The Regent's Park Skating Disaster of 1867 | Episode 98 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Nothing says fun afternoon quite like adding cutlery to your feet,
bruising most of your body and then going for a
nice swim. And to clarify, when I say nothing, I
mean because that is not something that anyone has ever
said before. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast.

(00:38):
Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre,
and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters
from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode,
we'll see how the former digs of axe murderers and
corpse thieves and child labor body became one of the

(01:02):
most beautiful green spaces in London. We'll learn why early
ice skates were only marginally more comfortable than being eaten
by wolves. And we'll see how Victorian fashion doubled as
de facto funeral attire with the addition of simple water.
And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you
would hear how early animal captivity turned one man into

(01:25):
a bloody, stretched armstrong doll, complete with blood spray effects.
He would learn how the Dutch invented a new high
speed form of knife fighting and ice skates for horses,
and you would hear how London had a unique form
of winter fare that only closed up for the year
once people started drowning. This is not the show you

(01:47):
play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company.
But as long as you find yourself a little more
historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life,
our work is done. With all that said, shoot the
kids out of the room, put on your headphones and
safety glasses, and let's begin. You probably never think about it,

(02:13):
but there is a small area in your brainstem that
autopilots your barf reflex. Once your brain's decided yep, this
is too much. It makes your mouth fill with saliva,
tightens your stomach and diaphragm, and then it relaxes your
throat so you can for subject stuff up with relative ease.

(02:33):
Results may vary, but you can consciously override the reflex
and interrupt the vomiting sequence. They call it wretch suppression.
And you may be wondering why I'm telling you this.
It's for a simple but unexpected reason. Today we will
be returning to eighteen hundreds Victorian England, and of all

(02:56):
of the times that we've been here, and this may
be hard to believe. This will be the first episode
where you will not have to worry about stepping in,
getting splashed with or drowning in feces, so vomit induction
will not be necessary. I mean, we are still visiting

(03:17):
eighteen sixty seven London, the largest, loudest and least washed
city in the world, where coal smoke, horse manure, and
the smell of prostitute blood dripping from a not so
shiny blade linger in the air. Whether you're looking to
bring home black lung or typhus or just some charmless

(03:38):
and persistent cough, I think you will never forget your
trip to Victorian England. And for the purposes of our
trip today, we will be visiting London, the capital of
the world's largest empire. It was also the financial center
of all global trade, and around this time it was

(03:59):
on the wrote because of industrialization and urbanization. Everyone and
their brother was moving from the moors into the capitol,
looking to be at the center of it all. Everything
you saw or heard or read, if you knew how
to read, made London out to be the place where
everything important happened. It just passed three million people, making

(04:23):
it the biggest city in the world. I've heard it
described as a booming, overcrowded, gas lit metropolis, and gaslighting
must have made everything from public speeches to muggings feel
more theatrical in a way that is lost to us now.
Metropolitan London may be a place where we don't know

(04:45):
what kind of puddle we're standing in, but for the
purposes of our trip today, the closest that we'll beginning
to a cholera outbreak or a mine collapse or a
train derailment will be in the newspaper. No shakings or
foul play on our trip. On the contrary, we're actually
here to relax and to try to enjoy ourselves. In fact,

(05:08):
this is a unique outing for us, where we will
be seeking out entertainment and fun rather than the effluvial
and excremental hijinks we normally find ourselves forced into. London
is buzzing with excitement, and depending on who you are,
how you spend your night might look very different. For

(05:29):
a dock worker or a costermonger or a factory hand
Leisure time is rare but precious. Free activities included playing
What's that Smell? A fun activity for the whole family,
especially on a warm summer day. Could that be the
wet leather, rotting flesh, hot urine smell of a tannery,

(05:50):
or night soil thrown thoughtlessly from a bedpan, or maybe
the not quite best before day rotting fish from the market,
I say, why choose? You could also take in a
public hang. Victorians loved events, exhibitions, parades, lectures, royal appearances,

(06:11):
public executions, whatever. But I hear that they are facing
executions out, so you may want to get in as
many as you can before they're gone. If you live
nearer the bottom of the food chain and just wanted
to get away from your nine kids for a bit
and had a few pennies to rub together after payday,

(06:31):
you might duck into a local pub, the kind of
place where there's somebody playing a fiddle or a piano
in the corner, and you try to read the menu
by the flickering gaslight, and you can't really even think
straight because it's so loud, with the sounds of laughter
and punching and tankards clinking together. It's not so much
a source of entertainment as it is a way to

(06:53):
tamp down all of your basic needs. Up to and
including the ability to sit upright, which this was a
rich British tradition. If you had a few more pennies
to rub together, you might liven up the night with
a visit to a music hall, another place that's loud,
with the sounds of laughter and punching and tankards clinking together.

