A history of… firefighting (Part 1)

If the fire brigade turned up at your house in ancient Rome it was time to move…

Having written about the making of fire a couple of weeks ago I thought that it might be interesting to explore the history of how humanity has tried to cope with it when it gets out of hand. Fire was unlikely to have been too much of a problem until people started living in towns and cities. For sure some huts would have burned down, fields caught on fire and so on, but it only really presented a material risk when there were lots of closely packed buildings together so that the ignition of one could lead to the destruction of an entire settlement. 

Sometimes these fires started by accident, but often they were weapons of war. One could be forgiven for thinking that the noble sacrifice of the ‘300’ Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae gave the Greeks time to muster their forces and defeat the Persians, but it was actually more complicated than that.¹ Having wiped out the Spartans, the Persian emperor Xerxes led his army through Greece burning the cities of Thespiae and Plataea to the ground and razed Athens itself in September 480 BCE before ultimately being defeated at the Battle of Salamis. A hundred and fifty years later, in 330 BCE, Alexander the Great burned down Xerxes’s home city of Persepolis as payback for Athens. Maybe. It is also possible that Thaïs, a mistress of Ptolemy I Soter, drunkenly suggested the idea during a riotous party and things got a bit out of hand…

The Great Fire of Rome

There isn’t much to be done about the fires started by an invading army, but individual buildings accidentally catching on fire could be dealt with. Ancient Rome was incredibly densely populated – around 75,000 per square kilometre (that’s nearly 200,000 people per square mile) – roughly the same as modern-day Hong Kong (and much more than 29,000/km in New York’s most densely populated borough, Manhattan). Despite the risk fire presented to the city, for much of its history Rome (and many other cities in the empire) did not have a formal fire-fighting force. This did not go unnoticed – Pliny the Younger was so concerned about it that he wrote to the Emperor Trajan proposing a solution:

While I was making a progress in a different part of the province, a most extensive fire broke out at Nicomedia, which not only consumed several private houses, but also two public buildings; the town-house and the temple of Isis, though they stood on contrary sides of the street. The occasion of its spreading thus far was partly owing to the violence of the wind, and partly to the indolence of the people, who, manifestly, stood idle and motionless spectators of this terrible calamity. The truth is the city was not furnished with either engines, buckets, or any single instrument suitable for extinguishing fires; which I have now however given directions to have prepared. You will consider, Sir, whether it may not be advisable to institute a company of fire-men, consisting only of one hundred and fifty members. I will take care none but those of that business shall be admitted into it, and that the privileges granted them shall not be applied to any other purpose. As this corporate body will be restricted to so small a number of members, it will be easy to keep them under proper regulation.

A sensible idea, right? The problem was that Roman emperors really didn’t like the idea of formally organised groups of men. While they might be formed for a beneficial purpose, those in power worried that they could repurposed to threaten the authority of the state, as Trajan’s response shows:

You are of the opinion it would be proper to establish a company of firemen in Nicomedia, agreeably to what has been practised in several other cities. But it is to be remembered that societies of this sort have greatly disturbed the peace of the province in general, and of those cities in particular. Whatever name we give them, and for whatever purposes they may be founded, they will not fail to form themselves into factious assemblies, however short their meetings may be. It will therefore be safer to provide such machines as are of service in extinguishing fires, enjoining the owners of houses to assist in preventing the mischief from spreading, and, if it should be necessary, to call in the aid of the populace.

Roman home-owners didn't have to worry too much about fire, however, because private enterprise stepped in to fill the void created by the inaction of the state. Okay, actually they still needed to worry quite a lot, because the private enterprise in question was operated by one Marcus Licinius Crassus (115–53 BCE). Crassus formed a private firefighting brigade of some 500 slaves and if your house happened to catch fire they would swiftly be on the scene. And then do nothing. They would only put out the fire if you agreed to sell your house to Crassus. The longer you waited, the more the fire burned, the lower the price went. Oh, and because they were at risk too, the same offer would be made to your neighbours for their houses. Inevitably people would take the deal, the fire would be extinguished, and repairs made to the building. If you were lucky Crassus would then rent your old house back to you. This was a hugely successful operation for him, as Plutarch reports:

…observing how natural and familiar at Rome were such fatalities as the conflagration and collapse of buildings, owing to their being too massive and close together, he proceeded to buy slaves who were architects and builders. Then, when he had over five hundred of these, he would buy houses that were afire, and houses which adjoined those that were afire, and these their owners would let go at a trifling price owing to their fear and uncertainty. In this way the largest part of Rome came into his possession.

