Blazes and Brigades: The Story of the Fire Service Timeshift

The risk of fire is ever present.

Its consequences can be devastating.

But help has long been just a phone call away.

The story of the British Fire Service is one of 200 years on the front line.

Firefighters have come to our rescue in Britain's darkest hours.

I am the last surviving fireman of the Sheffield Blitz.

They have continually strived to find more effective ways

of fighting the flames.

Just imagine the men who'd driven through the war

being given one of these in 1949.

The speed of it, the power, the acceleration.

And they've submitted themselves to the most demanding discipline and training.

The hook ladder.

Perfectly safe

as long as you remembered to lean back.

But modernisation has brought changes.

Is this really the sort of job for a girl?

Well, I don't know until I've tried it.

Even conflict.

Scab! Scab! Scab!

But, above all, the story of the Fire Service is of how sacrifice

and heroism...

If it wasn't for your father's bravery,

I wouldn't be standing here today talking to you.

..have forged a great British institution.

It's a breezy October day in London.

A small fire has just broken out in a building close to the Thames.

A fire which will soon become an inferno,

but this isn't 1666

and a flare-up in a baker's shop -

it's 1834 and the Houses of Parliament.

The fire at Westminster was rather unbelievably caused by hundreds of

these. This is a tally stick, a form of receipt for government income.

A wooden stick with notches on, showing the amount of money

that had been paid into the Exchequer

and at dawn, on the 16th of October,

two labourers started to burn

huge cartloads full of these sticks in the underfloor heating furnaces

of the House of Lords.

That, over the course of the day, caused a chimney fire and eventually

at half past six in the evening

a huge fireball burst out of the front of the House of Lords...

..and lit up the London skyline.

Soon after, Superintendent James Braidwood of the newly formed

London Fire Engine Establishment arrived on the scene.

A 34-year-old Scotsman, Braidwood was the pioneer of modern firefighting,

recently headhunted from Edinburgh,

where he'd set up the world's first municipal fire service.

Braidwood was an innovator.

His favourite trick was to drill his men in the middle of the night...

..so that they could, by touch alone,

find and handle their equipment.

But no sooner had Braidwood arrived at Westminster

than the roof of the House of Lords came crashing down...

..with such a deafening roar that onlookers thought

Guy Fawkes had returned.

Braidwood now faced an unprecedented challenge.

He needed a plan of action.

It became clear to James Braidwood

that everything at this end of the palace was going to perish.

So he drew an imaginary line across the palace from the river...

..and decided that everything north of it,

and especially Westminster Hall, this great window you can see here,

was where he was going to concentrate his efforts and those of his firefighters.

And at nine o'clock the Chancellor of the Exchequer cried out,

"Damn the House of Commons, let it blaze away,

"but save, oh, save the hall!"

Beneath its magnificent 14th-century hammer beam roof,

Westminster Hall had played host to coronation banquets,

the marriage feasts of Henry VIII and the trial of King Charles I.

In his bid to save the hall,

Braidwood followed a principle of his own devising -

not to douse a blaze from a distance,

but to venture into the heart of a building

and attack the fire at its seat.

And to do this, Braidwood had mustered 66 firemen

and 14 manual fire pumps.

This is a wooden manual fire engine pump.

It's a typical Newsham manual engine of...

There were various sizes. They were all made small enough

to fit through the door of a house,

or a church, or something like that.

It's operated by a team of people on either side.

You could have maybe 12 on this one,

and people would pump this up and down and that operates the pump

and works the water.

And other people standing in the middle operating these treadles,

which gives extra power to the pump and then the other person

would use this branch pipe made of copper and

direct this straight onto the fire.

Braidwood positioned two of his fire pumps inside the hall

and two outside in New Palace Yard,

where the water supply was located.

Because Westminster Hall is so gigantic,

it wasn't possible for a single engine to get its hose

from the outside water supply

right down to the far end where the fire was raging

behind the great south window.

So the fire engines joined up their hoses in a relay to pump the water

right down to where the firefighters were on the ledge of the window

facing the flames coming towards them.

The Westminster fire was now the biggest conflagration Londoners had seen since 1666.

Hundreds of thousands turned out to watch,

applauding each large burst of flame.

Among the spectators were two of the most famous artists of the day.

While John Constable recorded the unfolding drama close

to Westminster Hall, in a rented boat down river,

Joseph Turner hurriedly made sketches for two of his masterpieces.

Braidwood finally brought the fire under control just before dawn.

