When firefighters and the press gained access to the SS Noronic after it burned in Toronto Harbour during the early morning hours of September 17, 1949, they were sickened by what they saw. “It was a horrible picture of charred remains amid foot-deep embers and melted glass,” observed the Toronto Star’s Edwin Feeney, who was the first reporter aboard. “I saw the blackened bits that were once people. There was a young woman clutching her baby. The remains crumpled when picked up by firemen.”
The blaze, whose cause was never determined, was one of the deadliest fires in Canadian history, killing 118 or 119 (sources vary) of the Noronic’s 524 passengers.
The Noronic had a checkered history. Built in Port Arthur (now part of Thunder Bay), the ship experienced engine failure on its first voyage, in 1913. After it was determined that its height made the ship unstable, the hull was expanded to improve ballast, earning the ship the nickname “the Pregnant Lady of the Lakes.” Among its other nicknames was “Whoronic,” as some businessmen travelled on it under assumed names accompanied by women who weren’t their wives. During a labour dispute in 1946, the ship was attacked by strikers due to the use of scabs while it sat along the Welland Canal. A sister ship, the Hamonic, burned while docked near Sarnia in 1945, though there were no fatalities.
Ad for a Noronic voyage that never happened. (Detroit Free Press, September 7, 1949)
The trip that would prove to be its last was a special late-season run to Prescott and the Thousand Islands. After departing Detroit on September 14 and picking up passengers in Cleveland, the ship dropped anchor at Canada Steamship Lines’ Pier 9 in Toronto Harbour (now the site of the Westin Harbour Castle hotel) around 6 p.m. on September 16. Many passengers and crew spent their evening on land, enjoying the city’s entertainment options; those who stayed aboard could attend a dance, hold parties, play cards, or sit back and relax.
All but 15 of the 171 crew members left the ship. Captain William Taylor, who had been on the water almost as long as the Noronic, went with passenger Josephine Kerr to a gathering at the home of an Imperial Oil executive.
By 1 a.m., most passengers had returned to the ship and settled in for the night. Taylor and Kerr returned around 1:25 a.m. Taylor had trouble opening his cabin door — he later claimed he had broken his key ring earlier and reassembled the keys in the wrong order. Some who encountered him thought he had a drunken stagger and had liquor on his breath, although his cab driver said he looked fine. Taylor later claimed that he’d had only one small Scotch and couldn’t drink more, as he had diabetes.
A few minutes later, passenger Don Church, a fire-insurance specialist from Cleveland, was walking along C deck (the middle of the ship’s five decks) from the lounge to his room when he noticed smoke in the corridor. He saw smoke rising from a linen closet and heard rustling and crackling. Assuming somebody may have been trapped inside, he attempted to knock down the door. Failing to do so, he found head bellboy Garth O’Neill.
At this point, O’Neill made a tragic mistake. Believing the fire was controllable, he delayed informing other crew members and instead grabbed a fire extinguisher. When that didn’t work, Church opened the nearest hydrant, but only a trickle of water came out. The blaze quickly spread. “It seemed to Church that the heat was volatizing the varnish on the floor and woodwork,” writer John Craig observed in his book The Noronic Is Burning!, with “waves of flame sweeping over it as if the corridor were one giant fuse.” Church went to awaken his wife and children, who were sleeping one deck below.
Ford ad showing a trip on the Noronic, featuring Captain William Taylor. Windsor Star, August 8, 1949.
The Noronic was ill-equipped to battle a fire. It lacked an automatic fire-detection system or heat-sensitive sprinklers, relying on manual alarm boxes. While the ship’s external fire hydrants were tested regularly, the internal ones weren’t. The bulkheads lacked fireproofing. Flammable wood filled its cabins and hallways. Regulations introduced in the 1930s did not require the retrofitting of aging ships, and Canada Steamship Lines had shown no inclination to upgrade. Crew were left with confusing instructions on how to handle a fire emergency.
The fact that the ship was understaffed when the fire broke out didn’t help. The wheelhouse, which was supposed to staffed at all times, was deserted. Of the two special officials responsible for fire patrols, one was sleeping, while the other was off duty. Bellboys often carried out fire patrols when they finished cleaning, but that could be as late as 5 a.m. On this night, they were still working in the dance hall.
The linen closet would have last been used by ship staff around 7:30 p.m. Two passengers later testified that they had seen maids smoking in there earlier in the day. Besides linens, it also contained a cardboard box that was used as a garbage bin — and possibly also as a receptacle for tossed cigarette butts.
