Before Fire Brigades: The Strange History of Fighting Fires

SPEAKER_02 0:00 I'm standing on a mock-up of a Victorian street, which represents a time when the firefighting industry was in its nascy, when insurance companies ran the business. I'm at Fire Ground Museum in Rochdale in Manchester to learn all about the history of firefighting. Whether it's the Victorian firetrucks being pulled by horses, the communities that were set up and that lived around the fire stations, or the time of the Second World War in the Blitz, when the auxiliary firefighters made an incredible contribution and less a known contribution to the war effort. This museum charts the entire history of firefighting in Britain. I'm Ollie and this is what we did before. Welcome to the show. I'm here with Bob Bonner, who is the curator and founder of the Fireground Museum, and also you're a retired firefighter yourself. So this is something that you've lived and breathed for your whole career, isn't it? Fire.

SPEAKER_00 0:53 Yes, well, a bit earlier than that, probably. Going back to my childhood, it was what was always something that fascinated me. My dad had been a firefighter during the war, and I seemed to spend a lot of my childhood being interested in fire engines and fire stations. I joined the fire service at the age of 16 and did 40 years in that. But throughout that, I've also been very hit, very interested in the history and the heritage of the fire service, and met up with colleagues with the same kind of uh ideas, and all that came together and culminated in this museum.

SPEAKER_02 1:23 Fireground is an extraordinary museum, and it's just beautiful to walk in to see all of these old vehicles, but also just these incredible exhibits. We're standing on this uh kind of mock-up of a Victorian street, aren't we? Pump Street. Of Pump Street, okay. What's the relevance of um Manchester and specifically when it comes to the history of firefighting then? Because this Manchester really is an important city there, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 1:47 It is, and it's always been a pioneer in so many fields, you know, science and computing and firefighting and public services. Uh and this year's a special year because it's 200 years since the birth of the proper, fully funded and organised municipal Manchester Fire Service, Manchester Fire Brigade, which was the first in England of its kind. So Manchester is the start of it all. Uh well, Edinburgh actually did it two years earlier, but that's in Scotland. So that doesn't count. We are allowed to say we're the first in England. So Manchester.

SPEAKER_02 2:20 So tell me a little bit about the history then. Let's start with Pump Street, where we are standing. Um, just tell me a little bit about like the thought process behind creating this particular street.

SPEAKER_00 2:32 So, although Manchester started its proper town council fire brigade in in in 1866, um no it didn't, in 1826 rather, uh firefighting goes back a little bit earlier. So the start of the whole story is the Great Fire of London, 1666. Everything ends in 66, doesn't it? Yeah. The you know, World Cup and 1066. 1066, yeah, good and bad. So there was no fire service in London or anywhere in 1666. The whole city virtually was destroyed down there. But the Great Fire of London was only one great fire. Most towns had a great fire.

SPEAKER_02 3:08 And what was it before that buckets of water?

SPEAKER_00 3:11 People just trying to look after themselves, yeah. I mean, there wasn't even running water and pipe water, so it was you know um there was a great fire of Manchester in 1615. It was a smaller town than London, it was a village, but the same thing happened. Started in a baker's shop, spread the length of the street, and just destroyed the centre of the town. This happened in all around the country because there was nothing to do about it. The Great Fire of London led to two important developments. So the invention of the fire engine, but not overnight, you know, it took some years, people were trying to make pumps and things, and the introduction of fire insurance. So there's always an entrepreneur who sees an angle. So um, if people's houses and factories and shops keep burning down, wouldn't it be great to um take some money off them and say, look, we'll give you that money back when it burns down? But of course, with no fire service and no firefighters, it was more um paying out for losses than making a profit out of it. So it was the fire insurance companies with the newly invented fire engines that decided to form fire brigades, as they were called, and the separate privately run insurance companies, like the Royal Exchange and the Sun and all these companies, Norwich Union, got men together, got fire pumps, built fire stations, and became the fire service.

SPEAKER_02 4:30 So insurance isn't all that bad then. No, no, no. There's some good sides.

SPEAKER_00 4:33 Well, they were really only there for their clients, so the paying customers, they had no obligation to put fires out for anybody that wasn't a paying customer. So um there are a lot of myths about how they would go to a fire and stand there, watch it burn, you know, if it wasn't theirs and throw fuel on it and fight the other men and all that stuff. But really, the only people that were insured were businesses, you know, factories, shops, big places like that. The average cottage wasn't insured anyway. Yeah. And if you let a house is a row of houses burn down, it would probably eventually spread to your clients. So they were a little bit more, you know, community-minded than that. They would put the fires out, but they had no legal obligation to do so. They would identify the building that was insured with their own mark, a metal sign, which is called a fire mark or a fire plate. And these can still be seen around the country, mainly in old sort of Georgian villages and things, but most of them are either in museums or in the hands of collectors now, and you can probably see them on the wall. There are two examples there, and they bear a number which is the policy number for that particular, it's like putting your pin number on your house. Yes, and um the one on the left is a logo of the Sun Insurance Company, and it's the face of the sun, and the other one, which is a port cullis, is actually the Westminster, and there were numerous companies, they eventually all swallowed each other up, but some of the names are almost uh recognizable today. We still talk about royal and sun and words like that.

SPEAKER_02 5:59 So they would um would these insurance companies almost be in competition with one to put fires out?

SPEAKER_00 6:05 Yeah, and they did everything they could to look the best, so they had the smartest uniforms, the fastest horses. It was all about um putting a show on, and that would bring them the more customers. You know, it's like breakdown services, whichever's their quickest, probably gets the customer, doesn't it? You know, in those days, 1700s, many many men couldn't read and write. So the logo of the company was quite important. It didn't say sun, it was a picture of the sun, you know. Um, and that would give them the imperative to get on with putting that fire out because it was their insured company, their customer.

SPEAKER_02 6:38 Who were these firefighters then that plucked off the street?

SPEAKER_00 6:41 Plucked off the street, they were from the building trade, they were from the Navy or something, you know. In London, they were um fellows who worked on the River Thames loading boats and stuff like that. They were a mixture of men, they were usually big strong men. A lot of the insurance fire brigades work was getting stuff out of the building, yeah, rather than you know, they didn't have proper pipe water supplies, there was no fire hydrants, fire engines were hot manually operated and quite inadequate compared to anything that came later. So um they didn't save many buildings, let's be honest. They might have saved a few streets.

SPEAKER_02 7:14 And given the nature of these sort of heavy um things that the horses would have had to pull to get to the fires, is it also possible that by the time they actually got there, much of the damage had been done by the fire anyway?

SPEAKER_00 7:28 Absolutely. I mean there was no quick turnouts, it could be an hour before the fire and no. How could you call the fire service? There were no telephones, there were no street fire alarms. They usually waited while they all saw the smoke on the horizon, then every insurance brigade would turn out to it after having mustered the men, you know, found a horse and all that. And then when they got there, oh it's the other company, better let them do it, you know. So it was it was very amateur, very um but they they put on a professional front because it that was all there was, and people would see them looking very smart. I mean, some of the uniforms are absolutely ridiculous for a practical job, you know, like top hats and things, you know, and frock coats and all this breeches, you know, and then they go in a dirty building and put a fire out, we think. So uh it was very much about performance, and that was that was that was how it started.

