THE SUNDERLAND DISASTER
The Graphic, 23rd June 1883
The town of Sunderland was the scene last Saturday of a disaster almost without precedent for the age and number of its youthful victims. The Victoria Music Hall, the largest place of amusement in the borough, with accommodation for over 1,600 adults in the area and dress circle, and 1,100 more in the galleries, had been engaged that afternoon for a conjuring entertainment for school children by Mr. and Miss Fay, of the Tynemouth Aquarium. The prices of admission had been reduced to a penny for the gallery, and as a further incentive there was to be a distribution of prizes after the performance. All parts of the house, except the dress-circle, which Mr. Fay was not allowed to use, were in consequence well filled with children of all ages, from four to fourteen, but unfortunately without any one to control their movements. The entertainment had touched its close, and those in the gallery were beginning to descend, quickened by a cry that the prizes were being given away in the pit. Four flights of steps, with a sudden turn about half way, lead downwards to the basement, and at the foot of the third flight is a swinging door with a bolt which fastens in the ground. How this door, which had been open during the performance, was half closed and bolted at the finish, leaving only a space of 18 inches, or just enough for one person to pass, is still a mystery. However this may have happened, the foremost children seem to have fallen at the stair-foot, while those behind, unable to see what had happened by reason of the turn, kept pressing on, until the space behind the door became a wall-like mass of struggling bodies. The cries of the sufferers were unnoticed until The hall-keeper, going to the stair, was horrified to find the passage blocked with dead and dying, and the door itself fixed and immoveable. Making his way to the diess circle, and unlocking another door which opened on the staircase, he contrived to turn aside the still descending stream of children, and with the aid of a few volunteers, to whose numbers several doctors were soon added, proceeded to extricate the unhappy sufferers. The sight, as the bodies were tenderly laid out in rows upon the floor before removal to the hospital, was fairly heartrending. Some, and among them the youngest child of all, a boy not four years of age, appeared as though asleep ; but the swollen blackened faces and the torn clothes of most told tales of a terrible struggle, and rendered more than usually difficult the work of identification which now commenced as the distracted parents began to struggle into the hall. Including two deaths which have since occurred, the total of killed is now ascertained to be 182. The double inquests – for Sunderland is in two coroners’ districts – began on Monday, and have been adjourned till the 2nd of July, when permission will possibly be obtained from the Home Office to hold a single inquiry on the Sunderland side of the water, from which most of the victims come, and when the Coroner will have the help of ”a barrister or other expert” specially sent down by the Home Secretary to act as assessor on the occasion. The burial of the dead began on Tuesday, under a chill and clouded sky, with the interment of over eighty bodies in the three cemeteries belonging to the town, and in nearly all the factories work was suspended for the day. Letters and telegrams expressing sympathy with the parents, mostly members of the poorer classes, have ever since been pouring in, Her Majesty being, as usual, the first to send a message of sincere condolence ; and on Monday evening there was a preliminary meeting in the Sans Street Wesleyan Chapel to Provide assistance for those who needed it, and to commemorate the terrible disaster by the erection of some lasting memorial.
From a statement since made by Mr. C. Hesseltine, the man sent by Mr. Fay to distribute prizes on the stairs, it would seem that the existence of the fatal door was quite unknown to him until there came a block below where he was standing, and he heard voices crying, “We can’t get out.” The door, when he first saw it, was still moving, and with great exertions he contrived to reach it, and, with the aid of a workman, to pass several children through the opening. No fatality, he thinks, would have occurred, if he had known how the bolt was fastened, or if the door leading to the dress-circle had been left unlocked.
From a statement since made by Mr. C. Hesseltine, the man sent by Mr. Fay to distribute prizes on the stairs, it would seem that the existence of the fatal door was quite unknown to him until there came a block below where he was standing, and he heard voices crying, “We can’t get out.” The door, when he first saw it, was still moving, and with great exertions he contrived to reach it, and, with the aid of a workman, to pass several children through the opening. No fatality, he thinks, would have occurred, if he had known how the bolt was fastened, or if the door leading to the dress-circle had been left unlocked.
