1922 E-Book

Nick Rennison

• Herausgeber: Oldcastle Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

1922 was a year of great turbulence and upheaval. Its events reverberated throughout the rest of the twentieth century and still affect us today, 100 years later. Empires fell. The Ottoman Empire collapsed after more than six centuries. The British Empire had reached its greatest extent but its heyday was over. The Irish Free State was declared and demands for independence in India grew. New nations and new politics came into existence. The Soviet Union was officially created and Mussolini's Italy became the first Fascist state. In the USA, Prohibition was at its height. The Hollywood film industry, although rocked by a series of scandals, continued to grow. A new mass medium - radio - was making its presence felt and, in Britain, the BBC was founded. In literature it was the year of peak modernism. Both T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses were first published in full. In society, already changed by the trauma of war and pandemic, the morals of the past seemed increasingly outmoded; new ways of behaving were making their appearance. The Roaring Twenties had begun to roar and the Jazz Age had arrived. In a sequence of vividly written sketches, Nick Rennison conjures up all the drama and diversity of an extraordinary year.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR NICK RENNISON

‘The exemplary editorial notes are often as entertaining as the stories’ – Times (Crime Club) on American Sherlocks

‘An intriguing anthology’ – Mail on Sunday on The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

‘These 15 sanguinary spine-tinglers… deliver delicious chills’ – Independent on The Rivals of Dracula

‘A book which will delight fans of crime fiction’ – Verbal Magazine on More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

‘This miscellany of miscreants comes highly recommended for anyone with an interest in London’s colourful cultural history, and for readers who are fuelled by the flames of rebellion’ – LoveReading on Bohemian London

‘A gloriously Gothic collection of heroes fighting against maidens with bone-white skin, glittering eyes and bloodthirsty intentions’ – Promoting Crime Fiction on The Rivals of Dracula

‘Nick Rennison’s The Rivals of Dracula shows that many Victorian and Edwardian novelists tried their hand at this staple of Gothic horror’ – Spectator

‘A delight for fans of the history of crime writing and lovers of the short story mystery format. I can’t think of a more pleasant afternoon’s reading than this. Fun and informative’ – NB Magazine on More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

‘The Rivals of Dracula is a fantastic collection of classic tales to chill the blood and tingle the spine. Grab a copy and curl up somewhere cosy for a night in’ – Citizen Homme Magazine

‘All in all, this is a fascinating look at a vibrant and informative picture of a period in crime fiction history that was both productive and rich.’ – Crime Review on More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

‘The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts’

Willa Cather

Introduction

It was a decade with a distinctive character. Even at the time, those who were living through them recognised that the 1920s were unusual. They deserved a special status. In America, they were dubbed ‘The Roaring Twenties’ or ‘The Jazz Age’; in France, they were ‘Les Années Folles’ (‘The Crazy Years’). The world had just emerged from a war that had killed millions of people and a global pandemic that had ended the lives of tens of millions more. The so-called ‘Spanish’ flu, named because Spain had initially seemed one of the most severely hit countries, had first shown itself during the last months of the First World War. It had spread over the next few years, infections coming in several waves, until almost a third of the world’s population is now estimated to have caught it and between 20 and 50 million people had died of it. (Some estimates put the number of fatalities even higher.) Those who had come of age during these years and survived the twin traumas of war and disease were often disoriented and directionless. They were, in the phrase coined by the expatriate American writer Gertrude Stein, the ‘Lost Generation’. The only aim many of the members of this generation in Europe and America had was to enjoy themselves. In an era of dance crazes, Hollywood excess, illicit drinking and a relaxation of sexual morals, hedonism was the name of the game.

This determination to party was only one aspect of the 1920s. It was also a period of upheaval and change. Of all the years in this dramatic decade, 1922 was the most turbulent. It was a year which altered the map of the world. In the wake of the war, an empire tottered and fell. The Ottoman Empire, which had survived for 600 years, ended with its last sultan forced into exile. Even the British Empire, which reached its greatest extent in the 1920s, was showing signs of decay. In Ireland, the Anglo-Irish War had come to an end in late 1921. A peace treaty had been signed that created the Irish Free State but triggered a brutal civil war the following year. Egypt had been granted a diluted form of self-government. The independence movement in India was gaining strength. Elsewhere, new nations came into existence and older nations made radical changes in their politics. The last few days of 1922 saw the official foundation of the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Earlier in the year, Mussolini and his Blackshirts had embarked on their ‘March to Rome’ which had resulted in Italy becoming the first fascist state.

