Paisley's Hogmanay

Fifty years ago the grey little city of Paisley, seven miles outside of Glasgow, was world famed because beauties who could not afford real Cashmere shawls draped their drooping shoulders with "Paisley shawls" of soft wool, printed by Scots with Indian designs. Ladies no longer wear shawls. Paisley's Calvinist spinners make a modest living today spinning cotton thread.

Good Scotch Calvinists disapprove of Christmas, consider Christmas trees and Christmas presents to be popish and heathen things, savoring of idolatry. Scotch bairns wait for their toys till Hogmanay, New Year's Eve. On New Year's Eve last week, Paisley children were up with the dawn, shouting under housewives' windows:

Hogmanay!

Trollolay!

Gie's o' your white bread and none o' your gray!

It promised to be a specially good Hogmanay for Paisley bairns, for the manager of the Glen Motion Picture Theatre had advertised a holiday matinee for children. In deference to Scotch ethics it was not a free matinee, but the admission was only a penny. Just after lunch 800 children clutching grimy pennies trooped to the Glen Theatre and sat on hard wooden benches to watch the unreeling of The Crowd, a slightly morbid U. S. cinema depicting the struggles of a New York clerk and the distressing death of his little daughter. The only grownups in the audience were the theatre's three scrubwomen, delegated to the task of suppressing unnecessary Hogmanay enthusiasms.

Half way through the film came a spurt of flame, a cloud of acrid black smoke from the projection booth. The cinema operator's assistant, quick-witted, tore the roll of blazing film from his machine ran with it to the manager who threw it out of a window. He was not in time to avert panic. Children, nerves atingle from the film play, screamed in terror, stampeded for the only exit they knew, the main door. Someone slipped.

In an instant the door was blocked. Brutal with fear the bigger children fought, kicked, trampled the little ones under foot. Inside the theatre 15-year-old Jimmie McVey, operator's assistant, fought to show children to the side door. He could rescue only 30. Fear-crazed youngsters tried to climb up on the wall gas brackets, out of the panic. The brackets broke, flooded the theatre with gas.

Brass-helmeted firemen, rushing to the rescue, found the Glen Theatre's doors blocked solid with bodies "like a wall of cement bags." Cutting a hole through the roof, smashing windows they formed a living chain to pass out 70 small bodies, many trampled beyond recognition under stout Scotch boots. Inside the theatre, a few calm children were still alive.

Rain fell all night. While weeping parents tiptoed through three wards of the Royal Alexandra Infirmary, a temporary morgue, trying to identify their children, members of the Town Council met privately, voted $5,000 for a public funeral, started an investigation. At midnight a group of Paisley citizens gathered in the main square, softly sang "Auld Lang Syne."

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