STRANGE BUT TRUE

A quick puff and a big fire

Among of the most frequent fire hazards in the Bourne area in past times were hay and straw stacks which ignited easily and caused widespread damage, an unfortunate occurrence in some cases when farmers were not insured. Spontaneous combustion was often the cause and children playing with matches another but there are also many recorded cases of employees setting them on fire as an act of revenge for being badly treated or some other grievance.

More importantly, there were numerous cases in which stacks caught fire when farm workers had been smoking but this was difficult to prove because such allegations were invariably denied and if there were several of them working at the same time, then no one would take the blame.

Such a case arose in Bourne on the evening of Friday 26th July 1872 when fire broke out in a stack yard at the back of Star Lane [now Abbey Road] owned by Edward Banton. As a result, four stacks of hay and part of another (containing together about forty or fifty tons) were almost entirely destroyed. One of the stacks was an old one of last year's produce and the remainder were new hay.

As a result of the blaze, a local newspaper reported the following day: “The stack where the fire originated was raised partly on the previous day and finished on the afternoon of the same day; therefore the fire could not have arisen from spontaneous combustion, nor were there any children near who could have set it on fire with matches or otherwise. The stack which first became ignited was adjoining one at which three or four men were at work.

"A few minutes before the fire burst out they had finished putting a load upon the stack and were resting; the supposition is that some of the men were smoking and that the accident was occasioned in that way; excluding this theory the fire is a very mysterious one, they denying they were smoking at the time. It is, however, a fact (and a serious one too for insurance companies) that the habit of smoking is very prevalent in farmyards and in dangerous proximity to stacks. The practice of farming men going about their work with short pipes in their mouths ought to be put a stop to.”

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