We fight the flames: the Shanghai fire brigade from volunteers to professionals, 1866–1932

The short answer. For fifty-three years the fires of the International Settlement were put out by volunteers: merchants’ clerks and shop assistants organised in 1866 into engine companies with names like Mih-ho-loong and Deluge, a bell of three tons in a wooden tower on Shantung Road, a steam fire launch begged from a Chinese shipping company, and a motto, “We fight the flames”, over the door. The Council paid for the engines and, from 1880, for the Chinese coolies who pulled them; the insurance companies paid for the rest; the volunteers paid with their time and occasionally their lives. The brigade fought fires that took sixty, seventy, eighty houses at a time in the Chinese quarters, and on 30 April 1919 its last 44 volunteers resigned in a body, leaving a professional service that by 1932 cost the Council 715,000 taels a year. This is the brigade as its own annual reports and the Council’s count it.

1866: each hong for itself

Until 1866, Darwent wrote, “the matter was left to each hong to put out its own fires”. The Council had imported one engine from the United States in 1863, and that engine, Pott says, “formed the nucleus of a voluntary fire brigade service organized in 1866”, with Captain J. P. Roberts as chief engineer and C. J. Ashley as foreman of the “Mih-ho-loong (destroy fire dragon) Hook and Ladder Company”, the brigade’s No. 1. Ashley was still chief engineer in 1893. The French joined, and the three settlements became fire districts 1, 2 and 3. The brigade “was not at first under the control of the Municipal Council” and “was largely supported by the Insurance Companies”, who had the most to lose; its constitution gave it the motto “We Fight the Flames”. Water came from “the fire wells sunk in various localities”, dug by the Council in the main streets as reservoirs, until the waterworks began pumping in April 1883. The alarm was whatever could be heard: “the church bell”, three guns from the senior man-of-war in the river, the bells of the steamers at the wharves, and then a tower at Hongkew police station with a spare church bell in it.

In 1874 the brigade fought its first fire in a riot. The French Council’s road through the Ningbo guild’s cemetery brought the guild out, houses were set alight, and the Settlement’s firemen under their district engineer Brodie A. Clarke “had to be escorted by armed police and soldiers through a wildly excited mob” to reach them.

1880: the bell, the launch and sixty-six houses

The Fire Commission’s report for 1880, printed by the Council, shows what the brigade was before the water came. Its budget was a subscription: the Municipal Council 2,500 taels, the French Council 1,000, the daotai 400, and the agents of the Victoria engine’s insurers 1,182; it spent 8,219 taels. Its newest appliance was “the Steam Fire Launch”, handed over by the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company at the end of 1879 and found “in a very defective state”, three or four hundred taels’ worth of repairs. The Hongkew bell had “cracked while ringing the alarm of fire in April”; the commission bought a new one from “the Meneely Founders of West Troy” in New York, a bell “weighing 6,150 lbs.” by its own account and “rather over 6,000 lbs.” by the Council’s, 5,150 by Pott’s, for $1,500 against an original price of $5,000, and hung it in a hundred-foot tower at the central station on Shantung Road. The fire record for the year lists twenty-seven fires, and one of them is the type the brigade would fight for forty years: on 6 October 1880 in Fukien Road, “66 houses burnt and 7 houses pulled down. Origin, explosion of a kerosine lamp.” The Chinese quarters of the Settlement were rows of timber-framed houses sharing walls, lit by kerosene, heated by charcoal and stacked with goods, and a fire that got into a row went down it until the brigade pulled a gap.

Companies, boxes and hydrants

The brigade grew by company. “Phenix, No. 2 Hook and Ladder Company” was organised on 6 April 1883 with about twenty-five men and a motto of its own, “By Hook or by Crook”, in a new track house “fitted with electric alarm apparatus”; by 1904 the roll ran Mih-ho-loong No. 1, Hongkew No. 2, Deluge No. 4, Le Torrent No. 6, which was the French company, and Victoria No. 7. The Council was by 1883 considering the telephone for alarms, and in 1886 the telephone company put up wooden alarm boxes in the streets, replaced the next year with iron ones and maintained for 75 taels a month. The hydrants the waterworks company erected from 1883 changed the brigade’s chances: in 1887 the commission reported that they “have proved most useful in stopping the spread of fires on several occasions”, and complained in the same breath of “persons putting stones in the water-hydrants”. Seventeen more went up in 1889. In the same year the Council bought the brigade its second steamer, “Victoria Steam Fire Engine, Shand and Mason, Patent No. 2 size, Vertical Steam Fire Engine, built in 1870”, from the China Fire Insurance Company’s agents for about 1,825 taels, and it would still be in service, horse-drawn, in 1913.

