Josephine Reynolds joined the fire service as a teenager in 1982. The work was physically and emotionally gruelling but the camaraderie outweighed the isolation
In the spring of 1982, a 17-year-old woman called Josephine Reynolds pitched up for an interview to join the Norfolk fire and rescue service. A 40-minute interrogation by two senior fire officers – both men, obviously – followed, including such bog standard questions as: “Do you really think you’ve got the physical strength to handle this type of work?” and: “Why should we invest in you when later on in life you might have different priorities?” Reynolds was typically forthright. “Well, sir,” she replied, “if you train me correctly, then that shouldn’t be a problem.”
“That’s what the 80s were like,” Reynolds, now 52 and still “an adventurer by nature”, tells me. “OK, so they were trying to open up the service to women, but at the same time I was very much a woman going into a man’s world. They weren’t going to change for me. One chap in Norwich said: ‘I can’t speak to you, my wife doesn’t want me to.’ There was no sense of it being an equal place. Basically, the guys still ruled the roost.”
May 08, 2017 at 09:38PM
from Chitra Ramaswamy
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