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Pushkin. The most marvellous and thrilling spectacle ever produced. Introducing Majesty, the handsomest lion in captivity. The year is 1901, and the owner of the handsomest lion in captivity is a man billed by the theatre as the world's greatest entertainer, the great Lafayette.
That was his actual name, by the way. He had it legally changed. He signed his letters: T.G. Lafayette. And the world's greatest entertainer? It sounds like hyperbole, but it might have been true. He certainly became one of the wealthiest, as Ian Robertson and Gordon Rutter describe in their book, "The Death and Life of the Great Lafayette." By his life's end, Lafayette was pulling in the equivalent of something like $20 million a year.
"A conjurer, painter, sculptor, actor, mimic, an illusionist and a pantomimist," said one newspaper. Audiences certainly got their money's worth when they caught his act. The great Lafayette's signature performance was The Lion's Bride, a 25-minute extravaganza with a cast and crew of dozens. The most wonderful spectacle that the vaudeville stage has ever seen.
The Lion's Bride told the story of a beautiful young woman, captured by a wealthy sultan and given a terrible choice: marry him or be fed to the lion. Right on cue, the lion roars angrily. So would you if you were getting electric shocks to your paws. "Feed me to the lion then," says the woman, encouraged by her dashing lover, Lafayette. "I'll save you," he vows.
The Sultan throws the woman into the cage and here comes the lion leaping on her but, somehow unnoticed by the audience, the real lion has been swapped out. It's Lafayette now in a lion costume. The magician reveals himself and rescues his sweetheart. The show is a huge hit. In 1903 Lafayette takes it to London and then around the provincial theatres of the UK.
In Birmingham, England, one of the bars to the lion's cage breaks. The lion slips through the gap onto the stage. Lafayette leaps in front of the lion holding up a chair. The audience lap it up. It does look like there's an angry lion loose on the stage right in front of them, but this is an illusionist's act. It's all part of the show, isn't it? It is not all part of the show.
The cast and crew know this. They're quietly backing off. Lafayette moves slowly forward, brandishing the chair. The lion hesitates. He's confused by this unaccustomed freedom. He backs up, slowly, through the gap, back into his cage. Lafayette reaches for a nearby table and quickly wedges it between the bars. Then he carries on with the performance. The consummate professional.
Disaster averted. Undeterred, the showman keeps performing The Lion's Bride until, once again, the spectacle disastrously departs from the script without the audience catching on. And this time, it won't work out so well for the great Lafayette. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES
The great Lafayette began his performing career with a crack shot archery act. It wasn't popular. He got a job painting scenery so he could get a close-up look at other kinds of act and see what ideas he might borrow. In vaudeville at the turn of the century any popular act was sure to be copied.
Take the Chinese magician Ching Ling Fu. He was so popular, one struggling Western magician decided to reinvent himself as Chong Ling Su, complete with Chinese dress and haircut. He became just as famous as the original. For years, he kept up the discipline of only ever speaking a few phrases in broken English. His audiences never guessed he was really a New Yorker called William.
The great Lafayette, meanwhile, talked through his options with his friend, the escapologist Harry Houdini. Chinese magicians seem to do well, said Houdini. Maybe try being one of those. Lafayette bought tickets to Ching Ling Fu's show, night after night, and eventually figured out how he performed his signature trick, conjuring up a porcelain bowl of water from behind an empty cloth.
Lafayette pitched himself as another Ching Ling Fu tribute act. It ignited his career. But that wasn't the most life-changing thing Harry Houdini did for the great Lafayette. Houdini bought his friend a gift, a dog. He called her Beauty.
As luck would have it, Beauty turned out to be a willing trainee as a magician's assistant. She starred with Lafayette in lots of his productions. The Magic Dog, for instance, started with nothing on stage but an empty cardboard box, a chair and a table. Onto the stage walks Beauty. She pushes over the cardboard box with her nose. She jumps on the chair and takes in her mouth a magic wand from the table.
She trots back to the box and shakes her head to wave the wand. Out of the box climbs the great Lafayette. It would be a stretch to call Lafayette an animal lover when he routinely gave his lion electric shocks, but Lafayette loved his dog, Beauty. In the drawing room of his lavish London townhouse, he put up a sign for guests: "You may eat my food, you may command my servants, but you must respect my dog."
