Part 43

If we look at the mere number of fires, irrespective of the size of the industrial group upon which they committed their ravages, houses would appear to be hazardous according to the order in which we have placed them. Now, this is manifestly absurd, inasmuch as private houses stand at the head of the list, and it is well known that they are the safest from fire of all kinds of tenements. Mr. Brown, of the Society of Actuaries, who has taken the trouble to compare the number of fires in each industrial group, with the number of houses devoted to it, as far as he could find any data in the Post-office Directory, gives the following average annual percentage of conflagrations, calculated on a period of fifteen years:--

Lucifer-match makers 30·00 Lodging-houses 16·51 Hatmakers 7·74 Chandlers 3·88 Drapers 2·67 Tinmen, Braziers, and Smiths 2·42 Carpenters 2·27 Cabinet-makers 2·12 Oil and Colour-men 1·56 Beershops 1·31 Booksellers 1·18 Coffee-shops and Coffee-houses 1·2 Cabinet-makers 1·12 Licensed Victuallers ·86 Bakers ·75 Wine Merchants ·61 Grocers ·34

It will be seen that this estimate in a great measure inverts the order of "dangerous," as we have ranged them in the previous table, making those which from their aggregate number seemed to be the most hazardous trades, appear the least so, and _vice versâ_. Thus lucifer-match makers have a bad pre-eminence; indeed they are supposed to be subject to a conflagration every third year; while the terrible victuallers, carpenters, mercers, and bakers, at the top of the column, shrink to the bottom of the list. These conclusions, nevertheless, are only an approximation to the truth, since it is impossible to procure a correct return of the houses occupied by different trades. Even if a certain class of tenements is particularly liable to fire, it does not follow that it will be held to be very hazardous to the insurers. Such considerations are influenced by another question,--Are the contents of houses forming the group, of that nature that, in cases of their taking fire, they are likely to be totally destroyed, seriously, or only slightly damaged? For instance, lodging-houses are very liable to fire; but they are very seldom burnt down or much injured. Out of 81 that suffered in 1853, not one was totally destroyed; only 4 were extensively affected; the very large majority, 77, were slightly scathed from the burning of window and bed curtains, &c. Among the trades which are too hazardous to be insured at any price are--we quote from the tariff of the County Fire-office--floor-cloth manufacturers, gunpowder dealers, hatters' "stock in the stove," lampblack makers, lucifer-match makers, varnish makers, and wadding manufacturers; whilst the following are considered highly hazardous;--bone-crushers, coffee-roasters, composition-ornament makers, curriers, dyers, feather-stovers, flambeau makers, heckling-houses, hemp and flax dressers, ivory-black makers, japanners and japan makers, laboratory-chemists, patent japan-leather manufacturers, lint-mills, rough-fat melters, musical-instrument makers, oil and colour men, leather dressers, oiled-silk and linen makers, oil of vitriol manufacturers, pitch makers, rag dealers, resin dealers, saw-mills, seed crushers, ship-buiscuit bakers, soap makers, spermaceti and wax refiners, sugar refiners, tar dealers and boilers, thatched houses in towns, and turpentine makers.

The great mass of these trades bear "hazardous" upon the very face of them; but it is not equally apparent why that of a hatter should be so very dangerous, and particular portions of his stock uninsurable. We are given to understand that the stoves at which their manufacture is carried on, and the shell-lac and willow, are the causes of this proneness to conflagrations. The memorable fire at Fenning's Wharf, which burnt with a fury to which that at the Royal Exchange and at the Houses of Parliament was a mere bonfire, originated at a hatter's on London Bridge, from which place it speedily spread to Alderman Humphery's warehouses in the rear, leaped across Tooley Street--at this spot 60 feet wide--and thus invaded the great river-side wharf. The two floating-engines belonging to the brigade were brought into service on the occasion, and although they threw between them fourteen hundred gallons of water a minute to the height of a hundred feet, they had not the slightest effect upon the burning mass.

Nothing shows better the relative degrees of hazard than the different rates charged for insurance. Thus an ordinary dwelling-house pays but 1_s._ 6_d._ per cent., while a sugar-refinery pays at least two, and sometimes three guineas per cent., or from 30 to 40 times as much. The same class of houses pay different rates according to their locality. The residence which is charged 1_s._ 6_d._ in London, is, in St. John's, Newfoundland--a town famous, or rather infamous, for fires--charged by our English offices 1_l._ 11_s._ 6_d._ per cent. Probably the heaviest loss the Phoenix Office ever sustained was by the fire of St. John's, in 1846.

