THE ANNIVERSARY of the first major disaster in the Irish Free State fell recently. The Drumcollogher, Co Limerick, cinema fire happened on the evening of September 5th, 1926. It claimed 48 lives, by a strange twist of fate exactly the number of people killed in the Stardust inferno in 1981.
Just over 30 years before the cinema fire, Drumcollogher, in south Co Limerick, almost on the border with Co Cork, had been in the news for an altogether different and more positive reason. It was here that Ireland’s first co-operative creamery had been set up 1889, and that fact is now commemorated in the creamery museum in the village, run by Seamus Stack, chairman of the local community council. The original creamery has been restored as part of the museum.
Drumcollogher was also known, for close on five decades, for the German-run Irish Dresden factory, which made porcelain figurines; it closed earlier this summer, a victim of the recession.
But what happened on that fateful early September evening in 1926 was tragedy on a grand scale. It should never have happened, and the cause of it was an unedifying mix of illegality and incompetence.
Two local men, Patrick Downing, who worked as a cinema projectionist, and William “Baby” Forde, came up with a scheme to make a few pounds for themselves and at the same time to entertain the people of Drumcollogher, who had seen only a few films before.
What Downing and Forde decided to do was to borrow reels of film, without permission, from the Assembly Rooms Theatre in Oliver Plunkett Street in Cork city centre. In those far off days, films weren’t screened in Cork on a Sunday night, so the two men decided to purloin the current batch of films from the cinema in Cork, taking them away on the Sunday.
They planned to show them in Drumcollogher that evening, and then first thing on the Monday morning return them to the cinema in Cork, so that the cinema manager wouldn’t
know what had happened.
All cinema screenings had to be licensed by local authorities. In addition to cinemas, many church halls showed films and so too did travelling showmen. The showing planned for Drumcollogher wasn’t licensed.
Downing and Forde took the reels of film out of their fireproof metal cases and left the cases in the cinema in Cork, to preserve the illusion that the films were still where they should have been.
They transported the reels of film up to Drumcollogher in a Gladstone bag.
The cellulose nitrate film material that was used in the early days of cinema, indeed up to the early 1950s, was highly flammable, so a sequence of events was set in train that ended in disaster.
The films were shown to the audience that crammed into the upstairs loft above a hardware shop in Drumcollogher. The audience got up into the makeshift cinema by means of wooden steps up the outside of the building.
The loft had only one door.
During the film, a couple of candles were left burning to create a little illumination on the table where the takings were counted. The candles had been placed there haphazardly, simply secured with molten wax. The first candle burned out and then the second candle tipped over on to one of the reels of film that was lying around and set it on fire.
There were some suggestions later on that some young lads in the “cinema” had tried to extinguish the candle to help them escape with the takings.
Within seconds, the building was alight. Two gardaí were in the audience, to keep an eye on the local “boyos”; they managed to escape, but the fiancée of one of them was killed.
Other people escaped through a window in the room; during the War of Independence the room had been used for clandestine IRA meetings and the bars on the window had been cut to allow for a speedy exit if the RIC raided the place.
One former IRA man and the sacristan in the local church, John Gleason, was in the audience and knew this. He helped many people jump through the window. This escape route worked well until a plump woman got stuck and blocked the window.
Soon afterwards, the floor of the “cinema” collapsed into the shop beneath, which had highly flammable items in stock, like wood and petrol.
Within half an hour, the whole building was completely engulfed. The nearest fire brigade unit was in Limerick city, over 50km away. Local wells were empty after a very dry summer.
A total of 46 people died in the fire and two died later in hospital. All but one of the dead were buried in a mass grave surmounted by a Celtic cross, beside the local church.
Later, Downing, Forde and Patrick Brennan, who owned the shop and the loft, were tried in the Central Criminal Court on manslaughter charges, but were acquitted.
Forde emigrated to Australia and he died there after apparently putting strychnine that he was using to hunt rabbits into bread that he was baking.
In those days, cinema and theatre fires were more common than they are in these more regulated times. Three years after the Drumcollogher fire, a fire in a cinema in Paisley, central Scotland, killed 71 and back in 1887, a fire at the original Paris opera house had killed 200.
In the Drumcollogher disaster, half of those who died were below 25 years of age, another eerie echo of the Stardust tragedy.
The tragedy in Drumcollogher generated an enormous amount of international news coverage. It took Timemagazine in New York until its September 20th edition to carry its report. It described how "a crowd of eager Irish peasants had climbed the single rickety ladder and sat down in rapt expectance of Drumcollogher's first cinema show" . The tone of the report caused much local annoyance, as people considered it disparaging.
Locally, the dreadful fire became known as “The Burning”.