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

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. 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.