How visit to the pictures soon turned to tragedy
A smoking film box sparked a panic that left 71 children dead
NINE decades on, it is now at the very edge of living memory – and scarcely recalled at all, beyond this proud and close-knit town. Yet the Paisley cinema disaster, on December 31, 1929, is still locally spoken of with horror.
It claimed the lives of 71 children – most of them under three years of age; they were slain not by fire or structural failure but by their own terror, and it remains the worst cinema disaster in British history.
Hogmanay that year fell on a Tuesday – New Year was then the chief winter feast in Scotland – and, that afternoon, the Glen Cinema, by Paisley Cross in the Market Square, threw a special children’s matinée.
It was packed out – abnormally so, with a huge crowd of youngsters from the ‘poorer classes,’ as one report put it. There were 500 to 600 of them, ‘larger than the place was ever meant to hold,’ and many boys and girls standing between the seats: in an age of large families, many not yet twelve were escorting gaggles of smaller siblings.
The first film – a silent weepie, was, ironically, called The Crowd. Then the projectionist, Alexander Rosie, hastened to put on a two-reel comedy as a junior colleague, 15-year old James McVay, carried the used film off to the rewinding room.
Movies were then printed on highly flammable nitrocellulose film. It can catch fire spontaneously and burn without air. The comedy had just started when Rosie heard an ominous hissing from the rewinding room – then black, acrid smoke began pouring into his operating-box, through the vestibule, and into the jammed auditorium.
An aghast McVay burst in; the film he was putting away had begun to smoulder almost as soon he placed it in a box. Now they could hear children screaming. The projectionist blundered his way through the blinding fumes and managed to usher some terrified youngsters out by a side-entrance, as young McVay tried to carry the burning film (back in its box) out of the building.
BUT, disorientated by smoke and overcome by fumes, the lad could go no further and, fatefully, dropped the box in the vestibule as he fled in search of the manager. The pity of it is that all was resolved in less than a minute: the boss, Charles Dorward, sprinted to the scene, grabbed the box, found a sidedoor and kicked the box well clear onto some waste ground.
The fire was out; and everyone was unharmed. But enough smoke had filled the auditorium to panic the children, and they stampeded, naturally, in the opposite direction – towards exits atop narrow stairs, doors that opened inwards and which – it later emerged – were padlocked. And, in the balcony, they fled fatefully down a stair…
Attendants tried desperately to calm them and direct them to safety. But ‘they were maddened by fear’. Many were trampled underfoot; within a minute or two, children by the dozen were crushed in a ‘horrible heap’ behind the screen, unable to move – unable to breathe.
‘I was in the centre of the hall,’ nine-year old John McDowell recalled, ‘when somebody shouted “Fire!” and we all rushed towards the door at the back of the screen. The children in front of me fell over each other in a heap.
‘I was pushed from behind, but I managed to keep from falling. I was terribly afraid, and thought I could not get out, when someone broke the outside door open and helped me out.’
Hundreds of would-be helpers piled into the cinema, followed shortly by squads of policemen and firefighters. Ladders were brought, windows smashed, weans hauled forth and borne to safety hand over hand.
At least one youth, James Johnston, 15, made it to safety – and then piled back into to rescue a little girl, and lost his own life. ‘For God’s sake get your smoke-helmets,’ folk cried to the firemen. ‘We can’t get in through the smoke. The cinema’s full of children.’
But, hearing of children, men plunged into the theatre regardless of the fumes, smoke-helmets or not. They would be haunted lifelong by what they found, behind the screen and down the passages to those useless exits, ‘packed with children huddled together in every conceivable attitude… as tightly packed as a wall of cement-bags.
‘Some still moved; others were motionless. Legs and arms were intertwined in the most appalling tangle… Living and dead were lying breast-high near the exits…’
Worst was the scene at the foot of that stair from the balcony. Unaccountably, the iron gate had been drawn shut, and terrified youngsters had piled behind it in a ‘horrible jammed mass.’ It took helpers an age to tear the gate away. ‘I spoke to one or two of the children in order to cheer them up,’ John Lindsay McPherson remembered, ‘but after a few seconds I found they were dead.’
In another narrow passage, the mass of youngsters was six feet high. The casualties were carried to a builder’s yard where the only doctor in attendance tried to direct artificial respiration. Every ambulance in Paisley – and, in short order, trams, buses, any vehicle that could be had – was soon carrying boys and girls to the Royal Alexandra Infirmary.
Fifty-nine were dead on arrival; ten more died that day, and another two later on – in all, 71 children, including entire families, dead of asphyxiation due to crushing.
The mortuary could not begin to hold them all – and many poor parents could not afford to bury them. A public appeal was made and, by January 6, 1930, £4,000 had been raised; meanwhile, some 50 funerals had been held on the third. One gravedigger interred two of his own children.
There followed the inevitable inquiries – and a prosecution. Fire experts identified four fatal factors – the position of the rewinding room, the blocking of the exits, the lack of attendants and the gross overcrowding.
No entirely satisfactory explanation was ever reached for how that film caught alight. McVay thought there had been an ‘accumulator’ – a crude early battery – in the box. Had the film short-circuited it?
Rosie was adamant no one had been smoking in the operatingroom, and prominent signs prohibited it – yet experts found recent cigarette-ends.
ON January 2, manager Charles Dorward was arraigned on a charge of culpable homicide – centring on that trellis-gate behind which so many children died. He was tried that April, but the case hung on the Crown proving the trellis-gate had been locked and, if so, whether or not Dorward was responsible. Witnesses could not agree and Dorward was adamant he had left the gate open.
Most likely, someone had pulled it shut and it had been hopelessly jammed by the sheer avalanche of frightened bodies. The jury found Charles Dorward not guilty.
The Cinematograph Act 1909 was amended, decreeing cinemas needed more exits, with outward-opening doors operated by push-bar. Reforms that were swiftly followed all over the world.
Of the many survivors, only two, Robert Pope and Emily Brown, are still alive, and this month they took part in a special Paisley Abbey service. The tragedy was, as Peter Smith – another survivor – darkly put it in 2009, ‘a fire that was never a fire’.
For Paisley, and for always, it is their Black Hogmanay.