Firefighter Sean Gosling, 55, is newly retired after almost 36 years’ service in Swindon. He is married to Mary, a housewife, and has two children, John and Megan. John is an on-call firefighter who aims to join the service full-time.

SEAN Gosling will soon be back with his old comrades.

He’s retired as a firefighter but he’ll carry on his work with Wiltshire Fire and Rescue’s Salamander project, training and building self-esteem among young people with challenging lives.

“We show them just what they can achieve by working together, and it’s a great success,” he said.

Sean counts himself lucky to live and work here.

“I like Swindon,” he said. “A lot of people mock it, for want of a better word, but Swindon is a lovely town.

“When you think about what it does, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

“Nothing is too extreme; everyone gets on and everything works in Swindon. It’s a good, honest, hard-working town, and it’s a pleasure to serve the people of Swindon because of that.

“As a firefighter or a police officer you feel you’re doing your best for the community and they respect that.”

Unlike firefighters in many other towns and cities, the ones serving Swindon seldom face hostility.

The closest Sean has come to being attacked was when some children decided to mimic something they’d apparently seen in TV drama London’s Burning.

“It was a half-hearted attempt. They picked up some bottles and threw them but they were nowhere near us...”

Sean, one of seven siblings, is from Wroughton, where the family name is well-known. His father ran the chip shop, an uncle had a hardware shop and another uncle ran the local dairy.

A great uncle, William Gosling, won the Victoria Cross during the First World War, saving many of his comrades by disarming a defective British mortar.

Sean’s father served with the Royal Engineers in the Second World War and a brother is station commander at Bulford Camp.

While still in his late teens, Sean joined Gloucestershire Constabulary, but admits that his romantic notion of helping people was mostly dashed by the often grim reality of day-to-day police work.

He served for about a year before his life changed by chance.

“I was working in Cheltenham and my sister phoned me and said they were advertising in the Swindon Advertiser for firefighters.

“I was 19 at the time, and because the family’s roots were in Swindon I applied for the job.”

Three months’ training and a two-week breathing apparatus course later, he was a newly-minted firefighter. He would serve for 20 years at Swindon Fire Station and then move to Stratton St Margaret.

“I was a young man of 20 now, itching to get out there and fight fires. In those days we used to have an average of about three fires a day. Everything in those days used to burn – mattresses, chairs, carpets, clothes.

“You weren’t allowed to stand too close to a fire in your nightclothes because they were flammable, and thank goodness that 30 years on things like that have changed. Everything is fire retardant.

“Our fires now have been reduced to an average of one or two a week, which is a big difference.

“Chip pan fires were regular. There was a lot more smoking than there is now and smoking in bed was common.

“We had lots of chimney fires – you’d have a chimney fire every day in the winter. There were polystyrene ceiling tiles. You’d go into a burning building, looking for the fire, and you’d have this burning plastic dropping down on you.”

There are fewer fires, but Sean doesn’t regard that as a cue for cutbacks.

“What are you going to do when something does happen?” he said.

There have been other changes. Sean has seen the fire service become the fire and rescue service.

Where once firefighters were equipped with little more than hoses, axes and crowbars, they now have the latest cutting gear and a selection of medical equipment. At road accident scenes, where once they simply cut victims from wreckage, they now work hand-in-hand with paramedics to stabilise patients and protect them from spinal damage.

Modern firefighters are trained to deal with flooding, terrorism, water rescues and – a sign of the times, perhaps – moving the extremely overweight while preserving dignity.

They also perform animal rescues, such as extracting livestock from ditches, in co-operation with the RSPCA. Sean has never rescued a kitten from a tree, although he once helped to extract a python from the spare wheel compartment of a car.

Other memorable incidents include the Wiltshire Hotel fire in the late 1980s, when it was so cold outside that the water from the hydrant froze. Then there was the fire at an Old Town gas cylinder storage site: “As they exploded they were pinging off about 200 yards into the distance.”

A fire at the old Wise’s Bakery in the 1990s saw Sean and his comrades slithering in a lake of melted lard as they tried to fight the flames.

There were grimmer jobs, too, such as rescuing the dying young man who’d hitched a lift on the outside of a train, only to end up beneath its wheels.

On another occasion, Sean was sent on a tragic errand to search for severed limbs on a motorway after a coach crash.

He is uncomfortable watching programmes featuring surgery, but has had no qualms about comforting people in circumstances far worse than anything seen on an operating table.

“You talk to them and try to reassure them that we’re doing our best and will get them out.”

What binds the emergency services together, he insists, is comradeship and common purpose.

“People are there to do a good job. I think there’s a motto that we all abide by: did we leave the scene better than when we found it?”

There is also the reaction of the public.

“We’re seen as the good guys and long may that continue. We work with the support of the public and if we didn’t have that support it would be very difficult.”