It is a notable fact, that the city of London, which is perhaps the most densely inhabited spot the world has ever seen, has long been exempt from conflagrations involving a considerable number of houses. "The devouring element," it is true, has made many meals from time to time of huge warehouses and public buildings; but since the great fire of 1666 it has ceased to gorge upon whole quarters of the town. We have never had, since that memorable occasion, to record the destruction of a thousand houses at a time, a matter of frequent occurrence in the United States and Canada--indeed in all parts of Continental Europe. The fires which have proved fatal to large plots of buildings in the metropolis have in every instance taken place without the sound of Bow bells. A comparison between the number of fires which occurred between the years 1838 and 1843, in 20,000 houses situate on either side of the Thames, shows at once the superior safety of its northern bank, the annual average of fires on the latter being only 20 against 36 on the southern side. For this exemption we have to thank the great disaster, if we might so term what has turned out a blessing. At one fell swoop it cleared the city, and swept away for ever the dangerous congregation of wooden buildings and narrow streets which were always affording material for the flame.

Mr. Peter Cunningham, in his "Handbook of London,"[43] gives the following curious information respecting its supposed origin:--

"The fire of London, commonly called the Great Fire, commenced on the east side of this lane (Pudding-lane) about one or two in the morning of Sunday, September 2nd, 1666, in the house of Farryner, the king's baker.

"It was the fashion of the true blue Protestants of the period to attribute the fire to the Roman Catholics; and when, in 1681, Oates and his plot strengthened this belief, the following inscription was affixed on the front of this house (No. 25, I believe), erected on the site of Farryner, the baker's:--

"'Here, by the permission of Heaven, hell broke loose upon this Protestant city, from the malicious hearts of barbarous priests, by the hand of their agent, Hubert, who confessed, and on the ruins of this place declared the fact for which he was hanged, viz., that here began that dreadful fire which is described on and perpetuated by the neighbouring pillar, erected anno 1681, in the mayoralty of Sir Peter Ward, knight.'

"This celebrated inscription, set up pursuant to an order of the Court of Common Council, June 17th, 1681, was removed in the reign of James II., replaced in the reign of William III., and finally taken down 'on account of the stoppage of passengers to read it.' Entick, who makes addition to Maitland in 1756, speaks of it 'as lately taken away.' The house was 'rebuilt in a very handsome manner.'

"The inscribed stone is still preserved, it is said, in a cellar in Pudding-lane. Hubert was a French papist, of six-and-twenty years of age, the son of a watchmaker at Rouen, in Normandy. He was seized in Essex, confessed he began the fire, and, persisting in his confession, was hanged, upon no other evidence than his own. He stated in his examination that he had been 'suborned in Paris to this action,' and that three more 'combined to do the same thing. They asked him if he knew the place where he first put fire. He answered he knew it very well, and would show it to anybody.' He was then ordered to be blindfolded, and carried to several places of the City, that he might point out the house. They first led him to a place at some distance from it, opened his eyes, and asked him if that was it; to which he answered, 'No, it was nearer the Thames.' 'The house and all which were near it,' says Clarendon, 'were so covered and buried in ruins, that the owners themselves, without some infallible mark, could very hardly have said where their own house had stood; but this man led them directly to the place, described how it stood, the shape of the little yard, the fashion of the doors and windows, and where he first put the fire; and all this with such exactness, that they who had dwelt long near it could not so perfectly have described all particulars.' Tillotson told Burnet that Howell (the then Recorder of London) accompanied Hubert on this occasion, 'was with him and had much discourse with him, and that he concluded it was impossible it could be a melancholy dream.' This, however, was not the opinion of the judges who tried him. 'Neither the judges,' says Clarendon, 'nor any present at the trial, did believe him guilty, but that he was a poor distracted wretch, weary of his life, and chose to part with it in this way.' We may attribute the fire with safety to another cause than a Roman conspiracy. We are to remember that the flames originated in the house of a baker; that the season had been unusually dry; that the houses were of wood, overhanging the road-way (penthouses they were called), so that the lane was even narrower than it is now, and that a strong east wind was blowing at the time. It was thought very little of at first. Pepys put out his head from his bedroom window in Seething-lane, a few hours after it broke out, and returned to bed again, as if it were nothing more than an ordinary fire, a common occurrence, and likely to be soon subdued. The Lord Mayor (Sir Thomas Bludworth) seems to have thought as little of it till it was too late. People appear to have been paralyzed, and no attempt of any consequence was made to check its progress. For four successive days it raged and gained ground, leaping after a prodigious manner from house to house and street to street, at great distances from one another. Houses were at length pulled down, and the flames, still spreading westward, were at length stopped at the Temple Church in Fleet-street, and Pie-Corner in Smithfield. In these four days 13,200 houses, 400 streets, and 89 churches, including the cathedral church of St. Paul, were destroyed, and London lay literally in ruins. The loss was so enormous, that we may be said still to suffer from its effects. Yet the advantages were not few. London was freed from the plague ever after; and we owe St. Paul's, St. Bride's, St. Stephen's Walbrook, and all the architectural glories of Sir Christopher Wren, to the desolation it occasioned."