Photos of the interior of the Noronic following the fire. (City of Toronto Archives/Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 100, Item 460)
As crew and passengers grew aware of the fire, panic grew. The alarm horns rang, but when the first officer pulled the whistle cord, it jammed up. The whistle blew incessantly and, combined with the growing intensity of the fire, drowned out the horns. Some men allegedly pushed women out of the way while attempting to escape via ropes on the side of the ship. Those who tried to help with firefighting efforts found hydrant valves that refused to budge.
On the top-level A deck, people ran in all directions, some badly burned. A stairway was blocked by flames. Depending on which side of the ship they were on, people could dive into the lake or jump onto the concrete dock. A neighbouring ship, the SS Kingston, threw a gangway over to the Noronic, but it soon had to leave to avoid being set ablaze by drifting embers.
Passengers who didn’t escape suffocated to death. Of the 281 people who booked cabins on D deck, the lowest passenger floor, there was only one fatality. All the victims were Americans, except for one Canada Steamship Lines employee from Sarnia who was on vacation.
Photos of the exterior of the Noronic following the fire. (City of Toronto Archives/Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 100, Item 461)
Kerr, whose cabin was near the linen closet, smelled smoke and heard shouts. Opening the door, she saw the flames and woke up her nieces Barbara and Kathleen. They escaped the ship, though the girls’ brother and parents did not. When Barbara was unable to climb down a cable, another passenger, Cleveland golfer Arthur Alves, placed her on his shoulder and took her down. Kerr jumped off the ship, injuring herself when she hit the anchor cable. (Though Alves saved several lives, he did not receive a hero’s welcome from his wife when he retuned home, as he and his brother, who also survived, had told her they were going on a fishing trip.)
Several passengers survived thanks to card games that had run late into the night. Four members of the Yolanda Card Club from Detroit were still playing when they smelled smoke around 1:30 a.m. “There was no signal, no notice that the ship was burning,” Agnes Hintz told the Detroit Free Press. “All we knew was that something was wrong. Then everything broke loose. We just started to run. We didn’t even stop for our luggage — we just ran.”
Front page from the September 17, 1949, edition of the Hamilton Spectator and from the September 18, 1949, edition of the Detroit Free Press. (Note that the death-toll claims are higher than the actual final count.)
Water-taxi operators like Ross Leitch rescued passengers from the lower decks and from the water. “As soon as people saw my boat they started to jump from the first deck onto my boat and into the water,” he told the Toronto Star. “Some of them landed on the roof of my cabin and broke through it.” He noted that there was blood all over his boat. Leitch estimated that he and two companions took around 150 people to safety
A sense of how fast the fire spread was provided by Toronto Star reporter Jim Hunt, who drove past the ship around 2 a.m. on his way to catch a water taxi to his home on Toronto Island. He waited in a nearby restaurant, and when he left, he noticed “the sky was a mass of flames.”
As news of the blaze spread, people drove down to the waterfront to see what was happening, making it difficult for emergency vehicles to reach the ship. Every available ambulance within a 30-kilometre radius was dispatched. Taxi drivers united to provide free rides for survivors, taking them to hospitals when ambulances were overwhelmed. The Red Cross set up a temporary medical facility in the lobby of the Royal York Hotel; at the King Edward Hotel, cots were set up in banquet halls and meeting rooms, some guests gave up their rooms, and free coffee and sandwiches were provided. Survivors arrived with few personal items. One man, after being reunited with his wife at the Royal York, indicated that the only item of clothing he’d saved was her corset.
Front page from the September 17, 1949, edition of the Toronto Star (left); Photos of some survivors from the Cleveland area, from the September 19, 1949, edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Around 7:40 a.m., after the flames had been extinguished and the Noronic had settled on the harbour floor, firefighters boarded the ship. What they saw horrified them: Bodies burned beyond recognition, some of them piled up by exits and stairways, all almost indistinguishable from the charred wood. The decks had buckled. Wooden cabin partitions had burned away. The debris was almost knee deep.
Eaton’s and Simpsons donated clothing to the survivors, while other retailers provided grooming supplies and other items to replace possessions lost in the fire. The public called the Red Cross and the city’s newspapers to offer money, shelter, and the use of cars. By the afternoon, relatives had flooded into the city to discover whether their loved ones had survived. The Red Cross set up a special train service for survivors and their families to head to Detroit, where they could connect to other cities.
