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Thursday, 26 September 2013

60 years ago: The CBC Manitoba Building opens !

CBC Building Winnipeg

My latest post at my Downtown Winnipeg Places blog looks at the CBC Manitoba building

It opened on September 25, 1953 as CBC's second home in Winnipeg. Its history, however, dates back to 1927 when it was constructed as a Cadillac dealership !

Friday, 20 September 2013

Manitoba's Worst Train Disasters: Winnipeg (1906)

© 2013, Christian Cassidy

This is one in a series about Manitoba's worst train disasters.


Manitoba Hotel, circa 1891. (City of Vancouver Archives)

On Thursday, November 29, 1906, a bizarre series of events ended in the death of four people in the CNR's East Yards, now known as The Forks.

At 3:50 p.m. an eastbound Canadian Northern Railway passenger train was just kilometres away from the Winnipeg CNR passenger depot behind the Manitoba Hotel at Main Street and Water Avenue, (it would be another six years before Union Station was built.) At the same time, a lone freight engine was reversing out of the CNR East Yards en route to the West Yards (in Fort Rouge) to pick up cars.

As both trains neared the foot of Spadina Avenue, (now Stradbrook Avenue), their crews realized that they were on a collision course, but it was too late.

The passenger train, which was running two hours late, received the most damage. A number of its windows were broken and its front wheel truck derailed. The crew and passengers received a heavy jolt but there were no serious injuries. People either walked or took streetcars to the passenger station.

The crew of the freight engine were also spared as they had pulled the emergency brake and jumped to safety into the snow drifts along side the tracks. The freight engine sustained damage to its coal tender.

That should have been the end of the incident, but it wasn't.

November 30, 1906, Winnipeg Tribune

The heavy jolt popped the freight engine's transmission into "forward" and it began travelling back toward the East Yards. Due to the snow, the crew could not jump back on board to stop it.

A switchman in the yards saw the engine return and switched it onto a side track. He gave the signal for it to slow down and come to a stop, not realizing that there was no crew on board.


Ahead on that same track there was a crew of nine men were loading an industrial cement mixer onto a freight train. The runaway engine struck the end of the train at a speed of about 10 kph. The cement mixer shifted and train cars buckled, some spilling onto Water Avenue.

November 30, 1906, The New York Times

One worker, Michael Mudlow, was killed instantly. The crew supervisor, William Neal, died a few minutes later as he was about to be rushed to hospital.

A number of men were seriously injured, some of them crushed between rail cars. Two of them, John Suttice and Tony Oleson, died over the next 48 hours from extensive internal injuries. All of the dead were employees of the construction company that was loading the mixer.


As bad as the accident was, it could have been much worse.

If the switch had not been thrown as the engine re-entered the yards, it would have continued on to the dead-end at the passenger station behind the hotel where hundreds of people were awaiting the arrival of the passenger train now stuck back at Stradbrook Avenue.


 December 4, 1906, Manitoba Free Press

A coroner's inquest was held into the accident.

The jury was told by the supervisor who dispatched the freight engine from the East Yards down the single track to the West Yards that he felt there was plenty of time for it to get to Fort Rouge before the passenger train, which was just arriving at the city limits, reached the same spot. 


The inquest concluded on December 3, 1906. The jury found the accident to be "...the result of the extreme negligence of the Canadian National Railway Company."

It recommended that the railway post an employee at the Portage Junction, (near Jubilee Avenue), with a direct communication link to the yard office to inform them when a train had passed. It also recommended that a double track be laid between the CNR's East and West Yards. 


The Dead:

Michael Mudlow, "Polish immigrant", died at the scene. He left a wife back in Poland and is buried in St. Mary's Cemetery.

William Neal, 48, 23 Martha Street. Died en route to hospital. He left a wife and four children.

John Suttice, Pritchard Avenue. Died the following day in hospital surrounded by his wife and mother. He had a small child.

