MOTION FOR A SELECT COMMITTEE. (Hansard, 12 March 1867)

§ MR. M'LAGAN,

in moving the appointment of a Select Committee to inquire into the existing legislative provisions for the protection of Life and Property against Fire, said, that the numerous fires which had occurred within the last few years, the mystery with which the origin of many of them had been invested, the suspicious character of not a few of them, and the serious losses, both of life and property, with which others had been attended, had directed public attention to the whole question of fires. There was a strong opinion abroad that a Parliamentary inquiry should be instituted, with the view of devising the best means that could be adopted for the protection of life and property from fire. He but joined in the expression of that opinion in asking for the appointment of a Select Committee, which would be a natural sequence to the Select Committee on Fires in the Metropolis, which sat in 1862, of which the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr. Thomson Hankey) was Chairman, and to which we were indebted for much useful information and many valuable suggestions. The principal points to which he wished the inquiries of the Committee should be directed were—first, the proper construction of public buildings and warehouses, upon which depended very much the prevention of fires spreading; second, the means for extinguishing fires, under which head were included the supply of water and the arrangements and appliances that could be brought into action on the outbreak of a fire, such as the establishment of fire brigades, fire-engines, &c.; and third, the expediency of having a judicial investigation into all fires. The importance of providing some means for preventing the ravages of fire was acknowledged at a very early period. The Romans, for instance, had bands of men whose principal duty was to watch for and extinguish fires. About 800 years ago it was enacted in this country that all fires in houses should be extinguished at the ringing of the curfew bell, under a penalty; 1709 and about'300 years ago bellmen were appointed in London, whoso duty it was to ring the bells at night, and call out, "Take care of your fire and candle; be charitable to the poor, and pray for the dead." So also from time to time Acts had been passed with the view of preventing and of extinguishing fires. But still, the great increase in the number of fires and their devastating character showed that those legislative measures had not proved quite effective. For instance, in London alone the number of fires has increased from 681 in 1840 to 1,487 in 1864—that was it had been more than doubled in twenty-four years. No doubt there had been an increase also in the number of houses; but the increase in fires had been much greater than the increase in houses. And though the fire extinguishing arrangements were now much more efficient than they were, and had been recently brought under the control of the Metropolitan Board of Works, and the number of fires had consequently somewhat decreased, our means of protection against fire were still inadequate as compared with those in some other cities. For instance, while in London there was only one engine station for every six square miles, there was in Paris 15th, and in New York 1½ for one square mile; in London there was only one fireman to one square mile; in Paris there were 11 firemen, and in New York 64 firemen to one square mile; in London there was only one fireman to 20,000 inhabitants; in Paris and New York there was one to 1,338 and 676 inhabitants respectively; in London there was only one lire-engine to three square miles; in Paris and New York there were about 1¾ to each square mile. He might state that he gave these and other figures very much on the authority of Mr. Young, the author of Fires, Fire Engines, and Fire Brigades. But these arrangements in London, however unfavourable they contrasted with those of Paris and New York, would be reckoned efficient and complete when compared with the provisions against fire that were made throughout the country generally; for if we excepted such towns as Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, &c., matters were in a most unsatisfactory state. Where private Acts had been obtained by which the municipal authorities had been enabled to bring a sufficient supply of water into the towns, to establish efficient forces of firemen and engines, and to take proper precautious in 1710 the erection of houses, the results had been most satisfactory. We had a striking instance of that in Liverpool, where, in the five years from 1838 to 1843, up-wards of three quarters of a million were lost in warehouse risks. So serious were the losses to the insurance companies, that they were obliged to raise the mercantile rates of insurance from 8s. per cent to 30s. and 40s. per cent. These rates were tantamount to excluding a great deal of property from insurance. The authorities, appreciating the great danger to which much valuable property in the town wan exposed from fire, obtained two Acts of Parliament—the one to enable them to introduce a largo supply of water to extinguish fires and water the streets only; the other, to give them power to make it imperative on all owners of warehouses to erect and alter their warehouses according to certain conditions and restrictions. The effect of the carrying out of the provisions of these Acts was to cause the rates of insurance to fall again to 8s. per cent. Now, he expected that one of the results of the labours of this Committee, if appointed, would be the adoption in other parts of the kingdom of measures which had proved; so beneficial in Liverpool. The present mode of conveying intelligence to the different stations of the breaking out of a fire were most inefficient; he would mention one method in use in America which might be adopted with great advantage in; our large cities—he meant a telegraph system. In the principal cities of America as many telegraph stations were established in each district of the cities as were considered sufficient for the speedy acquiring: and transmission of