SPEAKER_02 8:16 And were like buildings at that time also more susceptible. I mean, obviously, we've got so many ways in which we protect um buildings against fire now, but back then as well, I imagine if something caught a light, it was going up in flames pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_00 8:30 Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, there was no sprinkler systems, there were no fire alarms, there were no fire extinguishers. Buildings, there were still buildings with thatch roofs and and you know, flammable stuff. Even big industrial things like cotton mills were had no fire protection, you know, so uh a fire could just rip through the place.

SPEAKER_02 8:47 It's kind of amazing, isn't it, that um control of fire is actually one of the defining um features of our species. It's the reason why we are the species that we are today. And yet we only recently we learned how to control it many, many thousands of years ago, but we've only really recently figured out a very good way of stopping it from um overcoming us.

SPEAKER_00 9:08 And we keep learning from from disasters and things like that. We think we know everything, and then something happens that we've never seen before, like a football stadium burns down or a high-rise block of flats or something, and we learn from that. Yeah, but yeah, London, to be fair, did introduce building regulations after the Great Fire of London, and some of their buildings and domestic property was a lot safer than what was going on in other parts of the country. So they had what you know, what they call party walls between occupancies. If you've got a terraced row of houses, even in my time, a fire at one house could get into the roof and spread along the roof. That didn't happen in London because they built party walls right through the roof. And if you drive into Houston or somewhere on a train, you know you're in London by looking at the roof line because you see houses with protruding party walls, which still doesn't really happen in other parts of the country. So the London Building Acts are more um stringent than other towns, and that goes back to the Great Fire of London.

SPEAKER_02 10:07 So that was even in the 1600s they were implementing that kind of level of station.

SPEAKER_00 10:12 I mean, we like to think we had the first municipal fire service, but London had the first building acts, you know. So fair dues, you know.

SPEAKER_02 10:19 Let's walk over to the fire alarm uh box over here. I would love to talk about this because you mentioned that there were no phones back in those days. Uh, back in the early days, there really was no way of um actually getting in touch with the fire service. You were sort of relying on smoke signals almost.

SPEAKER_00 10:34 Absolutely, or a running to the fire station was the most common way of doing it, and knocking on the door if it was an occupied station. And even in this day and age, a personal caller going to report a fire at a station, the official term is a running call. Oh, really? Nobody ever walks, do they, when there's a fire? No, that's true. It's still called and the little phone boxering over to the fire. The phone box, which is outside every fire station, in case it's empty when you get there, is known as a running call box. Ah, right. And that goes back to that idea, you know. You can imagine people running up the street looking for a fire station. The Victorians and the sort of Edwardians at that sort of period came up with um installing this device in in cities and and big towns, and it's before the days of public call boxes.

SPEAKER_02 11:21 Yeah, so this is um for anyone who's just listening, could you describe the uh device for us?

SPEAKER_00 11:26 So we've moved on from the Great Fire London and the insurance brigade. We're now in the area of the municipal fire service in the late Victorians. So this is known as a street fire alarm. So it's a network of call points around a big town. Uh, it's not a telephone, you don't speak into it. It's the fire service equivalent of the police box or the police pillar. So if you think of Doctor Who with the big box and the phone on the outside, or the smaller version in towns, which was just a blue pillar. So this is the fire service equivalent. It's connected by uh landlines to the fire station control room. Um, as an example, this is a Manchester box, they had 200 of these across the city. Each one's got its own number, which is significant. I'll explain that in a moment. Uh, it's clockwork, it has a clockwork mechanism inside it, wound up and set like an alarm clock, waiting for something to happen. The caller comes to the box. If you don't know what to do, you read the instructions which says break glass. The glass is a deterrent for malicious hoax calls. Not enough deterrent today, I would suggest. I don't think they'd have two thoughts about breaking the glass, but that was enough to decent people didn't break the glass. Break the glass, when you pull the handle, it releases the clockwork mechanism that sends an impulse to the fire station. At that end, there's receiving equipment. So printers, ticker tapes come out, bells ring, lights flash, and it sends a coded message which says this box, because it's called a box, has been actuated. Doesn't know what's on fire, which house, which street, it's just the nearest box had been pulled. So they all jumped on the engine and responded to the box. Oh wow. Now, how do they know which box it is? Is the big question when there are 200 and they all ring the same bell? It's done in code. So this is number 44. So like Morse code. It's like it's a bit like a simple Morse code. So number 44 rings the bell four times, a little space and four times. Four, four, forty four. It keeps doing that till the clockwork runs down, by which time the fire engine's here. But yeah, the fireman has to respond, the fire engine has to come to the location of the box. I think if they saw smoke coming out of a house, it'd be no, yeah. But it tells the caller to wait here. You have to meet the fireman. Good morning, it's my house that's on fire, you know, that sort of thing. So so that's the street fire alarm. It's an American invention, uh invented by the Game Well Company in America and used right across the country in big cities. No longer. The last one in Britain was in Liverpool in the 1960s, but they are still in use in the USA. Oh. So what they still use the same system? They still use it, probably a slightly modernised. I suspect it's digital somewhere, but the same system, a call box in the street that you don't speak into.

SPEAKER_02 14:14 So I'm just imagining somebody sitting, uh, would there have been quite a few people sitting in the call room waiting for a bell to ring?

SPEAKER_00 14:21 Uh the big towns would have a uh an operator on duty in a control room.

SPEAKER_02 14:25 And then they're making sure that they haven't counted five instead of four.

SPEAKER_00 14:29 Exactly that, yeah. Now the question is so if it's four four four bells is number 44, you know, a seven and a one is seventy-one. What do you do for number 20? You can't transmit zero. Oh yeah. So there's no 20. Okay. There's a 19 and a 21 Victorians, you know, simple answer to it.

SPEAKER_02 14:48 Um, I bet there's lots of um conspiracy theories about uh it's because they thought number 20 was superstitious.

SPEAKER_00 14:54 Yeah, that's the 13th floor. Yeah, exactly. It's purely because you can't transmit zero. They were used in the latter years purely for hoax calls, but people had got phones, there were phone boxes going up before the war. So, you know, unless you're in the habit of using this to call the fire service, you'd probably pick a phone up. So the only people that like these were naughty boys, really. And and that sold them off. That was the end of it in Britain.

SPEAKER_02 15:18 Manchester's a big city. 200 of these boxes actually seems inadequate to cover the entire city.

SPEAKER_00 15:22 Yeah, it never went below the merger. So as the city extended, they'd put another circuit in. Uh, but when they got to sort of northern Withington, they decided that was far enough. Okay. And we'd the people around there had phones, you know. So um, it was the inner city, really, that that did it, you know, that that that you could find them in. I was one on my street corner as a child, I can vaguely remember it. And if I heard a fire engine bell coming, I would run down and see what it was, and the fireman would inevariably come up and say, Have you done this? No, I'm just watching the fire engines. But that was a if you like fire engines, that was what you got into.

