In the On this Day Series our volunteer, Retired Firefighter/Heritage Officer, Dave Farries QFSM, highlights important days in fire history.
In the early morning, 2:18am, 23 January 1958 the London Fire Service responded to a call to the Poultry Market, one of the four buildings which together made up Smithfield Market, which covered an area of 10 acres.
On arrival the Service found a heavily smoke -filled basement which comprised of 90 heavily insulated storage compartments, some of which were further sub divided. These compartments were entered via underground corridors, lifts and trap openings in the pavements, etc., and were used as a cold store for, at the time, approximately 800 tons of poultry, game and meat.
The initial Officer in charge, Station Officer (Stn O) Fourt-Wells, donned in an oxygen Proto Breathing Apparatus (BA) set, led a party of four similarly dressed firefighters into the basement to try and locate the fire, but to no avail. Further information revealed that the fire might be in the main basement, which was secured by a padlock and a key was provided for the crew to return and check it out. Having gained access, the crew were very low on oxygen and as 3 turned to return to open air the Station Officer paused to have a look in the main basement. On arrival at fresh air the 3 firefighters realised that the Stn O and Fireman Stocking were no longer with them and made enquiries at the entry point if their colleagues had returned. It soon became apparent that they hadn’t returned and given that all had been low on oxygen, emergency measures were implemented.
It took the Emergency Crew, due to the complex configuration of the basement, over an hour to locate the bodies of the two missing men and recover them.
For the next 24 hours the Fire Service tried to locate the seat of the fire and extinguish it but they were severely hampered by the black, acrid smoke and intense heat produced by the burning cork, which had been soaked through with years of accumulated meat fat, and the bituminous insulation materials. The extreme conditions restricted firefighters in BA to just 15 minutes, sometimes less, of working in the basement and as the conditions worsened and numbers of firefighters suffering from heat exhaustion increased, all crews were withdrawn.
An attempt to fight the fire by flooding the basement was eventually abandoned when the anticipate outcome was not achieved and the nearby underground railway lines were put out of commission by electrical faults caused by the water.
The fire broke through the ground floor of the market in the early morning of Friday 24th January and the Service set up ground monitors thereby allowing jets of water to be applied without the need for Firefighters to hold them. The fire was confined to the area of the Poultry Market and was deemed under control by that evening. Operations continued and by the 7th February a total of 2,000 firefighters had worked at the fire in relays.
Following the incident, calls from the Chief Fire Officer of London and the Fire Brigades Union for safer BA procedures led to the Home Office set up a committee of inquiry into the use of BA. This resulted in the adoption of a series of guidance notes which introduced greater control over BA, how it was used, improved safety measures and a greater degree of command and responsibilities.