The silence after the blast
How the Halifax Explosion — the greatest human-made blast before the atomic bomb — was nearly forgotten
HALIFAX — A boy presses his small face up to a cold window pane. It’s an early winter morning, and two ships in Halifax harbour are exchanging a cacophony of horn blasts.
Vessels use these loud whistles as they pass, the boy’s mom explains.
But today, Dec. 6, 1917, they do not pass.
The Norwegian relief vessel, the SS Imo, collides with a French munitions ship laden with explosives, the SS Mont Blanc. For 19-1/2 minutes, a dazzling display of fireworks captivates onlookers as the Mont Blanc drifts and burns.
The toddler, playing with a toy train on the kitchen window sill, watches the flames engulf the ship — the last images he will ever see.
At 9:04 a.m., the Mont Blanc blows up with devastating force, its 2,600 tons of explosives levelling swaths of Halifax and Dartmouth, raining down shards of white-hot iron, blowing off roofs and shattering glass — including the windows of a small wooden house in the city’s north-end Richmond neighbourhood.
There, at age two years and seven months, Eric Davidson is blinded in the Halifax Explosion.
“My father was still looking out and all the glass came in on his face and his upper body,” his daughter, Marilyn Elliott, said in an interview.
“Doctors looked at him and determined that his eyes couldn’t be saved. Both of his eyes were removed that day. In an instant, a little baby, a happy-go-lucky baby, is without sight.”
As a little girl, Elliott grew up knowing her father was blinded in the horrific blast that claimed nearly 2,000 lives, injured 9,000 and left 25,000 homeless. But it wasn’t a topic that was openly discussed in her family.
The wartime disaster was mentioned in passing, in hushed tones, with a heavy heart.
“My grandmother was a changed woman after the explosion. She grieved the loss of her baby boy’s eyesight,” Elliott said. “It was a permanent trauma that she carried with her the rest of her life.”
A hundred years after the greatest human-made blast before the atomic bomb, the country is commemorating the explosion’s centennial with a large memorial service at Fort Needham Memorial Park. Dozens of organizations have received grants for museum and art exhibitions, theatre productions, documentary films and concerts. Canada Post has issued a striking commemorative stamp, a new plaque has been erected, a time capsule created and books published.
But the Halifax Explosion anniversary wasn’t always so publicly remembered.
For many years, Dec. 6 passed quietly in this East Coast town, with a small service or private prayers, but no official public ceremony marking one of Canada’s worst humanitarian disasters.
In the wake of a deafening blow and billowing white smoke that rose thousands of metres above the harbour, a silence settled over the city: It would take decades before the blackout was lifted, and the heart-wrenching stories of the Halifax Explosion told.
Jim Cuvelier, a 101-year-old survivor of the Halifax Explosion, said the disaster wasn’t spoken of when he was growing up.
“People tried to forget it. You don’t carry that stuff around,” said Cuvelier, a baby who was at home on Lady Hammond Road on the outskirts of the blast zone at the time of the disaster. “I never heard them talk about it.”
Mothers couldn’t bear the deaths of innocent babies. Children disappeared without a trace. Others turned up days later in makeshift morgues. Girls and boys struggled to comprehend being suddenly orphaned. Wives mourned their husbands, killed instantly in harbourfront factories. Soldiers grappled with the insurmountable trauma of watching homes burn to the ground, families still inside, the scent of burning flesh in the air.
“The city was devastated. It was such a cataclysmic event, so traumatic, that I think people probably didn’t want to revisit those horrors,” said Craig Walkington, chair of the Halifax Explosion 100th Anniversary Advisory Committee. “It really did do incredible damage. There was virtually no family that wasn’t touched by it, whether injuries, fatalities, or a loss in some way.”
The horrors witnessed by survivors on that day 100 years ago were, for many decades, unspeakable. The blast wiped out much of Halifax’s densely populated north end and parts of Dartmouth, including a Mi’kmaq settlement known as Turtle Grove, and badly damaged the African-Nova Scotian community of Africville.
The shock wave of the explosion was felt as far away as Cape Breton, and windows nearly 100 kilometres away cracked. It was followed by a towering 15-metre tsunami, drowning survivors near the shore and sweeping many bodies out to sea. Upturned cook stoves ignited fires that consumed wooden homes, scorched entire blocks and made the rescue of some injured survivors trapped inside homes impossible.
That night, a blizzard blanketed the city with more than 40 centimetres of snow. “It got cold and the snow buried bodies. The next three days were a horror story,” local author and historian Dan Soucoup said. “They found children two or three days later huddled and frozen in the snow.”
Relief efforts were badly hampered by the cold and snow. Still, miraculous stories emerged from the rubble.
