Fire-Fighting Memorabilia at Martin’s Bar

John Hannavy visited Martin’s Bar & Restaurant’s fire engine memorabilia and wrote an article for the Vintage Spirit Magazine (September 2024 edition). Here is that article, for anyone interested in learning more about the history of the collection, which sets the theme for the venue at Highlands End Holiday Park.

Now here’s a conundrum!

Martin’s Bar at the Highlands End Holiday Park in Eype, Dorset, has many branches, and yet there is only one of it. How can that be? The clue is, of course, in the pictures – the highly polished copper and brass nozzles at the business end of firemen’s hoses are known as ‘branches’, and there are many examples of them from far and wide displayed around the walls of the bar.

They are all part of Martin Cox’s collection of fire-fighting memorabilia, now comprising to more than 1,000 items, and they give his bar a unique and unforgettable ambience. Martin has a considerable knowledge base, having served for many years as a Retained Leading Firefighter with the Dorset Fire & Rescue Service.

I paid him a visit a few weeks ago while working on my forthcoming book In Search of Dorset. The reason? One of the star exhibits in the bar – well actually the extension to the bar was actually built round it – is Bridport Fire Station’s former 1902 Merryweather horse-drawn Steam Fire Pump. Lovingly restored and owned by Bridport Museum, it now has pride of place on permanent loan as one of the focal points of Martin’s exhibition.

Full steam pressure on the Merryweather ‘Greenwich Gem’ engine could be raised in about ten minutes, and that meant that, in a town the size of Bridport, if its fire was lit just before leaving the fire station, the pump would be fully functional by the time the engine and crew got to the fire. It was designed so that the stoker, positioned at the back, could tend to the fire and the monitor his pressure gauges while en route. Despite the vehicle being fitted with quite flexible leaf springs, the stoker’s job must have been both uncomfortable and somewhat dangerous. The rest of the crew had nothing to do on the journey and travelled either sitting on the box or standing on the running boards either side. ‘Health and safety’ clearly had not yet been invented back then.

Merryweather & Sons could trace their origins back to the late 17th century and the early fire engine enterprise founded by one Nathaniel Hadley in London. That later became Hadley, Simpkin & Lott and, when Henry Lott retired, the business passed to his nephew by marriage, the splendidly-named Moses Merryweather, who had worked his way up through the business after joining as an apprentice in 1807. The name was formally changed to Merryweather & Son, probably in the early 1860s when Moses’s son, Richard, joined the business. It was Richard and his brother James who started developing the vertical-boilered steam engine which would be incorporated into their fire pumps.

By the 1890s, the company was being run by James, and patents around that time were in the names of James Compton Merryweather and Christopher John Wallace Jakeman, and Bridport’s 1902 twin-cylinder Merryweather ‘Greenwich Gem’ engine was built to their 1896 patents – GB Patents Nos.9610 and 10,213. Patent No.9610 described the ‘improved’ elements of the engine itself, while No.10,213 was concerned with the specifics of the ‘improved’ pumps which would be fitted to the fire engines.

One of the advantages of the design, to which specific attention was drawn in the patent, was that ‘stoking and working the machinery may both be performed by one man, stationed at the rear of the machine’, enabling all the other members of the appliance’s crew to actually deal with the fire they had been called to extinguish.

The engine was hauled by a pair of horses, and reportedly the landlord of The Bull Inn made three horses available for the task, including a ‘spare’ if necessary.

The earliest account of a steam engine being harnessed to a mobile pump to help fight fires actually goes back a long way – to the late 1820s when Swedish-American engineer John Ericsson designed such a vehicle, and British engineer John Braithwaite actually built it.

Ericsson and Braithwaite were very busy in 1829, as they also designed and built the locomotive Novelty which took part in the Rainhill Trials in 1829 – the trials proving the success of Stephenson’s Rocket.

Fighting fires is almost as old as mankind itself, and as mankind has a habit of constructing buildings out of highly inflammable materials, the need for people skilled in putting fires out grew in tandem with the number of buildings. And in Dorset, which even today has more than 10% of all the thatched buildings in the country, firemen have always been in heavy demand. Back in 1762, on the eastern side of the county, as a result of hot coals being thrown on to a tinder-dry rubbish heap outside the Bull’s Head Inn, the Great Fire of Wareham ravaged the town on the breezy afternoon of Sunday 25th July, destroying 133 houses in just a few hours, most of them timber-framed and thatched. The town’s pair of hand-operated fire engines were woefully in the midst of such a fast-moving fire. The devastation ultimately led to thatched properties being banned by the local council, and the town was rebuilt with slated or tiled roofs.

