The Secrets of Q Central: How Leighton Buzzard Shortened the Second World War by

Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2014-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

The National Fire Service

During the war, as part of the ARP, a NFS was formed. It was based on and grew out of the Auxiliary Fire Service originally formed in 1838. Every village had its own unit but it did not have a good reputation in some places. The one at Tilsworth was immediately christened the Nannygoat Fire Service. The equipment consisted of a big green handcart with a pump mounted on it. One day, Celia Sinfield recalls, the thatch on Thanet Cottage caught fire and the village fire service went rushing down Dickens Lane with its cart. Unfortunately, a stone got thrown up and jammed the pump so they had to wait for the Dunstable Fire Service to come. The old joke ran ‘Keep it [the fire] going till the fire service gets here.’

The NFS also had a Linslade station in Springfield Road. It was in the old stables, coach house and grooms’ living quarters of Perth House, which was in Soulbury Road. This station was manned from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m., three crews taking shifts in turn. They had 3-ton trucks with room for crews and each towed a pump – a Coventry Climax – and had room for hoses, filters etc. There seems to have been little coordination between the units at Linslade and Leighton Buzzard, perhaps because the former was in Buckinghamshire and the latter in Bedfordshire, although in the daytime, when things were quiet, the Leighton Buzzard brigade was officially responsible for Linslade. In total, the two units could muster eighty men in September 1940.

Tony Pantling joined the NFS when he was still at school in late 1942 (aged 15), on duty one night in three. He was a messenger, not a fireman, but he had the same uniform, complete with equipment, axe etc. His duty was to fetch the next crew in, in the event of a crew going out. This meant going to the home of each fireman to get them to report to the station as soon as possible to man the standby pump in case of another call. None of the crew had telephones in those days. Having alerted the next crew, he had to return to the station to man the telephone.

Some of the firemen were connected to St Barnabas church because the station commander, a Mr Jordan, was a prominent church member and server. Tony Pantling’s section leader was Mr Dimmock, a manager at the Coty factory in Southcott. He was paid 4s (20p) a night subsistence allowance, which he received monthly. For the last six months of his time with the fire brigade, after another messenger, Sam Sinfield, joined the armed forces, he worked two nights out of three, so he received twenty times 4s or £4 a month subsistence. He started at Barclays Bank as a junior in August 1943 and was paid only £90 a year, so the extra subsistence was very useful. All crewmembers with whom he worked were in their late thirties or older and not liable for military service.

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