What did Lafayette's guests make of his hospitality? Eccentric to the point of insanity, was the judgment of one. One night, mid-performance, Beauty started barking. She'd discovered an intruder.
It was common enough for rival magicians to sit in the audience and try to decipher how tricks worked, as Lafayette had done with Ching Ling Fu. But this time, someone had sneaked in through a backstage door to get a look at the props from the other side. Alerted by beauty, Lafayette chased him off. The magician insisted that from now on, wherever he performed, all the doors at the back of the stage would be locked.
"She's the guardian of my life," he supposedly said once of beauty. "If I lost her, I would not live a week." In 1911, Lafayette took his show to Edinburgh. They stayed at the city's grandest hotel. Adjoining rooms, one for him, one for beauty. They dined together. The same food from the hotel menu. Lafayette was 40 years old. He'd never been more popular. His show was booked up for years ahead.
But Beauty was getting on a bit. Still, it came as a shock to Lafayette when the dog fell ill. He brought a doctor and nurses to the hotel for round-the-clock care. But Beauty died. Lafayette was inconsolable. He engaged a firm of undertakers to find a plot at an Edinburgh cemetery where he could build her a memorial. Most said, "No, we bury only humans." One said, "Yes." On one condition:
that Lafayette be interred with her when his time came. The day before Beauty's funeral was the very last show of the run at Edinburgh's Empire Palace Theatre. As The Lion's Bride approached its climax, an electrical connection to a light bulb fused above the stage.
The Chinese lantern around the bulb caught fire. One audience member described golden sparks raining down on the stage. It was rather pretty. It seemed like it might be part of the spectacle. The cast and crew knew it wasn't. They also knew that Lafayette, as usual, had ordered all the backstage doors to be locked, although perhaps not all of them remembered that in the moment.
As the falling sparks began to set light to drapes and props, one of Lafayette's assistants gave the signal to bring down the fire curtain. That should have sealed off the stage area from the audience, but the fire curtain came only part of the way down, then got stuck. Lafayette seemed not to realise what was happening, the assistant later said. The last I saw of him, he was in the lion's cage, wearing the lion costume.
The manager of the theatre was sitting in the front row and now he had a decision to make. He knew too, of course, this wasn't in the script. He knew he had 3,000 people in the audience sitting behind him and he knew that panic in a crowded theatre could be deadly.
A generation earlier in 1876, at the Brooklyn Theatre, New York, an actress called Kate Claxton was starring in a play when a fire broke out. Some painted canvas scenery had come loose, touched the flame of a gas lamp and caught a light. As the stagehands tried to extinguish the growing fire, Kate Claxton gamely continued with her lines. The audience grew restive.
Claxton thought she ought to try to keep them calm. There is no danger. The flames are part of the play. Then a lump of burning wood fell at her feet and she shrieked. The result was a sudden pandemonium. Claxton described a frantic, struggling mass of human beings trampling each other to death like wild beasts. Between the crush and the fire, nearly 300 people lost their lives.
So yes, panic could kill. The manager of Edinburgh's Empire Palace Theatre knew that as he sat in his front row seat, watching the shower of sparks above the great Lafayette in his lion costume and the props beginning to catch light. He had to get the audience out in an orderly manner. But how? Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.
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November 1987. King's Cross Station in London. Just before half past seven on a Wednesday evening. Philip Squire is going to meet his girlfriend. He gets off the underground train and makes his way onto the escalator. About two-thirds of the way up, he notices a wisp of smoke coming from under the escalator. Someone must have dropped a cigarette, he thinks.
But no. As the escalator takes him past the smoke, he looks down. There's a gap between the steps and the side panel. Through the gap, he sees a glow. Something's burning. The escalator deposits Squire in the ticket hall, just below ground level. He walks up to a booking office window. Excuse me, I think there's a fire starting on the escalator.
The clerk comes out of his office and walks with Squire to the top of the escalator. Squire points out the smoke. The clerk walks back to his office, phones the station safety inspector and gets back to selling tickets. Soon, another passenger comes up to his window. Excuse me, I think there's a fire. The clerk glances towards the escalator. There's no more smoke than there was before. He shrugs. It's probably fine.
London Underground's management took a surprisingly relaxed approach to fires on escalators. They saw it as inevitable that fires would break out from time to time. The escalator steps and balustrades were made partly from wood, maple, oak and ply. Passengers dropped litter, which was often flammable, and passengers smoked. They'd often drop burning cigarette ends and lit matches.
