THE FIREMASTER

During the post-war years, Leyland was probably the best-known name in British truck design, along with Bedford and their ‘you see them everywhere’ slogan, but in 1939, Leyland, unlike Bedford, moved out of fire engine manufacture and didn’t return for almost 20 years. When they did come back, they certainly made an impact with their new concept appliance, the Firemaster.

Leyland had been building fire appliances since 1909 delivering their first engine to Dublin Fire Brigade and then continuing to supply many fine designs including some beautiful open-cabbed turntable ladders set up on the TD 7 bus chassis during the thirties. Many of the petrol engines supplied to the National Fire Service to power the pumps on the Austin K4 and Fordson 7V heavy pump appliances were Leyland-produced motors. However, 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War saw Leyland cease production of fire engine chassis and bodies.

In 1959, after 20 years away from the firefighting appliance market, customer pressure was building on the company to re-enter this specialist world. Leyland engineers were being asked by their potential clients for a different approach to a fire appliance chassis; they needed something special, so the company returned to their range of bus chassis to hopefully, provide answers. The chassis chosen was the Worldmaster, originally offered as an export-only model for the Olympic and Royal Tiger bus and coach range and believed to be officially known as the TFM 2. It had been around for a while, in fact since 1954, and had already proved itself with its innovative four-speed, semi-automatic, pneumo-cyclic gearbox and air brakes. This chassis gave the designers the chance to put the engine, a Leyland 0.600 9.8 litre,150bhp diesel under the chassis, mid-mounted along the rail length, thus leaving the bodybuilders with a flat-floor pan on which to mount the structure.

This was the beginning of ‘Firemaster’. WXJ 286 became No 1!

The original concept for the Firemaster design had been created following a meeting between Manchester Fire Brigade’s