The Dromcollogher cinema fire disaster – Frank McNally on a fateful day in 1926

Dromcollogher in Co Limerick is one of many places in Ireland that Percy French could be said to have been put on the map. That great, much-travelled troubadour was so charmed by a stay there once that he immortalised the village in an eponymous ballad.
Mind you, it was a mixed compliment, taking the form of a proud native’s obsession with dragging his home-place into every possible conversation, to the detriment of everywhere else.
A typical verse begins: “I was over in London quite lately,/I gave King Edward a call;/Says the butler, ‘He’s out, he isn’t about/An’ I don’t see his hat in the hall;/But if you would like to look round, sir,/I think you will have to say,/Apartments like these are not what one sees/In your country every day.”
As with previous verses, of course, that only tees up the narrator for another chorus: “Sez I, Have yez been to Drumcolliher?” And this time it’s the turn of Buckingham Palace to suffer by comparison with the alleged architectural magnificence of his local hardware shop.
In putting the village on the map, Percy French did not go so far as to include directions. This may be just as well, given his infamous advice that to get to Ballyjamesdsuff, a returning Paddy Reilly and others should “turn to the left at the bridge of Finea”.
As pointed out here before, if you turned left at the Bridge of Finnea, in either direction, you’d end up in one of the two lakes that flank it. And as for the nearest turn-offs before or after the bridge, well, when trying to get to Ballyjamesduff, I wouldn’t start from there if I were you.
In any case, visiting Dromcollogher for the first time earlier this week, I had to resort to GPS. And that was not a good idea either. It worked okay as far as Newcastle West, where I turned left and where conventional maps insist it should have been a straight drive the rest of the way.
Instead, misled by the satellite woman, I took another four or five turns, in the process receiving an extensive tour of the (admittedly lovely) east Limerick countryside.
The last suggested turn was so obviously a private lane that I ignored the GPS until the imperious voice ordered: “Return to the route!” So I did. And sure enough, it led me into a farmyard.
I have had similar experiences since when searching for Dromcollogher in newspaper archives. The problem there is the multiple spelling variants (including Percy’s). Not even the “Drom” is simple. A rival school that argues for “Drum” as the prefix.
But after that binary choice, there are a multiplicity of suffixes ranging from “Collogher” to “Coliher”. In an archive as tyrannically pedantic as The Irish Times’s, which refuses to guess what you’re searching for if you don’t have the exact spelling, you can find yourself wondering if the place exists at all.
Anyway, I did get there eventually: in both real-life and database. And as I now know, Dromcollogher was on maps long before French’s song.
Of medieval origin, it was mentioned in the Book of Leinster (1160). Among several claims to fame since, it became a forerunner, via the local creamery 1889, of Horace Plunkett’s co-operative movement: one of the great success stories of pre-and-post-independence Ireland.
Then, alas, there was the Dromcollogher cinema fire: the Free State’s first major disaster which earned the town a more sombre fame.
It dominates the local Catholic Church, St Bartholomew’s, thanks to a mass grave with a Celtic cross which includes the names of the 48 victims, and to depictions on the modern, glass side walls of the now 200-year-old church.
The ill-fated film screening of Sunday, September 5th, 1926, arose from some local entrepreneurship by a man named William “Babe” Ford.
He knew the projectionist in a Cork cinema, which closed on Sundays.
So he “borrowed” the nitrate reels, leaving their tin cans behind – like the shape of a body in a bed – to disguise their temporary absence.
This was one contributor to the catastrophe. Another was a candle, knocked over onto the highly-flammable nitrate tape. But the venue, an upstairs barn, with only one entrance via a ladder, was a disaster waiting to happen.
Some 150 people had paid up to ninepence each to see a short film, False Alarm, followed by the main feature, The Decoy.
In the panic to escape, local ex-IRA men remembered that the bars of a window had been sawn through to facilitate their own getaways if the venue were ever raided.
The bars were now bent to let people out.
Then someone got stuck in the gap and cut that route off too.
The eventual death toll would be equalled 55 years later in Dublin’s Stardust tragedy. But in the Dromcollogher of 1926, it represented one tenth of the village’s population. Many of the victims were children.
A relief fund was still making payments until 1958. In the meantime, locals also raised money to buy the long-derelict site of the fire.
And in 1953, this was turned into one of one of modern Dromcollogher’s more original and charming architectural features: the flat-roofed, circular Memorial Library.