In the arts, traditional forms were proving inadequate and writers, musicians and painters were seeking different means of expressing themselves. In Anglophone literature, the publication in February 1922 of arguably the most influential novel of the century (James Joyce’s Ulysses) was followed in October by that of the most influential poem (TS Eliot’s The Waste Land). In society, already changed by the trauma of war, the conventions and morals of the past seemed increasingly outmoded; new ways of thinking and behaving were making their appearance. My book aims to provide a portrait of this rollercoaster of a year.

Through a series of snapshots of events, from murders to football matches, from epoch-changing events like the establishment of the Soviet Union to artistic landmarks, I have attempted to give some sense of what the world was like 100 years ago. Some of what follows will provide reminders that, in LP Hartley’s famous words, ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’; some passages will seem all too familiar.

A century later the influence of events from 1922 lives on in many different ways. Modern Ireland has been shaped by what happened in the country that year. The treatment of diabetes with insulin (see January) continues to save and improve lives. The little-known animator who established Laugh-O-gram Films in Kansas City (see May) went on to create a media empire that still plays a central role in popular culture today. Sport still holds the mass appeal it was just beginning to achieve in 1922. Racial divisions still plague modern societies. As we emerge from a worldwide pandemic not so dissimilar to the one experienced by an earlier generation, it’s easy to understand the determination of so many people in 1922 just to enjoy themselves. I hope that all of these snapshots of a past that sometimes carries surprising echoes of the present prove entertaining and enlightening.

January

Soon after the year opens, one of the greatest scandals in Hollywood history is reignited by the second trial of ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle. New hope is brought to diabetes sufferers around the world by the first successful treatment of the disease with insulin. The death of Ernest Shackleton on an island in the South Atlantic brings the heroic era of polar exploration to a close. In London, the first performance of an unusual work combining poetry and music heralds the arrival of a major talent. In Washington DC, atrocious weather leads to disaster.

The ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle Scandal

On January 11, the second trial of the comedian and film star Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle began. The spotlight of national media publicity was again about to fall on the American film industry and the place that was already synonymous with it. Little more than a decade earlier, Hollywood had been nothing but a small rural community a few miles northwest of Los Angeles, locally renowned for its citrus groves and vineyards. Then the film-makers arrived, in flight from restrictions to their activities on the East Coast and in search of the sun. By 1922, Hollywood was the capital of the booming American film industry. Amongst the movies released that year were Blood and Sand, featuring the screen’s Latin lover Rudolph Valentino; Foolish Wives, directed by and starring the self-proclaimed genius Erich von Stroheim; and Manslaughter, one of Cecil B DeMille’s earliest and most lurid melodramas, complete with an eye-catching ‘orgy’ scene. In June, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, the story of an Inuit hunter and his family, opened in New York. Despite the scepticism of the many movie distributors who had turned it down on the grounds that nobody would be interested in the lives of ‘Eskimos’, it became the first commercially successful feature-length documentary in cinema history. It spawned a brief enthusiasm for all things ‘Eskimo’, including a Broadway song with the unforgettable lyrics, ‘Ever-loving Nanook/Though you don’t read a book/But, oh, how you can love!’

