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The Blind Mechanic: The Amazing Story of Eric Davidson, Survivor of the 1917 Halifax Explosion
200Overview
Eric Davidson was a beautiful, fair-haired toddler when the Halifax Explosion struck, killing almost 2,000 people and seriously injuring thousands of others. Eric lost both eyes—a tragedy that his mother never fully recovered from. Eric, however, was positive and energetic. He also developed a fascination with cars and how they worked, and he later decided, against all likelihood, to become a mechanic. Assisted by his brothers who read to him from manuals, he worked hard, passed examinations, and carved out a decades-long career. Once the subject of a National Film Board documentary, Eric Davidson was, until his death, a much-admired figure in Halifax.
This book does not gloss over the challenges faced by Eric and by his parents. Written by his daughter Marilyn, it gives new insights into the story of the 1917 Halifax Explosion and contains never-before-seen documents and photographs. While Eric Davidson has been mentioned in previous Explosion accounts, his story has never been told in such fascinating detail. Davidson overcame such odds that his life story might not seem believable if it had not happened.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781771086769 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nimbus Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/28/2018 |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Halifax Explosion
Halifax was a robust city in 1917 with a population of roughly fifty thousand. It was thriving industrially and becoming a cultural centre complete with theatres, restaurants, libraries, and more. Government offices and banking institutions were located in the South End along with the more affluent of Halifax society, while industries and the working-class citizens of Halifax were mostly situated in the North End community of Richmond. The name Richmond was given to the area north of the Wellington barracks (now CFB Stadacona) and east of Gottingen Street in the mid-1800s when sugar was brought from Richmond, Virginia, and landed at wharves located near the present shipyards.
Originally, Richmond had been a farming village, but by the late 1850s a railway skirted the shoreline and Richmond became industrialized with factories such as the Acadia Sugar Refinery, the Richmond Printing Company, Hillis & Sons Foundry, and the Nova Scotia Cotton Manufacturing Company to name a few. In 1877, the Intercolonial Railway opened the North Street Station at the foot of North Street.
Industry workers settled on the Richmond slope, a steep hill that rises up from the harbour. At the top of the hill more than one hundred and twenty metres above the harbour is Fort Needham, which was at one time a strategic naval installation constructed upon a drumlin. The dictionary definition of a drumlin is a glacial formation, an elongated hill that is shaped like an inverted spoon or a half-buried egg. Fort Needham was active during the American and French Revolutions but after the War of 1812, the fort was decommissioned and was left to deteriorate to the point that by 1917 there was little evidence of its existence.
Richmond residents were mostly of Scottish and Irish heritage and the predominant religions were Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, or Methodist. Four churches served the Richmond community: St. Joseph's Roman Catholic, St. Mark's Anglican, Grove Presbyterian, and Kaye Street Methodist. Churches were the nerve centres of Halifax-area communities in the early 1900s and as such Richmond churches played a major role in the everyday life of the community. Religious and social events and community gatherings took place there.
Streets ran up the Richmond slope from Campbell Road to Fort Needham and Gottingen Street with side streets running north to south crossing at right angles. By 1917, these streets were dotted with hundreds of wooden-framed houses stretching along the shoreline of Campbell Road all the way up the hilly slope to Gottingen Street. The source of heating for these homes was coal or wood. Wharves and warehouses lined the Richmond waterfront and trains ran along the harbour and the shores of the Bedford Basin to points beyond delivering goods and passengers to and fro daily. It was a bustling little community.
Halifax was an important city in wartime and it was a beehive of activity in 1917. The First World War was in its third year and convoys formed up in Bedford Basin just a short distance north of Richmond. Bedford Basin is an oval-shaped sheltered body of deep water that lies at the northern end of Halifax Harbour. The harbour itself is approximately four miles long and the basin, like Halifax Harbour, remains open and free of ice all year round. The basin was an ideal place to assemble convoys that would be heading overseas with troops, much-needed supplies, and munitions for the war effort.