Over the last few decades, the Underground had averaged roughly one escalator fire a month. Hundreds of fires in total. They'd never spread far. Nobody had died. The Underground's rulebook said that staff should try to put out fires on their own and call the fire department only if the fire got beyond their control. The managers didn't even like to use the word fire. They talked about smoulderings.
The safety inspector put down the phone and went to investigate the smouldering. But he'd misunderstood which escalator to check. There are many in King's Cross. At the time, it was London's busiest underground station. It serves five lines. It's built across five levels, all connected by a labyrinth of escalators, passageways, staircases and service ducts. The fire is slowly growing.
Another passenger sees it as the escalator takes him past, and he presses the emergency stop button. He shouts down to warn the passengers below. Most ignore him and keep walking upwards. But the shouting draws the attention of two nearby constables from the British Transport Police. They see the smoke. And by now, a flame too. It's about three inches high.
Their radios don't work underground. One runs up to street level to get a message to his boss. Call the fire department. The other makes his way to the bottom of the escalator, where weary commuters keep piling on, heads down, annoyed that the steps aren't moving and they've got to trudge their own way up instead. It makes their journey that little bit more tiring. A few look up and see the smoke ahead. "Don't get on this thing. We've got to get out."
One woman starts to tug at the sleeves of her fellow passengers. Don't go up there! Most push past her. They just want to get home. By now, the safety inspector has found the right escalator and realised that he can't get to the source of the flames with a fire extinguisher. What's burning is all the grease, dust and debris that's built up over the years underneath the escalator. It never gets properly cleaned because you'd have to dismantle the escalator to do it.
Cleats at the edge of the escalator steps should stop lit matches from falling under the escalator, but quite a few of the cleats are missing. So, you can't reach the base of the fire with an extinguisher. What else? There is a water sprinkler system. It's not automatic, there's no heat or smoke sensor. You have to go to the machine room and turn it on by hand. The safety inspector has totally forgotten that this system exists.
Nobody else on the staff remembers either. They haven't been well enough trained in fire safety. There's something else they haven't been trained in. How to evacuate the station. The staff and police try to figure it out as they go. At last, they succeed in roping off the bottom of the escalator and directing passengers to walk through various tunnels until they get to another escalator.
It's not ideal. The alternative route also brings people into the ticket hall, close to the escalator that's burning. But the staff can't think what else to do. Up in the ticket hall, there's now a definite smell of smoke. The transport police have told the booking office clerks to stop selling tickets. People queue up at the automatic ticket machines instead.
The police try to herd them out of the hall, up the stairs, towards the street. But others are pushing past in the opposite direction. Never mind the smell of smoke, they want to get their train. And down below, trains are still running. Passenger Mark Silver gets off one, smells burning rubber and thinks, maybe I'll get back on the train and get off at the next station instead. He turns round, the train doors have closed.
He bangs on them trying to get the driver's attention. So do others along the platform. The train moves off. One woman even jumps onto the track and runs after the train down the tunnel shouting, "Let me in!" Mark Silver spots a police officer directing people. He follows the throng onto the alternative escalator. The smell is overpowering now. And soon he also starts to feel the heat.
As the escalator takes him upwards, towards the ticket hall, it passes close by where the fire is raging. Silver can't see the fire. He's in an adjacent tunnel. But he sees that the walls of the tunnel are sizzling. He feels his legs starting to burn. Some people push their way past him, up the escalator steps, hurrying to get out. But Silver, like most, just stands there and lets the escalator slowly take him up.
People are still descending on the down escalator as if there's nothing wrong. He steps off at the top. There's smoke everywhere. A few shouts and screams, but Silva later recalls passengers he saw calmly queuing at the ticket machines. I can still see six of them now.
Three were young lads with jeans, two were businessmen in suits, and there was a young girl with brown hair. Silver dashes past them, hurries through the ticket barriers, runs up the stairs into the cool fresh air of the November night, and collapses on the ground, gulping in breath. He's got out just in time. A century ago, it was common to assume that panic was the biggest threat in emergencies in a crowded place. And panic does happen.
But over the years, researchers have come to understand that it's not as common as you might expect. You'll get individuals who shout or scream or run and push, but usually their panic doesn't spread. Much more often, crowds in emergencies behave in a structured and orderly way. Even crowds of strangers tend to help each other out.
