Cotswold chip shop owner who fights fires as second job

Ian Shoemark is on-call at Stow-on-the-Wold station for 120 hours a week

A retained firefighter joined the service after missing the "adrenaline buzz" of his former life as a horse jockey.

Ian Shoemark retired from the sport and bought a fish and chip shop in Gloucestershire, but said he felt "lost".

He said joining has been a "great experience" for him.

Retained firefighters make up more than half the service in Gloucestershire and the hunt is on for more.

As a rural county, 16 of Gloucestershire's 21 fire stations are staffed entirely by on-call firefighters and 17 stations are currently recruiting.

Around 240 retained firefighters are needed at any one time.

On-call firefighters in Gloucestershire have varied main jobs

At Stow-on-the-Wold they need 11 people available to staff the two fire engines.

Each on-call officer is paid for the hours they do on call and has a pager to call them out when they are needed.

Contracts can be for upwards of 60 hours a week and they do not work on a fire station full time.

Mr Shoemark, who has been a retained firefighter for 25 years, said: "It does wake you up very suddenly in the middle of the night and took a bit of getting used to.

"Sometimes you do think 'I could do without this' but you focus and this is what you do."

And it gave him the excitement he missed from his former life.

'Adrenaline buzz'

"I was trying to make a living, but I was a little bit lost," he said. "Going from being a professional sportsman into the fish and chip shop, I wasn't getting that adrenaline buzz I used to get.

"It has been a great experience for me and gives me that and something else to focus on."

He is joined at the station by a variety of workers including a postman, chocolatier, builder, mechanic, retired banker and a cameraman.

"It is a very productive way of running a station because you're not paying people to be here all the time," he said.

"It is a very efficient way of spending money for the council. But there is an issue with recruitment because it is quite hard to recruit people to do an on-call job."

The biggest gap to fill, he said, is with daytime cover as most people work during the day and give their on-call hours at night.

Retained firefighters need to live within five miles of their local fire station.