Both houses of Parliament had been lost,

but Westminster Hall was saved and no deaths were reported.

Braidwood was the hero of the hour

and yet, remarkably, he had not been duty-bound to come to the rescue.

Parliament was uninsured and Braidwood could have been

called away at any time to deal with a fire at an insured property.

The Westminster blaze highlighted the precarious state of fire protection at the time.

London had no public fire service as such,

but instead, a number of private fire brigade offices,

set up by insurance companies following the Great Fire of London.

Each of these fire offices would have their own fire engines,

some manual fire pumps

and a small number of paid firefighters

who would turn out to fires in properties that were insured

in the name of that company.

Now, they could tell if the property was insured in their name

because you would have a fire mark

put up on the front of the property in a fairly prominent position.

Braidwood's London Fire Engine Establishment comprised ten of these

private brigades, but in the years following the Westminster fire,

increasing pressure from a rising number of call-outs spurred

the insurance companies to demand a publicly funded fire service.

The government ignored their appeals

until another great blaze made everyone take notice.

On the 22nd of June 1861,

an urgent report came in regarding one of the huge warehouses on

Tooley Street by the Thames, just a mile from Braidwood's station.

Packed with combustible goods, these were high-risk buildings.

Braidwood himself had recommended the use of party walls and

iron doors to act as fire breaks -

recommendations that were too often overlooked, or even ignored,

as he would learn to his cost.

As Braidwood came over London Bridge

he'll have noticed two things which would concern him considerably.

First of all, the tide was receding rapidly and therefore his main water

supply was dwindling by the minute.

Secondly, he would have been concerned that

the fire doors had been left open.

By 6pm, the waterfront was incandescent.

London Bridge had become impassable

as around 30,000 spectators massed in awe of the blaze,

but suddenly, explosions were heard.

Amongst the contents of the warehouses were 500 tonnes of saltpetre,

one of the main ingredients of gunpowder.

Braidwood walked from Tooley Street down a narrow alley

towards some of his men, who were working two hose lines from the floating engines on the river.

A section of the warehouse wall,

measuring about 80 feet long by about 40 feet high,

its integrity destroyed by the heat of the fire,

was starting to bulge outwards.

Then the wall started to collapse and Braidwood ran,

but was then seen to pause,

as if making sure that his men were all safe.

The wall fell, he was engulfed in tonnes of brickwork and rubble

and died instantly at the post of duty.

News of Braidwood's death reached far and wide.

"It made one very sad," noted Queen Victoria in her diary.

His funeral a week later brought central London to a standstill.

Church bells throughout the city told a funeral peal

as the cortege, which stretched for a mile and a half,

made its way solemnly to Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington.

This grave, now rarely visited, and these words, rarely read,

provide a memorial to a brave, unassuming man.

James Braidwood, the founding father of the modern British Fire Service.

Following Braidwood's death,

the insurance companies renewed their pressure on the government

to create a public fire service

by threatening to close down their operations.

They said, "You can have our equipment, we'll hand it to you

"willingly, but we've had enough of this."

And the government took five years to consider,

but it did result in the formation of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in 1866.

Employing 129 firemen at 41 stations across the capital,

this body was the forerunner of the London Fire Brigade.

With its creation came a change of emphasis.

Firefighting went from being a service duty-bound to protect property

to one now charged with protecting life.

This chimed with the values of discipline,

obedience and patience that James Braidwood had sought to instil

in his men, as well as his own sacrificial example.

The fireman had become a symbol of Victorian heroism.

There was a flowering of interest from print culture

and popular authors like RM Ballantyne started writing novels

such as this one, Fighting The Flames, published in 1867.

This is a tale of the London Fire Brigade

that takes the death of James Braidwood as one of its central stories and

builds a broader narrative about

the firefighter as an urban working-class hero.

Now it was the firemen, rather than the fires they fought, which became

the subject for artists.

The Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais painted The Rescue

after witnessing the death of a fireman in action.

Charles Vigor's 1890 painting Saved was another celebrated depiction.

Firemen may not have been drawn from the upper orders,

but they embodied a certain ideal.

These paintings depict the mid to late Victorian attitudes towards

masculinity and the idea that

in order to be a real man,

one has to protect those who are dependents to them.

In this case, women and children.

As the cult of the heroic fireman grew,

fuelled by these paintings and thrilling novels, so too

did the merchandising possibilities for fire ephemera,

such as toy fire engines

and a new domestic product that began to fly off the shelves.