In fact, a bigger problem than panic is its opposite. People don't grasp how serious a situation is. They're too calm. They don't react in time. As Mark Silver is making his way out of Kings Cross Station, the first firefighters are running in. One heads straight to the escalator to assess the situation. It looks bad, but manageable. He describes the fire as about the size of a big cardboard box.
But fires can be hard to predict. And this fire is about to do something nobody has ever seen before. Scientists later figured out what had happened and gave it a name. The Trench Effect. It's a combination of two things, each well understood on its own.
that fast-moving gases tend to cling to steeply rising surfaces, and the phenomenon of flashover, when materials heat up and give off flammable gases that eventually ignite on their own. Flammable gases were racing up the sides and the steps of the escalator, and now, all at once, they caught. A sudden explosion of flame shot up the escalator and into the ticket hall. In an instant,
The whole hall was ablaze. 31 people lost their lives. 19 more were badly injured. But why had so many people still been there? 18 minutes had passed since Philip Squire went up to the booking clerk's window. Excuse me, but I think there's a fire starting on the escalator. Time enough, you might think, to have cleared the station if only the evacuation had been handled smoothly. But it wasn't.
The staff did their best, but they had no training, no plan to follow. Just as they forgot to use the sprinkler system, they forgot something else too, the public address system. Nobody thought to make any announcements at all. Might that have helped? Researchers decided to investigate. We'll hear what they found after the break.
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If you worry about people panicking in an emergency, you might try to pretend that there's nothing wrong. If you worry that people won't take the threat seriously, you might instead want to communicate clearly and honestly about what's going on. After the tragedy at King's Cross in 1987, researchers gathered in Newcastle, northern England, at Monument Metro Station.
They chose monuments because it resembles a simplified version of King's Cross. Two sets of escalators that each disgorge passengers into the same central concourse. If one is blocked, the bottom of the other can be reached by a staircase. The researchers wanted to test how quickly the public would evacuate the station in case of fire.
Of course, there's a limit to how realistic you can make this kind of study. You can't actually light a fire. Instead, on five different days, they tried five different ways of warning people, and they watched the station's CCTV cameras to see how people reacted. One day, a simple fire alarm. People ignored it. Of course they did. How many times has it been a genuine emergency? What about a generic announcement?
Better. The passengers on the concourse left, but those at the bottom of the closed-off escalator didn't try to find an alternative way out. They just hung around, waiting to see if the escalator would open again.
When the researchers asked them afterwards, most said they didn't believe there was an actual problem. The researchers tried recreating the situation at Kings Cross. No announcements, but they told two staff members to expect a fire drill. "We'll tell you where the imagined fire is," they said, "and you'll have to figure out for yourself how to get people out." The drill starts.
The fires on the north-south escalators, the staff members are told. They enthusiastically set about herding passengers out of the station, but watching on the CCTV, the researchers can see that they're not always making themselves clear. Some passengers look confused.
Worse still, the staff members send the passengers up the staircase to the other escalator, which brings them out onto the concourse, the place of maximum danger. That's what their counterparts at King's Cross had done too. It seems logical, but we know from King's Cross that there would have been a better way. Keep the passengers on the platforms and get them out on the next passing train. It goes to show the need for training and a plan.
So, how about an announcement on the PA system that tells passengers exactly what to do? Please evacuate the station. If you're on a platform, board the next train. If you're in the concourse, leave by the nearest exit. Much better. The station clears quickly and efficiently. On the fifth and final day, the researchers try something else. The same announcement, but giving a reason.
There is a suspected fire on the north-south escalators. Not only do the researchers give people a clear evacuation plan, they also, for the first time, actually use the PA system to tell everyone that there was a fire. The Metro's managers had been nervous about letting the researchers do that. What if people panicked? People didn't. They got out calmly and quickly.
When the researchers asked them afterwards, this was the only announcement that had made a majority convinced that there probably was a real threat. Still, there'd been no smoke. There was no fire. Drills like this can take us only so far. What about the real world, when people are not only told there's an emergency, but see it? One way to study that question is interviewing survivors of emergencies, but memories aren't always reliable.
In 2021, another team of researchers came up with an ingenious way to solve that problem. In the age of the smartphone, they reasoned, there must be lots of YouTube footage of crowds in emergencies. They could watch that footage and draw their own objective conclusions. They found over 100 videos. Some showed people panicking and running. Some showed them being far too blasé.
