Last Dance
by Darrin McGrath

INTRODUCTION

The evening of Saturday December 12, 1942 was a frosty winter night in wartime St. John’s, Newfoundland. As is often the case on still, windless nights, it was bitterly cold, and “the thermometer was registering twenty degrees of frost.” Warships filled the harbour, and American and Canadian ser­vicemen roamed through town looking for some entertainment two weeks before Christmas.

One place the servicemen turned for recreation and enter­tainment was the Knights of Columbus Hostel on Harvey Road in St. John’s. On that fateful December Saturday, a local singing troupe known as Uncle Tim’s Barn Dance Band was to perform at the hostel, and the show was going to be broadcast over VOCM radio. Hundreds of people were jammed into the auditorium of the wooden K of C Hostel. None of those present could have imagined the awful horror that was about to unfold.

WARTIME ST. JOHN’S

In December 1942, World War II raged in Europe, Africa, and Asia. In Africa, the British Eighth Army under Field Marshall Montgomery was putting the German Afrika Corps on the run. Along the Russian front, the Germans were suffer­ing heavy losses around Stalingrad. At the same time, the British were making gains into Japanese-occupied Burma. And, The Evening Telegram reported that the “32 ºd contingent of volunteers had arrived in England from Newfoundland.”

Newfoundland, a sentinel in the North Atlantic, was an ocean’s breadth from the front lines of Europe, Africa and Indonesia. However, thoughts of enemy attacks were not far from the minds of those whose job it was to protect the far eastern tip of the North American continent.

After all, it had been only two months since the passenger ferry the SS Caribou was sunk by German sub U-69 while on the run from North Sydney, Nova Scotia to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. On the night of October 14, one hundred and thirty-seven people lost their lives in the frigid waters of the Gulf.

The sinking of the Caribou was sandwiched between two separate U-boats attacks on Bell Island, Conception Bay that resulted in four ships being sunk and sixty-nine seamen killed.

According to Steve Neary’s book The Enemy on Our Doorstep, the first attack occurred on September 5, 1942 when U-513 slipped into the anchorage at Bell Island and sank two ore carriers, the Saganaga and the Lord Strathcona. The sub escaped into the open sea.

Neary says that following the submarine raid, Bell Island’s shore defenses were strengthened. But the German navy struck again on November 2, 1942 when the U-518 snuck into the Bell Island tickle and sank two more ore boats, the PLM 27 and the Rose Castle.

The U-518, skippered by Fredich Wissman, had fired a torpedo at another ship, Anna T, but the “tin-fish” missed its mark and struck the Scotia Pier, causing $30,000 in damage. And, like the U-513, Wissman’s U-518 escaped unscathed into the Atlantic. According to Neary, the U-518 was also carrying a spy, who was put ashore in Quebec.

It is thought the German navy knew the waters of Conception Bay so well because of their familiarity in calling for iron ore at Bell Island.

Neary says that the Rose Castle had nearly been sunk on October 20 off Ferryland by the U-69, which sank the Caribou. The U-69 fired a torpedo at the Rose Castle on October 20 but the “tin-fish” misfired, allowing the Rose Castle to escape at that time.

So, in the three months leading up to the Knights of Columbus fire on December 12, 1942, the German navy was highly active in Newfoundland’s waters. German U-boats had attacked Bell Island twice and sunk the Caribou. Enemy torpedoes had also been fired at the submarine net strung across the entrance to St. John’s Harbour, the Narrows.

Blackout regulations were strictly enforced by the military. This meant that between sunset and sunrise, windows in hous­es and businesses, and even car headlights, were outfitted with shutters to prevent illumination. It was feared that the lights of settlements would be visible for many miles out to sea and would betray the positions of the many Allied ships plying Newfoundland’s waters.

Of course, St. John’s had been heavily militarized since the outset of the war, particularly after the United States began to build its series of bases in Newfoundland. The large American Army base, Fort Pepperrell, on the shores of Quidi Vidi Lake, brought thousands of American servicemen to be stationed in St. John’s. Warships filled the harbour, and navy men and merchant seamen swelled the population of the capital city. When all these soldiers and sailors went off-duty, filling their free time became important, and one such place the servicemen turned to for recreation was the Knights of Columbus Hostel on Harvey Road.

