SEVENTY-one children lost their lives in Paisley’s Glen Cinema, on Hogmanay 1929, when a smoking film canister created panic during a matinee at which more than 600 children were present.

The Glasgow Herald reported that the panic had arisen suddenly on a shout of “fire”. Dense clouds of smoke, caused by a film which had caught fire in the spool-room, had been swept into the theatre from the vestibule.

“The children immediately took fright and stampeded to a doorway behind the stage at the opposite end of the hall. To their horror, however, this doorway was closed and was protected on the outside by a closed iron gate. In a frenzied effort to escape the children screamed in terror. Some jumped from the balcony, many fainted, and their bodies were trampled upon in the wild rush for safety.

“All the windows in the building were smashed, and soon a large band of rescuers ... regardless of their own safety, laboured continuously until the entire audience was taken from the hall.

“The empty hall, however, could not be robbed of the evidence of the terrible occurrence. Boys’ school caps, coats, jackets, and even jerseys, and girls’ coats, hats, and woollen scarves, some of the garments torn almost to shreds by hysterical children clawing their neighbours in the fight to the exits, lay here and there in jumbled piles...

“Cheap, schoolboy sweets were scattered ... on the floor, dropped and forgotten in the dash for life”.

Agonising scenes were witnessed at the town’s Royal Alexandra Infirmary, where parents and relatives, tortured by uncertainty, “crowded at the entrance in an effort to obtain news of their children”.

Some modern accounts put the number of dead at 70.

* Continues tomorrow

Read more: Herald Diary