Shane Ewen

European cities in a networked world during the long 20th century

In this paper we argue that the contemporary revival of European municipalism should be examined within the rich context of the ‘long’ 20th century and the many and varied links forged between municipalities across national borders. In the first two sections we trace the emergence of the networked European municipality from the ad hoc individual connections made during the final decades of the 19th century, through the golden age of municipal internationalism during the interwar years, to the intensive cross-national cooperation pursued in the aftermath of the Second World War. We argue that the historical experience of these municipal connections was an essential prerequisite of the long-term move towards the multilevel networking experienced by European municipalities today. In the final section we focus on Eurocities, the main European municipal lobby group since the late 1980s, to show how municipalities have continued to utilise networking as their main tool within a supranational Europe, in effect to reinvent themselves within a globalised postindustrial economy.

From Fighting Fires to Fighting Firemen: A Fractured Fire Service, 1947–78

The 1947 Fire Services Act re-established key pre-war traditions in the fire service. Firefighting became a legal function of local government, albeit as the statutory responsibility of 50 counties and 75 county boroughs (as well as ten brigades administered by joint boards) in England and Wales, ranging from large full-time municipal brigades to largely part-time units in the more rural counties. In this sense, firefighting was ranked alongside other environmental services like town planning, and personal services like policing and childcare, which were also made the responsibility of the county tiers of local government during the late 1940s.1 The largest bodies remained London Fire Brigade, with over 2000 full-time firemen, and the larger county borough brigades, including Birmingham (with an authorized strength of 650 firemen), Liverpool (500) and Manchester (351).2 The police model of service administration was adopted, with the stick of national inspection counter-balanced by the carrot of an exchequer grant of 25 per cent of the fire authority’s annual charge. The remaining 75 per cent largely fell upon local taxation.3

From Braidwood to Braidy: A National Fire Service, 1941–7

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

Firemen as Workers and Heroes: Working for Victorian Municipal Fire Brigades, c.1861–1900

James Braidwood’s funeral in June 1861 signalled the beginning of the Victorian public’s adulation for the fireman and his profession. The cortege, numbering many thousands, stretched over one-and-a-half miles and took 3 hours to make the journey from the central fire station on Watling Street to Abney Park Cemetery, where Braidwood was buried beside his stepson, a fellow fireman killed on duty 5 years earlier. Comprised of over 1000 policemen, 700 members of the London Rifle Brigade, the 100 conductors of the Royal Society for the Protection of Life from Fire (RSPLF), various private and voluntary fire brigades and all of his firemen, the cortege’s composition reflected the professional authority and heroic disposition that Braidwood had engendered for his fire service. Mourners lined the streets, their ‘hushed demeanour’ paying homage to a man who was publicly revered as the first fireman hero. Braidwood’s heroism was indelibly inscribed in his personal sacrifice at the ‘post of duty…, the holiest place on earth on which to live or die’.1

Building a Professional Fire Service: The Rise of the Chief Fire Officer, c.1879–1914

In the aftermath of Birmingham’s fatal fire in August 1878, an independent fire brigade was formed under the town’s first permanent chief superintendent, Alfred Robert Tozer (1879–1906). The son of Manchester Fire Brigade’s chief superintendent, Tozer systematically re-structured and modernized Birmingham Fire Brigade during the 1880s and 1890s. Upon his death in 1906, he had, according to his Watch Committee’s resolution, established it as ‘very high among the fire brigade services in this country’.1 Following his appointment, Tozer convinced his employers to ratify various expensive reforms through which he transformed the brigade’s structure. Most of his ideas emanated from his observations of firefighting organization under his father. Similarly to Edinburgh and London, the Birmingham Fire Brigade was re-organized into divisions to decentralize operations and speed up response rates, with hose carts adopted as the first line of attack. Other appliances purchased included a horse tender similar to that used in Manchester, a telescopic escape and a plethora of stand and branch pipes, hand pumps, alarm bells, ceiling hooks, pocket lines and axes, all designed to improve brigade efficiency and boost its public standing. Shortly after, Tozer adopted the telegraph and street fire alarms to improve brigade responsiveness and flexibility.2

