TY - JOUR
AU - Ewen, Shane
AB - Abstract This article examines the changing relationship between chief officers and English municipal government between the eighteen-seventies and the nineteen-thirties, focusing specifically on the emergence of a new cadre of municipal experts, the chief fire officers. The article locates the chief officer within debates about the changing role and status of professional elites, and continues a long tradition of urban historical research through the comparative case studies of Birmingham and Leicester. It is argued that the chief fire officer's increasing indispensability to modern municipal government was shaped by a combination of functional reforms and unexpected crises, through which he established a position as the interface between the local state and civil society. The changing status of the professional classes within English municipal government has attracted mounting scholarly attention since the explosion of interest in urban history during the nineteen-fifties. As employees of municipal government, chief officials played increasingly active roles in service administration from the second half of the nineteenth century, influencing municipal policymaking and representing a shift from the amateurism of early nineteenth-century municipal government to a professional and prescriptive service a century later. Various explanations have been offered for this change that seek to identify a causal link between new directions in municipal policymaking, the growing influence of unelected chief officials and broader socio-economic trends. Classically, the escalating amount of Victorian social legislation tackling urban disease, criminality, immorality and squalor was part of a sequential process in which policymakers identified a common problem before seeking solutions through, first, relatively rudimentary and discretionary regulations and, second, when the consensus for more stringent measures was reached, compulsion and powers of enforcement. This second stage witnessed the chief officer's rise to prominence as the driving force behind enforcement, the success of the practice contingent on his expertise and access to essential resources.1 Of growing notoriety, particularly in north American urban historiography, is the interpretation offered by disaster theorists who view changes to service administration as a direct response to specific crises, such as fire, flood or plague. Disastrous events have historically acted as forces of change, with urban reconstruction plans, building regulations and organizational reforms shaped by the calamity itself.2 Officials were depended on for their knowledge of the causal factors of the disaster and their experience in augmenting reforms to avoid similar crises in the future; in effect, they contributed to creating ‘the resilient city’. Consequently, the responsibility of chief officials extended beyond co-ordinating emergency responses to include the restoration of local infrastructure and urban reconstruction beyond pre-disaster levels, taking account of the lessons learned from such crises and the inevitable wave of public demand for reforms to, say, fire departments and building regulations.3 In examining the changing professional influences on municipal government, this article will combine these two interpretations, which converge when attention focuses on the chief official's role in shaping municipal policymaking during the course of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Medical officers of health, sanitary engineers and nuisance inspectors, for example, were appointed to regulate the provision of sewers and clean water during the mid nineteenth century in response to fears about epidemic disease, through which they shaped nascent public health discourses and drove street improvement in cities like Edinburgh and Liverpool. A new elite of scientifically and technically skilled professionals positioned the city, and its attendant challenges in the form of social improvement, control and regulation, at the heart of municipal politics. Disease, housing and planning, poverty, crime and fire became embroiled in ‘the urban question’, which sought solutions to universal problems through evidence-based policymaking.4 This article will place the chief officer at the centre of debates about the management of local services, by focusing on the fire service between the eighteen-seventies and nineteen-thirties, the Second World War having been recently identified as heralding a rupture between fire-fighting and the local state.5 From establishing new organizational practices in the eighteen-seventies and eighties and adopting innovations in fire-fighting technology between the eighteen-nineties and nineteen-tens, to expanding the professional remit of the service between the nineteen-tens and nineteen-thirties, chief fire officers played a formative role in shaping the embryonic profession and making fire protection a crucial scientific and technically configured function of municipal government.6 This growth in ‘industrial professions’ like fire protection was a response to the intensification of urbanization and industrialization during the second half of the nineteenth century, with its attendant fire risks from densely-packed housing, unregulated building construction and the proliferation of new combustible materials like phosphorous, petroleum, electricity and plastics. In turn, this concentrated the demand for professional services and created opportunities for specialists within municipal government, contributing to the emergence of a meritocratic ‘professional society’.7 By drawing examples from the midland cities of Birmingham and Leicester, this article posits that their municipal experiences were representative of large and medium-sized cities, and, more importantly, that their chief officers' leading roles in professionalizing English fire protection allow some insight into the relatively neglected uniformed public services.8 In so doing, it continues a long-established tradition of undertaking local studies to analyse the changing character and roles of urban elites, originating in Asa Briggs's pioneering work in the nineteen-fifties.9 Although the population and scale of both cities differed markedly from the second half of the nineteenth century, with Birmingham's acreage over one-and-a-half times larger than Leicester's in 1891, and a further six times larger by 1931, this does not preclude analytical complementarity as both were products of industrialization and urbanization, their growth dependent on manufacturing and their governance on a combination of businessmen and professionals. The development of the footwear industry during the eighteen-fifties transformed Leicester from a small market town dominated by the hosiery trade into a thriving fashion centre by the nineteen-hundreds, acting as a magnet in attracting migrants. Similarly, the versatility of Birmingham's metal-working industries enabled the city to adapt quickly to changing economic conditions, diversifying into engineering during the eighteen-eighties. Continued diversification in the early twentieth century saw engineering and distributive trades gain a foothold in Leicester, while Birmingham embraced the electrical and motorcar industries, with both portraying a buoyant picture of the regional economy in contrast to the industrial stagnation suffered by northern cities.10 Both cities were similarly governed by a liberal, Nonconformist elite committed to defending the powers of the local state. Better known in the case of Joseph Chamberlain's Birmingham, where street improvement was combined with the municipalization of public utilities to underpin the city's late Victorian commitment to its ‘civic gospel’, the existence of a quasi-religious municipal ideology was equally evident in Leicester, where profits derived from the city's gas and water were used as rate relief, ensuring that reform was couched in terms of its moral benefits to society.11 It is within this context of ‘unprecedented expansion’ in municipal services that chief fire officers should be examined. The chief officer has hitherto been something of a ‘shadowy presence’ within historical studies of municipal government, but closer examination of his changing role adds to our understanding of the municipality as a ‘social domain’ responsible for controlling the gamut of negative externalities resulting from urbanization.12 Alongside municipal reform, the shifting burden of public sector funding and the escape of traditional elites to the suburbs, the growth of vocational groups dominated by authoritative figureheads loyal to their professions has been identified as facilitating the marginalization of municipal government within the increasingly centralized state.13 Yet, municipal chief fire officers, like fire brigades generally, started with low status: poorly paid, lacking powers and operationally subservient in most towns to the chief constable, they were appointed during a period of intense conflict between municipalities and the insurance industry over whether fire protection was a public or private liability. Having been responsible for the management of fire brigades throughout the eighteenth century, insurance companies gradually withdrew during the nineteenth, blaming the pressures of unregulated urban growth, the crippling effect of the government's annual duty on their profits, the endurance of uninsured and under-insured properties, and the multiplication of new industrial processes and combustible materials, which posed frightening risks to life as well as property.14 Moreover, with the piecemeal municipalization of ‘natural monopolies’ like water, a case could be made that fire protection was the next logical step in strengthening the ‘visible hand’ against the failings of the market effectively to deliver extended supplies to combat the continuing fire threat.15 After the Towns Police Clauses Act, 1847, permitted English municipalities to provide engines, stations and firemen, a number of municipal brigades were founded begrudgingly,16 while the responsibility for co-ordinating fire-fighting was deemed to be relatively unskilled and most early chief officers were consequently employed on a part-time basis. Moreover, with the government's refusal to compel insurance companies to contribute towards their funding or to sanction an exchequer grant as in the case of policing, many large provincial municipalities, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow included, secured local powers to charge