The Death of Lev Nikolayevich

Darya Protopopova (University of Oxford) writes about the centenary of Leo Tolstoy’s Death (20 November 1910 – 20 November 2010)

On the eve of the centenary of Tolstoy’s death the Russian TV channel Culture will be showing a four-part documentary ‘In Search of Tolstoy’, directed by Alexander Krivonos. The first part explores Tolstoy’s war experience, first in the Caucasus and then, during the Crimean War, in Sebastopol. It searches for the roots of Tolstoy’s pacifist philosophy in his first-hand impressions of death on the battlefield. The second part looks at Tolstoy’s complicated relationship with his wife Sofya Andreyevna. The third part tells the story of Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra who fulfilled her father's wishes by turning his estate into a museum. Alexandra Tolstoy was arrested several times by the Soviet government, but in 1929 she managed to emigrate, first to Japan, and then to the USA, where she founded the Tolstoy Foundation, active to this day. The last part of the documentary contains a somewhat ossifying message. According to the channel’s website: ‘Tolstoy’s philosophical quest will always be cherished by the progressive mankind’. Out of all people across the world who have dedicated their lives to studying and promoting Tolstoy’s works, the creators of the documentary have chosen to talk about a certain Alexander Shevchenko, an 82-year-old industrial worker from the Crimea who propagandises Tolstoy’s teachings on the streets of Sebastopol. They obviously wanted to demonstrate that Tolstoy, like Lenin from a famous Soviet slogan, ‘lived, is alive, and will live’ in the hearts of simple Russian people. Tolstoy’s works, especially his novels, are indeed still loved by the common Russian reader. But does his ‘quest’ resonate in the hearts of modern Russian politicians?

According to Miriam Elder, Fyokla Tolstaya, a great-great-granddaughter of the writer, said in a recent interview:

Lev Nikolayevich [Tolstoy] posed very uncomfortable questions. The problems he wrote about — militarism and pacifism, justice, religion, the Caucasus — none of them have been solved.

‘He is a very difficult author for today’s leadership,’ she added in the same interview. Tolstoy’s nonconformist views may be the reason behind the lack of official ceremonies commemorating the writer’s death in his homeland. But the absence of government-organised tributes is probably for the better: Tolstoy himself hated public homage. Alexander Goldenveizer remembered how Tolstoy said, with reference to the addresses and congratulations on his eightieth birthday (28 August 1908):

I believe I am right in saying that I have no vanity, but I can’t help being touched involuntarily. And yet, at my age, I live so far away from all this, it is all so unnecessary and so humiliating. Only one thing is necessary, the inner life of the spirit. (Trans. by Samuel Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf)

In a diary entry for 7 September 1908, Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya gives a detailed account of her mixed feelings about the ‘so called Tolstoy’s eightieth jubilee’, through which, to use her words, the family had to ‘survive’. Tolstoy received around 2,000 congratulatory telegrams, along with presents, from his admirers. But some ‘presents’ showed that he remained a controversial figure even amidst this universal approbation. A mother who probably had lost her son during the revolutionary turmoil in Russia at the time, sent a box with a hanging rope and a note wishing Tolstoy to die. Tolstoy preached peace, but his ideas of equality were often misused or misinterpreted by Russian radicals.

Tolstoy's deathbed - from Smert' Tolstogo (Moscow, 1929)

So perhaps it is best in the end that in Russia the commemoration of Tolstoy’s death at Astapovo railway station is restricted to TV documentaries and an opening of the Tolstoy Educational and Tourist Centre in Lipetsk, the administrative centre of the area to which Astapovo belongs. The railway station itself will be at the heart of the commemoration. The death that it witnessed on 20 November 1910 was not a tranquil event and certainly did not lack in publicity. Tolstoy’s ‘escape’ from his estate, his sudden illness at Astapovo, his wife’s futile attempts to see her husband, who was being guarded by his daughter and close friends including Vladimir Chertkov – these famous aspects of Tolstoy’s last days make up a dramatic and, in a way, sordid story, which was reported daily by international newspapers. The Times, for instance, published fifteen articles dedicated to Tolstoy between 14 November and 26 December 1910, covering Tolstoy’s death, funeral arrangements, and proving of the will.

While Tolstoy was lying on his deathbed, Astapovo was surrounded by a whole camp of prying people: journalists, devotees, and simply curious. They stayed in tents, warmed themselves around fires, and kept vigil under the station’s windows. They also sent and received numerous telegrams from Astapovo, over a thousand in total, which in 1929 were collected in a book titled The Death of Tolstoy (Smert’ Tolstogo), published by the Russian (then Soviet) National Library.