Throughout 1922, the comedians who had already become some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, continued to make movies. Charlie Chaplin was the world’s most famous man, his ‘Little Tramp’ persona familiar to audiences from Los Angeles to London to Soviet Russia. Chaplin himself had grown tired of the character’s limitations and was eager to make longer movies. His first feature, The Kid, had been released the previous year; Pay Day, his last short, two-reeler, appeared in 1922. Chaplin’s rival, Buster Keaton, had already appeared in his first feature-length movie, The Saphead from 1920, although all his releases in 1922 were short comedies. (Keaton was a friend of Arbuckle and had made his film debut, five years earlier, in a comedy starring the fat man.) Bespectacled Harold Lloyd, famous for undertaking his own, often dangerous stunts (the most memorable, which involved him hanging from the hands of a clock outside the top storey of a skyscraper, was from Safety Last, released the following year), was also making feature-length films. At the same time, other now half-forgotten comedians (Ben Turpin, Charley Chase, Snub Pollard) were delighting audiences with their inventive, slapstick humour. A young English comic named Stan Laurel, who had been Chaplin’s understudy in a music-hall troupe known as Fred Karno’s Army, was starring as ‘Rhubarb Vaselino’ in Mud and Sand, a two-reel parody of Blood and Sand, and awaiting his meeting with destiny and a plump American actor named Oliver Hardy. (Laurel and Hardy actually appeared together in a 1921 short entitled The Lucky Dog but not as a double act.)

However, the year’s blockbuster (although the word had yet to be invented) was Robin Hood, directed by Allan Dwan and starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr., ‘King of Hollywood’ during the silent era. Fairbanks was then at the height of his success and had demonstrated his talent for athletic swashbuckling in earlier films such as The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers. On the lookout for another historical costume role, Fairbanks was initially dismissive of the suggestion of Robin Hood. He didn’t want, he said, to play ‘a flat-footed Englishman walking through the woods’ but he was soon persuaded that the part could be tailored for his particular brand of energetic heroism. By the beginning of 1922, he was the project’s most eloquent advocate. Vast sums were spent on creating a huge castle set and a reconstruction of twelfth-century Nottingham in the Pickford-Fairbanks Studio on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Formosa Avenue in Hollywood. When Robin Hood premiered at the recently built Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard in October 1922, it had become the costliest movie in the history of cinema. More than $1,400, 000 had been lavished on it.

And then, in this same year of 1922, there were the second and third trials of Fatty Arbuckle. What was to become one of the greatest scandals in Hollywood’s history had begun at a party the previous year. The party was not in Hollywood. It was not even in Los Angeles. Many of the burgeoning film industry’s glitterati had taken to driving along the coast to San Francisco to seek more discreet and anonymous surroundings in which to have a good time than they could find in Hollywood. On Labor Day weekend in September 1921, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle and two friends arrived at the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco where they had rooms and a suite booked. The bootleg liquor was soon flowing (this was the Prohibition era) and more guests began to show up. Among them were two young women – Maude Delmont and Virginia Rappe. Rappe was attractive, twenty-six years old and had worked as both a model and an actress in minor movie roles. Delmont was a more enigmatic figure with a dubious reputation. It later emerged that she had a track record as a procurer of women for wealthy men and as a blackmailer.

There were conflicting accounts of what happened next at the ongoing carousal in the St Francis Hotel. What is clear is that, as more and more booze was consumed, Virginia Rappe became distressed and ill. The hotel doctor was called but, after examining her, decided that she was suffering from no more than severe intoxication. She was left to sleep off the effects of the hooch in another room. The doctor was badly mistaken. A couple of days later, by which time Arbuckle and his friends had left San Francisco, Rappe was admitted to hospital. She died there on 9 September from a ruptured bladder and ensuing peritonitis.

According to Delmont, her friend was the victim of a sexual assault by Arbuckle. He had pulled the drunken Rappe into a room with the words, ‘I’ve waited for you five years, and now I’ve got you’, and shut and locked the door. When Delmont, hammering and kicking furiously on the door after she heard screaming in the room, finally persuaded the comedian to open up, she could see Rappe stretched out on the bed, moaning and in pain. It was at that point that she was taken to another room and the hotel doctor summoned. After her hospitalisation, she had told Delmont that Arbuckle had raped her.

Arbuckle, denying any wrongdoing, told a very different story. Yes, he had drunk with Virginia Rappe but he had never been alone with her, and others could confirm this. She had, at one point, become hysterical and started tugging at her clothes, claiming she couldn’t breathe. Later he had found her throwing up in the bathroom and, together with some of the other partygoers, had arranged for her to be transferred to another room in the hotel so she could sleep off her intoxication. When he returned to Los Angeles after the weekend party, he assumed that she would be suffering from nothing worse than a monumental hangover.

