On this day … 29 May 1852

May 29, 2023May 28, 2023 ~ Peter Smith

The Preston Guardian carried a report on the laying of the foundation stone at the new fire station in Tithebarn Street. Until then, the fire brigade had shared premises with the police station and the town’s ‘lock-up’ in Glovers Court. There was clearly a need for better facilities, given the number of cotton mill fires in the town.

It seems that Preston’s first fire engine was a gift of one of the town’s MPs in 1724, long overdue possibly given the constant danger of fire in the thatched timber houses in which most lived in those days. Indeed, the townsfolk clearly recognised the danger, for a few years earlier in 1696 the court leet had punished ‘The wife of Wm. Blackledge for carrying fire in a paire of Tong[u]es in open street in danger of fireing the Towne and doe fine her in Thirteene shillings and four pence.’

When the town got its first piped water system a few years later, the two men who installed it as a private enterprise, Robert Abbatt and Thomas Kellet, ‘For the purpose of extinguishing fires … had to fix, at their own expense, “five cocks or plugs” in the main pipes, at such parts of the town as the Mayor might direct’.

More fire engines were purchased early in the next century, and as the old timber-framed houses were gradually replaced by houses built of brick, the danger of house fires diminished. But the threat of serious conflagrations at the growing number of cotton mills increased considerably.

In fact, despite the opening of the new fire station, these conflagrations continued to destroy mills and claim lives.

In 1860, Haslam’s mill in Parker Street was destroyed by fire. Probably the most destructive fire was that at John Hawkins and Sons’ Green Bank Mills the following year, where the cost of the fire was put at £25,000. And in 1865, the cost of a fire at Reade and Wall’s cotton factory in Church Street was estimated to be between £2,000 and £3,000.

And in 1893 a serious fire at St. Walburge’s Church caused damage estimated at £1,000.

By the end of the century, there were two manual engines and a steam-powered engine (purchased in 1872 for just short of £800) at the fire station, in the charge of the splendidly named superintendent, Alonzo Savage.

His team seems to have been part-time, to judge by the way they were paid: 4s. 6d. for monthly training; 2s. 6d. for the first hour of their attendance at a fire; 1s. 6d. for each subsequent hour while the fire continued; and 9d. an hour after they had put out the fire but stayed on duty to ensure it didn’t break out again.

Hopefully, the firemen did not view this payment system as a temptation to prolong the duration of fires.