In the early twentieth century, an age before cinema, audiences still wanted thrills. And following the Russo-Japanese War, there were a number of explosive re-enactments in America and the broader English-speaking world of that war. Doctor Robert Brown explains.
A drawing of a Japanese attack during the Battle of Mukden in the Russo-Japanese War.
In a 10 May 2022 article for the Guardian newspaper, ‘I almost got hit’ Ukrainian journalists recounted their stories of how the Russia-Ukraine war turned their personal and professional lives upside-down. Before the war, many such as Kristina Berdynskykh were civilian writers and reporters. However as the invasion began, these journalists found themselves on the front line of the biggest story in the world, and ‘they became war correspondents overnight’. They have done heroic and life threatening work, for which the Pulitzer prize board has already awarded them with a special citation.
One night in September 1905 a plucky local reporter for the Minneapolis Journal also took on the role of a war correspondent overnight. He bore witness to the most important siege of the Russo-Japanese war (1904-5), the bombardment of Russian held Port Arthur (Dalian) after a Japanese surprise attack. Furnished with a long army overcoat and cap, he was instructed to make his way up the Port Arthur battlefront.
After years of bitter contention between the Empires of Russia and Japan over control of the Liaodong Peninsula, Manchuria, Russia occupied the Peninsula and constructed Port Arthur naval base in 1897. This proved intolerable for Japan, and on 8-9 February 1904 they finally struck, as Admiral Togo launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet anchored there. The engagement and ensuing siege quickly gained international status as a gruelling cauldron of modern battle. The spectacle of large naval battles and massive artillery duels became a focal point for media attention, commemoration, and later theatrical re-enactment.(1)
Japanese victory in the Battle of 203 metre hill, overlooking the city harbour, proved a turning point. From here artillery spotters directed a devastatingly accurate bombardment of the bottled up Russian fleet. Russia’s Pacific fleet was destroyed or interned, while the Japanese Army systematically mined and captured key Russian forts. The situation hopeless, Port Arthur finally surrendered.
Such was the hellish ferocity of the bombardment the reporter witnessed that night, that even after escaping unscathed, he, ‘dreamed all night of crashing shot and bursting shell, of sinking warships and whole cities in flames.’ The horror of such a spectacle stayed with him, and even a ‘pencil falling on the floor…and the slamming of a door’ would send him into a post-traumatic ‘hysteria’ of palpitations.(2)
A Carnival of Fire
However something was amiss. The buildings and warships were somehow made of canvas and wood rather than steel and stone, and the heavy ordnance, was a mixture of dynamite and nitro-glycerine. Those discharging explosives were not Russo-Japanese artillerymen and naval gunners, but some thirty pyro-technists co-ordinated by director Emil Capretz. Finally this was not at Dalian, but located deep in the heart of the American Mid-West at the Minneapolis State Fair in September 1905. Russia had surrendered Port Arthur in January 1905, and six months later the spectacle of the carnage was being eulogised to baying crowds.
In fact this was ‘Pain’s Port Arthur’, a centrepiece production of James Pain junior and his son Henry J. Pain. The Pain’s Port Arthur spectacles were specifically ‘modelled’ or ‘al fresco’ painted canvas panoramas simulating the Manchurian battle zone, set up outdoors in large pleasure gardens, sports fields or exhibition grounds. These outdoor panoramas were modelled much like a movie set with large props of wood and plaster, and offered the historical-narrative backdrop against which the massive fireworks displays took place for a viewing public.(3)
The Empire of Pain
The Pain’s in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century oversaw a sprawling continent spanning fireworks empire, the Royal Alexandra Palace Fireworks Company (shortened to Alexandra Palace Fireworks Company in the United States). Their American base of production was at the Greenfield, L. I. fireworks factory, New York. In addition to using their own 10,000 seat purpose built arena at Manhattan Beach, from 1904-6 the show visited Nashville, Chattanooga, St. Louis, Detroit, and Buffalo (New York).(4) On top of this, in addition to re-enactments in London and Manchester, UK, James Pain Junior presided over an ambitious tour of the ‘Port Arthur’ spectacle throughout Australia and New Zealand, stopping off at all the state capitals of Australia in addition to smaller venues. In 1904-5 director Mr. T. Gaunt, operating under the Pain franchise, was still touring this war spectacle around New Zealand to enthusiastic audiences, warm reviews, and aggressive newspaper advertising.
