The Smoke in the Stairwell

At half past three on a Tuesday afternoon, smoke was coming up a stairwell at

Ballantynes, and the woman who saw it could hear nothing burning. There was

no alarm in the building, and no plan for getting staff out. She told a salesman,

and he told her to call the fire brigade and to tell the owners.

Some ground-floor showrooms were cleared. In others, staff were told to carry

on, to stand by. Upstairs, where the dressmakers worked, nobody was told at

all.

The last man in the cellar had left minutes earlier, crossing the street for a

smoke — Ballantynes kept a strict no-smoking rule. His name was Keith Smith,

and the fire started in that cellar, under the furniture department. The

cause was never established: an electrical fault or a discarded cigarette,

and no one ever proved either.

The first call reached the brigade at 3:46. The first fire engine arrived at

the Lichfield Street door two minutes later, and its crew saw no fire. On

Colombo Street, smoke was showing in an alley, and Roger Ballantyne, a

managing director, met the firemen and showed them a back way down to the

cellar. They searched for ten minutes and found nothing. A senior officer

ordered a full Brigade Call, but the order did not get through until 4:00 —

the fireman carrying it had to push through the crowd to a pharmacy and wait

for the phone lines to clear.

Half an hour after the smoke was first seen, the heat flashed over. The

conjoined first floors of the Congreve's, Goodman's and Pratt's buildings

went up together, and the fire climbed the stairwells into the floors above.

From the street there was little the brigade could do. The store's big

verandas kept their ladders off the upper windows, and shop fronts blew out

as the heat rolled down Cashel and Colombo Streets. The staff who had been

told to stand by were trapped above. The last man out was Kenneth Ballantyne,

pulled from a window as the floor gave way behind him. The fire was not out

until eight that night.

Forty-one people died — all of them employees, most of them young women at

work on the upper floors. It remains New Zealand's deadliest fire.

The Royal Commission found the store and the fire brigade both at fault, and

put a number on the loss. The thirty minutes between the first call and the

flashover, it said, had been enough time to get everyone out unhurt. The time

was there. It was spent looking for the fire.

On 23 November the city buried its dead together, in a common grave at Ruru

Lawn Cemetery, with some ten thousand people at the graveside. A rose garden

marks the spot now — one rose, one bronze plaque with a name, for each of the

forty-one.

Ballantynes reopened on this corner within the year, with alarms and an

evacuation pamphlet for every employee. The store you are standing outside is

the building that rose on the same ground afterwards.