Francis H. Clergue and the End of Imperial Russia

By Mitchell Harris
It is a peculiar and little-known fact that the first president of the Consolidated Lake Superior Company may have played a minor role in the downfall of the Russian Empire during World War One. His life, as one biographer put it, was "stranger than one would dare to put in a novel.” (1)

---

In January 1917, the Russian imperial government under “Bloody” Nicholas II in Saint Petersburg, then embroiled with the Allies in year three of a great war against the Axis on the eastern front, winced at incoming reports of an uncontrollable fire at a munitions factory on the other side of the planet – the Canadian Car & Foundry Company (CCFC) plant in Kingsland, New Jersey, to be precise – which destroyed the plant and sent hundreds of thousands of shells flying into an Italian working class neighbourhood nearby. Fortunately, with their detonators not yet added, the shells were not armed and did not explode. Still, the tin roofs and thin walls of “Guinea Hill” (as it was unfortunately called) were no match for the shells’ sheer velocity and blunt force when they fell down from the sky. The Times describes the scene near the plant shortly after the fire started on the afternoon of 11 January:

Children who had been playing in the streets and had run toward the blaze in eager excitement at first were now running away from it as hard as they could. Older children who had been in their classes in the schools were dismissed just about the time that the rumble of low explosions and the thud of falling shells were awakening Kingsland to the realization of the disaster. Most of these children lived on Guinea Hill and their natural impulse was to rush home in time of trouble. But as they ran homeward they met their mothers and the smaller children running away. The streets were jammed for a time, families were broken up and separated, women in terror and alarm who didn’t know where to go outside their own district ran this way and that, and the cries of lost children were heard on all sides. (2)

The bombardment continued for four hours straight. In freezing temperatures, residents of Guinea Hill fled to the valley for safety, hid in basements, or ran around the hill in a state of shock and panic. Miraculously, no one was killed or injured, although an indirect death occurred when a man was run over while frantically attempting to board a train. (3) Their relatively unscathed escape – by comparison, seven people were killed in the Black Tom disaster six months earlier, and over one hundred at Eddystone three months later – was largely due to the absent detonators and to the efforts of a valiant switchboard operator, Tessie McNamara, who despite the fire spreading through the plant remained at her post long enough to send out mass evacuation warnings to all of the buildings. Born in Lyndhurst in 1892, McNamara became the first woman hired by CCFC in 1915. Later recalling the events of 11 January 1917, she said:

My first thought was to save the lives of the 1700 men in the buildings. While making my calls, the first shell struck the building and passed about five feet from where I was sitting. About a dozen buildings were now on fire, and I had completed all calls. I started to leave the building without a coat, but I couldn’t walk. My courage left me and the arriving firemen picked me up, wrapped a big coat around me and rushed for the gate. (4)

Investigations following the disaster linked the fire to a worker – an Austrian-Polish immigrant named Theodore Wozniak – who was secretly operating on behalf of a ring of German spies and saboteurs. Wozniak got the job at the CCFC plant through a German agent working undercover as an employment manager in New York. (5) He was assigned to Building 30, where workers used dust brushes and gasoline-soaked rags to clean shells in preparation for shipment overseas. According to witnesses in Building 30, the fire broke out at Wozniak’s bench after he was seen dumping an unknown liquid on the floor.

But Wozniak was prepared with his excuses. Like other German saboteurs, he somewhat crudely prepared a cover story for himself in the weeks before the act by applying for Russian citizenship and submitting complaints of unsafe conditions and fire hazards in the plant to authorities. Moreover, he freely admitted during his interrogation that the fire started at his station, but claimed that it was a freak accident – the result of a spark that flashed from a shell on which he was working. These excuses worked. Wozniak was released from custody and immediately went into a long period of hiding. The full extent of his involvement only came to light after the war, when a US-German commission investigated the more than forty munitions factory sabotages by German spies in the United States during WWI. (6)

The reports of the Kingsland disaster would have otherwise been unremarkable to the Czar, who had much bigger problems to worry about in 1917, if not for the unfortunate reality that his Imperial Army was waiting for an utterly crucial order of shells from the CCFC plant. To grasp just how serious this situation was, we need to understand the importance of the 3-inch shell for Russian battle strategy, the series of events which led to its supply issues by the end of 1914, and the magnitude of the loss suffered at Kingsland.

As for the first, the 3-inch shell has been described as “the workhorse of the Russian artillery” during WWI. (7) These were battle-proven in Russia’s 1904-1905 war against Japan and instrumental in Russian victories over Axis forces at the battles of Gumbinnen (August 1914), Galicia (September 1914) and Vistula River (October 1914). The problem, of course, was not with the shells themselves but with their logistics. Like most militaries at the beginning of 1914, the Russian General Staff predicted a short war. As a consequence, they relied on shell estimates from previous short wars when supplying their forces on the eastern front. This proved to be disastrous by November 1914 when, after months of heavy fighting, all 6,520,000 shells held in Russian stockpiles before the war had been used up, and wartime shell production had not significantly increased to meet the new demand. (8) Thus, by 1915, we find the Russian artillery “starved for shell” and “unable to defend against a major German offensive”. (9)

