Tweeting history

It’s been almost a century since a ship exploded in Halifax Harbour, killing 2,000 people and injuring thousands more.

Not until Grade 4 or 5 did I learn the Halifax Explosion was real. I thought it was just a story in a book I picked up in the school library.

Flash forward to high school. The movie Titanic came out around the same time I decided to write a novel centred around the disaster. It was my second attempt at a novel. And probably one of my best ones to date. When I submitted it to the annual writing competition at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, the judges considered it publishable (they just disliked my ending, as did I).

Needless to say, as a result of my research into the disaster, and my fictionalizing the human aspect of it, I am quite moved by December 6 every year.

This year is the 95th year of this huge event in Halifax History. The Public Archives of Nova Scotia (which is an awesome building of history) is active on Twitter. And today, they are combining history and Twitter in a neat way.

PANS will collect Tweets containing the hashtag #hfxex1917 for posterity. (Hashtags are the little words or phrases following the # sign on Twitter, in case you think hashtags are something belonging to the Trailer Park Boys.) If you’d like more information on this venture, click here or visit the PANS website.

To read more on the explosion, go back in time to my little blog posting on the miraculous survival of Ashpan Annie.

You never know, maybe by the 100th anniversary, you’ll finally be able to read my novel on the explosion.

I did change the ending. And one of these days I do mean to get around sending it off again. I’ll keep you posted, Dear Reader.

First an explosion, then a blizzard.

Saying good-bye to Ashpan Annie, one of the last survivors of the Halifax Explosion

Like a tattered quilt, snow covered what remained of the north end of Halifax.

Debris poked up through the white like blackened knees.  Smoke curled up to the sky, even though the blizzard extinguished the most aggressive of the flames.

Campbell Road (now Barrington Street) looking north to the area which experienced the most dreadful devastation in the December 8, 1917 explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Such was the scene when a young soldier heard a baby crying.

Searching out the source of the noise, Benjamin Henneberry found a toddler tucked beneath the ashpan of a stove.  The young girl had minor injuries and burns, but had miraculously survived both the destruction of her home and the blizzard which hit the day after the explosion.

Though Private Henneberry was convinced the girl was his, while in the hospital, the toddler called out to a passing aunt.  That aunt identified her as Annie Liggins, and if not for that accidental meeting, she might have been raised as Olive Henneberry.

Unfortunately for Henneberry, none of his family survived the explosion and Annie was returned to her family.

In many ways, Annie was lucky.  She was the only person in her house to survive.  Both her mother and four-year-old brother were standing near a window watching the munitions ship Mont Blanc burn after colliding with a large relief ship, the Imo.  Sparks from the collision begat a fire, which enveloped the ship’s hazardous cargo of materials (TNT to name one.)

The miraculous part of the story: when the Mont Blanc exploded into a million pieces and her house collapsed, Annie was thrown into the nearby ashpan as her house fell down around her, killing her mother and brother.

Even more amazing, the leftover heat from the stove kept Annie from freezing during the blizzard.

Annie’s story made her a journalist’s darling.  Newspapers ran with it: Ashpan Annie, the miracle baby.  That she survived with only minor burns from the stove is best fitted to Ripley’s Believe it or Not.

Ashpan Annie’s father was serving in France when the explosion occurred.  He eventually returned and remarried.

Annie grew up.  Married.  Had children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

This weekend, at 95 years young, Ashpan Annie died, sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, an old lady warm in her bed.  In fact, she resided at the Berkeley, one of the finer residential homes for the senior set, the Cadillac of special care facilities.

Survivors of the Halifax explosion are passing on, given that it has been almost 93 years since the disaster, which killed nearly 2,000 people, literally in the blink of an eye.

Hearing stories of survival from those who experienced one of the world’s largest human-made disasters is a privilege that will soon be gone.  All that will be left are books and recordings of those willing to remember, like Janet Kitz’s extensive research or the University of Kings College’s slideshow of Ashpan Annie’s story.  Click here.

Rest in peace Annie Liggins Welsh, probably with her family once again for the first time in 93 years.