They made fire alarms. They had their own fire brigade. And they still couldn’t save the girls on the top floor. London, 9 June 1902. Fire broke out in the General Electric Company’s offices on Queen Victoria Street. Two hundred workers were cleared from below — but more than a dozen young women, hired weeks earlier for the Coronation rush, were trapped above the smoke. In the street, police and strangers held out a tarpaulin and begged them to jump. The fire brigade’s ladders arrived too short to reach them. Eight young women never made it down. The youngest was fourteen. The coroner found the company had illegally stored flammable fluid on site. It denied any negligence and defended its safety record to shareholders. A firm that sold the alarms to warn of fire couldn’t get its own girls out of one. So who decides a life is worth less than a longer ladder? #BritishHistory #ForgottenHistory #LondonHistory