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Lot Essay
Starting in the late 17th century, insurance companies began to form fire brigades which could be called on to fight fires and to protect and salvage items from any building that they insured. The need to identify these firemen as employees of the company was quickly identified, as well as the potential these men offered as walking advertisements for their employers. To meet this need the firemen were soon clothed in colourful costumes and given badges of silver or silver-gilt to be worn on the sleeve, as in the picture of a Fireman, thought to be George Mead illustrated here, and like those of the Thames watermen, from whom many of the early firemen were recruited. So important was the job of these men that they were exempted, after an act of parliament in 1707, from the press gangs who would have been roaming the streets looking for men to conscript into the Navy. Unlike fire marks, which would have been placed onto every building that was insured by a given company, these fireman's badges were never made in large numbers as each fire brigade would have consisted of no more than 30 men. This, along with the abuse that the badges would have suffered during daily wear, explains why so few have survived, indeed Brian Henham and Brian Sharp located only 140 of them for their book on the topic Badges of Extinction, The 18th and 19th century Badges of Insurance Office Firemen, Quiller Press, London, 1989.
The present example seems to be previously unrecorded.
The present example seems to be previously unrecorded.