Comments on: Self-help in an air raid

By: Neil Datson

Neil Datson — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 08:35:31 +0000

Silly me! Can't even read properly now.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 08:09:43 +0000

Mistake? What mistake? (Thanks!)

By: Neil Datson

Neil Datson — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 07:59:35 +0000

The Poplar school explanation seems a good one to me.

Incidentally Brett, can it be that: 'London wasn’t considered part of London until 1926.' Shome mishtake, shurely?

By: JDK

JDK — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:37:05 +0000

Australia's Ambulance 'club' seems a modern near-equivalent, with having to pay a fee for a 'membership' to avoid the major cost if you need an ambulance. (This was a surprising system having come from the UK's and being familiar with the NHS.) Currently it appears some US states are finding it hard to provide such levels of emergency service and I recall reading about (but can't find now, of course) charging for an aspect of an emergency call out. It's one of those areas where (even today) as a traveller you keep bumping into different systems the locals consider 'normal'.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:48:59 +0000

Traditional, maybe, but that sort of practice (as Chris notes) ended a generation or two before the First World War, so I doubt there's a direct line. But I'd suggest it's born of the same impulse. The government did not yet provide the full panoply of services that we would now expect it do, so when a new need arose, there was a period of muddle (or perhaps experimentation) where people had to look after themselves. The difference being that in this formative period of the welfare state, the government did eventually take on those responsibilities whereas a century earlier they wouldn't have had a bar of it. (That's one to Titmuss!)

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:08:12 +0000

Commercial fire insurance with associated brigades arrived in the UK at the end of the C17th and dominated til the mid C19th. Some of the companies kept good records which have survived as an excellent source for C18th urban history.

By: JDK

JDK — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:06:15 +0000

Indeed. There was a house with a Fire Insurance Mark in the village we lived in in Oxfordshire. (As an antique, rather than someone not letting go from granddad's system!)

By: Ian Evans

Ian Evans — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:24:17 +0000

Traditional principles, surely? Didn't fire brigades operate that way until the 1800s in Britain? (And I seem to remember reading that Imperial Rome used the same system)

By: Erik Lund

Erik Lund — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:42:41 +0000

It's a weird, weird symmetry that brings the author of _Lives of the Engineers_ into the civil defence conversation. From the kid who never went to school (lest they get all Anglicanised) and end up great inventors nonetheless, to air raid patrols that only visit the paid-up households, you can almost draw some kind of line from the Nonconformist to the libertarian.

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:57:27 +0000

Dagenham was built up during the 1920s and 1930s (and 1950s) as an industrial suburb, chiefly to serve the massive Ford factory which was also built there. The road from the traditional East End (ie Poplar) out to it was pretty well-travelled - it was where you went to escape the slums if you could. You can get a good flavour of the place in the 1950s from an autobiography written by my mate Dave Ray, which begins with his conception on VE Day... ISBN 978-0955292613.