Leeds United podcaster among firefighters sharing their life-saving stories

Gary Devonport is far from a stranger to podcasts as one of the presenters of the Talking Shutt series about his beloved Leeds United. But he has switched chatting about football with star guests to being in the hot-seat himself to discuss a very different topic; his role in a life-saving rescue as a senior firefighter.  

Devonport is one of a group of South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue frontline staff to take part in the organisation’s new weekly podcast series Shout, which is hosted by corporate communications manager Alex Mills and sees firefighters and control room staff from across the service talk about memorable incidents they’ve dealt with.

He says Mills initially approached him both for some advice on running a podcast and to appear on the show to talk about his chance role in the rescue of a man who had fallen into the sea in Wales last year.

“Alex said it was a good opportunity for the lads and lasses to talk about what we do,” Devonport explains. “It is not for praise – if you are in the fire service for praise, you are probably in the wrong job.”

In his episode, Devonport recounts how he and his five colleagues had been in Beaumaris on the island of Anglesey in March 2019 for a water training rescue course when they spotted people rushing to the aid of a man who had slipped off the promenade while out walking with his wife and dog.

The firefighters were having breakfast when they saw a man in a dry suit rush past outside. They went out to assist the Beaumaris lifeboat crew and Penmon Coastguard Rescue Team who were pulling the injured man out of the water, with the South Yorkshire firefighters helping to carry him back to the safety of the lifeboat station.

The man was in considerable pain with a suspected broken hip and Devonport and the others helped get him out of his wet clothes and provide him with some oxygen and thermal blankets.

“It was a bit of a funny one as nobody knew who were because we were all in civilian clothing,” Devonport says today. “We were actually talking that morning about how you seem to stumble across incidents when you are on training courses. As a firefighter, you are always on alert a little bit, particularly when there is a group of you and you have a van full of kit.”

Ironically, some of the other rescuers of the man turned out to be the people running the course that the Yorkshire group were due to attend that day.

“They joked afterwards we had completed the final exercise,” he says.

Devonport, who is originally from Barnsley, served in the military for six years after joining at 16 and did two tours of Iraq. After a short stint working for a private company transferring prisoners between jails, he found a new home in the fire service. After working in several stations across South Yorkshire, he rose through the ranks and moved into a training role.

“The fire service has got so may different elements to it. People think it is getting cats out of trees and putting fires out but there is so much more to it than that.

“I have been in training school for coming up to five years. I love the role, I’m a people person and you get to see so many different people. It is very busy and very demanding but it is great as well.”

He says he had no qualms about being the subject of a podcast himself rather than presenting it. “It is good for the public to see what the fire service do. Unless we have been involved with them in an unfortunate incident, I don’t think a lot of people have a grasp of what the job really is.

“Our role as firefighters has completely changed in the last 20 years. We are in tough times as every emergency service is in terms of government funding.”

Another firefighter to feature in the new series is watch manager Kirsty Wright, who recounts her role in giving first aid to an elderly woman who had been carried out of a burning building in Sheffield around three years ago.

Wright, who lives in Stocksbridge, has been in the fire service for 14 years having started in the control room before becoming a frontline firefighter. “I guess I have always been one of those people who wants to make a difference in life – not so much about saving lives, but just making a difference.

“Before this I worked in fire service control. I hadn’t thought of doing the role of firefighters because I didn’t think I would be fit enough. But having the experience in control and getting an understanding of the role, I realised there would be a place for me. I know people expect it to be dealing with fire after fire and I knew that wouldn’t be the case. But it was definitely a massive eye-opener doing it for real. Personally, I found the training particularly challenging but I enjoyed it.”

Wright says saving the woman was “very much a team effort” after the firefighters under her command saved the unconscious woman from the property and left the lady with her to revive as they went back to check if anyone else was trapped and to extinguish the fire.

After giving her oxygen in front of watching neighbours and passers-by, Wright was preparing to start CPR when the woman started to regain consciousness.

“I managed to get her quite a bit of oxygen. She came around after a few minutes. It was probably about four to five minutes but it felt like a lifetime, especially as everybody was watching.”

After working her way up the ranks to become a watch manager who oversees the response to incidents from the ground, Wright says the role is usually less directly hands-on as the incident she describes in the podcast.

“The good thing about the fire service is you work your way up from the bottom so you have an appreciation of each role.

“Being a watch manager you are in charge of the incident response and that brings a different kind of responsibility. You make the calls and you have nowhere to hide.

“You have to make the decisions you know may not be easy – if I say we are not going into that building because it is too dangerous or we are moving back, for a firefighter your first instinct is to help people. But you have the responsibility of being in charge of the firefighters’ safety as well.

“I always try and get a bit of closure for myself and my firefighters after major incidents because I think it is important.

“I will phone the hospitals if I can so we know when we have done something good for someone. We do what we do and see them off in an ambulance and you can never hear of them again. In incidents like this one, you can fear the worst because she was over 70 and very frail. I was made aware she made a full recovery and was rehomed.”

Wright says with women “massively under-represented” in the fire service, she still regularly gets sexist remarks from members of the public questioning whether she would be strong enough to rescue them on her own. “You would think in this day and age you would get it less but it does happen quite often. I hear it that often I do have my standard reply which is ‘I wouldn’t, I would struggle but I’m fortunate that we work in teams’.”

Wright says providing a positive example to her two young daughters is one of her biggest motivations.

“Sometimes you leave a particularly difficult incident where we have lost somebody or there has been an RTC where somebody has been hurt and the older I get, the more I take that with me. It is a 25-minute car journey from work to home and if I have had a horrendous call or something that has really bothered me, I will ring up home and say ‘put the girls on’.

“As soon as I get home, they both run to me which is just the best feeling. I want them to be proud of their mum and to know they have got the ability to make a difference.”

While she is modest about her own achievements, Wright says she was more than happy to take part in the podcast to help put across the human side of the fire service.

“The role we do because it is what we love, you can take it for granted. You forget what you do day-to-day isn’t people’s norm. I did want people to know what we do.

“I just want people to understand we are human and the role we do. When you have spent your career with the fire service, you know the risks we are taking, going into dangerous situations. You are trained to put yourselves in these positions but we are still human, we still have families and friends.

“It is about letting other people know exactly what we deal with on a day-to-day basis and how it affects us

“It is important to focus on the good but it doesn’t mean we don’t feel the bad. You wouldn’t be in the role if you didn’t care.”


Passers-by filming emergency rescues ‘now common’

Kirsty Wright says it is now commonplace for passers-by to film emergency incidents on their phones and post the footage online as operations are still taking place.

“I once had an RTC where we had to cut the lady out and my husband knew where I had been working because it had gone straight on social media.

“Nine times out of 10 I genuinely believe people don’t realise that have done it because getting your phone out straight away is the norm. But it really does make the job harder especially when you know the outcome might not necessarily be the one you want.”

The Shout podcast is available on the App store and Google Play.

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