Buckets to beat the Blitz

Eighty years or more separates these two pictures taken in a residential Wolverhampton street. Whereas these homes once mounted fire buckets for ready use during the Blitz, today they are adorned with something with a far more peaceable purpose – television satellite dishes.

This is Fisher Street, off Lea Road. The cobbled pavement has gone, the buckets have gone, but motor cars have arrived, and the homes are not that much changed.

The old picture is from our archives and before you ask, a newspaper artist from yesteryear has been at work on it to highlight the buckets. In the days before digital technology newspapers, including the Express and Star, had artists who would retouch photographs as they felt necessary.

Written on the back of our print is "Fisher St, off Lea Rd, fire buckets." It's filed among some of our wartime pictures. This print bears no date, but it's a reasonable guess that it was taken during the Blitz.

Alternatively it might have been taken in the last days of peace when various measures were taken to prepare for looming war, including the issuing of gas masks, the digging of trenches, and building air raid shelters.

Some of our more mature readers will surely be able to give chapter and verse on exactly how fire buckets were used. But no doubt they were mounted on these houses to be readily available to tackle fires when the bombs dropped, although it must have been a bit of a stretch to reach them, as they are mounted quite high up.

They may be pre-filled with water, or perhaps more likely, sand, with which to extinguish any incendiary bombs which might fall on Fisher Street – water wouldn't have been able to put out incendiary devices.

Obviously we can't tell with a black and white picture what colour they are, but typically they would be painted bright red.

Now here's another question for our more mature readers – how common were they in Wolverhampton?

Surely Fisher Street couldn't have been the only street in the town – now a city of course – to have had them?