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. "

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.