In fact, the Russians had recognised the situation already by late 1914 and scrambled for overseas shell contracts using British credit. Perhaps sensing Russia’s desperation, businessmen in Canada and the United States – industrialised countries relatively unaffected by the war – also scrambled to exploit the enormous wartime demand. The shell contracts signed during this period would become a source of much controversy in the final years of Imperial Russia.​

This was especially true of the two contracts issued to the CCFC. (10) A first contract for two million shells was initially secured in Saint Petersburg in early 1915 by Herbert John Mackie, a future member of parliament, who was working on behalf of a Conservative Party-aligned syndicate which was led by businessman John Wesley Allison and included CCFC president Nathaniel Curry and figures associated with the Borden government. (11) A second contract for three million shells was later secured by a wealthy industrialist from Maine with connections to both Curry and the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich. (12) He gave his contract to the CCFC in an opportunistic attempt to win a seat at their table (it worked – he was elected as company director in 1920). (13) After the two contracts were combined for a total cost of eighty-two million dollars, we find the CCFC plant in Kingsland producing five million shells for Russia by March 1915. (14)

​Interestingly, neither the CCFC nor its subcontractors had any experience in shell manufacturing when the two contracts were signed. This is perhaps the reason why the first shipments of shells were so severely delayed, not reaching the front until well into 1916. The controversies and changing circumstances which characterized the CCFC contracts are so numerous that it is best to refer the reader to Keith Neilson’s 1982 article in The Slavonic and East European Review for more details, rather than to try to recount them all here.

In any case, we know what happened next. In February 1917, one month after the Kingsland disaster, the total destruction of 11 January had been valued at seventeen million dollars. After insurance, the CCFC was out six million dollars. (15) Since they were not deemed responsible for the fire, they were not liable for the five homes in Guinea Hill that were completely destroyed, nor the dozens that were riddled with holes. Fortunately, residents of nearby communities like Hoboken, Jersey City, Passaic and Newark offered their assistance to the thousands of displaced and affected in Kingsland and Guinea Hill – so much, in fact, that most of it was politely turned away. The Russians, for their part, were out eight million dollars, although that hardly mattered, because the Romanov monarchy was overthrown that same month (the Czar and his family were executed by revolutionaries in Yekaterinburg the following year).

Indeed, one author finds it “interesting to note” that the Black Tom disaster which preceded Kingsland “might have lessened the shortfall that hastened the collapse of the Czar’s army in the fall and winter of 1916-1917.” (16) This speculative claim is arguably truer of Kingsland. Although the CCFC plant made shells for many allied countries, it was “almost exclusively” working for the Russians by the time of Wozniak’s arrival, and completing the final lot of the contracts at the time of his sabotage. (17) Hundreds of thousands of loaded shells (not to mention millions of unloaded shells) earmarked for the Imperial Russian Army’s guns on the eastern front were destroyed that day, and the destruction of the plant itself meant that they could not be easily replaced. Although accurate measurements are difficult to come by, the evidence reviewed here indicates that the loss of the Kingsland shells was rather significant and extremely untimely.

Russia’s losses on 11 January might have been mitigated through a strategy of diversification, if the original CCFC contracts for two and three million shells respectively had remained separate and produced in different locations. This might have really happened, if not in part for the self-interested maneuverings of the Maine industrialist – one of the men who put the Czar’s eggs in one basket. His name was Francis Hector Clergue, age sixty-one. He escaped the ordeal to Montreal with a handsome profit. (18)

1. Donald Eldon. “The Career of Francis H. Clergue.” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 3, no. 4 (1951): 254.
2. Quoted in Jules Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany’s Secret War, 1914-1917 . Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1989: 191-2.
3. Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom , 192.
4. Theresa "Tessia" McNamara. [Historical plaque]. Lyndhurst, NJ, USA. Bergen County Historical Society . Note: McNamara’s claim of 1700 men is somewhat higher than the more common figure of 1400.
5. Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom , 187.
6. Michael Warner. “The Kaiser Sows Destruction: Protecting the Homeland the First TIme Around.” Studies in Intelligence 46, no. 1 (2002).
7. Allan K. Wildman. The End of the Russian Imperial Army: Volume I, The Old Army and the Soldiers' Revolt, (March-April 1917) . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980: 83.
8. Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army , 84.
9. Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, 84; David R. Stone. The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917. Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2015: 4.
10. For the history of the CCFC contracts, see: Keith Neilson. “Russian Foreign Purchasing in the Great War: A Test Case.” The Slavonic and East European Review 60, no. 4 (1982): 572–90.
11. Neilson, “Russian Foreign Purchasing”, 579.
12. Eldon, “Career of Francis H. Clergue”, 265.
13. Eldon, “Career of Francis H. Clergue”, 265.
14. Neilson, “Russian Foreign Purchasing”, 580.
15. Passaic Daily News (Passaic, NJ), 13 January 1917, p. 1, 7. 16. Warner, “Kaiser Sows Destruction”, footnote 7.
17. Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom , 186-188; Neilson, “Russian Foreign Purchasing”, 585.
​18. Eldon, “Career of Francis H. Clergue”, 266: “There is some evidence that he [Clergue] himself profited considerably from the Russian shell contracts."