This collection of telegrams constitutes a valuable and moving source for today’s reader. Around 5.50 am on 20 November telegrams started flying from Astapovo to the rest of the world, containing two words, ‘Tolstoy skonchalsya’ (‘Tolstoy has passed away’). Two hours later journalists started telegraphing more detailed accounts of Tolstoy’s death. By that time it had become known that the writer’s last words were: ‘There are many people in this world, and you are worrying about one Lev [the Russian version of Tolstoy’s name]’. Telegrams were also flying from the outside world back to Astapovo: in one night the station received 8,000 words of condolence.

An interesting telegram was sent by a correspondent of the Russian newspaper The Morning of Russia. It reports that a few hours after Tolstoy’s death the sun was shining brightly and the station started attracting ‘pilgrims’ from nearby villages and towns. People were coming in big numbers to venerate Tolstoy’s body. Among crowds of agitated peasants the legend was born that Tolstoy did not die, but is only asleep, like miraculous saints of the past. Other journalists were using this legend figuratively, asking their newspapers to announce that although Tolstoy died in Astapovo, his spirit lives on in all Russia and the rest of the world, ‘for where love is, death does not exist’.

Tolstoy’s body being carried outside the Astapovo station - from Smert' Tolstogo

To me, the most touching evidence of Tolstoy’s life after his death is the story of the writer’s posthumous portrait by Leonid Pasternak. Pasternak, who admired Tolstoy greatly and painted numerous portraits of him during the writer’s life, arrived at Astapovo a few hours after the tragic news. With him he brought his twenty-year-old son Boris, at the time a philosophy student at the Moscow University. Thirty-five years later Boris Pasternak started working on his novel Doctor Zhivago, which can be described as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. The epic novel tracing personal biographies against a vast historical background, Doctor Zhivago undoubtedly continues the Tolstoyan tradition of fiction-writing. And the symbol of this for me is an image of the young Pasternak at Tolstoy’s deathbed.

On or about Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes

As defining moments go, 29 May 1913 is more famous in the history of the Ballets Russes than December 1910. That was the date of the first performance of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at the Théâtre du Champs-Elysée in Paris; and it was an occasion that saw riots amongst the first audience, requiring police intervention.

Critics are divided as to whether the audience was upset most by the polytonal asymmetrical rhythms of Stravinsky's music, by the Fauvist costumes and set designs of Nicholas Roerich, by the unorthodox choreography devised by the Ballet Russes star dancer Vaslav Nijinsky (dancers shuffled on with pigeon-toed movements), or by the subject matter of the ballet itself: a young pagan girl is chosen by her tribe as a sacrifice and dances herself to death, to the orgiastic accompaniment of Stravinsky's rhythmic chords.

The BBC's recent drama, 'Riot at the Rite' neatly captures the aura of controversy surrounding the Rite, from the personal tensions between the artists involved to the behaviour of the audience.



It also rightly identifies the central role of Sergei Diaghilev, the director of the Ballet Russes. Diaghilev is an unusual figure in the history of ballet: after a failed attempt to become a composer, he made a name for himself in Russia, through editing an avant-garde arts magazine, Mir iskusstva, but came to prominence in the West through a series of art exhibitions, promoting Russian painting in Paris during the early years of the Twentieth Century.

Diaghilev, by Léon Bakst (1906)

Diaghilev's career is currently the subject of an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London ('Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929'), which makes it very clear that his strengths did not lie in artistic creation. Instead, Diaghilev had the ability to spot provocatively modern talents, such as Stravinsky and Nijinsky, bring them together and, by dint of his personality (and his person - he was Nijinsky's lover for five years) keep them together for the period of their collaboration. Given the precarious condition of his finances, this was no mean skill.

Ballet, even more so than other theatrical art forms, is supremely collaborative. It depends on the combined talents of choreographers, dancers, musicians, designers and composers for the creation of spectacle. The V&A conveys this through the sheer variety of media on display in the exhibition: dancing shoes, costumes and musical scores vie with video projections of archive performances and the rooms are dotted with small booths playing an excellent series of informative films by Howard Goodall about the musical background to Diaghilev's ballets. In fact, the only problem with the exhibition is that there is so much multimedia on display that it is sometimes difficult to make out what Goodall is saying over the sound of Stravinsky's Firebird in another part of the room.

