By Terrie Todd
Charles Upham, a Halifax Harbour yardman, finished his night shift on December 6, 1917, and returned home. After eating a big breakfast and stoking the furnace for the day, he burrowed under the covers to sleep for a few hours. In the next bedroom, his daughter Millicent, nine, was staying home from school sick. Her brother Archie, seven, was visiting her for a moment before leaving for school.
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| Location of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada |
Suddenly, the children heard a huge rushing wind tear through their house as shards of glass flew from the windows. Glass lodged into the back of Archie’s head while Millicent’s face was sliced to shreds. Their screams roused their father.
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| Cloud created by the Halifax explosion. Photo: Wikipedia |
Although he’d been protected under the blankets, Charles ran barefoot into the next room, cutting his feet on glass fragments strewn about the floor. Seeing his children cut and bleeding, he led them out of Millicent’s room only to discover the entire east side of their house gone. The explosion had knocked out their staircase, trapping them on the second floor of a building about to collapse. The long strip of oilcloth that had covered the stairs, still attached at the top, flapped in the cold December wind.
Charles used the oilcloth like a rope to let himself down, then pulled it taut. He persuaded the children to slide down, even as beams and walls were caving in. Both children, though covered in blood and oily soot, did as their father urged and slid down the oilcloth. Immediately, the house went up in flames.
Charles carried Millicent piggyback and led Archie by the hand to safety. Though Millicent lost an eye and Archie later had twenty-two pieces of glass removed from his head, all three survived thanks to a humble oilcloth. All over Halifax, the strongest and most important parts of buildings (beams, joists, bricks) often became instruments of death while lesser, weaker items (like oilcloth) became lifesavers.
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| Oil Cloth Factory (Hubbard Free Library Collection) |
The Reluctant Healer of Halifax is the final and sixth book
in Barbour Publishing’s Enduring Hope series by various authors. In
one-fifteenth of a second, the world’s prettiest harbor suffered the world’s
largest man-made explosion prior to Hiroshima. A story of love, loss, faith,
and honor set against Canada’s most devastating moment of the First World War.
Watch for it in August 2026.
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