(07:15):
But instead of a drunk croaking out my heart will
go on to a pan flute or a recorder. Over
and over Here, entertainers built out songs, Dancers whirl across
a stage. Hell. You might even get to see a
magician or get to throw a knife at a poet.
These are what we think of as Victorian era working

(07:36):
man's entertainments. But these are just indoor activities. On a real,
special occasion, a traveling fairground might set up with their
striped tents and fried eels. This was your chance to
get your fortune red. Try not to kill yourself at
a shooting gallery. Throw some beer at a fire eater
or a circus style strong man or performing monkeys, any

(08:00):
one of which might pull off your face or settered
on fire. A place where little people and heavily tattooed
sailors were seen as exotic and put on display beside
cojoined twins and people of foreign skin tones who woke
up on a boat and must have felt like they
were being held captive on an alien planet. All this

(08:21):
could be a little loud or chaotic for more uptown
middle class family types, who might prefer to find themselves
gathered in their parlor or playing charades or singing around
a piano. These people had a specific code of leisure
and status and appearances. You ever hear of a calling
card before, Well, this is the kind of actual thing

(08:44):
that someone of higher esteem might leave at an acquaintances
during a weekly visit, and then they trot off to
the country house for the weekend to eat long meals
and shoot things. If a night out caught their fancy,
they too may enjoy an evening at the theater. Mind you,
west End theaters had actual seating, and the audience were polite.

(09:06):
Throwing knives or veggies or beer was frowned upon, and
they wouldn't be there to see some woman in a
puffy skirt sing about her fanny. They visited the opera
and took in symphonies and grand melodramas. Other nights they
might spend the evening at a societal ball, dancing waltzes
under glittering chandeliers, or at a gentleman's club sipping brandy

(09:31):
and discussing politics, or the stock market, or the British
Empire as a whole. This was a very busy little
time in history, a jolly good time indeed, but it
all points out what a gulf there was between how
the rich and the poor exercised their free time, whether
swimming in a large pool filled with coins or sawing

(09:53):
up dead horses in the street. It wasn't all divided
down class lines, though Cricket was laid by gentlemen but
adored by laborers. Rowing regattas drew thousands of people watching
strong armed dandies paddle and stroke through the feces laded Thames.
Horse racing, particularly the Epsom Derby, was a truly national

(10:16):
event where dukes and drunks stood shoulder to shoulder to
cheer on their favorite ponies. But at the time of
our visit, rowers or cricketers or horses would die outside.
Because it is the middle of January and it has
been one of the coldest winters in decades, they had
just experienced an unusually sharp cold snap. It was sudden

(10:40):
and bitterly cold, and immobilizing for most. Newspapers mentioned horses
falling in the ice laden streets, acquiring broken legs and
requiring what they called emergency slaughter. Throughout December of eighteen
sixty six and January of eighteen sixty seven, of persistent

(11:01):
Arctic northerlies and high pressure systems settled over Western Europe,
trapping cold air in place. Long periods of below freezing
temperatures were the result. And London is not a place
that freezes easily or often, but here we were. Water
troughs froze, solid pipes burst, homes glazed over with frost.

(11:23):
Even the Thames itself had been collecting sheets of ice
along its edges. People said London hadn't known a winter
like this in decades, like we said, but people didn't
even really complain, breathing normally, walking upright. Everything became an adventure.
The cold was seen as a novelty and Londoners were

(11:45):
loving it. They didn't get this kind of thing every year,
And on those years where the mercury dropped low enough
for long enough that lakes and ponds could freeze thick
enough for someone to stand on. Word traveled quick. Londoners
grabbed their skates and ran from their homes in search
of ice, like frenzied animals trying to sniff out prey man.

(12:08):
We haven't been skating since we visited the Indianapolis death
capades of nineteen sixty three. Remember it was a time
we went to see a Halloween holidays on ice and
we nearly burn to death in an explosion. Well, believe
me when I tell you there certainly will not be
any burning to death today. No, what we are here

(12:29):
to see today was often described by Victorian newspapers as
a mix of delight and slapstick. People wind milling their arms,
clinging to friends, bruising themselves terribly, and crawling towards land,
while clusters of spectators roared with laughter and cheered every
time someone took a dramatic triple axle as first into

(12:52):
the ice. It was more entertaining than a public execution.
And you have to understand that winters in London always
had a real freeze thaw thing going on, and that
didn't make for such great or reliable ice, And that
meant most people didn't grow up learning to skate and
the average skill level in eighteen sixty seven was described