Luckily for the Romans a more civic-minded individual, Marcus Egnatius Rufus, came along a few years later. Rufus created a similar band of 600 firefighting slaves, but these ones extinguished fires free of charge! This act was not wholly without self-interest though: the popularity this service accrued enabled him to be elected praetor in 21 BCE without having to go through the usual waiting period. He then had a run at consul in 19 BCE, but the Emperor Augustus, worried about this upstart, had him killed. Augustus was no fool, however, and knew a good thing when he saw it. He co-opted Rufus’s firefighting operation, eventually expanding it to 3,5000 freedmen called the vigiles. Sadly they were no match for the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD which saw 71 per cent of the city destroyed. 

Did the Emperor Nero really ‘fiddle as Rome burned’ as this fire swept through the city? Well he clearly didn’t play the fiddle as it wasn’t invented for another thousand years, but the historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, writing some decades after the event, tells us that he did something equally bizarre:

This fire he beheld from a tower in the house of Maecenas, and, “being greatly delighted,” as he said, “with the beautiful effects of the conflagration,” he sung a poem on the ruin of Troy, in the tragic dress he used on the stage. 

A later historian, Dio Cassius, claimed that he did this wearing a “cithara player’s garb” – the cithara was an early form of lute, so he would have been strumming, not fiddling – but the whole thing is probably anti-Nero propaganda.

As with many of the other trappings of civilisation, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire meant that formal firefighting forces were lost from Europe for the next thousand years. In some places households were required to have a bucket of water on hand at all times so that they could help extinguish fires but these were very much ad-hoc approaches. It took the catastrophic Great Fire of London in 1666 (in which 10,000 houses were destroyed and 100,000 people were displaced) to change things. Inspired by the tragedy of the fire, in 1680 Nicholas Barbon² created a consortium that offered houses in London fire insurance. To safeguard his business Barbon also formed London’s first organised firefighting force, and soon others copied his approach, both in offering insurance and organising brigades. 

The multiplicity of private firefighting forces created a novel problem. If a house was on fire, how did you know if it was insured by your company, and hence should be extinguished? The answer was the fire insurance mark – a small metal plaque with the logo of the company affixed to the front of the house. The Sun Fire Group (founded in 1710 and still trading today as part of the multi-billion-dollar Royal Sun Alliance group) was the first to introduce these and they became widespread. I was taught at school that if a house lacked the correct fire mark, the brigade would stand by and let it burn, but it turns out that this was not true at all. The private fire brigades would put out any fire, regardless of whether the building bore the company mark. Why? Well, a fire from an uninsured building could spread to an insured one; it was also the humane, decent, thing to do; and finally it acted as good advertising for the insurer. As Daniel Defoe remarked:

Only one benefit I cannot omit which they reap from these two societies [insurers] who are not concerned in either; that if any fire happen, whether in houses insured or not insured, they have each of them a set of lusty fellows, generally watermen, who being immediately called up, wherever they live, by watchmen appointed, are, it must be confessed, very active and diligent in helping to put out the fire.

Fire mark of the Hand in Hand Fire & Life Insurance Society on a house in Dulwich

The system of independent fire brigades continued in London for more than a century until in 1833 (at which point there were ten of them) were merged into a single public body, the London Fire Engine Establishment (LFEE), under the charge of James Braidwood. This wasn’t the first municipal fire-fighting force though. Nine years early Braidwood had, at the tender age of 24, been given the fantastic title ‘Master of the Engines’ and set up the world’s first fire service in Edinburgh. He worked fighting fires in London for the rest of his life, sadly dying in the Great Tooley Street Fire of 1861.

 In the next post I will explore the history of firefighting equipment, including the surprisingly long history of the fire engine!

1. Many historians think that the Spartan’s last stand at Thermopylae had no impact at all on the overall outcome of the war. Just don’t tell Gerard Butler that…

2. His father was the fantastically named “Praise-God Barebone” who gave his name to the “Barebone’s Parliament” in 1653. I, in my ignorance, (and ignoring the apostrophe) had always assumed that this was a descriptive name, not that it had been named after a person.