“I decided to focus on the stories of the Canadian survivors”: An Interview with Eve Lazarus

All Lit Up: Congratulations on your book Beneath Dark Waters and thank you for memorializing this piece of Canadian history. It was staggering to read that about a million Canadians can trace their roots back to an ancestor who came to Canada on the Empress of Ireland, and yet this piece of Canadian history seems to be a lesser-known tragedy. How did this affect your research, if at all? Was it a challenge to piece together a narrative?

Eve Lazarus: It was a massive project, and it took me a long time to find a structure that would show what a huge Canadian story this is, and one that has been largely overshadowed by the Titanic. I decided to focus on the stories of the Canadian survivors, and wherever possible track down letters, newspaper reports, inquiries and photos that would allow me to tell their stories in their own words. I was able to find this information from descendants, from various archives, and in one instance from a survivors’ trunk in the basement of a museum in Stettler, Alberta. 843 passengers died that night, many of them women and children, and whole families were wiped out. I wanted to show how this tragedy affected dozens of towns and cities in eight provinces—from Victoria, BC to St. John’s, Newfoundland. 

ALU: Can you talk a little about how World War I shaped the legacy of the Empress, and sealed the fates of many of her survivors?

EL: When I first started writing this book, my intention was to talk about the impact that such a large loss of life from the Empress of Ireland shipwreck had on the country. I soon realized that I couldn’t properly separate the Empress tragedy from the war that followed on its heels. Over a thousand people died that night, but this pales in comparison to the massive loss of life that would follow less than three months later. I was also fascinated to discover how many of the young men who had survived the sinking went on to fight in WW1. I write about their wartime experiences as described in their letters home, and for those who survived, follow their lives after the war.

ALU: In your research, did you come across any personal accounts of those who lost family members on the Empress that particularly impacted you? How did these stories shape the way you approached telling the history of the tragedy?

EL: I was able to find many personal accounts of the tragedy from survivors who had lost loved ones, but of all those stories, it was the ones of the children that had the most impact on me. Of the 139 children under the age of 13, only three survived. Eleven-year-old Helen O’Hara of Toronto lost her father; Grace Hanagan, seven, also of Toronto, lost both her parents, and eight-year-old Florrie Barbour of Silverton, BC lost her widowed mother and baby sister in the sinking. Florrie’s story was particularly heart-wrenching. She was taken from her small town and shipped over to England to live with her grandparents. It took her 50 years to save enough money to return to Canada, and she did that in 1964 on the 50^th anniversary of the sinking. Fortunately, her diary was donated to the Canadian Museum of History, and I was able to let Florrie tell you her story in her own words.

ALU: In your book, you explore the state of the Empress today and the many salvage and scavenger dives that have disturbed this underwater mass grave. What was your perspective on these efforts, and how do you reconcile the desire to recover relics with the respect for the lives lost there?

EL: I have mixed feelings about the subject of salvage. In the 1990s commercial operators ripped out the teak decking which accelerated the corrosion process and weakened the structural integrity of the wreck. A plan to blast a hole in the cargo hold to collect nickel ingots a few years later was so upsetting to the families of the dead that it led to legislation that designated it as a national historical site and put a stop to the removal of anything else from the ship. It was a case of shutting the barn door after the horse had bolted, because divers had been removing artifacts for decades, and many had made their way into private collections outside of Canada. However, many artifacts have also been donated to museums and archives across the country and resulted in the creation of Site Historique Maritime de la Pointe-a-Pere, a museum dedicated to the Empress of Ireland quite near to the wreck site.

ALU: One of the fascinating aspects of the Empress story is the bizarre and erroneous accounts of miraculous survival that persisted in the public record, even after being debunked. What do you think it is about these survival tales that captivated people’s imaginations, and why do you think they had such staying power?

EL: The first time I heard of the Empress of Ireland was in 2017, when I was hired by a New York lawyer to research the story of Gordon Davidson, who had supposedly survived by swimming 6.5 kilometres to shore. Experts told the lawyer that this wasn’t possible—not at that time of year and not for that distance, but he wanted to make sure. I was able to track down Gordon’s survival story through a letter he’d written to his parents immediately after the sinking. He had not swum to shore, but his real survival story was riveting. I was curious if other stories were false. I found that the captain had not been cursed by a murderer; a London, Ontario man swam did not swim with his boss on his back; a man from Brantford, Ontario did not watch his wife slip from his grasp and drown; and passengers were not hacked to death as they tried to escape to the top deck. In almost all cases, the originating story was published in the confusion immediately following the wreck. These firsthand accounts were not only sensational, but difficult to verify, and it’s not really surprising that they were assumed to be factual.

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