(13:15):
as spectacularly uneven but enthusiastic. Now that they had an
actual good frieze, people put on whatever ill fitting or
improvised nonsense they could find and just go for it.
Anywhere someone could reliably find themselves racing across a frozen
surface stable enough to hold them, a kind of a

(13:37):
festival atmosphere popped up all around it. You'd find vendors
selling beefshanks and bandages and skate rentals, and there was
music and laughing couples bundled up on the surrounding banks,
and gawkers taking bets on the next good injury. And
one of the most popular places to get your skate
on was the small lake at Regent's Park. Region's Park

(14:01):
lies in north central London, just above the West End,
right between the inner city and the more residential areas
to the north, straddling Camden and Marleybunn. As green spaces go,
it is one of London's crown jewels. It felt spacious
and open compared to the densely packed streets around Soho

(14:23):
and Oxford Circus. And I don't want to mislead you
by simply calling it up park. Imagine the London Zoological Gardens,
the London Zoo, Queen Mary's Gardens, cricket fields and brought
promenades all in one place, with plenty of room to spare.
It would have felt like another world compared to the dank,

(14:46):
filth and exploding horses just a short walking distance away,
and it became the place to be. Did I mention
the park at its own lake? While it didn't always
go back far enough and the land was originally part
of the manner of Marley Bunn later owned by the Crown,

(15:06):
back in the seventeen hundreds, it was just called Marleybun
Park and most of it was used for farm animals
to gnaw on. In the seventeen nineties and early eighteen hundreds,
it played double duty as a dueling site for anyone
from aristocrats to barroom drunks to satisfy their honor. Most
duels were held at dawn before the cops woke up,

(15:29):
and more often than not, both parties would choose to
fire wide, you know, having cooled off a bit and
respecting their opponent for even having showed up, and also
probably not wanting to go to jail. Not always, though
One very famous duel between and mister Melon and Delacour
resulted in no one being injured, and Delacour saying, mind

(15:52):
if we do a quick second round where he blasted
Melon squarely in the chest. Duels may have been illegal,
but at least they were organized. Less organized, or at
least less orderly was body snatching. Grave robbery for anatomy
schools was also rampant in the area in the early

(16:13):
eighteen hundreds. Imagine trying to shoot someone for cheating at
cards when a pair of ghoules trot by carrying a
recently deceased body. Before cremation became popular, churchyards became so
overcrowded that bodies were disinterred and stacked to free up
space for more paying customers. I mean, funerals and medical

(16:36):
training at the time relied heavily on a constant supply
of freshly deceased and easily dissectible bodies and the grave
robbers that supplied them. None of this paints the area
in a very good light. And this doesn't even begin
to touch on the axe murderers and arsonists and poisoners

(16:57):
and decapitators and ghosts and open dens and robber gangs
and pedophilic brothels and child workhouses, and the mass graves
and the bone pits. The area had a bit of
an image problem, and in eighteen eleven the future King
of England, King George the Fourth, took it upon himself

(17:18):
to initiate a large scale urban improvement campaign to clean
things up. He hired one of the era's most renowned
urban designers and architects, John Nash, to develop a sweeping
plan for a landscaped garden park and pleasure grounds with
all the amenities, and surrounded by elegant villas and terraced houses.

(17:41):
The addition of a lake really pulled things together, and
he called it Regent's Park. Now. Nash had intended the
park as a private estate for royals and aristocratic elites.
Few things, though. Most of the private villas never got built,
and rich people didn't like being surrounded by poor people

(18:04):
anymore than actually mingling with them, so they stayed away
and the unwashed masses took over. And they give you
a sense how large this park was. If those masses
had arrived in dodge caravans, they could have parked one
hundred and thirty five thousand of them there that would
have been four hundred and ten acres of pavement, which

(18:26):
would have been a terrible sight. Regent's Park was just
under half the size of New York City Central Park,
but for reference, Central Park is the size of Rhode Island.
And so it is said, in a land where people
lived fourteen to a bed, a designated green space, this
large and lush and beautiful must have felt like the

(18:47):
kind of thing they expected to see when they died.
Long curving paths, open fields, ornamental gardens, and the broad
stretch of the lake gave people plenty of room to
stroll or pick nick, or row, or just take a
minute away from the hum of factory wheels and the
soot darkened skies. They described it as being one of

(19:10):
London's lungs, a place for air and greenery and general
well being and being free and open. It was busy
all year round. In the spring, people couldn't get enough
of the gardens and the zoo. In summer it was
all boating and promenading and flower sniffing. By autumn it

