Real story behind Halifax explosion hero
Message of explosion sent before telegraph lines cut
Vincent Coleman’s last act was to warn the inbound No. 10 passenger train on Dec. 6, 1917 that an ammunition ship ablaze in Halifax harbour was about to explode. Coleman died a hero, but like so many other good stories, it didn’t happen quite the way it’s been portrayed. This is one of 15 Canadian stories we present as part the Citizen’s Canada 150 coverage.
Vincent Coleman’s last words, tapped out in the dots and dashes of Morse code, raced along the telegraph wire from Halifax to Truro.
“Hold up the train,” he tapped. “Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys.”
Minutes later came a dull rumble from the east, like a distant thunderclap, as the largest man-made explosion in human history until that time levelled the city of Halifax.
Coleman, a train dispatcher in the Richmond Station near the harbour, was one of an estimated 1,600 people to die in the blast on Dec. 6, 1917. His last act had been to warn the approaching No. 10 train, inbound to Halifax from Saint John, N.B.
Coleman’s bravery was immortalized in a popular 1991 Heritage Minute television commercial.
“The train is coming to Pier 6. I’ve got to warn them!” the actor playing Coleman exhorts in the commercial. “There are 700 people aboard. I’ve got to stop it!”
In the ad, Coleman hears his telegraph click out an acknowledgment seconds before the explosion. It’s a true story and Coleman died a hero, but like so many other good stories, it didn’t happen quite the way it’s been portrayed.
Wednesday, Dec. 6, 1917 was unseasonably warm with a blazing sun in a cloudless sky.
Halifax was busy with shipping as the First World War dragged into its third year. Haligonians were weary of war but still feeling the pride of the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge that April while nervously watching the unfolding events of the Russian Revolution.
A new ship had entered harbour that morning, the French-flagged Mont Blanc, whose crew had spent a tense night outside on the open sea since it had arrived from New York after Halifax harbour’s steel anti-submarine nets had closed for the night. The Mont Blanc was quite literally a floating bomb, jammed with explosives destined for the battlefields of the Western Front. She carried 2,300 tons of picric acid, an essential component of munitions and bombs of the time. There were also 225 tons of TNT and 61 tons of gun cotton stored below decks, and drums of benzine fuel on deck.
Vincent Coleman, 45, set off from his home on Russell Street in North Halifax, leaving his wife, Frances, behind with the couple’s youngest daughter, two-year-old Eileen. His job in the small dispatch centre at the centre of the nearby railway yards was to coordinate rail traffic in and out of the busy docklands.
If he had noticed the Mont Blanc steaming slowly into the harbour toward Bedford Basin, he would have had no idea of its deadly cargo. Another ship, the Belgium registered Imo, was dodging several vessels as it headed to sea with relief supplies for the war when, inexplicably, the Mont Blanc cut directly across the Imo’s bow.
The collision, at 8:43 a.m., bashed the Mont Blanc’s bow plates in by three metres, spraying sparks as steel ground against steel.
The Mont Blanc began to burn almost immediately as the fuel drums on her deck ignited.
“Dense clouds of smoke rose into the still morning air, shot through with flashes of fierce red flame,” wrote Archibald MacMechan, who was commissioned, less two weeks after the tragedy, to produce the official history. “The spectacle drew all eyes. Women in the north end went to their windows to look, or came outside their houses into the street. Men stopped work to gaze.”
Few suspected the disaster to come even as they watched the Mont Blanc’s crew rowing frantically toward the Dartmouth shore in two lifeboats.
Coleman was in his dispatch office when someone who realized the disaster about to happen burst in. Coleman knew the inbound No. 10 train was in peril and sat down to send his desperate message (The exact wording is unknown, but it did warn that a munitions ship was on fire and included Coleman’s plaintive “goodbye.”)
The explosion, at 9:04 a.m. was cataclysmic.
“The blast crushed internal organs, exploding lungs and eardrums of those closest to the ship, most of whom died instantly,” author Laura MacDonald wrote in her book, Curse of the Narrows. “Glass shattered ... sending out a shower of arrow-shaped slivers that cut their way through curtains, wallpaper and walls. The glass spared no one. Some people were beheaded where they stood ... It pierced the faces and upper chests of anyone unlucky enough to still be standing in front of a window.”
The concussion toppled cookstoves, igniting the city’s many woodframe houses.
Every structure within a mile of the blast was either levelled or severely damaged.
The Mont Blanc disintegrated. A 520-kilogram anchor shaft, hurled nearly four kilometres across the city, remains on display where it landed. A 15-metre tsunami swept across the harbour and three blocks into the streets of Halifax and Dartmouth.
The world would not see a larger man-made explosion until the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
Did Coleman’s message stop the No. 10 train?
Legend and Heritage Minute notwithstanding, most historians say no. The six-car train (carrying about 300 passengers, not 700 as in the television spot) had likely already passed Rockingham station, the last place where it could have seen a stop signal before entering the city. But it was running about 10 minutes late and avoided the worst of the blast.
“The cars were tilted violently over on the tracks as far as the safety chains would permit, then clashed back into their usual positions,” MacMechan wrote in his official history.
“The glass broke gently all along the train, coming inside, but injuring none of the passengers.”
As the train sat stopped, horrified passengers watched “hundreds” of dazed and wounded survivors stumbling down the tracks “black as if they had been shovelling coal and streaming with blood,” MacMechan wrote.
Passengers set about helping the injured, tearing the train’s bedding and linen into strips for bandages.
“Shrieks of agony rose from the ruins of the houses round about; and then they realized that the houses were on fire and in them were living, sentient, human beings in danger of the most horrible deaths,” he wrote.
In addition to the 1,600 killed outright, another 400 died of their wounds in the following days. Another 9,000 were injured.
In all, more than one in five of the city’s population were killed or injured. More than 1,600 homes were destroyed, leaving 12,000 people without shelter.
The Indian summer of Dec. 6 soon gave way to a howling blizzard, adding to the city’s misery.
It would be several days before Coleman’s body was recovered. His post was barely 200 metres from where the Mont Blanc detonated.
Frances Coleman and toddler Eileen would survive, as would the couple’s two other children, who were in school when the blast occurred. Eileen’s blood-spattered blue dress is on display at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax. Also on display are Coleman’s brass telegraph key, his pocket watch and brown leather wallet, which still contained two raffle tickets he’d bought as part of a Victory Bond drive.
Macdonald, who spent four years researching and writing Curse of the Narrows, said Coleman’s was one of many tremendous acts of heroism that day.
“It’s very touching. Many of those men running toward that pier knew they were making a sacrifice,” said Macdonald, who grew up overlooking the harbour and whose grandmother remembered hearing the explosion, 160 kilometres away in Antigonish, N.S.
In 2001, Macdonald was living in New York and considering writing a book about the Halifax explosion but decided she had nothing to add to the flood of books already written.
“Then 9/11 happened and I realized, ‘This is exactly the same, how the city reacted.’ Suddenly the story became really important to me.”
And though Vincent Coleman’s frantic message probably made no difference to the No. 10 train, it served a much more important role, she wrote. “While not as dramatic as stopping the train, it was ultimately more effective.”
The explosion destroyed telegraph lines, cutting Halifax off from the rest of the world.
But even as the devastated city burned, thanks to Coleman’s message, help was on the way.