No one remembers to steep some strips of gauze in alum water

A classic example of the limits of free speech is that no one has the right to shout ‘Fire!’ in a packed theatre if there is no fire. The sad truth is that history is littered with instances in which people in theatres have actually had every reason to cry just that.

Shakespeare’s Globe was famously lost in a conflagration in 1613, although thankfully there were no casualties. In the 19th century, Glasgow lost no fewer than four Theatre Royals to fire. Exeter, too, was a city where going to see a play was more dangerous than it should have been. One theatre succumbed to flames in 1820, another in 1885. This latter was replaced by the Theatre Royal, which opened in October of the following year at the corner of Longbrook Street and New North Road. This new playhouse had been designed by Charles Phipps, a renowned architect who had been responsible for more than 40 theatres, so hopes were high that it would not meet the same fate as its predecessors.

Monday 5 September 1887 saw the opening night of Romany Rye, a romantic play by George R. Sims. No one knows exactly how many people were in to see it that evening, but estimates range between 800 and 900, the initial audience swelled by poorer theatre-goers who bought cheaper tickets that permitted them to watch the latter stages of the performance.

The trouble started at around 10.10P.M., during the fourth act. Romany Rye was a play that required a good many changes of backdrop. Three flymen, so called because they clambered about up in the flies (the space above the stage), were responsible for raising and lowering the painted canvases for each new scene. The illumination that enabled them to perform this task was provided by gaslight.

The flymen became confused about which backdrop they should lower for a particular scene. As they were struggling to rectify the situation, they realised that one of the backdrops had caught fire. They cut the ropes on the flaming canvas, in the belief that by dropping it to the stage a hose could be brought on to douse the blaze without further ado. It nearly struck the one actor on stage, a Mr Mouillot, who had been in the invidious position of having to ad lib all alone while the crowds before him grew restless. With the burning backdrop now in a crumpled heap on the stage, the curtain was closed. Although iron safety curtains had started to be used in some theatres, Charles Phipps had not considered that one was necessary for the Theatre Royal.

The fire could have been contained on the stage and the looming disaster averted but for the fact that there wasn’t a hose to hand, or a hydrant. Indeed, there was not even a water bucket. Mouillot is said to have cried out, ‘For heavens’ sake, keep cool!’ but with nothing to fight the fire, any cool heads that might have been kept counted for nothing. Even when the stage manager did manage to bring a hose to the scene, no water came out of it.

With flammable material all around the burning backdrop, the fire took hold with frightening speed and within three minutes it was out of control. The audience, however, was still unaware of what was happening, beyond the fact that something had gone wrong with the play – the unfortunate Mr Mouillot’s pained improvisations and the impromptu dropping of the curtain were evidence of that.

A Colonel Freemantle, who was watching from the stalls, declared afterwards that the curtain blew outwards as a result of someone having opened a door backstage, giving the audience its first terrifying view of the blaze. The rush of air through the door also fanned the flames, taking them beyond the stage and into the auditorium. Immediately, panic ensued. Shouts of ‘Fire!’ competed with screams and cries for help as a stampede towards the exits began.

Those seated in the stalls, the dress circle, the boxes and the pit were able to get out of the theatre with relative ease. However, those in the cheaper seats of the upper circle and the gallery – who between them may have numbered between 300 and 400 – were obliged to use a single exit. It was this group who provided the vast majority of casualties.

A broadsheet published by H. P. Such of London the following day carries a reasonably accurate report of the disaster, including the terrible scenes that occurred in the auditorium:

Flames shot up through the roof over the stage and dense smoke poured forth from every window…

It is almost needless to say that the utmost panic prevailed throughout the theatre, and the terror and bewilderment was intensified a hundredfold at those points where egress seemed impossible. To gain anything like a fair conception of the dreadful struggle for life which took place in the gallery, one has to picture a panic-stricken throng of men, women, and children pushing or forcibly impelled towards the single doorway – the only exit the gallery seemed to have – and followed by the tongues of flame, momentarily increasing until at last the outer fringe of the mass was overtaken by it…

As for those who escaped from this furnace they did so either over the bodies of their more unfortunate companions or through the windows. When the latter alternative was adopted the jumpers often flew from one death to another almost equally horrible whilst others sustained fractures to their limbs. The great mass of men, women and children in the gallery were, however, wedged into an almost immovable mass and the advancing flames roasted them to death…

Soon after the outbreak the City Fire Brigade were on the spot, but the water they poured on the fire was absolutely without effect.

