History
Under the 1938 Fire Brigades Act, the UK Government set up a training centre at Saltdean near Brighton in 1941, to train National Fire Service personnel. With the return to local authority control after World War II, the British government decided to standardise the way in which the fire service worked. The college at Saltdean became too small and the Home Office opened the Senior Staff College at Wotton House, Dorking in Surrey in 1949, to train senior officers from all over the country. On 4 June 1966, they decided to do the same for the lower ranks and established the Fire Service College at Moreton. The College was built on a disused RAF wartime airfield about 3 km outside the village of Moreton in Marsh.
RAF Moreton-in-Marsh was, as the home station of 21 Operational Training Unit, RAF Bomber Command responsible for the training of aircrew to fly Wellington bombers. The Station also flew operations, and sent aircraft on the large bomber raids on the German cities of Cologne, Dresden and Hamburg. The airbase remained operational until the late 1950s. The government then used the base to teach fire fighting to military personnel undergoing their National Service.
The Home Office opened the College on the 500 acre (2 km²) site in 1968. The first students whilst having most of the facilities seen today had no proper accommodation and were bunked in large Nissen huts (in the area that is now the cricket and football pitches), which originally housed the RAF personnel when it was an operational airbase. The Staff College at Dorking was closed in 1981 and all training was transferred to Moreton.
In April 1992, the college became an executive agency under the Fire Service Trading Fund Order 1992 (Statutory Instrument 1992 No. 640). In June 2001, the responsibility for the college transferred from the Home Office to the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions and just one year later to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and then to the Department for Communities and Local Government.
Today, it has a wide range of facilities for theoretical education and practical training in fire fighting, fire safety and accident and emergency work.
On 16 May 2009, fire broke out at one of the workshops in the college, destroying 11 fire engines at a cost of £116,000 each. The blaze was not suspicious.
Read more about this topic: Fire Service College
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