THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION
Arnprior man among last surivors
“Who knows?” asks Doug Snair, “If I was a little bit taller, I might not be here today.”
The Arnprior resident is talking about the what-ifs and serendipity that played out minutes after 9 a.m. on Thursday, Dec. 6, 1917, when a collision between two ships in Halifax’s harbour resulted in an explosion — the largest man-made detonation prior to the atomic age — that ultimately left more than 2,000 people dead and thousands more injured and homeless. The blast levelled more than 300 acres, including most of the north end of Halifax.
For Snair, it marked the first of a handful of remarkable brushes with his own mortality, as ships, trains, automobiles and cancer have, over the years, all conspired to knock him off his mortal track. On each occasion, however, he’s somehow managed to sidestep the clarion call.
Snair was only 1 ½ at the time of the Halifax explosion and so has no memory of the disaster, but he heard the story told so often in his youth that he can easily recall many of the details.
He was at his home on Louisburg Street with his mother, Mabel, his one-month-old sister, Marion, and an aunt. His mother was bathing Marion in a basin, and Snair was standing behind his mother. At 9:04 a.m., the window of the room they were in was shattered by the shock wave of the explosion, its shards blowing into the house.
Mabel’s back was embedded with glass. Young Marion got some in her eyes and face — by the age of 16, she would be blind, a common result of the explosion. About 1,000 people lost their sight that day, which helped lead to the formation a year later of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Marion, Snair adds, also caught pneumonia from the cold, and both she and her mother spent time in the hospital as a result of the explosion.
Snair had glass cuts on the left side of his head. Over time, he says, the scars healed and disappeared.
“I was standing sideways to the window. If I had been looking at the window I mightn’t be here.
“But my aunt Ethel was living with us. She was 18 and in a part of the house that wasn’t damaged too badly. She was able to get help for my mother and sister and looked after me. She bandaged me up — she wasn’t a nurse or anything, and she apparently bandaged me so much that you could only see my two eyes.”
The blast left the house uninhabitable — the windows were all blown out, walls were damaged, and Snair recalls that the roof might have been blown off. So Aunt Ethel took him to the YWCA, where the two stayed the night. In the morning they boarded a train for Black Point, just over 40 kilometres west of Halifax, where Snair’s grandparents lived. He stayed with them for four years.
Some of Snair’s good fortune that day might have been inherited. His father, Walter, was a telegraph operator who worked in the same office as telegrapher Vincent Coleman, who, knowing his death was imminent as the explosives-loaded SS Mont-Blanc drifted, burning, in the harbour, famously refused to abandon his post so he could tap out a final warning to an arriving train.
On the morning of Dec. 6, however, Walter Snair had a dental appointment that unwittingly spared his life. Not long after, he changed jobs, and he family relocated to Kentville, 100 kilometres away.
“I never went back to Halifax,” Snair recalls, although, as one of only 16 known living survivors of the explosion, he’ll be there for a special ceremony on Wednesday to mark its 100th anniversary.
Exactly three weeks later, another hallmark anniversary — the 75th — of Snair’s incredible mixture of good and bad luck will arise, as Ottawa and Ottawa Valley residents remember the Almonte train wreck of 1942.
On Dec. 27, 1942, the local train from Petawawa to Ottawa, its 10 coaches overloaded with passengers returning home from Christmas celebrations, was rear-ended by a troop train as it readied to pull out of the Almonte station. The collision obliterated the last two cars of the passenger train, and split and severely damaged the third-to-last, killing 39 passengers and injuring more than 150 others, many of them severely. Snair and his then-girlfriend and eventual wife, Thyra Shore, were passengers on the third-to-last coach. At the time, he was an assistant paymaster with the Navy, in Ottawa. She was a secretary with the Royal Canadian Air Force. The two had been visiting Shore’s parents in Renfrew.
When they first boarded the coach, there was a two-seat bench open at the front, but a woman there said was holding it for a friend. So Snair and Shore continued to the two rear cars, which were jammed.
“So we went back, and I asked that lady again, ‘Could we have that seat?’” he recalls, “and she said yes.”
When the collision occurred, the locomotive of the troop train plowed through the last three passenger cars, coming to a rest partway into Snair’s coach. “I remember hitting the floor and something falling on top of me — it was the seat behind. But what I remember most was the big yellow headlight of the troop train.
“I was dazed and didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I managed to get up and get Thyra up, and I said, ‘Well, let’s get out of here.’
“We were all right on the side of the car we were on, but on the other side, just beside us, there were four people killed.”
Snair and Shore, meanwhile, were unhurt. “The only thing that happened,” he recalls, “was that I broke the crystal of my watch.”
(A week later, incidentally, the pair went back to Renfrew to celebrate the New Year. Returning to Ottawa on the same Sunday Evening Special, their train was held up at Stittsville by a heavy snowstorm, and they and the other passengers were obliged to spend the night in the train, on a siding. “Everyone went off in search of a store to buy food,” he recalls. “All we could find was a box of crackers.”)
In between and after these two catastrophes were other close calls. In the late 1920s, for example, when Snair was only 12 or 13, he and two friends were playing on a beach in the Bay of Fundy, and came upon an old wooden boat.
“The tides are tremendous there, and my friend Johnny and I, and a friend of his, were fooling around. And we thought, ‘When the tide comes in, we’ll float it.’ So we did and had a lot of fun with it, but it got to the point where it was time to get out of the boat and get to shore, because the water was coming up and up.”
The third boy, boasting of his swimming proficiency, decided to swim back while Snair and Johnny navigated the boat. “He dove in,” recalls Snair, “but he never came up, and they found his body the next day, in the mud.”
In 1944, two years after the Almonte train wreck, Snair had the good fortune to lose out on a job he wanted, as the supply officer, or purser, aboard the HMCS Athabaskan, a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer. A colleague and friend of his also wanted the job, and so both applied. “He had more seniority than I did, so he got the job.”
At 3 a.m. on April 29, 1944, the Athabaskan was torpedoed by German ships. One-hundred and twenty-eight crew members were killed, 44 were rescued and 83 were taken prisoner.
In his 50s, Snair had skin cancer tumours removed from his head, cheek and ears. And in his 60s, while at a traffic standstill on the Queensway, he was rear-ended by a car travelling at 70 or 80 km/h.
“People ask me if I think there’s something religious about all this happening to me, but I say, ‘No, it’s just something that happened and I happened to be there.’ There’s no point worrying about it and saying it’s going to happen to me again sometime and I’m going to get it.
“I’ve just been in the right place at the wrong time.”
We were all right on the side of the car we were on, but on the other side, just beside us, there were four people killed.