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Fighting Fires: Creating the British Fire Service, 1800-1978, by Shane Ewen; pp. viii + 235. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, £50.00, $80.00.
For fifty years, our knowledge of the British fire service has rested heavily on Geoffrey Blackstone's A History of the British Fire Service (1957), a two-thousand-year history of fire protection from the Romans to the 1950s, with a foreword by Herbert Morrison who, as wartime Home Secretary, took the bold political decision to form the National Fire Service, going against the grain-at least momentarily-of local authority control. Shane Ewen, who has revisited aspects of the past two hundred years of fire service history, now offers a history of the service from the turn of the nineteenth century to the 1970s. The narrative thread of the book is uncomplicated: a story of the nineteenthcentury municipalization and professionalization of organized urban firefighting and of the gradual shift from fire insurance companies protecting their customers' property to a national network of fire brigades, publicly funded and locally run. Aided and abetted by the demands of total war, a similar story runs through the next century, though the post-1945 era saw much more turbulence in industrial relations, culminating in the bitter and less-than-successful national strike of 1977 to 1978. For good reasons, the fire services of the largest British cities-London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Glasgow-receive the greatest scrutiny.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the consensus slowly emerged that firefighting should be a public service, not one dependent upon a patchwork of fire insurance companies and voluntary bodies. Urban elites, with their own commercial and industrial property at...