Fighting Fires: Creating the British Fire Service, 1800–1978 (review)

For fifty years, our knowledge of the British fire service has rested heavily on Geoffrey Blackstone's A History of the British Fire Service (1957), a two-thousand-year history of fire protection from the Romans to the 1950s, with a foreword by Herbert Morrison who, as wartime Home Secretary, took the bold political decision to form the National Fire Service, going against the grain—at least momentarily—of local authority control. Shane Ewen, who has revisited aspects of the past two hundred years of fire service history, now offers a history of the service from the turn of the nineteenth century to the 1970s. The narrative thread of the book is uncomplicated: a story of the nineteenth-century municipalization and professionalization of organized urban firefighting and of the gradual shift from fire insurance companies protecting their customers' property to a national network of fire brigades, publicly funded and locally run. Aided and abetted by the demands of total war, a similar story runs through the next century, though the post-1945 era saw much more turbulence in industrial relations, culminating in the bitter and less-than-successful national strike of 1977 to 1978. For good reasons, the fire services of the largest British cities—London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Glasgow—receive the greatest scrutiny.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the consensus slowly emerged that firefighting should be a public service, not one dependent upon a patchwork of fire insurance companies and voluntary bodies. Urban elites, with their own commercial and industrial property at stake, gradually saw the wisdom of bringing firefighting under municipal authority. Destructive fires pointed the moral. In Edinburgh in 1824 the historic heart of the Old Town was gutted in a fire that raged for three days, killed ten people, and made four hundred homeless, before heavy rainfall doused the flames. The autopsy revealed defective water supplies and the poor coordination of the men and equipment of the municipal, military, and private authorities. The event made it possible for the new fire chief, James Braidwood, to establish principles and practices of firefighting that influenced other towns and cities. One of those principles was the municipalization of fire protection. Each town had to find its own way to this conclusion, but Victorian local government, Ewen insists, was more responsive than historians have tended to suggest.

For the remainder of the Victorian era, municipal governments strove to find the most effective relationship between water, labor, and technology. If advances were made in the provision of water and steam-powered fire engines, economic considerations prolonged the life of the police fire brigades in which policemen acted as firemen when called upon, suggesting that firefighting required neither skill nor training. The reforming impulse was maintained, says Ewen, thanks to senior fire officers who claimed professional credentials and advertised them nationally via annual reports and professional association meetings. Chief fire officers built personal fiefdoms, like Captain Eyre Massey Shaw's in London or Alfred Robert Tozer's in Birmingham. While eager to celebrate the heroic acts of individual firemen, they were far less willing to improve the working life of rank-and-file firemen. The latter were subject to continuous duty, discretionary pensions, and "spit and polish" work around the fire stations (78–79). Little wonder that so many brigades recruited either decommissioned sailors, who were accustomed to hours of confinement and inaction punctuated by intense activity, or artisans who could also maintain equipment and station houses. Any attempts to unionize firemen were ruthlessly suppressed.

In the twentieth century, the main influence was that of war, which was vital in two main regards: by forcing the pace of national coordination of standards within the fire service, and by impelling firemen to act collectively to improve their pay and working conditions. The Second World War was much the more important of the two. Between 1941 and 1947 a National Fire Service came into existence to...