In addition to these advantages we acquired another, that of PARTY-WALLS--a safeguard which has prevented fires from spreading in the City, when whole streets have been swept away in a few hours in other parts of the metropolis, and especially in what might be termed the water-side suburbs of London--Rotherhithe, Greenwich, and Gravesend. The Act by which party-walls were enforced came into operation immediately prior to the rebuilding of the town, and has been rendered more stringent and effective from time to time by various amendments. The Building Act of the 7th and 8th of Queen Victoria contains the important enactment, that "no warehouse shall exceed 200,000 cubic feet in contents." Fire becomes unmanageable when it has access to large stores of combustible matter; under such conditions it acquires a "fortified position," and cannot, in the vast majority of cases, be reduced unless by an early surprise.

As the very heart of London is largely occupied with Manchester warehouses full of the most inflammable materials, the safety of the capital depends upon this restrictive law. The Manchester warehousemen, nevertheless, have managed to set that part of the Act at defiance. Let us take, as the latest and most flagrant example, Cook's warehouses. This structure, which within these last two years has raised its enormous bulk in St. Paul's Churchyard, and actually dwarfed the metropolitan cathedral by the propinquity of its monotonous mass, contains 1,100,000 cubic feet of space open from end to end, or _nine hundred thousand feet more than it is entitled to possess_. If we were to take twenty-five ordinary-sized dwelling-houses, and pull down their party-walls, we should have just the state of things which is here presented to us. But it will be asked, if it is against the law, why do not the proper officers interfere? Where are the City surveyors? The reason, good reader, is this: the Manchester warehousemen of late years have adopted a new reading of the law--a reading which we believe no judge would allow, but which the surveyors have not yet ventured to dispute. "We escape altogether," say these gentlemen, "the provisions of the Building Act relative to warehouses, as, by reason of our breaking bulk, our places of business are not mere storehouses." That this reading is a violation of the spirit of the statute there can be no doubt; that it is also a violation of its letter we also believe; if not, it is high time that the law be amended upon this point; for we affirm, on the very best authority, that London has never since the great fire been in such danger of an overwhelming conflagration as it is now by the presence and rapid spreading of these huge warehouses, filled with the elements of destruction, and placed side by side, as though for the very purpose of producing the utmost mischief by contagion.

Let us suppose, for instance, that a fire had once established itself in Cook's warehouses; to extinguish it would be out of the question. Fire-engines would be perfectly useless against a body of flame which would speedily become like a blast-furnace, and burn with a white heat. Who knows what would come after? Supposing the wind to be blowing from the south, we tremble for the cathedral. The huge dome is constructed entirely of oak, dried by the seasoning of 150 years, and the combustible framework is only lined on the exterior by sheet lead. It may be imagined that this would be protection enough against the enormous masses of burning cotton and linen cloth which would speedily be blown upon it; but Mr. Cottam not long since stated, at the Institution of Civil Engineers, that, "when the Princess's Theatre was on fire, part of his premises also caught. On examination, he found that it arose from a piece of blazing wood being thrown over from the theatre, which, falling into the leaden gutter, had melted it, and the liquid metal passed through the ceiling on to a workman's bench, where there was some oil, which it immediately set fire to." The great dome would be in quite as much danger as Mr. Cottam's workshop. Engines would be useless at such a height even as the stone gallery, the place where large bodies of burning material would most likely make a lodgment. Irreparable as would be the disaster with which we are threatened in this direction, one quite as great lies in another. Eastward of Cook's warehouses, and in the neighbourhood of a vitriol or some other chemical manufactory, is situated Doctors' Commons, the repository of the great mass of English wills. The roofs of this pile of buildings[44] are continuous; the buildings themselves are nearly as dry as the law itself. If one portion of the structure were to catch fire, nothing could save the whole from destruction. It may be urged that the block of buildings, which commands, like a battery, two such important points in the metropolis, is, after all, fire-proof, and, as far as danger from without is concerned, this is true enough; but as cotton bales are not fire-proof, it is an impossibility to insure safety from within. Iron columns in such instances melt before the white heat like sticks of sealing-wax; stone flies into a thousand pieces with the celerity of a Prince Rupert's drop; slate becomes transformed into a pumice light enough to float upon water; the iron girders and beams, by reason of their lateral expansion, thrust out the walls; and the very elements, which seem calculated under ordinary circumstances to give an almost exhaustless durability to the structure, produce its most rapid destruction. The great fire at Messrs. Cubitt's so-called fire-proof works at Pimlico is one of the latest proofs we have had of the entire fallacy of supposing stone and iron can withstand the action of a large body of fierce flame. We saw the other day portions of columns from this building fused as though they had been composed of so much pewter. Again, when the Armoury of the Tower was destroyed, the barrels of the muskets were found reduced to the most fantastic shapes, and some of the largest pieces of ordnance were doubled up. A stronger instance still was exhibited at Davis's wharf in 1837, when a cast-iron pipe outside the building was melted like an icicle. But such a fierce furnace is not at all necessary to destroy cast-iron supports, as it appears from the experiments of Mr. Fairbairn, that, at a temperature of 600° the cohesive power of the metal rapidly decreases with every increment of heat. Mr. Braidwood, in his paper on fire-proof buildings, read before the Institute of Civil Engineers on February 29th, 1849, was the first, we believe, to draw attention to this serious defect in a material used so extensively in modern buildings. Since that paper was read, a case has come under his notice which clearly testifies to the truth of his position:--

