Constructing Modern Fire Brigades: The Edinburgh ‘Great Fire’ of 1824

Abstract

Fire insurance companies played a key role in exerting supply-side pressures over municipal governments to take responsibility for organized fire protection during the early nineteenth century. Many insurance companies provided the capital, firemen and fire-engines to protect industrializing towns from the continued threat of fire. In indemnifying their customers, insurance companies absorbed the growing costs of organized firefighting, although municipal governments in Glasgow and Manchester were beginning to undertake some responsibility for this. In some towns and cities, it was the incidence of fire, coupled with a growing public clamour for action, that triggered the municipalization of fire services. In Edinburgh, the decision, first, to found a municipal fire-engine establishment, independent of external control, before, second, re-organizing it on more efficient principles, was the direct result of a wave of large fires that plagued the Scottish capital throughout 1824. Culminating with the city’s self-styled ‘great fire’ of November 1824, Edinburgh emerged from the ashes of this disaster committed to building a municipal fire brigade that, under the leadership of its ‘Master of Engines’, James Braidwood, acted as the model for municipal services in ensuing decades. It is this relationship between great fires and municipal reform that provides the focus of this chapter.

Over a hundred years ago the British Fire Service was inaugurated in Edinburgh by the Commissioners of Police and the managers of the local fire insurance companies.¹