Firefighters feel ‘treated as cannon fodder’ amid Covid crisis
ENTERTAINER GEORGE FORMBY PASSED AWAY 60 YEARS AGO. MARION MCMULLEN LOOKS BACK AT A LIFE OF LAUGHTER
I am always conscious about going home and cuddling my children before I go to bed Anonymous firefighter
DERBYSHIRE’S fire staff are feeling “forgotten” and believe they are being treated as “cannon fodder” due to a lack of regular Covid-19 testing and of vaccine prioritisation, it has been claimed.
A Derbyshire firefighter who spoke to the Local Democracy Reporting Service on the condition of anonymity said he believed staff were already at serious risk of contracting the virus while attending callouts, and that home visits they are being asked to do added to this risk.
The firefighter claimed the lack of regular testing has left many within Derbyshire’s fire and rescue service fearing that they could be “super-spreaders” and giving the virus to their children and loved ones without their knowledge.
Firefighters have been told that they must restart “safe and well” visits at the homes of the county’s most vulnerable the elderly and disabled.
This includes going into dozens of homes a month to check fire alarms are functioning properly and to check for other fire safety issues and provide advice.
Up until now, due to the pandemic, these checks had taken place at the doorway to avoid the risk of either contracting or passing on the virus.
The Derbyshire firefighter, we’ve named John to protect his identity, said: “It is a constant worry every time my child has a cough or any other symptom that might be linked to coronavirus.
“Thankfully, nothing has led to that so far but I am always conscious about going home and cuddling my children before I go to bed. I feel like I need to go for a shower, and what difference that would make, I just don’t know, but that’s all I can do.
“All our gaffers are making these decisions without serving on the frontline, they are at offices in HQ and have the option to work from home, with no worry about taking the virus back to their families - that is just not an option for us.”
During call-outs, social distancing is rarely possible, with firefighters often in close personal contact with residents as they rescue them from harm and to speak to those who are passing on details of the incident and fearing for their loved ones and properties.
The firefighter says he has had relatives of his pull out of vital childcare bubble arrangements due to the perceived risk of him catching and spreading the virus. He fears passing it to his kids and that he cannot now assist his elderly relatives with food shopping.
He and his colleagues across the county have been missing out on the support they often provide to each other after difficult incidents which have a long-lasting mental toll - worsened by the anxiety of a lack of testing and vaccine prioritisation.
They suspect that management has not brought in regular testing for firefighters to avoid crippling workforce shortages caused by self-isolation procedures should a case or cases be identified.
The pressure to restart home visits, despite a lack of testing, has been pushed by the rise in fatal and accidental house fires in homes in the county.
The accusations come after a much respected firefighter in Staffordshire died after a Covid-19 battle in hospital.
A spokesperson for Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service said that testing for staff without symptoms is in the works and that the chief fire officer, alongside the national fire chief’s council, have been lobbying the Government for vaccine prioritisation.
They said there was no evidence to suggest fire and rescue staff were at a higher risk from the virus than those in the top nine vaccine priority groups.
This includes everyone aged 50 and above, health and social care staff, care home staff and residents, the clinically extremely vulnerable and those with particular underlying health conditions.
A spokesperson for Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service said: “The health, safety and welfare of our staff and our communities has been a strategic priority for the service in response to Covid-19 since the pandemic began.
“Early intervention directed by the chief fire officer ensured the development and implementation of covidsecure procedures, including procurement of correct personal protection equipment (PPE), necessary face masks and cleaning materials, along with regularly-reviewed risk assessments of all fire service activity and this has been successful in ensuring a very low number of Covid-19 cases in the service.
“Enormous amounts of work has been undertaken to ensure the wellbeing of our staff including continual communications with all our employees and the local Fire Brigades Union (FBU) to support the workforce throughout the pandemic.
“We are in the process of introducing lateral flow testing (which takes just 30 minutes to get a result) on a wider scale, after initially having to prioritise, given the limited number of tests available to us at the time.
“This more wholescale approach is being rolled out in accordance with Government guidance, and is now possible due to greater numbers of testing kits being made available to us.
On the topic of safe and well checks – visits to the homes of the most vulnerable – the spokesperson said: “Since December the service has responded to six fatal fires and several serious fires.
“These fires underline why we must continue to deliver the face-to-face interventions that can prevent such fires from happening.