SPEAKER_02 15:55 You got you got accused of things, you know. And also in Pump Street, there is this incredible shop window as well, which kind of tells a uh quite a fascinating history about what the firefighters would have worn. Um, you mentioned sort of back in the early days of the insurance companies, they were just wearing flashy things to look as cool as possible, basically. Um, tell me a little bit about like uh some of these um pieces on display.

SPEAKER_00 16:19 So gradually, firefighters' uniforms through through the 19th century became a little bit more practical, and the the all-embracing fire tunic as it was known came in in the mid-19th century. The thing about the Victorian fire tunic made of what we call melting cloth, like big thick cloth, they were still using it more than 100 years later. I dressed in exactly the same tunic as not the same garment, yeah, the same design as my Victorian predecessors. They saw no need to change it. It was it wasn't waterproof, it wasn't fireproof. It kept you warm. Looked nice, it was that well woven, it kept the water never got through it, sparks couldn't get through it. Why change it? We got into more technical fibres in the 19 sort of nineties and things. You know, we have um Nomex and Kevlars and all these kind of names. So modern stuff is is fire resistant, water resistant, chemical resistant, um, high Viz helmets have changed. The famous fire helmet is the brass Victorian fire helmet, and that was introduced to Britain in the 1860s, having been borrowed from the French. Okay. So the French fire service, particularly in Paris, were part of the military. So a fireman, a French firefighter's helmet, forget the bit on the top, was essentially a French cavalryman's helmet. Oh, yeah. That was um borrowed and came to Britain in in London in the 1860s. We put the bigger comb on the top of it, as it's called, and that became the recognisable shape of a British fire helmet. Oh, so the Quiff kind of look thing on the top is is a British thing. It is, it's called a comb. It's called a comb. You do see it abroad, but it's particularly added to the French design to make the British fire helmet. It deflects a bit of falling debris, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A bit, a bit of plaster, a bit of glass or something.

SPEAKER_02 18:09 They have to give some excuse for putting it on and making it a little more fancy.

SPEAKER_00 18:13 Yeah, I suppose so, yeah. Um, over the years the material has changed, so we've gone from brass to leather to cork to plastics. Um, but the shape rarely changed. There's a leather and brass one. Uh, but now they've got on to a very modern one, uh, which is quite rounded, which is known as the Gallet helmet. That's the manufacturer. Strangely, also French. Oh. So full circle. Um, but the galet helmet appears in other. You'll see paramedics sometimes wear them. You'll see fellas on breakdown trucks wearing them. It looks like a crash helmet. It no longer, it no longer looks like a traditional firefighter's helmet, but that's what it is, and people are used to that. It's got visors now and stuff like that. Yeah. Your ears are covered. The old fire helmets, your ears and your neck were more or less exposed. And what when firefighters got modern helmets a few years ago that cover their ears, they didn't like them at first. Because when you go into a burning building that's dark, smoke logged, your ears are your most sensitive part to pick up heat. Your earlobes can detect the heat before other parts of your body. So it's it's like um a monitoring device. So covering your ears up is a little bit restrictive, it's got to be done, it's the modern uniform. But that was one of the changes that was significant.

SPEAKER_02 19:33 What do they do to get around those issues now? They just sort of learnt to live with it. Thermal image cameras and all sorts of things.

SPEAKER_00 19:39 Yeah, you don't need earlobes anymore. Yeah, that's right. But the uh yeah, the the sort of instinctive way of doing things, you know, gets pushed out as you as you develop new techniques. Why do we not have brass helmets and change to leather? Because at the early part of the 20th century, more and more houses became electrified. So wandering around a house in a in a brass helmet in three inches of water with dangling live wires was not a good idea. And fine did get electrocuted occasionally wearing brass helmets. So most brigades abandoned them. Was brass ever hugely uh beneficial in a fire? Uh no, it was always hot and uncomfortable, but it was very smart when you polished it. Yeah. So that was the hangover from the insurance days. Do a do a job, but look look the business, you know. So um, I mean, in all honesty, you put a loot beautiful polished helmet on and then go in a dirty, smoky building. Yeah. It's falling debris.

SPEAKER_02 20:36 You look nice for about five seconds.

SPEAKER_00 20:38 Exactly that. So it became over the years ever more practical, you know.

SPEAKER_02 20:42 And then you've got this uh on the right side of the shop, this sort of tunic which looks a little bit more adorned with it's wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 20:49 Yeah, it should be outside a cinema in the West End, shouldn't it, really? Yeah. It or a hotel. It's this is the the chief officer's uniform of a small volunteer fire brigade, right? Where the chief was probably a greengrocer or something in his day job, but when he was a fire, he was the man, yeah, and he could hardly he he designed his uniform how he wanted it. That is a very extravagant uniform, uh, which I've not seen anywhere else. It's got like shoulder glass. Oh, it's got a little lion whistle and everything, shoulder, yeah. It's um little embellishments on the collar. Um none of it for practical purposes. Absolutely, only the whistle. The whistle. Yeah, and of course, the bit on the shoulders is is a rank marking. Okay. But if you didn't know he was the chief wearing that, I don't know why. Uh this from a small town in Lancashire where the the chief decided he would look the business. Um normally they were just the same uniform as the lower ranks with with the with the rank markings like you get in the s in the armed forces, you know.

SPEAKER_02 22:46 And what I also find interesting is these sort of old ways of putting out fires. So this was before the age of the fire extinguisher, right? This is a kind of a uh precursor to it.

SPEAKER_00 22:54 These are the sort of precursors to fire extinguishers, and they were more appealing to a Victorian. Um things that they would buy. So they had very fancy names like um Firefox and all this sort of Killfire and that. And most of them were just a canister full of powder that usually congealed after about a year. But they were all very look beautiful artwork on them, and they would sell these to people, and this'll protect your house. The general public. Most, yeah, definitely. And the artwork is incredible. But there's an even earlier version, which was a glass fire extinguisher, which was called a fire grenade because it was a glass bowl with a with a secret formula liquid in it, usually coloured, which you could throw the whole grenade into the fire, it was smash, and the liquid come out magically put the fire out. Now you bought this probably in 1860 and 1870 when you had your first fire and discovered it was just water. Salesmen had long gone. So the fire grenade was um a typical Victoria. The appeal to them, things like that. So it worked a bit. Well, it did insofar as it was a cup full of water. Exactly. But these powder ones they really follow that theme, you know, they're all about look what I've got on my mantelpiece. You know, none of them were particularly effective.

SPEAKER_02 24:17 Oh, so if you did dump the powder onto the fire, it wouldn't be a big one.

SPEAKER_00 24:20 Go out if you're a small enough fire. Right. But you wouldn't put a house fire out with it. Maybe a chimney fire if you're lucky, you know. So uh yeah, all manner of things. Till till um the more recognisable canister, sort of two-gallon extinguisher came in with with pressure in it and stuff like that, and then foam, and then modern powders and modern gas extinction stuff and stuff like that. They're all controlled now by British standards and European standards, so it's moved on. But the charming ones are what are in the museum.

