I have seen the regular and auxillary fire uniforms at Hendon when I visited there years ago. It was quite interesting to see what equipment my Granddad would have worn and used. I do not imagine for a moment it would be easy fighting huge fires with stirrup pumps!
My Granddad on Mum's side was in the Pioneers (engineers). He later helped to bury the dead and clean up at one of the concentration camps, an act which haunted him for the rest of his life (I recall it may have been Belsen). On Dad's side, my Granddad was a fireman as noted above; his brother (my Great Uncle) was in the Royal Navy, and his girlfriend/my future great aunt who passed away last year, built radio sets for Wellingtons. I was named after one of my Great Uncle's friends, Joe Dawson, who was a soldier and captured by the Japanese in Burma. He wasted away to almost nothing in Japanese captivity. After the war he was actually prescribed daily Guiness by his doctor! I just don't think the doctor meant gallons of the stuff however.
My Great Uncle Bob was a stoker on HMS Ajax at the Battle of River Plate. He went on to serve in submarines, finally being captured by Italians when his submarine, HMS Saracen, was hit by Italian destroyers. He was sent to POW camps, from which he escaped, was caught with Italian partisans and was sentenced to be shot as a spy. He was reprieved by Field Marshall Kesselring (who happened to be visiting at the time) as they were on their way to be dealt with and claimed they were just sailors. Sent to POW camp in Berlin, he was caught as part of an espionage attempt on a railway (they were packing the earth under a bombed railway line they were repairing with ice so it would melt in the spring and buckle the lines, but the ice thawed early). He was 'tried' by the Gestapo for sabotage and sent to a concentration camp for his efforts by the Germans, and after experiencing the horrors of that, was posted to a another POW camp from which he was liberated at the end of the war. A book was written about him by Dennis Holman 'The Man They Couldn't Kill'. He also appeared in a 'This is your life' episode on TV. The archives for 'This is your life' shows are available online. His name is Robert Oldfield. He had other escapes too: prewar - riots in Jamaica, an enormous earthquake in Chile, and a backfire on HMS Wanderer. Wartime - leaving a pub in London which was bombed a few seconds later, falling between his ship and a dock in Gibraltar (drunk), his first submarine HMS Splendid nearly being rammed near the Isle of Man, a fight with Arabs in Alexandria, a time bomb in Haifa, HMS Maidstone (on which he was a passenger) narrowly escaping hits by torpedoes twice in the Mediterranean, and missing his submarine which was sunk that voyage (I think this may have been HMS Splendid).