information. When a fire occurred intimation was sent to the nearest station, which communicated at once to the central telegraph station, and it in turn transmitted the news to the engine stations. It was of immense importance that early information of the outbreak of a fire should be received, and there was no better way of accomplishing that than by such a system as that in use in America. The next subject of the inquiry of the Committee would be the means of ascertaining the causes of fires. Unfortunately, the information we had hitherto been able to obtain on this point was very scanty; and the short sentence at the end of the greater part of the newspaper reports of fires—" the cause or origin of the fire is not known"—proved how much we had to learn in that respect. The only 1711 report of the causes of fires which we had was that issued annually by the London Fire Brigade, which was organized by that able and intrepid superintendent, the late much lamented Mr. Braidwood. To him and his successor, Mr. Shaw, we were mainly indebted for these useful and curious reports on the causes of fires. Inquiries, he believed, were always made by the Brigade into the origin of the fires immediately after they had been subdued; but to show how extremely difficult it was to arrive at the true causes, he might state that 474 out of 1,487 fires in 1864, or nearly 32 per cent, were returned "causes unknown;" while in 1866 the proportion was even larger, for 589 out of 1,338, or 36 per cent, were returned in the same way. He had no doubt that the members of the Fire Brigade were most assiduous in their exertions to discover the truth, and that we might depend upon the Returns being as accurate as could be arrived at under the circumstances; but it was evident that there was a necessity for a more searching investigation being made into all fires by a well-qualified person who was accustomed to receive and sift evidence. Such an investigation would be productive of much good in various ways. On that point the late Mr. Braidwood wrote— One of the greatest preventives of carelessness in the use of fires and lights would be a legal inquiry in every case, as it would not only show the faults that had been committed, and thus warn others, but the idea of being exposed in the newspapers would be another motive for increased care. Mr. Samuel Brown, Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries, also said— The minuteness of inquiry will not only tend to give greater facilities of drawing useful conclusions, by enabling the inquirer to classify facts, but will lead, as it has already done, to direct attention to those causes which are of most frequent occurrence, and capable of remedy by watchfulness or change in habits. It serves also to indicate how men of science can give their services most effectually in the preservation of life and property. Thus the greatly increasing cause of fires, 'spontaneous ignition,' has led to some interesting chymical experiments into the nature of substances that may be thus dangerous to society without human agency. It was likely that if proper inquiries were made into the causes of fires there would be considerably more restrictions placed on the warehousing of certain substances than was the case at present. For instance, we were all afraid of gunpowder being stored near our dwellings, and that material had always been the subject of the greatest precautions, and yet it had been found that 1712 very serious explosions, quite as bad as any from gunpowder, would take place when water was brought into contact with nitrate of soda and sulphur heated to a high temperature; and yet few were heard complaining of stores of these substances being near their dwellings, often in proximity to one another. So, also, there were great precautions taken against large quantities of petroleum; and yet turpentine, which had comparative immunity from the rigours of the law, was more ignitable than, and quite as explosive as, well-refined petroleum, as was shown by the dreadful explosion from turpentine which took place in Liverpool some ten or twelve years ago, which shattered and blew down several of the walls of the vaults in which it was stored. One great good that would result from such an investigation as he proposed would be, as Mr. Braidwood said, the reducing the number of fires from carelessness. In the first twenty-one years of the existence of the London Fire Brigade, there were 9,341 fires reported on, of these 2,511 were attributed to curtains, 1,178 to candles, 932 to gas, and only 100 to carelessness. Now, it was quite clear that the curtains would not take fire themselves unless some light or fire was brought to them; nor would the candles cause a serious conflagration unless they were brought too near some inflammable materials. He might safely, therefore, conclude that the greater part of the fires attributed to "curtains" and "candles" were really due to "carelessness." On that point it had been well said— Carelessness, when reproved and shown the right way of proceeding, if persisted in, becomes wilfulness, and should therefore be severely punished. Reading in bed was a fruitful source of fires; and with the knowledge we have, and the instances of its pernicious effects continually occurring, it cannot be called other than wilful—it certainly is not carelessness. The recklessness with which candles, lucifers, gas, the inflammable oils, and other easily kindled materials, are used and treated in everyday life can scarcely be called carelessness, now that the danger arising from their improper treatment is known. Not long ago he had read of a farm labourer who, being engaged in the stackyard, and having indulged in a smoke, put his pipe into his coat pocket, and while he was working pushed the coat into a stack. The fire in the pipe not being extinguished ignited the coat and then the stack, and in a short time several stacks were burnt down. It was said to be simple carelessness that was the cause of the fire. Hundreds of such cases were occurring every 1713 day in town and country, in which valuable property was destroyed and life jeopardized and lost. He