Stravinsky in 1910

In terms of collaboration, though, perhaps Virginia Woolf's choice of 1910 does have a claim upon our attention. For it was in 1910 that Stravinsky first started working on his score for the Rite of Spring. But, there is some uncertainty here. As Sjeng Scheijen points out in a recent biography of Diaghilev, Stravinsky and his artistic collaborator Nicholas Roerich couldn't agree on who first came up with the idea. What's more Schejen describes an earlier production, The Pavillion d'Armide in 1907 as marking ‘a new era in the ballet culture of St Petersburg’ and Diaghilev’s first major success in bringing together avant-garde choreography and dance (in this case, Nijinsky and Michel Fokine).

It may, then, be a mug's game to try and pin down particular transformative moments in cultural history, but the first performance of the Rite of Spring certainly made a commotion. Diaghilev’s response? ‘Exactly what I wanted’.

Guerres imaginaires

Mark West (University of Glasgow) considers the literature of invasion:

On the 19 March 1906, the Daily Mail began the serialization of William Tuffnell Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910, an "invasion-fantasy" in which Germany invades Britain. Its enormous popularity was no doubt helped by a marketing strategy that included sending actors in German military uniforms to march down London's Regent Street. It sold over a million copies and was translated into 27 languages. One marker of its success was a film version entitled If England Were Invaded, released in October 1914.

From, I.F. Clarke, 'Future-War Fiction',
Science Fiction 24:3 (1997)

The book couches events as a military history, incorporating excerpts from journals and military descriptions of troop movements. Convinced that Britain was in constant threat of invasion by the Germans, Le Queux stresses the importance of preparation and training and devises a British resistance called the "League of Defenders" who manage to incite an uprising against the invading hordes.


The phenomenal success of The Invasion of 1910 testifies to the popularity of what I.F. Clarke calls “Future-War Fiction”, in the wake of the Paris Commune in 1871 and Germany’s unification. Writers across Britain, France and Germany imagined variations on “The Next Great War”, “der nächste Krieg”, and “La Guerre de demain”. H.G. Wells would go as far, in The World Set Free (1914), as to imagine a bomb so massive in its destructive capabilities that its use as a deterrent would lead to a new era of peace on earth.

Clarke suggests that the tone of this "massive European interest” in the next great was was a "cheerful language of anticipation", a language by no means limited to the military minds that first wrote such stories. Is it, then, a great leap between such popular fictions and the martial language of early Modernists, such as F.M. Marinetti and his gang of Futurists?

The Futurist Manifesto
in Le Figaro 20 February 1909

In his “Futurist Manifesto” of 1909, Marinetti describes how "like young lions we ran after Death". Singing "the love of danger", they "glorify war – the world's only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture". These are "beautiful ideas worth dying for", lit by "the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons".

If, as Virginia Woolf asserted, 1910 ushers in a new mode of human character, it was long in the making; and wide in its reach, too. Change of this kind embraces not merely the artistic consciousnesses of those that went to the Grafton Galleries in the last months of the year. These future-war tales and fantasies suggest a longing for change. There is a desperate desire in these “fantasies of the future” for what Clarke calls a “newer universe”. Of course, as we know now, the realisation of such a desire would have a terrible “human” cost.

"And so you are going abroad..." T.S. Eliot in 1910

1910 was the year that T.S. Eliot graduated from his first degree at Harvard; it was the year he published his first poem ('Humoresque: After Jules Laforgue'); and it was the year he travelled to Paris to hear Henri Bergson lecture.
According to some, Eliot's sojourn in Paris was life-changing. Lodging at 151 bis rue St Jacques, Eliot took French lessons from Alain Fournier (author of Le Grand Mealnes) and befriended a fellow-lodger, Jean Verdenal. In The Making of an American Poet, James E. Miller speculates that this friendship with Verdenal constitutes the first great gay love of Eliot's life - and his first great loss: Eliot marked Verdenal's death in World War I by dedicating Prufrock and Other Observations to his memory.

Charles-Louis Philippe

Miller suggests that Verdenal is a strong presence in The Waste Land too, one that lies behind the figure of Phlebas the Phoenician. A memory of Verdenal informs the vision of the lilac girl in 'The Burial of the Dead', he argues; and, more tenuously, he suggests that a boat trip to St Cloud with Verdenal lies behind the 'Damyata' section of the 'What the thunder said'.
There are more convincing, material influences upon Eliot to be traced from this period too. It seems that Verdenal introduced him to l'Action Français - Charles Maurras' right-wing movement, an influence upon Eliot in the 1930s; and Fournier introduced to Jacques Rivière, secretary to La Nouvelle Revue Française (established in 1909) and an associated group of writers, including André Gide. In turn, it is likely that Gide's tribute to Charles-Louis Philippe in November 1910 helped to introduce Eliot to Philippe's work, particularly Bubu de Montparnasse, which strongly influenced the urban landscapes of Eliot's early published poetry.

