The Savoy Hotel Fire, 25 December 1975

*DISCLAIMER - The following incident contains the mention of deceased persons and showcases photographs from the horrific incident, reader discretion is advised.

Before the sun even rose on Christmas Day 1975, a devastating fire engulfed the Savoy Private Hotel on Darlinghurst Road in Sydney’s Kings Cross district. The five-story hotel was packed with around 60 guests, a mix of local workers and holiday travellers who were taking advantage of the festive season. Within minutes, an inferno turned the holiday into horror. Fifteen people lost their lives, and 25 were critically injured in the blaze, making it the deadliest hotel fire in Australia at that time. The tragedy unfolding on a day meant for joy shocked the nation and remains one of the darkest Christmas mornings in Sydney’s history. 

The Savoy Hotel blaze was no accident. In the early morning hours, a 25-year-old cook and lodger named Reginald John Little slipped into the building through a back door after a long night out. Little, who had a history of petty crimes and prior arson offenses, set a pile of old newspapers alight in the ground-floor foyer near the rear entrance around 5:30 a.m. Within moments, flames roared to life and raced up the hotel’s two open stairwells, which acted like a chimney feeding the fire and funneling smoke upward. The blaze swiftly cut off access to this main escape route, trapping dozens of people on the upper floors. 

The first call to emergency services came in at 5:38 a.m., and fire crews rushed to the scene. The fire itself was reportedly extinguished within ten minutes of their arrival; however, the blaze was so intense that the lower levels had already been decimated. Anyone caught in the central part of the building had little chance to escape once the fire took hold. Those who survived the initial onslaught were forced toward the top floors, cut off by thick, acrid smoke and searing heat. 

As flames engulfed the hotel’s interior, desperate escape attempts began. Guests clambered out of the upper-floor windows, scrambling along drainpipes to the neighbouring building. Others, in sheer panic, leapt from windows to the street. In one harrowing instance, a young mother named Roslyn Young found herself trapped by smoke with her 12-month-old baby, James. Facing the unthinkable, she dropped her infant son from a second-floor window before she herself leaped out headfirst. Nick Misharin and Ken Swindells, who had rushed over from a nearby billiards hall upon hearing the shouts, were there to catch them both.  

Savoy Hotel Fire, 25 December 1975 [Museum of Fire Collection]

Firefighters from the New South Wales Fire Brigades arrived promptly and confronted a chaotic scene. They rapidly attacked the fire and had the flames extinguished within minutes, but rescuing those stranded was a more challenging task. With both internal stairways ablaze and collapsed, firefighters had to deploy a hydraulic lift platform to reach people trapped on the upper storeys. Dozens of hotel occupants remained stuck at windows or in smoke-filled rooms for up to half an hour awaiting rescue. Brigades worked swiftly to pluck people from ledges and bring them down to safety. Thanks to these combined rescue efforts, many lives were saved even as the fire continued to rage. Survivors later recounted that the screams of those trapped were terrifyingly loud, audible even over the roar of the flames, a testament to the panic and anguish of that morning. By the time the last people were brought down, the Savoy’s interior was completely devastated. If not for the sooty scars around blown-out windows and a barricaded front door, one might not have realised a deadly fire had just torn through the building’s core. 

Savoy Hotel Fire, 25 December 1975 [Sydney Morning Herald]

When the smoke cleared, the toll was staggering. Fifteen people had perished, and at least 25 others were injured. Many of the victims were found in their beds or huddled in bathrooms, overcome by toxic smoke before they could escape. The Savoy Hotel fire instantly entered the record books as one of Sydney’s worst fire disasters. It drew national attention not only for occurring on Christmas Day but also for the shocking speed and lethality of the blaze. The tragedy was later cited as a key factor in New South Wales ending 1975 with a fire fatality count more than double that of any other Australian state. 

Investigators soon confirmed that the fire was an act of arson. Reginald John Little, the guest responsible, was arrested and eventually convicted on multiple counts of murder and arson for the lives lost in the Savoy. In 1976, he was handed several life sentences and was incarcerated for a 28-year non-parole period. 

The Savoy Hotel’s owner at the time was Abe Saffron, a nightclub mogul locally known as “Mr. Sin” for his alleged ties to organised crime and vice in Kings Cross. Saffron had been linked to a string of suspicious fires in Sydney properties he owned. Although there is no evidence connecting Saffron to the Savoy arson - that blame lay squarely with Little - the fire’s location in the Cross and Saffron’s shadowy reputation added an extra layer of intrigue to the story. (Ironically, another Saffron-owned Kings Cross building next door burned down 14 years later in a separate fatal fire, reinforcing local lore about Kings Cross fires.) 

Today, the site where the Savoy Hotel once stood has long been rebuilt (a fast-food restaurant occupies the street level now, erasing most visible traces of the past). Yet the memory of the fire lives on in Sydney’s social history. The heroism displayed by ordinary citizens and firefighters that Christmas morning - catching babies, climbing drainpipes, and risking life and limb to save strangers - remains an inspiring counterpoint to the horror of the event. The 1975 Kings Cross Savoy Hotel fire is remembered as a tragic tale of lives lost but also as a story of courage and community rising from the flames. 

-Story by Museum of Fire Heritage Team