Out of Great Sorrow

In 1982, I taught an evening class of computer science at a small community college on the Texas coast.  The class had about a dozen students eager to learn about those newly developed personal computers.  The class was held at night because most of the class was made up of local businessmen looking for ways to lower costs or improve efficiency at work. 

Compared with today’s classrooms, this was a rather primitive teaching environment—there were no computers in the room, and most of the material was presented using an overhead projector or was scribbled on a chalkboard.  Only twice did I take the time and trouble to drag a computer (one I owned personally) to the classroom and set it up for the students to use.  The college had no computer labs, no computerized classrooms, and—as far as I knew—had not one, single computer of its own.

One night during class, a typical coastal thunderstorm developed quickly, causing wind and rain to lash at the building.  Just as one of the students remarked that the lightning sounded very close, there was a bright flash, followed by a resounding boom, and then the lights in the building went out.   As our eyes recovered from the flash, we could see out of the classroom windows that the corner of our building at which the utility lines were connected was on fire.  

It wasn’t a very big fire, and since we were all used to living on the coast with frequent storms, we weren’t too worried.  Still, we all knew that we had to leave the building.  Just enough light came through the windows so that we could make our way out to the hall and to the nearby fire exit located in the far corner of the building.  The building did not have emergency lights but a few of us had cigarette lighters and we carefully made our way to the stairs and down the single flight to the ground floor—where we discovered that the double exit doors had a padlocked chain wrapped around the push bar, so we could not leave the building.  Nor could we return to the interior of the building, since the exit doors into the fire escape stairs had locked behind us.

We were all seriously pissed.  A student and I used a metal torpedo-shaped trashcan to break a large window beside the exit doors and we all escaped.  I went to a nearby gas station to call the fire department (this was long before cell phones) and we then returned to the campus to explain to the fire department about the locked exit.  I learned later that campus security, not knowing about the night class, had locked those doors like it did every evening at the end of their shift.  This practice was suspended after the local fire marshal held a lengthy donkey barbecue.  (That’s Texan for an ass chewing.)

Today is the 140th anniversary of the Sunderland Disaster, a tragedy that produced lifesaving changes that we see almost every day, which should have prevented those doors at that community college being locked.  In Sunderland, England, a special magic show was held for the children of the town, with the promise of prizes and gifts of toys.  On June 16, 1883, over 1500 children showed up at the Victoria Hall Theatre for the performance, each paying a single penny for a ticket.  The crowd of children, most of whom were younger than 10 years old, filled up all three levels of seating in the hall, but they were accompanied by very few adults.

The show was a great success, except for the minor problem of a few children becoming sick due to the chemical smoke used by one of the magicians.  At the end of the performance, it was announced that lucky holders of tickets with certain numbers would receive a prize as they left the theater.  At the same time, the performers began throwing handfuls of candy and trinkets into the crowd.

It was tossing the candy and toys that triggered the disaster:  The candy and small toys had very little weight, so the little gifts all landed in the ground floor seating area and none reached the two balcony seating areas.  The children in the upper levels—rightfully believing they were missing out on some of the prizes—rushed to the stairs leading down to the ground floor.  The wide staircase had a single turn halfway down, after which the stairs led to a landing with the exit door on the left side of the landing.

This inward-opening door had been bolted in a slightly open position, leaving a gap only twenty inches wide.  Presumably, this had been done to allow an usher to examine the tickets of the children as they entered the theater and had been left open accidentally.  As the children rushed down the steps, they hurriedly pushed those in front of them.  Since only one child at a time could squeeze through the narrow opening, a bottleneck developed on the landing.  Those at the top of the stairs could not see what was happening on the landing because of the turn in the staircase.  Those in front were soon trapped by the crush from behind, unable to move toward the door even as more children pushed down the steps.

When attendants in the theater realized what was happening, they tried in vain to push open the inward-swinging door, but its opening by now was blocked by the bodies of children who’d fallen in front of it.  Nor could the attendants release the bolt holding the door open because it was located on the inside of the doorway.  One survivor, William Codling, Jr., later wrote:

“Soon we were most uncomfortably packed but still going down. Suddenly I felt that I was treading upon someone lying on the stairs and I cried in horror to those behind "Keep back, keep back! There's someone down." It was no use, I passed slowly over and onwards with the mass and before long I passed over others without emotion.”

All that the attendants could do was to pry one child at a time through the narrow opening.  "Don't let go of my hand, as someone is standing upon my face," whispered six-year-old Charlie Dixon to his big brother Alfie.  Alfie later remembered feeling tired, then being dragged through the barely open doorway by a strong man.  His brother Charlie was less fortunate, later being discovered down in the pile of children who died during the crush.

Eventually, one man—perhaps under the influence of adrenaline—wrenched the door off its hinges, allowing the adults to begin removing the hapless, helpless children, who by this time were piled as much as twenty small bodies high.  While hundreds were injured, 183 children between the ages of 3 and 14 had died of compressive asphyxia—a situation in which there is so much pressure on the body that the victim suffocates because they cannot expand their chest sufficiently to inhale.

The public was shocked at the tragedy, with sufficient donations pouring in to pay for the funerals of all of the children as well as to pay for a monument to the dead.  The monument, portraying a grieving mother holding the lifeless body of her child, was erected near the theater.

Parliament passed laws requiring all public buildings to have sufficient exits—with outward-swinging doors only.  Those laws are still in force in England; similar laws were passed in most of the countries of the world.

The Victoria Hall was equipped with new doors and remained in use until 1941, when a German naval bomb, dropped by parachute, destroyed the brick theater.  The people of Sunderland had no interest in restoring a building that had been the sad reminder of such a terrible loss and they choose, instead, to pull down what remained of the building.

There is, however, one more result of the tragedy, that lasts to this day.  Robert Alexander Briggs was a fifteen-year-old boy living in Sunderland the day of the tragedy.  A little too old to attend the performance, he was horrified at the loss of so many of his friends’ siblings.  When he grew up, he studied engineering and, just nine years after the disaster, he was granted a patent on his safety door-locking mechanism, which featured an interior horizontal bar that automatically unlocks a door when someone presses against it.  Called a panic bar or a crush bar, this is the type of door lock found today in most public buildings around the world.