The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (49 page)

The buildings collapsed because they were old, but modernity brought its own dangers. As gasworks grew ever bigger to supply more and more households, the perils increased too. In 1865, the meter house of the London Gasworks Company exploded at Nine Elms, in Battersea, killing several and injuring many more, even before two nearby gasometers were engulfed, one of which also exploded, killing another nine people. Newspapers began printing the locations of gasometers and fretting that the Houses of Parliament, or St Paul’s, or other heritage sites, might be at risk. What was surprising was not the explosion, but the general response: there had been numerous gas-related explosions ever since gas arrived and, on the whole, they were thought of as a routine hazard.

Even more common, in the days of lighting with candles, oil and gas, where naked flames were used for heating and cooking, were house fires, a well-loved element of popular street entertainment. Fires in private houses – particularly chimney fires, when the old soot and chimney detritus ignited – accounted for nearly half of all such incidents in the city, with candles causing another 30 per cent. In 1848, one newspaper reported that in London’s 644 fires (a much lower figure than in most years, which averaged around 1,000), 239 members of the public had been killed. However, this apparently did not include the children who had died when their clothes
caught fire – evidently too common an event to warrant counting. Theatres, too, were always at risk, given the gas lighting, the female performers in gauzy dresses moving near stage lights and the crowded conditions. In the quarter-century between 1841 and 1867, nine major theatres burnt down.

Technology having made such conflagrations more rather than less likely, the focus was on controlling them, rather than preventing them. From 1774, each parish vestry was obliged to have ready two engines, leather ‘pipes’ (hoses), and ladders. Initially these engines were not for the most part horse-drawn but were literally manned, pulled by local street boys or ‘by poor decrepit old men from the workhouse’, under the supervision of the parish beadle. Dickens, who all his life hated men in petty authority with all the hatred of a formerly lower-middle-class child harassed by these minor tyrants, contemptuously satirized a parish response to a chimney fire: its engine ‘came up in gallant style – three miles and a half an hour, at least’. Then ‘Bang went the pumps...the beadle perspired profusely; but it was unfortunately discovered, just as they were going to put the fire out, that nobody understood the process by which the engine was filled with water; and that eighteen boys, and a man, had exhausted themselves in pumping for twenty minutes, without producing the slightest effect!’ A quarter of a century later, the parish was no more efficient, their engine responding to a fire at the offices of
All the Year Round
‘like a drivelling Perambulator’. Dickens cheered up when the crowd, discovering that the fire had already been extinguished, ‘Snowballed the Beadle’.

More usefully, and professionally, the city’s insurance companies had their own fire brigades, and the façades of many buildings carried small metal tags to identify the company with which they were insured. This was an incomplete solution, leading to instances when a brigade failed to deal with a burning building because it was not insured with their company, only for the fire to spread to neighbouring ones that were their responsibility. Between the parish and the insurance companies, far too many buildings that could have been salvaged burnt down, and so in 1833 a single London Fire Engine Establishment was established by the ten largest insurance companies. (Another five joined soon after, and by 1846 just two did not belong.)

In its first year the Fire Engine Establishment employed seventy-seven men, with fourteen horse-drawn engines in thirteen stations, all under the superintendence of James Braidwood, aged thirty-three, who had already served as Edinburgh’s Master of Fire Engines for nearly a decade. He divided the city into five districts; by 1846, the most easterly station was at the Ratcliffe Highway, the most westerly by Portman Square, with thirty-five engines controlled by ninety men in dark-grey uniforms trimmed with red and black leather helmets. (The glamour days of uniforms were behind them: the Sun Insurance company firemen had worn blue coats with metal buttons, double-breasted waistcoats, breeches, striped stockings and boots; the Hope Insurance company dressed its men in red short-skirted frock coats and waistcoats, blue breeches and top-boots.) Two years after the devastating Tooley Street fire (see pp.111–121), a Parliamentary Select Committee recommended that a new brigade supersede both the parishes and the insurance companies, to be paid for by taxation as a public good. In 1865, the old Fire Engine Establishment was put under the authority of the Metropolitan Board of Works. By 1869, this Metropolitan Fire Brigade had forty-four stations, three floating engines and 314 men.

As early as 1830, steam engines had been available: a 10-horsepower engine with high-pressure hoses spraying out nearly 170 gallons a minute, to a height of three yards – vastly more than the old manual engines had been able to produce. However, these inefficient predecessors were preferred, partly through innate conservatism, but more so because the general populace could make money from assisting. For seventy-seven – or even 314 – men were not going to extinguish London’s fires all on their own, and volunteers played a major part. When a station was alerted to a major fire, all the men and engines from that district set off immediately, as did two-thirds of the men and engines from the districts on either side and one-third from districts further afield.
¹²¹
Fires were eagerly announced: a notification from a policeman earned him 10s; a member of the public received a smaller sum. At the first cry of fire, ‘away scamper the policemen to the nearest stations of the Fire Brigade, passing the word to other policemen as they run, till all the police force in the neighbourhood are clattering along the pavements...either towards an engine-station...or to pass the word to the policeman whose duty it will be to run to the engine-station next beyond. By this means of passing the word, somebody arrives at the gates of the Chief Office of the Fire Brigade, in Watling Street, and, seizing the handle of the night-bell, pulls away at it with vigour.’ The fireman on duty took the immediate details – location and size – before ringing the ‘singleman’s bell’, which rang in ‘the division where the four unmarried men sleep’, and heading for the stables to start harnessing the horses. By the time the engines were ready, Braidwood, if the fire was sufficient to warrant it, had mounted beside the driver, with the engineer, the foreman and firemen on board behind. Then they were off. If the fire was only a mile or two away, then the horses were set at full gallop, aiming for ten miles an hour, or ‘the best royal mail pace’. If it was further, they could not go flat out, ‘for
fear of breaking down the horses’, tiring them before they reached their destination. In the early part of the century, before gas lighting had become prevalent, men with lit torches ran alongside the horses, calling encouragement to the animals and shouting warnings to everyone else on the street by wild cries of ‘Hi! yi! hi! yi!’
¹²²
After gas lighting became more common, the torches were dispensed with, but two men on board the engine continued to stand by the driver and ‘roar incessantly’ to warn oncoming traffic.