Tony Oleson, 30, 125 Gladsone Street. Died two days later from massive internal injuries.He left a wife and at least two small children, one was less than a month old.

Wednesday, 18 September 2013

"The Human Scale" at Cinematheque


Check out the documentary The Human Sale at Cinematheque this Thursday and Friday at 7 p.m..

It examines how post-war urban planners lost the plot when it came to designing cities that included human interaction and how some cities have been changing those mistakes. Quite interesting.

If you come on Friday, I will be moderating a panel of local architects to discuss some of the themes and how they apply to Winnipeg streets.

For more information check out the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation website.

Monday, 16 September 2013

"Terry Fox Way ?": A history of Fermor Avenue


Despite the fact that he was born in Winnipeg and lived here until grade three we're one of the few major Canadian cities not to have something named for Terry Fox. 

Earlier this summer blogger The Purple Rod began a petition to have the Perimeter Highway renamed after the national hero. Cherenkov at Anybody Want a Peanut? added to the conversation by suggesting that  Fermor Avenue, part of the Trans-Canada Highway, be named for him instead. He reasoned that if Fox had made it to his birthplace he would have run through town rather than around it.

Renaming a street that has already been named for someone is tacky and something that I have sounded off about in previous posts. I felt that it was important to investigate who, or what, Fermor was.

The short answer is: I still don't know.


I went through both the Winnipeg Tribune and Winnipeg Free Press online archives from their first day of publication onward. I also checked the assortment of short-lived Manitoba newspapers of the day at Manitobia.ca and the History in Winnipeg Street Names section of the Manitoba Historical Society website. I even tried my luck with the a selection of Henderson Directories at Peel's. Nothing. 

The only mention of a local "Fermor" that I found was from the 1919 Henderson Directory: Herbert, a clerk at a drapery store who lived on Salter Street in 1919 -1920. I will assume that he's not the one.

The only newspaper reference to that name comes in 1904 and 1906. Wire stories about political upheaval in Russia reference Col. Stenbock-Fermor of St. Petersburg. I can't find a strong Russian history tie-in to St. Vital or any reason to believe that he visited here so can' timagine taht it owuld be him.

I went back through the process checking Fermer" and "Fermour", in case it was a case of a French word that got mangled, and still nothing. 

Thanks to the St. Vital Historical Society who checked their archives for me. Tehy. too, have no information on the origins of the name.

In my humble opinion, Fermor appears to be up for grabs as a street that could be renamed without offending someone significant from our past.

Since I spent a number of evenings digging around on this matter, here is what I did find about the origins of Fermor Avenue for all you St. Vital history geeks !

1921 Henderson Directory, p. 491
October 10, 1920, Winnipeg Free Press

"Fermor Avenue" first appears in newspaper articles in September 1920. The R.M. of St. Vital included it on their list of new streets to get sewer and water service. The tender was advertised the following month.

The original name for Fermor Avenue may have been Ismay, as seen in the above snippet of St. Mary's Road from the 1921 Henderson Directory. (It wasn't uncommon for the Henderson Directories to take a year or two to catch up with such changes.)

The intersection of Fermor and St. Mary’s Road soon became a hub of activity. In the summer of 1921 the Windsor Park Improvement Association used a privately owned field at the intersection for their annual Sports Day and Carnival. (The papers didn't say who the landowner was but it was likely C. E. Simonite, Winnipeg real estate mogul.)

The contract for the grading of the street was given in October 1921.

 April 22, 1922, Manitoba Free Press

An April 22, 1922 Manitoba Free Press article about development in the R.M. says that “On the Property of C. E, Simonite, which comprises Fermor, Inman and Kingswood Avenues, running from St. Mary’s Road to St. Anne’s Road, no less than 26 cottages have been built or are in the course of construction."

Also in April 1922, real estate company Stewart and Nicol began advertizing a branch office there. In May Mr. A. Cavanah took out a building permit for an eight-unit apartment block at the intersection and indicated that he would build an identical block adjacent to it in the fall. 

