Ballantynes fire

In November of 1947, a fire here at Ballantynes department store in central Christchurch killed 41 people. It's still the deadliest fire in New Zealand's history.

Ballantynes started way back in 1854 as a millinery and drapery on Cashel Street. It expanded over time, and by 1947, it covered about an acre with frontages on Cashel, Colombo, and Lichfield Streets. There were seven conjoined buildings, six of them with three or more stories, all connected by passageways. The showrooms, fitting rooms, art gallery, and tearooms were pretty fancy, catering to the elite of Canterbury.

Even though the outside looked dignified, there were some issues inside. The interior partitions had untreated softwood-fibre linings, which the Christchurch City Council had allowed even though it went against their own bylaws. The upper floors were classified as factory buildings because of all the clothes made here, which helped them pass Labour Department inspections. Some of the buildings were built before fire escapes were mandatory, and the fire brigade hadn't made them install any, even though there was a 1930 bylaw requiring it.

Fire protection was mostly manual extinguishers, but staff weren't formally trained to use them. There were also manually operated fire doors between buildings. Klaxons from World War II and a sprinkler alarm in one building hadn't been kept up and were eventually removed. They used to have evacuation drills during the war, but those stopped. There was no emergency plan, and evacuating was left up to individual department heads. A lot of staff only knew their own work areas and didn't know other ways out.

On the day of the fire, Ballantynes had 458 employees. Many worked on the upper floors. After the fire, the company said about 250 to 300 customers were inside, many of them in the tearooms on an upper floor, having afternoon tea and listening to a string trio.

The fire started in the basement of the furniture department, at the southern end of the Colombo Street frontage. They never figured out the cause, though an electrical fault or a discarded cigarette were suggested. An employee named Keith Smith was the last one in the cellar, leaving around 3:30 PM for his tea break. He went across the street to smoke because Ballantynes had a strict no-smoking policy.

Around 3:30 PM on November 18, 1947, an employee saw smoke coming up the stairs from a stairwell and asked a colleague to call the fire brigade. Staff who found the fire told their floor managers, and someone called the phone operator, who then called the fire brigade. Some ground floor showrooms were evacuated, but management told staff in other ground floor showrooms to 'carry on' or 'stand by.' Some left when they got uncomfortable. Other staff weren't even told about the fire because there was no alarm. Some even came back to work after their tea break, while others evacuated. Even the arriving firefighters didn't realize at first there were still people on the upper floors.

The first call to the fire brigade was logged at 3:46 PM, with the operator just saying there was a cellar fire. When the first fire appliance arrived about two minutes later at the Lichfield Street entrance, they didn't see any fire. They moved to Colombo Street, saw smoke from an alleyway, and were met by Roger Ballantyne, who showed them a back access to the cellar. They spent about 10 minutes looking for the fire but couldn't find it. Two other appliances arrived via Cashel Street. The senior fire officer ordered a Brigade Call, but that wasn't received until 4:00 PM because the firefighter had to push through a crowd, get