When I was seven, I was sent to a new school, one with many traditions. I was the youngest girl at the school and that meant that at school's bonfire night party I was to light the bonfire with the headgirl. Bonfire night was a big deal when I was growing up. Our local village would have one and everyone would go. People didn't do fireworks at home so much and if they did, they were pretty awful and very short lived compared to the public displays. I still remember eating sausages from the barbeque, seeing friends, sparklers... How it felt to know people throughout the crowd and be all toasty in my scarf, gloves and hat. I think fireworks night has lost something now it is spread over days, even weeks and it is less about communities coming together.
There was always a little danger to it. When you held that sparkler, you didn't want the sparks to fly at you and you couldn't touch anything with the hot end. Once they went out they had to be safely disposed of in a bucket of water or sand until they cooled. Firework safety ads were all over and people did get badly injured. One member of my family spent months in hospital following an accident with a marine flare, which while not actually a firework, definitely made the point of safety in our family.
That beautiful danger is one of the things I always loved. Fire is entrancing... I grew up in a very cold house with an open fire and in winter, if I was not sat by the fire in the evening, I was in bed reading with a hot water bottle. I would sit by the fire, watching the flames. The dog would love to be in front of it too, but she did not like it when the fire spat. I don't have a real fire in my house, we have one of those electric feature ones where you can change the colour of the fake flames at the touch of a button. It's not the same.
Fire was more of a fact of life growing up. More people used fire to heat their homes in some way and I remember seeing chimney fires or thatch roof fires. The worst though was when the barn down the road caught fire. I remember my parents left and my sister and I were supposed to be asleep but we were awake and knew something was up. We were looking out the windows at a sky that had turned red in memory. The most horrid thing about the fire though, the thing that always stayed with me was that they had two collie dogs who slept in the barn and they tried to get them out, but one of the dogs ran back in. I was very young and I knew those dogs.
I know we live in a time of terrorism now, but growing up it was an issue too. The troubles were at their height and you could not go anywhere in London without seeing posters about reporting suspicious items and not leaving your things untended. In school holidays one of us would accompany my Dad in the van when he would deliver things each Friday in London. My sister was with my Dad the day a hotel got bombed and she still remembers the missing walls and computer paper flying in long streamers when they had to drive by.
We grew up with an ear on the news every Friday, which is how I know that the Kings Cross Fire took place on a Friday, in 1988. My Dad was late home that day, London all snarled up with traffic. I think the events of our childhood that fill us with horror stay with us in a really powerful way. I had been in that ticket office, ridden the wooden escalators of the underground. Kings Cross is a rabbit warren of tunnels as several lines connect here. Hundreds were trapped underground and hid in cupboards and toilets or fled along the tracks. This article on the London Fire Brigade Website is very good and includes footage from the night of the fire and of the aftermath.
A match had been thrown and gone under the wooden escalator where there was an accumulation of paint and grease with the grease full of fibrous material like fibre from clothes, litter, tickets etc. Simulations showed the fire burnt horizontally to begin with, contained by the sides of the escalator, until the fire flashed over shooting a jet of flame up in to the ticket office. The mechanism of the fire had never been observed before and was named the trench effect, where conditions are perfect to shoot a jet of fire up an incline. In the ticket office, concrete cracked, tiles were stripped from the walls and plastic dripped from the ceiling as temperatures reached 600 degrees Centigrade.
The fire changed things with wooden escalators being phased out and smoking being banned on the underground. Procedure for British Transport and their communication with the Fire Service was also considerably improved. It's always good when disasters result in improvements to prevent reoccurrence. It's good when we don't forget those lessons and become complacent.
Of the 31 people that died, two stand out. The first was Station Officer Colin Townsley who has helping people evacuate when the flashover occurred. He entered the station without breathing apparatus, against his training. His space at Soho Fire Station remains empty in memory. The second person was Body 115 which was not identified until 2004 as belonging to Alexander Fallon of Falkirk. After losing his wife to cancer, he had drifted into homelessness and had very occasional contact with his family.