(19:31):
was all about strolling beneath the changing leaves. But in winters,
in unusually cold winters. When the lake froze, crowds of
thousands would pack the place. People who had never skated
before wanted to try, or at least watch. Skating, of course,
had been a thing for thousands of years. More than

(19:54):
three thousand years ago, people living around modern day Finlanden, Sweden,
and Denmark and parts of Russia started strapping the leg
bones of horses or reindeer to their feet and pushing
themselves along frozen lakes with wooden poles, not so much
for fun, but more as a way to get across
dangerous ice as quickly as possible. Early skates were thought

(20:18):
of more as survival tools. There are even stories of
people escaping wolves on these things. They'd make them by
drilling a hole through the bone to run a leather strap,
which they would then connect to their feet, and off
they went, and it was as clever as it was uncomfortable.
Modern recreationists have cried wearing these things. Imagine a rough

(20:43):
bone jabbing unevenly into your feet, with zero cushioning or
support or stability that you try not to roll your
ankles on, and all the while your feet are freezing.
Better than being eaten by wolves. But I cannot say
by how much. The Middle Ages, the Dutch swapped animal
femurs for steel blades, but they were heavy and unwieldy,

(21:06):
and the straps became a different kind of uncomfortable, so
they evolved from crude and painful to stiff and tiring.
It would only take about another four or five hundred
years for the blades to become more refined and for
boots to replace the s and M footstraps. Things became
a lot smoother, and the design became the ancestor of

(21:29):
modern skates. By these seventeen and eighteen hundreds, skating had
transformed from a way not to die on ice to
a fashionable pastime and eventually a sport. Our story today
takes place January fifteenth, eighteen sixty seven. Since the moment

(21:49):
the first rays of sun broke over the city, crowds
enthusiastically descended on the park from all corners, all eager
to enjoy the simple magic of gliding a a frozen surface.
And this continued all day. It was mid January, and
by around three point thirty the sun was already getting low.

(22:11):
There were at least five hundred people slashing and pin
wheeling their way around the lake, with as many as
three thousand people watching from the surrounding banks of the rink.
You probably didn't know this, but rink is an old
English Scottish term for a marked out playing area. Glacierium
is another word you've probably never investigated. Back in the

(22:34):
eighteen forties, right here in Victorian England, a guy named
John Gamgi created a way to reduce the freezing point
of water, using chemicals to create something sticky and waxy
but close enough to ice for people to skate on indoors,
and he called it the glacierium. People thought it was

(22:55):
cool but weird, and that maybe the chemicals may be
poisoning them, not like the perfectly natural, dull, whitish, gray
and perfectly slippery ice. Here at Regent's Park, everyone was
cheerful and lively to the point of festive, with people
laughing and learning how not to fall. That was until

(23:16):
the lake made a sound. Skaters did their best to
stop moving, and people shushed each other, listening as hard
as they could to try to understand what they had
just heard. Some were probably anxious to see if it
would happen again. When suddenly, without any warning, the center
section of the ice dropped several inches, with water surging

(23:39):
over its lower edge. It would have felt like standing
on a tabletop. When the legs started to collapse, A
booming crack tore through the park as this center of
the ice split free from the surrounding ice and all
began fracturing along multiple lines. At the same time, a
chorus of screams rows as jagged sections of ice beneath

(24:02):
their feet began tilting and lifting away, and with that
people began falling and sliding straight into the murky depths below.
The water was described as black, almost ink like, and
this wasn't some polite little hole. It was as much
as ninety feet or thirty meters across and growing. A

(24:24):
chain reaction of slabs dipped and fractured and dragged neighboring
sections down with them. Hundreds of men and women and
children were thrown into the black water beneath. People instantly disappeared,
while hundreds more scrambled to get off of the lake altogether.
Those close to the edge instinctively kneeled or lay flat,

(24:46):
desperately hoping to not be pulled in. For those that did,
the icy water was so cold it shocked the body
into a paralysis of hyperventilation and muscle contraction, which may
trying to swim for your life or grab onto the
ice almost impossible from any And for those who conquered
the cold water response quickly with enough resilience to fight

(25:09):
for their lives. I remind you they were wearing steel
bladed skates strapped tightly to their boots, and those boots
immediately filled and became heavy with water and the blades.
The greatest tool for pushing oneself through water are flippers.
Skates are, by every measure, the literal exact opposite of flippers.

