More local history

Church Rooms on fire

The history of local fire services was the subject of the talk at the October meeting of the Old Buckenham Social and Wine Circle. Cliff Amos from Attleborough was the speaker and he had first hand knowledge of the subject having been a member of the retained Attleborough Fire Service from 1967 to 2009.
Starting with the ‘Great Fire of Attleborough’ in 1595 (which virtually destroyed all the town centre) he went through the history including the insurance companies' fire marks, the manual fire pumps that were pulled to the fires, the first horse-drawn pump in 1830 and the fact that the fire pump was stored in the porch of St Mary’s Church during 1848. In 1905 there was a fire station in Queens Square, a steam (rather than manual) fire pump came into use in the 1920s and the fire station was in Eden Lane from 1922 to 1942 before moving to the High Street where it remained until 1960. The present fire station is now in Thieves Lane. The members of the retained fire service all work locally and all rush to the fire station when the call goes out. They attend about 250 incidents a year, about half of which are now traffic accidents.

The Social and Wine Circle’s next meeting is their AGM and this will start at 7.15pm on Thursday 11 November so that the talk (by Kate Hill) can start at the usual time of 7.45pm.