Whether or not Arbuckle was telling the truth, he was in deep trouble. Delmont’s story, when it emerged after Virginia Rappe’s death, was like red meat to the tabloid press. Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle was one of Hollywood’s best-known and best-loved stars. A former vaudeville performer who weighed in at more than 300 pounds (hence his all too predictable nickname), he had been appearing in films since 1909. His popularity was such that Paramount Pictures had offered him a three-year contract worth $3 million in 1918. Just before the scandal broke they had renewed it for another year and another million dollars. Accusations against a man so much in the public eye made for eye-catching headlines. William Randolph Hearst, the press tycoon, later reported that the Arbuckle scandal had sold more newspapers than any event since the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915.

With ever more lurid accusations of sexual depravity surfacing in the newspapers, Arbuckle came back to San Francisco and voluntarily turned himself in. He spent three weeks in jail, as a mugshot of him was released to the papers and the authorities decided what to do. The San Francisco District Attorney, Matthew Brady, was an ambitious man who saw the case as a means of self-publicity. He pressed for prosecution, originally on a charge of first-degree murder. This was reduced to one of manslaughter and Arbuckle’s first trial by jury rather than by media began on 14 November 1921. He was accused of causing Rappe’s death by rupturing her bladder during a sexual assault. (Even more sensational rumours were circulating that her injuries had been inflicted when Arbuckle, rendered impotent by too much alcohol, had penetrated her with a Coke or champagne bottle.) Many of Brady’s prosecution witnesses provided testimony that was either contradictory or persuasively rebutted by the defence. Arbuckle took the stand himself and gave a measured account of what he said had happened at the party, denying all responsibility for Rappe’s death. He must have had high hopes that his ordeal would soon be over but the trial ended in deadlock with the jury divided 10-2 in favour of acquittal. A mistrial was declared.

A second trial, which began on 11 January 1922, again ended with the jury unable to make a unanimous decision. Much of the same evidence was presented as in the first trial but the defence now had further means to discredit prosecution witnesses. One woman admitted that she had lied; another, a security guard who worked at the film studio and had testified that Arbuckle had once offered him a bribe to gain access to Virginia Rappe’s dressing room, turned out to be facing his own criminal charges of assaulting an eight-year-old girl. The defence team was so confident that they decided not to ask the comedian to enter the witness box and give evidence himself. This ploy probably backfired. Some members of the second jury may well have concluded that he had something to hide. This time the division was 9-3 but in favour of a guilty verdict. With a mistrial again declared, Arbuckle’s ordeal continued and a third trial opened on 13 March.

By this time, stories of the infamous party at the St Francis Hotel and of Hollywood orgies in general had been titillating newspaper readers for months. Many film distributors and cinema owners, not bothering with tiresome details of Arbuckle’s guilt or innocence, had already banned his films. Yet the comedian’s defence team had even stronger material to present to the jury than in either of the other trials. Maud Delmont’s blackmailing past was revealed; evidence was put forward that showed Virginia Rappe was not the near-saintly innocent the prosecution had depicted. At least one key prosecution witness had done a bunk. Arbuckle again testified himself and made a good impression. The jury took less than ten minutes to declare Arbuckle not guilty. More than that, they insisted on writing a formal statement in which they said, ‘Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him.’ After the verdict was announced, all twelve members of the jury queued up to shake the defendant by the hand.

However, the damage had already been done. Although he had endured three trials and been acquitted in the last of these, Arbuckle’s career was effectively over. Loyal friends came to his aid. Buster Keaton hired him as a writer on some of his short comedies. Under the name William Goodrich (Keaton originally suggested the punning pseudonym of Will B Good), Arbuckle directed a handful of movies for smaller studios. Ironically, the film that was probably his highest-profile work after the trials, The Red Mill, starred Marion Davies, the long-term mistress of William Randolph Hearst, the man whose newspapers had done so much to bring him down. However, the smears and innuendo that had haunted him since Virginia Rappe’s death were never forgotten. He was a broken man. The now cult actress Louise Brooks, who worked with him on a 1931 film, said of him, ‘He just sat in his director’s chair like a dead man. He had been very nice and sweetly dead ever since the scandal that ruined his career.’ Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle died in his sleep of a heart attack on 29 June 1933, aged 46.