Thursday, December 6, 1917, dawned a pleasant, sunny, and surprisingly warm day. Richmond households buzzed with the usual morning preparations. Men were heading off to work and children were readying themselves for school. The Protestant children went to Richmond School on Roome Street and the Roman Catholic children went to St. Joseph's School on Kaye Street. The majority of Richmond men were labourers employed at the nearby HMC dockyards, the North Street Station, and the Canadian Government Railways, the Acadia Sugar Refinery, and Hillis & Sons Foundry. As was customary at this time, Richmond women stayed at home caring for their children and managing the home.
While Richmond residents were busy with their morning routines, something was happening right below them in the harbour. Two ships were on a collision course in The Narrows, a location where the harbour narrows to join Bedford Basin. The Imo, a Norwegian steamer, had just left the safety of Bedford Basin and was heading south in the harbour. Painted on its side were the words Belgian Relief to protect it from German submarines. The Imo was a long and narrow steamship at 131.3 metres long and 13.8 metres wide, carrying a crew of thirty-nine men commanded by Captain Haakon From.
The Mont Blanc, a French munitions freighter commanded by Captain Aimé Le Médec, was heading north toward Bedford Basin to join a convoy of supply ships that would be leaving Halifax soon to cross the Atlantic for England. The Mont Blanc, smaller than the Imo, measured 97.5 metres in length and 13.7 metres wide. She was carrying a lethal cargo of 2,300 tons of picric acid, 200 tons of TNT, 10 tons of gun cotton, and on the deck 35 tons of benzol in large metal barrels. This combination of highly explosive materials made the Mont Blanc a floating bomb.
Both ships had Halifax Harbour pilots on-board. Piloting the Imo that morning was Pilot William Hayes and piloting the Mont Blanc was Pilot Francis Mackey.
The Imo was off course and steaming quickly toward the slow-moving Mont Blanc. There were signal blasts from ship to ship; however, the Imo maintained its course, bearing down on the Mont Blanc. The Mont Blanc and the Imo both took last-minute manoeuvres in an effort to avoid a collision. However, it was too little too late and at approximately 8:45 a.m., the Imo cut into the starboard bow of the Mont Blanc.
The Imo reversed its engines to pull away from the Mont Blanc, creating sparks, which ignited the picric acid and set fire to the drums of benzol on the deck of the Mont Blanc. The fire spread rapidly while the crew tried unsuccessfully to scuttle the ship. As the Mont Blanc floated toward the Richmond piers, witnesses observed two boats lowered from the Mont Blanc as its crew and the harbour pilot abandoned the burning ship and rowed hastily to the Dartmouth shore. The abandoned Mont Blanc continued to float in the direction of the Richmond piers.
A huge fireball lit up the morning sky as Mont Blanc burned. Hundreds of people converged to the dockside. Men on their way to work and children on their way to school stopped to watch the inferno. Richmond residents in the assumed safety of their homes stood at their windows watching. Dartmouth residents in Tufts Cove and the Mi'kmaw settlement of Turtle Grove watched the spectacle in the harbour just as their Richmond counterparts did.
The West Street station of the Halifax Fire Department responded to the call of a fire on-board a boat near Pier 6. When they arrived at Pier 6 with their brand new fire truck, Patricia, the crew of the tugboat Stella Maris was valiantly attempting to tow the burning ship away from the Richmond piers. Their efforts were in vain.
At approximately 9:04 a.m., roughly twenty minutes after the collision, Mont Blanc exploded near Pier 6 in Richmond. The ship was blown apart. A huge mushroom-shaped cloud formed over the harbour. A shock wave radiated away from the explosion and was felt in Truro, some sixty miles away. The blast created a massive tidal wave, which washed up over Campbell Road in Richmond and Turtle Grove in Dartmouth, sucking injured and lifeless victims with it as the wave receded. Many bodies were never recovered. Never before had such an explosion been detonated in the midst of thousands of people. The Halifax Explosion was the most powerful non-nuclear explosion in the world. To this day, it remains the worst disaster in Canadian history.