One big problem, ironically, was the very thing that made the study possible: people stopping to film on their phones, and they should have been getting out instead. Running, it seemed, was more likely when people perceived a threat themselves, but it wasn't being acknowledged. Any kind of alarm or announcement to evacuate calmed them down. Remember the tragedy at the Brooklyn Theatre in 1876, where nearly 300 people died?
The actress, Kate Claxton, thought she should pretend that everything was fine. There is no danger. The flames are part of the play. She wanted to help, but this research suggests she did the worst thing possible. By trying to deny the increasingly obvious danger, she was making panic more likely, not less. So what's the most effective way to get people out, quickly and safely?
Not generic alarms, but distinct instructions. What you need, say the researchers, is communication from humans that is clearly tailored to that specific situation. At the Empire Palace Theatre in Edinburgh in 1911, the great Lafayette was in his lion's costume in the lion's cage.
Sparks were raining from the faulty electrical connection above the stage. Crops were catching fire. The fire curtain was stuck. The blaze began to grow and grow. The city's firefighters were called. They had to battle for three hours to bring it under control. At last, in the early hours of the morning, they could safely investigate the theatre's charred and smouldering ruins. Nobody had seen the Great Lafayette.
His co-star in The Lion's Bride, the beautiful young woman, had been desperately searching the city's hospitals. He wasn't there. Had the friend of Houdini somehow pulled off a miraculous escape? No. News soon spread that rescuers had found Lafayette's body. Or so it seemed. It was badly burned, but recognisably him. Though, where were his diamond rings? Had somebody stolen them from the dead man's fingers?
The body was cremated and the funeral announced. The magician's ashes would be laid to rest alongside the embalmed remains of Beauty, his beloved dog. Then, two days later, rescuers found another body under the stage. It was the great Lafayette. Diamond rings on his fingers. So whose ashes had they been just about to bury?
It turned out that Lafayette's quick-change illusions relied on a lookalike who had also perished. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets of Edinburgh for the great Lafayette's funeral parade. Hundreds of police kept order. The King, George V, sent a message of condolence. Harry Houdini sent a floral tribute, forget-me-nots, in the shape of a dog's head.
The urn containing Lafayette's ashes was solemnly placed between Beauty's paws. Nine other bodies were found backstage, not counting the lion. Had someone tried to get out through the doors that Lafayette had ordered locked? It seemed possible. One survivor told the press that he'd only made it because he happened to remember where the nearest open door would be.
I bolted right upstairs. I shouted to all who were near me to run and I firmly believed that had they remembered about the doors, those who were found suffocated in the dressing rooms would have escaped. Again, evacuations need a plan. But what about the audience? Remember the dilemma faced by the manager of the Edinburgh Palace Theatre. He's sitting in the front row as bits of the scenery start to catch fire.
He knows there are 3,000 people in the theatre. They're watching an illusionist. They haven't yet realised that the sparks and the flames aren't part of the show. He doesn't have access to all this modern research about the best way to communicate in evacuations. He's got a decision to make, and quickly. Does he risk panic by urging everyone to flee? Or risk disaster by delaying, in the hope that the fire won't spread? His solution...
is inspire. Between the audience and the stage sit the theatre's orchestra. He calls over to the orchestra leader: "The King!" It was customary at the time for every evening's entertainment to finish with a rendition of the national anthem: "God Save the King." The orchestra strikes up the tune, the audience gets straight to their feet, it's the national anthem, and they get the message too. The anthem means "the evening's over."
It's time to go. As the orchestra plays and the stage starts to blaze and smoke billows out from under the stuck fire curtain, 3,000 people calmly file out of their rows of seats and form an orderly queue for the exits. In a couple of minutes, they're all safely outside. Not a single member of the audience is hurt. The orchestra put down their instruments and head for the exits too.
What does it take to evacuate safely? Communication from humans that is clearly tailored to that specific situation. Communication doesn't have to be words. In the heat of the moment, the theatre manager couldn't have played it better. An important source for this episode was The Death and Life of the Great Lafayette by Ian Robertson and Gordon Rutter.
For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Edith Russelo. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.
The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Julia Barton, Greta Cohn, Lital Millard, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Murano and Morgan Ratner.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It helps us for, you know, mysterious reasons. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. ♪
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