As armies of fire fighters and fire engines with their bells clanging arrived from all over London, the practising choir was evacuated, the exotic birds in the aviaries freed from their cages to fly up into the smoke and take their chances. The gas company worked fast to dig a trench to cut off the main gas supply Air forced through the organ pipes caused it to groan accompaniment. Motor pumps and turntable ladders were set up on the wide parade. Precariously balanced firemen turned scores of hoses on the fire and the new hose-lorry of the London Fire Brigade, which could reel out 1½ miles of hose at a speed of 15 miles an hour, was used for the first time after being demonstrated only the afternoon before. However, the brigade could do little but delay the inevitable. High on the hill the water pressure was simply not strong enough. Using the five million gallons of water available in the upper reservoir, still the hoses had negligible effect. Just short of an hour after the fire began, the entire building was in flames and the firemen had to retreat to 100 feet beyond the glowing mass.
Clouds of smoke stretched for miles. An exaggerated, orange glow took over the sky. It was seen in eight counties – as far as Devil’s Dyke near Brighton, about 50 miles away – causing hundreds of thousands of people to converge on the high ground of the South Downs at Epsom and on Hampstead Heath across the Thames. Tens of thousands more swarmed by every means to the Palace itself, hampering the emergency services in their race to the hill. One newspaper later reported that a parked car, used as a grandstand by hordes of onlookers, collapsed and was found the following day with its tyres burst and its wheels splayed at each corner. Many hundreds of bicycles were deserted as it became impossible to ride or push them through the dense crowds.
Throughout the 82 years it stood on Penge Hill, the Palace and its gardens had become London’s most famous resort, renowned above all for its music and for the great organ with its 3,714 speaking pipes. Over one million people visited each year to attend the Saturday festivals, wander through the historical courts or gaze at Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ giant dinosaur replicas. Here they enjoyed the firework displays, tightrope walkers and wild animals and cheered at cricket matches and dirt-track motorbike races. It had become a national monument for old and young well before it became national property in 1913.
Even the Duke of Kent joined the crowds to watch the fire. From every window, every tree and every available railing, people were mesmerised by the destruction of their poor old palace. One enterprising man in Hillside Road, Streatham, hired out field glasses for twopence a look. In Parliament, MPs and Lords packed the upstairs committee rooms and terraces for a view of the angry sky.
The ferocity of the fire was awe-inspiring. By 8.35, the ribs of the vast central transept roof had become a stark black skeleton against the white blaze, visibly bent and twisted. With a roar and an explosion of sparks that carried for miles, they collapsed. Just before nine o’clock, the modular arched girders of the south transept began to fall like hoops, one by one in a macabre reversal of their construction. The halls, the great organ, the immense library of Handel Festival music were gone. The vast stone steps to the terraces were shattered by the falling face of the transept, molten glass dropped from the great girders. The firemen were dwarfed against the great bowl of flame, as streams of molten glass poured down outside the building, forcing them back. Explosions rocked the neighbourhood as the fire reached the boilers in the basement, frightening a carpet of rats that streamed out across the park. The water in the central fountain inside the building boiled and the fish perished.
At either end of the Palace stood Brunel’s magnificent towers, each 282 feet high, built to house the water tanks that fed the elaborate fountains in the park. As the fire sped south down the building, the alarm was raised that the south tower was under threat and a great race was on to save it. The tower was close to the houses on Anerley Hill and contained 1,200 tons of water and material used by the Baird Company in their television researches; if it collapsed, it would take many hundreds of lives with it. Locals were evacuated from their homes – one newspaper reported that a woman was not allowed to get her coat but was told to wrap herself in newspaper to keep warm.
By 10.30, the buildings near the south tower had burst into flames but the tower appeared safe. The fire meantime worked against the wind and attention now turned to the north tower. By 11.40, flames were breaking through the roof of the northern end of the building but, luckily, a large section of the north wing had been lost after the gales of 1861, creating some distance between it and the tower. By midnight the fire was burning itself out with no further threat to Brunel’s great engineering achievements. Only the two towers, the south wing and a portion of the north wing’s roof still stood, all enveloped in flame, white-hot. By three in the morning, though small fires continued to burn, the firemen packed up – over five hundred of them, more than a third of the city’s brigade.
The following day, hoarding was erected to keep out the crowds, though sightseers continued to stream to the hill. The Daily Sketch estimated that there had been over a million visitors to the site within the first two days – the number of visitors to the Palace in a normal year. One family travelled overnight from Yorkshire. In the City, shares in Madame Tussaud’s, Olympia and White City soared.
The biggest blaze in living memory, caused perhaps by a cigarette stub, perhaps by a broken flue pipe from the boiler in the office at the front of the Palace, had left only a tangled wreck of buckled iron and molten glass, with here and there the broken arm, head or leg of a statue, lodged at fantastic angles. Amazingly, not a single life had been lost. The Christmas shows were cancelled and the booking agents were in chaos. There was concern that a major venue for the May Coronation celebrations for Edward VIII had been lost.
The general manager of the Crystal Palace Company, Sir Henry Buckland, made it clear that he did not believe the Palace would be rebuilt unless the government stepped forward with at least £5 million. He dispelled reports suggesting that the building was fully insured, and confirmed that insurance was only purchased to the value of £110,000. Eighty-four years before, it had cost £1,350,000 to build.
With blind optimism, three days after the disaster, the first sod was cut for a new road-racing circuit on the lower terraces as the burnt-out hulk of the Palace loured in the background. But national and international events were to take precedence that week. As the fire had raged on that Monday night, Madrid had been severely bombed, fuelling concern about the escalating civil war in Spain. On Thursday that week, Edward VIII sparked a constitutional crisis by asking Baldwin to sanction a morganatic marriage to Mrs Simpson. A week later the King had abdicated and Mrs Simpson, the most talked-about woman in the world, was fleeing across France, chased by the world’s press.
The weekend after the fire saw the first snows of winter. The Observer called the site ‘the very genius of December’. The naked, straggling trees were mimicked by the curious masses of twisted metal, odd twigs of ironwork and fantastic growths of remnant glass. ‘The vitrified palace had become a petrified forest.’
Two months later, in The Architectural Review, Le Corbusier articulated the essential attraction of the glass building which, by some miracle, had remained as a last witness to an era of faith and daring: he wrote ‘one could go there and see it, and feel there how far we have still to go before we can hope to recover that sense of scale which animated our predecessors in all they wrought’. Before the fire, like many millions before him, he had not been able to tear his eyes from ‘the spectacle of its triumphant harmony’. His definition of architecture as a way of thinking, of achieving order and of expressing contemporary problems in terms of materials, was epitomised by the achievement of Paxton’s miraculous building – the first in the world to be constructed of mass-produced standardised parts and the first to use glass and iron on such a scale. The Architectural Review carried its own obituary to the