(25:34):
People who were just inches below the surface, close enough
to see the light and moving arms above them, could
not get their feet to cooperate. Anyone trying to kick
up towards the opening naturally swung their legs in a
forward and up arcing motion, and that was exactly the
movement that brought their skates into contact with the underside

(25:56):
of the ice. Victorian skates had long, solid metal blades
with an upward curve at the toe, and in the water,
these acted like a hook or a harpoon. As soon
as someone's foot brushed the underside of the ice, their
blade bit in, and the more they tried to kick
it free, the more it wedged into the ice. And

(26:18):
once your skate caught with your feet stuck to the
ice above you, if you straightened out, you were effectively
standing with your body twisted upside down. Think of the
underside of the ice as the ceiling and you are lining.
No richie, and you cannot imagine how painful and disorienting
getting ice cold water into your sinuses for the first

(26:40):
time at fifty two years of age must have been.
The leather bindings that held them required both hands or
sometimes even a tool or another person to help remove.
You also have to remember these were people who were
not raised as recreational swimmers. Finding themselves suddenly submit urged

(27:00):
in freezing water no less would have been an entirely
foreign experience, and finding yourself confused and upside down in
this environment could not be more frightening. With the water
just above the freezing point, every moment of struggle would
have drained all the warmth and strength from their bodies.
And this will sound weird, but they would have been

(27:24):
better off falling in nude. I should probably explain Victorians
dressed in multiple layers of wool and flannel and cotton,
and then topped it off with heavy outer coats, all
of which would have soaked up water instantly. Men wore
long overcoats and waistcoats and thick trousers, and often scarves

(27:47):
or mufflers or both, wrapped high at the neck. Women
wore long skirts and petticoats and shawls and cloaks. And
I feel like I just described eight types of anchors.
These fabrics absorbed water and added dozens of pounds of
weight working against them, And I have to remind you
people of this age were also not raised to be

(28:09):
avid gym goers. Imagine trying to swim in heavy folded
clothing bunching up by your shoulders and chest that are
almost impossible to remove. Wool coats would have suctioned and
clung to the body, even without the buttons, which were
practically impossible to unjam with numb fingers. Many who managed

(28:30):
to breach the surface fought the weight that pulled at
their limbs and found themselves being dragged back below. They
clawed at the ice with their arms, but the weight
of their clothing made them too heavy to haul themselves out,
and the edge of the ice broke under their weight,
and all of this struggle and the weight of the
victims and their clothing took the breaking ice and reduced

(28:50):
it to smaller and smaller pieces, And as spectators rushed
forward to help, the addition of their weight only made
things worse, successfully fighting your way and gripping the frozen ledge,
clawing at the ice for your very survival, only to
have it break apart under your grip. The surface that

(29:11):
was solid only seconds earlier quickly became a slush of
floating shards and black water. Those near the center vanished quickly.
Some sank beneath the surface silently, while others thrashed until
they exhausted themselves and slowly joined them. One lady watched
as her husband descended below the surface like a gentleman,

(29:33):
while beside him two sisters held each other until the
water muted their screams. And that is the most frightening
thing about watching someone drown, the existential horror of watching
someone so vocal and filled with fear disappear under a
veil of immediate silence. Luckily, the Royal Humane Society had

(29:56):
rescue personnel station nearby, who sprinted to the scene with
boats and poles, waiting and rowing into the frigid water,
smashing pass through the ice to reach as many as
they could. They were trained for water rescues. In fact,
they were originally founded way back in seventeen seventy four
as the aptly named Society for the Recovery of Persons

(30:19):
apparently drowned on shore bystanders and park keepers through whatever
they could for people to grab onto, yelling for others
to bring ropes and ladders. Park keepers joined them, hacking
channels through the ice with poles, but there were too
many people in the water and two little time. Most

(30:40):
of the rescues were from ordinary people who found themselves
compelled to help for any number of reasons. Some threw
themselves flat onto the surface of the ice and reached
out with their canes or belts or umbrellas to people
thrashing in the water. One more elderly woman tore off
her shawl and through through the long end towards a

(31:01):
drowning skater, which helped guide them towards the thicker ice,
where others were able to pull them out. Groups of
men laid themselves on the ice, bellied down to spread
their weight while hauling people up by their wrists and
coat collars. Ordinary citizens formed human chains, desperately gripping hands,
leaning over the edge till their boots filled with water,

(31:23):
trying to haul strangers out. Some of those chains broke
when the ice under them gave away, sending the rescuers
now into the water. One man ran out to the
edge of the ice and managed to pull three people
out and throw them to safety by sheer strength before
falling in himself. A handful of skaters found themselves lucky

(31:47):
enough to be standing on angled slabs of ice that
had tilted instead of dropping into the water, which ended
up creating a kind of an underwater shelf that they
were able to stand on long enough to be reached Nearby.
Workmen from a construction site soon arrived with ladders and
planks to slide across the ice. Ropes were thrown and