The fires did not shrink. The commission’s figures are a run of bad years: 60 fires and 134 houses in 1886; 62 fires and 156 houses in 1887, 77 of them at one fire on the night of 7 December in North Soochow and Tiendong Roads; 58 fires and 196 houses in 1888, with 31 in Hupeh Road in April and 35 and 51 in Fuhkien Road in June and October; 58 fires and 211 houses in 1889; 68 fires and 268 houses in 1890, 141 of them at three fires. In 1893 a lottery shop on Honan Road burned with thirteen houses and four men were charged with setting it alight; a carpenter’s match took thirty houses on 24 November. The brigade that year cost 10,592 taels, a tenth of it new plant. The Settlement’s Chinese houses, which by then numbered tens of thousands, were burning at a rate of two hundred a year.

1903–1908: the Council takes the brigade

The new century gave the brigade a building, a paid staff and, in the end, a master. The Central Fire Station on Honan Road, “completed in March, 1903”, was a four-storey block with the motto cut over the door, and Darwent found there, beside the volunteers, “a paid native staff” under “a chief engineer and paid departmental engineer”, the whole costing the ratepayers “about 21,000” taels a year, against 102 fires in 1902 that destroyed 155 houses. The 1905 report counts 84 volunteers, 7 paid foreigners and 60 paid Chinese, with a new coolie corps, at 22,512 taels; the brigade attended 165 fires with 90 general alarms, and 348 houses were destroyed and 167 damaged inside the Settlement. Eighteen Chinese died in a fire in Rue Colbert across the creek on 29 November 1905. Three weeks later, in the Mixed Court riot of 18 December, the crowd that had burned the Louza police station came for the Hongkew fire station, and the No. 2 company “drove off the mob with well-directed streams of cold water”. The same report records the order, in April 1905, of “the Petrol Motor Fire Engine and Escape”, expected in February 1906, which is the brigade’s first motor by the Council’s reckoning, though its chairman would later remember 1908.

In 1907 the Council ordered from Merryweather of London “a steam motor 800 gallon fire engine and an eighty-foot petrol motor turntable fire escape”, and in 1908 “One self-propelled Steam Fire Engine, ‘Fire King,’ 800 gallons per minute” was in commission. The same year ended the partnership of 1866. The French Council took its company, Le Torrent, out of the brigade from 31 March 1908, keeping “its steam engine, 3 pony hose reels, 2 horses and 3 ponies”; and since “the French Company being separate, the necessity for the Commission, as then constituted, would cease”, the Fire Commission, whose chairman A. McLeod had sat since 1877, dissolved itself and the brigade became a department under the Council’s Watch Committee. The Council prosecuted that year 54 people for arson, negligence and storing too much kerosene. In 1909 it bought a 55/60 horsepower motor hose tender from John Morris and Sons for £750, out of twenty-one tenders, and began the Sinza station for the Western District; the budget for 1910 noted that “the cost of the Brigade has more than doubled in five years”.

1911–1913: a professional chief

The report for 1911 is the volunteers’ last as masters of their own house, and it is full of complaint. On 9 October a fire in Foochow Road caused “complete destruction by fire of about 80 houses” and damaged the turntable escape; the French brigade and German sailors from SMS Jaguar came to help. The street alarm boxes were “of an obsolete pattern”, and the bell towers were being hidden by tall buildings and drowned by electric light. The Victoria company’s new station on Myburgh Road opened on 26 February. And the budget for 1912 made “for the first time provision for a paid Head for the Brigade”. M. W. Pett, a professional from Singapore, was appointed Chief Officer on 16 November 1912, and the report for 1913 calls that year the brigade’s “first year of working under a stipendiary Chief Officer”.

Pett’s first report is the fullest the brigade ever wrote. It had 59 volunteers, seven watchmen in the bell towers and 99 Chinese, and cost 63,022 taels. It attended 130 calls, and the loss on property in the Settlement was “estimated at Tls. 724,465”, 540,000 of it at the Ewo cotton mill on 18 April; on 16 October a conflagration in Zhabei, outside the limits, destroyed “approximately 700 houses”. The two horsed steamers “have been in active service for over 40 years”, and “it is advisable that horsed appliances be replaced by motors at the earliest opportunity”. The general alarm “has been cut down from 25 to 10 strokes”; the fire float at the Nanking Road jetty could now get away in under ten minutes against twenty-five. The hydrants were “insufficient in number and placed too far apart”, the Central station “in every way unsuitable”, the Hongkew station “far from satisfactory”. His successor’s report for 1914 gave the comparison the Council did not want: “The total number of fire hydrants on Municipal roads in Shanghai is 202, whilst Singapore has over 1,220”, and against 4,435 buildings put up the year before only 17 new hydrants, “approximately one hydrant per 260 houses”. The chief officer’s view of Chinese building was that “ceilings in Chinese buildings are an abomination from a fire point of view”; the public works department’s was that “there is absolutely no relation between the Chinese Building Rules and fire prevention”, the “fire walls” between every eight houses being hollow, with the beams built into them. The brigade had 49 volunteers in 1914, “on account of the War”, and attended 161 calls; the Hall and Holtz department store burned on 17 February at “nearly Tls. 200,000”.