The Arbuckle scandal was a tragedy for the individuals involved. A young woman died in terrible circumstances. A much-loved movie comedian saw his career go down the drain. It also had wider repercussions. After the shock of the William Desmond Taylor murder (see February) followed the yellow press revelations surrounding Virginia Rappe’s death, the Hollywood studios began to realise that they needed to do something to protect the industry’s rapidly deteriorating reputation. Leading producers came together to create the MPPDA (the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) in order to do so. In 1922, William Hays, the fiercely moralistic, former campaign manager of the US president, Warren Harding, was appointed the MPPDA’s first chairman. Hays, ‘a man of exemplary dullness’ as one writer has described him, was charged in effect with creating a self-censorship board for Hollywood films. Fearing that more central censorship might be imposed upon them (there were already plenty of individual state regulations), the producers and distributors wanted to show that they could put their own house in order. Over the years to come, the ‘Hays Office’, as it came to be known, issued guidelines on what was and was not acceptable on screen, particularly in the portrayal of sex and violence. They were not always followed but, in 1930, a formal ‘Production Code’ was established. Four years later, the Production Code Administration came into being to enforce the often rigid regulations. All movies had to gain the PCA’s approval before they could be shown. The Code continued in existence until the 1960s by which time society and the movie industry had changed so much that it had become unenforceable.

Insulin Treats Diabetes

On 11 January, a 13-year-old schoolboy from Toronto named Leonard Thompson made medical history when he became the first patient suffering from diabetes to be injected with insulin. Weighing only 65 pounds and drifting in and out of a diabetic coma as he lay in his bed at Toronto General Hospital, Leonard was close to death when his father agreed that he should be given the insulin. It had never previously been tried on a human being. The first dose had no effect on the boy’s condition. In fact, it induced an allergic reaction but he was injected with a purer version of the insulin 12 days later and this time it worked. His blood glucose levels returned to normal and his most dangerous symptoms began to disappear.

Insulin’s therapeutic potential had been proposed by the Canadian physician and scientist Frederick Banting, working in conjunction with a younger colleague Charles Best, and they had presented their ideas to JJR Macleod, professor of physiology at the University of Toronto, the previous year. Macleod had encouraged them, provided them with grants and laboratory space, and had made his own contributions to the experiments designed to produce insulin that could be used on diabetic patients. Macleod and Banting, who was still only in his early thirties, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1923. Leonard Thompson lived for another 13 years, dying of pneumonia, a complication of his diabetes, in April 1935, aged 26.

The Death of Shackleton

The first week of 1922 saw the death of Ernest Shackleton, a man hailed at the time as one of the British Empire’s greatest heroes. Born in Ireland and educated at Dulwich College, London, he had served as an officer in the Merchant Navy before joining Captain Scott’s Discovery expedition and embarking on the career that made him one of the most famous of all polar explorers. Invalided home after his exertions on a journey with Scott and Edward Wilson to what was then the furthest south men had ever reached, Shackleton had returned to lead his own expedition to Antarctica and made it to within 100 miles of the South Pole in January 1909 before being forced to turn back. He had led the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17 during which he took part in an epic boat journey to South Georgia to seek help for his men stranded on an uninhabited island in the Southern Ocean. His last voyage had begun in a blaze of publicity when his ship, the Quest, a converted Norwegian sealer, sailed from London on 17 September 1921. The ship proved a problem from the start and Shackleton had to change his plans several times en route south to accommodate delays caused by the need to work on its engines. By the time the Quest reached Rio at the end of November, he was in poor spirits. His aims for the expedition seemed uncertain. ‘The Boss says,’ one man confided to his diary, ‘quite frankly that he does not know what he will do.’ The plan, such as it was, appeared to be to head for the Antarctic islands and review the possibilities there. The truth was that Shackleton was ill. He died of a heart attack in South Georgia, aged only 47, on 5 January 1922. Plans were made to return his body to Britain but a message was received from his wife, saying that he should be buried on South Georgia. His grave now stands in the cemetery at Grytviken where it is regularly visited by tourists on the cruise ships that now sail Antarctic waters.