(32:08):
dragged along, but people had trouble holding on, gradually relaxing
their grip and sinking. And I'm not going to get
into it, but there were an awful lot of children
on the ice that day, and in general they didn't
fare as well as big, chonky adults with more body
fat to insulate them against the cold. And the way

(32:30):
that I have been describing and telling you this tale
makes it sound like this was an ongoing ordeal. But
allow me to dispel you of that notion. After the
first two or three frantic minutes, there were very few
successful rescues. It was effectively over. So you're taking part

(32:53):
in a historical recreation of a Victorian skating party. But
the ice seems and you realize that your era accurate
outfit might as well have rocks in the pockets. And
your host is looking at you like maybe you don't
know what to do, and you're really not feeling good
about this one, and then he starts stopping on the

(33:16):
ice and counting down from five. Would you know what
to do? I wish I could tell you how to
save yourself in freezing water from your water logged petticoat
and frock. And I can never stand on ice in

(33:37):
multiple layers of Victorian wool. That's literally it problem solved.
Once in the water. It would have been almost impossible
for these people to shed these low key aquatic funeral
outfits in very cold water, wearing multiple heavy layers and
boots or skates, fighting fatigue and other victims, and with

(33:57):
nothing buoyant to hold onto, the chances of survival would
have been extremely low and dwindled with every passing second. However,
it is physically possible. In the modern age, people have
been able to free themselves from water logged modern synthetic
or blended fabric clothes, but mostly in friendlier conditions. A

(34:20):
person falls from a dock or a boat in jeans
and a heavy coat, but because the water is relatively
warm and they are not cold shocked while wearing multiple
layers of a leaded sponge material, they can stay at
the surface without being repeatedly yanked under by weight and
physical incapacity. The coat definitely gets heavy and drives them backwards,

(34:41):
but from many, many many reports of warm water boating
accidents and lifeguard rescues, individuals instinctively shrug their shoulders upward,
allowing the water logged garment to just slide backwards off
their arms. The coat becomes loosened by water flow without
clinging to the body. When trapped, air inside the code

(35:02):
vents it can help loosen it, making it slide off.
I hate to make it sound so simple, but survivors
in calmer, warmer and less panicked conditions claimed it was
like their coats just wanted to fall off. Results may vary,
and I hate to make it sound so simple. As
long as the water is warm enough to avoid the
immediate cold shock response, you can just stay at the

(35:24):
surface long enough to think the water is calm. You're
wearing modern, relatively short clothing with zippers or snaps or
loose buttons, and ideally you have some kind of buoyant
debris nearby to cling to, you should be fine. As
for your footwear, if it's the kind of thing that
you can kick off easily, go for it. It's always

(35:45):
going to be easier to dread water in bare feet
than in footwear, unless the water is cold, in which
case you have to balance ease versus heat loss. But
if they're not easy to remove, like you're wearing Doc Martins,
people often imagine laces would relax in water, but laces
behave very differently underwater. Cotton or leather laces can swell

(36:08):
and knots tighten, and when your fingertips prune, all of
that becomes harder to manipulate. My advice is you find
yourself in this situation and your footwear doesn't want to cooperate.
Stay calm and ignore them, even if they add weight
or they increase drag, because they're bulky and they're not
very hydrodynamic, and they change the mechanics of your ankle,

(36:31):
making your kicks less useful. Even if they make things
ten or thirty or fifty percent more difficult, it's still
way better than losing energy on a lost cause fighting
to remove them. You can cuss them out and set
them on fire after you're rescued. Swimming in an outfit
doesn't make you sink like a stone. It just tilts

(36:53):
the odds against you because you tend to burn more
energy and get less lift from every kick and paddle.
In a warm lake on a summer's day, it's potentially
frightening nuisance that requires you to calm yourself. In January,
with cold sapping your life force and all the dexterity
in your hands evaporating, it can feel more like your

(37:15):
clothes are trying to drag you to hell. The key
in either scenario is try to remain calm, maybe remind
yourself to take some solace in the fact that you
are not wearing some Victorian era aquatics cinder block. Those

(37:42):
who survived were typically the ones near the edge of
the hole when it broke. Those farther in died quickly
from cold chalk and weighted clothing. As day gradually surrendered, tonight,
rescue turned into recovery. All reports say the park became
eerily silent, except for the sound of axes breaking through

(38:04):
the refreezing ice and the sobbing of relatives as bodies
continued to be dragged back to shore. Thousands came to
watch mournfully, only to be confronted with an even more
horrifying final detail. The lake froze over again during the night,
with bodies visible beneath the new sheet of ice. Days later,

