Abstract
Stephen Spender joined the National Fire Service (NFS) in the autumn of 1942, having been twice rejected on medical grounds in 1939, and seconded to Sub-station XIY in Cricklewood, London. He completed a 3-week course in basic firemanship during which, ‘dressed in dungarees like rompers’, he was ‘made to obey humiliating and often ridiculous orders’ given to him by the regular firemen.2 Finding the work ‘wet and cold, and intractable and heavy’, Spender frankly admitted to never fitting in to life as a fireman. Reflecting on his first experience of a firefight, he admitted to playing ‘a minor role — indeed, I hesitated to get out on to a sloping roof two hundred feet above the ground, and let some one else do it who had been on the job many times.’3
When I think about [Sub-station] XIY, the men who gave the place its atmosphere were those who had been there longest, through all the blitzes. They had already composed a mythology with stories which were recited, together with confidential warnings to you ‘not to believe half of what the others tell you,’ especially about the blitzes.1
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Notes
S. Spender (1977) World Within World (London: Faber and Faber), p. 180.
S. Spender (1945) Citizens in War — and After (London: George Harrap), pp. 97, 100.
Ibid., pp. 271–3; S. Spender (1992) ‘Christmas Day at Station XIY’ in H. S. Ingham (ed.) Fire and Water: An Anthology by Members of the NFS, 2nd edn (Jeremy Mills: Huddersfield), pp. 176–87. In the latter narrative, Alfie is called Tommy.
A. Calder (1992) The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico);
S. O. Rose (2003) Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
P. Summerfield and C. Peniston-Bird (2007) Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
M. Connelly (2004) We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow: Pearson), pp. 128–9, 132;
J. Chapman (1998) The British At War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 (London: I.B. Tauris).
H. Jones (2006) British Civilians in the Front Line: Air Raids, Productivity and Wartime Culture, 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
See also, B. Beaven and D. Thoms (1996) ‘The Blitz and civilian morale in three northern cities, 1940–42’, Northern History, XXXII, 195–203.
J. Gordon (1992) ‘Thameshaven’ in Ingham (ed.) Fire and Water, pp. 74–85. Nationally, 1003 firemen and firewomen died as a result of enemy action during the entire duration of the War.
C. Clark Ramsay (1942) Firefighting in Peace and War (London: Jordan & Sons), pp. 48–52.
C. Demarne (1980) The London Blitz: A Fireman’s Tale (London: Parents’ Centre Publications), pp. 29–30.
B. Winston (1999) Fires Were Started (London: B.F.I. Publishing);
J. Richards (2005) ‘Humphrey Jennings: The poet as propagandist’ in M. Connelly and D. Welch (eds) War and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda, 1900–2003 (London: I.B. Taurus), pp. 127–38.
Contemporary accounts record a ‘Them and Us’ attitude prevailing in the early relations between the regulars and auxiliaries. For example, Anonymous (1942) The Bells Go Down: The Diary of a London AFS Man (London: Methuen), p. 33.
Ibid., 151; D. Godfrey (1941) We Went to Blazes: An Auxiliary Fireman’s Reflections (London: Werner Laurie), p. 72.
C. Demarne (1995) Our Girls: A Story of the Nation’s Wartime Firewomen (Edinburgh: Pentland Press), p. xiv.
J. While (1944) Fire! Fire!! A Story of Firefighting in Peace and War (London: Frederick Muller), p. 136.
Centurion (1944) In the Service of the Nation: The NFS Goes Into Action (London: Raphael Tuck), n.p.
J. Leete (2008) Under Fire: Britain’s Fire Service at War (Stroud: The History Press), p. 84; Demarne, Our Girls, p. 42; Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 157.
F. Eyre and E. C. R. Hadfield (1945) The Fire Service To-Day (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press), p. 29.
T. Harrisson (1976) Living Through the Blitz (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 132; NA HO/207/1068, Report on No. 9 Region (Coventry), 24 October 1940; NA HO/192/1533/RE.B68/3/2, Memo on A. Herbert Ltd., ‘Coventry Fire Precautions by Chief Fire Officer I. S. Sinclair’, 1943; NA HO/186/603, ‘Report and Recommendations of the Coventry Reconstruction Co-ordinating Committee’, 31 December 1940, p. 19.
For example, W. Sansom (1947) The Blitz: Westminster at War (London: Faber and Faber).
John Horner (1992) ‘Recollections of a general secretary’, in Bailey (ed.) Forged in Fire, pp. 333–5;
Aylmer Firebrace (1948), Fire Service Memories (London: Andrew Melrose), p. 204.
W. Sansom, J. Gordon and S. Spender (1943) Jim Braidy: The Story of Britain’s Firemen (London: Lindsay Drummond).
W. Sansom (1992) ‘The Wall’ in Ingham (ed.) Fire and Water, p. 122.
Fire Brigades Union (1943) What Kind of Fire Service? A Post-war Scheme (London: Fire Brigades Union).
W. Grant (2005) ‘Bringing policy communities back in: The case of fire service cover’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, VII, 301–16.
PP (1948–9) Report of His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Fire Services for 1948, XVI, Cmd. 7763, p. 3
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© 2010 Shane Ewen
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Ewen, S. (2010). From Braidwood to Braidy: A National Fire Service, 1941–7. In: Fighting Fires. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230248403_8
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