With Shackleton’s passing what has often been termed ‘The Heroic Age of Polar Exploration’ came to an end. Of the other great figures of that era, Captain Scott was, of course, ten years dead, the failure of his attempt to be first to the South Pole already transformed into the stuff of legends, not least by Scott himself in the final journal entries he wrote as the end approached. In 1922, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who had been one of the party which discovered the bodies of Scott and his companions, provided a less self-mythologising account when he published The Worst Journey in the World. Cherry-Garrard was frank about the dangers and discomforts he endured. ‘Polar exploration,’ he wrote, ‘is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.’ (The ‘worst journey’ of his title does not refer to the doomed race to the pole but to an earlier trip on which Cherry-Garrard accompanied Edward Wilson and ‘Birdie’ Bowers, travelling from the expedition’s base at Cape Evans to Cape Crozier. The journey was made in the midst of an Antarctic winter, in complete darkness and in temperatures that fell to more than 70° below zero. Its aim was to gather penguin eggs.) Cherry-Garrard’s record of Scott’s last expedition has become a classic of travel literature and remains in print a century after its first publication.

Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who had beaten Scott to the South Pole, was still seeking glory. In 1922, he abandoned plans for a naval expedition to the North Pole and turned his attention to the idea of an aerial trip to the top of the world. Although other triumphs awaited him (he made a successful flight over the North Pole before his disappearance in 1928 during a search for the missing airship Italia), the nature of heroism was changing in the 1920s. After the horrors of the First World War, old ideals of manly endeavour often seemed hollow and inappropriate to many people.

First Performance of Façade

The fledgling composer William Walton had been ‘discovered’ at Oxford, where he was a choral scholar, by Sacheverell Sitwell, youngest member of a trio of literary siblings. Convinced of his musical genius, Sacheverell, in alliance with his brother Osbert and his sister Edith, had adopted the young man and, as 1922 began, he was living in an attic room at the family home, 2, Carlyle Square, London, dependent financially on their support. ‘I went for a few weeks,’ he later wrote, ‘and stayed for fifteen years.’ It was while he was there that he wrote musical accompaniment to a series of poems by Edith. Dubbed an ‘entertainment’, Façade has become a landmark in the history of twentieth-century English music. Walton continued to revise and add to the music for much of the rest of his life.

Façade’s first private performance was given to invited guests at Carlyle Square on 24 January. Edith Sitwell recited her own idiosyncratic poems, declaiming 18 of them through a type of megaphone known as a Sengerphone which looks, in photographs, like a traffic cone upended so that someone can shout through the narrower end. It was invented by a Swiss singer named Alexander Senger, supposedly to give added volume to Wagnerian performers. Walton himself, still only a teenager, conducted the small ensemble of musicians.

In an expanded version, the first public performance took place in June the following year at the Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street. It was attended, according to one dismissive newspaper report, by ‘the long-haired men and short-haired women’ of London’s avant-garde. Other newspapers were even ruder. One headline supposedly read, ‘Drivel That They Paid to Hear’. Even some of the musicians didn’t enjoy playing the score. The clarinettist is reported to have asked the composer, ‘Mr Walton, has a clarinet player ever done you an injury?’ However, it was the succès de scandale which the Sitwells had sought and propelled both them and Walton into the public eye.

The Knickerbocker Storm

For two days and nights in January a blizzard battered Washington DC. It was the city’s worst snowstorm of the twentieth century. It began during the late afternoon of 27 January and within 24 hours most of Washington was lying under several feet of snow. More was to accumulate the next night. The ‘Knickerbocker Storm’, as it came to be known, took its name from the Knickerbocker Theatre, a movie palace in the city which was the site of the greatest loss of life during the atrocious weather. On the night of 28 January, the theatre was showing Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, a silent film version of a bestselling novel of the day. The audience sat happily through a number of shorts and cartoons but, shortly after the feature film began, at around 9 pm, some of its members heard what they later described as a hissing noise from above. The Knickerbocker’s flat roof was piled high with snow and it was starting to crack under the weight. Lumps of plaster from the ceiling began to fall on the cinemagoers. Many of them, realising the danger, ran for the exits or tried to shelter beneath the seats. It was too late. Within minutes the entire roof, detached from the supporting walls, fell. In doing so, it also pulled down the theatre’s balcony and people who had so recently been looking forward to Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford were buried beneath the debris.