Before 1904 the Pain Company already had a fine tradition for battles and sieges. Although biblical themed glories and disasters such as Last Days of Pompeii were roaringly popular, Manhattan Beach audiences were fed a rich diet of nineteenth and twentieth century conflicts, and particularly sieges. The Siege of Vicksburg in the American Civil War, the Siege of Sebastopol in the Crimean War, and even the burning of Moscow by Napoleon in 1812 among others proved consistently popular. The American bombardment of Tripoli against the Barbary Pirates was specifically more popular with American audiences.(5)
This activity points to a massive public appetite for simulated mock warfare in the pre-cinema era. To historian’s frustration, the ephemerality of these spectacles obscures their importance in the historical record. Firework panoramas and scenery were designed to be destroyed or thrown away. Poor record keeping in the Victorian and Edwardian entertainment business means that often all that survives are the newspaper advertisements and the odd precious event program.
Madison Square Carnage
For all the decades of frenzied advertising and glowing reviews across the English speaking world, in reality Pain’s as a global fireworks empire had been living on borrowed time. At around 10pm on the night of the 4 November 1902, at the celebrations of the election of William Randolph Hearst as New York congressman, a gigantic fireworks explosion had ripped through Madison Square, and decimated a nearby crowd of people watching Pain’s performance. An inquest was immediately set up, and ten of Pain’s employees were arrested.(6)
The ‘Madison Square Disaster’ killed fifteen and injured over a hundred, and left a trail of carnage, with blood and pieces of flesh littering the ground for a two block radius.(7) The investigation initially blamed Mayor Low and the Board of Aldermen for approving an ordinance on 25 October, to allow the display of fireworks within the city of New York until the 10 November.(8) However three parties were claimed to be liable. Hearst himself had through his agent arranged the firework display, and the Pain Fireworks Company employees had set off the explosion. In the end the City of New York, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, had to pay out over half a million dollars in damages.(9) In August 1904, again one of Pain’s workers died in an explosion in the combustible chemicals mixing shed at the Manhattan Beach grounds.(10)
After the disaster Henry Pain was showered with lawsuits. The technical deadline to compensate the dead and injured was 1911, but by that point Henry’s assets had been devalued by the accident, and he had insufficient funds. Leaving the United States to avoid arrest he sold the company to Central Fireworks who had previously been a partner. A holding company with several other firework manufacturers under their wing, they eventually sold Pain’s America to the Unexcelled Firework Company. Pain’s pyrotechnics largely came to a halt when the First World War was declared in 1914.(11) The Company does continue to operate to the present day as Pain’s Fireworks, based in Salisbury, England.
Conclusion
Much as with the Russia-Ukraine war, the Russo-Japanese war elicited a flurry of sympathisers, sceptics and charlatans across the western world and other bystander nations interpreting and tracking the conflict for their own commercial or geopolitical ends. Commercial interests in particular drove the Russo-Japanese war to loom large in the Western imagination. Edwardians were raised on a diet of escalating great power rivalry exacerbated by the British Harmsworth newspaper company’s campaign to propagate Germanophobia among the British public. Hysterical future war fiction such as William Le Queux’s million-copy selling The Invasion of 1910 (1906) imagined a German attack on London and H.G Wells’ The War in the Air (1908) explored frightening new weapons technologies. In this cultural atmosphere the spectacle of all out mechanised war in Manchuria shifted tickets and memorabilia like nothing except the major cricket or football fixtures. The war was narrated and even objectified by creative and savvy entrepreneurs throughout the English speaking world even as the conflict was progressing.
Through the Pain family’s bombastic firework re-enactments of the siege of Port Arthur, the article explored a snapshot of pre-cinema culture which sought to provide audiences with unsubtle yet fascinating simulacrum and mock warfare. In 2022, Japan supported Ukraine and joined in imposing sanctions on Russia. Entangled with the ongoing Russo-Japanese dispute over possession of the Kuril Islands, tensions have been turned up into downright antagonism once again. A Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, Hideki Uyama, even compared Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the occupation of the islands. At the very least then diplomatic fireworks between the two powers are back on the playbill.
What do you think of the pyrotechnic re-enactments? Let us know below.
Now read Robert’s article on the Liverpool City Council investigation of the Chinese community here.
References
1 R.M Connaughton, p.115
2 The Minneapolis Journal (Minneapolis, Minnesota) · Fri, Sep 8, 1905 · Page 20
3 Mimi Colligan, Canvas Documentaries, p.142
4 The Chattanooga News (Tennessee) 16 May, 1905, St. Louis Globe-Democrat (Missouri) 3 November, 1904, The Yale Expositor (Michigan), 1 September, 1905, Nashville Banner (Tennessee) 22 May, 1905, Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express (New York) 11 July, 1905
5 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 28 August 1904
6 The Brooklyn Daily, 5 November 1902
7 The Brooklyn Daily, 5 November 1902
8 Ibid
9 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 2 December 1902
10 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 24 August, 1904
11 Ralph Hyde, Dictionary of Panoramists of the English-Speaking World (2015, unpublished, but donated to the The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum)
