Seven deadly decisions: Who died when Parliament burned 100 years ago
Andrew Duffy, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: January 29, 2016 | Last Updated: January 29, 2016 1:54 PM EST
Some ran into danger, others ran to fetch their furs: Andrew Duffy reveals the final moments of seven people killed when Ottawa’s landmark went up in flames.
On the evening of Feb. 3, 1916, as politicians debated the merits of an inquiry into the high price of fish in central Canada, Yarmouth MP Bowman Brown Law stood up and surveyed the empty seats that surrounded him in the House of Commons.
“I have been very sorry to notice during the years I have had the privilege of sitting in this House,” the Liberal groused, “that when our fishing industry is being discussed very few members stay in the chamber.”
Law had spent 14 years on Parliament Hill after a term on Yarmouth’s first town council. He was one of that city’s leading businessmen, heir to a shipping empire founded by his father, William, a former Nova Scotia legislator.
Law had helped expand the business — into auctioneering and marine insurance — while establishing himself as a pillar of the community: He was a member of the Methodist Church, a leader in the local temperance movement, and a devoted father to his only child, Dorothy.
Law was also a strong advocate for his constituents, most of whom worked in the fishing industry; they had returned him to Ottawa three times by ever-widening margins.
On Feb. 3, he asked the House to consider a “bonus” for fisherman in recognition of their dangerous work.
“We are at all times assisting the farmer, doing things for him, which I have no hesitation in saying are quite right,” he argued. “But very little has been done for the hardy, sturdy fisherman.”
It would be the last time that Law addressed the House.
He left his seat sometime after 8:30 p.m., telling his colleague, Inverness County MP Dr. Alexander Chisolm, to “speak good and loud so that I can hear you.”
Law made his way to the long distance phone booths in the basement of the Parliament Buildings, where he put a call through to a friend in Nova Scotia. (Long distance calls were still a novelty: Within weeks, the country would marvel at the first long distance call connecting Montreal with Vancouver.)
When he emerged from the cloistered phone booth, Law stepped into a world that had changed utterly.
The building was in an uproar. Bells were ringing. Messengers, politicians and policemen were hurrying in different directions. Shouts of “Fire! Fire!” sounded through the halls.
Law was about to join an epic drama, a night like no other in the history of Ottawa.
Ultimately, he would become one of seven to die in a fire that would destroy the Parliament Buildings, the seat of government and the cherished emblem of a young country’s ambition.
The dead would come from all walks of life, from disparate social classes, from French and English Canada. Some would die as heroes, others not. All would be victims of decisions cast under pressure when seconds mattered more than more than power, privilege, furs or gold.
The fire started in the House of Commons reading room, where politicians frequently retired to absorb the news. It was wartime and the slaughter at Gallipoli had just ended; the slaughter at Verdun was about to begin.
Conservative MP Frank Glass was standing at the second reading table when he felt a blast of heat on his leg. At first, he thought it was just another belch from the building’s boiler.
“I turned around and almost immediately with my turning, I smelt the burning of paper,” Glass later told the Royal Commission that examined the cause of the blaze.
In its final report, the commission said it had a “strong suspicion” the fire was an act of German sabotage, but they left the matter open for further investigation since there was no conclusive evidence as to what started the inferno. Today, a century later, it is still not clear whether the fire was a tragic accident or mass murder.
What is clear is that the disaster could have been averted in the fire’s first, critical moments.
Just two days earlier, a similar scene had unfolded in the reading room. Two MPs had detected smoke coming from a shelf of newspapers underneath a desk. The two men, Conservative MP William Weichel and a visiting friend, pulled the smouldering papers onto the floor and stamped out the flames.
Curiously, the very same situation faced MP Frank Glass on the evening of Feb. 3.
When he smelled smoke, Glass bent down and saw a few small flames curling inside a shelf of newspapers under the desk behind him. He called for help, but no one came. So Glass ran to the door, where a member of the Dominion Police Force was stationed.
Const. Thomas Moore took one look at the smoke in the room and ran into the hallway to raise a general alarm. He then raced to the nearest extinguisher, which was at the other end of the large room. Meanwhile, a reading room attendant pulled the burning papers onto the floor. The policeman turned the extinguisher on the fire.
But it was too late.
