified by a sailor as Charles Dunn of Picton. One woman came looking for the body of her fiancé. He was an engineer on a ship in harbour. She was accompanied by a friend. The friend looked at a body and said it was definitely not the lady’s fiancé. However, when the bag of effects was opened up, she identified a ring and a watch. She said her fiancé had a tattoo. The soldiers checked and reported, “No tattoo.” Dean MacRae insisted that they wash the body and check again. They found a tattoo, “Hands across the sea.” It was the lady’s fiancé, Frank Lemieux.
Not all the morgue experiences were tragic. Chief Petty Officer William King of the Royal Naval College was left paralyzed by the explosion and carried to the morgue in a cart. On Saturday, however, he regained consciousness and found himself lying beneath a sheet on one of the forms in the basement of Chebucto School. He was still unable to move or speak. Twice, people looking for relatives removed the sheet from his face, saying, “No. That’s not him,” put the sheet back and moved on. The third time, he heard someone approaching, he summoned every bit of energy left and managed to stretch out his right arm and grab hold of some rough material that happened to be the uniform of a soldier. The soldier let out a scream and ran out of the morgue yelling that a dead man had come to life. King lived to tell the story of his resurrection. His name, too, had appeared on the list of confirmed dead.
King was not the only person mistakenly assumed dead. G.A. Holmes, who ran a motor-boat service from Dartmouth to the dockyards, was blown from the water and onto a cinder pile on the Halifax shore. He was found there, severely cut and unconscious, wearing only a pair of boots. He was dumped with other bodies headed for the morgue. His sister, Emily, an army nursing sister, spotted him in among those bodies, rescued him and nursed him until he regained consciousness three weeks later. Helen Clark was a student at St. Joseph’s School and the explosion buried her in a pile of debris. She was not a Roman Catholic and had been left behind when the other students went for morning prayers. A driver picked her up as dead. Then he had second thoughts. Instead of taking her to the morgue, he drove her to Camp Hill. Dr. Murray Macaulay recognized her as the daughter of a Kentville druggist who had been with him in France. He saw that she got emergency treatment and she survived.
FUNERAL DIRECTORS
The profession of funeral director was still in its infancy at the time of the explosion, especially in the Canadian Maritimes. However, the explosion led some funeral directors from Ontario to share their experience and customs with their Maritime colleagues, especially when it came to embalming the dead. The pioneer in North American embalming was an American physician named Thomas W. Holmes, who served with the North in the US Civil War. Many families wanted the bodies of their loved ones returned to them. That could be done only if they were preserved in some way. Holmes found the way. One of the men who met Holmes and watched him at work was Charles Bolton, a carpenter from Toronto. About the time the Civil War ended, Bolton returned to Toronto and opened a funeral home.
In the 1880s, undertakers began to acquire professional qualifications. Since there was no training in Canada, most of them learned their craft in the United States, usually at the Rochester School of Embalming. Three of the men who later became prominent in Ontario funeral circles—Marsena Morse of Drummondville (near Niagara Falls), Henry Stone of Toronto, and Charles Blachford of Hamilton—all trained in Rochester. To give their training Canadian credibility, these students took their courses in Rochester, but wrote their exams in Toronto, though American instructors supervised these. The certificates were issued in Toronto. It is not clear how long that situation lasted, but by 1891 the Canadians wanted something else. Led by Blachford, they formed the Ontario College of Embalming. It was under the control of the Board of Examiners for Ontario and the training was done at Central Technical High School and the anatomy department at the University of Toronto. Around 1913, R.N. Stone of Stone Funeral Home on Sherbourne Street took advantage of the college’s location in Toronto and took on students as trainees. Although he had no direct connection with the university, he became known as Professor Stone. One of his students, Wilfred Scott, later became the dean of Ontario funeral directors.