property-owners expenses for attending fires. In effect, the charges were a ‘fine’ punishing the carelessness of property-owners, a practice which was condemned by insurance experts because chief officers would concentrate the brigade's resources in preventing the spread of fire to contiguous properties: ‘Contributions from individuals, who suffer loss by fire, go to relieve others who are fortunate enough to escape, even though the immunity of the latter may be due to the efforts of the brigade.’17 Moreover, as this was an indirect charge on insurance companies, who guaranteed payment of fire expenses, property-owners were further penalized with higher insurance premiums. Thus, by effectively ‘imposing a tax on the insuring public’, municipal authorities placed the chief fire officer in a weak relationship with an initially hostile middle-class ratepaying public who considered it unreasonable for the ‘provident’ person to pay ‘either for something from which he receives no benefit, or in an inverse ratio to the benefit received, for the longer the fire, the greater the expense and the less the benefit’.18 The earliest full-time chief fire officers, notably James Braidwood of Edinburgh (appointed 1824),19 Alfred Tozer of Manchester (appointed 1862) and Captain Eyre Massey Shaw of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade (appointed 1865), employed in the larger cities where fighting fire was a daily business, shaped the development trajectory for this embryonic profession by initiating key organizational standards in recruitment, drill and officership. Braidwood, for example, popularized decentralized fire protection by opening district stations in Edinburgh, permanently manned by full-time firemen. Moreover, in publishing the first known regulations governing the behaviour of firemen at fires in 1830, he also devised modern brigade rankings, which Massey Shaw, owing to his naval experience, later adapted to inculcate the service with those seafaring traditions with which it is historically associated. As many of the provincial chief firemen served under either Braidwood or Massey Shaw, these regulations naturally featured prominently in the formation of many late Victorian brigades.20 Even then, such officers did not entirely embrace innovative change, with Braidwood notably resisting the introduction of the steam engine, which was the main determinant of municipalization in north American cities, for three decades after its invention in 1828 because of concerns that mechanical power could ultimately supersede manual labour.21 In an age noted for the absence of ‘a municipal professional ethos’, however, these early innovators were in the minority, with the majority kept under close scrutiny by employers wary of devolving powers to unelected and unaccountable individuals.22 In many instances, including Leicester and Birmingham, early municipal fire-fighting was a police function administered by the watch committee, with a cadre of policemen paid to fight fires and a tradesman appointed as a low-ranking fire superintendent. The rudimentary fire appliances, usually consisting of a manually-worked engine and water carts, were stored at the police stations. These police brigades, widely chastised for lacking the skills of a permanent cadre of professionals, worked alongside, and at times in competition with, local insurance brigades, who would race each other to the scene of the fire where they would sometimes levy charges on the property-owners for arriving first.23 In Birmingham, though, there was no recognition of the municipality's responsibility for fire-fighting until the withdrawal of the insurance companies from maintaining skeletal cover for the expanding borough in mid 1873. Indeed, before 1805, when the Birmingham Fire Office (B.F.O.) was founded with its own engine, there existed only an obsolescent parish engine dating from 1695 and Matthew Boulton's and James Watt's works engine at neighbouring Soho. Even then, fire protection was only taken seriously from the late eighteen-thirties as a consequence of intensified competition between the hitherto monopolistic B.F.O. and other offices like the Norwich Union, the Birmingham District and the Royal. By the mid eighteen-sixties there were five offices with their own brigades, each of which was faced with rising capital costs and overheads. Hence, in a transitionary move indicative of intensifying inter-company co-operation, they amalgamated their resources under an umbrella organization, the Birmingham Alliance Fire Insurance Company, which protected the town while its agents opened negotiations to transfer the responsibility into public hands.24 The decision to municipalize fire protection was in both cases not simply a reaction to public demands triggered by local crises. In Birmingham the move was dictated by supply factors, with the withdrawal of the insurance companies from providing fire protection. With negotiations ongoing since 1867, the dominant ‘economists’ on the town council – mainly comprised of lower-middle-class shopkeepers anxious about the rising costs of local government – resisted levying an additional rate for funding a municipal brigade, preferring to leave the cost of fire protection to individual property-owners. It was this laissez-faire attitude to local services and social improvement that was to be the ‘shopocracy's’ ultimate downfall. Amid the rhetoric of Chamberlain's ‘civic gospel’ during the eighteen-seventies, in which local elites preached in support of the moral obligation to have a strong local state guided by principles of equity and entrepreneurship, attitudes towards the public ownership of ‘natural monopolies’ softened and, faced with the prospect of having no organized fire service at all, a municipal police brigade was formed in 1874. However, to appease those who did not consider fire-fighting a ‘natural monopoly’, the decision to merge the two functions was a frugal option in the absence of substantial property income to fund non-essential local services.25 Four years later, a fire in the city's central Digbeth district triggered a further round of municipal reforms, the repercussions of which symbolized the cathartic meaning of disasters as a fulfilment of the deepest anxieties of urban life and, paradoxically, an opportunity for redemptive progress.26 Caused by a carelessly discarded cigarette in a confectioner's store, and with all but the head of the household perishing, the event received in-depth coverage from the local press, where there was unanimous public criticism of Chamberlain and ‘his obsequious followers’ for their ‘miserable failure’ in neglecting fire protection, preferring instead to lavish ratepayers' money on ‘the excessive ornamentation of our streets, or the development of gigantic plans for the glorification of some ambitious politician’. The shop was yards from the police brigade station, and the brigade was lambasted for its bungled attempt to rescue the trapped family, which had seen a three-month-old child dropped fifteen feet from the borough's only escape ladder to his death. There was also an outcry over the absence of both the chief constable and fire superintendent, which meant that no individual was available to authorize the use of the steam engine, purchased two years earlier. Moreover, the failure to control ‘a large, disorderly and excited crowd’ contributed to the destruction when some men, in attempting to render assistance, tore down the shop shutters and inadvertently fanned the flames. Under intense pressure from both the home office and the local government board, the municipal authorities were effectively compelled to establish an independent brigade under the sole command of a suitably qualified chief officer, which supports Carola Hein's argument that the scale of destruction is of secondary importance to its timing and the political context in which disasters occur.27 Moreover, although the fire was not of the same order as the notorious contemporaneous north American fires in Chicago (1871) and Boston (1872),28 it was a dramatic, episodic disaster in its own right because of its implications for a demand-led municipal culture, precipitating a period of extensive organizational reform which placed Birmingham in the vanguard of the fire profession. Leicester was protected by a police brigade between 1836 and 1872, in tandem with a private brigade maintained by the Leicestershire Fire Insurance Company and then, from 1844, the Sun Office. This inevitably led to ‘confusion, inconvenience and jealousy’ at fires ‘from there being two forces, acting under different officers’, which occasionally culminated in violent clashes between the firemen and the deliberate obstruction of each brigade's activities. Both brigades were merged following ratepayers' complaints about the police brigade's lack of organization at fires like that in a wool spinners' factory in August 1871, which caused the death of two young women, and growing anxieties about rising insurance premiums. The dismissal of the police brigade's superintendent for theft in the same year proved fatal for any remaining public legitimacy, and triggered the decision to appoint a full-time brigade under the officership of John Johnson, the Sun Brigade's experienced and popular chief.29 These examples substantiate Morris's assertion that ‘the delivery of the same service took place in many different ways’, yet they also demonstrate a degree of uniformity in that insurance interests, as was the case in America, played a crucial role in influencing decisions to municipalize fire-fighting. Clearly supply-side factors were at least as important as public demands in dictating the timing and manner of municipalization, although it remains to be determined what impact this had on local economic performance, especially in its effect on insurance premiums.30 After Johnson's retirement in 1887, Leicester preferred to recruit experienced officers externally rather than make internal appointments, which ran contrary to recruitment patterns in other local authority staffs.31 William Swanton, Johnson's short-lived successor (1887–9), was recruited from the Metropolitan Fire Brigade on Massey Shaw's recommendation. Swanton's successors, William Ely (1889–1909), Henry Neale (1909–38) and Francis Winteringham (1938–40), were recruited from smaller boroughs – Chester, Grimsby and Swansea respectively. By contrast, Birmingham, in the absence of any discernible personnel system, pursued a dynastic approach by appointing members of the Tozer family to senior