The extinguisher’s hard, narrow stream broke apart the burning paper and spread the flames. They climbed up the newspapers that hung on wooden partitions, and spread to the wood-panelled walls and gallery, where 20,000 books were stored.
The reading room had served as the former library and had accommodated the first sitting of Canada’s Supreme Court. It offered ideal conditions for fire: it was well ventilated, stuffed with paper, and panelled with varnished wood.
Within minutes, flames travelled out the door, and along corridors lined with pine wardrobes.
“The corridor seemed to act like a giant flue with a tremendous draught,” C.R. Stewart, chief doorkeeper of the House of Commons, would later testify.
Said another witness: “The fire ran among the floors like a prairie fire.”
It was Stewart who interrupted proceedings in the House of Commons at 9 p.m. to announce: “There is a big fire in the reading room; everyone get out quickly.”
In 1916, senior government officials both worked and lived in the Parliament Buildings. The House of Commons and Senate speakers, the Sergeant-at-Arms and the Usher of the Black Rod were among those who resided on the Hill when Parliament was in session.
Newly elected House speaker Albert Sévigny was in his office, on the ground floor of his living quarters, when he was warned that a fire had erupted in the reading room.
Sévigny immediately understood that his two children were in mortal peril: Their second-floor nursery was at the far end of the apartment, nearest the fire. They were practically above it.
Moments earlier, in the parlour, the four women had all made fateful choices.
Dussault, Morin and Bray decided to run to their bedrooms down the long hallway to rescue their furs.
Mme. Sévigny tugged at the skirts of her friends in an attempt to bring them with her down the staircase. She begged them to come, but they insisted they had enough time.
He raced upstairs and yelled a warning to his wife and her three guests, Mabel Morin, Florence Bray and Mme. Henri Dussault, who were gathered in the parlour.
Sévigny then went for his children asleep at the other end of the apartment. He escorted his daughters and their nursemaids to safety then attempted to climb back to his apartment, but was met by a wall of smoke and flames.
It was a wickedly cold night, and the women must not have been able to conceive of facing it without their furs. The lost seconds would cost two of them their lives.
After they reached their bedrooms, dense smoke and flame poured into the hallway, cutting off their escape. Dussault climbed out a bedroom window onto a ledge and cried for help.
One of the speaker’s stewards raced to the front of the Parliament Buildings and directed firefighters to the scene. They managed to get a net in place as Dussault dangled from the ledge. She was unconscious when she landed.
“I have never seen a braver woman in my life,” Kingston MP William Nickle, one of those who held the net, told the Ottawa Journal.
Repeated attempts were made to find the two women still inside, but the rescuers were forced back by smoke and heat.
About half an hour after the fire started, Ottawa firefighters pulled Morin and Bray from a second bedroom where they had collapsed on a couch. Their hands were scratched and bleeding from clawing at the window, which led onto a fire escape.
A subsequent inquest found that the window frame had been recently painted. Sévigny had often complained about how difficult it was to open.
Morin, 30, the wife of a lawyer in St. Joseph de Beauce, had intended to leave Ottawa days earlier, but kept postponing the trip because of an illness. She was the mother of five children. Bray, 27, left behind her husband, a Quebec City businessman, and their three-year-old.
A distraught Mme. Sévigny later told the Ottawa Citizen: “Oh, if those two ladies had only followed me when I tugged at their skirts, instead of returning for their furs, they would have been safe.”
There were many narrow escapes, some ready heroes, and much tragedy on the night that Parliament burned.
Agriculture Minister Martin Burrell, whose office adjoined the reading room, had to run for his life through the heart of the fire. He suffered serious burns to his head and hands.
The drama on Parliament Hill unfolded everywhere at once.
In the Library of Parliament, clerk Michael MacCormac ordered closed the heavy iron doors that joined the library to Centre Block as soon as he heard a messenger cry out that the reading room was on fire. He would be made a member of the Order of the British Empire.
In Room 107, steward Walter Hill was reading a newspaper in the deputy speaker’s sitting room when he heard a strange roar. He opened the door to discover the second-floor hallway running with smoke and flame — and a man struggling along one of its walls.
He pulled the man, whom he later identified as assistant Commons clerk René Laplante, into the office and slammed the door. Laplante had a room next door.
