65 years after drownings, Montreal community still mourns loss of 12 children

Over six decades after her identical twin sister and her cousin were ripped away from her, the horrific images of an Île Bizard boating accident are as vivid to Delia Walton as ever.

As she remembers the events that transpired when she was only eight years old, she has trouble holding back tears.

"It's too painful," she says.

Walton was one of dozens of people who filled the pews of Union United Church in Montreal on Sunday for a memorial service commemorating the 65th anniversary of a boating accident that took away the lives of 12 children participating in a day camp run by Montreal's Negro Community Centre.

On July 13, 1954, 62 children headed out from the community centre in Little Burgundy for what should have been a fun picnic on Île Bizard.

After spending some time in the sand, eating a lunch of hotdogs and oranges, the children were offered a ride on a motorboat. Jack Seligman, a 44-year-old Montreal baker and businessman, owned the 12-foot boat and took two groups of children for a ride without any incident.

On the third trip, 17 children between the ages of six and 11 piled onto the boat, along with a counsellor and Seligman. The boat was designed to hold seven adults.

As the boat circled the waters, its motor flooded and a wave swept over it, causing the younger children to panic, screaming and jumping into the water. The boat then capsized completely, with everyone aboard falling into the water. None of the children wore life jackets, and most of them didn't know how to swim.

Seligman was able to save two children, the counsellor was able to save a boy and a passing rowboat rescued two more, but 12 children never came back to shore.

Walton watched from the beach as her sister, Doreen, and her cousin, Estelle, drowned.

She did not yet know what death was, so she couldn't quite grasp what she was witnessing.

Walton's brother, Ralph, was on the first boat trip and had returned to shore safely. When he realized one of his sisters had gone on the boat, he tried to sprint toward the water, but a counsellor held him back.

He carried the guilt of that day with him for the rest of his life, but didn't start talking about it until 2004, 50 years after the drownings. He has since died.

"That was the longest walk of my life. As I walked up Atwater Street with one sister and I had to face my mother," he told CBC News in 2004, describing how it felt to have to break the terrible news to the family.

Delia says it was forbidden to talk about the tragedy in the community, so it wasn't until then that she found out what her brother had gone through.

With her family keeping the subject taboo, Delia spent several days waiting for her sister to come back home. It wasn't until she saw her sister in a casket that she realized what was going on.

"I said to her, 'wake up, it's time to go home,' and she didn't," she said at the memorial Sunday.

She hopes that parents will explain what death is to their children so that no child has to go through what she did. Because everyone refused to talk about it, she didn't know how to keep living without her sister there.

"It was like living in a ghost town. Nobody talked. Nobody explained anything. You just had to go on with your life, a little kid, on your own basically because we weren't allowed to talk about it," she said.

A year after the tragedy, Walton decided she needed to learn how to swim. She had a note forged to look like her mother was giving her permission, and signed up for swimming lessons behind her mother's back.

She would make sure that her long braided hair was perfectly dried off before going home, just to make sure her mother wouldn't find out.

Calls for mandatory swimming lessons

Gail Millington Grant wants swimming to be mandatory in Quebec schools. Her sister, Paula Millington, drowned that day when she was only two years old and Paula was six.

She's frustrated that, decades later, she still hears about people dying in Quebec's waters. The province's branch of the Lifesaving Society says that, so far, more than 30 people have drowned this summer.

Millington Grant doesn't remember her sister, and only found out about her when was around nine years old — asking questions when she came across old family photos.

"A lot of the community still doesn't know what went on that day," she said.

For that reason, she hopes to put up a mural on the church wall facing the old community centre, commemorating the 12 victims.

"I want [children] to have the knowledge, the respect and the fear of the water, that's why I keep this memory going," said Millington Grant.

Her mother, Betty, is now 97 years old and still lives with the pain of losing her daughter.

'It split the community'

Kathy Grant's father was one of the counsellors at the picnic on the day of the accident, but has since died. She said he carried regret over what happened for years.

"Some of the people still blamed him," she said.

She said that a few days after the accident, he would walk down the street and have to face people shouting "murderer" at him.

She is hoping that the government will release a commemorative stamp to mark the 70th anniversary of the drownings, and also wants to see the incident added to school curricula.

"It split the community quite a bit because some people were forgiving and some weren't," she said.

"It tore part of the community apart," she said.