This is a glass fire extinguisher grenade of the quart size.

Its function was to be thrown, as the name suggests - grenade -

by hand into a fire with the intention of extinguishing it.

The fact that they are quite colourful and pretty to look at

was a sop towards the females of the family.

If it could match the decor of the family home,

it was far more likely to have been purchased than if it was a plain,

ugly bottle. But these fire grenades were actually a confidence trick.

They contained nothing more than concentrated salt water.

So it was a pretty gullible public that took to these things.

If domestic fire safety equipment left much to be desired,

professional equipment was also highly variable.

At the turn of the 20th century there were 1,600 local fire brigades

in Britain, but firefighting apparatus was not standardised across the country.

Many provincial brigades operated with very basic equipment.

One of the first British films ever made demonstrates this problem.

Fire!, directed in 1901 by James Williamson,

dramatises the work of his local fire station in Hove.

It's a telling record of just how slow and cumbersome

the call-out to a fire still was.

But the film also closely documents the drilled routine

of a house fire rescue.

There's the fireman's lift...

..a wheeled escape ladder...

..and the drop into a safety net.

What the Hove firemen really wanted and needed

were the steam fire engines regularly deployed in major cities.

The main feature of the steam fire engine is this boiler containing

cold water which is heated by a firebox,

coal-fired fire in the firebox underneath.

This was lit as the thing turned out to a fire.

So they'd be hurtling down the street, producing steam,

six men clinging to it and by the time it reached the scene,

hopefully there'd be enough steam pressure to operate the pump.

We've got a steam whistle, like a train.

We've got a damper to help get steam up quicker.

We've got relief valves, we've got oilers.

The steam engine really became the main fire engine

right into the 20th century,

until the motor was invented and gradually pushed it out.

In 1903 the Merryweather Company built the first petrol engine fire appliance

and supplied it to Tottenham Fire Brigade in North London.

By the outbreak of World War I, two other manufacturers,

Dennis and Leyland, had also entered the market.

Response times radically improved,

but as road speeds increased, the safety of the firemen themselves,

often kitting up as they clung onto the sides, became a serious issue.

It wasn't until 1933, when Dennis introduced its New World model,

that fire crews were seated inside for the very first time.

-ARCHIVE:

-The last word today is an engine with a totally enclosed streamlined body,

designed by Major Morris, chief officer of the London Fire Brigade,

and the LCC are justly proud of it.

The storage space for the equipment is considerably greater

than the older type and twice as much hose can be carried.

A powerful turbine pump is capable of delivering 800 gallons of water a minute.

But as Europe slid ever closer to war during the 1930s,

it wasn't just a question of having the right equipment,

but of having the right number of fireman.

It was the Spanish Civil War, really, and the bombing of Guernica

that brought home to the government

the inevitability of aerial attacks in any future conflict.

So it was from that point onwards, really, that the government started

to prepare the Fire Service for a wartime footing.

To boost the number of available fireman,

in 1938 the government created the voluntary-based Auxiliary Fire Service, or AFS.

-ARCHIVE:

-The first recruits were sent out with the job of bringing in

more volunteers to swell the ranks of the new Auxiliary Fire Service.

Women made up a third of their number,

employed as fire watchers and drivers,

and to help manage the communications network.

Initially when these new recruits were imposed upon

a professional fire brigade, they viewed them as amateurs.

The first bombing raid changed that.

Fire! Fire!

Between September 1940 and May 1941

the German Luftwaffe subjected Britain to a sustained blitz,

dropping incendiary bombs designed to spread fire rapidly

through key cities.

London was to endure 71 major bombing raids,

but it was by no means alone.

Across two nights, the 12th and 15th of December 1940,

Sheffield suffered its own blitz, code-named Schmelztiegel,

meaning Crucible.

Now aged 99,

Doug Lightning was a professional fireman

who fought the ensuing blazes.

I am the last surviving fireman

of the Sheffield Blitz.

In the first night of the Blitz, I was sat finishing my meal off

as usual, ignoring everything, and I realised that

the bangs that were going off were not only naval guns,

they were bombs.

Now the roof on the old Town Hall in Sheffield was on fire.

The German incendiary bombs were very efficient...

..and the inspector came out and said, "Lightning," he said,

"I'm glad you're here. I want you. I want you up that ladder."

I was the only professional full-time man, so I went up,

took a line of hose and straddled myself on the top

and took my life in my hands.

Straight away, I managed to get water onto this roof

and I put the fire out.

