Panics in Theatres.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume I, Issue 46, 27 September 1887, Page 3

Panics in Theatres.

It is not often we in Gisborne hear an' alarm of fire during a largely attended entertainment or meeting, but Saturday night’s affair will give interest to the following article in reference to the late Exeter fire :— The disasters that occur from fire and panic in theatres teach us a terrible lesson from time to time, but they cannot teach us the one lesson that would render such disasters impossible. Whenever the world is startled by some horror in Vienna, Paris or Exeter, entrances are enlarged and multiplied, and various other precautions taken to prevent the next accident. But the next accident happens all the same. In the present alarm the British Home Secetary goes as far as to announce that his G-overnment will legislate to prevent similar disasters in the future. But his G-overnment cannot do it. What is needed principally is legislation against panic, and even the Bight Hon Matthews’ Q.C., will find it oifficult to legislate serenity into the human bosom in the moments of real or fancied danger. Safe exits may reduce the magnitude of a disaster, but whenever a multitude of people is gathered together, panic will breed disaster in some shape or other. The ideal theatre-goer at the commencement of a wild stampede should arrest the flight of his wife and children, and calmly produce from his pocket a flask and a packet of sandwiches. “ Let us remain seated, my family,” he should remark; “ this building is probably not on tire and will not be. it it is on fire we will be dug out with the bodies; if it is not we will walk out presently over the bodies.” That, alas 1 is. what it really comes to in most cases. There is no brutality like that begotten of fear, and the safest place in a panicstricken crowd is at the rear. But fear is unluckily infectious, and the ideal theatre-goer with his packet of sandwiches is not to be manufactured by Act of Parliament. Neither wide exits nor prudential maxins will prevent a terror-stricken crowd from rushing and crushing and jostling and jambing, and then in a wonderfully few minutes they find themselves walking over the bodies of shrieking women, and grinding little children beneath their heels.