The cities of Halifax and Dartmouth were both rocked. Richmond suffered a direct hit and in an instant was obliterated from the face of the earth. The blast from the Explosion killed nearly two thousand people; most died instantly. Approximately nine thousand people were injured, twenty-five thousand were left homeless, and over two hundred children became orphans. The Mi'kmaw settlement at Turtle Grove was destroyed, leaving nine dead and many injured.
On the western side of the Richmond slopes nestled into the southern shore of the Bedford Basin was Africville, an African Nova Scotian community. While Africville was protected from the direct blast of the Explosion, homes were badly damaged and there were four known casualties from that community.
There were casualties on-board boats and ships docked and operating near Pier 6 as well. The SS Curaca lost thirty-two men, five of them from the tiny Scottish island of Barra. The Stella Maris, Calonne, HMS Highflyer, the Picton, and several more ships lost crew. The Imo lost seven crew, including Captain From and Pilot Hayes, while one member of the crew of the Mont Blanc died from injuries he sustained while attempting to escape the blast.
The scene in Richmond that day was one of absolute devastation. Hundreds of corpses littered the ground, hideously destroyed bodies strewn about, some missing limbs and some bodies missing heads. Homes and businesses were flattened, trees were uprooted, and the area looked as though a tornado had swept through. Not a house remained standing in Richmond as fires from overturned stoves burned amidst the collapsed houses. A black rain fell from the sky, covering everything and everybody with an oily residue. The four Richmond churches and the schools were destroyed.
Survivors covered in the black oily residue wandered about bewildered and in shock. Many had their clothing ripped from their bodies by the explosion's backdraft. Others suffered grotesque injuries such as facial lacerations, vicious open wounds, broken and lacerated limbs, and partially detached limbs. The sights were ghastly. Many survivors thought they had been attacked by the Germans. Hundreds of survivors died, as they lay trapped in burning houses or from exposure waiting to be rescued from the wreckage of their homes. Because coal was stored in the basements of houses, fires continued to burn in Richmond for days following the explosion. A soldier recently returned from the war is reported to have said that Richmond looked worse than the war-ravaged battlefields he had seen overseas.
Archibald MacMechan, who was later appointed by the executive committee of the Halifax Relief Commission to record an official history of the Halifax Explosion, wrote in his report The Halifax Disaster:
Under the wreckage of Richmond that morning there were hundreds of human beings injured, but in some cases unhurt, who were to die by fire. The mind refuses to dwell upon the horrors of that morning men and women like ourselves, broken, bruised, bleeding, half-conscious or worse still, uninjured but imprisoned in the wreckage and the inexorable flames coming swiftly nearer. The pity of it…to see your own perish in torment before your eyes and being impotent to help. All that morning a tall silvery column of smoke rose to the sky above the burning North End…the streets were filled with the strangest apparitions: men, women and children with their faces streaming with blood from wounds dealt by the flying glass, faces chalk-white with terror and streaked with red, faces black with the "black rain" and smeared with blood. The dead, the dying and the severely injured lay about the streets, amid ghastly fragments of what had been human beings' heads and limbs. ... Some were dazed and semi-conscious from the shock. Some were uttering shrieks of pain and terror. Some were helping injured people away or trying to extricate them from the ruin of their houses. There was no order or direction.
Dr. Willis Bryant Moore was travelling on a relief train from Kentville to Halifax on December 6, 1917, only a few hours after the Mont Blanc exploded. In his personal narrative to the Halifax Disaster Record Office, Dr. Moore's eyewitness account vividly describes the totality of Richmond's destruction and brings the reader to that moment in time such that they feel they are riding the train with him.