It turned out that Doug's actions had saved more than just the hall.

Then suddenly, out of the building the Chief Constable came

and he took me down beneath the old Town Hall.

Nobody knew this was there, by the way.

There was a special room there, built in concrete,

and it was the telephone centre for South Yorkshire Emergency Services.

And he said to these people,

"This fireman has put the fire out, so you're quite safe now."

And I know they all cheered and they brought me a cup of tea.

They did. You remember these daft things, don't you?

But saving the old Town Hall was only the beginning of what would be

a very traumatic night.

A bomb had dropped in Queen Street

and these out-of-town fireman that I took charge of,

they come running to me and they said,

"There's a fireman and he's in a doorway up there."

I said, "I'll go and have a look at him," but

there wasn't much to say, really, because the shrapnel had

just chopped him into pieces, more or less.

And, er...

That was very sad, that was,

because afterwards you think a lot about that kind of thing.

In all, Doug would lose seven of his colleagues that night

and by the end of Sheffield's Blitz,

the bombing had claimed nearly 700 lives

and destroyed large tracts of the city.

It's difficult to put it all in proportion, but

I did realise afterwards, and I've realised since, there were times

when I was really scared.

On the 29th of December 1940, just two weeks after Sheffield's Blitz,

the capital took another heavy hit,

dubbed the second Great Fire of London.

The defining image of that raid remains this photograph of

St Paul's Cathedral emerging unscathed from the firestorm.

But that night and many others were also captured by a resourceful group

of artists working as Auxiliary Fire Service volunteers.

Just as the late Victorians had promoted the image of the heroic

firefighter, this fireman-artist committee depicted them as symbols

of resilience and courage.

The great thing about these paintings were that they were documentary.

They were realistic paintings of actual situations

experienced by that artist.

These three paintings referred to a particular night,

the 29th of December 1940,

when St Paul's was in the greatest jeopardy of being destroyed by fire.

This first one by Paul Lucien Dessau,

the impression of movement and action is unmistakable

as firemen strove to move a trailer pump into position

over the rubble caused by the collapsing buildings.

This is Fore Street in the city,

and in the background you can see St Paul's surrounded by flame.

The second, Leslie Carr.

Carr was renowned for detail in paintings.

The technical details with this trailer pump with its gauges and its

valves, etc, gives a very close representation of precisely

the scene at the time.

The third, by Auxiliary Fireman Haybrook,

entitled View of The City from The West End, shows precisely

the conditions on that fateful night.

Firefighters tackling incendiary bombs on the roofs of buildings.

A fireman at the head of a turntable ladder projecting a jet of water

with St Paul's above.

The particular significance of these three paintings is that they formed

part of a much larger display of paintings taken to America,

along with the artists, on what was essentially a propaganda tour,

bringing to the attention of the American public just what London

was suffering during the Blitz.

America would enter the war in December 1941.

By then, more than 300 firemen and women,

those "heroes with grimy faces" as Churchill called them,

had perished in the Blitz.

For the remainder of the war,

Britain's Fire Services were run as a single national operation.

After the war, the government returned them to local authority control,

but the 1947 Fire Services Act brought in some important changes.

It introduced the principle of national inspection

to make sure that standards of firefighting were uniform across the whole country.

It also introduced national conditions of service,

so a national rate of pay,

a guaranteed pension and a fixed working week.

BELLS RING

One of the main benefits to come from the 1947 Act

was the introduction of better kit

and the most prized of all was the Dennis F7 Pump Escape fire engine.

At the Greater Manchester Fire Museum,

curator Bob Bonner is being joined by Barry Green

to take a spin in this shining symbol of post-war modernisation.

BELL RINGS

I just imagine the men who'd driven through the war in all those old

relics being given one of these in 1949.

-Goodness gracious.

-What they must've thought.

-They must've thought they'd landed.

-They'd arrived.

It would feel like luxury,

and the speed of it compared to the old vehicle,

the power, the acceleration.

Fitted with a 5.7 litre Rolls-Royce engine, the Dennis F7 could hit

a top speed of 60mph.

It came complete with breathing apparatus,

a 50-foot wheeled escape ladder

and a pumping capacity of up to 1,000 gallons per minute.

The F7 became the workhorse of the British Fire Service,

remaining in use for the next 20 years.

One of the first fire engines I rode was one of these.

Do you remember that trick where we used to follow the previous fire

engine by looking for the water on the road?

-Aye. They don't do that now, do they?

-Well, I don't know.

They don't seem to leak like they used to do.