(38:27):
by the time the last victim was recovered, forty people
were declared dead, most to drowning, but one had died
from hypothermia. Sow what happened well to begin in the
winter of eighteen sixty seven, Mother Nature was all, hey, London,

(38:48):
watch this, and the lake in Regent's Park froze solid
enough to skate on, And as the days went by
and the temperature stayed low, more and more people ventured
out on the ice. It's called normalcy bias. People start
to believe that since no one's died out there before,
no one probably ever will. Newspapers and neighbors and Chatty's

(39:11):
shop owners made this the worst kept secret in London,
and the whole area became a kind of a fair
ground surrounding the ice. Here's the thing. I live beside
a bay that freezes every winter, but you could not
pay me to walk to the other side because water
continues to flow so it never freezes evenly. The lake

(39:35):
at Region Park was only about twelve to fifteen feet deep,
and the ice had varied in thickness from four down
to a measily two inches thick. I won't step out
onto ice less than six to eight inches thick. Some
witnesses testified that the ice was actually snow ice, which

(39:56):
is much weaker than regular ice. The difference is snow
ice is the stuff that you get when falling snow
mixes with slush and then refreezes. It's not nearly as
strong as regular frozen clear lake ice, and although it
failed with a mighty crack, Here's the thing. Snow ice
is softer, so while regular clear ice would have offered

(40:19):
up a lot more verbal cues, snow ice is softer
so it doesn't crack the same way. Clear regular ice
would have offered up a lot more loud and distinct
cues earlier on. That may have gotten more people off
the ice sooner and saved lives. But wait, there's more.
The day before the disaster, something happened that maybe should

(40:42):
have raised an eyebrow here or there. You tell me.
You see the day before our story, a section of
ice on this very lake at the crack, and twenty
one people had fallen through. Well, you say, damn, that
sounds bad. I might have mentioned it earlier, but everyone
was rescued and no one died, and I did not

(41:04):
want you yelling hello the whole episode at me. And
the thing too was people did not take that as
a bad omen. They actually took it as a sign
of luck. It was that normalcy bias I was telling
you about. Overnight, the ice refroze nice and smooth, and
the crowds came back the next day even stronger than before.

(41:26):
But wait, there's more. On that morning, the morning of
the disaster, before the crowds arrived, a small crew of
Regent's Park workmen had stepped out onto the frozen lake
with poles and chisels to break the ice around the islets.
First you're all, wait, what why? Second you're wondering what

(41:50):
an islet is. If you picture Regent's Park Lake, it
wasn't just a smooth oval of water. Scattered within it
were a handful of tiny wooded islands that helped give
the parkamore picturesque quality, and also served as habitats for wildlife,
mostly birds like swans and geese and ducks. Here is

(42:11):
the thing. Birds need open water to survive, so really
they were doing this with the best of intentions. The
ice breaking activity around the islets didn't create the disaster,
but it is possible that this subtly changed how stress
traveled across the rest of the ice, and in a

(42:31):
way it could have corralled the skaters closer to the
center of the lake, concentrating their weight where the ice
did eventually fail. People believed the catastrophe was due to
the incompetence of park officials and the police, who should
have started clearing the ice as soon as the danger
became obvious. But in eighteen sixty seven, how do you

(42:54):
close a public skating area? There just wasn't any kind
of protocol for that kind of thing. The coroner's jury
had its hands full, but in the end they treated
the deaths as accidental. They couldn't bring themselves to blame
anyone specific for the disaster, As was the custom of

(43:15):
Victorian legal practice, blame required clear proof, and the jury
ruled that even though the conditions did turn out to
be dangerous, the collapse was a natural hazard and not
a failure on the part of park management or anyone
in particular. Recommendations were offered up about how to prevent

(43:36):
what we just saw from happening again in the future.
And we've seen safety reforms on this show before, but
I do not believe we have ever seen one quite
like this. By June of that year, the entire lake
had been drained and engineers reimagined and rebuilt it from scratch.

(43:57):
The whole thing was leveled and lined with concer so
that its maximum death was reduced to no more than
four feet, shallow enough for an adult to stand. And
if you think this was overkill. While in eighteen eighty six,
about twenty years after our story today, on a similarly

(44:18):
cold day, when people and families flocked to the lake
to enjoy a day of skating the surface, ice once
again shattered, sending about one hundred people plunging into the
freezing water below. Except in this case, not one person died.
Everyone was just able to walk to shore. Sure they

(44:40):
were cold and shaken up, but the biggest concern was
whether there was enough cocoa to go around instead of
body bags. The eighteen sixty seven tragedy was caused by
a terrible combination of contributing factors. On even nice hidden
weaknesses from earlier thoughts, the novelty of the attraction and

