Trampled to death for trinkets

'THE man eagerly scanned the faces of the dead, and without betraying any emotion said, with his finger pointed and with his face blanched, 'that's one', and passing on two or three yards still pointing, 'that's another', and still walking on, pointing to the last child in the row, he uttered: 'Good God! All my family gone.'

"Staggering back, he cried out: 'Give me water!' His face seemed to turn into furrows deep at once, and his eyes sank. I thought his heart would break, as he could not find tears to relieve him."

He was not the only parent in this unimaginably awful position. Laid out in rows around the auditorium - 124 years ago to this very day - were the bruised, bloodied and blackened bodies of 180 other children. All had perished in a theatre in Sunderland, crushed lifeless in a mad rush to grab cheap, shiny trinkets tossed out from the stage.

No parents can have thought, as earlier that afternoon they waved off their little ones - aged three to 13 - that they'd return to the Victoria Hall three hours later to collect their tiny bodies.

The Fays, travelling entertainers, had billed their appearance as "the greatest treat for children ever given". There would be "conjuring, talking waxworks, living marionettes, the great ghost illusion". And, most exciting of all, there would be "Prizes! for every child entering the room".

Mr Fay had toured the schools of Sunderland all week, offering tickets for a bargain 1d. So, by 3pm that Saturday, the Victoria Hall - recently built by Darlington's renowned architect GG Hoskins and partly financed by the Backhouse family of bankers to encourage workers to stay out of pubs - was packed. These were the days of bench seats, and about 1,000 children were packed into the stalls and another 1,000 children into the upstairs gallery. Parents were not welcome - they would have to pay 8d to accompany a child - and there was just one grown-up on the balcony.

Of course, parents weren't required. The kids had a whale of a time, gales of laughter echoing around the huge hall - although when Mr Fay miraculously disappeared in a thick cloud of smoke, the acrid fumes made several children vomit. Nevertheless, they soon recovered, and they thrilled to the finale when Mr Fay hatched some pigeons and set them free to fly around the auditorium.

The show closed shortly after 5pm with the distribution of the prizes. Some sources say that Mr Fay lobbed them liberally from the stage into the auditorium; other sources suggest that lucky ticket numbers were read out and children had to come up to collect. Whichever way, a scramble soon erupted in the stalls, and the children up in the gods realised that they were missing out on untold treasures.

Up they jumped and out they ran, scampering down three precipitous flights of stairs. At the bottom of the third was a pair of doors that had been bolted partially open to form a funnel through which only one paying ticketholder could pass. The doors formed, in fact, a death-trap.

Three stampeding children must have arrived at the 18-inch wide aperture of the funnel at the same time. They were caught in the trap: none wished to give way or to pass up the opportunity of being the first to collect their prizes. And clattering down the stairs behind them were hundreds more equally determined not to miss out.

Mr Graham, the caretaker, was in the auditorium. "When I approached the lower door I heard some fearful screams, groans and noises of struggling," he told The Northern Echo. "I rushed to the door and attempted to open it, and found I could not do so; the bolt was in the socket about two feet from the door frame, and the opening was jammed up nearly as high as my head with the bodies of children."

Sidney Duncan was caught in the crush. He was ten at the time. Ten years later he recalled his indelible impressions. "Within half a minute I was forced off my feet and almost buried in the struggling, dying mass. Only the cries of a few who were being crushed in the back behind could be heard. In front, comparative silence reigned, but the writhings of the expiring little ones were fearful to behold. I witnessed all, and lay unable to even aid myself."

The Echo's reporter wrote: "The poor children who lay underneath were soon suffocated, and the cries of the young ones, who fell plunging in all directions, only to be crushed by the weight of the succeeding mass which fell upon them, were appalling."

Mr Graham said: "I tried at first to take out children from the thickest of the mass, but they were so tightly wedged in that I could scarcely move them without risk of further injury to their poor limbs, so I began by picking out those little ones from the top who groaned, moved their limbs or showed other signs of life."

As the dead bodies were pulled out, they were laid out in rows. Word rapidly spread. "Sunderland has never before witnessed so heart-rending a scene as was presented by the mothers shrieking and struggling to obtain entrance to the building in order to reclaim their children, living or dead," said the Echo.

"The children were laid out in rows terrible to behold, many with their faces blackened. Though cold in death, their cheeks were swollen, their lips parched, and the tears of those beholding them could not be restrained. As parents were let in and identified their children, their shrieks were terrible to hear. They in some cases fell upon their dead children, clasped them in their arms, and cried out."

Within a couple of hours, nearly all of the 183 - 114 boys and 69 girls - had been claimed by their grief-stricken parents. "Men were to be seen in the public streets carrying away in their arms the dear bodies of their children, with a white cloth over their faces," said the paper. There were inquests and then inquiries, but it was never discovered who had bolted the door in such a deadly way (architect Hoskins issued a statement through his solicitor absolving himself of any blame).

This was the greatest British theatre disaster in an era of extraordinary loss of life in these huge entertainment palaces - at least 620 burned to death in the Vienna Ring Theatre in 1881; about 150 died in a fire in Exeter's Theatre Royal in 1887. In response, regulations slowly evolved about the number of exits and the use of outward-opening emergency doors.

All of which meant nothing to the victims and was of no consolation to their parents.

"It must have been a dreadful death struggle by those poor children," noted the Echo. Heart-breaking, indeed.

Chris Lloyd's book, Of Fish And Actors: 100 Years of Darlington Civic Theatre, is due to be published in September.