Eventide Home fire kills 153 old women

ON JULY 1, 1870, the Jamaican Government opened a home specifically for elderly women, but eventually it opened its doors to destitute and crippled old men, and children. It came to be called the Eventide Home for the Aged. One hundred and ten years later, on May 20, 1980, a massive fire at the Slipe Pen Road, Kingston 5 facility killed 153 of the residents.

The building that was burnt down was overcrowded and had previously been described as a “tinder box”. After fire broke out early on the morning of the 20th, the building burnt quickly.

At the time, the home was a three-building facility operated by the Jamaican Government. One of them, the two-storey Myers Ward, had about 211 old women, some of them blind, though its legal capacity was 180. It was a wood structure, old and decrepit, a factor in the quick way in which the fire spread.

The fire broke out about 1 a.m. and spread fast. Although firefighters arrived quickly on the scene after the blaze was reported, they were unable to enter the furnace that they came upon. The structure, it said, collapsed four minutes after firefighters first arrived. They were, however, able to evacuate disabled children from a nearby building.

After the blaze subsided, 144 charred bodies were taken from the rubble of metal rods, zinc sheets and ashes. A few days later, two other women who had suffered severe burn injuries died at the Kingston Public Hospital on North Street. Seven women who were reported missing were eventually presumed dead. Some media sources say 58 of the women had escaped the fury.

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Some sources say Kingston’s fire chief, Allen Ridgeway, criticised the building, describing it as a “tinder box”. It was a fire hazard, and he initially theorised that an electrical short circuit could have started the fire, and ruled out arson as there was no proof of such. Damages were estimated to be approximately $150,000.

The tragedy occurred at a time when political tension in Jamaica was very high, and the news was full of reports of politically motivated violence. A public utterance by Prime Minister Michael Manley that there was a possibility the fire was started by arsonists – as telephone lines going to the building were discovered to have been cut before the fire – triggered a national debate about who set the building on fire.

The fire chief did not support the prime minister’s theory, yet, the police later on said they had got reports of four men fleeing the building just before the blaze started. But, who were these men, who saw them, and why did they really set the building on fire? It is still the deadliest ever in Jamaica, and was the worst worldwide since the 1978 Cinema Rex fire that killed over 420 people.

“The fire at Eventide was not the biggest in the history of Jamaica, but it took the most lives. The women who died in that fire were victims of a country trying to reposition its political identity. As was unfortunately common in small countries like Jamaica, this process of change was marred by much violence and bloodshed,” Daive A. Dunkley writes in Dis ‘N Dat, a Jamaica National Heritage Trust online column.

“ One opinion on the cause of the fire argued that it was the result of political manoeuvring during the final months leading up to the most violent general elections in Jamaica’s recent history. There were in fact a number of reports to the police from persons living at the home that gunmen had entered the premises more than once, claiming they had come to kill the staff and inmates for reasons connected with their alleged political affiliations … None of the women at Eventide deserved the type of death they received, and along with the other sad events of 1980, the fire is indeed a significant part of our political history.”

The politically motivated arson theory was strengthened when the home was attacked six months after the fire. “Moreover, gunmen besieged the premises of the home just six months after the fire and this time injured two persons. One of them, Mr Harold Tefler, a meal van driver for the home, was stabbed and then beaten while unloading the meal van,” Dunkley says.

“The other victim of this recent attack on the home was a 63-year-old female resident, Miss Vera Wynter. Miss Wynter was sitting on the veranda ‘taking in a little fresh air’ she said, when the gunmen opened fire on the premises hitting her several times.”

Prior to that, May 26, 1980 – the day on which the Eventide women were laid to rest in 26 wooden coffins, in a mass grave inside National Heroes Park – was declared a day of national mourning. Thousands of people attended the burial and memorial service at the Holy Trinity Cathedral on North Street in Kingston.

A May 27, 1980 article in The Daily Gleaner says, “The charred remains of 145 of the victims of the May 20 fire at the Eventide Home in Kingston were buried in 26 wooden coffins in a single grave at National Heroes Park.”

In this space a monument is established in honour and memory of the victims, but to this day, there is no official conclusion as to what caused the fire. The belief that it was arson is still lingering with this heart-wrenching memory.