The Dominion Parliament in Ottawa was gutted by a great fire on the night of Feb. 3, 1916, that killed seven and destroyed the building—except for the adjacent Library of Parliament, which was untouched by flames and stands intact to this day.
Canada was at war, and rumours spread that the disaster was the work of German saboteurs. There were, in fact, numerous German agents working in Canada and the United States under the direction of military attaché Captain Franz Von Papen of the German Embassy in Washington and the Kaiser’s Ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff.
One news editor claimed that he had received information from “employees of the German Embassy” that “within three weeks from that time the Ottawa Parliament Buildings would be destroyed by fire.” The source for this was John Revelstoke Rathom of the Providence Journal, the flagship newspaper of Rhode Island.
It transpired that Rathom, born in Australia, answered to British intelligence. His job was to magnify German atrocities and war crimes in order to nudge American public opinion in favour of joining the war on Britain’s side. Congress finally declared war on April 6, 1917. When in 1918 the State Department sniffed a rat, Rathom publicly admitted his role in spreading British propaganda.
Colonel Arthur Percy Sherwood was chief commissioner of the Dominion Police, then responsible for Parliament Hill. An ex-officer of the Governor General’s Foot Guards, Sherwood had reinforced security around the Parliament Buildings with “extra vigilance” since the outbreak of war in August 1914. He testified that he had not received any advance word of Rathom’s allegations.
The fire spread rapidly because much of the interior was done in beautifully carved white pine. Ceilings and panelling were “oiled and varnished” and “highly inflammable,” witnesses said. (Inflammable is the correct English word for “easily set on fire,” but “flammable” has become the commonly accepted North American usage.) When the Centre Block was reopened in 1920, the walls and ceilings were of limestone.
The giant portrait of Queen Victoria, having survived its fourth fire, was restored to the Senate foyer. Alfred Hamlyn Todd, also an ex-officer of the Guards and in 1916 a Senate official, helped save the portrait. Incredibly it had been Todd’s father, the first Parliamentary Librarian, Alpheus Todd, who rescued the Queen’s portrait from the Montreal parliamentary fire of 1849. The elder Todd had also had the foresight to insist in the 1860s that the library be protected by iron fire-doors in the corridor leading to the Centre Block.
Today, visitors enjoy hearing that the library was saved thanks to those iron doors, painted to resemble wood panelling, and touch them for good luck. “The fire spread with tremendous rapidity,” the Royal Commission report stated. “Once breaking from the reading-room the heat and flame spread around the corridors of the House of Commons chamber and into the roof of the Commons and Senate chambers,” which the Chief of Police called “a veritable forest of timber.” Moreover, “There were no fire checks or iron doors in the building with the exception of one to the Library which evidently had the effect of saving the Library.”
The reading room, the report pointed out, was “used as a newspaper room” and “contained six double reading tables or desks with shelving on which newspaper files were placed. … All fittings, except two of above-mentioned reading tables (these two were of hardwood), were of white pine, oiled and varnished, and were highly inflammable.”
According to the official account, it was a quick-thinking Library clerk, Michael “Connie” MacCormac, who closed the heavy doors. Member of Parliament William F. Nickle testified that he was in the Library when smoke first drifted in, that he exited the Library and came back in via the iron doors, opened and shut by “an attendant.”
Curiously, there is another version of this event. In Toronto one evening decades later, socialist intellectual Eugene Forsey was dining with one of his heroes, former prime minister Arthur Meighen and Meighen’s wife, Isabel. She told Forsey that the iron doors had in fact been closed by Meighen, then solicitor general in the cabinet of Sir Robert Borden. As Forsey told the story later:
“‘Eugene, you know it was Arthur who saved the Library.’ I was thunderstruck. ‘No, I never heard that.’ ‘Yes, when the alarm was sounded, Arthur, being Arthur, thought at once of the Library, rushed over, and shut the iron doors.’ I looked at Meighen in astonishment. He said: ‘Oh, yes. Did I never tell you that?’ … I may add that this story has been strongly contradicted by people who say it was Mr. McCormac. … All I can say is that the Meighens certainly told me what I have just recounted.”
Forsey said he “recalled this too late to get it into” the three-volume biography of Meighen by Roger Graham, published in 1960.
When I chanced to meet Meighen’s grandson, former senator Michael Meighen, on the Toronto Island ferry one afternoon around 2010, I asked him if he knew of this story about his grandfather. He denied ever having heard it and subsequently confirmed that by email.
I know of no other source for it apart from Forsey’s memoir, “A Life on the Fringe,” published in 1991. It seems bizarre that Meighen and his wife would make up such a tale. They would have to be slightly mad to tell Forsey it had happened, if it had not. It’s possible Forsey misremembered the conversation. No witness identified Meighen at the time. Could McCormac have pushed the doors shut without bumping into Meighen? There would have to have been a lot of smoke! But then, unlike the library clerk, it was not in Meighen’s character to seek notoriety for having done it.
Remarkably, the Centre Block was entirely rebuilt in just four years between 1916 and 1920. Today’s much less efficient restoration means that Canadians won’t see the interior again until 2032.
