Dr Henderson’s medals
In September 2011, Peter Seabroke, great grandson of Dr Roderick Henderson, one of Rickmansworth’s most celebrated former residents, presented Three Rivers Museum with Dr Henderson’s medals, awarded to commemorate his long service with the town’s fire brigade and his national reputation within the fire service. For many years the medals had been ‘lost’ in the sense that their location was unknown. They appeared in Australia and then in New Zealand in the possession of a medal collector and were purchased by the Seabroke family, who generously donated them to Three Rivers Museum.
Dr Roderick Henderson (1841-1929) is probably a familiar name to many residents of Rickmansworth, as the house he occupied and enlarged is the home of Three Rivers Museum. As well as working as a busy medical practitioner, Dr Henderson was also a keen voluntary fireman, establishing the local fire brigade in 1869. The medals awarded to him for his work in the fire service disappeared until they recently came to light in a collection in New Zealand and have now been purchased and donated by his family descendants to the Museum.
Dr Henderson’s interest in the fire brigade may have developed through the work of the pioneering fireman James Braidwood (1800-1861). Braidwood established a level of professionalism in the fire service by ensuring that his men were physically fit and properly trained. When the London Fire Brigade Establishment (the forerunner of the London Fire Brigade) was formed in 1833, Braidwood was appointed Chief Fire Officer, a post he held for 28 years. Braidwood introduced a uniform for the firemen as part of the measures he instituted. While a medical student at Guy’s Hospital, Henderson acted as a runner for the fire service, then under Braidwood’s direction.
Arriving in Rickmansworth in the mid-1860s with his wife Marie Louise, Henderson was concerned to find that not only was the local fire brigade inefficient, but that it was manned by untrained volunteers and dependent on the parish. Herbert Fellows, manager and trustee of Salter’s Brewery, shared his concerns and together they established the ‘Rickmansworth Volunteer Fire Brigade’. Henderson and Fellows followed Braidwood’s lead by ensuring that the men received proper training and, by organising regular drills, that they worked as a team. To further improve the brigade’s efficiency, Henderson purchased a steam-driven fire engine to replace the old, slow parish machine. He also allowed his home and surgery, Basing House, on Rickmansworth’s High Street to be used as a dropping off point for messages for the firemen. In 1891, Henderson took the initiative of providing the town with its first fire station, located at the west end of the High Street. Today, the building is a fish and chip shop, but a foundation stone, laid by ‘R.W. Henderson, Esq., Captain of the Rickmansworth Fire Brigade’ along with the names of the firemen (most of them familiar names as town shopkeepers) can be seen just above head height on the wall of the old building.
In recognition of his continuing support for the town’s volunteer fire brigade, Dr Henderson was presented with the National Fire Brigades Long Service Medal in December 1895. On this occasion he also received three bars on the medal, for a total of 30 years’ service. Subsequently, five additional bars, each for five years’ service, were added to the medal ribbon. This medal and its bars show that Dr Henderson had been involved with the fire brigade for a grand total of 55 years. A well-respected member of the national voluntary fire brigade service, Henderson sat on sub-committees of the British Fire Prevention Committee concerned with fire prevention legislation, as well as undertaking the testing of fire extinguishers. He also gave evidence to a select committee set up to ‘inquire and report on the existing arrangements for the provision of fire protection’. Henderson informed the select committee that the brigades should be put under the management of the County Council and be open to government inspection. In further recognition of his work for the fire service, the National Fire Brigade Association awarded him a medal for ‘services rendered’. Two more medals in the set suggest that he was also involved with the international fire brigade movement as the medals were awarded by Belgium and France.
The last medal in the group was awarded to Dr Henderson for ‘faithful service in the special constabulary’. The medal includes a bar recording ‘The Great War, 1914-1918’. In spite of his age (Henderson would have been 73 at the outbreak of the First World War), he was placed at the head of a force of special constables charged with safeguarding water supplies from German infiltrators. After the war ended in 1918, Henderson continued to take an active interest in the organisation of the special constabulary during the General Strike of 1926. By the time of his death in 1929 he had become head of the uniformed branch of the constabulary.
It would seem likely that it was through his involvement with the National Fire Brigade movement that Dr Henderson’s daughter, Marie, met her future husband George Tertius Seabroke. His father, George Mitchell Seabroke, who had set up a volunteer fire brigade Rugby, Warwickshire, went on to become one of the founders of the National Union of Fire Brigades and no doubt the two older men would have met at national fire brigade meetings.
When Dr Henderson died in 1929, his coffin was placed on the new Rickmansworth fire engine, ‘Muriel’, named after his second wife. This modern machine, brought into the brigade two years earlier, formed part of the funeral cortege with members of the town’s fire brigade as pall-bearers. On his coffin sat his brigade helmet, belt and hatchet, together with his medals. Representatives of local and national fire brigade organisations followed the engine along the High Street. His obituary in the Watford Observer described Dr Henderson as, ‘a man without an enemy, whose sterling character endeared him to every inhabitant in the town … He was a typical English gentleman.’
Susan Bennett
September 2011