1922 Henderson Directory, (source)

This change can be seen in the Henderson Directories of the time. In 1922 there are only two households listed on Fermor, neither had street addresses. (It also appears that the street only extended from Suffolk Road to St. Anne's Road.)

One household was the W. J. King family. He was a chiropractor who practiced in the Somerset Building on Portage Avenue. The other was the Mitchell Family. It was headed by Frances, a bricklayer, who died in 1925 at the age of 54 leaving a wife and six children. One child was John (Jack), a pressman who lived in the house for many years to come. (As you will see below, Mitchells continued to live on Fermor for decades !)

In the 1923 directory there were eighteen households listed. Due to a printing error, Henderson's did not include Fermor in the streets section of the directory that year so this list is compiled from the names section:

82  William J King Chiropractor 
84  Jack Mitchell, pressman, Hitchings Paper Box
98  Jenny Olafson, bookkeeper, Canadian Security Assurance Co.
99  Benson Dalzell, manager, Miller Morse Hardware
100 Thomas Knight, clerk, CPR
104 E S Lord, clerk, Main Steel and Iron
109 Harold Haysham, labourer, Gordon Ironside and Co.
111 R F Palmer, stock keeper, Vulcan Iron Works
125 William Ekins, reporter, R. G. Dun and Co.
129 Harry Swift, linotype operator, Western Canadian Fire Underwriters
133 Arthur W Whitney, elevator operator, CPR Building
131 G N McBride, auditor, HBC
135 J Nind, conductor, Street Railway Co.
139 Ernest Partridge, chef, CPR
145 CD Belchin, Street Railway Co.
151 H J Francis, machinist, Street Railway Co.
153 Leslie Woods, employee, Travelers Ind Co. 

155 Jno Jolivet, accountant, Winnipeg Piano

St. Vital fire hall 002

All of this new development created hardship for the small R.M.. In 1924 its police station and other municipal services were relocated to the newly-built fire hall on St. Mary's Road, likely as a cost-saving measure. In 1926 the province had to appoint a third party to manage its affairs, (source).

This meant delays with continuing the infrastructure work. In a May 1927 letter to the editor, Fermor Avenue resident T. W. Knight complained that work on the road had ceased after the installation of sewer and water leaving it dug up and impassable in places. 

February 15, 1944, Winnipeg Tribune

Fermor Avenue's most famous resident is likely Betty (Mitchell) Olson. A Glenlawn Collegiate grad, class of 1945, she was a speed-skating phenomenon. 

She broke a couple of international records when she while still competing as a junior and took the overall North American Senior Women’s Championship in 1947, 1948 and 1950. Unfortunately, World War II kept her from international events in her prime but she was Canada's only entry in the world championships in Norway in February 1949, (women's speed skating was not yet an Olympic sport). Olson finished 12th of 20 competitors.

Related:
St. Vital Historical Society 

Thursday, 12 September 2013

Manitoba's Worst Train Disasters: St. Boniface (1916)

This is one in a series on Manitoba's worst train crashes.

 January 25, 1916, Manitoba Free Press

Just after 4:00 pm on January 24, 1916, a 20-car freight train was departing St. Boniface on the CNR's main line. At the same time a switching engine was heading in the opposite direction. In their respective clouds of coal smoke neither crew saw each other when rounding a curve near the foot of rue St. Jean-Baptiste.

The force of the collision pushed the coal tender of the freight train into the cab of the switching engine, crushing it.

January 26, 1916, Winnipeg Tribune

There were five staff aboard the switching engine, all from Winnipeg. They were: Tracey Tait, switchman; Dan Morrison, switchman; David R. Gilmore, switch foreman; Wesley C. Wortman, fireman; and E. Creiger, engineer.

Gilmore and Tait, both sitting in the cab, were pinned between the coal tender and their engine's boiler. Boiling water from broken pipes rained down upon them for about ten minutes until they finally died. Wortman died seven hours later at St. Boniface Hospital from internal injuries and frostbite. Creiger and Morrison survived with minor injuries. 