This undated photograph (probably after 1866 from the uniforms) shows Willesden Fire Brigade with two engines and ‘fire-escapes’, extendable wheeled ladders used to rescue people from upper storeys.

As the horses were always at risk of slipping on their mad careen to the fire, the men were also there to help them up if it were possible or cut them out of their traces if not. A problem of a different kind was posed by the number of private streets in the capital, especially in Bloomsbury on the Bedford Estate, and in Mayfair, where the Westminster Estate ruled. These neighbourhoods marked their exclusivity by barriers at the ends of the roads, but they also prevented the entry of fire engines, increasing the danger to these neighbourhoods. Even with the risks to the horses and the detours, by the late 1840s Braidwood expected a response time of twenty-eight minutes for a fire within a half-mile of any station, from first receiving the report of a fire to the water being pumped. (In 2006, the average response time to fires in England was just under seven minutes.)

Metal plaques were affixed to buildings across London: ‘W.M. 16 feet’, for example, indicating the distance to the nearest water mains. As part of their charter, all water companies were obliged to give free access to their pumps in case of fire. Immediately the engine arrived, crowds collected and volunteers stepped forward to help hook up the pipes and especially to man the pumps, six or eight men per pump handle. (The two floating river engines required 100 men each.) The work was exhausting: every five minutes a fresh relay of pumpers was needed. The excitement of the fire made people want to join in; an added incentive was that those who pumped were paid 1s for the first hour of their labour and 6d for each
additional hour, as well as being supplied with bread, cheese and beer. A foreman for each engine chose from among the volunteers (while the hungry masses might want to work for the money, they weren’t necessarily physically capable). Such was the enthusiasm that, ‘if necessary [he] fought off the surplus with the aid of his crew’, before acting as a coxswain, setting the tempo for pumping. ‘Down with her,’ he cried, ‘down with the pump,’ as the men worked to the chant of ‘Beer-oh! Beer-oh!’ Sometimes armbands were used to identify the volunteers, which they handed over in return for their ‘creature comforts’ of beer and food. Sometimes, if the fire were big enough to make it pay, nearby pubs opened up again, ‘doing a roaring trade in beer, which is distributed to the volunteers at the pumps in sufficiently liberal quantities, a check being kept upon the amount consumed by means of tickets’. So that a pay office didn’t have to be established with every fire, the volunteers were given metal tokens, to be exchanged for cash at the station the next day. While the volunteers were pumping, the Fire Engine Establishment employees, known as the ‘brigade men’, did the dangerous work, first clearing a working area for themselves by a fast squirt from their hoses to move the crowds back.

For those not actively assisting, fires were street theatre for all, from high to low. In 1830, a fire broke out at 2 a.m. at the English Opera House, in Covent Garden. Charles Greville, the political diarist, ‘was playing at whist at the “Travellers” [club, a few hundred yards away]...when we saw the whole sky illuminated and a volume of fire rising in the air. We thought it was Covent Garden, and [he and two peers] set off to the spot...though it was three in the morning the streets filled with an immense multitude…All the gentility of London was there from Princess Esterhazy’s ball and all the clubs; gentlemen in their fur cloaks, pumps, and velvet waistcoats mixed with...men and women half-dressed, covered with rags and dirt.’ This was not at all unusual: when the Houses of Parliament were destroyed by fire in 1834, everyone who was anyone turned out to watch. The fire was probably caused by the overheating of flues from the furnace under the House of Lords, where the exchequer tally-sticks were burnt. The old, in many places medieval, wooden structure went up quickly, aided by a lack of fire-stops or party walls, as well as by the fact that Braidwood and his men, when
they arrived, had no idea of the layout of the building. In private houses or warehouses, a basic floor-plan could be assumed, but faced with such a rabbit warren at no time did the firemen have any sense of where they were, or where the fire might break out next. The Fire Engine Establishment supplied twelve engines and sixty-four men, even though, technically, the Houses of Parliament were outside its remit, being uninsured government property. From the first they saw that they were too late to save Westminster Palace and St Stephen’s Chapel; instead they concentrated on Westminster Hall, dragging their engines inside the walls and cutting away the roof where it adjoined the Speaker’s house, which was already well alight.

Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, and other members of the government gathered to watch throughout the night. The philosopher Thomas Carlyle, also present, described the crowd as more gratified than awed or frightened: they ‘
whew’d
and whistled when the breeze came as if to encourage it: “there’s a
flare-up
...A judgement for the Poor-Law Bill”...A man
sorry
I did not anywhere see.’ The artist Benjamin Robert Haydon and his wife arrived by cab specifically to see the spectacle, sitting with ‘the people’, who were full of ‘jokes and radicalism universal’. When Covent Garden theatre burnt down in 1856, Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal visited the smouldering site the next day, as did Dickens three days later, ‘the moment’ he returned to London from a trip. In adult life, the Prince of Wales did not wait until the flames were out to put in an appearance. He and his friends enjoyed attending fires, like the rest of the populace, and they even had replica fire-brigade uniforms made up, in which they bustled about at fire scenes, playing at firemen and getting in the way. (While volunteers were still needed, it is hard to imagine the already portly Prince of Wales taking his five-minute turn at the pumps.)