When the Halifax explosion occurred, the three local funeral homes were overwhelmed. Not only were there 2000 bodies to look after, the bodies had to be preserved so that there would be time for them to be identified. The relief committee asked for help and it came from the leaders of the profession in Toronto. Stone and A.A. Schreiter came to help, and with them came some of Stone’s students. Stone had thought about mass death and came with a plan:
Bodies were washed, clothing removed and properly ticketed with a number corresponding to that on the body, the effects, such as rings, watches and money or small trinkets that would aid in identifying the bodies were removed and placed in small cotton bags with corresponding numbers. Descriptions of the bodies were taken on forms prescribed therefor. All the bodies in the basement were covered with cotton in strips cut to size…. In order that the bodies might be retained for as long a time as possible about [no number is included] were embalmed, including every child it was at all possible to embalm. For this purpose, a room was equipped with heating and other facilities to carry on the embalming process.
The numbered tickets were not only attached to the bags of effects, they were used in all further processing and in advertisements placed in the newspapers describing the unidentified bodies. They were also placed on the graves and noted in cemetery records. Unfortunately, the system did not always work.
Although many bodies were brought to the morgue without any indication as to where they came from, some were labelled. Colonel Ralph Simmonds, who supervised the initial body recovery, had procured some labels from his family firm in Dartmouth. However, some of those labels fell off and the wet snow obliterated others. At some point, Stone and Schreiter were joined by Donald Alexander MacRae, dean of the Dalhousie law school, who convened a registration (identification) committee.
The soldiers were not always careful about the way they worked. Even if a name was recorded, it was often inaccurate. The list of dead includes a Frank Shepherd and a Frank Sheppard. There was an Upbarn, an Uppam and an Upham. There is a Moxin and a Moxon, a Lemeux and a Lemieux. The deputy fire chief is listed both as Brant and Brunt. The soldiers doing the searching listed bodies found at 24 Union Street as Russell Keating and Frankie Keeting. Richard Williams, manager of the Robert Simpson Co., and Dean D.A. MacRae spent sixteen days carefully going over everything, trying to correct the errors and did correct some. For example, one body had been brought to the morgue in a nightshirt with a wound on the forehead that had been sutured. The soldiers had taken a monogrammed ring off one finger and copied down the initials inaccurately. It turned out to be the body of George Francis Richardson, a teacher at the Mi’kmaq school in Tufts Cove and organist at St. Joseph’s church. Richardson was identified because of his ring. He was killed as he was walking from the Dartmouth ferry to the school. Next day, he was taken to Victoria General, where his dirty, bloodstained clothes were cut off and burned. Others were never identified, even though there seemed to be far more information.
Today, most funeral organizations have plans for their role in mass death situations. Some also have experience. Robert Scott, son of the man who trained with Henry Stone, worked with the Ontario Provincial Police after an air crash north of Toronto International Airport. His work was so effective that Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs (now Global Affairs Canada) often asked him to travel overseas to help other countries develop appropriate plans. What happened in Halifax has also been shared with the INTERPOL18 working group that helps countries deal with disaster victim identification (DVI) after a mass-fatality incident.
SOLDIERS SEARCHING
While some bodies were being processed at the morgue, others were still being recovered from the ruins of burned-out homes and buildings and from beneath the snow. One woman recalls pieces of bodies and charred remains everywhere: “Dad and I went up to the breweries to see if we could help the afternoon of the explosion and Oh Nell! The sights were awful—could see hands and arms all over the place. Dad got two men out but they were dead. I got sick at last and said I wanted to go home, so he took me home.”
FIGURE 15.2 | Canadian soldiers in the Devasted Area. The soldiers cleared roads, searched for bodies, patrolled the Devastated Area looking for fires and searching for looters, and helped at the morgue. Nova Scotia Archives. W.G. MacLaughlan, 1917 or 1918; NSA, Halifax Relief Commission, accession no. 1976-166 no. 36 / negative: N-2303.
While some people did their own searching, large teams of sailors and soldiers under the supervision of Lieutenant-Colonel Simmonds did an organized sweep of the devastated North End. The most intense effort was 8–30 December, when as many as 268 men from the navy, the Princess Louise Fusiliers, the CEF and BEF troops on the Commons, the garrison artillery, and the 10th Siege Battery recovered some 242 sets of remains.
