Kitchener’s link to the Halifax Explosion
100 years ago, local mortician Armand Schreiter rushed East to aid a devastated city
KITCHENER — By the time Armand Schreiter arrived at Chebucto Road School, there were already 300 bodies piled up inside. Hundreds more would be delivered within the coming days.
A 100 years ago today, the Kitchener mortician rushed to wartime Halifax to help the city devastated by a massive explosion when two ships collided in the harbour. Schreiter played a critical, yet largely forgotten, role in the aftermath of the Halifax Explosion that killed almost 2,000 people.
Schreiter was tasked with organizing the soldiers who were embalming, arranging and identifying the victims from the blast. He brought order to a chaotic morgue where the dead were arriving in staggering numbers.
Schreiter, a former bank clerk whose father started a successful family furniture and funeral business in 1902, was commended for his work, but refused to be paid anything for his expenses.
Even for a man who made a career out of dispatching the dead, it was the most grim assign-
ment of his life. So why would he volunteer to go, and refuse any compensation?
“Because it was my duty,” he said, when he returned to Kitchener.
On the morning of Dec. 6, 1917, a French cargo ship SS Mont Blanc loaded with explosives collided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo in the Halifax harbour. The collision spilled barrels of benzol inside the French ship, which caught fire, prompting the crew to flee.
As crowds gathered to watch thick black smoke billow from the ship, the dangerous cargo erupted. First, a gas wave with one-third of the power of an atomic bomb erupted, flattening buildings more than 2.6 kilometres away.
The blast also created a tsunami that exposed the sea bed underneath the Mont Blanc and formed an 18-metre tall tidal wave that sucked survivors out into the harbour and drowned them. Then came the fires. About 1,600 people died within minutes, including hundreds of children. Hundreds more died in the coming days.
The explosion left Halifax’s Richmond neighbourhood looking like a scene from the apocalypse. From telephone poles snapped in half to homes reduced to rubble, nothing was spared.
There were so many dead the city’s undertakers were overwhelmed. The authorities turned Chebucto Road School, just outside the blast area, into a morgue and triage centre where the victim could be identified.
The large, three-storey brick building became the place where devastated families would come to confirm that their loved ones had been killed. Schreiter, put to work as soon as he arrived, saw things inside there that he would never forget.
“One young and beautiful woman was brought in and clasped in her dead hand was the wrist and hand of an infant. That was all,” he told a reporter for the Kitchener New Record.
In many cases, the bodies weren’t bodies at all, but remains left charred beyond recognition.
“A sailor called day after day, and at last found the charred remnants of his wife and child. He identified them by the dishes and basins into which they had been put when taken from his burned home,” Schreiter said.
“Seven children in another home were all killed, and the mother caught up with the headless baby from among them and ran shrieking into the street calling out I’ve saved my baby,” he said. “The poor soul’s reason had left her, and she was violently insane.”
Under his command, soldiers were soon able to bring some order to the chaos at the Chebucto Road School. Bodies were washed three times, tagged, identified and released for burial.
“Not only did Mr. Schreiter refuse payment for his services, but he also refused payment for his transportation and hotel expenses while here,” wrote Arthur Barnstead, chair of the disaster’s mortuary committee.
Schreiter returned home a hero, becoming one of the city’s most prominent young business people and briefly a city councillor. He married Margaret Erb, who’d served as a wartime nurse, in 1920. Eight years later, the young entrepreneur opened the Schreiter Funeral Home on Benton Street, a landmark business that operated until it was closed in 2014.
He also continued his father’s furniture business, Schreiter’s Home Furnishings, which is in its fourth generation of family operation today. His funeral home became known as the SchreiterSandrock funeral home in 1939.
But even as his businesses grew, Schreiter was forever remembered for his work after the Halifax Explosion. Another accident, on a much smaller scale, took his life 15 years after that horrible blast.
The mortician died Dec. 10, 1932, when he was overcome by carbon monoxide poisoning inside the garage of his Queen Street house. He’d driven his wife to a women’s bridge party that evening, and was planning to go back out to get her when he succumbed.
The coroner suspected Schreiter was warming up the car and had left the garage door closed when he collapsed. His wife didn’t find him until 3 a.m.
“On returning home Mrs. Schreiter thought that her husband had been called out on business and she went to bed. On awakening and noting her husband’s continued absence she went downstairs and heard the drone of a motor car engine. She immediately went to the garage and made the gruesome discovery,” the Kitchener-Waterloo Record reported.
He left behind four young children — Stanley, 11, and three daughters, Hazel 9, Susan, 7, and Peggy, 5. His funeral, quite naturally, was held in the business that he built, and he was buried in Kitchener’s Mount Hope Cemetery.