The Telegraph Key That Vince Coleman Used to Stop a Train Is in the Canadian Museum of History

Vincent Coleman was 45 years old on the morning of 6 December 1917 — the senior train dispatcher at the Canadian Government Railways’ Richmond Station in north-end Halifax, working the early shift in a small wooden station building about 200 metres from the waterfront. He had been a railway telegrapher for 22 years. He was married to Frances, had four children (the youngest five years old), and lived in a small house on Russell Street about 800 metres from the station.

At about 8:30 AM a runner from the Halifax Fire Department reached the Richmond Station with a message from a fireman who had been watching the burning Mont-Blanc in the harbour: the burning ship was a munitions vessel, the fire was approaching the cargo, the entire north-end district of Halifax should be evacuated immediately. The runner told Coleman and the station’s chief dispatcher William Lovett. Lovett and Coleman were the only two railway employees in the station at that moment.

Lovett told Coleman to leave. Coleman stayed.

The last message

The Canadian Government Railways’ Halifax-Truro line had an inbound passenger train from Saint John, New Brunswick — Train Number 10 — that was due to reach Halifax at 8:55 AM and was at that moment somewhere between the Rockingham flag stop (5 kilometres north of Halifax) and the Bedford Basin entrance. There was also an outbound freight on the same line and approximately ninety crew members at the Richmond yards.

Coleman sat down at his telegraph key, opened a circuit to the Rockingham station and the railway dispatcher’s central office, and sent the following message:

Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys.

The message took about 30 seconds to send in standard Morse. It was received clearly at Rockingham (which stopped Train Number 10 about 7 kilometres outside Halifax) and at the central dispatcher’s office in Truro. It was acknowledged by the operator at Rockingham at approximately 8:43 AM.

The Mont-Blanc exploded at 9:04:35 AM. The Richmond Station was about 800 metres from the harbour blast centre. The shock wave reached the station within about three seconds and demolished the wooden building completely.

Coleman’s body was recovered from the wreckage of the station three days later. His left hand was still on the telegraph key when his body was found.

What the message accomplished

Train Number 10 had about 300 passengers. The Rockingham hold kept it about 7 kilometres outside the blast radius. None of the passengers were killed by the explosion. The train was held at Rockingham for about 18 hours and then continued to Halifax (over the partly-destroyed track) on 7 December as one of the first reinforcement trains carrying rescue workers into the destroyed city.

The outbound freight train had already departed Richmond about 20 minutes before Coleman’s message and was past the blast radius when the explosion happened. The yard crew of 90 men was not so lucky — they had not had time to act on the warning and most of them were killed in the explosion.

Coleman was one of approximately 1,800 confirmed dead from the Halifax Explosion — at that point the largest accidental explosion in human history, surpassed only by the 1945 nuclear detonations 28 years later. His specific role in warning the inbound train and the broader Canadian railway system became part of the immediate Halifax Explosion narrative within days of the event; his last message was reprinted in Canadian newspapers across the country in the second week of December 1917.

The key

The telegraph key Coleman used to send his last message was a standard Canadian Government Railways issue brass-and-wood pattern, manufactured by the J. H. Bunnell Company of New York around 1908. It had been mounted on the wooden desk of the Richmond Station dispatcher’s room. After the explosion the desk was destroyed but the key itself was found intact in the station wreckage, recovered by railway employees on 9 December 1917, and held in the personal collection of Coleman’s family.

His widow Frances kept the key on the mantelpiece of their Russell Street home (the house had been damaged but was reparable) for the rest of her life. She died in 1949. The key passed to her eldest daughter Eileen, who kept it through the 1950s and 1960s. It then passed to Eileen’s son James, who held it through the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1995 — on the 78th anniversary of the explosion — the Coleman family donated the key to the Canadian Museum of History (then called the Canadian Museum of Civilization) in Gatineau, Quebec, across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill. The key was formally accessioned as catalogue number CMH 1995.43.1.

It is now in the museum’s permanent collection. It is on rotating display in the museum’s Canadian History Hall, in the World War I section, mounted in a small glass case alongside a photograph of Coleman and a transcript of his last telegram. The brass is polished. The wooden base has the small chips you would expect from twenty-seven years of service in a working railway station and a one-second exposure to the largest pre-nuclear shock wave in human history.

A second telegraph key — a similar but not identical Bunnell pattern — is on display at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax as part of the museum’s Halifax Explosion gallery. The Maritime Museum’s key is provenanced as having been the standard Richmond Station spare key and is not the specific key Coleman’s hand was on when the Mont-Blanc went up.

The Coleman story has entered the Canadian collective memory as the founding example of telegrapher’s-duty courage. A Canadian children’s book (Heroes of the Halifax Explosion by Joyce Glasner, 2003) features Coleman as its lead character. A 1991 CBC Heritage Minute reconstructed the last message; the Heritage Minute is one of the most-watched short films in Canadian broadcasting history and is still in regular rotation. A Canadian destroyer (HMCS Vincent Coleman, projected commissioning 2031) is being built at the Irving Shipyard in Halifax — a few kilometres from the spot where the Richmond Station once stood.