'The great blast smote the place'

The Macdonald library after the blast — "MacMechan hurried over the Dalhousie and found the tall Palladian windows of the library blown, in glass everywhere," writes P.B. Waite in The Lives of Dalhousie University.

December 6, 1917 dawned bright and sunny in Halifax. Before darkness fell, more than a thousand people would die, with another thousand to follow. Nine thousand more would be injured and maimed in the largest man-made explosion the world had ever seen.

Dalhousie casualties were comparatively light, writes historian P.B. Waite in The Lives of Dalhousie University. One student lost an eye, another was cut severely on his face and hands. Many of the buildings were damaged; the tall windows of the library (now the Macdonald Building) were shattered, scattering glass everywhere. The university Senate converged an emergency meeting and decided to stop classes until after the Christmas holidays.

At the time, writer Thomas Raddall was a boy of 14 and in Grade 9 at Chebucto School. In this account written in 1951 and preserved in Dalhousie University Archives, he describes what happened that day and afterwards when his school was turned into a morgue.

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By Thomas Raddall

One of the most curious things about Halifax, the great fortress, the naval base which has played so prominent a part in the history of Canada and of the world, is that in all its 200 years it has never been attacked. The strength of the forts, and of the fleet, made the place invulnerable, and no enemy ever made the attempt. But this very strength, this constant preparedness, meant the storage of large quantities of munitions, and several times the fortress has been in danger of destruction from within.

Unidentified house destroyed in the Halifax Explosion Halifax, NS, December 1917 (Thomas Head Raddall Digital Collection)

This danger began when the town was founded in 1749, and when the gunpowder of the garrison was stored aboard ships anchored off the waterfront. Later, it was stored in a wooden shed on George’s Island, which itself lies only a few hundred yards from the harborside. Then it was stored in an old hulk off the Dockyard, then in a shed in the south end of the city, then in the Citadel itself, then in the north end of the city new Wellington Barracks, and most recently in a big modern magazine on the shore of Bedford Basin. So you see, Halifax for two centuries has been like a man compelled to keep a bomb on his person; he doesn’t like it, he tries to allay his foreboding from time to time by shifting the bomb to another pocket, but he never succeeds in fooling himself, and the bomb is always there. And the worst of it is that, as time goes by and science moves on, the bomb not only gets bigger but the explosive inside becomes more powerful and more touchy in its characteristics. When you consider the vast quantities of munitions that have been handled at Halifax, especially during the past two great wars, you wonder that explosions have not been more frequent.

The worst disaster occurred in December 1917, when the First Great War was well into its fourth year. The passage of ships laden with terrific explosives had become a commonplace, and nobody thought much about the French steamship Mont Blanc coming in from the seaward and moving past the city’s waterfront on her way to Bedford Basin. She had a devil’s brew aboard; 2,300 tons of picric acid, 22 tons of TNT, 61 tons of other explosive acid, and for good measure, though it sound incredible now, a deck cargo of benzene in tins. A more frightful packet of fireworks could not have been conceived in those days before the atomic bomb; and there it was, moving placidly up the harbour on that cold winter morning of 1917.

About this time, a steamer called the Imo, laden with food and clothing for the suffering Belgians, pulled up her hook in Bedford Basin and started on her passage past the city towards the open sea. The two ships drew together in the Narrows, which separate the Basin from the harbour proper, and through some petty mistake in signals there was a collision. The damage was seen to be slight as the two ships drew apart’ but the shock had started a leak in some of the tins on the Frenchman’s deck and suddenly the benzene flared. The crew promptly took to the boats and fled into the woods on the Dartmouth side of the harbor. Their ship, still flying the red flag which meant explosives aboard, slowly drifted against one of the piers at Richmond, the northern suburb of Halifax.

The benzene made a spectacular blaze, and as it happened between eight and nine o’clock in the morning, when crowds of people were on their way to work, and children on their way to school, the nearby wharves were soon a mass of eager sightseers. Someone rang in a fire alarm, and at once towards the scene sped the pride of the Halifax Fire Department, their new motor-pumper Patricia – at that time the only motor fire apparatus in the city. Meanwhile a British cruiser in the harbor, and the Canadian cruiser Niobe at the Dockyard, sent off men in boats to board the ship and fight the fire.

Then, at a few minutes past nine in the morning, in a terrific stroke of magic, the big ship vanished. In the few seconds before they were shattered, the city’s windowpanes reflected a sudden blaze of light that outshone the December sun; and then, with its roots in the harbor, a huge white pillar shot into the air and began to unfold rapidly at the top in beautiful white and grey convolutions like a monstrous fungus growing in the sky. Many of you have seen moving pictures of the great atomic bomb explosions at Bikini. Those of us who remember the great explosion at Halifax in 1917 can find little difference in one and the other, except that the atomic bomb pillars have a thicker stem. The other manifestations, the tall fluted column shining in the sunlight, and the tight coils at the top of it, twisting, writhing, unfolding and falling to form the characteristic toadstool cloud – these were the same. In fact, this instantaneous eruption of 2,400 tons of high explosive in Halifax harbour was the greatest single man-made explosion in the world’s history up to that time; and it was not surpassed until the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima in 1945.

