My most harrowing childhood memory is of watching a woman's death in a burning building in Bray. She gesticulated wildly behind an unopenable upstairs window to a powerless crowd and firemen below. Flames were consuming the storeys of the large seafront house below her. I remember being amazed that the windowpanes melted and reformed as glass as we watched, writes David Shanks.
The woman was still shouting soundlessly as flames leapt through the floor she stood on and she fell into the inferno like a doll. We never heard her cries.
That was one incident and it left its mark. When reading a history of the Dublin Fire Brigade it occurred to me how utterly unimaginable it would be to have been a fireman for over 35 years, as was one of the authors, constantly participating in such dramas.
The Dublin Fire Brigade (published by Dublin City Council) is dedicated to all who served in the brigade, "in particular those who mocked at fear and whose noble service and kindly acts built the reputation of this humanitarian organisation, especially those who paid the ultimate sacrifice".
At over 300 pages it is the first complete such history - and "complete" is the word. It looks as if the authors, Tom Geraghty and Trevor Whitehead, could not steel themselves to leave out even one of Dublin's many fire dramas. Geraghty is a retired district officer of the brigade and Whitehead was librarian of the Fire Brigade Society. The passion and commitment behind their labour of love is evident.
To simplify the task of sampling what seems really to be a complete archive I decided to look up The Irish Times, thinking of the famous 1951 fire that destroyed most of the paper's archives. It started shortly after midday on September 17th in the ground-floor machine and dispatch rooms.
Fuelled by highly inflammable inks, oils and paper, the blaze spread with alarming speed in the Fleet Street section of the building. Apparently the plucky staff continued working in the Westmoreland Street part and the paper came out the next day with the help of the Evening Mail, which was in the same ownership. No one perished.
Earlier that year, the Abbey Theatre was destroyed overnight. Its director, Lennox Robinson, said: "We people who had known and loved the Abbey Theatre for 50 years knew that it had to be taken down brick by brick and rebuilt as a noble new National Theatre and we should hate that. [Then as now, politicians had been discussing a scheme to build a new national theatre.] But the Abbey took the matter out of our hands. It decided that it would go up in smoke and flames. . .expire in glory." Again the show - in this case The Plough and the Stars - went on, at the Peacock.
Fires had been a fearful hazard in the city since its earliest days. In 1305 the city fathers outlined a stern approach to the problem. They issued an ordinance fining householders where a blaze broke out. If "flames issue not" the householder was to be fined 20 shillings. If the flames were visible the fine doubled.
This measure, revoked in 1715, ended: "Any person answerable for the burning of a street shall be arrested, cast into the middle of the fire, or pay a fine of one hundred shillings". It seemed to make little difference, we are told.
Before the Dublin Fire Brigade was founded in 1882, fires were tackled by a large number of separate groups, often working at cross-purposes. But a fatal fire at the Kildare Street Club - "haunt and home for many of the gentry and the judiciary" - started a debate that culminated in royal assent for the Dublin Corporation Fire Brigade Act.
It is interesting to read how this worthy modernisation was bitterly opposed by insurance companies, which had their own brigades, and other vested interests. Up to then parishes also had their own units.
Four years later "the so-called corporation" - as an irate Irish Times letter-writer called it - was the object of public derision after a spectacular Westmoreland Street fire in which five women and a child perished due to alleged incompetence (the authors say the efforts of a well-intentioned crowd contributed to the débâcle). The following day firemen had to have a police escort.
The book covers all the major fires in the brigade's history, including the 1916 conflagration, the 1921 Custom House fire set by the IRA, the Belfast blitz of 1941, the 1972 British embassy burning and bombings, and of course the infamous 1981 Stardust ballroom disaster which killed 48 young people and maimed 128 others on St Valentine's Night. It prompted the Fire Services Act, whose shortcomings on training and prevention the authors criticise.
Seven years earlier a family of 12 had died in a fire in their Dalkey home. It was the biggest single domestic fire up to then. And at the centre of it was the same material that so quickly turned the Stardust into a holocaust: polyurethane foam furniture lining.
Recalling the Stardust tragedy, and the outrage over those chained emergency doors, I found myself wondering how the city fathers of 1305 might have reacted.