Fired Up For Service
I very much appreciated Felix Rowe’s article ‘Fighting fire’ in the July issue, because I have often felt that compared with the armed forces or the police, information about the fire service is much underrepresented.
Wartime fire service brought my parents together. My father, Jim Bodfish, joined Smethwick Borough brigade in 1940, and my mother, Hilda Battey, seized the opportunity to train for the Auxiliary Fire Service in Wolverhampton in 1939 as a route into war work and out of a dead-end shop job. For the first time in her life she had real responsibility, and her intelligence and commitment brought promotion. She attended training courses both at Divisional HQ and the National Fire Service Training College at Saltdean in Sussex, and qualified in 1944 as a mobile training instructor. She was then transferred to Rolfe Street Fire Station in Smethwick, where she met my father. He was certainly impressed by this lively, no-nonsense young woman who was now delivering training programmes to both firemen and firewomen in Smethwick, Oldbury and West Bromwich.
Hilda had to give up any plans of continuing a career that had brought her fulfilment, as all firewomen were made redundant soon after VE Day in 1945, but marriage plans were soon on the horizon. Towards the end of her life, in her nineties, Hilda reminisced constantly about her time in the fire service; and fortunately for me she kept a collection of the administrative paperwork relating to it.
Mary Bodfish, by email
EDITOR REPLIES: I’m glad you enjoyed the feature Mary, and shining a light on what wartime work offered women like your mother.