One more last working class hero

1.2. METHODOLOGY
Before coming to academia, I was a firefighter for over 30 years and as my research is about firefighters’ masculinity, I
wanted to develop a methodology that would make best use of my experiences. I also had to consider that my PhD had a
political aim, which was to assist the fire service with its difficulties over equal opportunities and therefore should be
available to firefighters themselves. Consequently, my methodology had to be flexible enough to enable me to respond to
any leads, use my experiential knowledge of the fire service with academic rigour and provide a report firefighters could
understand.
Chapter 2 will describe in detail the development of my methodology, but for now let it be understood that I
collected the bulk of my data using qualitative methods of interview, observation and auto-critique, and some data was
collected through quantitative/qualitative questionnaires. Collation and analysis of this data took place using grounded
theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967) to provide a considerable ethnography of the fire service, which became especially
revealing because the actual analysis took place using Hearn’s (1994) notion of pro-feminist auto-critique 5 .
My use of pro-feminist auto-critique allows me to reveal much about the fire service from my own experiences,
including some of the previously hidden joint understandings that firefighters use to perpetuate their power 6 (see Chapters
2-6). Section 3 is an example of how I use pro-feminist auto-critique and involves an experiential view of the fire service
that my fieldwork influences. This is produced at this time to provide some context for those whose knowledge of the fire
service is limited, and to separate it from the remainder of the report, which is fieldwork led and influenced by my
experiential knowledge. As a warning, it may appear that the report moves away from debates about gender. However, I
am trying to develop a more complex understanding of gender by listening to how firefighters actually explain firefighting
and their social arrangements on the station. From this understanding, I hope to show that firefighters’ working
arrangements are influential in how firefighters socially construct their identity/masculinity. Chapters 3-5 are the outcome
of this practice. In Chapter 6, I shall conclude the whole report in a critique of the social/political construction of gender
amongst firefighters and move this discussion to wider debates about gender. However, gender is about power and any
understanding of how firefighters construct their masculinity first needs a prior explanation of some important
structures/traditions in the fire service, how the fire service works and some important features concerning firefighting 7 .
This explanation follows and I recognise right from the onset that this explanation is a subjective view. This is done with
academic rigour, but I know that my surroundings and knowledge influence the way I think, therefore for me so called
objectivity (the ability to think impartially) is not a reality.
1.3. THE FIRE SERVICE
1.3.1. History
The Great Fire of London (1666) was the dynamic for establishing the fire service, but the fire-insurance brigades that
sprung up after the fire was part of the wealth creation process and not a humanitarian response 8 . In origin each brigade
had a distinctive uniform, mainly as an advertisement for their insurance company (see Appendix 2) and firefighters only
fought fires in the property insured by their company—they had no life saving role. As cities expanded, fire-insurance
companies (and brigades) increased. In London, the first economic rationalisations occurred in the fire service (1827) as
fire-insurance companies started to amalgamate their brigades to eventually pool their resources in forming the ‘General
Fire Engine Establishment’ (1833). In 1866, the responsibility for providing a fire service in London passed to local
government who formed the London Fire Engine Establishment. This forerunner of the London Fire Brigade (LFB),
under the command of Massey Shaw, experienced immediate financial restrictions. The budget was less than Shaw
wanted 9 : a problem that still exists today (see Chapter 5).
Large cities followed London’s lead, but parish arrangements remained haphazard. Not until the country prepared
for war (1938), did the government require local authorities to organise a fire service. The fire service was nationalised
3
consequence) water provides exactly the same sort of grounding to knowledge as I hope to provide for firefighters. It is almost ironic that firefighters’
main medium for firefighting is water; in fact the whole scenario I explain here is a further example of an unintended consequence.
5 I shall return to Hearn’s (1994) notion of pro-feminist auto-critique in Chapter 2. However, it needs to be understood that pro-feminism is a politically
charged approach to sociology that attempts to enlighten men about how their behaviour damages society, women and themselves.
6 During my education as a working class man, I learnt that there were understandings and forms of behaviour that men support and test themselves
against, what I will later generalise as ‘masculine standards’. The fact that these standards had to be achieved, rather than that they were natural, is
something that men do not publicise, nor particularly discuss, but nonetheless the groups they form do police these standards. As an example when I
joined the fire service I was expected to conform to the way the experienced firefighters operated (what I later explain as conforming to firefighters’
hierarchy), this was in effect a very similar situation to that I had accepted as a working class boy, but these standards were rarely, if ever, discussed, they
were just policed. Keeping to these standards and yet not publicising them is what Goffman (1959: 216) identifies as dramaturgical loyalty.
7 Later in this chapter and in Chapter 2 I will explain that this thesis will not be another ritual discovery of harassment in the fire service that produces
simple to find examples of how firefighters harass women (see Howell 1994; Baigent 1996; Lee 1996; Richards 1996; Archer 1998; HMI 1999).
8 Segars (1989) argues that the financial revolution saw the provision of fire-insurance companies as a response to a need by merchants to protect their
properties from fire (particularly in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London). Having provided the insurance, it then made economic sense for the fireinsurance
companies to protect the risk by establishing their own individual fire brigades.
9 The insurance companies contributed 30% of the cost, which represents a saving to them of about 50%, but this did not prevent them complaining
about having to contribute towards the fire service’s ‘new’ role of saving life from fire (see Segars 1989).