They were assisted by a list of names of missing persons, and sometimes they found what they were looking for. At the corner of Hanover and Barrington, they were looking for the bodies of John, Frank, and William Guest. They found all three. At 1274 Barrington Street, a Protestant orphanage, they were looking for the matron, her assistant, and the twenty children. They found their bones.
By mid-December, they had searched most residential properties though they did not always find what they were looking for. At Isaac Creighton’s home, for example, the soldiers were looking only for his body but found three lots of bones. At 32 Hanover, they were looking for Robert Ellis, his wife, Margaret, and their nine-year-old son, Robert. They found two charred bodies, but not the third. At 65 Hanover, they were looking for a Mrs. Conrad. They found a child’s body. (They were unaware that a Mrs. William Conrad was one of the injured taken by train to Truro the day of the explosion, and that she had survived.) At 1355 Barrington Street, they were looking for the bodies of six men, one woman, and a child. They found the woman and the child but only one other skull. After an ordinary house fire, it is possible to get information from neighbours. After the explosion, many neighbours no longer existed. On Veith Street, for example, five bodies were found at number 8 (all were identified), one was found at number 12 (it was identified), but three more found at number 6, including those of two children, were not identified. The sailors had one other task that no one wanted. Surviving animals, finding nothing else to eat, had started to chew at the bodies. Volunteers were recruited to shoot these animals, and many were destroyed.
Even when the residential search was largely finished, the search had to go on at places such as the Hillis Foundry, the Acadia Sugar Refinery, or the dry dock. That continued until 12 January and it turned up scores of charred remains. When the search covered a specific location and someone from that location was missing, it was reasonably certain the body found was that of the person who was missing, but many bodies were not in obvious locations:
- Mumford’s Drug Store—man, 30, 5′6″, corset stays
- Pier 7—trunk of man found minus head, legs, arms
- Pier 9—body of man found
- Yard A, Pier 7—man, body mutilated, plaid check coat, silver Waltham watch
After the formal search stopped, some people were convinced that their relatives were still buried in the wreckage. When workmen started finding bodies as the ground softened the following spring, Charles Upham decided to search the ruins at 12 Rector Street. His wife, Annie, his son, Charles Jr., three, and his two daughters, Ellen, five, and Jennie, not yet two, had been killed. “All we found … we put in a shoe box—just a few bones.” However, one man, buried under the Acadia Sugar Refinery, was not found until April 1918. He was identified by effects in his pockets and a watch. (The man had borrowed his son’s watch the morning of the explosion.)
It is far from clear who was allowed access to the North End while the search for bodies continued. It is clear that soldiers and sailors were involved as official search parties, but there are a number of accounts of individuals searching for their own relatives. Other records show that access to the impact area was controlled and that mounted military patrols attempted to check out those who wished access. Presumably, passes were issued to residents searching for bodies at their own homes and to those with official business. The records that still exist suggest the system was not always efficient. There are a number of reports of conflicts between the soldiers and residents. Sometimes, cars would simply drive by officers on horseback ignoring their shouts to stop.
BURIAL
With so many bodies and the weather so cold, the army proposed that the unidentified bodies be cremated. This created public outrage, so teams of soldiers were set to work creating graves. When the ground proved too hard, dynamite was used. The weather remained cold and wet and the soldiers found this work trying: “We dug out long lines of trenches in this inclement weather to bury the dead in, and when we returned to our huts at night we would have to hang our wet clothes around the old stoves in the hut to dry them out, if only a little, so we could wear them the next day.”