As poignantly captured in Trapped, Martin Sorrell’s radio play about the catastrophe, there were many heroes and heroines that night, some of whom lost their lives while saving others. The lion-hearts included a Mr and Mrs Thorne, who helped pull two women out through a lavatory window and onto a parapet from where they were eventually saved when a ladder was put up to them. Mary-Anne Dyke ushered groups of theatre-goers out through an exit and managed to open the gate to the pit which, if closed, would have trapped scores of people. Passerby William Tremaine, a 19-year-old artilleryman, rushed into the theatre several times to rescue those inside who had fallen unconscious. The young bombardier Francis Scattergood showed extraordinary courage. Time and again he braved the flames to haul bodies from the theatre in the hope that some might still be brought back from unconsciousness. He failed to emerge from his final foray into the inferno and was in turn saved by able seaman William Hunt, who found him lying unconscious on the floor inside. Hunt saved a good many others that night, climbing repeatedly up a pillar at the entrance to enter the theatre. Curiously, he was unable to repeat this feat of gymnastics when asked to do so in the days after the fire. Sadly, Scattergood died on his way to hospital.

An inquest into the disaster opened the following morning, presided over by the city coroner. It found that the fire had started because one of the calico mediums – blue, red and yellow strips of gauze about two feet wide that determined the colour of the light thrown onto the stage – had been set alight by a naked flame from the gas lamp it was masking. In those theatres where they were still used, calico mediums were soaked in alum water. This is a solution of sodium (or potassium or ammonium) aluminium sulphate that was customarily used to prevent the mediums from catching light. No one had remembered to carry out this procedure during the preparations for the opening night at the Theatre Royal, making a fire almost inevitable.

The coroner’s court also found that the theatre was a veritable tinderbox. Not only were laths and match-boarding used in places where their use was expressly prohibited by fire regulations, the building was also lit throughout by gas and candles rather than by electricity. Compounding this, the height of the ceiling above the gallery – just six feet – meant that any smoke would quickly fill the space and choke anyone unfortunate enough to be in it. If this were not enough, there was just one stairway out of the gallery, and the exit door that led to it opened inwards. There had been plans for a second stairway that would have passed through a shop below and out to the street, but this would have meant forgoing the rent from the shop, so it was never built.

The proceedings unearthed a catalogue of deficiencies in the safety measures at the theatre, for which the architect Charles Phipps, the owners of the theatre, the city surveyor and the Exeter magistrates who had been responsible for granting a licence to the theatre were clearly at fault to varying degrees. However, the jury returned a verdict of accidental death on the 186 victims of the fire (a figure that is likely to be an underestimate). The foreman of the jury added that the magistrates should be censured for their lack of care in ensuring that the theatre was in a fit state to open its doors to the public, and the theatre-owners were at fault for installing an unauthorised pillar and a ticket box, both of which hampered egress from the theatre.

In terms of loss of life, the Royal Theatre fire was Exeter’s worst ever peacetime disaster and Britain’s worst ever theatre fire. Nearly 100 children lost one or both parents, and many were consequently shipped off to orphanages (Exeter having none of its own).

Although the fire was not the only calamity that took place in Britain around that time, it was one that caused a particular horror among the population – even Queen Victoria sent money to the disaster fund for the victims – and was instrumental in forcing the government into action.

The catastrophe led to the setting up of council-funded fire brigades up and down the country. These replaced the private companies who had, up until then, provided fire services in a much more patchy manner and were often wholly inadequate when faced with major blazes. The Exeter Fire Brigade was established in March 1888. The city was also handed its first electricity-generating station, with the result that the next Theatre Royal to be built was not lit by gas but by much safer electricity.

Legislation was introduced in 1890 that considerably toughened up safety measures in theatres and other places of public entertainment. Henceforth, all theatres were compelled to install a safety curtain and mark their exit doors clearly. Even half a century after the event, the Home Office manual on ‘Safety Requirements in Theatres and Other Places of Public Entertainment’ cited the Theatre Royal disaster as being one from which lessons had been learnt.

Back in October 1886, the theatre’s lessee, Mr Sidney Herberte-Basing, wrote a piece of doggerel which he recited at its inauguration. It included the lines: ‘If there be faults, and faults there are no doubt/We’ll rectify them as we find them out.’ Had he been as good as his word, particularly when it came to the slapdash procedures that led to the carelessness over the calico mediums, those 186 lives would not have been extinguished. The only consolation granted to those who lost loved ones that night was that the legislation brought in after the fire would doubtless go on to save many more lives than that.