James Braidwood

One of the last insurance company fire chiefs, Braidwood was the most celebrated fire-fighter of his time and a popular hero.

Braidwood was born in 1800 in Edinburgh and trained as a surveyor. He was appointed the first master of fire engines in October 1824, when the Edinburgh Fire Engine Establishment was founded by the city's police commissioners.

Braidwood developed an efficient force insisting on physical fitness and discipline. A measure of his success was a marked reduction in the proportion of fires. He described his pioneering fire-fighting methods on the construction of fire engines and apparatus, the training of firemen and was credited with establishing the distinctive principle of British fire-fighting that, under the command of their officers, firemen should enter burning buildings to reach the source of the fire. He made many practical improvements to fire engines and fire escapes. For his invention of a chain ladder to enable people trapped in burning buildings to escape, the Society of Arts awarded him its silver medal in 1830.

In the summer of 1832, when the insurance companies agreed to co-operate in running the London Fire Engine Establishment, he was appointed superintendent in overall command of the new joint force. He was on call all night through a speaking tube beside his bed at his Watling Street headquarters, where the gaslight in his bedroom was always illuminated so that he could respond quickly to an emergency.

Braidwood died in the course of his duties on June 22, 1861 at Tooley Street London, the scene of an enormous fire which broke out in six-storey riverside warehouses packed with inflammable materials. Investigating the blaze that raged for two weeks on its first night, he was crushed and buried when the wall of a warehouse collapsed. The iron fire-resisting doors, which Braidwood had recommended to be installed in all such warehouses, had been left open. His body was recovered two days later and was buried at Abney Park cemetery on June 29. Queen Victoria sent her condolences to his widow, and his funeral procession, the longest since that for the duke of Wellington, stretched for a mile and a half.

What our voters think

"James Braidwood was a hero in his life both in Edinburgh and in London and when he died at a fire his funeral as the largest London had seen for many years. If the modern Fire & Rescue Services of the UK have a founding father than that is James Braidwood." Michael Kernan

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