(c) Houghton Library

It's striking that Eliot should turn to another written source to make sense of Paris. Biographical speculations aside, it's certain that this period saw significant developments in his poetry. According to Christopher Ricks' edition of his poetic notebooks (Inventions of the March Hare), it was during Eliot's stay in Paris that fragmentary scraps of verse began to cohere into 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' (a discarded passage, 'Prufrock's Pervigilium' shows the heavy influence of Philippe) and in November 1910, Eliot composed the first section of 'Portrait of a Lady' (a poem that closes with the narrator's departure for Europe). In other words, this is the period in which Eliot starts to shrug off his reliance upon Laforgue and write his earliest and most striking mature verse.

A Century, a Lifetime and a Comet

Celebrating the appearance of Halley's Comet in April 1910, Tom Coles (University of Glasgow) ponders comets and periodisation:

"I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out  together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that." 

Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark  Twain, A Biography,
Ch. 282 ‘Personal Memoranda’

Halley’s Comet means almost as much to me as it did to Mark Twain: I was born in early 1986, around the time when it last appeared, and in 2061 when it next approaches close to Earth I suppose I will not be too sad, like Twain, if I leave with it. As a period of study, the 75 years that the comet takes to return is curious, perhaps more useful than the equally arbitrary 'century'. A century tends to be the default time-frame of the rise of empires, the dominance of an art-form, the epoch of a revolution. It has become the primary frame through which we view history, even if we often have to make it ‘long’ and ‘short’. The century is always followed by another century; it is a method of linear chronology that invites concepts of procession or improvement.

We risk fetishizing a unit of time of our own making. In contrast, a comet offers an image of the same object returning unimproved, unadorned, for its own reasons - but measurably. The problem is that one hundred years in any direction is that it is just out of reach. It exists as a social rather than a personal memory. A hundred years is simply a hundred years: within it much can happen while little changes, or much can change with little happening. The world a hundred years ahead or behind is an older or younger peer. The orbital period of Halley’s comet, a single transit of a lump of rock, ice and gases around the sun is, on the other hand, a lifetime. It seems longer, somehow, than a century.

Tycho and Kepler were able to place the comets beyond the moon; to make further roads out of a geocentric totalised world-view; to chalk one up for rationalism. They participate in what Gabriel Josopovici has described in his recent Whatever Happened to Modernism?  as part of a “powerful myth, that of the Renaissance as the triumph of the individual after centuries of subservience to authority and tradition… of light coming out of darkness and the myth of the emancipation of the individual…” (p.11). How does the symbol of this comet, which Halley proved to be engaged in an almost eternal return, fit in with a procession of knowledge unwinding its secrets? If there is no permanent triumph, but only return, how do we create a narrative of our own and others' lives within history?

This contradiction, that the scientific universe is guided by stronger and more rigid rules than those of any social or cultural system that previously claimed to govern our worlds, is what Schiller calls the disenchantment of the world: it is the difficulty that we have when our problems are too satisfactorily explained. Explained in so rigorous a fashion their very rationalism, meeting our needs perfectly, becomes a sort of magic in itself. Knowing that Halley was coming back in 1910 didn’t stop people from claiming that it threatened cataclysm – its very predictability seemed terrifying. The millennial feeling is perhaps the overburdening of what we know to be an arbitrary date. It is simply another day, but because it is ‘simply another day’ how could it possibly survive the weight of expectation we have placed upon it?

Josipovici suggests that to argue over the ‘beginnings’ (and endings) of Modernism as occurring at one date or another, is short-sighted: instead we should be looking at what in the past is still present for us, where we still live in the same space. Rather than looking for what has left or arrived on a certain date, it may be better to look for what came back.

Mark Twain did, after all, die the day after the comet’s appearance, as he promised, on the 21^st April 1910. He was seventy-five. His autobiography, which has been under a publication ban, is to be published in November 2010, one hundred years (and a few months) after his death, as, for his own reasons, he insisted.

