What the heck is a lek?
Males great bustards perform spectacular courtship displays, gathering at a ‘lek’ or small display ground to try to impress the females.
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From 1892 until after the Second World War this impressive Shand Mason & Co. fire engine, named ‘Victor’ served with Poole Fire Brigade. Drawn by a horse and carrying 8 firefighters it must have been quite a sight clattering down the streets as it responded to a call!
If you needed a fire engine in the 1800s, Shand Mason & Co. would have been right at the top of the list of companies to approach. In their brochures they boasted of winning over 70 ‘medals, awards etc. for the excellence of their fire appliances’. They hadn’t invented the steam powered fire engine but they had been the first to make the idea work commercially, installing their apparatus on a previously hand pumped fire boat on the Thames in 1855.
Poole Borough Council must certainly have been impressed enough to spend £425 (about £46,000 in today’s money) on a brand-new engine called ‘Victor’ in 1892. Poole’s Volunteer Fire Brigade had been established in the 1870s and was initially made up of the officers and troops of Fourth Dorset (Poole) Rifle Corps. The foreman received an annual salary of £10 and three engines were available for use with two based in Poole and the other in Parkstone. Firefighters received 3 shillings for the first three hours of any call, 1 shilling for each of the next 3 hours and finally 6 pennies for each hour after that!
The new Shand Mason engine would have been a big upgrade for the brigade when it arrived. Older engines needed large numbers of people to pump the water manually but with a steam engine on board firefighters could shoot jets of water over a hundred feet in the air and pump 350 gallons of water a minute, although you did now need a stoker and engineer to keep the engine going!
One of ‘Victor’s’ big early jobs was the fire at Brownsea Castle in 1896 caused by an electrical fault. The new engine did sterling work, although attendance was complicated by the need to ship it across the harbour by boat. ‘Victor’ was also called to help at another castle fire 33 years later, assisting the Dorchester Fire Brigade extinguishing the blaze at Lulworth Castle in 1929.
Although the technology was improving the brigade were still volunteers, the son of Reuben White, a master farrier who drove ‘Victor’ in the early 1900s gave an account of what would happen when a call came in.
‘When there was a fire, the alarm went off at the old pumping station near the lifeboat station. If he was shoeing a horse and did not hear, my mother would go up and tell him. He would find the dustcart as he knew where it would be at any given time, and take the horse round to the engine in Corporation Yard. All the other men would have gathered, about eight of them. They were all volunteers…’
‘Victor’ was officially retired in the 1940s, after the Second World War, and eventually arrived at the museum to take pride of place in the museum’s street scene after a redisplay in the 1990s. It was even wheeled into the museum by members of Dorset Fire Brigade!
The fire engine was moved into the entrance to Poole Museum when the new atrium was built in 2006 and was the first object from the collection that most visitors saw. ‘Victor’ is hugely popular with both staff, volunteers and visitors alike so was a crowd-pleasing pick for the showcase!
Males great bustards perform spectacular courtship displays, gathering at a ‘lek’ or small display ground to try to impress the females.
The great bustard has a dignified slow walk but tends to run when disturbed, rather than fly.
The hen-bird on display at The Salisbury Museum was one of the last great bustards to be eaten in the town!