A HISTORIAN has returned from the USA after a two-month trip studying its fire heritage.

Michael Kernan, 69, a historian and archivist to the Fire Service College at Moreton-in-Marsh, has recently returned from a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship which offers a grant to those travelling overseas for educational reasons.

It enabled him to cross America studying all aspects of fire heritage, including preservation, restoration, display, storage and documentation.

Mr Kernan, a retired fire officer who has been a historian at the college since 1998, visited fire department museums, private collections and interested organisations in Washington DC, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

He said the highlight was seeing the Hall of Flame museum in Phoenix.

He said: "It is the largest fire museum in the world and is quite magnificent.

‘The whole trip was quite literally the experience of a lifetime. "

During his fellowship, Mr Kernan was appointed a charter member of the US National Fire Heritage Centre and has been invited to present a paper at the 2010 Annual Conference of the US Fire Museums Network which will be held at Maryland State Fire Museum.

He added: "Coming home is not the end. This is just the start of phase three.

"Phase one was planning, phase two was the tour and phase three is writing up my notes.

"Phase four will be cascading the information to all the fire collections in the UK and US. I can foresee at least five years ahead."