Watching For And Fighting Fires (25 November 1977)

The firemen’s strike coming immediately after Remembrance Sunday put me in mind of the days when fire-fighters were needed as never before nor since – the days of the last war. The established brigades were heavily reinforced; retained men became full-timers; many thousands of new part-timers were enlisted; and in 1940 or 1941 all were linked in the National Fire Service.

Main cities and towns were an extraordinary sight. Huge static water tanks were positioned here, there and everywhere; and water mains were laid along street gutters and the like, both to replace bomb-damaged underground mains and to reinforce the general water supply.

Fire-fighting was a man’s job, but many women, part-time and unpaid, also had a vital and perilous part to play. They were known as fire watchers, but this was a misnomer, since their job was not to watch fires, but to watch for them. Theirs was largely a night-time service and was carried out on a rota system.

Three or four women would be responsible for a building or group of buildings according to the size of the properties. Often they were employed in those buildings during the day. They usually gathered in a little room set aside for them until an alert was signalled. Then they scurried to the top of the buildings and watched out for fires – particularly for small ones not certain to have been spotted by wardens in the streets below, but which might become big ones if not nipped in the bud. Their job was thus as perilous as anyone’s while high explosives and incendiaries were falling around.

I knew a girl from my home town who throughout the war occupied a top flat off Curzon Street and slept in it every night she was not on roof duty and went to her secretarial work every morning without a hair out of place. She was a friend of my wife’s, and the last we heard of her was that she was retired and living in her own small villa in Spain, no doubt still without a hair out of place.

Tales of bizarre bomb incidents are legion. Nevertheless, I will now tell one of my own.

I was stationed at an army depot on the outskirts of London which before the war had been a new factory estate similar to some in Milton Keynes.

Most small army bases and compounds had firefighting equipment, usually comprising nothing more than a pump driven by a Coventry Climax engine, useable by anybody who happened to be around, all personnel having been drilled with it. But this depot was so large that it had a pukka fire station, superior equipment and special fire fighters to man it.

For a long, long time those men were never in action for real. Then, one beautiful sunny morning, the klaxons warned us that a doodlebug was coming our way and would be overhead in seconds. This was the signal for all of us to dive – unless we happened to be at the top of a ladder, of course. One jiffy later a stunning bang, clouds of dust, shattering windows and a rain of debris on the roof told us that the depot had at last been hit.

The doodlebug had destroyed an ex-factory full of radar equipment and the remains were now burning furiously. But where were the firemen with their equipment? We didn’t have far to look. The fire station was right opposite the burning building and had been wrecked by the same blast!

Luckily, the local fire brigade had been chasing the doodlebug up the main road that ran almost beside the depot and so arrived on the scene without actually having been called.

That might be the end of my tale, but having got so far with it, I will now complete it.

Those of us who always had some kind of authority to leave our jobs for a few minutes and had gone to see the damage now went back. But I had been back no more than a minute when our small section was breathlessly called out by a runner. The news was that the telephone system was out of action, although the exchange was at the far end of the depot from the bomb site; that the fire chief must have a link with the outside world pronto; and that we were the boys who were supposed to know about everything besides the actual job we were specifically in the depot to do.

Well, we certainly had a few experts on this and that among us, and luckily they included two former post office engineers. Incidentally, almost from the start there had been ambulances milling around and I do not know how they heard of the incident. They were certainly needed, for besides 14 troops and ATS being killed outright, over 30 were taken to hospital injured, including some civilians who also worked in the depot.

Anyway, our post office men got on the job at the exchange and in no time at all we had run a field telephone from there to the scene – the only time I remember when we got anything without indenting for it and in triplicate.

I had just made sure we were “through” and was passing the handset to the fire chief when one of his men, who had been groping about in some charred and sodden debris only a few yards away, held up a soggy mass of human hair, probably attached to a scalp. He raised his eyebrows to the chief. The chief nodded and the man then placed the object in a small canvas bag apparently kept for such a purpose.

I thought little about this at the time. The main point was that the fire chief was now connected with the outer world, as he wished – and having been a reporter I had seen some grizzly objects in my time, quite apart from war.

But afterwards I wondered whether that might be all that remained of somebody’s wife, daughter, or girlfriend. And now I wonder whether her name is on a town or village war memorial somewhere. I can well understand young people being apathetic about remembrance. After all, they have nothing like it to remember. But the rest of us can never forget that watershed in our lives.