CIVIL DEFENCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 October 1943, Page 4

CIVIL DEFENCE

“FIREMEN ON THE RIVER.” GALLANT WORK DURING AIR BLITZ. (By S. C. Leslie in a 8.8. C. broadcast.) In the job of fighting fires in Britain a very special part is played by firemen afloat—the men who work from their craft on the rivers, docks and estuaries of the big ports. The biggest is London’s. Oddly enough, the Thames provided London with its first professional firemen. In the years after the Great Fire of London in 1666, the city began for the first time to think carefully and systematically about its fire defences. Early in the 18th century a fire insurance company was advertising 30 lusty able-bodied firemen clothed in blue liveries to be always ready to assist in quenching fires.” These men were watermen. A few years later came the first reference to a real fire boat. Thus was the River Fire Service born. When the blitz began in 1940 it had quite a number of craft, very much more highly developed and fully equipped than those of the year 1715. But the fighting history of the River Thames Service, began before the blitz. It began at Dunkirk when, among the little ships that made voyage after voyage to bring back the battered remains of Britain’s Continental Army, was the pride of the service, a fully equipped fire float of 50 tons. She was called the Massey Shaw, after one of the most famous chief officers of London’s Fire Brigade. Gilbert and Sullivan fans will remember him in the lolanthe ballad “Oh Captain Shaw, type of true love kept under Cculd thy Brigade, with cold cascade, quench my great love I wonder?”

But that is by the way. Four months after Dunkirk the Massey Shaw had something to quench even more ardent than the flames of unrequited feminine passion. She and her sister ships did a magnificent job in the three months of London’s continuous raids, and in every one of the big attacks after that. Whatever happened to the mains ashore (and something usually did happen before the night was put) there was always water in the river. The fire floats could pump it ashore into empty dams, whence the landlubbers could pick it up. Many of the dock fires were fought and beaten direct from the river, or from the dock basins alongside. The engines which drove the floats themselves up and down river could be switched to serve their pumps and could throw a fine long powerful stream, of water on to the target. Many of the crews of the floats are the Thames lightermen and licensed watermen, one of the oldest of all Britain’s organised bodies of workers. The Thames lightermen have secrets of their craft, jealously guarded as a rule, but under pressure of war passed on, some of them, to the National Fire Service colleagues working alongside them. It is, however, quite impossible to pass on to any newcomer all the inner mysteries. You see the old hands, as they nose barges or floats into particularly difficult places, exchanging weird signals with their fellows —movements of the hand and short sharp whistles through clenched teeth, meaningless to the uninitiated but full of complicated significance if you know. The whole affair has a salty tang about it. Some time after the N.F.S. was formed, the River Thames Service was made part of it as the River Thames Formation.