Cricket was a serious spectator sport in turn-of-the-century Scotland, and no fixture pulled crowds like the inter-county match between Perthshire and Forfarshire. Crowds at the two home grounds, the North Inch in Perth and Forthill in Dundee, regularly topped 20,000. On 1 August 1903, the morning crowd at the North Inch was already 5,000 and growing. To handle the demand, a temporary grandstand had been erected on the north-east side of the ground, on the same plot it had occupied the previous year and at other events before that. The Burgh surveyor had inspected it before the match started and declared it safe. Tickets in the stand were sold at different prices, the lower-priced seats clustered at the north end.

The pricing scheme had a quiet, fatal consequence. Spectators flocked to the cheaper north end. Eyewitnesses noted that the north section was considerably more full than the south long before the collapse. The stand was not designed to handle a load that was so badly unequal. When Sheriff Andrew Jameson eventually conducted his inquiry, he ruled that the most likely cause of failure was a combination of inadequate bracing and the use of nails where the design called for eight-inch bolts. The lopsided weight at the north end did the rest. The structure went over progressively - one section pulling the next - rather than disintegrating outright, and the eyewitnesses agreed that the stand came down almost as a single piece, upright and intact, rather than shattering.

There were no reported deaths. There were also more than 150 reported injuries, with some accounts suggesting that the actual count was higher and that local authorities had quietly underplayed it to manage public fear. Some of the most severely hurt had fallen from the top of the stand, a drop of more than thirty feet onto people below. Perth Royal Infirmary was overwhelmed in the immediate hours afterwards, its staff working through the night to stabilise broken limbs, crushed ribs, and head injuries. The disaster came barely a year after the 1902 Ibrox stand collapse in Glasgow had killed twenty-five and injured over five hundred. People asked, openly and angrily, how such a thing could have been allowed to happen again so quickly.

The inquiry, held in Perth that December, ruled that the contractors - Thomas Leith and Sons - had been negligent in erecting the stand and were at fault for its collapse. The Burgh surveyor who had passed the structure as safe also took some of the blame. Perthshire County Cricket Club, although ruled not at fault, was nonetheless required to pay 3,643 pounds, 18 shillings and 6 pence in compensation to the injured - an enormous sum for a county sporting club in 1903. A national disaster fund raised at least 700 pounds to help with the bill. Even so, the club was left financially shaken for years afterwards, an injury of a different kind that took longer to heal than most of the broken bones.

The North Inch is still there, a broad green common alongside the River Tay where Perth holds matches and markets and public events to this day. The disaster is not commemorated by a monument, but it sits inside the city's memory of itself. The 1903 collapse joined the Ibrox disaster as a turning point in how temporary structures were inspected and engineered in the United Kingdom. The eight-inch bolts that Thomas Leith and Sons had not used became, in time, the kind of detail that inspectors began to insist on. Five thousand people came to watch a cricket match that day. By the standards of progressive collapse mechanics, they should not all have walked away. That they did is part of why the story is still told.