3-008-572 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Illustration of the Great Fire at Enschede, by our special artist: doorway of the Protestant church, 1862. The town '...contained about a thousand dwellings, four churches, a townhall, a post-office, a penitentiary, an orphan hospital, gasworks, schools, and other buildings of a municipal or commercial character, in addition to about twenty manufactories...Away sped the flames from house to house, from street to street. In sank the roofs in rapid succession; down fell the walls, barricading the streets with their smoking and blackened debris and rendering locomotion of any kind utterly impracticable. Molten lead streamed through the interstices; broken machinery, red hot, lay helter-skelter; the townhall and the churches, tumbled into a heap of smoking beams and blackened bricks, shared in the general destruction: the post-office, the orphan-house, the prison, and even many buildings in the suburbs were at six o'clock that evening but one widespread mass of smouldering rubbish'. Because the medieval city was largely built of wood and stone houses were the exception, fire was a constant risk and a series of fires in 1517, 1750 and again on 7 May 1862 earned the people from Enschede the nickname Brandstichters (arsonists). From "Illustrated London News", 1862.