THE people of Southampton were concerned. Something had to be done as not one of the public wells in the town had ropes and buckets.

It was 1573 and the problem was put before Court Leet meeting on the Common, which discussed how to protect local people from the ever present problem of fire.

Many believe this was the first record in Southampton of any moves to provide equipment to fight the dangers of flames that could, at any time, sweep through local areas.

In the following centuries, it was a common occurrence for people, especially bakers with their ovens, to be fined for allowing inflammable material to lie around. In 1611, again at Court Leet, there were again criticisms, this time that the local watch, as the firefighters were then called, consisted of “poore sillye ould men”.

By 1684, every householder was compelled to keep a tub of water at the front door during the dry season, and it was an offence to store hay in a room of a house. It was not until the middle of the next century that any real progress was made, when special reservoirs were built around Southampton to provide water in case there was a fire.

In 1836, the local Water Commissioners were give the power to purchase all types of equipment, to build fire stations and buy horses (which had names like Colonel, Turpin and Tom), to employ firemen and pay them wages and to have the authority to take and use water to put out any blaze. Southampton’s first chief fire officer was a Mr G Garrett, who, in 1853, had three wooden fire engines under his command.

The first really serious fire recorded in Southampton was at a warehouse, which was completely destroyed, in the High Street in 1837, when 22 men lost their lives and the damage was estimated at £12,000. Although the blaze was first reported at 11pm, the fire brigade, based a quarter of a mile away in Orchard Lane, did not arrive until midnight.

In 1916, the last “turn-out” took place of horse-drawn fire engines in Southampton, while the first motor-driven tender had arrived eight years earlier. The local firefighters’ most testing time came on the nights of November 29 and 30 as well as December 1, 1940, when the city suffered a concentrated blitz by enemy bombers and the heart of the town was burned out.

When the changeover to peacetime firefighting came, the Southampton brigade was left with equipment battered by years of war. The town had five of its pre-war appliances – together with a Dodge water-tender, which had replaced a vehicle – hit by a bomb in Woolston.

The Daily Echo of the time said: “When the grey wartime paint was removed and the scarlet of peace returned, some of the grandeur of the old brigade returned, too.”

But, as one officer said, the machines had had “the guts knocked out of them”. They bore the burn marks of the Blitz.

Every chassis had been stretched to the utmost, bumping over the smoking rubble of the old town. Yet, miraculously, they survived to do a useful peace-time job.