Halifax Explosion survivors heard on tapes lost for decades

During a recent move, Rick Howe spotted a cassette tape he hadn’t seen in years. When he slid it into his vintage Marantz recorder, the sounds carried him back half a century — and the voices took him back more than 100 years. 

Howe was a cub reporter when he moved to Halifax in 1978. He was a radio news junky, so when CJCH host Dave Wright opened his Hotline show to people who’d survived the Halifax Explosion, he started recording. 

“It ended up with three hours of riveting historical context. People who were actually there, experiencing it as it happened and telling us what was going on,” Howe says. 

“And these are just average people. These aren’t your fire chiefs, or police chiefs, or your mayors. These are just everyday Nova Scotians who were going about their everyday business when this calamity hit. “

Eyewitness to disaster

What he heard led him to write Eyewitness: Atlantic Canadians Experience History In Their Own Words, which includes a chapter on the 1917 disaster. 

“Dave went on at the beginning of the show, did a brief history of the explosion, had some actor reporters down on the scene calling the shots and saying what it would have sounded like, and then he opened up the phone lines,” Howe says. 

The opening was so compelling that one woman called in to say she thought a new disaster was unfolding and chided Wright, comparing it to Orson Wells’s notorious War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938. 

One caller gave her name as Mrs. Gerald Rodgers of 10 Almon St. She was 22 the day of the great explosion. She was living with her husband and two small children — both boys under two. 

“My oldest son and I watched the fire engine leaving the station on Gottingen Street. Billy Wells drove the fire engine Patricia on that fateful day. And all he had left was the steering wheel in his hands. It was a miracle that he survived that day as the engine was blown to millions of pieces,” she tells Wright. 

“I took my two small children, cut and bleeding from broken glass, and went next door to Mrs. Martin’s, who had a place fixed up in her basement.”

They were soon told to leave the area, as people feared a second blast.  

“We were piled into Cousin’s Laundry Truck, which was horse-drawn, not knowing who or where we were going to,” she says. They were taken to the Halifax Common to wait. Mrs. Rodgers says her father returned from work at a glass-work store on Argyle Street.

“When he came near to his home, he was not allowed near, as all the houses were on fire. All he could find of the ruins, of the two houses and the barn, were charred bones and [a] prayer book.”

Mrs. Rodgers said she lost consciousness during the evacuation and was kept near her children. Her husband was blown through a plate glass window on Gottingen Street, but survived. He, too, set out to rescue the young mother and children. 

“Bewildered and in shock, he then came home to 10 Almon St., not able to find us, since we had already left. Myself, I was cut by flying glass and unconscious. When I came to, I found myself in an army camp packed with survivors at Long Lake in Spryfield.”

One woman says she was a nine years old living on the corner of Charles and Agricola streets the day of the explosion. 

“I was just getting ready to leave, to go downstairs to go to school. One of the windows blew out, or was smashed out, and I got cut on the back of my head and on my arm. From there they got me to the Commons,” she says. “I was hurt, I was taken to the Camp Hill Hospital.”

She remembered seeing people lying on mattresses on the floor, as the beds were all full. “I can remember it as if it happened today,” she says. “It was such a fearful, pitiful sight.”

Reunited by diamond ring

Another woman said she was Ms. Lowe at the time, as she hadn’t yet married, though she didn’t give her married name. 

“I’m one of the victims of the Halifax Explosion. Well, not really, because I was just a little baby. I’m going on 63. But I was cut. I needed 14 stitches. I still have the mark on the forehead over my head. I was laying in bed, mother tells me, the plaster fell from the wall and hit me on the head,” she recalls. 

A soldier on a rescue patrol walked into their ruined house, saw the bleeding baby, and immediately took her for medical help. He may not have noticed her family, as nobody knew where the one-year-old went. 

But she wore a diamond ring her father had given her and through that detail was reunited with her parents. Her younger sibling did not survive the disaster at 124 Windsor St. 

“My mother was standing by the stove. She had a dust cap on. Her dust cap went right through, out and up to the stove pipe and right out. She went to go out to the hall, the door came right in. My dad was coming down and he had a baby in his arms. The next thing he knew, all he had left was a pair of the baby’s shoes.

Another man said he was five and about to go sledding near Nicholson’s Bridge off Kempt Road. 

“I was up on the hill there ready to coast down and this terrible explosion took place. And I didn’t get a scratch. It must have blown all over me. So I went down — I thought it was the Germans. I was only a kid,” he says.

“Down where we lived, there were apple trees, and I remember my aunt walking through. Her arm was hanging off and she had my brother by the hand. The house was all broken up.”

He recalled “beautiful blue skies” over the city for the rest of the day, before the blizzard. His father helped with the rescue by driving a horse and wagon through the wreckage. He travelled around the Bedford Basin and found it full of debris from the shattered city. 

One woman was in her first year of school. The explosion cut her badly. 

“We were upset, we were terribly frightened when the blast came. Everyone lunged,” she says. 

She remembers one woman was playing a hymn on the piano when the blast hit. The piano was wrecked, but the player was unharmed. Many called it a miracle. 

The caller remembered running through the streets with blood soaking her pale yellow hair. Her father found her and reunited their family in the hospital. She remembered soldiers blocking out the windows of their house as best they could to keep the storm out. 

“It’s been quite a tragedy and every year the memory comes back. We live it again. But there’s much to be thankful for,” she says. 

Rick Howe says listening to the voices from the deep past brings the events of 106 years ago to the edge of yesterday. 

“I can’t imagine what the citizens went through for a period of time there. But they were strong, and they survived, and they rebuilt. And here we are.”