positions between 1879 and 1940 (see Figure 1). Alfred Tozer was born into the service, living at fire stations in Manchester and London during his childhood where he learned the skills of fire-fighting. He served as messenger boy for his father, who was Manchester's first chief superintendent, a former understudy of Braidwood and himself the son of an insurance fireman. Following an apprenticeship as a hydraulic engineer with Merryweather, the largest fire appliance manufacturer in the country, Tozer was appointed chief superintendent of the new Bristol police brigade in 1876 at the age of twenty-three, the town having suffered a spate of fires in recent months. That he only served for three years before being hired by Birmingham's authorities underlined his family's growing reputation, which was further evidenced in a starting salary of £250, Chamberlain having earlier warned his colleagues that they had to pay lucrative salaries for professional services if they hoped to attract the right calibre of candidate.32 Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide The Tozer family tree Key: Names in bold typescript denote those officers who served in Birmingham Fire Brigade during their career. Dates in parentheses are their known official starting dates in the service; C.F.O. = chief fire officer/superintendent; V.O. = visiting officer; S.O. = station officer; A.F.S. = Auxiliary Fire Service. (Source: Moreton–in–Marsh, Fire Service College, FSC/8, Tozer family collection.) By the time of his death in 1906, Tozer was recognized as ‘one of the most popular figures in Birmingham’, embodying ‘the characteristics of a thorough Englishman – a hero imbued with the spirit of a Nelson’. The chief fire officer was often likened to a military commander going into battle; contemporaries suggested that ‘when fighting as crafty an enemy as fire, it requires not only the skill of the commander but also confidence and prompt compliance with orders on the part of subordinates’. That Braidwood, upon his death at London's Tooley Street fire in 1861, was similarly compared with the duke of Wellington –‘Our Wellington and our Braidwood are gone’– underscores the quasi-military, heroic status and ‘immaculate manhood’ attained by early chief fire officers.33 Morris argues that Victorian urban political and social elites were integrated through family links and intermarriage (and that this was not solely restricted to traditional landed elites), while social and economic relations were shaped by family and community interests.34 The diffusion of scientific expertise and patronage could also be assisted by kinship networks. Perhaps best known is the case of Henry Littlejohn, Edinburgh's medical officer of health (1862–1908), who was succeeded by his son, but this pattern is similarly evident across the spectrum of municipal services.35 Full-time service meant that an officer's children were invariably indoctrinated with the values of his profession from an early age, much like a son would follow his father into the family business or politics. The children of firemen were invariably born and raised at the fire station where their father worked, often acting as messenger boys. Being ‘a solid symbol of continuity’, popular fire-fighting families like the Johnsons in Southampton, the McMurtries in Edinburgh, the Roses in Manchester, the Hollands in Radcliffe, the Vergettes in Peterborough, the Jeffreys in Dunoon, and the Bretts in Sandwich continued existing traditions throughout successive generations in large and small towns alike.36 Alfred Tozer exploited his expertise and authority at Birmingham by successfully pressing for the award of the brigade's higher ranks to four of his five sons, creating an integrated kinship network which dominated prestigious ranks within Birmingham and established links with other provincial and colonial towns, such as Manchester, West Bromwich, Durham, Finchley, Madras and Rangoon. With the acute challenges posed by the increasing size, complexity and anonymity of the industrial city, the presence of respected families evidently brought a welcome sense of authority and reassured the public that the city was in ‘trustworthy hands’.37 Tozer's eldest son, also Alfred, was deemed his natural successor ‘by birth and training’ and was appointed chief officer at the age of thirty-one following his father's death.38 Born at Birmingham's central fire station on Upper Priory, this fourth-generation Tozer joined the brigade in 1892 after serving an apprenticeship as a brassfounder. His father quickly promoted him to assistant engineer in 1896 and second officer in 1901. ‘As one would expect coming of such a stock’, reported the trade journal Fire and Water in November 1901, ‘he is a skillful fireman and has already distinguished himself in saving life’, which belied his relative inexperience.39 Another of the fourth-generation Tozers, William, also served under his father before being appointed superintendent at West Bromwich in 1900, while Charles Wright succeeded his elder brother as second officer in 1906, after only six years in service. The Tozers' reputation for expert leadership and innovation assisted the diffusion of the family's influence at the expense of other firemen, despite claims that expertise was depersonalized and dependent solely on ability and scientific knowledge.40 The association of the name ‘Tozer’ with qualities of technical ability and efficient, trustworthy leadership allowed members of the family to negotiate advantageous positions within the municipality, while creating an orderly urban environment. In return, the retention of kinship networks reinforced public consent and civic authority, with Birmingham's lord mayor, speaking at the retirement presentation of Second Officer Charles Wright Tozer in 1938, proclaiming, ‘When anyone hears the name of Tozer one thinks of fires, and when one thinks of fires one thinks of the Tozers’.41 Two years later, though, Tozer and his son were removed from command after a bruising night of air-raids on the city. Having resisted the integration of his regular men with those of the Auxiliary Fire Service, it took intervention from the most senior home office civil servant and the chief of fire staff to end the family's stranglehold on the city: ‘The Tozer dynasty had come to an end. Someone high up had snapped his finger and thumb.’42 Dynasty building had ultimately led to ossification and resistance to innovation. Such service inefficiencies were unacceptable to the new breed of national policymakers. The expansion of regulatory powers into building inspection and the enforcement of minimum safety standards between the eighteen-seventies and nineteen-thirties empowered chief fire officers to become indispensable experts within municipal culture.43 Although local powers had existed since the eighteen-forties, it was not until the eighteen-eighties that Birmingham's and Leicester's chief fire officers were authorized to inspect building plans to ensure that adequate means of exit were provided in large factories. Both brigades similarly inspected licensed theatres from 1890 to ensure that exits and gangways were kept clear, fire appliances kept in working order and the fireproof curtain lowered at appropriate times, the chief officer invariably delegating power to specialist brigade inspectors. By the nineteen-thirties chief officers had secured additional powers to inspect hospitals, cinemas, department stores and public libraries, and convinced employers to enforce strict regulations governing high-rise buildings.44 Yet, such duties were never the statutory responsibility of the chief fire officer, and his influence was initially constrained. The Explosives Act, 1875, for instance, appointed a chief inspector of explosives, yet it did not stipulate who should enforce such regulations locally.45 Both Birmingham's and Leicester's authorities appointed explosives inspectors, rather than grant the powers to the chief fire officer who would naturally respond to any emergencies precipitated by explosive substances. A similar situation existed for the licensing of petroleum during the eighteen-sixties and seventies. From 1909, though, following a series of fatal cinema fires, municipalities were compelled to appoint an officer to enforce the safe storage of celluloid, and this responsibility was devolved to the chief fire officer in both cases. Again in response to notable fires, legislation in 1936 empowered municipalities to force manufacturers to install fire exits in all business premises, with the chief fire officer assuming responsibility for enforcement. That the majority of inspection and enforcement duties were being delegated to the chief fire officer demonstrated growing municipal faith in the office by the turn of the century. By influencing the issuing of licences to factories and places of entertainment, the approval of building plans and the storage of petroleum and celluloid, the chief fire officer was empowered to regulate private property, thus extending the ‘visible hand’ of municipal control into hitherto unregulated activities on safety grounds, and introducing in the process incremental technical influences within municipal management, especially in decentralised communication technologies for reporting fires and detailed bye-laws governing the safety of places of work.46 Chief fire officers had to earn these responsibilities and the trust of their employers by demonstrating competence in their work, identifying problems associated with water supplies and fire-fighting before new functional regulations were drafted. Upon his appointment in Leicester, John Johnson was directed to attend all fires, to prepare a code of conduct and to test the town's hydrants daily.47 Through his knowledge of local geography and fire risks, Johnson reported every fire brought to his attention, making informed comments on the town's fire risks and the precautionary measures he considered it necessary to adopt. For example, when, in 1872, Johnson inspected the town's 900 hydrants to determine the quality of the town's water supply, he urged the water company to improve its pressure in certain districts and its provision of fire-plugs, preceding legislation in 1875 which compelled water authorities to install and mark fire-plugs for ensuring an adequate supply of water for fighting fires.48 Moreover, by making references to large suburban fires, Johnson raised public awareness of the threats posed by the town's rapid expansion into the outlying residential districts of Belgrave, Humberstone