Nobody from the freight train's crew was injured. The man in charge of it, sadly, was George Tait, brother of Tracey from the switching engine. He was riding in the caboose at the time of the crash.
 

The following evening a coroner's inquest was held. The jury required just one hour to return a verdict of accidental death. They blamed the crews of both trains for failing to properly look out for each other on the track.

The tragedy came just two weeks after the Brandon train disaster when 16 were killed when a work train and freight train collided.

The Dead:

David R. Gimore, 41, of Arnold Street. Left a wife and daughter Mabel, 11.
Tracey Tait of Coburg Street, Elmwood.
Wesley C. Wortman of Gunnell Street, Winnipeg.

Sunday, 8 September 2013

Brutalist Architecture Tour !

Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre
It's back and as brutal as ever.

The Winnipeg Architecture Foundation is hosting another Brutalist Architecture Tour on September 21, 2013 at 2:00 pm. The tour is free but registration is required.

To see a sampling of some of our Brutalist treasures.

It's part of the Winnipeg Design Festival which takes place September 18 - 22.

Wednesday, 4 September 2013

Manitoba's Worst Train Disasters: Dugald (1947)

©2013, Christian Cassidy
This is one in a series of blog posts about Manitoba's worst train disasters.


Dugald, Manitoba

On the night of Monday, September 1, 1947, the thirteen-car CNR Extra No. 6001, known to most as the Minaki Campers' Special, was returning to Winnipeg from cottage country with 326 passengers on board. Just after 9:40 pm it was nearing Dugald, Manitoba.

At the same time, CNR Train No. 4, a transcontinental passenger train en route from Vancouver to Toronto, was stopped at the Dugald station to allow passengers to board. It was running two hours behind.

Instead of switching onto a siding, the Minaki Special continued on the main line and at 9:44 p.m. slammed into the stationary train at 50 kilometres per hour.

 Dugald, Manitoba
Above: September 3, 1947, Milwaukee Sentinel
Below: From the memorial at Dugald, Manitoba

The Minaki Special had the disadvantage of being made up of a number old, wooden passenger cars that were still lit and heated with oil. These relics were not used on regular train runs but still common on "beach trains".

The wooden cars closest to the front of the train disintegrated into splinters killing most who were aboard them. The cars that followed plowed into the rubble and a number of them jumped the tracks. 

The deadliest factor in the accident was fire. Oil from the lamps and heaters spilled free setting the cars alight, trapping those inside. The fire soon spread to an Imperial Oil storage facility next to the track containing 12,000 litres of bulk oil, gasoline and kerosene.

Emergency crews en route from Winnipeg to assist said that they could see the fire burning from ten kilometres away.


September 2, 1947, Winnipeg Tribune

The fact that more people did not die was thanks to area residents and the less injured passengers.  

Gerald Shields, (his name is incorrect in the photo caption above), of Dugald was working on his car when he saw the crash take place. He crawled into the wreck and pulled five people out before being forced back by fire, suffering multiple lacerations and burn wounds for his trouble.

Russell Bell, a trucker from Anola, saw the glow and sped to the site. Seeing that the last two cars had yet to catch fire, he uncoupled them and with the help of others attached a chain and pulled them free with his truck.

There was some first aid in the form of three nurses and a doctor from Toronto who happened to be passengers on both trains. The "Dugald' sign on the station was removed to be used as a stretcher to load the injured into trucks to be brought to hospital or to buildings near the highway.

The aftermath (source: MHS)

The injured were rushed to St. Boniface Hospital which was soon jammed not only with patients, but also with those searching for loved ones. It was a chaotic scene as there was no passenger manifest to identify who was on board. In fact, in the days to follow, newspapers carried the stories of at least a half dozen people who either missed the train or decided to stay an extra night at the cottage.

The less injured passengers from the Minaki Special were taken back to Winnipeg aboard Train No. 4 which sustained only minor damage.