On 17 December, the first mass funeral was held with the music supplied from the band of HMS Hildebrand. (While waiting for a convoy to form, Hildebrand had also been sending sailors ashore to assist with body recovery.) There were two services, one for Roman Catholics and one for others. The latter was conducted by the Anglican archbishop, by Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Lutheran ministers, and by a Salvation Army captain. (There is no mention of a Rabbi, perhaps because none of the dead or missing was Jewish.) The unidentified bodies were buried in numbered graves, with the numbers on the coffins and on the tombstones matching the numbers in morgue records. The mass services became necessary because local clergy had not been able to keep up with the demand for funerals. Dwight Johnstone says that some people were buried without a religious service. Presumably he learned that from his close friend and classmate, Reverend Samuel Henry Prince. While burial of the unidentified dead and the destitute normally cost a standard fee of $14, the going rate for children after the explosion was $15, young people $20, and adults $30. The three local undertakers—Joseph Spencer, Messrs. Snow and Company, and the Nova Scotia Undertaking Company—handled the burials. The $30 fee applied only to those who had no families or could not afford the cost of a funeral. People such as Edward Condon, the fire chief, Lieutenant-Commander J.A. Murray, and George Richardson, the organist from the church, had more elaborate $75 funerals.
Most of the dead were buried in Halifax and Dartmouth, but some were shipped to other locations in Nova Scotia. Foster Baker (34) was sent to West Jeddore; Wiley B. Canning to River Phillip; Mrs. Charles Dakin to River John; William Mathews (34) to Hubbard’s; Lottie Wallace (34) to Shubenacadie; Lizzie Westhaver (42) to Mahone Bay; Albany D’Entremont (28) to West Pubnico; Isabella Gillespie (24) to Sydney Mines; Mrs. James O’Grady (26) to New Germany. Many bodies shipped away from Halifax were children: Hugh Munroe (7) was sent to Chester; Christian Johnson (6) to Sydney; Harris Donnelly (6) to Elmsdale, Hants Co.; Everett Beiswanger (7 months) to Goldboro; Frances Pettipas (10 months) to Hammond Plains. Family members were not always buried in the same cemetery. Dorothy Greenough, for example, was buried in St. John’s cemetery, but her sister, Rita, in St. Peter’s cemetery in Dartmouth.
A few bodies, mainly those of soldiers and sailors, were shipped farther away, to places such as Montreal or Petawawa, Ontario, or to England. About thirty, including three women, were listed as “buried at sea.” Apparently that meant someone was lost in the harbour and the body never found. One of the few to go overseas was Haakon From, captain of IMO. His family arranged for his body to be shipped to Norway so he could be buried in the family plot in his hometown of Sandefjord. The shipment of bodies out of town and the burial of the unidentified dead brought an end to most of the problems with bodies, although occasionally people would come to pore over the list of effects, hoping to discover a lost relative. In January, George Tupper’s relatives from Truro identified him from things in a bag. His body was exhumed and interred in the family plot in Truro. He and his wife had been visiting Halifax and had stayed over on 6 December to do some shopping. Her body was never found.
The morgue did a breakdown of the dead by occupation: the largest single group was housewives, 337, followed by labourers, 166, and craftsmen, 122. There were 113 seamen. Not surprisingly, there were just three farmers and one miner, but, strangely, just one fisherman. By religion, the largest group, 543, were Roman Catholics, the next largest, 441, Church of England. There were 200 Presbyterians, 124 Methodists, 61 Baptists, and 1 Lutheran. Of the 1635 who were identified in some way, 1610 were Caucasians. Ten were listed as Africans, 3 Mongolians, 11 Indigenous (presumably Mi’kmaq), and 1 Malay.
