At least he turned up. Credit: Getty.
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In the early hours of a January morning in 1958, Jack Fourt-Wells and Richard ‘Dick’ Stocking were part of a crew from Clerkenwell fire station mobilised to a blaze that had broken out at the nearby Smithfield meat market in London’s City district. The fire had taken hold in a vast labyrinth of underground tunnels leading to cold storage rooms.
Wearing their primitive breathing apparatus sets, Fourt-Wells and Stocking were sent down into the acrid smoke with an instruction to locate the seat of the fire. They were never seen alive again. Their bodies were eventually found among piles of frozen meat packets and animal carcasses.
The incident became the catalyst for a powerful campaign led by the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) to modernise equipment and safety procedures. The union called for breathing apparatus sets to be equipped with low-pressure warning alarms and audible distress devices, and for a better system of monitoring firefighters while they were working in such hazardous conditions. The campaign was a success. Government and fire service bosses were eventually forced to concede that the demands were eminently reasonable. As ever, it had taken a tragedy to spark change.
The FBU’s campaign was a commendable example of a trade union looking beyond the battleground of pay, and lobbying for the safety of its members at work. 60 years after the event, I hosted proceedings as a plaque dedicated to the memory of Fourt-Wells and Stocking was unveiled at the spot where they fell. We will never know the number of firefighters whose lives were saved — and, mercifully, whose names it was never necessary to inscribe on such plaques — thanks to the union’s efforts.
Other trade unions can justly lay claim to having been instrumental in bringing about a safer working environment for those they represent. The annual number of workplace deaths has been dramatically reduced from an average of over 4000 at the beginning of the last century to fewer than 200 today. This is why anyone who tries to persuade me, a lifelong trade unionist, that unions have no business interfering in such matters is liable to get short shrift. History shows that trade unions are overall a force for good when it comes to safety in the workplace, and we shouldn’t forget it.
All of which brings me to Covid-19. At all times and on all matters, trade unions must strive to ensure their demands are measured and pragmatic. Crucially, union leaders must always seek to take their members — and, where possible, the public too — with them. This is even more the case when the issue at hand is one that is politically contentious.
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