and Knighton: The rapidly extending area of the town renders the prompt extinction of fire in the outskirts a matter of increasing difficulty. The distance from the fire station being in many places considerably more than a mile, it becomes every year more of a necessity that the Central Station should be provided with a Hose Reel properly fitted and manned and ready at a moment's notice. This will have to be done whether the [Watch] Committee decide to purchase a Steam Fire Engine or otherwise.49 By making such comments, Johnson exploited growing public anxieties about the safety of late Victorian cities and pressured the municipality to purchase new appliances, notably a steam engine, to improve response rates in these bulging catchment areas.50 If the threat of fire disasters could provide opportunities for chief officers to initiate reform and strengthen their positions, actual disasters could weaken their authority. As was evident in a timber yard fire in May 1889, Leicester's newly appointed chief officer, William Swanton, was not sufficiently resilient to withstand the barrage of criticism levelled at him in its aftermath. Quickly spreading to the adjoining factories of Smith, Faire and Co., boot and shoemakers, and Faire Brothers and Co., elastic-web manufacturers, the fire caused ‘extensive’ damage estimated at £18,000. The directors of the family-owned companies, which were large local employers, included Samuel Faire, a Conservative councillor and local benefactor. Faire furiously lobbied the municipality to investigate the brigade and Swanton's alleged ‘flagrant …. bungling’ during the fire. By exploiting his position as a leading ratepayer and his family's connections with the borough, Faire argued that Leicester could not expect to attract investment while insurance offices threatened to raise their premiums: We wish to say in the strongest terms that a more scandalous and disgusting piece of mismanagement we have rarely heard of, and that it is a disgrace to the town. … that nothing has been done within the last few years to put an end to the unenviable position which Leicester undoubtedly has among fire insurance companies who appear to be well nigh panic stricken.51 A municipal investigation concluded that although Swanton quickly responded with his men he had failed to summon the borough's steam engine immediately. Upon its arrival he directed it to the wrong end of the street so that it was prevented from reaching the scene by fire hoses lying across the thoroughfare. Further complaints that Swanton was ‘not sufficiently accessible or vigilant in taking observation in various positions’ were upheld. Swanton had failed to direct his men appropriately, an expected skill of all chief officers. Despite his defence that he had earlier advised both companies to install a fireproof iron door to prevent fire spread, Swanton was dismissed, having been identified as the personal embodiment of an unprofessional fire brigade, and having undermined negotiations to extend the municipal boundaries into the suburb of Humberstone by raising doubts about the effectiveness of municipal services.52 Exposing the continued limits on burgeoning technical and professional ‘experts’ by traditional urban ruling elites, this example illustrates the expansive disciplinary powers still at the disposal of late Victorian social elites. Indeed it was only with the cumulative effect of experience and piecemeal reform that the chief officer was awarded greater autonomy over operational and personnel regulations, a process similarly evident in other uniformed public services like the police.53 It took Swanton's successor, William Ely, two years before he re-established a favourable reputation for the brigade. He extended the hydrant and telegraphic network to legitimize the extension of the municipal boundaries in 1891, which was sealed by securing funds to purchase a second steam engine, and by 1893 he was publicly lauded for having ‘done more towards making the Leicester Fire Brigade an efficient organisation than any other person’.54 Through a combination of piecemeal functionalist reform and contingency planning, the shifting boundaries between officers and elected elites were in part shaped by the past actions of their predecessors, and depended on their response to mistakes which undermined service delivery and challenged popular discourses of civic prestige. Additional responsibilities naturally brought financial rewards, which reflected the position's increasing indispensability between 1914 and 1930 when the annual salary doubled to £1,000 in Birmingham and more than trebled to £900 in Leicester (Table 1). Notwithstanding these rises, the position remained middle-ranking compared to those better-paid, white-collar officials who were without exception high earners in the larger boroughs.55 In 1890, when he received £120 annually in Leicester, the fire officer was ranked at the lower end of the scale alongside the chief inspector of nuisances, the lighting superintendent, the police surgeon and the inspector of weights and measures. In conjunction with the growing responsibilities of the post, his prestige had materially improved by 1914, when he received pay similar to that of lower-status white-collar officers like the clerk of the peace and the chief librarian. By 1930, however, his salary had outstripped the former, overtaken that of the chief curator and raised him to a level comparable with the chief constable, his earlier superior. This indicated the post's growing importance to the local community, and the office-holder's personal embodiment of public trust, leading Henry Neale to express his hope that ‘the time will soon arrive when the fire chief will be regarded as equally important as the head of any other municipal department’.56 Table 1. Annual salaries of chief officers (£) Position . Birmingham . Leicester . 1890 . 1914 . 1930 . 1890 . 1914 . 1930 . Town clerk 2000 2200 2700 1000 1250 2500 Clerk to the justices 2400 – – 1050 1250 1550 Gas engineer – 1500 – – 1000 1470 Treasurer 800 1500 2000 400 710 1270 Surveyor 1000 1400 2000 680 1250 1580 Medical officer of health 850 1300 1800 420 750 1400 Tramway's manager – 1300 – – 450 1790 Coroner 1230 1300 1250 340 350 500 Chief constable 800 800 1000 300 510 950 Curator – 800 900 200 300 560 Clerk of the peace 500 600 770 150 200 200 Chief librarian – 500 – 180 320 – Markets' superintendent 500 400 500 – 120 460 Recorder 400 650 750 140 130 210 Chief fire officer 350 500 1000 120 250 900 Police surgeon 200 400 – – 100 230 Chief inspector of nuisances 130 – – 120 250 300 Lighting superintendent – – – 140 190 470 Inspector of weights and measures – – – 110 180 410 Position . Birmingham . Leicester . 1890 . 1914 . 1930 . 1890 . 1914 . 1930 . Town clerk 2000 2200 2700 1000 1250 2500 Clerk to the justices 2400 – – 1050 1250 1550 Gas engineer – 1500 – – 1000 1470 Treasurer 800 1500 2000 400 710 1270 Surveyor 1000 1400 2000 680 1250 1580 Medical officer of health 850 1300 1800 420 750 1400 Tramway's manager – 1300 – – 450 1790 Coroner 1230 1300 1250 340 350 500 Chief constable 800 800 1000 300 510 950 Curator – 800 900 200 300 560 Clerk of the peace 500 600 770 150 200 200 Chief librarian – 500 – 180 320 – Markets' superintendent 500 400 500 – 120 460 Recorder 400 650 750 140 130 210 Chief fire officer 350 500 1000 120 250 900 Police surgeon 200 400 – – 100 230 Chief inspector of nuisances 130 – – 120 250 300 Lighting superintendent – – – 140 190 470 Inspector of weights and measures – – – 110 180 410 Source: B.C.A., L63.8, Birmingham council annual abstract of accounts; R.O.L., L352, Leicester council annual abstract of accounts. Open in new tab Table 1. Annual salaries of chief officers (£) Position . Birmingham . Leicester . 1890 . 1914 . 1930 . 1890 . 1914 . 1930 . Town clerk 2000 2200 2700 1000 1250 2500 Clerk to the justices 2400 – – 1050 1250 1550 Gas engineer – 1500 – – 1000 1470 Treasurer 800 1500 2000 400 710 1270 Surveyor 1000 1400 2000 680 1250 1580 Medical officer of health 850 1300 1800 420 750 1400 Tramway's manager – 1300 – – 450 1790 Coroner 1230 1300 1250 340 350 500 Chief constable 800 800 1000 300 510 950 Curator – 800 900 200 300 560 Clerk of the peace 500 600 770 150 200 200 Chief librarian – 500 – 180 320 – Markets' superintendent 500 400 500 – 120 460 Recorder 400 650 750 140 130 210 Chief fire officer 350 500 1000 120 250 900 Police surgeon 200 400 – – 100 230 Chief inspector of nuisances 130 – – 120 250 300 Lighting superintendent – – – 140 190 470 Inspector of weights and measures – – – 110 180 410 Position . Birmingham . Leicester . 1890 . 1914 . 1930 . 1890 . 1914 . 1930 . Town clerk 2000 2200 2700 1000 1250 2500 Clerk to the justices 2400 – – 1050 1250 1550 Gas engineer – 1500 – – 1000 1470 Treasurer 800 1500 2000 400 710 1270 Surveyor 1000 1400 2000 680 1250 1580 Medical officer of health 850 1300 1800 420 750 1400 Tramway's manager – 1300 – – 450 1790 Coroner 1230 1300 1250 340 350 500 Chief constable 800 800 1000 300 510 950 Curator – 800 900 200 300 560 Clerk of the peace 500 600 770 150 200 200 Chief librarian – 500 – 180 320 – Markets' superintendent 500 400 500 – 120 460 Recorder 400 650 750 140 130 210 Chief fire officer 350 500 1000 120 250 900 Police surgeon 200 400 – – 100 230 Chief inspector of nuisances 130 – – 120 250 300 Lighting superintendent – – – 140 190 470 Inspector of weights and measures – – – 110 180 410 Source: B.C.A., L63.8, Birmingham council annual abstract of accounts; R.O.L., L352, Leicester council annual abstract of accounts. Open in new tab The chief fire officer's public prominence was nowhere more evident than in local newspapers, which reported on his stewardship of the brigade's activities and played a formative role in the construction of measures of ‘civic inclusivity’ and adulation for municipal officials.57 Fire reports exhibited narrative conventionality, centring on the life-cycle of the blaze and the brigade's efforts in confining the flames and preventing their spread to contiguous properties, bringing a sense of order to the anxieties created by fire, which included unemployment, homelessness, fraud and death, and providing a medium through which citizens browsed the increasingly unfamiliar urban landscape.58 In a typical example, the Leicester Daily Mercury's report of an outbreak at a leather merchant's factory in February 1890 noted that ‘but for the promptitude and energy displayed by the brigade, under the skilled direction of Supt. Ely, the fire must have extended’. Similarly, in a report on the brigade's battle against