One more last working class hero

Many leaders often emerge who are not junior officers and indeed their leadership is sometimes so strong it can
overwhelm the weaker junior officer and management becomes almost a competitive issue.
When I was a watch-commander I thought I was in charge, but I now realise that running the watch was rarely “a
competitive issue”, which I subjectively viewed myself as winning, but more-often a compromise in which I may well
have been a lesser partner but actually kidded myself I was in charge. Alf explains:
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Alf
I think some of the decisions of the general running of the watch are negotiable, i.e. if a watchcommander
requires you to act in a certain way all day every day and the whole watch disagree with
that, you call a meeting and you say sorry Guv, but we don’t like this. We don’t want to get up at 0900
and polish fire engines till 1345, we think that is too much. We don’t mind polishing the fire engines,
we’re quite prepared .. we know they have got to be cleaned up .. how about if we just do it every other
day until 1130’. And then you strike a good compromise and you then build a working relationship, as
far as that goes. Yes you have a watch-commander but his role is negotiable. We are not tin soldiers;
we are human beings; we have opinions and we are all entitled to voice them.
[My emphases].
In an organisation with formal/written rules, Alf is describing the informal compromise between the watch and their
officers 190 . Firefighters can often work together for decades and experiential knowledge suggests that there will very often
be flashpoints. These are more common when a new watch officer arrives, but in a group so socialised to fitting-in,
boundaries are negotiable. There is a fire service expression, ‘don’t wash your dirty linen in public’ and firefighters were
not always so ready to explain problems within the watch, nor the negotiations that sorted them out:
Ted:
It would be behind closed doors anyway.
(Ted, Brigade one, firefighter, 1.25 years’ service, age 23).
However, unlike Arnold, I did not just pop in for a cup of tea with firefighters during my research. I spent time
with them and eventually I gained a considerable amount of data from firefighters about the informal negotiation at
stations. Watch-commanders were not so accessible, nor prepared to trust me. Only one watch-commander admitted to
the watch organising so democratically. However, any officer caught negotiating the rules would be subject to censure, or
worse and I am not at all surprised by their silence. Accepting that watch-commanders were unlikely to provide evidence
of compromise in a direct form, I used my experiential knowledge to look at a number of key sites to explore whether
firefighters were resisting specific BO’s with their watch-commander’s complicity.
5.4.2. Dynamic risk assessment (DRA)
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have followed up their concerns about safety in the fire service by issuing several
‘Notices’. The fire service response relates to improving management of firefighters (see Robinson 1998). During my
observations at the Fire Service College (FSC), I found that this was being done by training watch-commanders to
implement DRA. By attending a lecture on DRA I found this ‘new’ safety feature requires watch-commanders to balance
firefighters’ safety against the potential risk, before allowing firefighters to get-in. The teaching includes the possibility
that officers may have to prevent firefighters from getting-in if officers judged the risk too high. This appears to conflict
with the findings of Chapter 3 and firefighters’ response to DRA could provide an early ‘barometer’ to firefighters’
resistance, and watch officers’ complicity in this. Given that this ‘rational’ intervention by officers has FBU support
(Mathews 1997), during a break in the lecture, I asked a group of officers, from a variety of brigades, about what impact
the lecture had on them. Their answers were immediate; all suggest a considerable resistance to DRA and I quickly
scribbled these answers in my fieldbook:
• it’s one thing talking about it in the classroom situation. On the fireground the last thing on your mind is a court
of law;
• anoraks (a new word describing officers who did not have any idea of the real world, as these watch-commanders
see it, of firefighting);
• the hardest thing of all is to stop the crew;
• the crew rig in B.A. on route to a persons reported, they are already breathing air before they get off;
• if you tried to stop them they would push you out of the way.
There were clearly concerns amongst these watch-commanders, if not outright resistance to the whole notion of DRA. If
these concerns influence watch-commanders behaviour more than the training they are being given, then DRA might not
improve the management of firefighters. Therefore, I looked to see if DRA is an area of compromise and negotiation
between firefighters and their officers, or if firefighters listen to their union. Jasper suggests not:
190 It may be that the close affiliation the fire service has with the navy could be important here. There were some surprisingly liberal regimes in the 18 th
century navy, where officers sometimes took a vote before entering into a battle (Grint 1998: 53). Nelson’s decision to break the rules by using his blind
eye is perhaps the most celebrated act of disobedience in the British military and naval traditions may contrast considerably with the army whose blind
obedience led to the carnage at Balaclava.