Henry Joseph Deakin
This research was started by me at the University of Salford in 1974 but was not completed as an M.Sc. thesis till December 1977 . It developed out of or from an undergraduate project I started at the University of Leicester in 1971 where I had ,fairly briefly, looked at the effects of shift working on groups of firemen working in the Leicestershire Fire Service.At Salford I developed this research much further by using more detailed questionnaires and tape recording the results. The results from these recordings were transcribed back onto the original questionnaires as read out to the firemen . The idea was to allow time to capture the individuality of each fireman's participation and to allow time for this to be transcribed back onto an individual questionnaire ,one for each fireman . I thought that this approach would guarantee that I would get good quality feedback and material for the thesis itself. The firemen interviewed this time were from the local Salford City Fire Brigade . This material did take some time to write up and my first attempt tried to widen it out to put the research into the wider context of emergencies and disasters : this was not a successful approach for me and the thesis was later re-presented focusing on and using the large amount of material from the original interviews.It was finished in 1977 and the M.Sc. was awarded in December of that year. One area I looked at was the effect of shift work on the work-leisure relationships and family life of these firemen . As Harry Deakin I wrote a brief article for the Magazine "New Society" on 1 December 1977 page 465 called "Firemen on the Job" which also gave a kind of overview of the project. As well as looking at work-leisure relationships and attitudes to work , there was also an opportunity for me to look at the effects on the Firemen , of this small City Fire Brigade being absorbed and integrated into the much larger Greater Manchester Fire Service as the interviews were carried out at th
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