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Working as a fireman in London's East End through the early 1970s was no easy trip. Inside the years before work area health-and-safety legislation acquired began to exert its grip, Allan Grice had to cut his fire-and-rescue teeth without the benefits of a breathing apparatus for each person in his crew. In the past, the time-tested strategy was to 'get in' - to crawl below the intense high temperature and 'eat' the thick smoke - in order to discover a missing child or even to halt a rapidly spreading inferno. In Call the Hearth Brigade!, Grice recounts his most remarkable experience as a front-line person in the London Hearth Brigade working the city's East End, with its myriad commercial premises, brooding Thames-side warehouses, seedy tenements and colourful cosmopolitan community, which range from profitable manufacturers to down-and-out winos with the body-warming bonfires in derelict properties. Fires in factories, tenements and warehouses, and non-fire emergencies including the Moorgate Tube devastation of 1975, are graphically described, while the elation of rescue, the sadness to be too late to save lots of lives and the warm camaraderie of flame crews during a few of the capital's busiest peacetime years are vividly depicted. Allan Grice's job in the flame service spanned more than 30 years, most of which was spent in the best flame risk districts. Upon retirement living, he formed an independent fire safeness advisory consultancy and is a visiting lecturer burning, rescue and flame police at Leeds College or university since 1997.