SPEAKER_02 24:49 So these were sort of just roaming salesmen, they weren't controlled by anybody.

SPEAKER_00 24:52 They were they were snake oil salesmen, weren't they? The um the shop is modelled on the kind of shop that we we know existed around Manchester and Salford where such devices were on sale and the local fire chief could come and order uniforms and helmets and stuff like that. So there really were shops in Manchester and Salford and Rochdale that look like this. Um, but in a museum, it's a nice way of showing stuff behind a piece of glass as well. Yeah. So there's a curatorial side to it.

SPEAKER_02 25:22 I guess before um you have like fire services as this sort of established part of modern life funded by the taxpayer, you've got all these individual insurance companies and volunteers who just who do need somewhere to go and buy their stuff.

SPEAKER_00 25:37 Completely random until the Second World War. You know, your fire service was as good as the town you lived in. If you lived, you know, right up to the 1940-ish. If you lived in a big city, you had a big professional fire brigade, possibly headed by the chief constable and disciplined and everything. If you lived in a medium-sized borough, you probably had whole-time firemen. You know, if you lived in a small town, there would be part-time. If you lived in a village, they were volunteers. The engines were according, you know, you had a the big stuff in the big towns and the small stuff in. So it only got became standardised in the Second World War and afterwards.

SPEAKER_02 26:10 So we just stepped into a room which kind of resembles what a building may have looked like after a fire during the Blitz. And to me, this is such a stunning room, the way it's been curated, the way it's been decorated and fitted out. Like you really feel like you're in London during that time. You've got the sort of bricks lying on the floor, you've got the charred door of the house. This just as an exhibit alone is quite stunning, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 26:40 It is, yeah. We were we uh we had wonderful designers who put this together for us, and you know, we can't thank them enough. But the Blitz, uh, and the whole Second World War, if you like, is a very significant phase in the development of British fire services. So we like to think there are two or three major landmarks. So the Great Fire of London started it all off. The Blitz pulled it all together and and led to the you know, after the war was the modern fire service with all the lessons we learned from the Blitz, and then of course, later things like 9-11 or Grenfell will will have their own effects on the progress of the service. But this was a very important period. So um, yeah, you said you mentioned London, but most big cities across Britain were were bombed, you know, Coventry, Glasgow, Hull, Liverpool, they all they all had it, and it was a time when there were still over a thousand completely separate local authority fire brigades in Britain that had no particular reason to talk to each other or work together. So um were they still insurance-based? No, we're long past that. Okay, so local authority controlled, but not um unified or coordinated, particularly unless it was voluntary between neighbouring towns. So the government recognised from lessons they've seen in Spain and that, what aerial bombardment might come to in the event of a war. So in 1939 they formed what was called the Auxiliary Fire Service, which meant every town had to recruit uh a separate fire service of volunteers, if you wish, to cope with the air raids. And the first the thinking was quite random at first. They thought, well, let's use the auxiliary firefighters to deal with the air raids, and the firemen who were employed can get on with the real fires. Because it was nonsense, you know, because they the the the the the situation was bigger than they'd ever understood it was going to be like. So that the auxiliary fire service and the regulars, as they were called, were slightly separate at first. The fire brigade trained them and mobilised them, which meant turning them out, but they were paid by maybe the town hall or had their own rank structure and things like that. But once the bomb started falling, they realised that what had gone wrong and they essentially merged every fire service and every auxiliary fire service. So you're talking about two or three thousand organisations into one unified thing called the National Fire Service, and that was meant to cope with the war. Now, the National Fire Service didn't kick off till August 1941, which had missed the first 18 months of the worst blitz damage. So the blitz was handled, you know, in 1940, an early part of 1941, was basically dealt with by the original structure. The fire brigades and the auxiliary fire service. The National Fire Service came in and reorganised it all, but the war was moving on from mid-41. Uh Manchester didn't have many air raids after the summer of 1941. London did, they got all the flying bombs and things, but it was a change. So the National Fire Service was set up to deal with something that was already fading away in the war change direction. Uh, and it was only for the duration of the war, but it took till 1948 to be disbanded and hand back to local control. And the post-war fire service was on a new footing and it learnt so many lessons from the Blitz. For example, fire engines were being brought in from other towns to assist in the Blitz, even though they'd never done it before, some of them. You'd perhaps come in from a town 30 miles away into a city like Manchester, only to find that your host pipes didn't fit the hydrants in that town because there was no standardisation. So one of the things that came, and then you might find you might go to help another town, and the rank structure was completely different. The chief was probably um a shopkeeper, you know, and things like that. He had he had jurisdiction.

SPEAKER_02 30:19 And a city, maybe if you've never visited a city before.

SPEAKER_00 30:22 Oh, yeah, completely. Alien environment, you know, and the massive fire is like refineries and mills and things. So it was the it was a very sharp learning curve, the blitz, you can imagine. The auxiliary firefighters outnumbered the regular firefighters in most towns by something like 10 to 1. Wow. So, as an example, Manchester City had 200 regular firefighters and an establishment of AFS of three or four thousand. So they were outnumbered, which meant when they were fighting fires in the Blitz and you were getting things like injuries and deaths and casualties, there was more auxiliary firefighters killed than regulars because of more of them. So it was disproportionate in the um sort of effects of it, if you like.

SPEAKER_02 31:03 Well, can we walk over to um Fred, uh one of the auxiliary firefighters models? So he's one of he's a model of one of the auxiliary firefighters. He is indeed.

SPEAKER_00 31:12 So he's wearing the uniform which was uh standardized across auxiliary fire services, which is the the symbol AFS, and the town name underneath it. So this is before the nationalisation.

SPEAKER_02 31:23 And so these um people wouldn't have been part, as you mentioned, they wouldn't have been part of the fire service before. So they would have been sort of dragged off the streets, basically.

SPEAKER_00 31:32 They were made up from people who were perhaps in protected occupations, couldn't be drafted into the forces, or they perhaps weren't medically quite fit enough for the army to go abroad. So there were people who were left here, uh some older men. Um you could almost uh unkindly compare it to Dad's army, but that was a bit unfair. So so bakers um would have been a uh a potentially a protected oh yeah. Um yeah, all sorts of industries and things that were you know, uh textile industry and driving and local authority jobs. So these people were volunteered essentially, and there was a lot of kind of different roles that people volunteered for during the war. There were fire watchers and you know, welfare people and all manner of things. But the AFS is one of the big ones. So this is Freddy's probably got a day job. He probably works two or three nights a week putting fires out in the blitz, you know. They were very much treated as second-class firefighters at the beginning, they weren't allowed in the normal fire stations, they had temporary buildings, so they're in railway arches and factory loading bays and things. They didn't have the proper big fire engines that their regular colleagues had. They'd have things like a trailer pump. It works very well. It's got a real fire pump in it, but you need something to pull it. Uh it was painted grey. The uniforms at first didn't even have this uniform, they were just wearing overalls. So at the beginning of the AFS, they were very much second class. So what what was pulling the um well that was it? They had to commandeer vehicles or buy second-hand Lurries and taxis and things. And they was convinced that by making a you could make more fire engines quicker if you put them on two-wheel trailers, and there'd always be something to pull them, wouldn't they? No, no, they wasn't. I mean, vehicles weren't getting maintained, uh, you couldn't find a car and that. They kind of drifted towards buying big American cars that had a bit of bigger engines in them and that, and then they put a ladder on the roof and a trailer behind, and get six burly men sat in it, and that'd be a fire engine.