(45:02):
the sheer weight of the crowd. It was a disaster
born out of nature's bounty, simple human enthusiasm, and the
confirmation bias that reassured everyone that if no one had
been killed before, they weren't likely to be killed now.
If ever, simple human faith told them, if it looked

(45:23):
solid enough, it must be and always would be. With
forty people dead, this incident became one of London's worst
peacetime accidents and the worst weather related accident in Britain's history,
and that is no small feat in a country known
for peacetime accidents, and to this day, in the almost

(45:47):
one hundred and sixty years since the Regent's Park skating
disaster of eighteen sixty seven remains the deadliest skating related
disaster in human history. I said in the last episode,

(46:12):
how if you've been on our socials, you've seen that
I've done a little cold water swimming before, and with
every truly awful swim I've done, I am always surprised
how relatively quickly you become almost used to it and
barely recognize that you are dying anymore. In writing this,
I was very much reminded of being a young child

(46:35):
watching Air Florida Flight ninety bounce off the Potomac Bridge
in Washington, d C. In nineteen eighty two. That disaster
sticks with me to this day, watching crash victims floating
in the freezing icy water of the Potomac, trying to
be rescued, but too cold to hold onto ropes and
life rings or to even help to save themselves. And

(46:56):
then the heartbreaking moment a twenty two year old girl,
Priscilla Torado slowly and heartbreakingly started slipping below the bone
chilling water with a dead look in her eyes and
two week to move. When a man named Lenny Scott Nick,
just some ordinary guy trying to get home that day,
could not watch for another minute, and bravely dove and

(47:19):
swam out and saved her. It's on YouTube and it
still breaks my heart to watch, and I think it
made a pretty big impression on me. No one asked
him to do it. He just did it, kind of
like this show. And this is our last real full
episode of the year, and we're not done yet. Our
Christmas episode is right around the corner, which I am

(47:42):
preparing as a special gift to you, our listener, by
popular demand, the return of the disaster minisode. The last
time we did one, it was the nineteen ninety eight
Michael Bay schlocktacular Armageddon, a movie so bereft of sense
or scientific consideration they used to use it at NASA

(48:04):
as a test to see how many things you could
find wrong with it. Well, this time we have a
film so preposterous it makes Armageddon look misunderstood, and it contains,
within its two hours and fifteen minute running time, almost
every type of disaster except ironically, asteroids. It's the two

(48:27):
thousand and three Aaron Eckhart movie The Core, and I
know you're gonna love it. I saw it in the
theaters and I certainly didn't, with the year coming to
a close and your host having brought you nine hundred
and thirty four minutes of content this year and twenty
three thousand, five hundred and eighty nine deaths to go

(48:48):
along with it. If you feel the spirit of the
holiday within you and want to chuck a coffee or
a monthly membership to our Patreon may whatever God or
deity or extraterrestrial content, except you believe in baby You
with love in twenty twenty six, If you have a
buck or two to throw in some guys stalking you

(49:08):
can at buy me a coffee dot com slash doomsday
or patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo. I'll be spending
the holidays finally drywalling a bathroom that lost its ceiling
a few years ago after a flood, and recording a
very special Bad Day at School episode for one very

(49:29):
special listener and her hubby, whose generosity and kindness has
kept me from punching myself in the face a few times.
This year, I will also be introducing more minisodes to
keep the content flowing, and a whole suite of bad
Day at Work episodes Because so many of us find
them cathartic. I get how the Christmas holidays have a

(49:51):
way of making some people feel low and a little sad.
And for those of you who do, if you're feeling
alone and just the a kind word from a voice
on the internet might not make things worse, you can
reach out to me on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, at
Doomsday Podcast or draw me an email to Doomsdaypod at

(50:12):
gmail dot com. And for those of you who have
been wearing elf socks since September, for all of you,
I wish you the greatest of times with your family
or friends, or pets, or TV or whatever it is
that brings you joy. I always thank my Patreon listeners,
new and old for their support and encouragement. But if

(50:34):
you can spare the money and had to choose, I
ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic.
Global Metic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers
offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath
of disasters and crises. They are often the first and
sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people

(50:56):
in life threatening situations, and to date they have held
over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You
can learn more and donate at globalmedic dot CA. On
the next episode, we're gonna find out what happens when
the government accidentally shuts off the planet. Literally everything that

(51:19):
can go wrong does, and the guy that they bring
in to fix it doesn't even know how to put
on a coat. It's the core disaster movie Soode of
two thousand and three. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off,
and thanks for listening.

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The Regent's Park Skating Disaster of 1867 | Episode 98

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Regent's Park Skating Disaster of 1867 | Episode 98