Approaching Richmond the completeness of destruction was increasingly apparent, and when we finally left our train to walk until we met faster means to approach our destination, the City Hall where we were directed to report for distribution, no word except appalling would indicate the horrors of the scene. To the writer it seemed like an actual realization of the scene picture of Dante's Inferno, which he had witnessed at the moving picture theatre some years ago. The peculiar blackness of the whole devastated area lightened by lurid jets of flame springing from the crater-like cellars of the ruins, with the fantastic shapes of those around the destroyed homes, searching and probing vainly for their lost ones, and springing back from the shooting flames like imps of Hades, and the blackened tree trunks in the region standing gaunt and spectral like, as it were, the outpost sentinels of their kingdom, with the rows of blackened and often half naked and twisted bodies of the dead, through which we picked our way, made a weird and desolate spectacle, the depressing effects of which could only be understood by those unfortunate enough to witness it.
Unfortunately, there was no warning for the hundreds of onlookers who gathered along Campbell Road and near the piers to watch the ship burning in the harbour. Nor was there any warning for the thousands who innocently stood by their windows watching the fire or for those who were going about their business in Richmond on that December morning, possibly oblivious to what was happening. Because so many residents in North End Halifax and Dartmouth were standing at their windows watching the Mont Blanc, there were a massive number of eye injuries from shattered windows.
No family in Richmond was left untouched. Husbands rushed home to find wives and children dead and their homes on fire or destroyed. Children who survived ran to their homes only to find them either flattened or in flames and that one or both parents, as well as siblings, had perished. Children who had been part of a family were suddenly alone and orphaned. So many tragic souls. Many families suffered a tremendous loss of life with multiple casualties. In addition, there were the injured survivors, many of them children now orphaned or disabled in one way or another.
The first to offer assistance and to rescue survivors were neighbours who were uninjured. They pulled survivors from burning homes, bandaged wounds, and helped transport the injured to hospital mostly by horse-and-buggy, as there were very few automobiles in working-class Richmond in 1917. Halifax-area firefighters and police responded immediately for rescue and recovery operations. Residents outside the area of devastation rushed to Richmond to assist in rescue operations. Residents of Halifax neighbourhoods where homes were undamaged opened their homes and offered food, clothing, and shelter to the thousands of people left homeless. Towns and communities across Nova Scotia responded as well with food, clothing, medical supplies, and shelter for refugees.
As Halifax was a military city, the response from the military was immediate. They organized rescue and recovery operations, set up temporary hospitals, and provided medical assistance for the injured. Military vehicles transported the injured to hospitals and the dead to morgues. Private vehicles were commandeered for the same purpose. A perimeter was set up around the disaster zone and the military organized patrols to prevent looting.
Rescue efforts were hampered when a dreadful blizzard hit Halifax on December 7, 1917, the day following the Explosion. Countless people who had survived died of exposure as they lay trapped in the rubble of their homes and buried under the snow waiting for rescue.
Halifax-area doctors and nurses worked without rest for forty-eight hours treating a multitude of hideous injuries. The medical professionals accustomed to routine minor ailments found themselves overwhelmed with thousands of injuries similar to those that would be sustained on a battlefield. There were not enough beds, so hundreds of injured survivors were laid out on hospital floors awaiting treatment. Injuries were triaged with the most urgent treated first.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Blind Mechanic"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Marilyn Davidson Elliott.
Excerpted by permission of Nimbus Publishing Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword 6
Preface 8
The Halifax Explosion 14
And Then It Happened 27
Recovery and Transition 36
School Days 50
Defying the Odds 60
A Love Match 69
One of the Boys 77
Raising a Family 83
Vacations 96
Shopping with Dad 101
Family Life 108
Grandma Georgina 119
Peepers and Croakers 132
A Passion for Antique Autos 145
The Golden Years 158
The Halifax Relief Commission Pension Fund 173
Commemorating the Halifax Explosion 181
Epilogue 191
Acknowledgements 195
Bibliography 197
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