Exploded Identity: A Saga of the Halifax Explosion

Catherine M. Mildon

Nov 2006 · Trafford Publishing

About this eBook

I was four and half years old and living in Halifax with my seven siblings the day my city was devastated by an exploding ship in the harbour. It threw me to the floor as our windows collapsed. In the days, weeks, months and years that followed, this vivid, terrifying moment and the stories of altered lives dominated our daily thoughts and conversations. As CEO of the Northern Electric Company in Halifax, my father was heavily involved in the immediate demands. Years later I felt driven to record my family experiences and to study thoroughly the record of those awful days. As I wrote, I was struck by the overwhelming determination, heroism and cooperation that the unheralded citizens of Halifax demonstrated in the face of death, destruction and snowstorms.

For centuries women have known that when war came they would be needed for their sheets torn up for bandages, for clothing and for food. So, the women of Halifax met in August 1914 and made tentative plans should Halifax be attacked. Some don't believe it. Yet war was very frightening in a seaport city. And these Halifax ladies were the women who, two years before, gathered at city hall behind long tables with pen and paper to assist survivors of the Titanic to identify bodies gathered up from the sea and brought to Halifax on our own ships.

When the Explosion went off the wife of a judge met her friend and arrived at the city hall by 9:30 a.m. They swept up glass and plaster knowing that the women would be coming soon with everything they had mustered. At 11:30 a.m. one of the city councillors came downstairs and said to the women "Give everything to everybody who asks". Half-naked, blackened, bloodied people had been coming in all morning. The women were ready with "everything for everybody" because the ladies had planned for an attack.

About the author

One of the youngest of eight children, Catherine learned to read and write before her fourth birthday. She did so even though born hard-of-hearing, a challenge all her life. The family was in Halifax the day their world exploded. In the years that followed the horror, with no radios or televisions, they gathered around the fireplace winter and summer remembering and embellishing the personal memories and the tales told by others. Catherine remembers learning a great deal beyond her years from those evenings.

Much later, Catherine won a scholarship into Art School. However, when her father died in 1931, Catherine took a nursing course and nursed the poor during those grim years. In 1935 she returned home to Montreal to marry and to attend University with her husband, studying sociology and psychology.

In 1960 Catherine moved to Toronto to allow her four children to go to university there. It was here that Catherine began to spend long hours studying the events of that fateful Halifax day still vivid from her childhood years. Having survived cancer at 55, Catherine was determined to set down the experience of her community. She read everything available, searched the archives of daily newspapers for that dramatic year and wrote the stories her family had retold and retold. After completing a degree in English and History at the University of Toronto, she continued to write and revise. Now in her 90's after three heart attacks, Catherine has decided it is time to finish her work and publish it for all to read.