Almost two years ago, I made a video about fire marks.
Back in the 18th century,
firefighters in London were funded by insurance companies.
When you insured a building, you would be given a fire mark,
a big plaque to put on the front
And if a fire ever broke out,
all the various companies' firefighters would rush to the scene.
and the story goes that they would look at the building,
and only fight the fire if they saw their company's mark,
or the mark of a company that they had an agreement with.
"If the building wasn't insured, they would let it burn."
This is a really well-known story in Britain,
it's part of the standard 'history of the fire brigades'.
Panel show QI has talked about it.
"If you hadn't paid, they wouldn't put your fire out.
"Unless you happened to be next to someone else who had."
Children's TV show Horrible Histories did a whole sketch on it
including the host, a talking rat,
holding up a sign that says 'they really did this'.
And the sources I used for my video included the history page
on the London Fire Brigade Museum's own website.
This was not controversial.
Now, soon after publication, I was told about one embarrassing error in the video:
the plaques I filmed weren't actually fire marks.
There's no list of all the surviving marks anywhere,
but I found stock photos of some marks with locations attached,
and I figured, great, I can just film there.
But, those captions are wrong,
whoever wrote them was completely mistaken,
apparently those are parish boundary markers.
Which is not great, but it s the sort of thing I can fix
by pinning a correction,
it doesn't affect whether the main part of the video is true.
But. About a month ago, I got an email that was like,
you know that source you used, the London Fire Brigade Museum's page?
It doesn't say that.
And it doesn't. The page has been changed, and it now says:
"There is little real evidence to suggest that this was the case."
So I was straight off into a rabbit hole of research.
Because this was exactly on a weird borderline in my head:
at times I was like, well, actually,
that makes no sense when you think about it,
no-one would let a fire burn if they were standing there with water.
It's got to be an urban legend.
And then I'd switch to,
well, there were many more cruel things going on in that century.
Heck, there still are, there are places in the world
where that system exists today, it's summed up as "no pay, no spray".
And it seemed like every source I read had a slightly different opinion.
I couldn't find any actual testimonials from the time,
and the secondary and tertiary sources that I had access to
didn't go into any depth:
most of them just briefly stated it as an unreferenced fact
and said no more.
I'm on the road right now, so I can’t go into archives,
and even if I could, I wouldn't know where to start.
So: I hired an experienced, professional archives research consultant.
My brief was simple: is the story true?
Answering that took the consultant two weeks of work.
Not two weeks of undergrad-slacking-off-time,
I mean two solid weeks of eight-hour work days,
including visiting the British Library
to check documents that haven't been digitised yet.
He's put together a thoroughly-referenced report,
I've linked it down in the description.
And now I'm going to summarise his summary in about 60 seconds.
Here we go.
Through the 18th century, fire marks were an indicator
of whether a building was insured,
but the general policy of London insurance companies
was that their firefighters did try to fight all fires,
whether insured or not. Three reasons why:
One. A fire in an un-insured building
can easily spread to an insured property,
or dozens of insured properties.
Economically, it made sense to cut the problem off
as early as possible.
Two. It is really good advertising to have smartly dressed firefighters
rushing in to save the day.
And three: it was the right thing to do.
There are good references from the time to back all that up.
But. By 1721, there were eight fire insurance offices in London.
We don’t know how many actual fire brigades there were,
but there were enough for there to be rivalries between them.
And there was also a law that gave reward money
to the first, second, and third brigades to attend a fire.
That's one of the reasons they raced to fires so fast,
they got paid more if they did.
So sometimes, too many firefighters would turn up. They couldn't all help,
and there might not be enough fire-fighting water for all of them.
Many of those firefighters were recruited from being watermen
on the River Thames, rough-and-ready ferry workers.
So if they weren’t quick enough, and they missed out on the reward,
and it wasn't a building insured by their company anyway,
they might just stand back, jeer a bit, or worst case,
maybe even interfere with the folks
who were going to get the reward money instead of them.
That is, in the researcher's view,
the most probable place that the story came from.
There are so many more subtleties than that,
this is not certain, history is fractal
and you can always, always find more detail if you keep looking.
We're summarising more than 150 years here.
But big picture: did some firefighters ever stand back
and let a building burn?
Yes, it probably did happen.
But there's no evidence from the time to show it
was ever an official, standard policy for insurance fire brigades
in 18th century London.
I was wrong. QI was wrong. Horrible Histories was wrong.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of pop-history books and storytellers were wrong.
We think.
If any history students are looking for a PhD topic,
it feels like you could get three years of research out of this
and still not end up with a definitive yes or no.
It's a perfect example of how quickly and how badly
even big important stories can become muddled,
and how the study of history is not about memorising dates:
it's about the interpretation of really messy, patchy data.
So I have pulled my original video. It's unlisted now.
I've put a link in the description here for posterity,
but YouTube won't ever recommend it,
it won't show up in search results,
and I've put a big warning on it.
Also: turns out I made another error anyway,
I said the wrong organisation name later on in the video.
As ever, you shouldn't trust me.
Sometimes I blunder, sometimes I'm standing on the shoulders
of mistaken giants.
Anyone who tells you they're certain about how the world works
is either a mathematician, or they're selling something.
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