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Angus Fire Armour

The fire-protection division of George Angus & Co of Newcastle upon Tyne, a leather and rubber firm dating from 1788 that made fire hose and extinguishers at Bentham in Yorkshire and traded from Angus House on Gray's Inn Road, London. Under the Firefly name it built Land Rover fire tenders from about 1960, gaining Land Rover approval in 1962, before the marque passed to HCB of Southampton.

History

George Angus & Co was founded in Newcastle in 1788 and grew from leather into a general engineering and rubber-goods group: by the 1840s it kept a gutta-percha depot on Grey Street, in 1888 it became a public company, and by the 1910s and 1920s it made leather, rubber and asbestos goods, machine-cut gears at Walker-on-Tyne and, from 1935 under licence from Freudenberg, the Gaco oil seals that went into aircraft hydraulics. Fire hose and fire extinguishers were part of the range by the 1930s — both were on its stand at the 1937 British Industries Fair — and became the business of Angus Fire Armour, its fire-protection division with a factory at Station Road, Bentham, in the Yorkshire Dales. The group's London office was Angus House, 300 Gray's Inn Road, which is why period captions describe Firefly equipment as coming from London.

The Firefly was Angus's Land Rover fire tender: a coachbuilt adaptation of the 109-inch chassis with a pump, hose reel and lockers, of which examples were exported — the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority in Australia ran a 1960 one — and which Land Rover approved in 1962. At least a dozen were built before Angus sold the Firefly marque to Hampshire Car Bodies of Totton, Southampton, which marketed the range as HCB-Angus until it closed in 1994. Angus Fire itself continues as a hose and foam manufacturer at Bentham.

Vehicles in this registry (1)

Sources & citations

Maker record updated 2026-09-11T08:59:46.159Z · status: researched