No, I don't think they do, but I found my way to many a fire

-by following the water trail from the previous engine.

-Absolutely.

But the sounds and the smells of this and the comfort, or the discomfort,

are all bringing it all back to me, I must say.

-This is the classic Dennis, though, isn't it?

-Yeah.

This was the state of the art

and just after the Second World War, wasn't it? The Dennis F7.

But for all this modern firefighting equipment,

the 1947 Fire Services Act

also made provision for crews to be deployed to non-fire related emergencies.

On the 31st of January 1953,

a violent storm hit the east coast of England.

It created a tidal surge which would force 30,000 people to flee their

homes and result in more than 300 deaths.

Responding to the disaster,

fire brigades like the one at Great Yarmouth

had to rely on sheer brute strength,

stamina and individual heroism.

My father Fred Sadd was a big strong man.

He was well over six feet

and he weighed nearly 18 stone.

His hands were huge.

Do you remember the old leather footballs?

He could pick one up with his hand that way.

The brutal conditions on that night in January 1953 would test leading

fireman Fred Sadd to the limit.

With his three-man crew,

Fred had rushed to a reported fire at prefab bungalows

in the coastal village of Gorleston,

only to be met with an entire street of residents

in grave danger of drowning.

Ordering back his men, who were all much shorter than him,

Fred ventured out alone into the icy black floodwater.

It must've been terrifying to be out in a storm

and sort of up to your neck in sea water as well.

Swimming through the debris from home to home,

pulling an old boat behind him,

Fred ferried men, women and infants

to the safety of a high embankment before collapsing with exhaustion.

He hardly gave himself time to recover before wading back out,

returning time and time again with more survivors clinging to his back.

That night, Fred Sadd rescued 27 people.

We were amazed at what he'd done

because he didn't tell us what he'd done

and we learned more from reading the newspapers than we did from him personally.

Now, 64 years to the day since that fateful night,

Brian is returning to Gorleston to meet for the very first time

one of the 27 people rescued by his father.

Hello, Tony. How are you getting on?

-Hello, Brian. Pleased to meet you.

-And you.

The reason your father came to save us,

here was a six-foot wave.

-Six-foot wave.

-Really?

So we forced the door closed and we got wet feet and we ran upstairs and

we hung out the window. So the Fire Brigade come and that's when

your father turned up, stuck himself into the water

and I was the first one. I grabbed my arms round his neck.

Really held on tight, I did, yeah.

I really did. He saved my life.

-I'm really pleased to meet you now.

-Pleased to meet you.

But at the time, ten years old, you don't realise that the people,

how good they are to save you.

I was up there in that bedroom and I prayed to God that someone would

come and save us and he turned up and that's the truth, that is.

-Really?

-Really the truth, yes.

-Yes.

The people next door were really big people and

-he carried them out as well.

-Really?

-Yes, yeah.

-Oh, right.

I think there were six people he saved in there,

-or seven people.

-Really?

-Yeah.

And he went one by one and brought them out on his piggyback,

on his piggyback in the water.

-The water was up to his chest.

-That must've been so cold.

-Yeah, freezing. It was absolutely freezing.

-I can't imagine.

-Tony, I've brought something to show you.

-You have?

Oh, yes.

He's a smart man in his uniform.

Never seen him, never seen him.

He just bought me out, dropped me down and went back in again.

-There we go.

-It's even got my name on there, look.

-That's it.

-Yeah. Wow!

Yeah, this is his work sheet from the night of the floods.

-Yes?

-Yes.

Very good of him to do what he done, though.

-Yes, that's right.

-If it wasn't for your father's bravery that night,

I wouldn't be standing here today talking to you.

To his surprise, Fred Sadd became a post-war equivalent of

the heroic fireman in Victorian popular culture,

as he was put on a par with Dan Dare

in the pages of Britain's leading comic for boys.

This was a copy of the comic Eagle, which contained a story

about my dad.

Well, when we saw it, we were quite pleased and quite proud in a way.

It's called Only The Brave

and we thought it was done quite nicely, really.

A picture of him carrying people from the floods.

Him swimming away.

And collapsing for a while afterwards.

And then going back and rescuing one or two more.

"You're the bravest man I know, Fred Sadd."

"He ought to get the George Medal."

"And sure enough, two months later, he did."

He was very excited to learn that he'd won the George Medal.

Absolutely. And absolutely delighted, really.

Didn't show it, of course, but I knew he was.

