Firefighters and the Blitz

Firefighters and the Blitz
By Francis Becket
With an introduction by, Matt Wrack, General Secretary of the Fore Brigades Union.
Published by Merlin Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-85036-673-0.

The executive council of the Fire Brigades Union are to be congratulated for commissioning this short popular, well illustrated, seventieth memorial to the over one thousand firefighters who died and the many thousands who where injured in the Blitz. There is considerable revisionism in current historical thinking about the home front in the war to which this book adds another chapter.

It is a familiar story of amateurism and class privilege being replaced by professionalism and a structure fit for the huge tasks the war presented, with a great deal of heroism in between. It is astonishing how poorly prepared the service was for war, considering how much of the talk before the war had been about the threat from the air. What’s more it is largely thanks to the FBU that the service evolved into one capable of meeting the challenge.

At the beginning of the war there where 1,600 independent fire brigades each a separate fiefdom run on military lines. Becket says that the Home Office had been thinking about the threat since Hitler came to power in 1933 but it took until 1937 for them to fund fire precautions and improvements in the nations fire fighting services.

Despite the experience from Spain it was not until 1938 that a civilian fire service was formed - the Auxiliary Fire Service. The Fire Brigades Act of 1938, made fire protection compulsory for every local authority in Britain, with the country divided into 11 regions to coordinate resources but there was no extra cash or any reduction in the number of brigades. The biggest the London Fire Brigade had only 106 pumping appliances whilst some of the smallest, controlled by Parish Councils, only had a few part timers and an ancient pump.

In the early part of the war fire fighters tackled some terrifying blazes with large amounts of improvised kit and considerable bravery and stoicism. It was the very toughest of learning environments. Yet it took two years before the government realised the service needed to be unified and it was nationalised in August 1941.

A classic example of the type of bureaucratic bungling was when the London Fire Brigade left its area to tackle a blaze following an air raid on the fuel depots at Thamesdown. On arrival they where told only the local commander could make the request for assistance. “In the absence of a local officer, the order had to go through the regional commissioner for Essex and East Anglia, who was, it turned out, the Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Efforts where made to contact this eminent gentleman, the Master [however] had retired for the night and his staff were reluctant to wake him.”

Some improvised equipment was highly successful like the two wheeled trailer pumps that ended up being pulled around by over two thousand London Taxi driver volunteers. This is reminiscent of the mythology of the little boats that saved the day at Dunkirk - heroic certainly but no substitute for a properly equipped and trained service.

If there is a real hero of this story it is John Horner, FBU General Secretary from 1934 until 1964, he battled, with amongst others Herbert Morrison, to modernise and professionalise the service. According to current FBU General Secretary Matt Wrack, he “was the most significant person in the Unions history”. It was Horner who realised how important it was to recruit the members of the auxiliary fire service into the FBU thereby strengthening the unions hand in the formation of a national fire service. Sadly the national service was not retained after the war. It never fails to amaze how politicians of all stripes have the capacity to praise to the skies the work of the emergency services when they are needed and then treat them so badly once the emergency has passed.

The country was woefully prepared for the war and if Hitler had decided to finish us off he almost certainly could have done. He didn’t and we got our second chance but not before many people paid with there lives.

I remember going to see my grandparents in November 1990. When I arrived my grandfather was glued to the local television news. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the devastating attack on Coventry. That night we found out for the first time that he had been working on building hangers for the shadow factory at Ryton near Coventry. The morning after the attack he and his fellow workers where asked to go into town to help clear up the mess and damp down the fires.

Fifty years later he was still traumatised by what he had seen that day. That night 554 people had been killed including 26 firefighters. That was the first time he had told anyone of his experiences, including my grandmother, he was full of praise for the fire crews who had battled all night having come from as far away as London and Peterborough.

There are many lessons to be learned from the experience of the fire service in the Second World War and whilst this book is a splendid introduction I believe the subject is worthy of a much more substantial study.