Novelties and Nostalgia

Guest contributor, Will May (University of Southampton), reviews 'The 1910 Last Night of the Proms' - a tribute to Henry Wood. This programme of music, conducted by Paul Daniel, was based on Wood's own Last Night from 1910. Clips from this prom can be viewed here until 18 September.

The 1910 Last Night of the Proms, September 5, 2010

Henry Wood

Given that the event is already a ritual re-enactment, restaging the 1910 Last Night of the Proms seems a risky move. Petroc Trelawney pitches the evening half-way between respectful tribute to Sir Henry Wood and historical curio: laugh at the mock-1910 fake palm trees; squirm at the gruelling three-hour programme; marvel at Wood’s thick baton; imagine the thick smoke of gentlemen’s cigar smoke filling the Queen’s Hall! The odd boater hat, kerchief and diamante aside, few prommers seem to have made an effort to recreate Edwardian dress. The mixed messages are verbal as well as sartorial: the national anthem which closes the concert offers the bizarre spectacle of an audience unsure whether to save the King or Queen.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

   1910 was the year Ralph Vaughan Williams wedded the twentieth-century to the Tudor period in Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, as Rob Young reminded us recently in the Guardian; European audiences were reeling from Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909) with its ‘total chromaticism’. Yet the Last Night finds little space for incipient musical modernism, alternating between the late romantic overtures of Wagner and virtuosic diversions by Dvorák or Paginini. Hindsight provides its shocks through programming rather than musical language: 16 separate items make up the bulging set-list, leaving the BBC Concert Orchestra a little exhausted by the conclusion. The evening’s eclecticism shames modern classical concerts: here late Romantic titans mingle with tin-pan alley tunesmiths. Readers who have spent a century imagining Beethoven‘s goblins in Howards End (1910) might not expect Helen Schlegel to have heard Dorothy Forster’s music hall favourite ‘Mifanwy’ in the same sitting.

   Other dates haunt this centenary concert too. In 1941, after a performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, the Queen’s Hall was destroyed by an incendiary bomb; we have forgotten the Royal Albert Hall’s status as a substitute. The following year, Vaughan Williams began a cello concerto, unfinished at his death. It finally has its premiere here, arranged by composer David Matthews and played with conviction by Steven Isserlis. It fulfils the role of what Henry Wood affectionately termed ‘novelties’; heard as part of an otherwise faithful recreation of the 1910 programme, its plaintive cello lines fall halfway between an elegy for something already lost and a prophetic warning of its destruction. 

The Proms - courtesy BBC.

Carrie Nation at the Britannia Panopticon: Smash Ladies, Smash!

As part of the conference, we are organising a visit to the Britannia Panopticon Musichall on the afternoon of Sunday 12th December (for more information see here). As part of the visit, onsite curator Judith Bowers will be giving an introductory talk about the Panopticon and its history. Judith has kindly given permission for us to reproduce part of her book Stan Laurel and Other Stars of the Panopticon (available here) on this blog. It tells of a colourful incident in the Panopticon's past involving the famous temperance campaigner, Carrie Nation:

SMASH LADIES, SMASH

This next turn was not a fighter in the fist-i-cuffs sense of the word, but rather a fighter for moral decency. Her name was Carrie Nation, and she was known across the globe as “the Saloon Smasher.” Her fight was for the abolition of alcohol at a time when alcohol was the ruin of the age. “Smash, Ladies, Smash!” was her Battle cry.

    Carrie Nation the Saloon Smasher held a public meeting at the Panopticon in December 1908 to warn Glaswegians of the evils of drink, quite a tall order in Glasgow! Underneath Britannia’s Balcony floor we have uncovered blank temperance pledges dropped by members of the audience which we believe are remnants of her 1908 visit.

Carrie Nation

       Standing at nearly 6ft tall and weighing 180Ibs, Carry Amelia Moore Nation, Carrie Nation as she became known, was a lady not to be meddled with.

      As a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, she had been jailed on numerous occasions for entering saloons in the United States and smashing all the bottles of alcohol with a hatchet! No-one stood in her way, even the prize fighter John L. Sullivan was reported to have run and hid when Nation burst into his New York City saloon. In 1908 - 09 she extended her crusade to Europe, Glasgow being at the top of her hit list!

     Her life had begun on the 25th November 1846 in Gerard County, Kentucky. Her childhood was quite normal and when she left school, Carrie trained to be a teacher. This was not a successful avenue for Carrie who found her temperament constantly being challenged by her pupils, so when she married in 1867, she gave up teaching to become a good wife and hopefully in time a mother too. Her first husband was Dr. Charles Gloyd, a physician and together they had one daughter, Charlene.

