A good servant but a terrifying master, fire has been an ‘element’ that homo sapiens and our ancestors, homo erectus, have tried to control for between eight hundred thousand years and two million years! Far more than tools, using fire marks us out from all other animals. It’s been suggested that Australian hawks deliberately start wildfires to flush out their prey, but they don’t use fire to cook, nor to keep warm whilst they eat. Otherwise, we’re the only animals arrogant enough to fool ourselves into believing we’re in control of everything.
Not long ago New York was reminded how fire can threaten us without provocation or foolishness on our part. Fire takes oxygen to thrive, and so do we. Fire makes ash and carbon dioxide. Ash can choke us, and all carbon dioxide does is trigger the reflux that makes us gasp for the oxygen that fire has already used up. In our cities we have tried to tame fire, but as the Grenfell Tower showed us, we take insufficient care to understand how we can be bitten back by the elements we think we exploit.
We aren’t pioneers in using fire. Banksia, Eucalyptus and Lodgepole Pine are amongst plants which need fire to release and prime their seeds. Not that they necessarily think about it, nor do they start the fires themselves. Fire is a force of nature. Easy to start, hard to stop.
Fire might have been the way everything started, but it’s not good for the air: it uses up oxygen. When it overwhelms water, it boils and turns it to steam.
When plants, especially trees, are burned they react with water to create ‘potash’ which helps fertilise soil, repairing the sterile scorched earth. Prehistoric humans must have been the first to think they could use fire to their advantage – not just to cook and keep warm, but to fertilise the earth for the earliest farmers to begin agriculture. Then came the bronze and iron ages when fire was used to forge metals.
In recent years we’ve burned stubble and set controlled fires in heather on grouse moors. Since the 1990s fire brigades and climate change activists have been strongly opposed to such practices, as wildfires endanger both people and property. Now, with the increase in both droughts and record-breaking temperatures, the use of barbecues is becoming outlawed in many public places.
It seems humans learned to cook during the Stone-Age, when hunter gatherers possibly took advantage of wildfires when animals fell dead into burning herb patches, thus inventing ‘Viande aux Herbes’ about three million years ago. I still enjoy a leg of lamb roast with rosemary and mint, but I try to avoid setting fire to the thatched roof. Promising not to use naked flames means insurance premiums are appreciably reduced.
It’s not long since London was beset by ‘peasouper’ fogs, caused by the burning of coal which had brought prosperity in the Industrial Revolution. Buildings were blackened with soot, and even in Cirencester stonework became stained and eroded by the sulphurous and acidic atmosphere generated by our fires, and the steam engines and eventually the diesel and petrol engines which replaced them.
Fire has also been a weapon of war. Boudicca – for example – used fire to arrack the Romans in Colchester, and then to destroy London and St Albans. Later Viking raiders attacked Holy Island with fire, and native Americans used fire arrows against the immigrant settlers. It’s been suggested that the Phoenix became a symbol of Cirencester because the Saxons possibly used fire when they sacked the town in 577.
Even cats enjoy a real fire barbecue now and then: see Arrowsmith’s cat tending the rotisserie chicken.
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