SPEAKER_02 33:21 No way, you can sort of imagine them riding it around.

SPEAKER_00 33:24 This is what my dad was doing, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:26 Wait, so fire engines at this point for the actual fire service they were they were okay. They were sort of bit they were actually kind of closer to what we imagine as a modern fire engine.

SPEAKER_00 33:34 Exactly that, yeah. Uh, but the AFS struggled with stuff at first. And the other thing that was uh which spoiled their job for them was that people didn't like them at first. So you get a street where the neighbours, perhaps two or three of the neighbours and men in France getting shot, and and Fred just goes into the fire station a couple of evenings and plays dominoes, waiting for a bomb, you know. So they they were they were a little bit derided at first. People there and then as soon as the first bomb started falling, they became heroes overnight. And that was the story of the AFS.

SPEAKER_02 34:06 Was there a sense that people thought they were kind of just in it for the glory?

SPEAKER_00 34:10 Yeah, like all that, yeah, definitely. And uh then they realised when they started um going out, and other everybody with the brain was in an air raid shelter. These lads were out in the streets and they were getting killed, and so on, and they went from zero to hero almost overnight, you know. And then of course they all merged with the regular firemen, and you couldn't see the join in 1941. There was a new auxiliary fire service formed after the war, in case basically a civil defence measure for uh the Cold War and stuff like that, and that's where you see green goddesses and things like that. There's green fire engines that came out in the 1950s, and another new set of volunteers that worked alongside regular firemen one night a week. That was the new auxiliary fire service, which lasted for another 20 years or so, mainly training, doing exercises and drills, helping out on major incidents, but not being your normal firefighter.

SPEAKER_02 35:02 So when you say there were volunteers, they were still getting some sort of pavement.

SPEAKER_00 35:05 Well, expenses and things like that. The the Bosch War AFS didn't really get any money at all, just travelling and stuff like that. The wartime, I think there was a bit of wages involved, but uh nothing compared to their regular colleagues. You know, you had to be, it was the volunteering sort of ethos, you know.

SPEAKER_02 35:19 Yeah, because I I mean we we'll mention there's a uh an artifact here which is really fascinating in a moment, but you know, I I I mentioned maybe at first people thought, oh, they're just in it for the glory. There wasn't much glory to be had, but by the time the blitz were happening. Um, this was you know, brutal. There were fires everywhere. They were they, you know, this would have been a really grueling job for these people, wouldn't it?

SPEAKER_00 35:45 Then go back to work the next morning, you know. I mean, I don't know how they did it, some of them. And a number of them, that was their start to a full career. They stayed in the fire service and they'd had the the real baptism of fire, some of these AFS men, you know.

SPEAKER_02 35:58 And so, and many of them died, as you mentioned. Um obviously they outnumbered the deaths of the traditional fire service because there were more of them. But do you think it was also due to the fact that they were just not as well trained?

SPEAKER_00 36:08 Yeah, that's an element of it. I don't think people knew what was expected of them. They'd never seen air raids in Britain and all that, so it was all a little bit unknown, and then of course it hit them hard. They could only do so much training in basic, basic firefighter, you know, how to join hosts together and that. And that they'd often go out with perhaps 30 or 40 auxiliaries to a street that was in the middle of the city that was burning on both sides, and one fire, one regular fireman in charge of them, and he'd never been in charge of men before. Yeah, so it was all very, very uh rough, really.

SPEAKER_02 36:41 And um uh there's a sign uh on the a poster on the wall here um saying women you too can serve. So we had women as part of the exhibition.

SPEAKER_00 36:50 This was the start of women in the fire service that joined the auxiliary fire service and the national fire service. They weren't firefighting, they were doing every other job. They were doing telephony, they were doing admin, they were doing finance, they were driving cars, taking officers to fires. Uh, women firefighters as we know them today, female firefighters as part of a team, didn't come until much later.

SPEAKER_02 37:11 And I love this artifact that you've got as well displayed in uh in the Blitz setup because it really shows, well, it kind of tells the story of what specific incident, doesn't it? Can you tell me about this?

SPEAKER_00 37:21 It does, but it also epitomizes the whole thing about the the firefighters and the dangers in the Blitz. So this is what's known as a branch pipe. It's the end, it's the bit that goes on the end of the hose. It's the squirty bit, if you like. And this was being held by two auxiliary firefighters at a fire in December 1940 in Old Trafford, Manchester. Uh, a church had been set on fire by incendiary bombs. They used to drop incendiary bombs first, set buildings on fire, and then come back an hour or two later and drop high explosives on the burning cities. So church was set on fire. Two auxiliary firemen were holding this, trying to get this church fire out. The sooner you got fires out in the blackout, the better. When a plane came with high explosive bombs and a direct hit on the church and the firefighters, two of them were killed instantly. This is what they were holding. That's what the bomb and the shrapnel damage did to a very heavy piece of brassware. I don't think they'd have known what hit them, poor chaps, you know. And that has been turned into a just after the war, in you know, long before there was a museum, this was turned into a memorial to these two men, but it also epitomizes the whole thing about being a a blitz firefighter, and it's so stark and and and brings it home. I I dread to think what it must have been like for them, you know.

SPEAKER_02 38:45 Yeah, because you can imagine the act of just putting out the fires being dangerous and difficult enough.

SPEAKER_00 38:50 Firefighters now, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:52 Without having the the risk of a bomb being dropped on.

SPEAKER_00 38:54 I mean, the stories of firefighters in the middle of Piccadilly being shot at by planes with machine guns at the same time, you know, raiding, they come back and raided on you. Everything was in blackout in the war, but every fire that was started by an incendiary bomb made it a target for the for the own for the planes that followed. So it's very important to get the fires out quickly. Um, and of course, you were the target, you were the stud the man next to the flames, so that plane was going to drop its bomb where you were. So absolutely horrendous time really.

SPEAKER_02 39:24 And how how long would the blitz have lasted then, this period where the auxiliary firefighters were really involved in the putting out fires?

SPEAKER_00 39:32 Well, the auxiliary fire service w got going in 1939. It was being put together during during 1939 and they were mobilised as soon as the war was declared. And it stayed on in that structure till the mobile till the nationalisation of August 1941. So, right through the Blitz period, AFS men and women were holding it together.

SPEAKER_02 39:54 Do you think people know about the important role, sort of the heroic role they played in in history, in the same way that we know about the traditional fire service and their role?

