The Cambridge First All-Ladies Fire Brigade

Today, we handed in a full first draft of “The Cambridge First All-Ladies Fire Brigade”  to the Musical Theatre undergraduates at The University of Lincoln, and their brilliant programme leader and director Clare Chandler. 

Cue epic celebrations!

Before they start workshopping it, and we start rewriting it…

This seems like a good day to throw back to the show’s moment of inception, which was handily captured by BBC Radio 4. Back in 2017, I was asked to go on the programme Great Lives as the celebrity guest (I’m using a very loose definition of the word “celebrity” here…)

I chose physicist and inventor Hertha Ayrton as my Great Life, and together with the show’s producer, I set to work researching more about her life. We recorded it in December 2017 and it was broadcast in January 2018. You can still listen to it now.

I remember doing the research for this show with one hand on my phone, and the other pushing my one year old daughter in a pram around the local park. As was usual for late 2017, I was trying to get her to sleep while thinking about how I got to where I am, and wondering what her life will be like in the future.

I’d chosen Hertha as my subject because we shared the same initials and had both studied physics, so I already felt a little bit of affinity with her. I also believed that she wasn’t as well known as she should be – and even though she is more recognised now, I still think that’s the case. 

Everything I had learnt about her until that point had turned the one-dimensional of a Victorian scientist on its head. Even when you put her science aside, she was still a fascinating person: Singing in the College choir at Girton, campaigning for the vote as a Suffragette, and instead of the privileged upbringing I assumed she had, she was actually one of seven children to a widowed mother who worked as a seamstress to support her family. Not the kind of start in life that you’d expect from someone who went on to Cambridge in the 1880s, and be awarded the Royal Society’s Hughes Medal for achievements in the physical sciences 20 years later.

At this point I hadn’t thought about creating a musical of Hertha’s life. That moment came during the actual recording of the radio programme, which you can still hear on BBC Sounds:

At 20 minutes 45 seconds you can hear Anne Locker, archivist at the IET and guest expert on the show, sharing that Hertha founded Girton College Fire Brigade. You can hear me respond with a very surprised “Wow!”.

That genuinely was the first moment I’d heard about Hertha’s Fire Brigade, and the first moment I thought inside my head “No way – this should be a musical!”

And now, 8 years after that episode was broadcast, Jenni, Brian and I still agree with that idea and have handed in our first complete draft.

Let’s hope the second draft doesn’t take quite as long…  

This blog is posted with thanks to Prof Ed Rochead, for pointing out that I sounded a lot more more surprised than I should have done when Anne shared her fire-fighting fact on Great Lives. It made me realise that this was indeed the moment of our show’s inception, and it was captured live by the BBC!