AS starts to a New Year go, it could hardly have been worse. Because on New Year’s Eve 1981 a chip pan fire in a bungalow at Norton, near Worcester, cost the Wilson family all they owned. Even their pet Staffordshire bull terrier was killed.

Miraculously everyone except Cindy the dog escaped the timber-framed building, but as Mrs Doreen Wilson said tearfully: “We have lost absolutely everything else. All our clothes, furniture, silver – there’s nothing left.”

However, with remarkable determination and stamina her husband David – a former soldier – set out to repair and rebuild their rented home and within three weeks, everyone, father, mother and their three children, had moved back in.

He said: “On New Year’s Day, the morning after the fire, I could have sat down and cried, but I pulled myself together and got on with the job and it’s been worth it.”

Mr Wilson also paid tribute to the firefighters of Hereford and Worcester Fire Service, who had battled to bring the inferno under control. For them it was also not the start they wanted to a New Year, but just the sort of challenge they could face on every day of every year.

Thankfully today major fires are a rarity in this area, but in the past Worcester has been the scene of some spectacular blazes that showed all too clearly how much firefighters put their lives on the line to tackle them. One of the most potentially dangerous occurred on a June day in 1966 when the premises of ironmongers and agricultural engineers JC Baker Ltd in Foregate Street went up in flames. It stood adjacent to the Odeon cinema and provided an extra hazard as the shop contained many Calor gas cylinders and a large paint store.

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As they heated, the gas canisters turned into exploding bombs, sending shards of red hot metal ripping through the building. Fortunately the only casualty was a woman bystander who was hit in the face by a fragment of flying metal and treated at Worcester Royal Infirmary just round the corner.

Another fire to bring the city centre to a standstill happened in October, 1979 when flames and acrid smoke began pouring out of the Woolworths branch in High Street. A remarkable picture by Evening News photographer John Pratt showed one firefighter enveloped by thick smoke as he climbed into the building off the top of a turntable ladder.

It was a rather more gentle scene on the banks of the Severn back in March, 1957, when Worcester City and County Fire Brigade, as it was then, became the first brigade in the Midlands to try out the exotically named Bikini.

Not a two-piece bathing costume, it was a transportable water unit based on a 15ft by 6ft raft containing three pumps each capable of shifting a thousand gallons of water a minute.

Its aim was to provide water supplies to locations inaccessible to conventional fire appliances. Fire brigade chief Gerald Eastham called it “an extremely mobile and powerful fire fighting unit”.