September 2, 1947, Winnipeg Tribune

By late the next day twenty-six bodies had been recovered from the wreck and taken to Cook's Funeral Home in Transcona. Relatives of the missing were invited to come identify the charred, mangled remains. More than two hundred people lined up for the grim task but by the time the night was over only four were identified, most due to the jewellery they were wearing.

In the end, thirty-one people were killed and around eighty injured, fifteen of them considered serious with major burns, severed limbs and / or multiple broken bones.

September 8, 1947, Winnipeg Tribune

Only seven bodies could be identified and two were never found. It was decided to bury the unidentified at a mass service at Brookside Cemetery on September 9th. 

Thousands of people lined the route as the cortege of twenty-two* hearses and more than fifty cars filled with loved ones and officials left the Legislature at 2:05 pm on a twenty-minute procession to the cemetery. (* The additional casket was that of Richard Mellor whose body was identified but the family chose to bury him with the unidentified so that he could be with his wife.)

At Brookside Cemetery a brief private ceremony was held. Members of the Winnipeg Police Department, CN Constabulary and RCMP acted as pallbearers, placing each coffin next to a marker that read "Unidentified. Died September 1, 1947." A permanent gravestone to all Dugald victims buried at Brookside was eventually erected.

September 24, 1947, Winnipeg Tribune

The Transportation Board, CNR and provincial coroner all held inquiries into the crash.

Testimony at the preliminary Transportation Board hearing indicated the both the east and west bound lights were green, thus putting the two trains on a collision course. This put immediate suspicion on the signal man at Dugald.

Even before the testimony about the lights had not finished, the coroner issued a material witness arrest order for
signalman Donald F. Tedlie, a former RCAF signalman who had been with CN for three years. He spent a week in Headingley before being released on $5,000 bail.

As the inquiry continued, it was determined that an order had been sent to the Minaki Special by CN dispatchers to take the siding when it reached Dugald and that the light had been switched to red at the switching point. Tedlie had simply switched it back to green as soon as the train reached that point to save having to do it later in the evening. In other words, the light was changed after the train passed the point of no return.

The coroner took heat for his decision to have Tedlie held but stuck by it. The Tribune, though, published a front page apology to the signalman. The following year, Tredkie sued Southam for defamation and lost, but appealed and in 1950 was awarded $2,000 in damages.


A. C. Nichols, an assistant superintendent with the C.N.R., was a passenger aboard the Minaki Special. He testified that he didn't realize that anything was wrong until seconds before impact.

The train had been travelling at eighty kph then slowed to fifty before reaching Dugald, something required by law when passing a station. The engineer blew the train's whistle, an indication that he had received his instructions. Seconds before impact, the emergency brake was applied and Nichols knew instinctively what was coming next.


October 10, 1947, Winnipeg Tribune

The coroner's inquest lasted from September 23 to October 9 and heard testimony from dozens of witnesses. The jury lay blame for the crash on the crew of CN Extra No. 6001, the Minaki Campers' Special, for failing to obey the order and red light signal that they were given.

During the inquest, the jury heard testimony that it wasn't uncommon for crews to get "highballs" - last minute localized manual signals or hand gestures that overrode official orders. In fact, this happened to the Minaki Special at another siding just over an hour before the crash at Dugald.

This, of course, created a dangerous situation if CN's central dispatch was directing traffic based on their orders, not on what was actually happening on the ground.

In the end, t
here was no evidence that a highball was given at Dugald before the crash.

The jury recommended that a more robust signals system be installed at Dugald and that crews and local signalmen be given better training as to when and how signals and orders could be changed on the ground.


September 2, 1947, Winnipeg Tribune

The jury also recommended that the use of wooden passenger cars be phased out as soon as possible. In the meantime, they should be relegated to sidings and spur lines where meeting oncoming trains would not be an issue. 

