The Telegraph Operator Who Stayed at His Key

At 8:45 on the morning of 6 December 1917, two ships in the Narrows of Halifax Harbour did almost exactly the opposite of what they had been ordered to do. The Norwegian relief steamer Imo, outbound, was running too fast and too far to starboard. The French freighter Mont-Blanc, inbound, was running on the wrong side of the channel because the Imo was on the wrong side too. They scraped each other at an angle of about thirty degrees and parted.

The Mont-Blanc carried, in her holds and on her decks, 2,653 tons of high explosive: 226 tons of TNT, 2,367 tons of picric acid, 56 tons of gun cotton, and 246 barrels of benzol fuel lashed to her foredeck. The benzol caught fire from the impact. The crew, who understood exactly what they were carrying, lowered the lifeboats within four minutes and rowed for the Dartmouth shore. The captain, Aimé Le Médec, ordered them to row, in his words later given to the Royal Commission, “for our lives.”

The Mont-Blanc, abandoned and burning, drifted across the channel and grounded against Pier 6 on the Halifax side at about 9:00 a.m. A crowd gathered on the wharves to watch the fire. Children, on their way to school, stopped to look. Adults at office windows pressed their faces to the glass.

The ship exploded at 9:04:35 a.m.

The blast destroyed the entire north end of Halifax. It killed roughly 1,800 people instantly, blinded another 1,000, injured 9,000, and flattened 12,000 buildings within a radius of 1.6 kilometers. The shock wave was felt 300 kilometers away. Until the detonation of the Trinity bomb in New Mexico in July 1945, it was the largest man-made explosion in human history.

The man who saved the most lives in those four minutes never left the building he was working in.

Vince Coleman

Patrick Vincent Coleman was forty-five years old, the train dispatcher for the Canadian Government Railways at the Richmond Station yard, on the north end of the Halifax peninsula. His station stood about 230 meters from the Mont-Blanc’s grounded hull, on the same waterfront.

At about 8:50 a.m., a sailor from the harbor — accounts differ on which one — ran up to the Richmond station and shouted that an ammunition ship was on fire in the Narrows and was going to blow. Coleman and his colleague William Lovett initially decided to get out. They left the station and started running south. Then Coleman remembered the inbound morning passenger train from Saint John, due to arrive at Richmond Station at 9:05.

He turned around. He went back into the station.

At 9:02 a.m. he sat down at his telegraph key and sent, in Morse, the message that was logged by the receiving operator at the Rockingham station several kilometers up the line. There are several slightly different transcriptions of the message in the surviving record, but the version preserved at the Nova Scotia Archives reads:

“Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys.”

The Saint John train was less than two kilometers from the station when the message arrived. The engineer stopped. Every passenger on board survived. They were, by some counts, the only passenger train in North American history whose lives were saved by a telegram.

Coleman did not survive. The Richmond station was within the radius of total destruction. His body was found in the wreckage three days later. The telegraph key he had been using was sent, after the war, to the Canadian Railway Museum, where it is on display.

What was actually destroyed

The figures from the Royal Commission of 1918, supplemented by later research, give a sense of the scale that adjectives cannot.

The Mont-Blanc’s anchor shank — a piece of forged iron weighing 517 kilograms — was thrown 3.8 kilometers across the harbor and the Halifax peninsula and landed in a field on the far side, where it remains, fenced off as a memorial. Her 100-millimeter forward cannon was thrown 5.6 kilometers and landed in a pond in Dartmouth.

The pressure wave traveled outward at supersonic speed and stopped most clocks within a kilometer of the wharves at 9:04 and 35 seconds. The flash burned exposed skin. The blast picked up children on their way to school and threw them through brick walls. A tsunami, generated by the displacement of harbor water, ran up the Dartmouth shore as a 5-meter wave and pulled people who had survived the explosion back into the harbor to drown.

The Mi’kmaq settlement at Tuft’s Cove, on the Dartmouth side directly across from the Mont-Blanc, was erased. Of its approximately 50 residents, only nine survived the explosion, the wave, and the fires that followed.

The Halifax Protestant Orphanage at Veith Street caught fire and burned down with most of its children inside. The schools, which had started classes minutes before, took some of the highest casualties of any single category of building. The blast happened at 9:04. The first morning bell at Saint Joseph’s School had rung at 9:00.

At Pier 6, where the Mont-Blanc had grounded, there was no longer a pier. There was no longer a hull. There was no longer, in any recognizable sense, a north end of Halifax.

The blizzard

A storm moved in from the Atlantic the following morning and dropped 40 centimeters of snow on the ruined city. The temperature fell to minus eighteen degrees Celsius. Injured survivors, many of them already blinded by flying glass, froze to death where they had been trapped under collapsed houses. Rescue trains from Truro, New Glasgow, and the rest of Nova Scotia were delayed by drifts. Telegraph lines, the same network that had carried Coleman’s last message, went down across the province.

Then on the morning of 8 December — within hours of the explosion, in fact, because the news had crossed the U.S. border the previous afternoon — a relief train from Boston arrived in Halifax. The Massachusetts Public Safety Committee had loaded it with doctors, nurses, blankets, food, and surgical equipment within a few hours of the first dispatch reaching Boston. It pushed through the blizzard at low speed. It was, by most measures, the fastest large-scale humanitarian response of the early twentieth century.

The Bostonians stayed in Halifax for weeks. They set up field hospitals in the YMCA, in the Masonic Hall, in private houses still standing. They evacuated the badly burned to Boston by ship. They left, eventually, with the city’s gratitude — and a story that the children of Halifax would still be told sixty years later.

In 1971, the city of Halifax sent the City of Boston a Christmas tree. It was a thank-you, decades late, for the relief train. The gift has been repeated every year since. The tree now stands on the Boston Common each December. The donor card, which Boston broadcasts every year, names the explosion and the year.

What stands

A few specific objects remain.

The Mont-Blanc’s anchor shank, in a wooded park off Spinnaker Drive, with a plaque. The 100-millimeter cannon, on a stone plinth in Albro Lake Park, Dartmouth. The clock from the Halifax Naval Yard, stopped at 9:04, in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. The bell of the Mont-Blanc, salvaged from the harbor floor in the 1920s, now in the same museum.

Vince Coleman’s telegraph key, in Ottawa.

His grave is in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Halifax. The headstone, replaced in the 1990s, includes the last line of his last message. It is the only inscription on the stone.

The pilot Francis Mackey, who had been on the bridge of the Mont-Blanc and had survived the explosion in a lifeboat, was prosecuted for manslaughter and acquitted. He never piloted a ship again. He died in 1961, mostly forgotten. The pilot’s certificate was returned to his family. It is, as far as anyone can tell, still in a drawer in Nova Scotia.