A soldier walking through the flattened Richmond neighbourhood a day after the explosion heard a faint whimper coming from a burned-out house. He walked through the charred debris and there, protected under an ashpan, he found a baby girl. The 23-month-old orphan, nicknamed ‘Ashpan’ Annie, was burned but alive.
In some cases, entire families were killed. In others, one survivor lived on. One woman, Mary Jean Hinch, lost 10 children and her husband in the explosion. Pregnant and alone, she was rescued after being pinned under lumber for 24 hours. She and her unborn son were the only survivors in her family.
Other harrowing tales from the front lines speak of near mythical courage. A train dispatcher, Vince Coleman, spent his final minutes warning an incoming train of the impending blast, prompting it to halt in its tracks and saving passengers and crew. In another case, most of the crew aboard the Stella Maris died attempting to attach a line to the Mont Blanc to tow it away from bustling Pier 6.
The disaster, toward the end of the First World War, made headlines around the world.
“I have newspapers from all over the world. The Halifax Explosion shared the headlines with the major wartime events. It was not just some local thing,” said Janet Kitz, author of several books on the Halifax Explosion.
As stories of the disaster got out, generosity flooded in. Children in Brantford, Ont., gave up their Christmas presents to raise money for the children of Halifax, donating $15,000 for relief efforts. People in Truro, N.S., lined the tracks at the rail station waiting to help the waves of refugees that arrived from Halifax in need of food and shelter.
The city’s hospitals were inundated with wounded survivors and several emergency medical stations were set up in schools and clubs. Although aid arrived from across Canada and the United States — particularly Boston, a city Nova Scotia still thanks every year with a Christmas tree — many of the first medical responders on the scene hailed from nearby communities. Doctors, nurses and firefighters from across the Maritimes showed up to take on the task of aiding the injured.
George H. Cox, a doctor and eye specialist from New Glasgow, about 150 kilometres northeast of Halifax, arrived at the Rockingham train station outside Halifax the next day. With the tracks into the city destroyed, he trudged through deep snow to Camp Hill Hospital. Men, women and children lined the corridors, many with glass, pottery, brick, mortar and nails stuck in their eyes. He quickly realized that the large number of ocular injuries required his expertise.
“He worked for 40 hours removing eyes. He had a bucketful of eyes,” Soucoup said. “He chased everybody out, slept for three hours, and did that again.”
Halifax’s mortuaries were also overwhelmed. Bodies, charred and frozen, were stacked like firewood outside funeral homes. Many unidentified corpses were stored in a school basement. Funerals went on for weeks, and services for the unidentified bodies drew thousands of mourners.
As the body count climbed, bereaved locals, politicians and newspaper editors began questioning the cause of the blast and demanding to know who was responsible for the calamity. Details of the collision emerged during a judicial inquiry and legal proceedings, though few got the answers they were seeking.
When the Mont Blanc, laden with thousands of tons of explosives, came upon the Imo on the wrong side of the harbour, it asserted its right-of-way using loud whistles — the very horn blasts that attracted little Eric Davidson.
“The Mont Blanc did have the right to the channel. But the Imo was stuck on a course it couldn’t get out of,” said Joel Zemel, an author and historian. “By the time they realized it, it was too late to avoid an accident. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.”
In the end, however, the Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London found both the Mont Blanc and Imo were equally to blame for the navigational errors that led to the crash. No one was ever convicted in the disaster.
Despite the enormity of the catastrophe, Halifax was forced to slowly pick up the pieces and move on. Swaths of the city had been levelled, and rebuilding was necessary to assuage the misery and anguish of survivors.
Prime Minister Robert Borden promised the full resources of the federal government would be placed at the city’s disposal, said Barry Cahill, author, researcher and member of the Halifax Explosion advisory committee.
Nearly $30 million was set aside for the Halifax Relief Commission to assist with medical care, rebuild infrastructure and establish pensions for injured survivors.
As homes, churches, schools and factories were rebuilt, Halifax residents pushed the terror of the explosion from their minds, in part out of necessity. With hard times ahead, people struggled to get on with their lives.
“It wasn’t an easy time in the 20s and 30s. There was a lot of depression here. Economically it was a difficult time in the Maritimes,” Soucoup said. “The city went to sleep until the Second World War.”
After the one-year anniversary, the city didn’t hold another official public memorial until 1967’s 50th anniversary. Church services were observed and small ceremonies organized, but Halifax’s collective psyche was not yet ready to publicly recall the calamitous blast that claimed so many lives.
“It could have been too painful in the early days,” Elliott said, noting that even after the service in 1967 it once again fell by the wayside. “Why was it forgotten? No one has the answer to that. It could have been a sign of the times. Back then, people didn’t like to dwell on misfortune. It wasn’t really talked about.”