fire in a china merchant's shop-cellar in February 1895, the same newspaper recorded that ‘after more than half-an-hour's hard work, Mr. Ely had succeeded in getting behind the smoke and driving it out sufficiently to allow of an entrance to the cellar to be made’.59 Thus, while newspapers rarely named rank-and-file firemen, the chief officer, as the public face of the brigade, was an instantly recognizable and respected figure of authority. His views frequently sought on factory fire safety, high-rise buildings and theatre protection, the chief officer was the embodiment of public safety, methodically expanding his control over civil society.60 The securing of public consent was underpinned by the collection and dissemination of information on fires, a practice which accelerated from the last quarter of the nineteenth century as one component of the new ‘information state’. Beginning with public health reform in the eighteen-forties, and heavily influenced by developments with the census and civil registration, the accumulation of information was targeted by municipalities to create ‘knowledgeable communities’ through which they could pursue ‘local solutions to local problems, locally identified’.61 As a local and objective resource, information was collected by statisticians and provincial scientific associations to measure a variety of socio-economic consequences of urban development, which, coupled with the growing intensity of municipal regulation, contributed to the emergence of a networked urban society that sought practical solutions to universal urban problems like fire through evidence-based policymaking.62 As a purely discretionary function of British brigades, the increasing availability and presentation of fire statistics relied equally on the chief officer's commitment to the exercise and the public's proclivity to report fires to the brigade.63 The rising trend of reported fires in Birmingham and, to a lesser extent, Leicester from the late eighteen-seventies thus reflected more than an increase in risk (see Figure 2). The rise in Birmingham coincided with organizational and technological reforms, including the adoption of steam traction in 1876, the separation of the police and fire brigade in 1879, and the introduction of telegraphic communication and street fire alarms in 1879 and 1884 respectively. In the aftermath of the Digbeth disaster, then, these reforms re-connected the municipality with the local electorate by decentralizing protection and improving public communications and response rates. Tozer quickly exploited this position by asserting that turnout would quicken at night if a modern station were to be built in the central district, incorporating up-to-date innovations in station design like sliding poles and firemen's accommodation. Through reference to data collected from other large boroughs and by running mock time trials, the opening of a new station, complete with accommodation for twenty-five men, in the Upper Priory in 1882 validated Tozer's immediate impact in using evidence-based policymaking as a tool against the encroachment of political interests into what he considered were purely technical problems.64 Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Reported fires in Birmingham and Leicester per 10,000 population, 1868–1940 Source: R.O.L., 10D58/1–54, central fire station call room occurrence books; R.O.L., 10D18/180–98, annual fire brigade reports, 1928–39; B.C.A., MS. 1303/38–9, annual fire brigade reports, 1880–1916; B.C.A., MS. 1303/26–9, annual fire brigade reports, 1921–40; B.C.A., MS. 1303/172–3, record of fires. Chief fire officers demonstrated a causal link between the adoption of new innovations and a rising trend of reported fires, through which they justified further infrastructural investment. Thus, Birmingham experienced a fourfold increase from an average of 3.2 reported fires per 10,000 population between 1868 and 1880 to 13.2 fires from 1928 to 1940; in Leicester the number of reported outbreaks almost doubled from an average of 4.7 to 8.6 during the same period. These figures were used to illustrate that growing public faith in municipal fire protection, coupled with the rising costs of fire-fighting and the spread of new combustible risks, culminated in rising service demand. Ultimately, the public were increasingly likely to report small fires, especially domestic and chimney fires that caused minimal loss, rather than attempting to extinguish them themselves. Such information was conveyed through the widespread publication in the local and trades press of annual reports, from the eighteen-eighties, wherein the number and types of fire calls received during the preceding year, the brigade response, the method of extinguishment and the extent of loss were recorded. The reports invariably closed with the chief officer flagging up several notorious fires to warn of the need for vigilance in an increasingly hazardous environment, as in 1898 when Ely explained the ‘somewhat heavier’ losses on previous years by reference to ‘the serious fire on the premises of Messrs. Dalrymple and Co., Warring-street, which amounted to £14,000’.65 Usually classifying large fires as those which caused at least £10,000 in damage, Leicester's respected chief during the inter-war years, Henry Neale, admitted that in most instances of the largest uncontrolled fires, his brigade's resources would focus on protecting contiguous properties from fire spread, thus leaving unprotected the property where the outbreak originated. In other notable fires, loss of life was recorded, with those in densely congregated buildings like theatres, hospitals and department stores receiving particular attention because of the fear of widespread social panic and the threat that deaths of this type posed to political legitimacy.66 Such comments demonstrated growing confidence among chief officers in exploiting public anxieties to increase their powers. Moreover, their virtual monopoly of statistical information enabled them to direct the deployment of resources and strengthen their own positions. They achieved this by embracing technological advances in intra-urban communications, transportation and fire extinction, which were essential for the retention of public legitimacy by enabling brigades to respond quickly and extinguish fires more effectively. This was the case with the substitution of steam for manual engines, which had greater capacity for pumping water and were drawn by horses rather than the firemen themselves. By the nineteen-hundreds, brigades began to substitute petrol-driven for steam engines, with Leicester and Birmingham purchasing their first motorized engines in 1904 and 1907 respectively, which were quicker and more reliable than steamers. This speed of technical development in engine design, and other areas such as telegraphic communications, during the decades either side of 1900 placed the service at the forefront of technological innovation.67 In an age of intense fascination with technology, fire officers acted as one of the main local adopters of innovations, incorporating advances in communications and transport to disperse the fire brigade's regulatory powers throughout the expanding city, which in turn strengthened their emerging base of municipal authority.68 By laying claim to expertise, elected and unelected municipal elites shared a commitment to the creation of knowledge networks, assisted by the development of occupational associations from the eighteen-eighties onwards. The relatively unstable position of the chief fire officer during the last quarter of the nineteenth century demonstrated that individual expertise carried less weight than a collective voice in defining a profession's claims to independent practice. Although well-established professions such as medicine and law developed outside an interactive organizational culture, industrial professions depended on intensive institutional interactions and knowledge transfers between members to standardize service administration and create economies of scale. National associations were thus formed for municipal engineers, surveyors, treasurers and medical officers of health, not to mention the National Association of Local Government Officers in 1905, in recognition of the growing depth of scientific expertise demanded from such positions, and the perceived need to introduce a system of professional accreditation for white-collar local authority employees. Such associations frequently met to discuss common policy issues, to provide professional legitimacy, mutual solidarity and camaraderie for their members, and to mobilize the profession through the publication of competitive technical periodicals.69 The spread of associational culture was more than an information-sharing exercise, then, as it enabled chief officers to exert their collective authority. Owing to the absence of central regulation and legal recognition within the fire service, there emerged a tightly integrated network of professional associations earlier than in other uniformed public services such as the police. Indeed, chief officers like Tozer, Ely and Neale, learning from their close association with the engineering professions, were pivotal players in establishing a national associational culture, which shifted the focus of professionalization away from the narrowly local and self-interested level. Through the creation of integrated networks they shared common experiences and mobilized to secure statutory recognition and professional accreditation. Tozer, for example, established the Midland Fire Brigades Association (M.F.B.A.) in 1882 to encourage municipalization in the west midlands through a regional support network. Its amalgamation with other fledgling associations in 1887 to form the National Fire Brigades Union (N.F.B.U.) created the service's first nationally representative organization, albeit one devoted chiefly to training voluntary brigades. The activities of these early associations were, in turn, generously promoted by a nascent trades press, notably the London-based periodicals The Fireman and Fire, launched in 1877 and 1908 respectively, and the Birmingham-published newspaper Fire and Water, which was launched in 1884 initially as the mouthpiece for Tozer's M.F.B.A.70 Moreover, the establishment of the Association of Professional Fire Brigade Officers in 1902 (shortly thereafter renamed the Professional Fire Brigades Association (P.F.B.A.)) provided chief officers with their own distinctive voice. Unlike the N.F.B.U., the P.F.B.A. represented permanent