Originally published in St. James's Magazine (W. Kent) vol.2 #5 (Aug 1861).
The destructive calamity which has laid three acres of warehouses waste on the southern bank of the Thames, may naturally be taken as the text for a brief account of the Fire Brigade, and an attempt to appreciate its invaluable services, and to estimate the condition of London, relatively to other great cities, with reference to its means of protection against fire.
Many a reader will remember a very remarkable picture of John Millais', which adorned the walls of the Royal Academy some years ago. It was called "The Rescue." The scene was the staircase leading to the upper storeys of a house. The dense volumes of smoke, and the lambent flickering tongues of flame breathing through from above, told plainly of the presence of the Fire Demon. There was a woman in the foreground, clad merely in her night-dress—(the Demon mostly comes when the household is asleep)—kneeling upon the stairs, and stretching her arms forward and upward. The straining of the eye-balls, the intense expression of the face, told of the heart agony, the despair, she had suffered, and the rich gush of happiness that had succeeded them. Bursting through the thick veil of smoke comes a fireman of the Brigade, fully equipped for his work. How calm and brave, and fit for his purpose, he looks! What more is needed to the making-up of a hero? The strong, useful black helmet, the axe and the sober dregs, are better for such work than gold lace and plumes would be. But see! He bears in either arm a chubby darling one, and to his back a third little fellow clings. This is why the mother stretches out her arms to the Brigade-man with such frantic gladness; this is why she almost seems to worship the plain, calm, strong, brave man, who has saved those whose loss would have been her death, What cares she for aught else? The house and all that is in it may make a merry bonfire: though the Turkey carpet on the stairs, and the lace upon her nightclothes, indicate the presence of wealth—what of that? Her darlings are saved, and she owes what is indeed "The Rescue," to the Brigade.
In seeking the subject for this fine picture, the artist had no need to visit the regions of fiction. It was an every-day matter of fact, such as happens hundreds of times every year. Poor Braidwood told us there were two fires and a half in London for every day in the year; and at a very large proportion of these there is at least the risk of sacrifice of life. Much of this is overcome by the efforts of the persons exposed to danger; in other cases, they get aid from the public and the police. A short time ago, a brave cabman (and cabmen can be brave) rescued a whole family out of a house burning near Cheapside, by getting upon the roof of his cab and assisting the inmates out of the first-floor windows, In other eases, the Escapes provided by the excellent society of which Mr. Sampson Low is Secretary, do inestimable service. But, of all instrumentalities for rescue, which, under Providence, are promoted to save human life, none is to be compared to the Fire Brigade.
The Fire Brigade may be said to have originated with the noble man who organized it, and commanded it, until he met his death the other day, bravely doing his duty in its foremost rank. James Braidwood was a citizen of Edinburgh: he was born in 1800; his father was a cabinetmaker; and up to the year 1824 young James worked at that trade. On the 15th and 16th of November, 1824, a great fire broke out in Edinburgh. It began in the Royal Bank Close, and destroyed the houses at the part of the south side of High Street and the eastern angle of Parliament Square; it destroyed the steeple and spire of the Tron Church, and, in a word, laid the fairest part of the Old Town in ruins. There is a full account of that fire in Blackwood's Magazine (No. XCV.), and it appears that some of the most famous contributors of that periodical—then in its palmiest days—were present. About that time the subject of a fire had occupied a prominent position in a "Noctes;" Hogg and Tickler going out to see a shoemaker's shop burnt down, where the Shepherd gets his pocket picked of his watch; and they both return to North, whom they had left asleep on the sofa, and wind up with one of Ambrose's suppers. Certainly, Scott was present at this great fire; for the writer of the article relates how the Great Unknown dropped his stick upon the pavement when the steeple of the Tron Chureh fell. It was at that fire that James Braidwood first distinguished himself. Shortly after it he organized the Edinburgh Fire Brigade, and was made its Superintendent. He wrote a book about the best modes of dealing with fires, and even struck out new theories on the subject from the result of his own observation. Perceiving the slight effect that water directed up the outside of a house has upon the flames within, he first introduced the system of entering the burning piles and combating the Demon in his secretest and most dangerous lurking-places. In the tall Edinburgh houses the superiority of this plan was at once obvious.
Previous to 1833 London had no Fire Brigade. The means to put out fires were provided in a desultory and disorganized manner, and were not very effectual. The parishes had small engines, and fire-buckets were to be found in warehouses, and large houses of business or residence. It is true, that the Legislature (stimulated thereto by the Great Fire of 1666) had passed an Act of: Parliament "for preventing and suppressing of fires within the City of London, and Liberties thereof;" but in truth it was found that fires would not be obedient to Acts of Parliament, but rather, made small account of documents which were fit for little else than to be burnt. When the Insurance Offices came into existence they provided each its own fire-engines; possibly finding it cheaper to put out fires—the damages of which they had to pay for—than to let them burn on. Still, there was no action of an organized kind until 1833, when the Insurance Offices consulted together, and agreed to amalgamate their forces and found a Fire Brigade. That same year James Braidwood was sent for to come from Edinburgh and take command of the new corps; and from that time London had a Fire Brigade.
