“Newe Devised Squert”

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6850, 4 March 1929, Page 4

“Newe Devised Squert”

MS fire-fighters i our forefathers must have been singularly efficient, writes J. P. Quane in the Melbourne “Herald.” That they laboured under difficulties when the dread alarm was given may be readily understood by the awesome aspect of the contrivance portrayed in the illustration. This, by the way, is not one of the fruits of Heath Robinson’s fertile brain, but an engraving, published in 1590, of an Elizabethan fire engine. It is said that the first engine used in England was of this type. The letterpress of the volume from which the illustration is reproduced states that the machine is “a newe devised squert out of which a hoggeshea.d of water may be thrown on a fiered house or any other thing.” But, when the brigade turned out in the old days the actual fire-fighting was the least troublesome task ahead of them. The worst trouble was getting the engine on the spot with the greatest show of expedition. Besides, you could not always arrange for a fire to occur in a convenient position, and if one broke out any distance from a public cistern it took 28 men to roll a portable one to the scene of devastation. Then while the apparatus was placed in a point

whence the stream could be unerringly directed upon the conflagration, all the maids and matrons set about filling the cistern, and their job was to keep it replenished while the rest of the team bent all their energies to combating the flames. If the age of the before-alluded-to book was not beyond doubt, we could almost imagine the old gentleman so busily engaged turning the Archimedean screw to be clad in modern pyjamas and slippers! He is the hardest-worked man in the group, and the other active male, as he wields the long-handled dipper, reminds us of the gradually vanishing Chiuese market gardener or the “fossicker” of our boyhood days. The nonchalant person whose job it was to pull the engine to the scene of activity leans in a posture cf careless abandon upon the handle of his machine, regarding not the leaping tongues of flame so uncomfortably contiguous. He is probably visualising with pleasurable anticipation the sweet-scented moisture which later on (we feel sure) shall pour forth from an entirely different kind of "hoggeshead.”

And, after their strenuous labours, who among us would deny it to them?