In the line of fire

Above: Charlie Hendry

Kent’s Chief Fire Officer, Charlie Hendry, used to live just 10 miles from his job at London Fire Brigade, but the “quick commute” across London would take him a frustrating hour and 10-minutes every day. He swapped all that for a rural outlook where foxes run past his window when he joined Kent HQ seven years ago.
Despite the move being a promotion, it caused a few raised eyebrows from his colleagues in London, where he was Assistant Chief Fire Officer (Operations), but Charlie Hendry, 46, knew exactly what he was doing.
“I was looking for something where I could have a little more direct influence on what happened,” he tells me. “The very size of the organisation meant it could take a very long time to see the difference between cause and effect.”
There was a sense, too, that although he had lived in or around London all his life, “that I was getting a little older, and wanted something a little quieter from time to time.” Now, living in east Kent with his wife Sandra, he loves his borrowed county: “I like the people here, I like the feel of it, and the fact that if I want to go to the theatre in London, I still can,” he smiles.

Build and presence
Charlie does a lot of smiling. He’s got the build and presence of a man accustomed to command, but his manner is relaxed and easy, and you can tell immediately that his team adores him. But was it tough at first, coming down to Kent, with his fancy London ways?
Another big grin: “I think everyone was expecting me to make waves, this boy from the smoke. In fact, Kent had very little history of taking on anyone from outside, so people were both curious and supportive.
“They wanted to know what I thought, and do you like us? And I did – I was very impressed by what they did, practically, as firefighters, and I was impressed by the fact that although Kent is a third of the size of the London service (2,000 compared to 6,000), it achieved things very quickly, and had a reputation for being innovative.”
He adds: “What you have to do is to try and not say ‘when I was in London…’ all the time. I still get phone calls from people in London asking ‘any jobs?’ They find it hard to recruit at senior level, unless it’s bringing people up from inside.”

You can be turned out of bed at 3am, and six minutes late be faced with mayhem

Charlie should know – he worked his way very rapidly up the ranks, from firefighter to training junior officers by the age of 26, confounding his family and friends by choosing a career in the fire service at a time when it was a virtually unknown option for a graduate.
Despite the cliché, I had to ask, did he dream of being a firefighter when he was little? “No, I always wanted to be a vet,” he laughs. “But I did want to do something that was socially useful, something that wasn’t predictable, that I could come into work and not know what I was going to do every day.”
Charlie certainly his wish, from the initial training, which he describes as “very scary, and seemingly designed to test where your limits are: mine are about nine floors up”, to the huge physical challenges the job brings (and which this rugby and tennis playing lad loved).
It also triggered off something that has lasted his whole career, a real passion about learning how to manage critical incidents. “It’s the ability to stand there and soak up the most amazing amount of pressure happening in an incredibly short space of time and make sensible decisions with very little information,” he explains.
“It’s a skill, and you get exposed to it very quickly: you can be turned out of bed at 3am and six minutes later, be faced with mayhem. You have to make sense of it very quickly, with everybody wanting something from you, to work out exactly what will happen, and in what order.”
So, can this be taught? Charlie ponders: “It’s the age-old question, isn’t it, are leaders born or can you train them? I believe you can train them, but I guess you have to have some pretty good raw material to begin with. All I know is that I loved doing it, and I miss doing it. But you don’t really want the chief going out too often – though the chief would love to.”

Sheer exhaustion
He can’t complain, for Charlie has been among the first on the scene at numerous high-profile incidents, including the fatal train crash at Wembley in 1984, just a year after he joined London Fire Brigade, and the IRA-led terrorist attacks at Brent Cross Shopping Centre.
Then in October 1999, Charlie led Fire and Rescue Service operations at the Paddington rail disaster, which he describes as the most difficult thing he has ever done.
“At the end of that day, I’d had nine solid hours in command and I was more exhausted than I have ever been in my life – not physical exhaustion, just sheer mental exhaustion. I’ve never seen such carnage, and hope I never do,” he recalls.
“We’d never had a train crash followed by a fire, normally you go to a fire and the worst bit has happened and it’s how you make sense of that, but with this the worst had happened, and it was still getting worse.”

We’re just ordinary people doing an interesting job

Charlie is adamant, however, that he wouldn’t have missed the experience: “It taught me a lot about myself and how you command a situation on that scale.” It also taught him about coping with the aftermath of a disaster: “Because, of course, it doesn’t just end there; there was huge media interest, then there were the public enquiries, with everyone wanting a different piece of you.
“I was there representing the service, and we knew we had done the things we needed to do and that operationally, it had gone well. But you suddenly see how easy it would have been to be unravelled.”
One of the lessons that emerged post-Paddington was the importance of managing stress, which Charlie has seen force good men to leave the service. He tells me: “We do a lot of work now with de-briefing people, because sometimes all they want to do is talk about it. In the early days you were just supposed to suck it up: get on with it, sonny.
“We now train officers to know what to look for and we provide a lot of confidential counselling services and all sorts of occupational health support.”
So it was with this extraordinary wealth of experience that Charlie arrived in Kent, and helped a good service become great. Now one of only two Fire and Rescue Services to have gained an ‘excellent’ CPA rating, success has bred success in Kent and the service is attracting different types of people, from all works of life – including those elusive graduates.