The heroism of firemen like Fred Sadd was an inspiration

to a whole generation of children.

I think the late 1950s and 1960s

was a golden age for the Fire Service

because it was a respectable

career within which members of the working classes aspired to join.

People like Bob Bonner, who signed up in 1966.

I suppose like every boy I was absolutely fascinated

by fire engines and firemen,

but even more so because of my dad's connections as a wartime fireman

and his enthusiasm that really bubbled over.

And when it came to the possibility of it being a career,

I started to realise that might be something for me

and there was a cadet scheme for 16-year-old boys,

which I was very lucky to be recruited into.

The Fire Service of the 1960s owed much to the generation of firemen

who had come through the war.

Discipline, regimentation and obedience were the order of the day,

as Ron Long found when he joined up in 1963.

Training on stations involved a regime of drills.

And this is one of the things that Braidwood had first introduced to

the Fire Service - a group of men

working in concert with each other,

each of them knowing what his function was

and performing it.

Sir.

As equally important, if not more so, was the physical capabilities

that you had to demonstrate.

A strength test.

'You have to wind the weights to the top in 30 seconds.'

A lot of hose work.

Firemen's lift and carry involved picking a person up,

getting him over your shoulders

and covering 100 yards in less than a minute.

They were easy tests for a young man who'd spent his life running around,

up and down the mountains of South Wales.

But recruits eager to get their hands on the latest appliances

sometimes faced disappointment.

Now, this Dennis 1940, strangely enough, has personal memories for me

because I actually trained on this fire engine as a recruit.

It had a long, long life and long after it should've stopped going to

fires, it was kept on for recruits to practise on.

The ladder was taken off and on and off and on all afternoon.

Some days we had to push it out of the garage

into the centre of the yard

and then run around drilling all afternoon and push it back

at the end of the night. But, yes,

I know hundreds of firemen who see this for the first time and say,

"Wow, I remember that. Trained on that."

Part of that training, not only using ladders in the conventional

sense of a ladder you'd prop up against a building,

but of course the hook ladder.

It was a ladder that was four metres long.

You take a ladder from a companion below, hoist it above,

stick it through a window, and by that method,

you could progress up the outside of a building.

Looked hazardous - perfectly safe,

as long as you remembered to lean back.

Leaning back stabilised that ladder and made sure it didn't move.

More rigorous training and the introduction of new equipment were

transforming the service, but these changes couldn't come fast enough.

During the 1960s the number of house fire deaths in Britain rose steadily

from around 400 to more than 700 per year.

And a series of high-profile incidents raised serious questions

about the public's awareness of fire safety

and Britain's approach to fire prevention.

In May 1961,

a fire broke out at a nightclub in Bolton called The Top Storey.

There were no fire extinguishers on the premises and the only means of

escape were windows eight floors up.

19 people perished.

Fire brigades were subsequently granted new powers

to inspect clubs and issue licences.

We have a thing in this country called stable door legislation

whereby it takes a disaster, or a tragedy,

to focus the authorities' minds on bringing in safety measures.

It needs the high-profile stuff to shake people up.

It's the way it seems to work.

On Boxing Day 1969,

11 people died at The Rose and Crown Hotel in Saffron Walden

in a fire thought to have been caused by an electrical fault.

People hanging out shouting,

there was smoke pouring out of all the windows.

Black smoke, you couldn't see them properly.

Just looking up and The Rose and Crown was just on fire, you know?

Flames shooting up everywhere.

The fire at The Rose and Crown

was the worst hotel blaze in modern British history.

It led directly to the Fire Precautions Act of 1971,

which required public premises sleeping more than six people

to be issued with a fire certificate.

-ARCHIVE NARRATOR:

-Mary lived here. Mary was born during the war...

This new raft of fire safety legislation was reinforced

by harrowing public information films.

She was going to be married in the summer.

Last night...

Mary went to bed and left the fire unguarded

and she died in the blaze that followed.

SIRENS

Tonight, before you go to bed, fire guard your home.

Despite increasing prevention and precaution,

1976 saw a major crisis for which neither the public

nor the Fire Service were prepared - another natural disaster.

They're now trying to throw a human cordon around the houses here,

but the situation is still by no means under control.

The summer of '76 was the hottest since records began.

Coupled with a severe drought,

this raised the risk of fire to an all-time high,

with temperatures pushing 100 degrees

and parts of southern England going without rain for 45 days.

Fire brigades were under extreme pressure

and appealed for volunteers.

But a station in East Sussex was taken aback by one person

who came offering their help.

