'They died simply doing the day-to-day job of a London fireman.' Dudgeon's Wharf disaster-July 1969.

For me, in that summer of 1969, the news of an unfolding tragedy came in the most unlikely of settings. I was delivering wine to a flat in Dolphin Square, Pimlico on 17^th July. The occupant, one of the shop’s regular customers, was an extremely kind but single, decidedly gay, middle-aged, man. Immaculately dressed and well spoken, his mannerisms clearly betrayed his sexual preferences. Opening his door to the elegantly appointed flat and inviting me in he said. 

“Oh you poor boy, you must be so sad.” 

It was obvious from the confused look on my face that he could see I had no idea what he was talking about? 

“I’m so sorry. You have not heard the news. Five of your fellows have been killed this morning in a terrible explosion in East London.”

I had built up a rapport with this particular customer as I dropped off his regular weekly case of wine to his posh flat. He knew I was a serving fireman, working somewhere in central London. He loved to chat. I liked the generous tip he always gave me.  I would normally accept his offer of a cuppa but not today. His devastating news hit me like a hammer blow! The sudden change in my mood reflected the awful sadness I felt.

“Here, please take this and put it in the widows’ collection box,” he said as he thrust two ten pound notes into my hand. 

This was an exceptionally generous gesture back then. One I had not experienced before or since. Twenty pounds was a great deal of money. As much as I earned in the LFB in a week.

The mood was sombre when I went into Lambeth fire station later that day reporting for my Red Watch night duty. The vacant bays, which normally housed the principal officer’s staff cars, indicated the severity of the day’s awful events. Details of the explosion, which had killed five East London firemen, were on the watchroom teleprinter. It announced with the deepest of regret etc… These deaths seemed even more poignant by the fact that they had died at an incident which appeared, at the outset, to be almost trivial.

By the evening a Brigade Headquarters principal officers’ car driver, Johnny Guy, added grim details to the briefest of information given out on the official teleprinter messages. He told of his small part in the extraction of some of the bodies from the oil laden sludge in the partly demolished oil tank farm at Dudgeons Wharf.

Around the station there was much debate and speculation about that day’s incident. The same, no doubt, that was mirrored across all the Brigade with the Red watch asking the many questions raised by this wasteful loss of lives. The ‘who, how, what, where and why’ were speculated about endlessly. Emotions were raw. The anger generating some ill-founded assumptions and accusations.

What later became common knowledge was that the Dudgeons Wharf disaster was caused by a workman hot cutting away an inspection cover securing bolts on an oil tank. An oil tank that had contained flammable substances. Although the affected tank was marked ‘‘light oil and linseed oil’’ the lettering was indistinct. There was certainly no warning of the potential dangers to firemen having to deal with a fire within them. The national papers, the following day, gave fitting tributes and reported, 'They died simply doing the day-to-day job of a London fireman.'

On that fateful morning it was Millwall's pump-escape and pump, Bruswick Road's pump, the foam tender from East Ham together with the fireboat Massey Shaw, from her moorings at Woolwich, that were dispatched to Dudgeons Wharf on the Isle of Dogs at 11.22 a.m. It remains a particular 999 call that still resinates and whose aftermath continues to be remembered in the long history of the London Fire Brigade.

A fire had broken out in one of the huge oil storage tanks at Dudgeons Wharf. The expansive Dudgeons Wharf had lain unused since 1951. It was situated between the riverfront and Manchester Road. The tank, which was empty but not purged, had a capacity of 20,000 gallons. The demolition workers believed thet had actually put the fire out. The land crews, which totallt 12 in total, arrived to make sure it was. Meanwhile the Massey Shaw was still enroute to the scene.

Over 100 tanks od various shapes and sizes had stood on the site. The demolition contract was approved and issued and the contractors started their work in earnest on the 30th June. On the 4th July a serious fire had occurred on the site, a fire that resulted in eight fire engine crews, the the fireboat, attending before it was brought under control and extinguished. The site, the that fateful day, was in varying stages of demolition. However,a miscalculation led to a horrifying, and fatal, explosion. One that sent six men, five members of the London Fire Brigade and a demolition worker, to their deaths.

It was believed that the storage tank in question, a 60 foot high 'No 97' tank, was empty. They were attempting to inspect the tank. Their efforts to remove a securing nut from a base 'manhole' cover having proved fruitless. A demolition worker started to remove/loosen the nut of the inspection cover using heat from an oxy-peopane cutting torch. When the flame was applied to the securing nut the roof of the tank, onto which the firemen and a contractor had climbed, blew off almost instantaneously. The explosion hurling the six men high into the air.

Other fire crews, police officers, and nearby dock workers raced to the scene to search for the men. The injured were ferried, in a fleet of ambulances, to Poplar Hospital. A neighbour, living close by in Manchester Road, reported.

"The explosion rocked our flats. It was just like the blitz all over again."

Local mothers ran to the nearby Cubitt Town Primary school fearful of their childrens safety. Wreakage from the blast landed 150 feet away from the site of the blast. A demolition worker who helped find the bodies was a metal0cutter Roy Measom. His friend, Richard Adams, (known as Reg), was the demolition worker on the top of the tank who was killed. Roy later told news reporters attending the scene;

"When I looked up at the firemen were flying around like paper dolls. The air was full of helmets and debris. There was no need to cut into the tank. The fire was out!" He added; "We should have left it to cool and not taken the inspection plate off."