fire brigade officers and was governed by those professional chiefs like the Tozers and Ely who campaigned to abolish police fire brigades by encouraging their chief superintendents to take an active role in service politics. From humble origins the P.F.B.A. soon expanded its ambit, as noted by Birmingham's lord mayor, Henry Sayer, when welcoming conference delegates to the city in 1908: [The P.F.B.A. is] of great value in aiding the advancement of their profession, furnishing an opportunity of gaining and imparting knowledge, and fostering a comradeship between the officers of the different Brigades. They [meet] not only to discuss the best means of dealing with fires and saving life from fire, but also to endeavour to find out what [is] the best way of preventing fires.71 By developing a corporate identity and broadening its sphere of influence into broader policy networks during the inter-war years, the P.F.B.A. was a formative authority in the introduction of standard pension rights in 1925 and civil defence reform during the nineteen-thirties.72 Knowledge exchange was further enhanced during the inter-war years by the co-operation of these two existing institutions with the technically-orientated Institution of Fire Engineers (I.F.E.) in rationalizing the fight against fire.73 Founded in 1918 by six prominent chief officers, including Tozer and Neale, the latter serving as president for its first six years, the I.F.E. raised professional standards by adopting technical examinations for the officer cadre and pressured municipalities to appoint only those with accreditation. Drawing on the experience of engineering professions, with their long-established technical qualifications, the I.F.E. legitimized the scientific responsibilities of ‘the present-day fire brigade officer’, who ‘is being constantly faced with new problems brought about by the advanced scientific developments of modern industry’. Through its annual meetings and examinations, and by publishing textbooks on the chemistry of fire, the I.F.E. popularized fire engineering such that, by the end of the nineteen-thirties, the majority of professional brigades only appointed chief officers who held its graduate diploma. Indeed, Neale's final wish before retiring as Leicester's chief officer in 1938 was for his successor to be a fellow graduate, a request to which his employers acceded.74 Rather than simply acting as a closed shop for greater technical and scientific integration, this associational culture acted as a facilitator between the fire profession and municipalities, sharing scientific and administrative knowledge, and blurring the boundaries between elected and unelected elites. Municipalities sought to host the meetings of associations like the I.F.E. and the P.F.B.A. to encourage mutual co-ordination between chief officers and their employers, while simultaneously promoting themselves as centres of civic expertise.75 By arranging mayoral receptions, lavish dinners and town hall speeches in the event programmes, municipalities openly demonstrated that fire protection had become an essential public service, which could not be left to the vagaries of the market. This led to elected elites celebrating the professional fire officer, like Ernest Wilford, Leicester's watch committee chairman, in a speech to the I.F.E.'s annual conference in 1930: in Leicester the Fire Brigade is entirely separated from the Police Force, and that is how things should be. Fire fighting is a scientific and technical profession, in which a knowledge of mechanics and chemistry plays a great part; and that being so, there is no room in it for figureheads. We must have practical men at the head of fire brigades, and I hope it will not be long before the Home Office will insist that professional fire brigades shall be commanded by qualified fire officers, and no one else.76 The high proportion of fire service conferences held in Birmingham and especially Leicester indicated that, aside from having suitable facilities for hosting such events, their chief officers shaped the direction of service reform between 1890, when the first N.F.B.U. annual meeting was held at Leicester's fire station, and 1930, when the I.F.E. returned to Leicester for an unprecedented second time.77 As presidents of the P.F.B.A. in 1906, 1915 and 1922 respectively, Ely, Tozer and Neale acted equally as innovators and ambassadors, working tirelessly at the local, national and, through Neale's membership of the prestigious International Fire Service Committee, international level to professionalize the service, while retaining its municipal roots. Through the interaction of technical and administrative experts, fire conferences undoubtedly contributed more to service uniformity than nationally prescribed regulations. In effect, local technical elites shaped national policy by translating the skills and knowledge of municipal government from a local to a national stage. In 1922, in a speech at the P.F.B.A.'s annual conference, Henry Neale highlighted many of the changes in the chief fire officer's responsibilities and status since the late nineteenth century, signifying the post's non-linear evolution from a low-ranking, semi-skilled job to an indispensable factotum exerting considerable influence over urban management: Without doubt, a fire brigade officer's position becomes more exacting every year. Many of us can remember the time when men were chosen for an officer's position without very serious consideration being given to their qualifications, but many authorities now realise that it requires men of special ability for the responsible positions.78 Through a combination of statutory and non-statutory measures, the chief fire officer was awarded greater responsibilities, especially in enforcing workplace fire standards. Between the eighteen-seventies and nineteen-thirties, powers were secured to inspect and license the storage of petroleum, phosphorous, celluloid and other combustibles, and simultaneously to enforce safety regulations in theatres, cinemas, factories and department stores. Fire regulations were also circulated, warning businesses and homeowners of the dangers associated with modern power sources, advising against striking naked lights when checking a gas leak or using water in extinguishing electrical fires.79 Connected with this, the chief fire officer commanded extensive public support beyond that enjoyed by most municipal officials, in part because of his working-class roots. As a popular, recognizable and reputable authority figure, his growing prestige was recognized slowly by employers hesitant to award greater financial rewards to a social inferior. However, the growing public recognition of the expertise that the chief officer brought to urban regulation, combined with the emergence of networked institutions responsible for the exchange of scientific knowledge and the introduction of professional accreditation, gradually strengthened his position within civic society and ultimately legitimized fire-fighting as a public duty. Yet, the municipality's increasing reliance on its chief officers for managing the hazardous and amorphous urban landscape coincided with the gradual separation of professional services from their historic affinity with place. Municipal officers increasingly looked to their peers in other cities for advice on urban management, while claims to professional expertise had greater bearing than local ties and informal relations on brigade recruitment policies. In the case of fire services, this was exemplified when Birmingham's complete dependence on its fire brigade during the air-raids of 1940–1 coincided with the Tozer family's sixty-year grip on the city coming to an abrupt end. As both cities continued to grow, municipal government in Birmingham and Leicester accepted the importance of decentralized operational authority, a recognition similarly evident during the inter-war years in the appointment of transport officials, architects and engineers responsible for service delivery in a sprawling suburban landscape. Although the remit of the municipal authorities had broadened since the reforms of the eighteen-thirties, and despite the encroachment of central government into social welfare, service delivery, particularly in the domain of public protection and planning, remained quintessentially local.80 This in turn contributed to the celebration of ‘a century of municipal progress’ in the mid nineteen-thirties.81 Again, in the case of fire services, it took the threat of incendiary bombs to precipitate civil defence planning by the state during the nineteen-thirties, and the eventual compulsion of fire brigades in 1938.82 Their scientific knowledge was the main means by which the chief officers negotiated their increasingly advantageous positions within municipal government. Central government and municipalities, regardless of their extensive administrative capacity, did not possess sufficient professional knowledge of the work of fire departments, especially where questions hinged on the application of science and engineering to fire-related problems. Contrary to Jordanova's intimation that knowledge was socially constructed, chief fire officers learned to exploit their positions as ‘purveyors of specialist knowledge’ to strengthen their authority and build a scientifically objective profession grounded in evidence-based policy-making, through which they distinguished fire-fighting as a purely technical issue divorced from unedifying political interests.83 By identifying problems associated with, for example, new fire risks or water supplies, and drawing upon specialized knowledge and equipment in seeking explanations and solutions, chief officers provided the foundations for adopting more stringent measures for tackling them. They were assisted in this, albeit unevenly, by prominent disasters, which helped to cement their indispensability to municipal regulation by magnifying everyday public anxieties and defining a technical issue to be placed on the political agenda. It was inevitable, then, that the independence and authority of chief officers became a defining characteristic of municipal administration between the eighteen-seventies and nineteen-thirties. As the work of fire departments became more complex and time-consuming, traditional ruling elites were unable to devote as much time to the minutiae of policy. This enabled chief officers to develop sophisticated and hierarchical work structures through which they exerted their superior knowledge and commanded greater