SPEAKER_00 40:03 A lot of people still don't know the story. We still have to uh explain to younger visitors, you know, how people wanted to do this voluntarily and the prices they paid to do that. It's a story if we're this is why we have museums like this to keep these stories alive because that contribution could just be lost. You know, people like my father that did that job. If if we don't portray that and explain things with artifacts and recreations, those stories can be lost, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 40:30 And now we're standing in front of a cabinet which contains the oldest stories. Well the oldest items, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:36 So what we say in the British Fire Service is that our father figure is a man called James Braidwood. He's our Admiral Nelson to the Navy, if you like. And this is James. He was a young Scotsman, 24 years old, in the city of Edinburgh, who was given the job of um being the chief of the first ever fire, municipal fire service in in the UK, which was the Edinburgh Fire Brigade, 1824, just two years before Manchester. Um he came out of the building trade. They had a big fire in Edinburgh, lost half the city. He said, We need a fire service, let's get somebody in who can do this. 24 years old, never been to a fire, and he organised this city fire brigade impeccably, built fire stations, bought fire engines, trained men, and he was so such a strong and significant character that the things that he initiated, firefighters still do some of them today. Oh wow. Techniques, um, working in twos, uh, training in the dark, and you name it, James Braidwood is our father figure. Even the fire engine design of some of the engines is called the Braidwood design, and he'd never even seen one because he was who ever rode on a horse-drawn engine, but we still use the name of Braidwood Fire Engine. And um he set up the Edinburgh Fire Service, uh, Manchester followed and other towns. Um he was headhunted and went to London in the early 1830s and set set up a similar organisation there. It's actually still linked to the insurance companies, but it was the it was the start of the London Fire Brigade. Um, and he stayed in in London as the fire chief until 1861, when he was 61 years old, essentially, and turned out to a big fire in the Docklands area of London near um what would be Tower Bridge today and all that sort of stuff, and was killed in a massive fire in London, buried in a collapsed building. He was found a day or two later by his number two, a chap called Alfred Tozer, and Alfred Tozer uh became probably the most famous firefighter in the country after James Braidwood. And within a year or two of James Braidwood's disastrous death, Alfred came to Manchester. So our most famous fire chief, our local father figure, and uh well known throughout the world, Alfred Tozer. But Alfred uh had the sad um job of finding James Braidwood under all the uh debris. Wow one thing he did, uh a bit ritualistic probably, I don't know where it comes from this, but he had he got his knife out and cut the button off James Braidwood's tunic, or one of the buttons of James Braidwood's fire tunic. And that button is in this museum, and it's the most significant little object in British Fire Service history that we've got. I think he had more than one button on that tunic, and I think there might be a couple left in London, but um it's very, very significant and you know it's a tangible thing about James Braid. Well, he has a statue in Edinburgh, but there's his button, and then we had then we got Alfred, who's who's um the most amazing character and the head of a dynasty of about seven generations of fire chiefs, all called Toza.

SPEAKER_02 43:47 Um and actually his uh lineage exists in the fire industry today, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 43:51 It does. So, right down to the current generations, which are now in the fire service in the Durham area. Uh, his great-great-great-great whatever granddaughter is is a female control room operator, and she's about the second or third of those in that brigade. We're in touch with the family. Um, and the grandfather at that level was uh also a descendant called Toza. So he goes on and on and on, and he had sons that were fire chiefs in Birmingham, Bristol, and around the world and everything. And like James before him, he invented and uh conceived so many things that are still in use by the fire service today. What sort of things did he invent? Well, um he invented uh things like quick turnout methods for horse-drawn fire engines where the harness just drops on them. He designed fire engines, he invented portable fire equipment, he he invented it sounds strange, quick opening fire station doors, pull a rope, boom. You know, that was an invention that somebody had to invent. Otherwise, you're waiting for the damn thing to open. So that was Alfred. Um, he was also a writer, a naturalist, uh, he uh a Collector. An overachiever. An overachiever. And I look at his kindly face and I think, what I wish he was my chief, you know. He had a big family of about six or seven children. Some of them died before him, quite Victorian. And some of the objects in here, the most the oldest objects, were his. Were his collection. Our oldest fire engine dates from 1741. That was Alfred's. He he he came out of the colour. And this is this black one there. Wow. Yes, it's never been a fire engine around here. It came out of Alfred's house. And of course, the button and the the little artwork that goes with it and some of these old objects, all to do with Braidwood and Tozer. They're the two most famous firemen. Uh, there are some other characters that you'll hear about, but for me, they are the men.

SPEAKER_02 45:47 Yeah. Oh, amazing. So if you're looking for legends of firefighters, these really are the guys. Very definitely, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:54 And Alfred's father had been an insurance fireman in London. He was the first Tozer fireman. He was called Robert Tozer. Now, in those days in the early 1800s, there was something called the press gang, which meant that's how we call it the army recruiting office today, but um there would you could be forcibly enrolled into the armed forces, yeah. And it was done by a uh a team of um recruiting sergeants and very tough men that would go into a village and round up all the men and say, right, you're in the army now, and the old trick of putting a coin in the beer, so they say you've accepted the king's shilling and all that stuff. Um, and of course, one of the tricks when people heard that the press gang was coming into town, they went hiding. Yeah. But so they got the the press gang got the idea if they rung the fire bell, firemen and men had come running, and they would be right, you, you, and you. So they actually passed legislation to say firemen were not allowed to be press ganged.

SPEAKER_02 46:48 Oh, so they couldn't take firemen into the army. So they couldn't. Because they were so important, they couldn't do that. They couldn't do it.

SPEAKER_00 46:54 Well, this is a certificate that was held by Robert Tozer, the first Tozer, Alfred's dad, and it was his exemption certificate. It's like having an MOT.

SPEAKER_02 47:03 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:04 It says, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:05 You feel really chuffed to be in the pub with that, you know, everyone else is running and hiding in your side.

SPEAKER_00 47:09 I don't know how this works. I think if you woke up on a ship with a sore head, yeah, pulled it out of your pocket, they'd turn round and go back. Of course they would. But it would you have that legal protection, and it does say um he is free from being impressed. I wouldn't be impressed, or liable to be compelled to go to sea, serve as a marine or a soldier, signed 1824.

SPEAKER_02 47:31 Okay, so that that really um kind of puts a stamp on how important firefighters were viewed uh then as well.

SPEAKER_00 47:36 Even then they recognized, yeah, and the the the military was being a bit unfair, yeah, all the firemen, you know. So um what it they were hard times, weren't they? You know.

SPEAKER_02 47:46 And what why is it? Um, I mean, I I find it amazing, first of all, that you've you've spent your whole time uh as a firefighter and now you run this museum. We've got the story of um Toza who whose lineage goes throughout fire. What what is it that kind of keeps people and families in it for decades?

