One more last working class hero

commander who rides to all incidents on the appliance and is responsible for their watch’s day-to-day administration,
discipline, training and welfare (see Chapters 3-5).
6
1.3.6. Formal hierarchies
The term officer can have a wide ranging meaning in the fire service, in this work I try to differentiate between the always
operational watch-officers, and senior officers who are not attached to a watch and only have a limited operational
involvement. Promotion in the fire service is by single tier entry promotion (STEP), a system that requires every officer to
have served as a firefighter. The hierarchy is so arranged as to ensure promotion is achieved step-by-step: there is no
leapfrogging of ranks and in achieving promotion officers must serve in each rank before applying for the next 21 . Overall
responsibility for the four watches at a firestation, or a group of firestations, falls on the Station-commander, who can be a
Station Officer or Assistant Divisional Officer [ADO]. ADO’s are the first senior officer rank, and (although this
formality is changing) may be addressed as ‘Sir’ and saluted when met. Station Commanders do not have ‘hands-on’
responsibility for the watch or firefighting, but they are responsible for ensuring that each watch organises according to the
rules and regulations. Groups of stations can also be organised as Divisions and then Divisional Officers coordinate the
ADO’s 22 . The upward hierarchy continues to principal rank (Appendix 4). Officers’ working week averages 72 hours,
divides between day desk-hours and hours on call from home. All officers can be called from their desk, or home, to a fire
at a moments notice.
Coordinating four watches that operate around the 24 hours is not easy. To facilitate the operational and
administrative organisation of the fire service, especially during the absence of senior officers, written Brigade Orders
(BO’s) provide the complete wisdom on how to run a fire service. BO’s cover every conceivable administrative concern,
and a written procedure exists for almost every type of emergency incident (despite firefighting being hands-on see
Chapter 3). In an organisation where rank is supposed to provide unquestionable authority, rank also implies a greater
ability and there is little room for entrepreneurial questioning during or after the rule making process (see Dixon 1994 23 ).
The expectation that firefighters accept officers given right to lead and will comply with BO’s is a service value: a
tradition few will publicly deny. However, this report will suggest that firefighters often make entrepreneurial
interpretations to avoid officers’ ‘iron cage’ (see Chapters 3-5) and that practice will often differ from public
acknowledged values. These informal cultural decisions, whereby values are offset by practice, can extend to a point
where the watch, rather than senior officers, organise how they do their work. It may be that senior officers are aware of
this breakdown in discipline, but few recognise it publicly: content almost that they have written the orders in such a way
as to protect themselves and unconcerned that the bureaucracy is failing (see Chapters 3 and 5; Baigent 1996).
1.3.7. The link to the military
The formal structure of the fire service may be organised along military lines, but despite the regimentation, the traditional
attachment is to the, “highly disciplined and immensely strong sailors of the Royal Navy” (Lloyd-Elliott 1992: 24; see
Segars 1989; Bailey 1992: 4; Divine 1993). It is easy to see how the link with the navy served the fire service, because
firefighters have historically worked extremely long hours, in groups isolated at a station and in dangerous and confined
situations (see Segars 1989). The link with the navy is mostly only one of tradition now, but firestations can still be
referred to as ships and shifts are called watches and the fire service often acts as if it were the senior rescue service.
As in the military, officers report to the officer above (see Dixon 1994). Chief Officers report to politicians on the
Fire Committee, which in turn is responsible to voters and to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Chief Officers are
also responsible for writing Brigade Orders (BO’s), which impersonally/objectively cover ‘every’ contingency and they do
so with the public belief that they are dictating how their brigade will organise. Weber (1971) could identify BO’s as
creating an iron cage of rationality, especially as the fire service makes convincing claims to be a uniformed disciplined
service, where the rule is “salute and execute” (CCC 2000: 21; see Archer 1999: 94). Whilst it would be easy for a
researcher to accept this view, it is a view I query. Much of my evidence collected from politicians, at The Fire Service
College, on stations and from the FBU, challenges the whole concept of the fire service as disciplined in any military
sense (see Chapters 3-5). Analysis suggests there is a concerted attempt throughout the fire service to suggest that the
disciplinary model still exists (see Chapters 3-5). Each level of the hierarchy may have different reasons for maintaining
this image, but it is firefighters’ view that every officer appears to justify their rank as if they were the centre-pin of the
fire service. Therefore, if any officer admits they were not in control, they would destroy their own justification and the
21 STEP is my abbreviation, chosen because it aptly reflects that promotion is only achieved step-by-step. The lack of accelerated promotion and outside
entry at senior level may cause the fire service considerable difficulties regarding expertise, restrict the ability for entrepreneurial decision making and
contravene equal opportunities legislation (see Chapter 5).
22 Each brigade may organise their own structure and re-organisations occur as a regular feature of management.
23 Dixon (1994) provides a very clear explanation of how military officers have been historically ‘given’ the right to lead. As his account of the countless
blunders in the many battles that the UK has been involved in indicates, this actually means that ‘right is might’. The senior rank is not only in charge,
but identified by their subordinates as having absolute power and there is little room for negotiation of this right. Not forgetting the ‘Charge of the Light
Brigade’, one recent examples of this behaviour is the Commons Public Accounts Committee’s criticism of the Ministry of Defence handling of the
enquiry into the Chinook helicopter crash that claimed 29 lives in 1994. They suggested that the ruling by two Air Marshals who blamed the pilots for
the crash was unsustainable. Yet, Sir William Wratten, one of the Air Marshals on the original RAF board of inquiry, dismissed the charges of
arrogance. “As far as I am concerned there is no doubt whatsoever. There wasn’t then, there isn’t now,” he told Newsnight (BBC, 30-11-00; see
Norton-Taylor 2000a 2000b). To a lesser degree, this thesis will indicate that fire service officers might have a similar belief in their own infallibility.