They were in desperate trouble. With the heat of the inferno building, Hill pulled down the curtains and tied them together. He anchored them, smashed the window, and tossed the makeshift rope toward the courtyard below.
Hill implored Laplante to join him on the lifeline, but the 60-year-old clerk refused to go, and instead begged, “For God’s sake, send someone back after me.”
Hill later told the Globe: “I explained that it was certain death to remain in the room, while if we left by the window, we took a chance of getting through with probably a broken leg. My efforts were all in vain, and when I could not stand the terrible heat any longer, I had to leave him.
“As I looked at him before I took the leap, he was on his knees praying. It was awful to have to go as I knew in five minutes he would be a dead man.”
Hill injured his back and leg in a long drop to the stone courtyard, but he lived to talk about his daring escape.
The body of Laplante, a married Montrealer who had served 19 years as a Commons clerk, would be found two days later.
The Speaker’s entrance suddenly collapsed
Firefighters and volunteers battled all evening to save the Parliament Buildings and those trapped inside them.
Around midnight, after fighting the blaze for hours, government pipefitter Alphonse Desjardins expressed concern about the safety of a co-worker still in the building’s boiler room — an engineer who had rebuffed earlier entreaties to leave his post. Desjardins enlisted his nephew and a few other men to help save him. If necessary, he said, they’d drag the engineer out.
The men went into the basement and ran a fire hose down the hallway to douse some flames licking out of the Parliamentary barbershop, near the boiler room.
It was then that disaster struck: the west tower of the Speaker’s entrance suddenly collapsed and crashed down onto the rescue party.
Dominion Police officer James Knox grabbed one of the men, Charles George, a waiter in the Parliamentary restaurant, and pulled him to safety. George would later give the officer a gold watch for saving his life.
But three men were buried by debris. Randolph Fanning, a post office employee who had earlier in the night tried to rescue Morin and Bray, was killed. So was the pipefitter Desjardins, 55, a father of three, and his nephew and namesake, Dominion Police Const. Alphonse Desjardins Jr., 27, also a father of three.
On Wellington Street, Desjardins Sr.’s wife, Exilda, and son, Horace, a seminary student, were in the crowd that had gathered to watch events unfold on Parliament Hill. They stayed late into the night. Yet it wasn’t until the next day that they learned — by reading the newspaper — of their loved one’s death.
A year after the fire, Parliament granted a $2,000 “compassionate allowance” to each of the families left behind by the men killed in the rescue effort. The family of clerk René Laplante received $5,000.
Ottawa’s Yolande Desjardins, 86, says her father, Horace, abandoned his religious studies after the tragedy and returned to look after his widowed mother. He later opened a Dalhousie Street pharmacy, married and raised four children.
Desjardins, who sleeps in her grandfather’s carved-oak bed, says her father and grandmother rarely discussed the fire. “It seemed to be something they didn’t want to talk about.”
MP Bowman Law was last seen alive in the messengers’ room in basement of the Parliament Buildings.
Messenger Richard Bailey told the Royal Commission that several MPs were there, including Law’s friend, Dr. Alexander Chisolm, who asked him if he “would take a chance to go up after his coat?”
“I said, ‘No doctor, the smoke would put me back,” Bailey testified.
Bailey then ran into Law, who was worried about something he had left in his coat pocket. “If I had what was in my coat,” Law said, “I would not care for my coat.”
The coat was in Room 213 on the opposite end of the Parliament Buildings. To reach it, Law would have to climb the stairs and cross to the Senate side.
No one saw him go, but it’s believed Law died in pursuit of whatever was in his pocket. His charred remains were the last to be found, buried in the rubble near the reading room.
Law’s only surviving grandchild, Mildred Saunders, says no one in the family ever discovered what was in his coat.
“I have no idea, but it’s a good question,” says Saunders, 85, of Bridgewater, N.S.
The youngest of Law’s six grandchildren, Saunders says the fire was a disaster for her grandmother, Agnes. “The family was never the same,” she says.
Agnes Law “just kind of folded up” and died a few years after her husband, while the couple’s only daughter, Dorothy, was left to manage the sale of the family business. “My mother (Dorothy) was just sort of left alone,” Saunders says. “It was a drastic thing to have happened: I don’t think my mother ever got over it, really.”
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/the-night-parliament-burned
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