     Gloyd was an alcoholic and his excessive drinking kept his wife and daughter poor. When Charlene became sick and died in infancy Carrie blamed her husbands excessive drinking. Unable to reconcile her feelings about her husband’s alcoholism, her marriage to Charles was not to last and within a year she had left him.

      Ten years later she remarried, this time setting her sights on a man 19 years her senior who was also a well respected pillar of the community; he was David Nation a minister. Under his influence Carrie became a devout woman and through scripture and her dedication to God, her calling became clear, she must lead the war against the vices of tobacco and liquor.    

      In 1880 the voters of Kansas adopted a constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture of intoxicating beverages, except for medicinal purposes. Kansas saloon keepers, however, did not adhere to the law and neither did the majority of the male population. Carrie asked God to use her to save Kansas and God told her to “Go to Kiowa” which she did and there she smashed her first saloon on June 1st 1900.

       And so her career as a saloon smasher began.

     Soon people from other counties urged Carrie to “Save their towns from saloons”. She promptly obliged using stones and bricks wrapped in newspaper, but before long she purchased herself the small hatchet for which she would become famed. The hatchet became a symbol of her mission and pewter hatchet brooches went on sale, her thousands of supporters bought the brooches to show their support and the resulting income paid Carrie’s numerous jail fines. Between 1900 and 1910 the pious lady was jailed thirty times!

     Even Carrie's enemies were compelled to acknowledge that her extraordinary methods had produced definite and concrete results. In less than six months she did more to enforce prohibition laws than had been done by churches and temperance organisations in the years before or since.

       Sadly Carrie Nation died penniless on June 9th 1911 at Levenworth, Kansas where she is buried beside her mother. Her epitaph reads; “She Hath Done What She Could”

     As mentioned at the beginning of this piece, Carrie appeared at the Panopticon January 1908. The following was recorded by the press:

     “On Saturday week, Mrs Carrie A. Nation, previous to her departure for Aberdeen, visited Mr Pickard's Panopticon, and although the American saloon smasher only made up her mind the day previous to visit the old “Brit” as this establishment has been termed for the last half century, and notwithstanding that the time advertised for the hall to open was 6.30, as early as 4 o’clock crowds began to wend their way to the Trongate. By five o’clock it was necessary for the chief constable to dispatch a brigade of gentlemen in blue, under the command of inspectors and sergeants, in order to regulate the traffic, the Trongate at this hour being a mass of humanity all eager to gain admission as soon as the doors opened.

        At six o’clock it was quite evident that the crowds lined up were in excess of the capacity of the hall, but still they came from all directions, adding themselves to the three long queues which already existed.

The Britannia Panopticon

     By  6.15 further squadrons were requisitioned from the Central Police Station to regulate the crowd and traffic, for trams had been held up for fully half an hour owing to the dense mass which was so anxious to get in, if it was only  to get a glimpse of the notorious Bar Wrecker. At 6.30 Mr Pickard instructed his staff who were in readiness, to pass the waiting crowds through the turnstiles, thus preventing any rush, disorder or panic, and great praise is due to his men for the able, manner in which they handled the crowd. By 6.45 it was necessary to post up “House Full” much to the disappointment of thousands of people who would have liked to gain admission.

      At seven o’clock sharp the sacred concert commenced, it wasn’t until eight o’clock that Mrs Nation arrived in Mr Pickard’s motor car, having been detained at the Primitive Methodist Church, Alexandria Parade where she had been lecturing that evening. Her arrival was signalled by cheers and hooting from the crowds outside, and some difficulty was experienced as the police tried to keep the crowds back, while the motor car was run up to the side entrance of the Panopticon. A few minutes later the sprightly old lady was on the platform, and here another ovation was in store for her. Carry bowed her acknowledgements and with a smile upon her face and a bible in her hand she addressed the crowded meeting, explaining how she started her crusade against drink, how she smashed the saloons in the States with her hatchet, and what induced her to visit her cousins on this side of the ’Herrin’ pond’. She described her experience in Scotland, where she had seen women and children half clad and foodless, which were the results of that hellish curse drink. At the conclusion of her lecture she thanked Mr Pickard and the audience for the cordial welcome she had received, and hoped she might be spared a visit to the old “Brit” again shortly. She left the mass outside, as she journeyed along to her hotel. We hear on good authority from some of the oldest inhabitants of the Trongate that this was the largest gathering ever witnessed in this part of the city.”