"A chapel in Liverpool-road Islington, 70 feet in length and 52 feet in breadth, took fire in the cellar, on the 2nd October, 1848, and was completely burned down. After the fire it was ascertained that, of thirteen cast-iron pillars used to support the galleries, only two remained perfect; the greater part of the others were broken into small pieces, the metal appearing to have lost all power of cohesion, and some parts were melted, of which specimens are now shown. It should be observed that these pillars were of ample strength to support the galleries when filled by the congregation, but when the fire reached them, they crumbled under the weight of the timber only, lightened as it must have been by the progress of the fire."

But when we are considering the safety of Manchester warehouses, we are also considering the lives of the young men who are employed in them, and are in most cases located in the upper stories. In several of the wholesale warehouses in the City, as Mr. Braidwood informs us,--

"The cast-iron pillars are much less in proportion to the weight to be carried than those referred to, and would be completely in the draught of a fire. If a fire should unfortunately take place under such circumstances, the loss of human life might be very great, as the chance of fifty, eighty, or one hundred people escaping, in the confusion of a sudden night alarm, by one or two ladders to the roof, could scarcely be calculated on, and the time such escape might necessarily occupy, independent of all chance of accidents, would be considerable."

The application of water would only aggravate the difficulty, for, if it touched the red-hot iron, in all probability it would cause it to fracture and render it useless as a support. It is well known that furnace-bars are very speedily destroyed by a leakage of the boiler, the effect of the steam on the under side of the bars being to curve and twist them. To insure a perfectly fire-proof building, we must resort to one of two courses--either we must divide large warehouses into compartments by solid brick divisions, and thus confine any fire that should happen to break out within manageable limits, just as we save an iron ship from foundering, on account of a circumscribed fracture, by having her built in compartments; or we must resort to the old Roman plan of building--that is, support the floors upon brick piers and groined arches well laid in cement, for mortar will pulverize under a great heat. The former plan has the great advantage that it insures the safety of the principal contents, as well as of the building itself. The new Record Office in Fetter Lane, is a perfect specimen of the kind, and is, perhaps, the only absolutely fire-proof structure in England, being constructed of iron and stone, and having no room larger than 17 feet by 25, and 17 feet high, with a cubical contents of only 8,000 feet. None of the rooms open into each other, but into a vaulted passage by means of iron doors; and if the documents were to take fire in any one of them, they would burn out as innocuously to the rest of the building as coals in a grate.

It must not be supposed that we disparage altogether the use of iron and stone in the erection of warehouses, even where they are built on the ordinary plan; for the outside structure they are invaluable, and render it safe from most extraneous danger. No better proof of this could be given than the experience of Liverpool, whose fires during the last half-century have been on the most gigantic scale. The larger bonded and other warehouses were generally built with continuous roofs, and with wooden doors and penthouses to the different stories, which always kindled when there was a fire on the opposite side of the narrow streets in which they were ordinarily placed. To such a lamentable extent had conflagrations increased about the year 1841, that the rate of insurance, which had been eight shillings per cent., ran up to thirty-six shillings. This was about the time of the Formby Street fire, when 379,000_l._ worth of property was destroyed, and the total losses from the beginning of the century had not been less than three millions and a quarter sterling. The magnitude of the evil called for a corresponding remedy. A Bill was obtained in 1843 for the amendment of the Building Act; party-walls were run up five feet high between each warehouse, doors and penthouses were constructed of iron, the cubical contents of the buildings themselves were limited, &c.; and the effect of these improvements was so to diminish the risk that insurances fell to their normal rate. It cannot be said, however, that Liverpool has yet purged herself of the calamity of fire.