“Our friend, Mr. Witton, offered us the use of the whole of his house at Kitwell ready furnished. Mr. Blakeway, another of our friends, made an offer, which we gladly accepted, of a house of his in Tenant Street, which then stood empty. In this we determined to put up the beds, most of which had been saved, and use it as a lodging-house till our own could be repaired.
“We were anxious to inform the friends of the children as soon as possible of the accident, in order to prevent that alarm which the exaggerated accounts in the first instance generally circulated on such an occasion would raise. This was undertaken by a friend; but, notwithstanding the precaution, the good people of Kidderminster, from which town we had several boys, were terribly alarmed. An uncle of a boy named H——, whose friends reside at Kidderminster, happened to be in Birmingham at the time of the fire. As soon as the news reached him, he wrote to his sister (the boy’s mother), to prevent any uneasiness which she might have felt had she heard a wrong account from another quarter. In his haste he incautiously made use of the following expression: ‘Hazelwood is burnt down, but Henry is safe.’ The report was immediately circulated in Kidderminster that the house was burnt down, and that all the boys except H—— were burnt. The friends of the other children were in a state of the greatest anxiety. The father of one of the boys immediately rode over in the greatest haste. He was soon followed by another. I need not say how glad they were to see their children.
“During the course of the day the friends of many of the children arrived, and took their sons home. This, though it relieved us of the care of them, made us anxious whether an impression might not get abroad, that either we were particularly careless or very unlucky; the more so, as an alarm of the same kind, sufficient to induce us to send for the engines, although they had nothing to do when they arrived, took place the winter before. We now began to place the furniture in the school-room and the chamber over, as this part of the house had not been injured by the fire or the water. Some also took precautions to defend the house from further injury by rain. To accomplish this, we borrowed a great quantity of tarpaulin from the different carriers in the town, by means of which a temporary roof was constructed. I engaged a number of men to remove the rubbish which had fallen with the roof and ceilings upon the floors of the garrets, and to riddle it in order that nothing valuable might be lost. The quantity of rubbish collected amounted to several wagon-loads. Frederic, and I slept at night in the school-room to guard the house. We had also a watchman on the outside. The other part of the family slept at the neighbours’ houses.
“The next day the family again assembled at dinner at the house of my brother Edwin. We now made arrangements for restoring things as soon as possible. One undertook the repairs of the building; another those of the furniture; one to make out the account for the Fire Office; another to prepare the house in Tenant Street. Printed circular-letters were sent to our friends as soon as possible, expressive of our gratitude for the kindness we had met with, and stating our intention of resuming the business of the school on the Thursday following—that is, eight days after the fire.
“Besides the injury done to the roof, the floors of the rooms in that part of the house, and the garret ceilings, were almost completely destroyed. The garret floors were much injured by the burning wood which fell upon them, and they doubtless would have been destroyed altogether, but that persons were engaged, at a considerable risk, in throwing water upon the blazing timbers as they fell, before the engines arrived. The walls and ceilings of the lower rooms were also much injured by the water.
“The school assembled on the day appointed. Till the roof was completed the boys slept in Tenant Street; when that was done they occupied the chambers of the house, a part of our own family sleeping from home. It was not till Christmas that we were enabled to reinstate everything.
“Among the things destroyed in the flames, almost every one of us has lost something which he valued highly. My brother Arthur has lost the accounts of some tours which he has taken at various times; Howard has lost a copy of Mavor’s ‘British Tourist,’ which he gained as a prize in the school. But in things of that description I have been the greatest sufferer. I have lost all my original drawings, six in number, which were framed and glazed. I made these drawings when I was quite a boy, and for that reason I valued them. At Hill Top they hung in the parlour, but when we removed they were put in one of the roof rooms till a convenient opportunity should occur to hang them up. The electrical planisphere, representing the southern sky, and the water-alarum, both of which I have described in these memoirs, were consumed in the flames. I valued these because they were the best specimens I possessed of my boyish handicraft.
“I have not yet lost the impression which this accident made upon my mind. My sleep is frequently broken by dreaming of fire; when awake I often suppose that I smell smoke; and it is not till I am out of bed that I can convince myself that I have been deceived. It is remarkable that at the present time, and, indeed, immediately after the fire, I remembered but little of what took place; although the roof fell in, and the flames were seen at a great distance from the house, I have no recollection of noticing either; yet I was more than once on different parts of the roof, giving directions to the firemen.”
He thus accounts for the origin of the fire:—
“Upon making known the situation of things as they stood previous to the fire, it was suggested by some one that it might have originated thus. I have before said that a great quantity of carpeting, old and new, lay in the closet. An old Brussels carpet was folded up and placed on the floor of the closet; on this lay a roll of new Scotch carpet; and the whole was surmounted by a number of empty paper hat-boxes. This being the state of things, and the closet having no ceiling, it is very probable that during the heavy rains which fell a short time previous, some of the water might penetrate through the roof and wet the carpets. The rain was succeeded by some of the hottest weather I ever remember. The heat immediately under the slates would be very great; and we were told that Brussels carpeting, which is composed partly of hemp and partly of wool, if wet and afterwards exposed to heat, will ferment and fire spontaneously, in the manner that hay sometimes does. This opinion, upon inquiry, we found to be confirmed by experience. A ship in the Mediterranean took fire from the fermentation of some wet ropes stowed in the hold. A relation of ours, a builder, had his premises partly destroyed by the fermentation of a quantity of hair for plaster, placed under a shed. He knows this to have been the cause, from the circumstance of the hair’s smoking having been noticed the day preceding.”