Bourne

Fire

Brigade

There was a fire brigade in Bourne as early as 1815, administered by a local fire insurance company who owned a manual water pump. By 1890, responsibility for the fire brigade had been taken over by Bourne Urban District Council when the horse-drawn pump was kept underneath one of the arches of the Town Hall. In 1900, the council bought a horse drawn steam pump manned by twelve volunteers and capable of delivering two or more jets and in 1928, a Dennis trailer pump was purchased and this was towed by a lorry borrowed from a local firm.

The steam engine was replaced in 1930 by the brigade's first motor tender, a Ford A Type appliance with long ladders on the top and benches alongside the tender on which firemen sat while travelling to a fire, and this appliance remained in service until 1945.

Work on building the present fire station began in 1944 and was completed the following year.
The National Fire Service was formed to meet the emergencies of the Second World War from 1939-45 and included the Bourne brigade but in 1948, when the fire service was returned to local authority control, Bourne became part of the Kesteven Fire Brigade. In 1974, the brigade was integrated with the Lincolnshire Fire Service as part of the nationwide-wide re-organisation of local government and there has been a continuous development to the modern fire service we know today with constant upgrading of vehicles and equipment.

The parent brigade is now known as the Lincolnshire Fire and Rescue Service that has an establishment of 750 uniformed and non-uniformed staff organised from the service headquarters at Lincoln and covering a total area of 2,237 square miles and equipped with around 100 vehicles including fire pumps, hydraulic platforms, rescue tenders, water carriers and various other units.

Bourne fire station in South Street is now manned by retained fire fighters, that is personnel who also have full time jobs but are alerted by bleepers when there is a fire or other emergencies because the brigade also turns out for other disasters including road accidents and air crashes.

A new water ladder rescue tender was delivered to the Bourne station in November 2001 to replace a previous appliance that had been destroyed in an accident. The new tender, pictured below, is a £100,000 Volvo FL614 that had previously been in use at Grantham and is powered by a five litre turbo-charged diesel engine and equipped with a major and a lightweight pump.

Volvo

A detailed history of the town's fire brigade with photographs is included in
A Portrait of Bourne