One more last working class hero

Alf is distancing himself from those officers that use promotion to escape from firefighting: officers who may also
comprise the ‘Careerists or Movers’ category in Chapter 4 and leave the operational watch as quickly as possible. Liam
calls them ‘flyers’:
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Liam:
Those ADO's or DO's don't know a lot. Just sit in offices and read a lot … Flyer, right place, right time
… some might have experience, some jump experience, go to FP.
(Brigade seven, Leading firefighter, 5 years’ service, age 38).
There is no doubt that despite arguments about shared understandings, there is a distance between what officers may or
may not have been when they were firefighters and what they are now (they have left the class of firefighters). You do not
even have to be a firefighter to recognise this as Hilary explains:
Hilary:
No senior officer can talk to firefighters. In reality they can’t talk the role.
(Senior civilian equality worker) [My emphasis].
Firefighters are busy creating a gap between themselves and officers, and as a consequence firefighters’ perception that
officers cannot ‘walk the talk’ becomes real in its consequences (see Thomas 1909).
5.3.1. Paperwork
Closely associated with the ‘prized model’ of working class hands-on proletarian masculinity is the argument that
paperwork is somehow not proper work (see Collinson 1994). Firefighters’ characteristic dislike for paperwork and
academia, in turn, can therefore widen the gap between them and those officers who firefighters see as deskbound. When
I asked Terri if she was interested in promotion, her answer provides a clear link between respect, operational experience
and firefighters’ views on office work:
Terri:
[T]o get the respect you need, I think you have got to have that operational experience. … I wouldn’t
want to be really shoved into some office somewhere and forgotten about, yunnoo [laughter] and
vegetate there.
[My emphasis and inserts].
Terri argues that the embodied activity of the vital and alert notion of getting-in, which firefighters use as a benchmark, is
in powerful contrast to the paperwork of officers. Firefighters appear to be busy distancing themselves from the many
officers for whom they have no respect and consequently do not trust. Officers whose promotion is based on academic
prowess, rather than shared experience: a belief firefighters support by associating officers with pen-pushers and
firefighters’ own clear view that promotion should only be available after a considerable shared experience of firefighting
and watch life. Firefighters’ argument shifts from a belief in shared understandings to suggest that ‘academic’ officers
were never ‘real’ firefighters (like them) anyway. Officers according to firefighters just pass through the rank (class) of
firefighter on route to ‘better’ things. Keith provides an explicit example of firefighters’ view of academic officers:
Keith:
You get one of these young upstarts, these boys coming along and the only reason why they’re there is
through exams; through paper work. … He cannot fit-into a team. … So he is going up on his academic
side, from office to office to office. Occasionally he gets thrown back into operational and he finds out
he can’t do and he strives harder and goes back into his office.
(Brigade 2, firefighter, 15 years’ service, age 40, in a focus group). [My emphases].
Keith’s lack of respect for officers is obvious. He uses two of the worse insults that a firefighter can make about a
‘colleague’: accusing him of not being able to do The Job and hiding in the office. Such a statement may paraphrase
firefighters’ and indeed Collinson’s (1994) argument about the distance between the ‘workers’ and the academic penpushers
they do not trust.
5.3.2. Would you take promotion?
The view that men “sacrifice their manhood … change once they were promoted” (Collinson 1994: 33) may not get
Young’s (1991) support when he argues that masculinity is a central feature of police promotion. However, masculinity
comes in many forms (Cockburn 1991a, 1991b; Hearn 1994; Connell 1995) and, as I argue in the introduction, has no
fixed meaning (except through the eye of the speaker/interpreter; see Thomas 1909; Giddens 1979; Kondo 1990). In
Collinson’s case, the eyes belong to engineers, in Young’s case police officers and in this case firefighters. On the sliding
scale of “what is masculinity?” it might be safe to talk of a (working class) proletarian masculinity that celebrates physical
deeds and a (middle class) white-collar masculinity that celebrates managerial authority. The police position on this scale
is somewhat ambiguous, their masculinity involves ‘proving’ they are in charge, sometimes physically, but more often
involves a physical presence, which supports a psychological approach. Despite the distance between the physical and
psychological, there are metaphors which try to bridge the gap.