Immediately following the fatal explosion Station Officer Harold Snelling, who was in charge of Bruswick Road, and fireman Ian Richards, the driver of East Ham's foam tender, rushed to the aid of their fallen colleagues. The force of the explosion was such it had thrown the pair off a pathway, down an embankment, into a deep pool of oil and water. Station officer Snelling was completely submerged. With both men suffering from shock they were assisted back on their feet by the workmen. The contaninated oil was already affecting their eyes. Informed that a fireman had fallen into the exploded tank, using side ladders, they climbed a 35 feet high wall into the tank and commenced their search. After making their way through thick sludge, many feet deep in places, they reached the half submerged body of a fireman which they realised was already beyond help. Disentangling the body from the wreckage they carried their former colleague to a dry spot where he could be lifted from the tank by line.

After being ordered out of the tank the pair became so ill they had to removed to hospital for treatment for shock and oil affecting their eyes. (For their actions Station Officer Snelling and Fireman Richards were both awarded a Chief Officer's COMMENDATION, the Brigade's bravery accolade, for their attempted rescue of a fireman ast the disaster. Subsequently both men were later the British Empire Medal for Gallantry. 

The East End went into mourning after this tragic loss, whilst 100s of firemen from all the UK arrived the following week for the funeral of their firefighting brothers from Millwall, (Sub Officer Michael Gamble and fireman Alfred Smee), Brunswick Road Road, (Firemen John Appleby and Terence Breen), and Clerkenwell fire station, (Fireman Trevor Carvosso-who was standing-by at Millwall).

It was a bright, sunny, day when 100s of members of London's fire brigade and representatives from all around the country gathered, unified in grief, to pay homage and say a personal frewell to five 'good firemen'. They formed a guard of honour four deep as the coffins, all drapped in Union flags, were carried into All Saints Church at Stratford. Crowds lined the Esat London streets to see the coffins arrive where, brass-helmeted, Brigade trumpeters played the Last Post. The London Fire Brigade Missionary, Jack Woodgate, spoke of the six men, including civilian Richard Adams, as 'comrades in death'. After the church service traffic came to a halt, and passengers alighted buses, to pay their respects as the firemens' cortage slowly made its way to the City of London Cemetery. It was the greates loss of life from a single incident since the Second World War three decades before.

Sub Officer Michael Gamble, Firemen John Appleby, Alfred Smee, Trevor Carvosso and Terence Breem were carried on their last journey on five gleaming, scarlet, 100 foot turntable ladders. Each fire engine bearing a flag drapped coffin. A blaze of floral tributes were mounted on both sides of each fire engine. The Requiem Mass for Fireman Breem having already been held and a funeral service held at West Ham Parish Church for the other four before they were reunited and the five comrades started their final journey to the City of London crematorium in Manor Park. Emotions were raw as the Brigade bugler sounded the Last Post from the rear of the Parish church.

As moving as the turn-out of the Brigade's Honour Guard was, an outstanding feature of this sad day was the presence of the ordinary people of Esat London. People who came out in their droves to pay homage ot five firemen they probably would not have recognised had they sped by on their fire engines whilst responding to some call or other. Any feelings that the public took London firemen for granted were totally dispelled that day as 'Eastenders' lined the route; either in small groups of neigbours or as they added their considerable weight to the continious single file of firemen, regardless of rank, standing to attention along the kerbside and under the hot sunshine.

As the pallbearers moved slowly, with solumn gravity, along the crematorium's narrow pathway of the still cemetery towards the grey stoned chaple they processed passed, standing shoulder to shoulder on either side of the pathway, the uniformed Honour Guard. Unmoving we were bound together in common tribute with each thinking our own thoughts. My own position just happened to be adjacent to the Chaple's entrance. With the dignity the occasion demanded I watched as the pallbearers gently lifted and carried the coffins into the Chaple one by one. They were followed by the chief mourners, whose own private grief had been shielded from the publib gaze by the darkened windows of the funeral limousines.

It was after the brief sermon, relayed to the very many unable to get into the crowded chaple, a particularily poignant moment.  The muted sobs of a woman, broken in grief, overshadowed the words of the commital and the music. Then it was over. The mourners eventually, almost reluctantly, left the cemetery, but not before an astonishing act of personal courage was displayed before our eyes. As they were preparing to depart one the widowed wives got her limousine to  stop and she got out. This beautiful and gaceful young woman walked over to some of the Honour Guard to thank them for their attendence and then repeated her personal thanks to those on the other side of the path before she returned to her vehicle and departed. This simple act of gratitude, delivered with such sincerity and displaying such resolve and fortitude, was too much for some of those receiving it. As tears filled my own own eyes many others were overcome with emotion as the broke ranks. The continious line of firemen, their officers and Control Room staff who had seen their fallen comrades arrives but who would never see them depart.

(Footnote: In 2009 the London Fire Brigade's Commissioner, Ron Dobson, formally unveiled a memorial plaque commemorating the site of the Dudgeon's Wharf disaster and recalling the names of the six men, who on the 17th July, 1969, tragically became 'comrades in death'.)