Ruins of Richmond School. (Thomas Head Raddall Digital Collection)

Halifax in ’17 had only about one quarter of the population of Hiroshima in ’45. Also Halifax was much more solidly built, and much of the city was saved by the steep cone of Citadel Hill, which parted the great air blast like a mighty rock in the middle of a stream. Nevertheless, 2,000 men, women and children were killed outright or died later of their injuries; 2,000 others were seriously injured, many of them mutilated or blind, and almost everyone had been slashed by the flying glass. The hospitals were choked. Thousands patched up their wounds and their homes as best they could, and “stuck it out.” These untreated wounds, by some peculiarity of the explosion, and the subsequent exposure in cold weather, left ugly blue scars like tattoo marks which in many cases disfigured the bearers for life. Many others were injured by the tremendous shock of the blast, and some lingered for months and years before death came, so that it was never possible to compile an accurate casualty list.

In the entire northern half of the city, the houses were shattered; doors blew off hinges, windows vanished, every scrap of plaster tumbled from ceilings and walls. In the Richmond section an area of about one square mile was smashed almost flat. With so many stoves upset in these heaps of splintered wood, fire appeared almost at once, and brought a terrible death to those pinned in the ruins. Whole streets of wooden homes and shops went up in flames together like so many boxes of matches.

Chebucto School, pre-Halifax Explosion. The school is now the Maritime Conservatory of Performing Arts. (Thomas Head Raddall Digital Collection)

I was a student at Chebucto School in the North End of the city, and I lived close to it. It was a big brick building and normally it held 700 kids, but fortunately only my class was in session when the great blast smote the place. Most us were cut, and the flying plaster made us look like a company of ghosts, but we got out alive and with only one or two seriously hurt. That evening, in the snowstorm which whirled in from the sea on the heels of the explosion, I guided a party of soldiers through the wrecked and littered classrooms of my school. They didn’t say what their errand was, but they selected the basement for their purpose. All the windows and doors had been blown away and of course there were no lights. That big empty school was a dark and dismal place, I can tell you.

I stood in the basement doorway and saw a kind of luminous ghost swimming through the snow towards me from the street. It turned out to be a city policeman, riding one of the big white horses which used to pull the patrol wagon – the so-called Black Maria – in those days before everything was motorized; and the light was thrown in a kind of halo by a lantern dangling from the horse’s neck. All the man said was, “The first wagon will be right along.” After a time, a wagon came. It was one of the low-slung drays which used to rattle over the cobbles of Water Street from morn to night, and its load was covered with a tarpaulin. The soldiers came tumbling out of the school and in the light of the teamster’s lantern one of them dragged off the cover. I beheld three men, two women and a girl lying stiff and silent on the dray. They were from the place called Africville, at the Narrows, which had received the full force of the blast. They were dead, of course, and the soldiers carried them into the school basement. All through that night, and through many days and nights to come, a steady procession of wagons and sleighs brought bodies to the school, so that at one time there were over a thousand waiting to be identified and claimed by friends. The bodies were arranged in rows and each was covered with a sheet of factory cotton. The soldiers had the grim job of washing the blackened and disfigured faces to make them easier to identify, and I remember how weird it was at night, with the lanterns of the soldiers throwing long shadows on the basement walls, the wintry draught through the empty window frames, the breath of the soldiers visible like smoke in the lantern light, the steam rising from their washing-buckets, and all that great white company so very still.

Veith Street following the Halifax Explosion. (Thomas Head Raddall Digital Collection)

There were other things to remember. The grim struggle just to stay alive, that stormy night after the explosion, in homes without doors or windows, with boards and blankets and carpets nailed over the frames. The emergency food and medical centre set up in our church hall. The tents pitched in the snow on the Common. The dearth of glass that forced everyone in the North End to live by lamplight or candle-light, day and night, for months after the disaster. The heaps of broken glass and plaster shovelled off the floors and piled outside each house. The calmly accepted fact that three out of every four people you met in the street were injured and bandaged. The sight of the steamer Imo flung up on the Dartmouth foreshore, and, not far away, the demolished wharf and warehouse of a cable company, and a smashed brewery pouring a river of beer into the harbour. The finding of the French ship’s gun in a lake behind Dartmouth, with its barrel bent like soft wax; and of her anchor shank, miles away in the other direction, where it dropped into the woods after an enormous toss into the sky; and the rest of her – all that remained of that big ship – in chunks of twisted iron, some as small as a walnut, none bigger than the palm of your hand, scattered all over the North End of the city, lying in the streets and gutters, in yards and gardens – everywhere you looked.

But chiefly I remember the people, most of them women and children and old men, for the drain of the western front had been terrific and almost every able-bodied man in Halifax had vanished overseas. Yes, the people, the ordinary people of Halifax, and their courage, their endurance, their patience in adversity – those are the things I shall never forget about my old city in her finest hour.