THE KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS HOSTEL

HARVEY ROAD

The K of C Hostel had opened in December, 1941 and on December 12, 1942 was nearing its first birthday. The building was one of several throughout Canada operated by the charitable Knights of Columbus organization, after the outbreak of hostilities in 1939.

According to Robert Ryan, the manager of the Knights of Columbus Canadian Army Huts organization, at the start of the war, “the senior officer to the Knights of Columbus Fraternal Society in Canada offered their services to the Government of Canada to provide comforts and recreation for the men of the armed forces of the country.” The K of C built a series of “huts” or hostels across North America to help with the war effort on the home front.

The enquiry into the fire would describe the hostel as a “sleeping, eating and recreation centre for servicemen.” The hostel included a reading room, a restaurant, toilets, showers, a dormitory where men could stay, a recreation room, and a large auditorium.

The building was basically shaped like a horseshoe. A front block about one hundred and fifteen feet long and thirty-eight feet wide faced south toward Harvey Road. This front block stood two storeys high and had a gabled roof. At each end of this section, two wings extended north at right angles to the front, with a courtyard between the wings. The east wing extended to approximately eighty-eight feet long, two storeys high, and about the same width as the front block. The west wing was only one storey in height, but the same width and length as the east wing and also with a gabled roof.

FIRE AT THE K OF C HOSTEL

On the night of December 12, servicemen and civilians had come to listen to the “Uncle Tim’s Barn Dance.” A total of approximately three hundred and fifty people had wedged into the auditorium, “like sardines,” according to one eyewitness. In addition, a considerable number of men were sleeping upstairs in the dormitories, while the staff of the facility, and a number of civilian volunteers, stayed downstairs and helped to ensure that the evening went smoothly, and that the canteen was stocked.

The Uncle Tim’s Barn Dance Band was a popular act in wartime St. John’s and was broadcast live over VOCM radio on many Saturday nights, including the night of the twelfth. The show was scheduled to start at 10:30 P.M.

William “Uncle Tim” Duggan later told the enquiry into the fire that shortly after the Barn Dance had started, local singer Biddy O’Toole (real name Mary Bennett) was belting out the tune “My Bonnie Blue Boy.” She was followed by Teddy Adams, who started to sing “Moonlit Trail.” Partway through the song, Duggan heard a noise he thought was a “rumpus,” or fight, starting in the hall. Little did he know that this was the first indication of the horror that would soon face those care­free souls crammed into the wooden-framed K of C Hostel.

William Duggan’s youngest son Derm played the drums on stage that night, and like his father’s testimony, Derm remembered hearing a noise and thinking that someone had started a fight. Suddenly, smoke started swishing around him and some­one yelled “Fire!” Everyone was running, but for a few moments longer he continued to sit there, beating on his drums, shocked by the unfolding events.

During the enquiry, survivors would recount feeling very warm, that the air inside the auditorium was heavy, and that they heard crackling noises shortly before eleven o’clock. Most reports and eyewitness accounts of the fire talk about the suddenness with which it burst into the auditorium, seeming to be everywhere at once, surrounding and trapping people.

The first person to actually see flames was a Newfoundland militiaman who was upstairs in the hostel, and who had mistakenly opened a cupboard, thinking it was a bathroom. The soldier was greeted by flames leaping out and licking toward the ceiling. He ran downstairs to spread the alarm. This was shortly after 11:00 PM.

Around the same time the people inside the building discovered the fire, some civilian and military policemen in the area took notice of the blaze. Two Royal Newfoundland Constabulary officers were on the beat that night and had walked by the K of C Hostel at the time. Constables Clarence Bartlett and Blanchard Peddle stood near the intersection of Pennywell and Freshwater, not far from Harvey Road, around seven minutes after eleven, when they saw the sky suddenly light up. Similarly, a United States Army military policeman, Corporal Raymond Hoosier, testified during the enquiry that around 11:10 P.M., while he was standing directly in front of the hostel, he heard a noise and turned to see fire and smoke coming out from under the edges of the roof.