Name: I was wrong (and so was everyone)
Uploaded: 2025-05-23T07:38:40.000Z
Duration: 6 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Almost two years ago, I made a video about fire marks.

Basic passive voice

Back in the 18th century, firefighters in London were funded by insurance companies.

When you insured a building, you would be given a fire mark, a big plaque to put on the front.

And if a fire ever broke out, all the various companies' firefighters would rush to the scene.

And the story goes that they would look at the building, and only fight the fire if they saw their company's mark, or the mark of a company that they had an agreement with.

If the building wasn't insured, they would let it burn.

This is a really well-known story in Britain.

It's part of the standard history of the fire brigades.

If you hadn't paid, they wouldn't put your fire out.

Unless you happened to be next to someone else who had.

Children's TV show Horrible Histories did a whole sketch on it, including the host, a talking rat, holding up a sign that says, they really did this.

And the sources I used for my video included the history page on the London Fire Brigade Museum's own website.

Now, soon after publication, I was told about one embarrassing error in the video.

The plaques I filmed weren't actually fire marks.

There's no list of all the surviving marks anywhere.

But I found stock photos of some marks with locations attached.

And I figured, great, I can just film there.

Whoever wrote them was completely mistaken.

Apparently, those are parish boundary markers.

Which is not great, but it's the sort of thing that I can fix by peening a correction.

It doesn't affect whether the main part of the video is true.

But about a month ago, I got an email that was like, you know that source you used, the London Fire Brigade Museum's page?

And it now says, there is little real evidence to suggest that this was the case.

So I was straight off into a rabbit hole of research, because this was exactly on a weird borderline in my head.

At times, I was like, well, actually, that makes no sense when you think about it.

No one would let a fire burn if they were standing there with water.

And then I'd switch to, well, there were many more cruel things going on in that century.

There are places in the world where that system exists today.

And it seemed like every source I read had a slightly different opinion.

I couldn't find any actual testimonials from the time, and the secondary and tertiary sources that I had access to didn't go into any depth.

Most of them just briefly stated it as an unreferenced fact and said no more.

I'm on the road right now, so I can't go into archives, and even if I could, I wouldn't know where to start.

So I hired an experienced, professional archives research consultant.

Answering that took the consultant two weeks of work.

Not two weeks of undergrad slacking off time.

I mean two solid weeks of eight-hour workdays, including visiting the British Library to check documents that haven't been digitised yet.

He's put together a thoroughly referenced report.

And now I'm going to summarise his summary in about 60 seconds.

Through the 18th century, fire marks were an indicator of whether a building was insured.

But the general policy of London insurance companies was that their firefighters did try to fight all fires, whether insured or not.

One, a fire in an uninsured building can easily spread to an insured property, or dozens of insured properties.

Economically, it made sense to cut the problem off as early as possible.

Two, it is really good advertising to have smartly-dressed firefighters rushing in to save the day.

There are good references from the time to back all that up.

But by 1721, there were eight fire insurance officers in London.

We don't know how many actual fire brigades there were, but there were enough for there to be rivalries between them.

And there was also a law that gave reward money to the first, second, and third brigades to attend a fire.

That's one of the reasons they raced to fires so fast.

So sometimes, too many firefighters would turn up.

They couldn't all help, and there might not be enough firefighting water for all of them.

Many of those firefighters were recruited from being watermen on the River Thames, rough-and-ready ferry workers.

So if they weren't quick enough, and they missed out on the reward, and it wasn't a building insured by their company anyway, they might just stand back, jeer a bit, or worst case, maybe even interfere with the folks who were going to get the reward money instead of them.

That is, in the researchers' view, the most probable place that the story came from.

There are so many more subtleties than that.

And you can always, always find more detail if you keep looking.

We're summarising more than 150 years here.

Did some firefighters ever stand back and let a building burn?

But there's no evidence from the time to show it was ever an official, standard policy for insurance fire brigades in 18th-century London.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of pop history books and storytellers were wrong.

If any history students are looking for a PhD topic, it feels like you could get three years of research out of this and still not end up with a definitive yes or no.

It's a perfect example of how quickly and how badly even big, important stories can become muddled.

And how the study of history is not about memorising dates, it's about the interpretation of really messy, patchy data.

It's unlisted now, I've put a link in the description here for posterity, but YouTube won't ever recommend it, it won't show up in search results, and I put a big warning on it.

Also, turns out I made another error anyway, I said the wrong organisation name later on in the video.

Sometimes, I'm standing on the shoulders of mistaken giants.

Anyone who tells you they're certain about how the world works is either a mathematician, or they're selling something.

I'm not going to be home for Christmas, but my internet connection can be.

Lots of websites and apps block international traffic or redirect it.

They think they're being clever, they think they're helping some international user, but I'm actually abroad, trying to order Christmas presents from Britain for people in Britain.