I knocked on the door and a firefighter,

a fireman opened the door and I said,

"Oh, I've come to join the Fire Service."

I could hear in the background this phone call.

"What?!"

Despite this initial surprise,

Mary Joy Langdon was quickly enlisted as Britain's first female

firefighter and sent out to battle the blazes.

We didn't beat them out, as I had in my head that we would.

We used a hose.

It was actually quite scary because I thought,

"Gosh, it's never going to rain again."

But regardless of the perilous state of the country,

the press seemed more interested in the prospect of a fire girl.

I know the age of sex equality is with us now,

but is this really the sort of job for a girl?

Well, I don't know until I've tried it.

They've accepted me, so perhaps they think it is.

There were a lot of reporters there

and there were cameramen there.

I mean, it was all a bit overwhelming for me.

You know, my parents say, "It's coming on the television now"

and I'd run out the room.

Will they be making any concessions for your sex?

Will you be doing all the jobs, or will there be some that you don't do?

Well, as far as I know, there's no concessions whatsoever.

You know, I'm just one of them.

In the Fire Service, you work as a team,

so there cannot be a weak link.

You have to be able to trust every firefighter with your own life.

So I...I feel that

I was accepted

on those lines because I think if they didn't think I was up to it,

the crew at local level wouldn't have wanted to have worked with me.

Mary Joy Langdon's acceptance into the ranks,

and the women who followed her,

began to change what had always been a bastion of male camaraderie.

Firemen would soon be known as firefighters,

but this gesture of modernisation belied a crisis that was brewing in the service.

Ten to nine this morning and out come the posters

as the men of Lambeth Fire Headquarters prepare to march out.

Firefighter pay had drifted away from the police.

It had also started to drift away from the average pay of a skilled

working-class industrial worker.

After many years of frustration, the Fire Brigades' Union

feels that the strike is its last resort.

Scab!

Throughout 1977, there was growing dissatisfaction

with the Labour government's proposals to reduce firemen's wages

to three quarters of the average pay.

CROWD CHANTS

The Fire Brigades' Union demanded a 30% pay rise,

as well as a 40-hour working week.

But with no resolution in sight, firemen downed their hoses.

The first-ever national firefighter strike began

on the 14th November 1977 and continued through the harsh winter.

But a minority refused to take part,

creating divisions in once tightly knit teams.

Do you realise no-one will work with you after this is over?

So you'll be looking for a job.

According to this, this is not the official picket line.

It is an official picket line.

There were certain people, including myself, that weren't for the strike,

that believed that we were in an emergency service

and our duty was to respond to emergency calls.

Peaceful picket line.

I'll have to see what's going on because I don't know.

I remember having to go up to the station on a few occasions

where there was a picket with firefighters there

and then taking a fire appliance out.

They'd be standing there with the placards

and as you went into the station they would be shouting abuse at you.

Scab! Scab! Scab!

More than 20,000 troops were brought in as emergency cover,

with a fleet of 850 former Auxiliary Fire Service engines,

the famous Green Goddesses.

There was ardent opposition in the media,

with some newspapers warning firemen

that any shred of public sympathy

would soon go up in smoke.

I was a station officer at the time, so I came out with my men,

if you like. I worked at a fire station over in Bolton

and the thing that surprised me was that the public support was there

all the time and people were signing petitions.

We were out over Christmas,

people were giving us turkey and stuff like that.

Firemen were obviously on picket duties outside fire stations.

Very uncharacteristic, very uncomfortable place to be,

but the public seemed to stay behind us all the way.

Every single fireman that you see here,

every fireman on this station is stood outside here now.

That's how solid we are in this action we're taking. 100%.

The strike was settled early in 1978.

In all, it had lasted nine weeks.

It was quite a bad time, really, but it did lead as a result of that

to a very successful pay and hours package,

which meant industrial stability for a long time in the Fire Service.

The 1980s saw a new generation of firefighters embracing

the biggest advances in equipment since the post-war years.

Hook ladders and wheeled escapes were phased out.

In their place, trainees got to grips with new technology,

such as thermal imaging cameras and hydraulic cutters,

nicknamed the Jaws of Life.

As well as new kit came a more scientific approach to training.

For some recruits it felt like going back to school.

I was quite surprised, thinking that I was going to be spending

most of my time out on the training yard training

and then all the classroom stuff started, which I had no idea about,

but you began to do chemistry, which I'd done at school.

Fire science, hydraulics, which is about moving bodies of water about.