Controlling Fire: The Politics of Water and Steam Technology, c.1833–80

In an early issue of his short-lived journal, Household Words, Charles Dickens recounted the spectacle of a night-time domestic fire in ‘a squalid court’ in London. Narrating the immediate response of the London Fire Engine Establishment (LFEE) to the frenzied cries of ‘Fire!’, Dickens emphasized the importance of speed and composure in mastering city fires. Mounting the manual fire-engines, the firemen, including their Superintendent, James Braidwood, were dragged by horses through London’s teeming streets, ‘all alive with excited people’, first at a ‘brisk trot’, before becoming a ‘canter’ and, once they caught a glimpse of the ‘bright red gleam’ of flames in the distance, a ‘gallop’.1

Conclusion: The British Fire Service in Comparative Context

How unique has been the British experience of fire protection and the gradual professionalization of the service? To what extent was North American fire protection similarly interwoven with the changing fortunes of local government? In this conclusion I will contextualize the British experience within the wider literature on the history of fire services in North American cities. There are comparative studies of municipalization available, some of which have provided an analytical framework for this study.1 In addition, there is a burgeoning literature on the professionalization of firefighting in North America that has examined the changing working practices of firemen in the broader context of social and cultural history. The way in which firemen construct and protect their collective identity within prevailing gender relations has also attracted growing historical interest.2

Constructing Modern Fire Brigades: The Edinburgh ‘Great Fire’ of 1824

Fire insurance companies played a key role in exerting supply-side pressures over municipal governments to take responsibility for organized fire protection during the early nineteenth century. Many insurance companies provided the capital, firemen and fire-engines to protect industrializing towns from the continued threat of fire. In indemnifying their customers, insurance companies absorbed the growing costs of organized firefighting, although municipal governments in Glasgow and Manchester were beginning to undertake some responsibility for this. In some towns and cities, it was the incidence of fire, coupled with a growing public clamour for action, that triggered the municipalization of fire services. In Edinburgh, the decision, first, to found a municipal fire-engine establishment, independent of external control, before, second, re-organizing it on more efficient principles, was the direct result of a wave of large fires that plagued the Scottish capital throughout 1824. Culminating with the city’s self-styled ‘great fire’ of November 1824, Edinburgh emerged from the ashes of this disaster committed to building a municipal fire brigade that, under the leadership of its ‘Master of Engines’, James Braidwood, acted as the model for municipal services in ensuing decades. It is this relationship between great fires and municipal reform that provides the focus of this chapter.

Governing Fire Protection: The Origins of Municipal Fire Brigades, c.1800–38

During the first four decades of the nineteenth century, municipal governments began to manage the transition into an urban industrial society. They did so by organizing and administering a variety of services, ranging from street cleaning and scavenging to lighting and watching, which were increasingly recognized as public because their effective delivery affected everyone and they were seen as integral to the improvement of the urban environment. Improvement necessitated establishing order and guaranteeing prosperity within rapidly growing towns that lacked the basic infrastructural amenities or administrative structures necessary to be deemed well-governed. From adequate street lighting to regularly swept and paved streets to public fire-engines and paid firemen, nascent municipal governments, the majority of which were concentrated in the North-west of England and in the Scottish Central Lowlands, attempted to keep pace with the intensity of urbanization by strengthening their administrative structures and powers.1

Rational Reform in an Age of War: Creating a Modern Fire Service, 1914–38

By the outbreak of war in 1914, chief fire officers like Alfred Robert Tozer Jr., Henry Neal and Arthur Pordage had made significant inroads locally into municipal administration. Through their regular reports to their elected employers, as well as their participation in a burgeoning associational network, these firemen asserted influence in determining standards of fire protection and prevention within their nascent profession. The British fire service’s institutional roots were put down in this diffusion of the cumulative experience of extinguishing and preventing fires, and drew together those professional fire brigades that were independent of police control, as in Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Leicester. The modern fire service was destined to be both professional and local.