Definite improvement
However, attracting women, and people from minority ethnic groups, to a service that is still regarded as a predominantly white male organisation is another matter, although a total of 62 women compared to none 10 years ago is a definite improvement.
Charlie also took the unusual step when he arrived of starting his own blog, becoming one of the very few chiefs to have done so. Deliberately controversial “to get things going” at first, it’s proved highly popular and has really opened up the lines of communication in the service.
Charlie is most proud about is the work being done with young people in Kent, because, as he says, “if you really want to change the long-term future, you influence the children. We’ve had a number of incidents where children have saved their parents in a fire because they remember the firefighter coming to their school and what they learnt.”
Last year a pilot was started with a school in Maidstone to work with four young people aged between 14 and 16 who were excluded and on the fringes of the criminal justice system. Four firefighters who worked in the youth unit were trained up to do one-to-one mentoring with them over three months, and the results were amazing, says Charlie with considerable pride.

Improving relationships
“It brought out skills in the firefighters I don’t think they knew they had, and turned at least three of the kids around in terms of improving school attendance and what they were achieving, as well as improving their relationship with their parents. It’s all about preventing disaster before it occurs – after all, a lot of fires started deliberately are done so by young people.”
In a similar vein, Charlie himself works voluntarily on a committee for a charity that deals with young people and helps them get back into full-time employment or education. He says it’s fascinating to see how they get completely turned around, just through restoring a sense of self, of value and of confidence.
“We’re also successful because firefighters are seen as very neutral figures, we’re not officialdom, or enforcement figures – just ordinary people doing an interesting job.”
Kent Fire & Rescue also does a lot of work with Kent Police and the County Council Highways Agency and Charlie finds his partners extremely supportive. “We’re a relatively small organisation compared to them, but they appreciate what we have done,” he says. “We’re pretty agile, we’ve got 24-hour response service on tap all the time, and we’re producing some extraordinary results.”
Part of that success lies in the spectacular reduction in the number of people getting killed by fire in their own homes in Kent, and brings us to Charlie’s personal hobby horse: sprinkler systems, and why prevention is vital, whether it’s death by fire or in a road accident.
“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity in Kent and the south east, with the building of the Thames Gateway and the development of Ashford, to design and build safe housing – and if that means installing a modest sprinkler system, that would probably cost less than putting in a heating system or carpets, then you probably wouldn’t get any fire deaths at all in Kent.

You don’t really want the chief going out too often – although the chief would love to

“In America, the building code in certain states specifies that sprinkler systems must be installed, and they haven’t had a fire death for eight years. We’ll never have this opportunity again as a generation. The NHS puts the cost of a life at just over a million pounds; set this against two or three thousand pounds to install a sprinkler system, and it doesn’t seem very good economics.”
What Charlie never wants to do, however, is lose sight of what makes the service great. “If we stay still and do the things we have always done, we may always get the same results; though there are some things we have always done that we will always continue to do, and do well,” he says.
“The idea that you can pick up a phone and get a fire engine quickly is something that I never, ever want to do anything about, because that is the foundation of being a successful, responsive, respected service.”
So does Kent bring the same level of adrenalin-fuelled incident as London – can it compare, I wonder? It certainly brings its own potential headlines: after all, we’ve got the Channel Tunnel.
“There are very few other places where you would have to fight a fire 25km underground, in very confined space, with very little air or water. It’s probably the most difficult firefighting challenge you could imagine,” admits Charlie.
“We’ve had two fires since the Tunnel opened - rather more than the initial risk assessment suggested there would be - and dealt successfully with both, but it was very challenging and very dangerous.
“There are two or three locations in the county that, as the chief, get me waking up at 3am worrying about them – and that’s one of them.”
And of course Kent is full of irreplaceable heritage sites and a lot of Kent Fire and Rescue’s work is associated with places like Canterbury Cathedral and Ightham Mote, working in conjunction with English Heritage and the National Trust. If there is a fire, members of the crew will be committed to both fighting fire and to getting the valuable artefacts out according to well-rehearsed procedures

Doesn't get better
So how does Charlie sum up a job he is still clearly as passionate about now as he was more than 20 years ago? He smiles: “I feel at least as passionate about the job as when I started. To do something you love, rather than just being a wage slave – it doesn’t get any better.
“My role is very different now, and I do miss the ability to get job satisfaction about 13 times a day. When I was a firefighter someone would ring up with a problem, you would go off and solve it and then on to the next one – it was fantastic.
“There aren’t many jobs you can get that level of satisfaction in. Now everything I do is a much slower burn, it’s more long term - but it is still the most satisfying thing I have ever done.”