How well and nobly he did his duty there is little need for us to tell. During the past month the papers have teemed with anecdotes and traits of his bravely-spent and active life. One while we hear his calmness in peril extolled—a calmness so potent that it quelled the fears of timorous women and children; another tells how he bore barrels of gunpowder from the flames, holding them high above his head, and directing his men to play the water over the dangerous commodity as he walked. When he met his death he was engaged in the kindly office of administering restorative refreshment to some of his men who had been exposed to the fierceness of the heat. Honoured, beloved, his life was one long career of brave deeds,—of deeds more noble than those which gild the soldier's laurel, just as saving is nobler than killing. "In a rude, modest. form (Mr. Carlyle writes of him), actually a kind of hero." Modest, surely, as all true heroes are; but why "rude" we know not. Certainly it was no rude or common man whom the people mourned as they thronged in thousands to do honour to his funeral, winding its slow and solemn way to the Abney Cemetery. Ere we bid farewell to Braidwood, let us venture to express a hope, that the mourning of those thousands may take some more solid and definite form than mere words. Mr. Carlyle very properly proposed that something should be done by the public for the endowment of his family, as a recognition of the merit of him whom they have lost. There has been a meeting at the Mansion House, and an influential committee appointed. Let us hope the results will be worthy of the cause.
In dealing with the great fire at Cotton's Wharf, which proved so fatal to poor Braidwood, the reporters have taken strange liberties of language and of fancy. The loss has been estimated variously—from a quarter of a million to six millions sterling. Soberer and more detailed calculations make it little over a million. Perhaps, however, it would be asking too much to expect severe arithmetic from gentlemen who are capable of comparing the Thames to "a stream of burnished gold," and the scene of the fire itself to a city of Semiramis-looking temples, among which the firemen, with their antique helmets, moved about like so many Sardanapaluses." These imaginative gentlemen have also repeated over and over again the assertion, that this was by far the largest conflagration that had taken place in London since the Great Fire of 1666. Would that it had been so! Unfortunately, the terrible roll of the Fire Demon's conquests tells us far otherwise. In 1716 there was a great fire at Wapping, which entirely consumed a hundred and fifty houses. Thirty-two years later there was an awful conflagration about Cornhill, which destroyed two hundred houses. On the 21st of July, 1794, there was a fire at Wapping, which burnt six hundred and thirty houses, and a warehouse containing 35,000 bags of saltpetre. Over the very ground around London Bridge there have been fires before nearly, if not quite, rivalling this one in magnitude; and the ancient History of London tells of a fearful calamity which consumed the whole of the bridge, and caused the destruction of about two thousand persons who happened to be on it at the time. London Bridge, it must be remembered, was formerly covered with houses built on both sides, and by some means or other these houses were set fire to at either end, and the poor people who had crowded to the bridge were either burnt like rats in a haystack, or were drowned in the rapid stream, which was their only refuge.
It is not by sums of money, or particulars of loss, that the worst work of the Fire Demon can be estimated. Of course, it is a calamity for large stores of valuable property to be destroyed; and we cannot agree with those thoughtless and most illogical reasoners who maintain that because the Insurance Offices bear the loss no one really loses. It is impossible to destroy a million's worth of property without making somebody a million poorer. But these are losses that may be borne. The Insurance Offices take their quota; and it is some consolation to them that these great fires always beget a number of fresh insurances; so that, somehow or other, the loss is distributed among a great many persons, and it presses nowhere with any intolerable severity. But not so with the loss of the precious human lives. What amount of insurance can represent the terrible agony of those poor creatures who long ago met their fearful death upon the Bridge, or the still more unendurable agony of the survivors? What sum of money can be offered to Mrs. Braidwood and her six children as a compensation for the great loss they have suffered? What shall repay the family of poor Mr. Scott, who was killed almost at Braidwood's side, and of whom nothing was found but a little metal he had about him, and a poor handful of calcined bones? These are the most terrible feats of the Fire Demon, and it is to preserve us from those that we look to the Brigade for "The Rescue."
Those who understand the matter appear to think that London is even yet very inadequately provided with the means of quelling fires;—Braidwood thought and said so. He deprecated the growing fondness for vast warehouses filled with combustible property. He ridiculed the word fireproof. No building, he said, could be considered fireproof that was filled with goods more or less combustible. He pointed out how the provisions of the Building Act are evaded, and how piles of building had been erected which were nothing but huge furnaces, only awaiting a spark to kindle them into inextinguishable fires. In a sense, indeed, it may be said that he predicted the calamity which killed him; for he pointed out that wherever one of these piles of fireproof warehouses should be ignited, it would be quite out of the power of the Brigade to put it out. Had his warning voice been listened to, he might still have been among us to dare and to save—still have been ready to come to the Rescue.