You had to learn about all of the equipment,

and not only how to use the equipment, how the equipment was made. So I was quite surprised.

ALARM BEEPS

The public were also becoming more fire-aware

as new preventative measures were ushered in.

Fire experts today launched a campaign aimed at cutting down

on fire risks in the home.

They're urging householders to install smoke detectors.

The main drivers really were the furniture regulations which came in,

and of course the increase in domestic smoke alarms.

And those two factors together had brought domestic fires right down

and thankfully with them casualties.

But while call-outs to homes declined,

the mid-'80s were marked by a series of shocking, large-scale incidents.

It's now well over 24 hours

since the worst tragedy in English football.

In May 1985,

56 fans died when the main stand at Bradford City Football Club

was consumed by fire.

Just three months later,

55 people perished when a British Airtours passenger plane caught fire

on the runway at Manchester Airport.

And in November 1987 came a disaster which would have a lasting effect

on the operation of the Fire Service itself.

On the surface the fire would've been a minor affair,

but below ground, in the labyrinth of tunnels and shafts

where five of London's Underground railway routes coincide,

a disaster was being kindled.

Beneath the wooden Piccadilly line escalator at King's Cross station

lay half a tonne of waste.

When ignited, possibly by a discarded match,

it took less than 20 minutes to turn the Underground ticket hall into

a 600-degree inferno.

Firefighters arriving on the scene found the water from their hoses

turning to steam before it even reached the flames,

and the very nature of the location

presented an almost insurmountable challenge.

Horrendous. One of the worst fires I've been to for many years.

Any fire underground is horrendous to a firefighter.

There is no ventilation, we need to take our own lighting down there,

we're working in very hot, difficult conditions.

We have to do everything with breathing apparatus on.

People who had not moved fast enough were felled as the hot air hit their

lungs and firemen began to emerge with their bodies.

That night, 31 people lost their lives,

including one of the first firemen on the scene,

Station Officer Colin Townsley,

who was found close to the body of a woman he had stopped to help.

The reality of what firefighting was came home that night.

The week after the King's Cross fire

we came in off duty for the funeral of Colin Townsley.

Firefighters' funerals are always well attended by other firefighters,

but this had been a real big media event and probably the biggest funeral

that London Fire Brigade had seen since Braidwood in 1861.

Following the King's Cross tragedy,

the equipment issued to firefighters nationwide was overhauled.

When I first joined the job,

we were still wearing the fire kit that people had worn for decades before that.

That gave you no fire protection at all, you know?

I've got scars on my arms from an ember going down my sleeve early on

in my career and as a result of King's Cross,

a programme to update firefighters' equipment was brought forwards.

Firefighters were provided with new fire-resistant coats and leggings,

giving them substantially increased body protection.

What really made the difference is when you've got a big fire, an event

in a fire where you had a massive expansion of fire

where previously the firefighters would have been badly burnt,

they had a lot more thermal protection from that equipment...

..than we had previously, for generations.

In nearly 30 years since King's Cross,

over 50 British firefighters have died on active duty.

However, no subsequent fire on mainland Britain has claimed civilian lives

on such a devastating scale.

Today, there are over 50 regional fire services,

responding to nearly 2,000 call-outs a day.

Increasingly, fewer of these are to actual fires.

Recognising this in 2004,

the Fire Brigade was officially renamed the Fire and Rescue Service.

That word "rescue" that really underlines the work

that the modern professional firefighter does today.

They respond to road traffic accidents.

They respond to floods.

They provide first responses to terrorist attacks,

like the 7/7 bombings.

They save lives to the point that they are often seen

as an humanitarian emergency service by many people today.

My generation of firefighters have been quite privileged

because we're the living link between the way it was

in the old days. It was still really busy,

there were still loads of fires and we've been privileged that we were

the generation who really have turned that Fire Brigade

into the modern Fire and Rescue Service.

150 years after his death,

the pioneering James Braidwood might be bewildered by the range of

services firefighters perform,

and the state-of-the-art equipment they use,

but he would surely still recognise the values that he sought to instil

in his own colleagues.

The thing about the Fire Service,

it's a team job and you feed off each other.

You've got to rise above the emotional aspect of it,

but it's still there, you're not hardened to it,

you're not unfeeling, but you have to be able to be professional about it and being a member of

a team really helped that.

Given the opportunity, I would, you know, definitely do it again.

I have been responsible for saving people's lives...

..which is a big privilege.

SIREN WAILS