Photo of Captain William Taylor, September 17, 1949. (City of Toronto Archives/Globe and Mail fonds, Fonds 1266, Item 136606)
Captain Taylor’s behaviour raised many questions. As the fire spread, instead of taking charge, he acted as confusedly as the rest of his crew. He did try to hose down the flames, but, besides a few useless attempts to knock on cabin doors and windows, he made little effort to ensure passengers escaped. “I had hoped to end my career without loss of life,” he told the Globe and Mail during his recovery period at a friend’s home. Some crew members claimed drunken passengers had hindered evacuation efforts, but other reports suggested they’d invented these stories to cover their neglect of duty. That no crew members died raised many eyebrows.
A temporary morgue was set up at the Canadian National Exhibition’s Horticulture Building (now the Toronto Event Centre). Some of the cleanup crew pocketed valuables they found among the remains. Of the victims, only four were never positively identified; they were given a special burial in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
A memorial ceremony held at the CNE Coliseum on September 25 drew 8,500 spectators. Mayor Hiram McCallum read messages of thanks from Cleveland and Detroit city councils and a message from Michigan governor G. Mennen Williams asking that “all possible measures be taken to prevent such a tragedy in the future.” The main address was given by United Church of Canada moderator Willard Brewing, who declared that the “good neighbours who have perished in our territory, as it were, in our house, have stirred the Canadian heart with a sorrow that it has rarely suffered.”
A federal inquiry was conducted by Supreme Court of Canada Justice R.L. Kellock. Damaging testimony from the crew revealed the lack of adequate fire protection, improper certification, and poor communication with passengers. First Officer Gerald Wood admitted that he had no clear idea what to do, nor could he give his crew specific instructions. Arrogant Canada Steamship Lines officials dodged blame, feeling they were above reproach, and said that there hadn’t been a need for a closer watch that night because there had been no signs of trouble.
Taylor, who had suffered burns to his face and hand, was in rough shape during the inquiry. As he testified, his hands shook, his face flushed, and he became so flustered that he couldn’t read his notes. Craig described his answers as “vague, sometimes obviously evasive, occasionally almost incoherent.”
Canada Steamship Lines ad following the tragedy. (Detroit Free Press, September 22, 1949)
The final report, released on November 21, 1949, did not determine a cause nor did it find passenger intoxication a significant factor in the death toll. It did determine that O’Neill’s failure to report the fire immediately was a fatal mistake. Kellock’s final conclusion was harsh. “In my opinion, no one in a responsible position in connection with the ship, either on the ship or ashore, had applied his mind in any serious way to the handling of a situation such as arose on the outbreak of fire on the night in question, although such an eventuality cannot be considered otherwise than one which might occur at any time. Moreover, complete complacency had descended upon both the ship’s officers and its management.” He believed the fire and its resulting deaths had been “caused by the wrongful default of the owners” and Taylor. The captain received a year-long suspension, which he took as an opportunity to retire.
The inquiry determined that, whatever happened, it hadn’t been a case of spontaneous combustion. None of the maids or porters who might have had access to the linen closet testified. There were suspicions arson might have been involved, especially after it was determined that had been the cause of a fire that destroyed another Canada Steamship Line ship in Quebec the following year. Both fires, combined with a general decline in leisure ship travel, led to the winding down of the company’s passenger services. The company would pay $2.15 million in claims to families of the victims.
When the 50th anniversary of the fire was marked in 1999, four surviving passengers and 29 crew members attended a ceremony on the waterfront, where a plaque was unveiled. I’ve had a number of people break down in tears on the phone,” Fred Addis, special-projects manager for the Pier Museum told the National Post. “Even though it was a long time ago, for some people, there’s been no closure on this.”
Sources: Passage to the Sea: The Story of Canada Steamship Lines by Edgar Andrew Collard (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1991); The Noronic Is Burning! By John Craig (Don Mills: General Publishing, 1976); Report of Court of Investigation Into the Circumstances Attending the Loss of the S.S. Noronic in Toronto Harbour, Ontario, on September 17, 1949 (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 1949); the September 18, 1949, and September 26, 1949, editions of the Detroit Free Press; the September 19, 1949, edition of the Globe and Mail; the September 18, 1999, edition of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record; the September 17, 1999, edition of the National Post; and the September 17, 1949, September 16, 1984, and September 11, 1999, editions of the Toronto Star.