The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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York Fire Brigade
Looking like something out of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, York firemen impress the mass of onlookers with their skills of standing still whilst in motion and climbing ladders.
From the collection of:
Overview
A public display of what appears to be a routine, albeit extended, fire fighting drill, that certainly gets public attention as spectators crowd onto King’s Staith and Ouse Bridge in York to watch as dummies get rescued from five stories up the Terry’s warehouse. The river also gets a topping up as firemen display their prowess with a hose, while the police lend a helping hand to the injured.
It isn’t known who took this film, or when it was taken – presumably sometime in the early 1930s. A trolley bus can be seen in the film, and these were stopped in York in January 1935 – tramlines are also seen, and trams stopped in November 1935. Until the Fire Brigades Act of1938 there were some 1,500 small municipal fire brigades run by local councils in the UK, but the act amalgamated many within county boroughs and districts. The Auxiliary Fire Service was formed the same year. It is intriguing to speculate what could have prompted this training exercise and the public interest it garnered, with the threat of war still some way off. Perhaps this counted as entertainment at the time.
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