“Our work is to ‘Make Derbyshire Safer Together,’ so we simply cannot sit back and not carry out these lifesaving interventions, but of course we are carrying these out with all of the necessary risk assessments, PPE and covid secure measures possible to protect those receiving our visits, our staff delivering them and of course their families, too.”
COUNCIL officials have admitted that many of their pothole repairs may have to be done again after a few months and that repeated “quick patch-up jobs” will often be carried out.
A core issue was the lack of money available to carry out more long-lasting repair work on the 3,500 miles of road it oversees, Derbyshire County Council says.
Cllr Simon Spencer, the authority’s deputy leader and cabinet member for highways, said the council performs “extremely well” in terms of the number of pothole repairs carried out.
Last summer, Cllr Spencer said the council had filled 28,000 potholes in two months, more than half of the total filled in the entire previous year.
However, residents and councillors have repeatedly raised the issue that pothole repairs often seem to be extremely temporary, with the capped repair wearing away or coming loose within months or even weeks.
Cllr Kewal Singh Athwal said in a scrutiny committee meeting: “In the recent past we have seen lots and lots and lots of potholes repaired, which is very much appreciated, but the issue is potholes are repaired and then a few months later, maybe due to the weather, they are coming up again and the same potholes are being reported time and time again.”
He asked that future repairs be made more permanent to avoid having to visit the same potholes “three or four times”.
Cllr Spencer said: “Sometimes we only do temporary repairs because if it is on a sensitive junction or a sensitive location, to avoid having to put traffic management measures in, we do a quick patch-up and go, and that can happen two or three times before we have had a chance to strip the road back and do a full repair.
“We have got to up our game and you are going to see a lot more activity and a lot more of ripping out of whole stretches, a lot more surface dressing and digging out of drainage systems. We also have a level of accountability that we have to improve on as well.
“We have tried to keep the reactive firefighting going.
“Potholes can form overnight and are caused by water ingress into a surface which isn’t in perfect condition, which I have already said is the case, then it freezes, then it fractures and that is how quickly a pothole can form, and people have to recognise that.
“Some of them are small and some can be quite big and rip the roads apart. In some areas, roads are missing altogether due to landslips.
“In the meantime the guys will continue to patch. We make it very clear to staff that if the report says repair x pothole on x street and you see another one while you are out there, you repair that pothole as well.”
He said the past 18 months has been a “perfect storm” of problems for the highways department, including three bouts of heavy flooding, Covid and the Toddbrook Reservoir crisis.
Cllr Spencer said: “We have been firefighting and facing the next challenge as it came down the track. This has inevitably had an impact on the ability for the department to do its day job.”
Tim Gregory, the authority’s interim director of economy, transport and the environment, said the highways department has been having to
“rob Peter to pay Paul” in order to combat issues, shuffling people between departments and taking money away from other schemes.
He said: “We had a huge backlog of works following last winter and we managed to get on top of that really quite quickly in the spring of last year.
“We are in a similar position now and have had a significant increase in reactive challenges, we were on top of it just before Christmas, but have then had two months’ worth of really extreme weather, both of cold, snow and ice together with a very large amount of rain has exacerbated the reactive works.
“It is very much a focus at the moment to try and keep on top of those and get the numbers down and get those more permanent repairs.
“The best way to stop a pothole is do to the preventative work to start with – that is resurfacing– but given the 3,000plus miles of road we will never be able to do as much resurfacing as we would like to but we can do things like micro-surface dressing as well as major patching to try and eliminate those potholes going wrong as frequently.
“We are never going to be able to completely resolve it because, fundamentally, we don’t have enough money to do everything that one would like to do.”
A Department for Transport spokesperson said: “We have committed £6.771 million for local roads maintenance for 2020-22 in Derby, and £55.049 million for Derbyshire, which will ensure that local roads are made safer and easier to use.”
It said a Government consultation in 2014 to 2015 found that local highway authorities were best placed to prioritise funding and that Government would not hold reserves for emergency funding, such as flooding.
This week we begin a look back at the former Memorial Pavilion, which has recently been demolished to make way for a new sports and community hub.
In this first picture of our series, kindly sent to us by Dinah Archer, we look back to the building’s opening party, on the recreation ground, in June 1957.
