Only the other day occurred a case of panic among children in a theatre at Barnsley, when a crush and panic occurred from no cause at all except overcrowding, and eight children were crushed to death. More lives would certainly have been lost had not two men kept their heads and done the right thing. One man named Gray called to a number of the children in a cheery voice to come another way, while the man who was working a lantern-slide show threw a picture on the screen and so diverted the attention of the rest, and prevented them catching the panic. That is the great point in a panic. If only one or two men keep their heads and do the right thing on the spur of the moment, they can often calm hundreds of people and thus save many lives.
This is a great opportunity for a Boy Scout. Force yourself to keep calm and not to lose your head. Think what is the right thing to do and do it at once.
RESCUE FROM FIRE.
Instances of gallant rescues of people from burning houses are frequent. One sees them every day in the newspapers, and scouts should study each of these cases as they occur, and imagine to themselves what they would have done under the circumstances, and in this way you begin to learn how to deal with the different accidents. An instance occurred only the other day where a young sailor named George Obeney stationed at Chatham in H.M.S. Andromeda was walking along the Kingsland Road, when he suddenly saw a house on fire, and a woman on the second storey was screaming that she had some children there who could not get out. The sailor rushed from his friends and somehow scrambled up the face of the wall till he reached the window on the first storey and broke in that window so that he could obtain room to stand. The woman at the window above was then able to lower a child so that he could catch it, and he again passed it down to the ground. Child after child was thus handed down till he passed six of them to the ground, and finally two women, and then he, overcome by smoke himself, fell insensible, but was caught by the people below. His act was an example to you of how to do your duty AT ONCE without thinking of dangers or difficulties.
In January, 1906, at Enfield Hospital, the Children's Ward caught fire in the middle of the night, and a number of children would probably have been burnt before the firemen arrived on the spot had it not been that the matron, Miss Eardley, rushed over from her house in her nightdress and fixed up the fire-hose and played it on the flames while the two night nurses set to work and rescued twenty children out of the burning building.
The Boys' Life Brigade have taken up the instruction of boys in what to do in cases of fire.
DIRECTIONS.
These are some of their directions:
If you discover a house on fire you should
1st. Alarm the people inside.