resources. Yet, expertise was equally contingent on existing and past relationships between officers and civic elites. Many of these relations were shaped by functional reforms and unexpected crises, as well as elaborate social and familial networks maintained by dominant figures like Alfred Tozer in Birmingham or Henry Neale in Leicester who, upon his retirement in 1938, was praised by Ernest Wilford, who proudly declared that they had worked together ‘for more than twenty years, and we have become the closest and most steadfast of friends’.84 Thus, as ‘a locus for the formulation and implementation of public policy’, municipalities were part of the ‘social domain’ shaped by urbanization and industrialization,85 while authority figures like the chief fire officer served as the interface between the local state and civil society. Increasingly autonomous and technically proficient, the social history of municipal officers and services teases out the interdependent relationship between expertise and democracy, and sheds light on the risks associated with urban life and the changing structure of elite power. Footnotes * The author is grateful to the British Fire Services Association and the Institution of Fire Engineers for granting access to their private collections. The Economic and Social Research Council and The Leverhulme Trust funded the research. This article is a revised version of a paper originally presented to the international conference on ‘Local elites and the modernisation of local government, 1850–1940’, held at the University of Gröningen, 21–23 Sept. 2005. The author also acknowledges helpful comments made on an earlier version of this article. 1 O. MacDonagh, ‘The 19th-century revolution in government: a reappraisal’ , Historical Jour. , i ( 1958 ), 52 – 67 ; Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close H. Parris, ‘The 19th-century revolution in government: a reappraisal reappraised’ , Historical Jour. , iii ( 1960 ), 17 – 37 ; Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close V. Cromwell, ‘Interpretations of 19th-century administration: an analysis’ , Victorian Stud. , ix ( 1966 ), 245 – 55 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; O. MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government, 1830–70 (1977); Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators and Professionals, 1860–1919, ed. R. M. Macleod (Cambridge, 1988). 2 C. Hein, ‘Resilient Tokyo: disaster and transformation in the Japanese city’, in The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, ed. L. J. Vale and T. J. Campanella (Oxford, 2005), pp. 213–34; G. Massard-Guilbaud, ‘Introduction: the urban catastrophe – challenge to the social, economic, and cultural order of the city’, in Cities and Catastrophes: Villes et Catastrophes, ed. G. Massard-Guilbaud, H. L. Platt and D. Schott (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), pp. 38–40. 3 B. Luckin, ‘Accidents, disasters and cities’ , Urban Hist. , xx ( 1993 ), 177 – 90 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; Out of Ground Zero: Case Studies in Urban Reinvention, ed. J. Ockman (Munich, 2002); L. J. Vale and T. Campanella, ‘Conclusion: axioms of resilience’, in Vale and Campanella, Resilient City, pp. 336–7; C. M. Rosen, The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (Cambridge, 1986), p. 4. 4 C. Hamlin, ‘Muddling in Bumbledom: on the enormity of large sanitary improvements in four British towns, 1855–85’ , Victorian Stud. , xxxii ( 1988 ), 55 – 83 ; Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close C. Hamlin, ‘Sanitary policing and the local state, 1873–4: a statistical study of English and Welsh towns’ , Soc. Hist. of Medicine , xviii ( 2005 ), 39 – 61 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; R. Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh: Land, Property and Trust in the 19th Century (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 415–58; P. Laxton and G. Kearns, ‘Power and salubrity: the politics of sanitary reform in Victorian Liverpool’, in Les Hygiénistes: Enjeux, Modèles et Practiques, ed. P. Bourdelais (Paris and Berlin, 2001), pp. 182–9. 5 S. Ewen, ‘Preparing the British fire service for war: local government, nationalisation and evolutionary reform, 1935–41’ , Contemporary British Hist. , xx ( 2006 ), 209 – 31 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 6 For a similar argument, see M. Tebeau, Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800–1950 (Baltimore, Md., 2003); see also S. Ewen, ‘Managing police constables and firefighters: uniformed public services in English cities, c.1870–1930’ , International Rev. of Soc. Hist. , li ( 2006 ), 41 – 67 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 7 T. R. Gourvish, ‘The rise of the professions’, in Later Victorian Britain 1867–1900, ed. T. R. Gourvish and A. O'Day (1988), pp. 13–39, at pp. 14–15; H. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (1989); J. A. Garrard and V. Parrott, ‘Craft, professional and middle-class identity: solicitors and gas engineers c.1850–1914’, in The Making of the British Middle Class? Studies of Regional and Cultural Diversity since the 18th Century, ed. A. Kidd and D. Nicholls (Stroud, 1998), pp. 148–68. 8 The exception here is the police, who have attracted extensive historical interest, notably C. Steedman, Policing the Victorian Community: the Formation of English Provincial Police Forces, 1856–80 (1984); and C. Emsley, The English Police: a Political and Social History (2nd edn., 1996). 9 See esp. A. Briggs, History of Birmingham, ii: Borough and City (1952); as well as his better-known Victorian Cities (1963). 10 E. P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in 19th-Century Urban Government (1973); B. Lancaster, Radicalism, Cooperation and Socialism: Leicester Working-Class Politics 1860–1906 (Leicester, 1987); Leicester in the 20th Century, ed. D. Nash and D. Reeder (Stroud, 1993). 11 A. Briggs, Victorian Cities (1968 edn.), pp. 213–19; M. Elliott, Victorian Leicester (1979). 12 M. Dagenais and P-Y. Saunier, ‘Tales of the periphery: an outline survey of municipal employees and services in the 19th and 20th centuries’, in Municipal Services and Employees in the Modern City, ed. M. Dagenais, I. Maver and P-Y. Saunier (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 1–30; I. Maver, ‘The role and influence of Glasgow's municipal managers, 1890s−1930s’, in Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750, ed. R. J. Morris and R. H. Trainor (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 69–85, at p. 69; P. J. Waller, Town, City and Nation: England 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 281–8. 13 This debate is succinctly summarized in B. M. Doyle, ‘The changing functions of urban government: councillors, officials and pressure groups’, in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, iii: 1840–1950, ed. M. J. Daunton (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 287–313. 14 Although contemporaries estimated that the sums insured against fire increased by 210.9% between 1801 and 1845 alone, Pearson has recently calculated that, notwithstanding impressive market growth between the 1760s and 1840s, 43.8% of British property remained uninsured in 1850 (G. R. Porter, Progress of the Nation in its Various Social and Economic Relations (1847); The Fireman, xi (Sept. 1887), 47; R. Pearson, Insuring the Industrial Revolution: Fire Insurance in Great Britain, 1700–1850 (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 15–54; C. Trebilcock, Phoenix Assurance and the Development of British Insurance (2 vols., Cambridge, 1985–98), i. 124–41). 15 R. Millward, ‘The emergence of gas and water monopolies in 19th-century Britain: contested markets and public control’, in New Perspectives on the Late Victorian Economy, ed. J. Foreman-Peck (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 96–124; R. Millward, Private and Public Enterprise in Europe: Energy, Telecommunications and Transport, 1830–1990 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 42–53; R. Rodger, ‘The invisible hand: market forces, housing and the urban form in Victorian cities’, in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. D. Fraser and A. Sutcliffe (1983), pp. 190–211; R. J. Morris, ‘The state, élite and the market: the “visible hand” in the British industrial city system’, in Economic Policy in Europe since the Late Middle Ages: the Visible Hand and the Fortune of Cities, ed. H. Diederiks, P. Hohenberg and M. Wagenaar (Leicester, 1992), pp. 177–99. 16 The Scottish experience of municipalization is, however, different, with Glasgow and Edinburgh forming municipal brigades in 1807 and 1824 respectively, the former a police brigade and the latter a permanent brigade. This innovative approach was in part the result of local disasters, such as Edinburgh's ‘great fire’ of 1824, but also owed something to the Scottish tradition of local ‘policing’, which, dating from the late 18th century with the writings of Adam Smith, combined the local state's traditional crime detection functions with broader regulatory powers over street cleansing, lighting and fire-fighting (K. Carson and H. Idzikowska, ‘The social production of Scottish policing, 1795–1900’, in Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750–1850, ed. D. Hay and F. Snyder (Oxford, 1989), pp. 267–97, at pp. 270–2). 17 H. S. Bell, The Legislation and Administration of the Fire Brigade Service of the United Kingdom (1919), p. 19. 18 Bell, p. 17. Similar controversies existed in the funding of other municipal services, notably utilities (R. Millward, ‘The political economy of urban utilities’, in Cambridge Urban History, iii. 315–49, at pp. 324–35). 19 Braidwood, a qualified surveyor and engineer, left Edinburgh, the first municipal fire brigade, in 1833 to become superintendent of the London Fire Engine Establishment, which was managed by a conglomerate of insurance companies. Upon his death at the Tooley Street fire in 1861, which ultimately precipitated the transfer of responsibility for fire-fighting from the insurance industry to the Metropolitan Board of Works four years later, Braidwood was replaced by Eyre Massey Shaw, who then took command of the publicly-controlled Metropolitan Fire Brigade. 