Homeless as a teenager, Sabrina Cohen-Hatton is now one of the top female firefighters in the land. Rosanna Greenstreet hears a tale of heat and light...
Self-assured, well-spoken and attractive, Chief Fire Officer Dr Sabrina Cohen-Hatton is a busy mum of one with a PhD to her name.
To see her, out and about, one would never imagine that the 37-year-old spent part of her youth sleeping rough. And yet, astonishingly, Sabrina was just 15 when she found herself out on the streets.
“I was either homeless or vulnerably housed for about two years and that included a period living in a van,” she explains.
It is just after Christmas when we catch up, the festive decorations still very much in evidence. For Sabrina, it is a reminder of things past.
“Christmas was always tough on the streets,” she reflects. “There were times when I would be sat there watching people go past, everyone happy and looking forward to good family time. And I would be lonely and isolated.”
Born in South Wales, Sabrina enjoyed a normal upbringing until the age of nine. Then, as she documents in her book The Heat of the Moment – first published last year and now out in paperback – life took a terrible turn. Her father died suddenly from a brain tumour and a difficult relationship with her mother led to Sabrina’s eventual departure from the family home.
Despite living rough in Newport, however, Sabrina carried on going to school and passed her GCSEs. At 16 she began to sell The Big Issue, the world’s most widely circulated street newspaper.
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Finally, when she was 18, she had enough money to move into secure accommodation. Today she is a passionate ambassador for The Big Issue, founded in 1991 to help homeless people to earn a legitimate income and improve their lives.
“Having a home boosts your self-esteem,” she says. “It took me three attempts to escape the streets and reintegrate into normal society, but when I got to the point where secure housing was clearly going to be a reality, I began to think about what I could do with my life.
“It struck me that, in the fire service, you are trusted to know what to do when people are having the worst day they’ve ever had. I had spent two years enduring some of the worst days that I was ever going to experience. I wanted to rescue other people in a way that nobody had rescued me.”
So, the fire service it was. Sabrina spent the early part of her career in South Wales and then moved around, eventually joining the London Fire Brigade (LFB) and rising to become Deputy Assistant Commissioner.
In March 2017 she took charge of the service’s response to the terror attack at Westminster. And in June of that year, following the fire at Grenfell Tower – a disaster she cannot discuss, on account of the ongoing public enquiry – she established a welfare centre to ensure that firefighters who had fought the blaze had access to psychological support.
Resident in Surrey since 2014, when she joined the LFB, Sabrina shares a home with husband Mike, their 10-year-old daughter Gabriella and two Mexican hairless dogs, Luther and Jimmy Chew. Last year, after a short secondment to Surrey Fire Brigade, she landed the top job of Chief Fire Officer for West Sussex.
Mike is also a firefighter, and it was a tragedy in which he was involved that would become the catalyst for Sabrina’s PhD.
“I was called to an incident in which a firefighter had been severely burned. There was a one in four chance that it was Mike, as he was on the truck, which had been called to an exploding pavement. They assumed it was a hoax, but it turned out that an underground electrical junction box had a fault.
“Mike had been lying on his belly with his head in the pit, poking around, wondering what on earth it was. As he got up, the box exploded and a flame shot out of the ground and caught his colleague in the face. Had it exploded when Mike was on the ground, he would have been killed instantly.
“Travelling to the incident was the most difficult and harrowing experience of my life. I was torn between the role of responder – and all the accountability that comes with that – and the role of a loved one. I was fortunate: it wasn’t him. But it was our friend. So I felt this massive sense of relief, while at the same time I was overwhelmed by a huge sense of guilt. It was as if, by not wanting it to be Mike, I had wished it on somebody else.”
Tortured by the internal conflict, Sabrina took a highly practical step.
“It was really upsetting to me. So, to stop it chasing round and round in my head, I started to look at things we could do to make firefighters safer. Initially, I thought about a better burns pack or something. Then it struck me that the majority of injuries, in all areas of life, are caused by human error.”
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The realisation led Sabrina back into study. Still serving, she gained a psychology degree through the Open University and then started a part-time PhD in behavioural neuroscience, despite having just given birth.
“Gabriella was born on January 1 – the day my PhD started! I’d go to the lab at 5.30 am to crack on with my experiments. Then I’d pull a shift at work, come home and put Gabriella to bed, go back in for the night shift, sleep for a couple of hours and then wake up to do it all again.”
Having finished her PhD in 2013, Sabrina moved on to firefighter-focused research.
“I co-supervised a small research group at Cardiff University. We looked at how people were making decisions on the scene and developed a set of new techniques to help commanders do it better. We introduced that work into our national policy and now all emergency services can use it.”
Recently Cardiff made Sabrina an honorary fellow for her award-winning work – something beyond the wildest dreams of that homeless teenager of long ago. Yet her focus remains the same.
“I don’t need accolades or a pat on the back,” she says. “Just knowing that the work is helping to make firefighters safer is enough for me.”
When Sabrina joined up at 18, just 1% of UK firefighters were women. Now that figure is 5%. Glamour described Sabrina as “one of the wonder women of our emergency services”, and there is no doubt that her story has led other women down the same path.
“Many women have been in touch with me on social media, particularly after reading my book, saying that they’ve been inspired to apply. A few have gone through with it and are now fully-fledged firefighters. It makes me feel so very, very humbled to have had such an influence on people’s lives.”
The Heat of the Moment: A Firefighter’s Stories of Life and Death Decisions, by Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, is out in paperback (Black Swan, £8.99). For info about firefighter recruitment: fireservice.co.uk