1919: the last volunteers

The war took the young men who had filled the companies, and a professional chief and a volunteer brigade did not mix. By 1917 there were 44 volunteers and 194 Chinese firemen with 12 watchmen; calls had risen to 325 and losses to 859,400 taels. Then, Pott records, “the whole force consisting of 44 men resigned en bloc on April 30th, 1919”. The Council’s chairman, E. C. Pearce, told the ratepayers what had happened in a short history of his own: reels “were first drawn by ponies in 1890”, “it was not until 1908 that the first motor was introduced”, “difficulties arose after the engagement of a professional chief officer for the Brigade in 1912”, and “we must rely more fully on a paid fire staff”. The 1932 report puts it in one line: “1919 is the first year the Brigade was placed on a whole-time professional basis.” The fire that tested the new brigade came in 1921, at North Soochow and North Thibet Roads, with a loss “which amounted to Tls. 6,500,000”, the largest in the Settlement’s history, and 1922 brought its worst year for lives: the steamer Ta-Shing “burnt to the water’s edge in the harbour” on 10 November with some two hundred dead, and on 30 December a fire among seven hundred huts near Jessfield in which “from 30 to 40 mill-workers were burnt to death”. The brigade lost its first man that year “since its reorganisation”.

The brigade in numbers

The Council’s tables let the brigade be measured over sixty years.

Year	Fires or calls	Houses burnt	Loss (taels)	Staff	Cost (taels)
1880	27	66 at one fire		volunteers	8,220
1887	62	156		volunteers, paid secretary and engineer	7,060
1893	69	204			10,592
1905	165	348 destroyed, 167 damaged		84 volunteers, 7 paid foreign, 60 Chinese	22,512
1913	130		724,465	59 volunteers, 99 Chinese	63,022
1922	447	55 destroyed, 229 damaged	235,303	professional	224,944
1925	563	12 destroyed, 194 damaged	459,410	5 station officers, 18 sub-officers, 481 Chinese	368,806
1932	900		2.46 per cent of risk	57 foreign, 681 Chinese	714,980

Two things moved in opposite directions. Calls went from about sixty a year in the 1880s to nine hundred in 1932, as the Settlement grew, as the telephone made calling easy, and as the brigade was called to every rubbish fire. Houses destroyed went from two hundred a year to a dozen: in 1925 the brigade attended 563 calls and lost twelve houses, with property at risk valued at 53 million taels, though 33 people died at fires that year, eleven of them at one small fire in Singkeipang Road. The brigade that had pulled down rows to stop a fire was now stopping it in the room it started in. The price of that was the professional staff: 167,279 taels in 1921, 368,806 in 1925, 714,980 in 1932, when 57 foreign officers and men and 681 Chinese firemen ran Cadillac and Fiat tenders out of the stations, used 87 miles of hose, and were reorganising a volunteer reserve of at most fifty men as an afterthought.

What the sources disagree on

The bell of 1880 weighs 6,150 pounds in the commission’s report, “rather over 6,000” in the Council’s and 5,150 in Pott. The first motor is the petrol engine ordered in 1905 by the Council’s report and “not until 1908” by its chairman in 1919; the Fire King and the turntable escape of 1908 are probably what he remembered. The great fire of December 1887 is dated the 7th in the fire record and the 8th in the commission’s narrative. The 1913 losses are 724,465 taels in that year’s report and about 1,224,465 by the arithmetic of the next, which compared a different base. Pett’s appointment is 16 November 1912 in the staff list and 1913 is “the first year” under him in the brigade’s report. The brigade’s reports for 1866–79, 1906 and 1910 are not on the Internet Archive, so the earliest fire counts and the arrival of the first motor are missing. “Calls” after 1908 and “fires” before are not the same measure, and the table above mixes them.

What to look for

The Central Fire Station of 1903 stood on Henan Road Central near Fuzhou Road; the block is rebuilt. The old station with the bell tower on Shandong Road is gone, and so is the Hongkew station on Hanyang Road that the crowd attacked in 1905. Fujian Road Central, where 66 houses burned in 1880 and 86 more in 1888, is still a street of close-set shophouses, now of brick. The fire wells under the main streets were filled long ago; the pillar hydrants the chief officer thought too few are the ancestors of the ones on every corner. Pott says the old bell went to Jessfield Park; no one has recorded whether it is still there.