Unfortunately, complacency with regards to fire safety still occurs. More recently, the decision to use cladding and insulation in a combination that would not be safe in the event of a fire resulted in tragedy at Grenfell. It has been difficult to read the reports of buck passing and penny pinching. Due to the cladding used, fire was able to spread between the cladding and the building as the insulation burnt upwards. This was the first fire of it's type and as a result, it spread quicker than expected and residents were not given advice to evacuate independently before this became impossible. The fire service worked to evacuate residents with their specialist equipment before this became impossible. 72 people died.
There are still many high rise buildings in the UK with cladding and there have other fires, such as the Cube in Bolton. Even before Grenfell there had been a fire of this type in the Lacrosse Tower in Melbourne. Australian fire services gave different advice however and no one died. They have also been more proactive in dealing with the issue of cladding on buildings. There have also been cladding fires on high rise buildings in Dubai.
The Towering Inferno was a film made in 1974 and remains a classic. There is something so terrifying about the idea of being stuck in a high rise building, with limited ways to escape with the possibility that short cuts in construction may have made the building unsafe in the event of a fire.
The Piper Alpha disaster was worse with 167 deaths resulting from a fire on an oil platform. No evacuation was ordered as the control room was destroyed in the first explosion. Oil was being pumped to Piper Alpha from two other platforms and they continued to do so even though they could see the platform was on fire. Procedural and design changes were made following the disaster.
The fire service in this country is slowly changing as there are fewer fires in general. Many fire stations are now not manned full time. Many staff operate on reserve or volunteer basis. It's a difficult situation as any large fire requires trained personnel and equipment. The Lizard is a pretty isolated area and there fire personnel also act as first responders and support the ambulance service, which is increasingly stretched.
The fire service initially began as independent insurance organisations. People would pay premiums for fire cover and the fire appliances of those companies would only fight fires in buildings they had been paid to protect. Fires would often be left to burn until an appliance belonging to the correct company arrived. The first of these organisations was formed in 1667 following the Great Fire of London in 1666 where two square miles burnt and temperatures reached 1700 degrees Centigrade.
The first municipal fire organisation was formed in Edinburgh in 1824 and from then, other cities slowly established their own organisations. In Liverpool, the fire and police services were combined and the firefighters were known as fire bobbies. This is of particular interest to me because my great great grandfather, Arthur James Barker was a fireman. In 1870 he was a fireman living in Bethnal Green, London but the 1881 census shows he was a fireman foreman living in West Derby and working in Liverpool. By 1891 though, the family was back in Walthamstow, London, with Arthur continuing his career as a fireman.
In reading about early fire fighting, it is clear it was difficult and dangerous. Technology was in it's infancy so bringing water to fires was difficult with limited power and distance. Buildings were often demolished to act as fire breaks. Construction was not as it is now so buildings frequently became unsafe. Fire fighters had the power to conscript passers-by as a workforce to help and this was dangerous for them as well.
The contribution of the fire service during the Blitz is also important. In the first 22 nights of air raids, 10,000 fires were fought. 28,000 additional firefighters were recruited but with able bodied men fighting at the front, those considered too young or old to fight and women joined. Women were recruited as watchers and drivers. Cities across Europe burned during the Second World War. Coventry suffered horrendously and the remains of the cathedral are still a memorial. In Dresden, the Frauenkirche was also bombed and remained as a memorial for 50 years before being restored following the reunification of Germany.
More recently, Notre Dame in Paris burnt due to faulty wiring.
In general, we are much safer from fire now but it still seems that when things go wrong, fire has the potential to be disasterous. So often though, it's our complacency or financial considerations that make situations worse. How many people take the batteries out of a fire alarm because they often burn toast? Fire is scary... I did Fire Warden training in a previous job and this involved having to put out a fire with an extinguisher. It's one thing to do this with a small controlled fire, but the thought of doing it in a real emergency is something else.
I have huge appreciation for all those who continue to protect us from fire. It's not a job I could do. I think it's important we don't forget. It's not pleasant thinking about the awful things that have happened previously. We should never be too comfortable with fire, we should always remember what it's capable of and plan accordingly to keep people safe. It's always important that we learn and improve, particularly as the world around us continues to evolve and change.
If ever you need a reminder just how bad fires can be, I collected some images on pinterest.
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