SNAPSHOTS OF DFB HISTORY

Rathmines Farewell

is photo was taken on the last night at Rathmines re station on 2 December, 1982, when C Watch were on duty, before moving to the new station at Donnybrook.

In the back row from le to right are George Cornelia, Peter McGlynn, Ken Lee, John McBride, and Sé Collins, with C Pearse, myself, Jim Daly and Charlie McGlynn in the front row.

It was a strange feeling. e morning we nished, we put all of our stu in kit bags, before the ird O cer locked up, and the next morning we reported for duty at Donnybrook as if nothing had changed, but it felt like the end of an era.

It was a fairly quiet last night, and apart from the photo, we didn’t do anything to mark the occasion. On the rst Saturday in Donnybrook, a few of us did go out for a pint, partly because we wanted to get an idea of where to have a good pint in the area!

It was a completely di erent ethos going from Rathmines to Donnybrook in those days. At the time, Rathmines was at land, with most of the people elderly – many of them women who had worked in domestic employment in the area, or in the laundries. ey were very appreciative of DFB and we tried to do our best on their behalf, raising a lot of money for them with the gardaí and the barber around the corner who was well-established. e barber was chairman of the local residents’ association and they organised outings for the elderly women in the area, and we raised a lot of the money for them.

It was a di erent atmosphere in Donnybrook – an upper-middle-class area. Very little at land, all owner occupied.

John McBride took the picture because he was the editor of Brigade Call at the time, as Firecall was known then, and he had a camera with a stand and a timer, so we could all get in the photo.

I don’t know if anybody has any photos from the nal nights when Dorset Street or Buckingham Street were closing, but it would be interesting to hear if someone does have a few photos somewhere, because it would be great to see them, they would be a very interesting snapshot of big parts of DFB history.

Castlebridge Ba Training

is photo was taken at the BA training facility in Castlebridge, Co Wexford, in 1980, and shows re ghters Cornelia and O’Dowd, with A/C/O Walsh and a younger re ghter whose name I don’t recall as he was very new in the job at the time.

A er the Stardust re, Dublin City Council recognised the need for a dedicated training centre for Dublin Fire Brigade, and they bought the O’Brien Institute that was then given to DFB, but prior to that, the facility in Castlebridge, a few miles outside Wexford Town, was the only such BA training facility in the Republic of Ireland.

DFB acquired use of the facility for a number of months every year between 1980 and 1983. It was an old malt house converted into a top-class facility, which had tunnels and crawl spaces for going through in BA. It was ideal, because as an old malt house it had wooden shutters on the windows so you could make it pitch dark inside, but they also had smoke generators and heat generators, and barrels so we could set controlled res for training purposes.

ey had sliding panels at di erent intervals along the interior so that you could change them up to avoid being too familiar with the training routines, running di erent ways over two levels. e Chief Fire O cer in Wexford obviously got advice from UK training facilities because Castlebridge was converted into a BA training facility in a very professional way, with proper facilities such as kitchen, wash rooms, lecture hall, etc, as well as the actual BA training area. e class would be Monday to Friday, with trainees given an allowance to stay in digs, and they would all go home on the weekend and then go back for the second week. e younger re ghter was a new recruit, and any new recruit who came into the job at the time was sent on the course, but they were mixed with more experienced people, which was the right thing to do, and is still a very good way of developing skills and teamwork to this day.

Each course was made up of four instructors – two S/Os and two Sub-O swith 12 trainees in each class, running for two weeks. A ird O cer would also be there to supervise.

We used ten-stone dummies that we placed in di erent spaces around the facility, setting res in barrels that had to be put out with hoses, nding the dummies in spaces that you got into through tunnels, and it was all done in total darkness. Part of the crawls were sewer pipes, which was the toughest part when you are dragging a body through them.

NEW TENDER’S EARLY DAYS

I thought this photo was interesting because it shows a Dodge Carmichael Emergency Tender on one of its rst major incidents, at the Ballymun Shopping Centre re in 1979.

e tenders had only been delivered to DFB in May, and the re in Ballymun occurred on 14 September of that year, so it was still relatively new.

I wasn’t at that re myself, because I was in Rathmines at the time, but despite the smiling faces in the photo, I know it was a big re that did a lot of damage.

You can see that the tender had a long door so that you could walk into it, which was the rst of that style we had in DFB. It could carry a lot more BA and equipment in it, so it was a very useful addition to the eet.

The Timoney

Of similar interest is this photo of the Timoney WrL appliance, the rst Irishbuilt appliance supplied to DFB, which was delivered in 1982.

Timoney were a company in Meath manufacturing armoured cars that they were selling to the UN in the Middle East. When the Arab-Israeli War broke out, the UK supported Israel so a few countries around that area boycotted British goods, and Timoneys decided they would make the vehicles, but sales weren’t high and they decided to adapt them into re engines. e Government at the time paid a 50% subsidy to local authorities to purchase re appliances, and DCC purchased two, while the Dublin Airport Authority purchased one.

As re engines, they didn’t quite work out, they didn’t last long, and DFB sold theirs on to county re brigades. Without going into detail, it didn’t turn out to be a success story.

Bedford Ambulance

I thought this photo was interesting because it shows you the di erence in the style of ambulance used by DFB over the years and how that has changed. With these old Bedfords, you had to carry a person on a stretcher up three steps at the back to get them into the ambulance, which was a problem if you were carrying someone heavy. It was tough on your back.

Newer ambulances had a Lomas gear on them, which worked on a ratchet so you could pull out the back and li the stretcher onto the Lomas gear, which was on rollers, and push it in and put a locking bar across it. at was a big improvement.

We phased out the Bedfords over a few years when newer models were bought in ones and twos, because it wasn’t nancially possible to replace the eet in one go.

As is the norm now, the newer ambulances would have gone to the busier stations, with the vehicles they were replacing being moved on to other stations until they were eventually phased out.