At 5:35 p.m. on a cold February day, February, 17, 1910, many workmen in the Gurney-Tilden foundry were glancing at the clock anxiously anticipating the end of that day’s shift.
Suddenly, with out any warning whatever, volumes of thick, acrid smoke poured up the building’s stairways and through elevator shafts. Within seconds there was a mad scramble as the workmen quickly headed for the exits.
There were over 200 workmen employed in the section of the building where the fire broke out. Many barely escaped with their lives.
One workman, interviewed after the fire, escaped down an elevator shaft by gliding down a greased cable :
“We were so thick coming down the elevator rope that the man who was coming down beside me, kicked me in the head several times, and I thought that I would lose consciousness between the thick smoke and the kicks I received.”
The Gurney-Tilden foundry was a large, four storey brick building which ran the whole bock on the east side of John street between Gore (Wilson) and King William street.
A major department of the company was the japanning room where black enamel was prepared so that the stoves could be lacquered to a durable, glossy finish.
It was later presumed that the insulation on one of the electric wires which ran over the lacquer pots burned through, causing the wire to fall into the hot flammable liquid. Following a brilliant flash, dense, black smoke rolled along the length of the floor, enveloping the room in semi-darkness in a split second.
Mr. William H. Griffin, interviewed after the fire, said that he was passing the lacquer room, “when suddenly there shot up from the lacquer tank a big flame, which instantly caught the stairs, which were close by. Then the smoke began to rise from the tank and stairs in dense volumes. The girl, Miss Payne, and the boy, Ed, the only two employees in the room, besides myself, fortunately were not near the tank; had they been they would have been burned to death, as the flame would have enveloped them. I at once cried fire and the girl began to develop hysterics and seemed powerless to move, so I pushed her through the door and Mike Griffin, another blacksmith, helped her to escape. I then notified all I could of the fire.”
Harry Bowden Jr., a foreman of the girls’ lock room said to the press after the fire that Dunnett rushed into his room shouting “Fire! :”
“I told him to be quiet, and hastened to assure the girls that there was no cause for alarm, and succeeded in keeping them from becoming excited. They quietly got their hats and coats, and after I had seen them all safely out, I left myself.”
As the Central Fire Station was less than a block from the scene of the blaze, there were several streams of water turned on the flames within a very brief time after the alarm was turned in.
A Times reporter on hearing the fire alarm rushed to the scene from the newspaper’s office just a few blocks away at the corner of King William and Hughson streets.
Turning north on John street, he could see that the whole street was filled with dense smoke. Later, he wrote that “the scene was one of the most thrilling ever witnessed in Hamilton. All along the building, windows were seen to crash through. The firemen ran ladders up and three or four men piled out of each window helter skelter onto the ladder and slid to the ground. They were hardly able to walk.”
At one of the windows, a man was seen smashing glass with his bare hands, and then climbing out onto the window sill. After the fire net was put under him, the people below called for him to jump. At first, the man was hesitant; the crowd’s pleas for him to jump renewed but were more a sending for appeals rather than commands.
Finally, the man hurled himself off the ledge and pitched headlong into the net. His name was Samuel Hobson, Later Hobson was quoted as saying that he saw the smoke pouring forth and realized that he had to get to the windows “but the smoke was faster than I, and I had great trouble in finding the windows. As soon as I did, however, I heard the voices below yelling to me to jump and I did so.”
The fire was mainly limited to the lacquering room and the firemen were able to have it extinguished within minutes.
As the dense, poisonous clouds of smoke began to clear, efforts were made to account for all the employees who would have been at work in the vicinity of the lacquering room.
“Where is Harry Bawden?” someone cried out.
Ladders were set up allowing several firemen including the Chief to plunge into the smoke to search for any missing workmen. Within, the firemen reappeared with not one, but two, lifeless bodies.
Both bodies were carried to the sample room A large crowd followed, anxious to learn the identities of the two unfortunates.
Among the crowd was Harry Bawden, Junior,
“As he peered over the shoulders of the crowd, he was horrified his father stretched out, cold in death.”
The other victim, Arthur McCulley, had only been working at the Gurney foundry since the previous Monday.
Chief Ten Eyck, who happened to be a personal friend of McCulley, had been the one to find his body in the building :
“That he lost his way and did not know the layout of the room he was in was shown by the fact that in going from where he was working to where the body was found, he had passed a door which would have led him into the other part of the building and, for a time, out of the smoke. He would then have been able to get out.”
While McCulley lived for a while, due to the resuscitation efforts of Police Constable Campaign, he could not be saved. Both McCulley and Harry Bawden suffocated and there were no burns on either body.
Percy Woodbridge risked his life in a vain attempt to save one of his comrades. He said that “it seemed as if a black curtain had been thrown over the entire department. I could not see a soul in the place because the smoke was so thick and it was all the time becoming denser. As I was slowly making my way across the room, I almost tripped over a man who seemed in a state of suffocation. With all the strength I could muster, I tried to assist him to the window, but he was too much for me and he fell from my grasp across a bench, apparently unconscious. That man, I believe, was McCulley.”
Coincidentally, Percy Woodbridge’s 9 year old sister-in-law happened to be in the neighborhood of the Gurney foundry when the fire broke out.
“I was walking along John street about twenty minutes to six,” she said, “when I heard the reels coming, and looking up at Gurney-Tilden’s factory saw that it was on fire. Then a man appeared at an upper window, and I cried “Look, look, there is a man at the window. Oh, poor man, he might be my brother-in-law. I then saw the fire escape put up and when the man was brought down, I saw it was Percy. I then hurried home and told mother.”
Harry Bawden Junior had collapsed upon seeing his dead father’s body. He was sent by cab to his home, having the responsibility to tell the sad news to other members of his family.
When a Times reporter called at the Bawden home with the purpose of obtaining a photograph of the dead man, he found the son “scarcely recovered from his terrible shock, he staggered around under the burden of his grief, talking incoherently. Upstairs the dead man’s widow, heartbroken, sobbed pitifully.
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