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They say every cloud has a silver lining and so it was when Barry Clarke was overlooked for a promotion while working as an office equipment mechanic for the NZ Postal Service. In line with post office policy, the job went to a longer serving employee even though that employee didn’t have the same experience. Coincidentally, about the same time, the Auckland Metropolitan Fire Board was advertising for recruits, so Barry decided it was time for a career change. He put his name forward and, in his own words, “never looked back”. This month, Barry will receive his double gold star for 50 years combined service as a permanent and volunteer firefighter. He reflects on his long career …
The fire service was changing to a four days on/four days off roster when I started, so they were looking for a couple of hundred more firefighters. There wasn’t much to the pre-entry test – you had to put up a wooden extension ladder against the side of a building on your own, carry a dummy up the yard and back, and run up a flight of stairs carrying two breathing apparatus cylinders. There was also an IQ test.
If you were a real dummy, you didn’t get in and if you were really bright, you didn’t get in. They wanted down-to-earth people who could think on their feet and do the job, not academics.
We did a nine-week training course at Mount Wellington. This involved taking a bunch of guys who had never seen inside a fire truck before and teaching us to run out a hose, climb ladders, drag charged hoses up a tower and work together as a crew. Health and safety officers today would have a heart attack if they saw what we did – there wasn’t a helmet in sight. We learned how to climb out of windows carrying a dummy and then descend down a 35-foot wooden ladder. It wasn’t a dummy though – it was one of the other recruits pretending to be unconscious. How no-one got hurt, God only knows! You can’t even get on the roof of a house without lines and special training now, which is probably a good thing. During storms, when roofs were blown off, we’d get up there in our gumboots and firefighting gear and try to put salvage sheets up with nothing to hang on. It’s a wonder guys didn’t slide off the roof. But we didn’t.
I started at the Otahuhu Station. Firemen were still sliding down poles in those days, but I think health and safety has put a stop to all that – we used them for years without any problems, but maybe there were too many broken ankles! At Otahuhu there were two doors opening onto the same pole, so when you went to jump on you just had to hope there wasn’t anyone coming through the opposite door at the same time. It was a lot of fun. The first accident I attended happened on George Bolt Drive out by the airport. Some young kids in a station wagon missed the bend in the road, rolled and hit a tree or a power pole. It was a real mess and, of the seven on board, only one survived. We didn’t have much in the way of cutting equipment, but we did have what was called a partner rescue saw. It was like an over-grown chainsaw with a huge circular blade on it, about 12-inches in diameter. There was fuel spilled and sparks flying everywhere. Pretty rough work really. That was my introduction to motor vehicle accidents and it left an impression on me. It also changed my driving habits for ever because I never wanted to end up like those boys.
As time went by and I attended more accidents, I got used to it and just accepted that it was all part of the job. Counselling wasn’t something that anyone thought about. Usually, we’d head back to the station after an incident and unwind over a cup of tea. There was a lot of black humour, but it was a way of relieving the stress. It’s how we coped. I also think we were different sorts of people then. Most of the guys were really down-to-earth and the older guys had a lot of life experience. By example, they showed you how to keep calm and, if you were feeling a bit overwhelmed, to step back, take a breath and have another look at the situation. Most people had a second job because it was hard to make ends meet on a firefighter’s wage. I think this gave us a grounded sense of what our job was and helped us process what we had to deal with at times. I spent my days off tinkering in the shed – I’ve always had a mechanical bent – and I also made a lot of home brew.
I rode on rescue tenders for part of my career, out of Otahuhu and Manukau. And I really enjoyed that work. Cutting people out of cars sounds gruesome, but every job was different and it was a challenge to get those people out, into an ambulance and keep them alive. When you heard back later that the person had made it, you really felt good about it. I never had any aspirations to move up the ranks. Senior firefighter was as high as I went because I never wanted to swap hands-on operational work for paperwork.
The shift work meant you both worked and lived with your crew, and this resulted in some life-long friendships. It’s probably the part of the service that I enjoyed the most – the camaraderie. There were some real characters and it seemed everyone had a nickname. A particularly officious chief got the name ‘Step Aside’ after turning up to a fire in a multi-storied building and ignoring a warning from a younger firefighter not to go through the door at the end of the corridor. The young firefighter was told to “step aside”. As a result, the chief marched through the door and fell to the storey below and broke his leg. They used to call me Clean Clarke because no matter what sort of fire I attended I could leave it looking like I’d just stepped out of the drycleaners.
Some of the stations were composite stations, where volunteers were attached. I remember we had a particularly keen volunteer at the Manurewa station, who worked at the car yard next door. One day he provided back-up to a callout in the volunteer’s truck on his own. He had a broken leg in plaster and was driving the truck using his walking stick to operate the siren and push the clutch down. Christ knows how he got to the call! On another occasion, we had a young fella join the crew and suddenly business was booming and we were putting out fires all over the place. It’s not common to get arsonists on the team, but it does happen from time-to-time.
There was a big change in the sort of equipment we had to use when Allan Bruce took over as Auckland Central’s chief fire officer in the 1970s. He was responsible for getting us new trucks with mid-mounted pumps, high pressure deliveries and good rescue equipment. Sadly, after he retired, he was involved in a really bad car accident. His wife died at the scene and he died later. He had worked over many years to make us a really good brigade.
I did nearly 32 years as a paid firefighter and then Cheryl and I moved permanently to Matakana in 2002. I joined the Mahurangi East Volunteer Brigade, mostly in a training role, and then the Matakana brigade when it started in 2005. For a couple of years, I turned out whenever I could for both brigades before finalling quitting Mahurangi East and devoting my time to Matakana. I was the chief fire officer for a number of years but stood down in 2017 to let a younger member take charge and have more free time to use the camper van. I’m still the station officer and enjoy training nights and Saturday mornings checking the truck out, fuelling it up if necessary and making sure the gear is in good order.
Matakana brigade is pretty strong at the moment, with about 20 active firefighters, including operational and on-operational and a very good medical team. It’s a bit of a funny brigade in some ways because we’ve trained about 150 people over the years, but a lot of them have relocated for work or because the rents are too high here. Our loss has been another brigade’s gain though, because a lot of them have joined the service in their new towns.
If I had my life to live over, I’d definitely sign up again under the same circumstances that I did in 1972. The job gave me confidence and taught me a lot. But would I sign up under today’s rules and regulations? I’m not so sure. Things had to change because firefighters were expected to take too many risks in the old days and many paid the price with their health. But it’s gone too far the other way now. You have the ridiculous situation where a volunteer who drives a truck and trailer for a living has to do a four-day driving course just so someone can tick a box. I’ve never had much time for that part of the job.