Mrs Archer has picked out the following people in the picture: the Rev
Manchester of the Congregational Church, the Rev Pratt, of St John’s, - the next three men are unknown, but the man with the chain of office is possibly the chairman of the rural district council Mr Griffiths.
Then we have Sir Ian Walker Okeover (Mrs Archer’s father), JL Peel (then chairman of Ashbourne Urban Council), an unknown man peeping through and then, Mrs Archer thinks, a Mr Gather. Do you have similar memories to share? At the moment we cannot go out to collect and return images, but we do welcome scanned pictures. Please send them to editorial@ ashbournenewstelegraph. co.uk
BANNED by the BBC and loved by the Queen, George Formby was one of Britain’s biggest stars making 22 movies bearing titles like He Snoops To Conquer and Bell-bottom George, and entertaining Montgomery’s troops in the Sahara, where he declared “Ee, it’s just like Blackpool sands.”
But he worked hard for success, recalling of his early days: “I was the first turn, three minutes, died the death of a dog.”
George Hoy Booth was born in Wigan in 1904 and later adopted his father’s stage name of George Formby. George senior had been in a music hall troupe with a young Charlie Chaplin and encouraged him to try his luck in America.
George left school at seven, unable to read or write, and started as stable boy in Yorkshire and later became an apprentice jockey before turning to comedy and making his professional stage debut in 1921 aged of 16. He was paid the princely sum of £5 a week for a fortnight at the Hippodrome in Lancashire and it was his first step to stardom.
Queen Elizabeth loved the king of the ukulele so much she toyed with becoming President of the George Formby Society and it is claimed she once said she knew the words to his songs Leaning On A Lamp Post, When I’m Cleaning Windows and With My Little Stick Of Blackpool Rock ... and could sing them.
Her Majesty had been won over by the comic after his private performances at Buckingham Palace, and the Windsors were said to be huge fans. In 1941, when the BBC banned the saucy track When I’m Cleaning Windows, branding it a “disgusting little ditty”, George reminded the corporation it was a favourite of Queen Mary’s.
The lyrics of many of his songs were rather saucy though. He sang in Andy The Handyman: “A girl gave me a gold watch. I said ‘It’s rather light, it’s got no works inside it, now surely that’s not right’. She said ‘Now don’t you worry, I’ll give you the works tonight’”.
With his catchphrase “Turned out nice again,” George was Britain’s biggest entertainer in the 1930s and 1940s and was seen as a lovable working-class hero with a goofy grin no-one could resist.
His career took off in 1924, when he introduced the ukulele banjo
George in 1945 into his act and fell in love with clog dancer Beryl Ingham. They married two years later and she gave up her career to become his manager.
Beryl helped him to memorise the words of his movie scripts and his songs, because of his problems reading and writing, and George was soon the highest-paid entertainer in Britain earning the equivalent of £1.5 million a movie although Beryl only gave him five shillings a week pocket money. Most of his earnings were spent on their home in Lytham St Annes, near Blackpool, which came to be named Beryldene.
George made movie after movie and his work entertaining the troops during the Second World earned him an OBE in 1946. Basil Dean, head of ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) remembered him “standing with his back to a tree or a wall of sandbags, with men squatting on the ground in front of him, he sang song after song, screwing up his face into comical expressions of fright whenever shells exploded in the near distance, and making little cracks when the firing drowned the point lines in his songs.”
Beryl was a controlling influence in George’s life and, when she died from leukaemia on Christmas Day 1960 he admitted: “My life with Beryl was hell”.
He became engaged to teacher Pat Howson, more than 20 years his junior, shortly afterwards and bought her a diamond engagement ring and a car.
He knew the engagement would cause a stir, but said: “I’ll be perfectly honest. I’ve got to have somebody to look after me.”
George died of a heart attack on March 6, 1961, just two days before he and Pat were to married. He was just 56 and had planned a honeymoon cruise to the West Indies for them, before moving to a new home near Preston.
Around 150,000 people lined the streets of Warrington to pay their respects at his funeral and the entertainer was buried next to his comic father in Warrington Cemetery. The inscription on his grave reads: “A tradition nobly upheld.”
The George Formby Society was founded shortly afterwards and he became inducted into the Ukulele Hall Of Fame in 2004 with the citation: “He won such love and respect for his charismatic stage presence, technical skill and playful lyrics.”
As George himself would say, “Turned out nice again.”