THE SURREY GARDENS ACCIDENT.

Lyttelton Times, Volume VII, Issue 450, 25 February 1857, Page 4

THE SURREY GARDENS ACCIDENT.

A most melancholy accident has broken the monotony of the Long Vacation.' A certain '< Jlr. Spurgeon,a popular preacher of extreme Calvinistic views and of the Baptist "denomination,'; undertook, on Sunday last, to hold a service,: . and preach a sermon'in the newly-erected Music1 Hall in the Surrey 'Gardens, a building hither-; to used only for-concerts and musical entertain-; merits, and which is, we believe, capable of accommodating from 10,000 to 12,000 person's. ■ Mr. Spurgeqn has for some time been preaching .at St. John's Chapel, Park-street, and recently, during the enlargement of that structure, has; delivered a series of, discourses in Exeter-hall,. .on. Sunday evenipgs, which have attracted continually increasing crowds, c;hiefly r from the middle classes. The repairs of his chapel being ■ completed, the permission •to use Exeter-hall; ' was .withdrawn; whereupon Mr. Spurgeon, in-; stead of returning to an edifice which his congregation had now" outgrown, conceived the

idea of ."engaging-the/Surrey. Music Hall, the most spacious room probably * irrthe metropolis. His intention was largely advertised and placarded, and when Sunday evening arrived 15,000 or. 20,000 persons, induced. by various motives, came together and sought admittance to the building. Ten or twelve thousand are said to' have found sitting or standing room in the place, while the remainder stood outside the doors, or besieged the iron gates of the gardens. The service then commenced, but had not proceeded far when suddenly, from some unascertained cause, an alarm arose. A cry of " Fire!" was raised, whether by malicious or mistaken persons does not appear, and the whole audience was at once in commotion. A terrible scene followed. The people in all parts of the hall rose en masse, and rushed towards the outlets, which were soon choked up by a struggling stream of human beings. Down "the spiral staircases pressed the crowds from the galleries, with such force and weight tliat the heavy iron balustrades gave way, and numbers were precipitated a distance of twelve or fourteen feet upon the stone floor below. In the hall itself the human tide heaved and surged—screams, shouts, and groans- commingled—while a few, who saw that the whole alarm was causeless, endeavoured in vain to calm it by singing some verses of a hymn. Frantic alarm seized on many. Some -threw themselves over the galleries into the body of the hall, others burst through the plate-glass windows, and jumped from the balconies to the ground. In this way the greater part of the deaths took place. Some, however, were squeezed^some trampled to death. A young girl was precipitated on her sister, and felt that she suffocated her, but could not move for the crush, "and for the weight of others who had fallen on her. A boy leapt from one of the staircases to the pavement, a distance of twenty feet, and dying instantaneously, was carried home in the arms of his father. One of the women trampled to death was probably within a few hours of her confinement, and had her condition been known at first, it is thought that the child might have been saved by the Caesarian operation. As it was, both mother and infant perished. The entire number known to # have lost their lives is seven —one man, five women, and one boy; but it is impossible to say in how many other cases the injuries received may have a fatal termination. Calamities similar to this in their general character have undoubtedly often, occurred before.) Great crowds cannot be accumulated without danger inside'& building for this very reason. There are in every large crowd a number of selfish, and a number of weak persons. The latter lose all control over themselves when an alarm is sounded, while the former deliberately resolve to save their own lives at the cost of any suffering to others. ISFo direct blame, therefore, attaches to those who collect the, crowd, if it be considered that they collected it for a legitimate purpose, and if they took, due precautions against accident. With regard to the first of these points there will probably be! some difference of opinion. If the real motive: of' those who collected the assembly was not gain, not love of display, not vanity; but an ■earne '.t desire to save souls, and to preach the Gospel to as large a number as possible, then, however we may differ from Mr. Spurgeon and! his friends astowr-at the Gospel message reallyis,we must hold that their purpose was one in which:

all earnest Christians ought to sympathise. Under this impression we would .not even wish, to be hard upon the accessories'of the gathering; —the placards: and advertisements, the suddenl conversion of a place of amusement, into a place' worship, and so forth; little .as they approve; themselves' to our taste, they .might be neces-; sary means to the end proposed, which we pre-; sume to have : been something like a great religious revival after the American pattern. But with regard to the second point—the sufficiency; of the precautions taken—the utmost stretch of; charity will not allow us to exonerate those in charge of the proceedings from a large share of blame, ...

Mr. Spurgeon and his friends seem to have been alike blind to the extent of-"the; danger which they wpre incurring, and incompetent to; deal with it when it arose. . A sergeant of police and eight policemen in uniform, together with a; few detectives in plain, clothes, was all the force provided to maintain order and repress alarm in a body of. 12,000 persons, from the,middle and lower classes. True, there were also sixty! "office-bearers" (query, beadles?) attached t(V Mr. Spurgeon's congi-egation;" but the utility of such persons in time of need is more than questionable., We certainly do not hear of their doing any good when the panic arose ; and it is not even clear that they did not themselves: share in it. Thus, the maintenance of order was, in point c f fact, committed to some nine or ten policemen, who-had each the superintendence cf above a thousand persons. Further, there appear to ha\ c beeen no policemen at all in thegalleries, where the alarm was consequently the' greatest. Again, all the doors and windows, were shut and barred, except those at the main entrance, whereas every facility of ingress and egress should have been given. Altogether it may be said that the arrangements were left to chance—no care being taken except to secure thecomfort of Mr. .Spurgeon's..." own-congrega-tion," who were admitted, first to the best seats. ' Nothing could possibly have been weaker than the conduct of'Mr. Spurgeon from the time when the alarm began. A man has no business to collect crowds, unless he can sway them pretty'well at his will. Mr. Spurgeon made no attempt to exert any control at all. ;H6w .would Wesley, or Whitfield, or Luther, or any of those wprthies : to whom Mr. Spurgeon's friends compare him, have acted on such an an emergency ?■ How "would they with eye and hand, if not with voice, have commanded -attention—have sub-dued-and calmed the people ! And what a ser-. »mon would they have made of such an occasion! Mr. Spurgeon, having done nothing" to avert;oi\ moderate the catastrophe,.essayed, to preach'to the 'remnant of his congregation after' it, but "knew not what to say to them." We do'not blame a man for physical or even moial weak-; ness under such circumstances. ,But the man: who is overpowered by them, instead of rising with them, has mistaken his vocation-whenhe sets up to direct .the masses.., It will be well/for! Mr. Spurgeon if the lesson of last Sunday,teachj him to moderate his aims, and content himself with a humbler sphere than that to which he has recently aspired. '"".'-'.' - ' : ;In all this we have said nothing of the most" painful feature -in the entire affair. "As people moved out,'' we are told, "a jcolle'ction was; made—the boxes for the new chapel (which.it; is proposed to build) were rattled about while the corpses were being removed, and the service, concluded almost as if nothing had happened !", On this point we cannot:; trust ourselves to speak. We will content ourselves with echoing the charitable hope which we have seen expressed, that Mr. Sptvrgeon was. so overpowered as to be insensible of what his- friends were doing in his name, and .that they were.ignorant that any of the accidents had had a fatal issue.— Guardian.: \ : ■ ;■■. ■•■• -•-., ' :