20 J. Braidwood, On the Construction of Fire-Engines and Apparatus (Edinburgh, 1830); E. M. Shaw, Fire Protection: a Complete Manual of the Organisation, Machinery, Discipline, and General Working of the Fire Brigade of London (1876); V. Bailey, ‘The early history of the Fire Brigades Union’, in Forged in Fire: the History of the Fire Brigades Union, ed. V. Bailey (1992), pp. 3–97, at p. 5; G. V. Blackstone, The History of the British Fire Service (1957); T. Segars, ‘Working for London's Fire Brigade, 1889–1939’, in Politics and the People of London: the London County Council, 1889–1965, ed. A. Saint (1989), pp. 167–85. 21 A. Anderson, ‘The development of municipal fire departments in the United States’ , Jour. Libertarian Stud. , iii ( 1979 ), 331 – 59 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; A. S. Greenberg, ‘The origins of the American municipal fire department: 19th century change from an international perspective’, in Dagenais, Maver and Saunier, pp. 47–65 at pp. 54–5. 22 Doyle, p. 296. 23 R. Ford, ‘Beneath two helmets: the history of police fire brigades’, Police Review, 19 Sept. 1969, pp. 833–86 and 3 Oct. 1969, pp. 874–5. Indeed, after leaving the armed forces Massey Shaw himself briefly combined roles as chief constable and fire superintendent in the Belfast police from 1860 to 1861. 24 The Fireman, xi (June 1888), 228. 25 Birmingham City Archives (hereafter B.C.A.) [unreferenced], watch committee minutes, 14 May 1867, p. 170, 30 July 1867, p. 201, 29 July 1873, p. 447; L. Jones, ‘Public pursuit or private profit? Liberal businessmen and municipal politics in Birmingham 1865–1900’ , Business Hist. , xxv ( 1983 ), 240 – 59 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 26 C. Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: the Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago, Ill., 1995); K. Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire 1871–4 (Chicago, Ill., 1995), pp. 22–3; K. Rozario, ‘Making progress: disaster narratives and the art of optimism in modern America’, in Vale and Campanella, Resilient City, pp. 27–54. 27 Birmingham Mail and Birmingham Gazette, 28–30 Aug. 1878; B.C.A. [unreferenced], watch committee minutes, 1 Nov. 1878, 6 Dec. 1878, 31 Jan. 1879; Hein, p. 229. 28 See esp. Rosen, ch. 1. 29 Leicester, Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland (hereafter R.O.L.), CM42/10, watch committee minutes, 26 July 1870, pp. 128–9, 26 Sept. 1871, p. 222, 10 Oct. 1871, p. 226; Leicester Journal, 18 Aug. 1871, 23 Feb. 1872. 30 R. J. Morris, ‘Governance: two centuries of urban growth’, in Morris and Trainor, pp. 1–14, at p. 12; Greenberg, p. 53; Millward, pp. 335–8. 31 Waller, p. 287. 32 B.C.A. [unreferenced], watch committee minutes, 1 Apr. 1879; Birmingham Faces and Places, vi (1894), 52–5; Waller, p. 286. 33 Fire and Water, xviii (1901), 136–8, xxiii (1906), 52; Glasgow Daily Herald, 10 July 1861, p. 3; J. Kenlon, Fires and Fire-Fighters (1914), pp. 45–9; R. Cooper, ‘The fireman: immaculate manhood’ , Jour. Popular Culture , xxiv ( 1995 ), 138 – 70 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 34 Morris, ‘Governance’, p. 3; Patricians, Power and Politics in 19th-Century Towns, ed. D. Cannadine (Leicester, 1982); R. H. Trainor, Black Country Elites: the Exercise of Authority in an Industrial Area 1830–1900 (Oxford, 1993); P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: the Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Brighton, 1980), pp. 134–57. 35 Rodger, Transformation of Edinburgh, pp. 429–30. 36 Maver, p. 69. I. T. Johnson (1884–1901) and his son (1901–18) were both chief officers of Southampton Fire Brigade, while the latter's five brothers also served in the local brigade and were later appointed high-ranking officers in the London, West Ham, Gloucester and Ramsgate brigades. Four generations of the McMurtrie family have served in Edinburgh since Thomas senior volunteered for service in the 19th century. Father and son, William and Thomas Rose were both superintendents of Manchester Fire Brigade from 1828 to 1862. The Jeffreys family dominated Dunoon Fire Brigade from its foundation in 1889 until 1978, the Bretts controlled Sandwich for over a century, while the Holland family experienced four generations of distinguished service during the 20th century in Radcliffe, Bristol and elsewhere (A. House, Gateway Fire-Fighters: a History of the Southampton Fire Brigade (Southampton, 1996), pp. 44–5; R. F. Bonner, Manchester Fire Brigade (Manchester, 1988), p. 29; D. Dalziel, Dunoon Fire Service: Centenary, 1889–1989 (Glasgow, 1989); Message: the Newsletter of Lothian and Borders Fire Brigade, xi (2003), 6–7; R. 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Wermiel, The Fireproof Building: Technology and Public Safety in the 19th-Century American City (Baltimore, Md., 2000). 44 City of Birmingham Fire Brigade, Rules and Regulations, Conditions of Service, and Hints on Life Saving (Birmingham, 1903); R.O.L., L352.2, Leicester Fire Brigade Annual Report (Leicester, 1925), p. 12; B.C.A., MS. 1303/38, Birmingham Fire Brigade Annual Report (Birmingham, 1929), pp. 15–18; R. Read and W. Morris, Aspects of Fire Precautions in Buildings (1983), pp. 11–16; S. M. Gaskell, Building Control: National Legislation and the Introduction of Local Bye-laws in Victorian England (1983). 45 J. Pellew, ‘The home office and the Explosives Act of 1875’ , Victorian Stud. , xviii ( 1974 ), 175 – 94 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 46 For a similar argument, see J. McSwain, ‘Fire hazards and protection of property: municipal regulation of the storage and supply of fuel oil in Mobile, Alabama, 1894–1910’ , Jour. Urban Hist. , xxviii ( 2002 ), 599 – 628 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 47 R.O.L., CM42/10, watch committee minutes, 21 May 1872, pp. 286–7. 48 R.O.L., CM42/11, watch committee minutes, 11 Feb. 1873, p. 33, 20 May 1873, pp. 60–2. This replaced the permissive 1847 Waterworks Clauses Act, which granted fire brigades powers to use public water supplies without payment. 49 R.O.L., CM42/12, watch committee minutes, 10 July 1877 (not paginated); see comments made on suburban fires on 10 July 1877 and 19 March 1878 (not paginated). 50 R.O.L., CM42/13, watch committee minutes, 15 Apr. 1880, 12 Apr. 1881 (not paginated). 51 R.O.L., CM41/15, watch committee minutes, 4 Apr. 1889 (not paginated). 52 R.O.L., CM1/13, Leicester borough council minutes, 28 May 1889, pp. 169–73; Leicester Daily Mercury, 24 May 1889, p. 5. 53 H. Shpayer-Makov, The Making of a Policeman: a Social History of a Labour Force in Metropolitan London, 1829–1914 (Aldershot, 2002); Ewen, ‘Managing police constables and firefighters’. 54 R.O.L., CM42/16, watch committee minutes, 1 Dec. 1891, pp. 30–2; Fire and Water, x (1893), 18. 55 Doyle, p. 296. 56 Institution of Fire Engineers Annual Report (1927), p. 18. 57 M. Bromley and N. Hayes, ‘Campaigner, watchdog or municipal lackey? Reflections on the inter-war provincial press, local identity and civic welfarism’ , Media Hist. , viii ( 2002 ), 197 – 212 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 58 Rozario, p. 36; P. Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). 59 Leicester Daily Mercury, 8 Feb. 1890, p. 2, 23 Feb. 1895, p. 2. 60 See, e.g., Alfred Tozer's views on fire escapes in factories in Midland Express, 12 June 1902. 61 E. Higgs, ‘The rise of the information state: the development of central state surveillance of the citizen in England, 1500–2000’ , Jour. 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Ewen, ‘The internationalization of fire protection: in pursuit of municipal networks in Edwardian Birmingham’ , Urban Hist. , xxxii ( 2005 ), 285 – 304 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 63 The Fireman, xiv (May 1891), 201–2. 64 B.C.A., MS. 1303/38, Birmingham Fire Brigade Annual Report (Birmingham, 1880), pp. 7–8. 65 Leicester Daily Mercury, 9 Feb. 1898, p. 1; The Fireman, xii (Jan. 1889), pp. 126–8. 66 R.O.L., L352.2, Leicester Fire Brigade Annual Report (Leicester, 1924), p. 4; Leicester Fire Brigade Annual Report (Leicester, 1925), p. 4; B.C.A., MS. 1303/38, Birmingham Fire Brigade Annual Report (Birmingham, 1923), p. 2; Birmingham Fire Brigade Annual Report (Birmingham, 1927), p. 17. 67 R.O.L., CM42/19, watch committee minutes, 18 Apr. 1904, p. 250; Ewen, ‘Internationalization’, p. 299. 68 J. Teaford, ‘Technology, expertise, and municipal services, 1860–1940’ , Jour. 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Spoor, White-Collar Union: 60 Years of NALGO (1967). 70 Fire and Water, i (1884), 1. 71 Fire and Water, xxv (1908), 220. 72 S. Ewen, ‘Central government and the modernization of the British fire service, 1900–38’ , Twentieth Century British Hist. , xiv ( 2003 ), 317 – 38 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at pp. 327–8. 73 The N.F.B.U. was renamed the National Fire Brigades Association in 1919 to prevent confusion arising with the Fire Brigades Union, the service trade union established in 1913. 74 I.F.E. Annual Report (1925), pp. 5–10; I.F.E. Annual Report (1939), pp. 53–4; Fire, xxix (1938) 208, xxx (1938), 53; Chemical Fires: How to Deal with Fires Involving Chemicals and Dangerous Goods, ed. A. Pordage (Edinburgh, 1934). Pordage, the I.F.E.'s honorary secretary, was the respected chief officer of Edinburgh Fire Brigade (1896–1927). 75 Moore and Rodger, p. 49. 76 I.F.E. Annual Report (1930), p. 33. 77 Similarly, Birmingham's council house was the location for the P.F.B.A.'s annual conference on two separate occasions in 1908 and 1915, thanks to Tozer's membership of its governing council. In all, seven annual meetings were held in Leicester during this period, including the I.F.E.'s inaugural conference in 1918, and three in Birmingham. 78 Fire, v (1922), 21. 79 E.g., see Birmingham Fire Brigade, Rules and Regulations, pp. 36–8. 80 J. W. R. Whitehand and C. M. Carr, ‘The creators of England's inter-war suburbs’ , Urban Hist. , xxviii ( 2001 ), 218 – 34 ; Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close N. Hayes, ‘Civic perceptions: housing and local decision-making in English cities in the 1920s’ , Urban Hist. , xxvii ( 2000 ), 211 – 33 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; M. J. Daunton, ‘Epilogue’, in Cambridge Urban History, iii. 839. 81 See chapters in A Century of Municipal Progress, 1835–1935, ed. H. J. Laski, W. I. 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TI - Chief officers and professional identities: the case of fire services in English municipal government, c.1870–1938
JF - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2007.00409.x
DA - 2008-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/chief-officers-and-professional-identities-the-case-of-fire-services-Ie6g0SLoa4
SP - 123
EP - 149
VL - 81
IS - 211
DP - DeepDyve
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