In the days before municipal fire services came along, putting fires out was a competitive business, with rival companies racing to the scene – and there were stories, probably apocryphal, that if they got there and found that the building was protected by a fire insurance company which they were not in partnership with, the firemen just watching the building burn! There is, however, no reliable evidence that such calculated and negligent behaviour actually happened – not that the truth, or otherwise, of such stories really mattered. A good story, true or not, could be spread just as quickly as a fire, and almost as easily back then as it would be today.

Each insurance company affixed a little metal plaque bearing their insignia to buildings which they insured, and by the early years of the 20th century and, like stamp collecting, or any other collecting hobby, seeking out and collecting those badges had become something of a craze. In 1911, the first ever book on the
history of ‘fire plates’ was published, and The Antiquary, a monthly magazine ‘devoted to the past’ ran an article on the craze, which included a brief history of fire brigades – and of the alleged rogue behaviour of the past:

‘Collector mania takes many forms, and the passion developed in recent years by a few enthusiasts for collecting the fire-marks and fire-plates which used to be affixed to the walls of houses, is by no means the most eccentric of such forms.

In the early days of fire insurance – the first fire office in London appears to have been started about 1667, immediately after the Great Fire – each company maintained its own fire brigade, and as that brigade was maintained simply for the purpose of protecting and saving the property of the company to which it belonged, and for no other purpose whatever, it was important that means of identification of the company in which the insurance of a burning house had been effected should be at once available… …so that, in the event of a fire taking place, a fire-brigade on arriving could tell at once whether it was a fire which there company was interested in putting out, and, if it was not, could comfortably return to their homes…’

That would have been a very short-sighted policy, with fires quickly spreading from an uninsured building to an insured building, with dire financial and social consequences.

What is believed to be Britain’s oldest fire insurance company was established in 1680, using the name ‘The Fire Office’, but that name lasted only until 1705 when it adopted the names Phoenix Fire Office, and later Phoenix Protection. Another of the early companies was the Hand in Hand Fire Office, later known as the Hand in Hand Fire & Life Insurance Society, set up in 1696, which later merged with Norwich Union – which had been established just a year later – adopting the former’s ‘hand-in-hand’ logo in 1905. Fire plates from both these companies can be seen on the walls of Martin’s Bar.

Hand in Hand purchased its first fire engine in 1710, ten years after it had made its first insurance pay-out for the loss of a building in London’s Newport Street.

As fighting fires was, by its very nature, a hazardous occupation, the development of protective clothing and ‘hard hats’ was vital to minimise potential injuries. As far as helmets were concerned, Britain was some way behind the French fire services – known as the ‘Sapeurs-Pompiers’, and the distinctive brass helmet, which served so many early fire brigades, owes its popularity to a visit to France by Eyre Massey Shaw, who served as Superintendent of the London Fire Engine Establishment and its successors – the Metropolitan Fire Service and The London Fire Brigade – for 30 years from 1861. He brought one of the helmets used by the Sapeurs-Pompiers back to London, and persuaded Merryweather & Sons to create a modified version of it. Used by fire brigades across the country from 1868 until well into the 20th century – and manufactured by several different companies – it is still referred to as the ‘Merryweather Pattern’ helmet, distinguished by the ‘crossed axes’ badge on the front.

Collecting fire brigade-related memorabilia can be traced back to about that same time, with several decorative thermoplastic ‘union cases’ – introduced in America to house photographic portraits – bearing moulded fire-related scenes. The ‘union case’ was one of the world’s earliest uses of moulded thermoplastic, back in the days when plastic was new and considered a luxury item, displacing the wood and leather cases portraits had been housed in hitherto.

The brass helmet offered very effective protection, but as more and more of the buildings to which firemen were being called had electricity installed, the possibility of the helmet being hit by a live electricity cable – with lethal results – led to a new design using the insulating properties of hard rubber instead of brass. Martin Cox’s collection displays a large number of both types of helmet, from fire brigades far and wide.

I may have gone to Highland End simply to photograph the 1902 Merryweather, but I came away with much, much more, and a curiosity for learning more about the evolution of the fire brigade. But if I could make one suggestion, a few explanatory caption cards giving some of the back story of selected items in this fascinating collection would greatly enhance the experience.

Many thanks to Martin Cox for letting me loose with my camera, and for his help in creating this article, and to Graham Hill-Howgate, General Secretary, British Fire Services Association for his input.