The president of the CNR responded in the media saying that all railways had little choice but to press old equipment into service. He noted that his company had $50 million in back-orders, including those for dozens of steel passenger cars, sitting unfilled at factories until wartime restrictions on the use of steel was lifted.

 Mass headstone, Brookside Cemetery
August 27, 1977, Winnipeg Free Press

The various inquiries answered "why" the disaster happened: the Minaki Special train crew failed to switch to the siding. None of them answered "how?".

How could an experienced crew that was obviously awake and in charge of the train as it approached Dugald ignore the dispatcher's orders and the red light signal ?


The coroner's inquest confirmed that engineer Gaylord Lewis died from severe brain trauma sustained i the crash, not of a heart attack or seizure.

Though some of the testimony of rail yard workers didn't match up completely, there was no indication that someone on the ground overrode the original orders with a highball. Some who testified noted that it would have been physically impossible to give a highball as the very long Train No. 4 was idling right on main line at Dugald Station and they physically couldn't see the Mainaki train as it pulled in.


With the entire crew of the Minaki Special killed in the crash, what exactly happened in the minutes before the crash will never be known.

Dugald, Manitoba
Dugald, Manitoba

In August 1950, a cairn was erected in Malachi Island, Ontario, where some of the cottagers had their summer homes. No memorial was created in Dugald for sixty years.

In the early 2000s the Springfield Women's Institute began fundraising to create a memorial near the accident site. It was unveiled on September 1, 2007, the 60th anniversary of the disaster. 


The Dugald Train Disaster remains Canada's fourth deadliest train crash.


The Dead:

These names and photos are compiled from various editions of the Free Press and Tribune in a three week period after the crash. All victims are from the Minaki Campers' Special.

The CN crew of the Minaki Special were all killed:

Frederick Skogsberg, 50, conductor147 Walnut Street. He was a 31 year veteran of the CNR. He left wife May and grown sons Fred, Allan and Raymond.

Gaylord B. Lewis, engineer, of 97 Park Circe, Transcona, He left a wife, Mamie.

J. E. Papkie, fireman, 234 Bell Avenue.

Gilbert Rougeau, brakeman, 99 Victoria Avenue W.. He left a wife and young twins Murray and Joan.

 Three families were wiped out by the crash:

The Dixon Family of 121 Smithfield Street, W. Kildonan: Granville Dixon, CNR Rail Clerk, his wife, son Donald (21) and daughters Merle (11) and Patricia.

The Steele Family of 694 Toronto Street: George Steele, wife Verna and 9 year-old son Donnie.

Richard and Elizabeth Mellor of 20 Kingsford Avenue, St. Vital, and their son George Fraser, a TCA employee. Richard's body was identified but Elizabeth's was not. The family chose to bury him with the unidentified so that they could be buried together.

Albert Simpson (57) of 13 Morier Avenue, and his 2 year-old granddaughter Peggy were the only survivors of the Simpson Family. Mrs. Simpson and daughters Winnie (26) and Betty (17) were killed.

Edward Adams (23) of 754 Government Ave, E. Kildonan was the only survivor of the Adams Family. His father Stanley C. Adams, CNR employee, mother, and 18 year-old sister Shirley of 750 Moncton Street were killed.

Mr and Mrs George Harmon, Joyce Vander Linden, 308 Roseberry Street, St. James.

Donna Barlow, 17, of 82 Morier Avenue, St. Vital. She was the best friend of Betty Simpson and stayed with them for the long weekend.

Alma Wynn, an award-winning classical vocalist, 847 Westminster Avenue.

Edlaura (Ida) Kozar, 131 Langside Street

Marta Jarvi, 123 Sherbrook Street

Jane Jamieson, 774 Wellington Crescent

Miss E. Booth, 847 Westminster Avenue

 Adam Richardson, 48 Woodrow Place


October 2, 1947, Winnipeg Tribune, p.1

Related:
Dugald Train Disaster Manitoba Historical Society
Dugald Train Crash of '47 CKND News (video)
Manitoba's worst train disasters West End Dumplings