EMOTIONAL IMPACT
Although the physical presence of the bodies was gone, the emotional impact remained. While there is disagreement among those who study disaster about the emotional impacts of such experiences, there is agreement about one thing: no one, no matter how experienced, can cope emotionally with a great many bodies in one place. They find it even more difficult under certain circumstances: when many bodies are mutilated, when many are children, and when this happens close to a religious festival. The emotional problems are even worse when nothing can be done. The situation in Halifax was a worst-case scenario. Mutilated bodies were everywhere. Many were children. The incident happened two and a half weeks before Christmas and, in many cases, people stood by helplessly while they watched or heard family members burning to death. Even after the dying had stopped, the sight of mangled bodies was enough to cause emotional scars. Almost everyone who wrote letters mentioned what they had seen:
I went ashore and everyone you can see was bleeding, some with their arms off, some with their legs off, and some with half their faces off. I went to the north where my friends lived and all you could see was dead people lying around everywhere. (William Crossman, engine room, Niobe)
Just as we were going to put the first one in the boat, there came a second patient. Imagine a man with his face off. When we went to put him in the boat…. I can’t tell you any more though he was still living. (Roy Laing, Royal Bank of Canada)
Perhaps hardest to deal with was the sight of so many dead children. Thirty-six of the dead were less than a year old, 194 less than school age, another 151 less than age ten. Among the bodies at the morgue were Robert Moffat, 9; John Harris, 8 months; Hugh Bardsley, 5 months; Jean Hillis and William Jackson, 3 months; and Rhoda Gallant, 2 months. See Table 1.
Age of deceased |
Boys |
Girls |
|---|---|---|
Under 2 years |
61 |
50 |
2–4 years |
50 |
43 |
5–9 years |
85 |
77 |
When Dr. G.H. Cox of New Glasgow was walking through the devastated area, he picked up a postcard by the burned wreckage of one of the homes. It was to a girl from her father:
Somewhere in France, September 16, 1917
My Dear Little Girl:
Your little loving letter received and am thankful to know you are really well. Pray for the day when your daddy will come home to you and mother.
Your loving father,
With lots of love and kisses for you and baby Joe.
Lieutenant-Colonel Good of Fredericton, who had been on the Boston Express, reported coming up to a wooden house that was in flames: “An old man stood helpless crying that his wife was in the burning house somewhere. With two others, I managed to enter the house and found what appeared to be the half-burned body of a woman. We brought it out into the open and beckoned the aged man. For several seconds, he stared at it as though bewildered by the smoking pile. Then he said, ‘Well, that’s my wife.’”
In the spring of 1918, Dorothy McMurray helped physiologist David Fraser Fraser-Harris work on his book on the medical response to the explosion. McMurray wrote that one incident involved a woman who, according to Fraser-Harris, had been in her kitchen doing the dishes when the explosion picked her up and blew her through the air. When she came to, she had no idea where she was. “Getting to her feet, she gazed about her. A few yards away, she saw a headless body. To her, it seemed the most important and natural thing that she should give the body its head. Finding it a few feet away, she picked it up, carried it back and placed it in position on the body. Patting the corpse, she said, ‘There dear, there’s your head,’ and fell unconscious not to wake for a week in a strange hospital.”
Dwight Johnstone reports that Gordon Davis, a private in the Canadian Army Medical Corps, was knocked unconscious by the explosion, and awoke to find himself under the bodies of two women. For the next two days, he assisted with the rescue work and then, for reasons unknown, boarded a train to Montreal and, after arriving there, wandered the streets. After being taken to hospital, he would stroke his pillow, crying, “Poor baby, poor little baby, it’s too bad,” apparently thinking of some of the bodies he had helped rescue. One physician from Sydney found the whole experience too much to bear. On 20 December, after returning home, he killed himself.
Although most of those separated during the explosion eventually re-established contact with other survivors, some went for years without knowing what had happened to their friends. Several years after the Second World War—three decades after the explosion—Art Faulkner, the boy who had tried to hop onto the Truro train to Halifax the day of the explosion, picked up a hitchhiker. Faulkner was driving a truck for a lumber company. When he started to talk to his passenger, he realized the man was unable to speak. When they arrived at the lumber camp, the passenger spotted a man driving a team of horses, a man also deaf and unable to speak. Faulkner’s passenger jumped out of the truck, rushed over to the wagon and he and the man started hugging each other. They had been in the same boarding house at the time of the explosion and had not seen each other since. For thirty years, neither knew the other had survived.