In
September of 1949, I traveled from Calgary to Kingston to become
a member of the Class of Meds ’55.
Two
very important factors combined to make this financially
possible: I was the recipient of the Queen’s Provincial
Scholarship for Alberta which provided my tuition; and my father
worked for the CPR and held a “long-service pass”.
That wondrous pass provided free transportation across the country
for the next 6 years (3 nights, 2 days each way), including a
visit home each Christmas – a week on the train and a week
at home. On my initial excursion, the train arrived in Toronto around
7 am the morning of Saturday 17 September, and 3-4 hours later
I was to board a connecting train to Kingston. Someone had suggested
that, since this was my first time in Toronto, I should venture
across the street and check out the magnificent Royal York Hotel.
This I did and at this point my Gael Tale merges with the story
of one of the great tragedies of Great Lakes shipping. The Royal York that morning was a tumultuous scene and like
no hotel I had ever seen. Hundreds of people were in the lobby,
many of them wrapped in hotel blankets with little or no clothing
underneath. With a few questions I soon heard about the Noronic
fire.  The
SS Noronic – flagship of the Canada Steamship Lines
and the largest passenger cruise ship on the Great Lakes – had
come to a fiery end on the night of 16 September 1949 while docked
in Toronto harbour at the foot of Yonge Street.
The Noronic was a magnificent craft, a stately queen of the
Lakes - five decks, carved staircases, walls of teak, oak and
cherry, a ballroom and many opulent facilities for pampering
her guests. On
this particular cruise, which began in Windsor/Detroit, she
crossed Lake Erie to Cleveland and traveled through the Welland
Canal into Lake Ontario to dock in Toronto Harbour before going
on to the Thousand Islands and Prescott - which means she would
have sailed past Queen’s at about the same time as I was
arriving by train. On board were 544 passengers and 171 crew
members. Many had left the ship that evening to go sightseeing
in Toronto, including much of the crew, but most had returned
and were asleep in their cabins when the fire started in a linen
cupboard around 2:30 am. The
fire spread forcefully and rapidly. The ship’s fire
hoses were out of order. Much confusion arose as to how the passengers
could evacuate the ship. Access routes were from one deck only.
Most of the ships stairwells were on fire. A 135-foot old wooden
ladder that the fire department had stretched from the pier to
the deck broke, dropping passengers into the lake. Many were
trapped in their rooms. Others decided to jump into the lake
- all but one were successfully rescued.
After pumping 6.4 million liters of water into the ship, the
Toronto Fire Department gained control of the fire around 5 am.
It was another few hours before the wreckage had cooled down
enough for firefighters to board the ship and survey the dreadful
aftermath. Survivors were brought to the Royal York; the dead were taken
to a temporary morgue in the Horticultural Building at the Exhibition
grounds - 118 passengers lost their lives. Needless
to say a Board of Inquiry was called into action. A subject
of much acrimony was that the entire crew escaped, possibly
because they knew where the exit was while the passengers had
never been informed of exit routes and procedures. The Noronic
had been exempted from regulations requiring fire-resistant and
fire-retardant bulkheads because of her age - 37 years – grand-fathered
in or out so to speak. It was suggested that all those years
of polishing so much fine wood with lemon oil made her even more
combustible. The Board attributed the high death toll to “complete
complacency that had descended upon both the ships’ officers
and management”. As a consequence, stringent new requirements
for passenger ship safety were enacted in 1950. And
so began my first year at Queen’s, with an indelible
memory of tragedy to start it off. However, as I write this tale
- 56 years later - I am preparing to revisit Kingston in 2 weeks
for Reunion Weekend. I am looking forward to joining my classmates
of Meds ’55 for our 50th anniversary celebration. I suspect
we will be sharing many, many more Gael Tales and rejoicing in
the stories that provide so many happy memories of our time at
Queens. Therese Gauthier Lynch
Meds 55
Reference: en.wikipedia.org
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