Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 November 1878 — The Liverpool Catastrophe. [ARTICLE]

The Liverpool Catastrophe.

There were between 4,000 and 5,000 in the Coliseum Theater when the terrible and fatal panic occurred. It appears that one of the performers was singing a comic song when a free fight commenced in the pit. The cry of “fire” was raised, and there was a general stampede for the box-office entrance, though there are said to have been five other doors open for the egress of the audience. The police inside and outside the theater vainly endeavored to control the crowd. The structure of the theater at the point where the crush occurred is intricate. The exits couverge into a narrow “well,” and it was in this well that the suffocations took place, and the dead were piled six or seven bodies deep. An upright partition in the center of the doorway stopped the passage until one of the men attached to the theater cut it away, enabling some of the imprisoned people to escape. A scene of the greatest excitement prevailed outside the theater. The fire-engines and fire-escapes arrived, and the firemen, joining the police, entered the building to reassure the people. The manager of the theater, upon the first alarm, rushed into the pit from the entrance, and shouted to the people to remain quiet, but all his efforts were ineffectual until the theater had been nearly cleared, when the dead and injured were carried to the Royal Infirmary. Two of the dead were women, three were boys, and thirty-two were strong, able-bodied men of the laboring class. —Liverpool paper.