Have you ever wondered why the Green Goddesses exist, and what they were for? Fire Engines, obviously?
By 1949 the Russians had the Atom Bomb. The world was slipping into the Cold War. The wartime NFS (National Fire Service) was reformed as a new Auxiliary Fire Service, part of a far bigger Civil Defence Corps. Initially, they used old WW2 equipment and vehicles, but new equipment was designed and ordered. The Bedford RL chassis was high-tech at the time, but was designed for reliability and the ability to go anywhere.
To fight fire storms triggered by an A Bomb, based on WW2 experience, self-sufficient independent fire-fighting and rescue units would advance into the devastation from safe areas. It also was anticipated that nothing much would be left of the mains water system or the civilian Fire Brigade. So what was needed was an out-of-town Fire Brigade who could take water from miles away and work inwards laying miles of pipe as they went. This was done at 20+ mph with the hose tumbling out the back of an RL truck. The Green Goddesses or “self-propelled pumps” followed on, and were spliced into the hose where instructed, to boost the pressure. Naturally, you needed relay pumps closer together when the water is going uphill, and further apart when flowing downhill. One Goddess every 40 lengths of hose or 2/3 mile was needed on the level. A Gypsy or Land Rover carried a ‘Relay Pump Indicator’ which was essentially a very sensitive aneroid barometer which detected if you had travelled uphill or downhill, and told you when to set in the next Goddess.
To draw water out of a river, lake or canal at 900 gallons a minute, the suction pipe has to be in water at least two feet deep. But in an estuary or sea beach, this was a real problem. So they developed the ‘Transportable Water Unit’, known as the ‘Bikini Unit’. This was a truck carrying three inflatable rafts. Each raft carried three 300-gallon per minute portable pumps and could be driven out into the estuary where there was deeper water. Six 3-inch delivery hoses were laid back to land and into a 6-way collecting head fitted to 6-inch hose. So a raft provided exactly the right amount of water for the Goddess to pump into the hose into the burning town.
You can watch a Bikini Unit exercise from 2009 here.
A mobile column consisted of 125 vehicles and was crewed by 34 officers and 587 other ranks:
- 13 command and reconnaissance cars (Austin Gipsy or Land Rover Series 1)
- Communications unit – phone line layer (Gipsy)
- Control Unit (Bedford RL)
- Mobile Workshop
- Mobile Kitchen
- 5 Transportable Water Units, known as ‘Bikini Units’ (Commer Q4)
- 57 General purpose – 3 ton flatbed trucks (Bedford RL and Commer Q4) used as
- Hose layers.
- Pipe carriers.
- Ramp, dam and hose carriers.
- Personnel carriers.
- Petrol carriers.
- Clothing carriers.
- Recovery Vehicle (Bedford RL)
- 30 Self propelled pumps (Bedford “Green Goddess”)
- 18 Motorcycles (Matchless and BSA)
Essentially, this Mobile Column, without any external assistance, could pump vast quantities of water from a remote water supply (such as a river, lake, canal or estuary) up to 20 miles away to a burning city. And ‘vast quantities’ means 900 gallons (or 4 tons) a minute, or nearly 6,000 tons of water a day. They carried 20 miles of 6-inch hose, and a further 20 miles of 3-inch delivery hose, and enough petrol to run 30 Goddesses for a week and the firefighting equipment to deliver this water round the city to burning buildings. They carried pipe bridges to get the hose over roads, and enough food and clothing for 620 men for a week, portable pumps to get water from the most inaccessible places, a communication system that would work over 20 miles (no mobile phones back then!), and workshop facilities to mend anything that broke.
A mobile column, fully deployed would be 15 miles long with reconnaissance units anything up to a further 8 miles away.
This wasn’t a small undertaking. Sufficient equipment was bought to form 40 mobile columns. That’s 800 miles of 6-inch hose! If they had needed to, they could have delivered 6,000 tons of water a day from Land’s End to John O’Groats!
There was civilian recruiting for the AFS, but most units never made their establishment. It might also be argued that the concept of being a fire fighter whilst people were dropping A bombs did not appeal; that boredom and lack of deployment meant that many recruits drifted away. As the threat of Nuclear War receded, the AFS was stood down, the Civil Defence disbanded, and the vehicles sold or put into store. That was on 1st April 1968, just over 50 years ago.
Since then, the Goddesses have been used occasionally in times of national fire strikes, floods and drought, until in 2005, the government decided to sell off the remaining 1,000 or so Goddesses.
So were the Goddesses any good? As a Fire Engine, they were mediocre. They carried little rescue gear other than an axe and a sledge hammer – not much use if you are trapped in a crashed car. But if your city has been hit by a nuclear bomb, and everything as far as the eye can see is on fire, then you really need an AFS Mobile Column. For shifting vast quantities of water, they were unsurpassed, even today.
David Moore
Further reading: https://oakparkrunner.wordpress.com/auxiliary-fire-service-1948-to-1968/
We did a major display at Welland Steam Rally a few years back. You can watch the video here.