SPEAKER_00 48:05 It does happen, it does still happen. People, fathers and sons and daughters now uh join the service. It's what you know, and because it was a job that took over your whole life, sometimes you would live on a fire station as a child. So that's that was your world. Yeah, so you naturally fell into it. And I've got friends that were born on fire stations, grew up and became firemen, um, because that was the world they knew.

SPEAKER_02 48:29 And that brings us quite neatly on to the story of the fact that people did live um on sort of around the fire station often, didn't they? Um even around this fire station.

SPEAKER_00 48:39 Even this one, yeah. This one had 32 houses. So the bigger towns, the firefighters, worked on a continuous duty system as it was called. They were never off duty, or maybe one day a fortnight. So they they worked in the station during the day and went to fires. They went home for the meals in the adjacent housing or upstairs in the fire station, perhaps. Um, at night time they slept in their own beds but were on call with the bell in the house and stuff. A little bit like happens in smaller towns today. Obviously, in a much smaller town, you might have a part-time turnout, you know. But the the tr the typical thing for a large city or borough was to live on the station with your family. So it became a little community hub.

SPEAKER_02 49:17 So kind of like you uh might imagine a mining village.

SPEAKER_00 49:20 Yeah, just like just like that, or an army garrison, or even or something like that. So, this particular this picture, for instance, these are all the children that lived at one particular fire station. They're not all the same family, um, they're all the fireman's children. Um, they've come out to have the photograph taken because of course this was early 1900. Uh, in those days, you didn't take a picture every two minutes. No, it's a big event having your picture taken. So they've all put the best clothes on and the sailor suits, and they brought the baby out and the cat and all the rest of it. And you do deal with whatever facial expressions you get, basically.

SPEAKER_02 49:50 I do, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:51 These are Ancoach children, so they've seen it and done it, you know. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't like to tangle with him at school, you know. But they all, you know, if your dad was a fireman, he was that he was a pillar of the community and he had a decent job. So these children were lucky that they came from a stable family with a a father who had a bit of standing, you know. They just look as common as every other child in Manchester in 1900. But um, I just love this picture, it just tells so much atmosphere, doesn't it, of the of the day, you know, a rag doll because he couldn't afford proper toys and things like that. But as I say, one one boy's brought the pet cat with him, but that's not the only animals you would see on a fire station. It was normal, quite common for for fire stations to have a pet. Very often a dog that lived in the stable with the horses, yeah. Quite often a cat that would keep the mice down and stuff, bit like a ship's cat, you know. It was it was a it was done. There were some extremes, some fire stations in Manchester had weird pets like a monkey. Uh and that was actually a pet in there. It was actually a pet monkey which was at this station where the children were and died and was buried in the fire station. And one day that's going to be dug up and it'll be a major crime scene when this skeleton's found in Ancoats, and there's only me knows what it's for. But another station in in the Hume area had a pet sheep. Why they're allowed to keep a sheep on a fire station, I'll never ever know. So they were not they were not official animals, these dogs around. They didn't have a job, but they were semi-official, they became kind of semi-official, they would run to the fires alongside the fire engine, um, which you also see in America. Just by chance, like they would do they it became custom and practice on the fire when the bells went and the horses were hitched, the dog was there as well.

SPEAKER_02 51:34 They weren't training them specifically for this.

SPEAKER_00 51:36 It wasn't official, yeah. Um, and it became a bit of a romantic storyline, you know, how the the these they saved children and all this stuff, and they knew where they were going. I mean, one little six-year-old said to me here one day, how do they know where to go then if it's running in front of the engine? And I had to think of an answer to that. Of course, the answer was you can smell smoke, you can see smoke, and the fellow driving the horse has a whip, and if he's turning left, he does that, and this horse keeps looking, this dog keeps looking behind him. So they would go to the fires. They always ended up the same way, they always got run over by their own fire engine or something. But many of the fire dogs became famous names. So Chance in London, uh, Wallace in Glasgow, who is actually in a museum, is stuffed and mounted. No, right. Wallace the fire dog, and he's had books written about him, as has Chance. Uh, Lion, the famous Salford dog, and Nell the famous Rochdale fire dog, which went to every fire in Rochdale, except one when she was sick, and um was very unhappy to see the engines go out without it. And when the fireman came back an hour later, it had shredded all the uniforms out of temper.

SPEAKER_02 52:43 How could you leave remote?

SPEAKER_00 52:45 How dare you go to a fire without me? But the saving grace was there was a famous story in Rochdale where Nell was running in front of the engine and saw a young toddler playing in the road, sitting in the road, and allegedly got hold of the child and dragged it to the curb before the fire engine spent passed. And this actually appeared in the local press, so it's a famous Rochdale story. You prove it, I can't. Yeah, but it's a great story, and there's a lot of these kinds of stories going on. You can see loads of images of fire dogs and things. The Americans liked always a Dalmatian, that was their tradition, a fire dog, a Dalmatian. The story about that is um a Dalmatian with its spots is very visible to a galloping horse rather than a little grey dog like we always had. Yeah, you know, so they would keep it wouldn't tread on the thing, you know. It was it was quite the spotty dog, was was they say was visible. Probably also a an appropriate breed for what it did or something, you know. We would have anything in England, any dog, cat, monkey, you know, it was just the tradition of the Victorian firemen.

SPEAKER_02 53:47 And all these famous names that you mentioned, like chance, um, were they these these were all came before we started training dogs specifically to oh yes.

SPEAKER_00 53:55 I mean we have working dogs today in the fire and rescue service, which um is a fairly modern introduction. So there are two types of dogs in the fire service uh search and rescue dogs, which can investigate, you know, where there's a collapsed building or something, and they've been sent abroad to earthquake zones and things like that to help. They call on the British Fire Service as part of the international rescue movement, and then the other dog, which is used even more, is uh the fire investigation dogs, which is a sniffer dog. It compares to a drugs dog, if you like, that kind of intelligence. They're usually labradors for some reason. Uh they can they can help the fire investigators and the police locate the uh the source of a fire, particularly if it's used accelerants. Ah because when when you're investigating, imagine a massive building's burnt down, your job is to find out how it started, if it was suspicious, and that always involves going back to the source. So you've got to get to the point where it began. Now, if if the point where it began has got a pool of petrol under the debris, that dog is a great tool, and I've seen it do it many, many times. So it helps the investigators. And the fire dogs in Greater Manchester have caught have led to many, many successful prosecutions and saved lives.

SPEAKER_02 55:09 And um, there's a story of a dog, isn't there, that um sort of went around the world um searching through problems.

SPEAKER_00 55:16 British fire dogs will be sent abroad. Our dog uh Echo went to Haiti and and uh saved lives, or certainly located casualties. I'm not sure how many living casualties it found. Um went there for a few days in the big Haiti earthquake, uh, came back and was awarded a wonderful glass trophy. Amazing. Apparently, Echo would have preferred a new tennis ball, but wasn't asked. None of the firefighters got a trophy there. I don't think the handler they went with they got anything, you know. Uh so that's the story of Echo. We don't have Echo now, we got too old and retired. And and the dogs tend to be shared now between different services because they're an expensive thing to do. And when the dogs retire, they usually go home with a handler, much much like a police dog. But uh, if you'd have said to me we're gonna join the fire service 50 years ago, we're gonna have dogs one day helping you do the job. I wouldn't have believed them, I'd have laughed at them. But having seen them firsthand, what a fantastic tool, you know.