had seen a report of a miner being sentenced to ten days' imprisonment, with hard labour, for endangering the lives of his fellow-workmen in a gaseous pit by lighting his pipe by the flame of his safety lamp. Another miner was fined 40s., and in default of payment was committed to the House of Correction for two months, for striking a match and lighting his pipe in the pit. An engine keeper, also, who endangered the lives of his fellow-workmen by careless conduct in the working of his engine rendered himself liable to prosecution; and there was no reason why carelessness in fires should not be similarly dealt with. One of the great benefits that would be derived from a judicial investigation into fires would be the prevention of incendiarism, or, at all events, the reducing of the number of incendiary fires. There was a strong suspicion amounting almost to a certainty that the cause of a great majority of those fires, the causes of which were returned as unknown, was incendiarism. Fire-raising was now a frequent crime; and insurance offices, owing to the great competition among one another, were reluctant to prosecute any individual unless the suspicion was very strong against him. Fire-raising was now become a trade with a gang of swindlers, who made it their sole business to arrange fires with a view of defrauding the insurance offices— Their plan is to take houses in different parts of London and in the suburbs, selecting the premises with an eye to their being as far distant as possible from the Fire Brigade stations. The houses are furnished, and immediately an insurance is effected on one of them the gang prepare the house for the fire and remove the furniture to another house. When the fire takes place they make their escape from the burning tenements with their night clothes over their ordinary clothing. Again, he was quoting from a Liverpool paper— The frequency of these conflagrations in Liverpool cotton warehouses when the market is low and their rarity when prices are high is a suspicious circumstance when observed over a long period. These statements were corroborated by Mr. Chadwick in an able paper he read before the Social Science Association in 1865— He found that while less than one-half of the properties are insured, nearly three-fourths of those burnt are insured. He asked the late Mr. Braidwood how on any doctrine of chances there 1714 could be more burnt of insured than of uninsured houses? His answer was—The brigade were regularly occupied in preventing the spread of fires a large proportion of which they knew were wilful. They came to their conclusion from primâ facie circumstantial evidence as to the times and modes of the fires, the recency of insurance, the parties named being in debt or straitened circumstances, suspicions as to the quantities of the stock and furniture consumed, full and high insurances of old tumble-down or inconvenient premises, the immediate production of well-matured and complete plans for re-building the premises, which must have been prepared before the fire. Mr. Payne, the coroner of the city of London, for a time held inquests on fires, and he gave as evidence that he found that 23 per cent of them were clearly wilful, that one-half of the remainder were apparently accidental, and the other part from causes unknown, including suspicious causes. But they were not left merely to surmise as to what would be the effect of having a judicial investigation into all fires. Mr. Humphreys, in his evidence before the Select Committee on Fires in the Metropolis, stated that by a recent decision of the Court of Queen's Bench, that Court has no power to inquire into the cause of a fire unless death has ensued. He stated that the holding of inquests upon fires was revived a few years back by the coroner for the City of London, and immediately after that the fires fell one-fourth in proportion. In several of the cities in America an officer called the fire marshal was appointed, whose duty it was to investigate into every fire, whether suspicion attached to it or not; and he had power to examine witnesses on oath. On the institution of this office about twelve years ago there had been only one conviction for arson during the previous thirty years. There were now on an average fifty arrests and six convictions annually. The salutary vigilance which that officer exercised had been the means of reducing the number of incendiary fires in the half-year ending the 31st of May, 1866, to sixty-one, being twenty-one less than it was in the corresponding six months of 1865. In Baltimore, also, there was a fire inspector, who investigated the cause of every fire, and prosecuted when necessary. For the first eighteen months after his appointment there were 223, or about 149 a year. In six years there was a gradual but rapid decline from that number to ten incendiary fires a year. In France an official inquiry was made into the cause of every fire that occurs in small towns and villages by the local authorities, and a report of the investigation was forwarded to the Procureur Imperial; in the large 1715 towns in which were courts of justice, the inquiry was instituted directly by the Procureur Imperial. Strict investigations were made into all fires in Russia, Prussia, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Hamburg, and Bremen. In Scotland, within the last two or three months, the Lord Advocate Patton issued a circular to the procurators-fiscal requiring them to institute an investigation into the origin of every fire to which was attached any suspicion, and to satisfy themselves as to the absence of any ground for suspicion in cases of extensive destruction of property or where life had been endangered. The only objection to this investigation was that it was done in private; and therefore it had not the effect of deterring others at a distance from committing the offence. The proper party in England in whom the power of investigating fires should be seated was the coroner. It would be the duty of the Committee to inquire as to the expediency of investing him with this power. The hon. Member concluded by moving for a Select Committee.