SPEAKER_02 56:07 And and so back back in the day they were kind of onto something without realising they were.

SPEAKER_00 56:11 Without realising they were they just kept the mice down, you know. But uh yeah, amazing. Uh but it's such wonderful stories about the Victorian fire dogs and goats and things like that, you know, and turkeys, I don't know what else they had, you know, all manner of strange things.

SPEAKER_02 56:26 And there's a nice little story that comes along aside this um environment and money box as well here that you've got on display.

SPEAKER_00 56:32 Yeah, one of my favourite objects, to be quite honest. So at this period, a little girl that was born in a fire station in Manchester in 1906 when she was five, um, and this was a typical family living on a station, and dad said, What would you like for your birthday, Alice? And she said, I like my own fire engine, you know. But you couldn't just go down to a toy shop and buy a fire. So Daddy had to make this fire engine over a period of nights uh out of scrap wood and things, legend, and presented Alice with this birthday present, and there it is. That was the kind of engine she would see when she opened the front door. Um that is unbelievably good for kept it all alive and died in the 90s and gave it to us, so that's how much she treasured it. And I I absolutely love that girl.

SPEAKER_02 57:17 You couldn't buy something like that from a toy shop anyway.

SPEAKER_00 57:18 No way, it's amazing, it just tells you so much about what the life of the fire station and the people that were in it, and that the dad would do that, and he found a few old iron wheels off something in the factory or something, made all the ropes and put all the you know, whipping on and everything, and put this engine together and she treasured it.

SPEAKER_02 57:38 That's amazing. Wonderful story, lovely story. And I just want to end we're in a very echoey room here, and this is the fire station tower. It is and it is obviously massive.

SPEAKER_00 57:49 The tower is what identifies a fire station. If you go in a town, you see a tower, you know it's the fire station. Now, the history of the tower, a lot of people are not clear what it's for. They think it's a lookout tower, yep. So they think it's got a clock in it, they think it's um for training. The origin of the fire station tower, and the only job that they had for many, many years, is to hang up canvas hose pipes when it's wet to dry it. It's a drying tower. Now, in later years they found the advantage of a tower was something you could use for practice, you could put ladders up it, you could squirt water at it, don't get it on the hose. And now the modern fire station tower is a far more technical structure that's designed to um use different ladders and rescue techniques. But the traditional fire station tower, such as we have here, is a brick drying tower.

SPEAKER_02 58:42 It's hilarious because there's so much brick and construction work that goes into building it just to dry some.

SPEAKER_00 58:49 This is a particularly unusual tower. Most fire station towers are about 80 feet high because the host pipe is 75 feet long. This tower is 130 feet high, 35 metres, for no good reason other than to make it look really special.

SPEAKER_02 59:03 Yeah, that's a good enough reason.

SPEAKER_00 59:04 They don't even use the top 20 feet. Can you imagine? You know, um, maybe the top 30 feet far too much. Sometimes you've just got to look at it. Rochdale landmark, and it is it has got a protection order on it. Um, one of the reasons they had to move to a new fire station because it was difficult to adapt this building, you know, in the 2000s to modern use.

SPEAKER_02 59:24 And when they were canvas, um, so this is before the modernisation pose. So how far more durable? How important was it to sort of dry them out in this way?

SPEAKER_00 59:33 If you don't dry your canvas hose every time you've used it, you have to wash it, test it, and dry it. It would go rotten because it's it's a it's a man-made, you know, it's a fibre. So um strangely, we spend our we used to spend all our time wetting it, but then you must dry it, else it goes off. Yeah. But that was the only material they could make hose parts. The first hose parts were made of leather, they were invented by the Dutch in the 1700s, and this was replaced by the canvas hose that we're talking about. There was a phase when they lined the inside with rubber to make them more waterproof. That was the the later phase of canvas hose, but nowadays it's all plastic, yeah, and it's not as important to have it bone dry. It doesn't leak. Um, it's tougher, you know. When we had the canvas hose, you had to have large stocks of it because half of it was always half being dried somewhere. Yeah, you know, so you had to have to keep the stocks up on the fire engine, you had to have massive amounts of hose on the station. And did it leak a lot as well during um like the hose. Yeah, the hose. Uh it percolates, so it it seeps out the water. Yeah. Uh that's where the rubber lining came in to stop it doing that. So it would leak. And of course, if you're dragging it over debris and broken glass, it very quickly gets spurred in it and things.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:47 Did you use canvas pipes?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:48 Yeah, we still had canvas when I joined. Oh right. Uh it was rubber line canvas, and there were people, there were lads on the watch whose job was to keep repairing it, stick patches on, like a bicycle tire, and things like that. And there's a technique for putting a patch in the middle on the inside of a 75-foot hose, which sounds impossible, but you could do that with a special machine. Oh, amazing. Feed it through and then vulcanize it and all this stuff. The plastic hose is far tougher and doesn't need the same care.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:17 Um, do they bother hanging them up like this anymore?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:19 Only if it's going for repair. Okay. Uh otherwise, you just they can just wipe it down when it's wet, put it back on the fire engine.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:26 So there is actually no practical use other than for in the modern day for towers like this, other than for training exercises.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:34 They don't build hose towers anymore, they build training towers now.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:37 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:38 There was a period when they kind of do both jobs, you know, the tower would be divided vertically. You'd be hanging hose in one half, squirting water at the other half. But there are techniques you need high height for. Firemen have to be able to work at height, they have to be able to rescue people from high places, they have to be able to fight fires above ground, use all different kinds of ladders for all different jobs. So a tower or any kind of high-rise training facility is still a very important thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:03 Were you ever afraid of heights as a teenager?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:07 No. No. When you were on the training school and you were doing the most ridiculous, dangerous things with ladders, you were more frightened of the instructor who was shouting at you than you were ever of falling. A bit like being in the army. We used to do a thing called hook ladders, which is a 13-foot ladder with a metal hook on the end and climb up the outside of a building with it one floor at a time and keep moving it, sitting on the windowsill. Don't do that anymore. That was the most scary bit of the fire service training the hook ladder. And it was never used on the job. Very dangerous. We have hook ladders, we have pictures of people using hook ladders. Um, I look back now at my age and I would think, how the heck did I ever do that at 18? Yeah. But you do, and they would shout at you if you got it wrong. Something sorry. So um, yeah, but if you can do a hook ladder, you're never frightened of any height or ladder again. And that was the point.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:58 Well, Bob, it has been absolutely fascinating exploring the history of the fire industry. This museum is incredible for anybody who wants to visit. It really is worth coming along to Rochdale to see it. Uh Bob, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much indeed.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:12 Thank you very much. Lovely, my pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:14 If you liked this video, like and subscribe. I'm Ollie. This is what we did before, and I will see you next time.