London’s Burning — Part 1
The city of London sleeps in the early hours of a Sunday morning unaware of the drama and devastation that is about to engulf the city. The year is 1666 and on this September morning following a long hot dry summer a storm arrives bringing strong easterly winds and a change in the city’s fortunes.
At around 1am Thomas Farriner, his daughter Hanna and their servants are awoken by smoke rising from a fire that has broken out in their bakery which is situated below their living quarters. The baker, his daughter and their manservant were able to escape the choking smoke by climbing out a window onto their neighbours roof but their maid was too afraid to climb out and became the first casualty of what was to become known as ‘The Great Fire of London’.
History does not recall the name of the unfortunate soul who lost their life on the 2nd of September 1666 in the Bakery located in Fish Yard just off Pudding Lane. Just as the exact cause of the fire will always remain unknown, Thomas Farriner claimed all the fires in the bakehouse except one had been extinguished and the remaining one had been left to smoulder. Whatever the cause, the resulting inferno would lead to the destruction of a quarter of the city.
There were certainly opportunities to stop the fire early on the first morning. At 3am the Lord Mayor of London, Thomas Bludworth, was summoned to inspect the fire and decide if fire fighting should be permitted to take place. Firefighting in 17th century London consisted not so much of using water to extinguish the flames, but rather by using long sticks with hooks on the end to pull down the neighbouring buildings and prevent the fire from spreading.
There are various reasons why Bludworth may not have given permission to start firefighting on that morning, maybe he was met on the scene with vociferous calls from the owners of the neighbouring buildings who did not want their building pulled down, or that if he ordered the buildings to be pulled down without the King’s authority he would have been personally responsible for the cost of rebuilding them, maybe he didn’t think the fire was too serious and wouldn’t become dangerous Samuel Pepys recorded the Lord Mayors words before he returned home to go back to sleep as “a woman might piss it out”.
Whatever the reason, Bludworth had misjudged the severity of the situation. The strong easterly winds ensured that the fire spread rapidly with the dry wooden buildings acting as tinder and the copious amounts of tar, rope, oil and brandy stored in the buildings acting as fuel to the fire.
The fire happened at a time before there was a public fire service in London and fire services were provided by private insurance companies. There were fire squirts and buckets employed to try to fight the fire they did not dispense enough water with and many people did not try to fight the fire with Samuel Pepys noting there was “nobody, to my sight, endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods and leave all to the fire”.
Indeed Pepys himself kept his wine and Parmesan cheese safe from the fire by burying it in his garden. In the event Pepys house didn’t burn down but he was obviously a man after my own heart as the cheese was later recovered and eaten. ))
It is a sad truth that whenever there are hard times in the world there are always seemingly people looking to profit from others misfortune. Carters saw the fire as an opportunity to charge inflated prices to hire carts to take belongings to safety. There was widespread looting with some opportunistic thieves apparently starting new fires to enable them to steal property in the chaos.
Memorandum that on the sixth day of October in the eighteenth year of the reign of our Lord Charles
the Second by the grace of God King of England Scotland France and Ireland defender of the faith etc came before me Peter Sabbs knight one of the Justices of the Peace of the said Lord King in the aforesaid County John Plummer of Creed parish London Gentleman and made recognizance that he owes forty pounds of good and legal money of England to the work of the said Lord King his heirs and successors of his own goods and chattels to be conceded under the following condition. [Transcribed & updated from English] Condition that if he personally appear at this instant general Sessions of the peace holden for this County to prosecute Edmund Nunne & Anne his wife for imbezelling his goods in the late fire which goods were as he has sworn to the value of above thirty pounds that then the recognizance to be void.
At around 11am Pepys advised the king that “unless his majesty did command houses be pulled down nothing could stop the fire” and Bludworth belatedly gave the order that house were to be pulled down to create gaps that the flames couldn’t span.
The endeavour was futile as the wind spread the fire quicker that the houses could be pulled down by the hooks with Bludworth complaining to Pepys that “I have been pulling down houses. But the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it”
There was one small piece of good news on the first day, after many hours fighting the fire at St Dunstan-in-the-East a group of schoolboys from the nearby Westminster School managed to save the church and neighbouring houses from being destroyed by the fire. Although severely damaged the church was repaired but nearly 300 years later it would not be so lucky, suffering damage during a bombing raid in World War II, today the ruined church is a tranquil public park which deserves it’s own article so I will write about another time.
King Charles II and his brother the Duke of York began overseeing the firefighting efforts on the morning of 3 September with the help of members of the Privy Council the took charge of the firefighters and set up eight firefighting bases called fire posts around the city. Each fire post consisted of 30 soldiers and 100 local volunteers who received one shilling as reward together with bread, cheese and beer to ensure they were well fed and watered.
Despite their best efforts the fire continued to rage and on the evening of the third day and with the fire continuing to outpace the fire hooks a new tactic was employed to create gaps that the fire could not cross. Samuel Pepys describes this method as follows “Now begins the practice of blowing up of houses in Tower-streete, those next the Tower, which at first did frighten people more than anything, but it stopped the fire where it was done, it bringing down the houses to the ground in the same places they stood, and then it was easy to quench what little fire was in it…”
The tactic was to use gunpowder to blow up houses which proved to be a much quicker and effective method of tackling the fire. This was employed from the evening of Tuesday 4 September which along with the lessening wind on Wednesday morning allowed the firefighters to start to contain the fire. Although there were several further outbreaks the fire was gradually extinguished and was out by dawn on Thursday 6 September 1666.
A total of 13200 houses, four-fifths of the City of London and an area covering 436 acres were raised to the ground. Of the 109 churches that stood in the City of London before the fire 87 were destroyed, the first of which was St Margaret New Fish Street, remember that name for part 2 of this tale. The Guildhall, which is where the Lord Mayor of London works, caught fire and although it survived apparently glowed from the heat with Thomas Vincent writing “…the sight of Guildhall was a fearful spectacle, which stood the whole body of it together in view, for several hours together, after the fire had taken it, without flames, (I suppose because the timber was such solid oak) as if it had been a palace of gold, or a great building of burnished brass.”
The trade and craft associations in London are known as guilds or livery companies. These companies protect customers, employers and employees by maintaining work and quality standards within a trade. As they had grown over the previous centuries the individual companies had acquired meeting halls. The first of the livery companies halls to succumb to the fire was the Fishmongers’ Hall by London Bridge. However due to it’s location by the riverside most of it’s most import documents money and silver were transported to safety by boat. The destroyed building was rebuilt after the fire to designs by Sir Christopher Wren. Another 43 livery halls were destroyed by the fire.
Some of the city’s prisons were destroyed or damaged by the fire. The first was Poultry Compter, a compter was a small prison for people who had committed minor crimes such as drunkenness. The prisoners from this prison were released. Wood Street Compter would suffer the same fate. The prison at Newgate was badly damaged with inmates being marched under armed guard to Southwark. Some of prisoners took the opportunity to escape. The prison at Ludgate was for people who could not pay their debts and when the fire surrounded the prison the guards fled after first opening the cells so the prisoners could escape. Another debtors prison called the Fleet was destroyed with the warden, Sir Jeremy Whichcote, housing the homeless prisoners himself and paying for the prison to be rebuilt with his own money.
Of course the most famous of all the buildings to be destroyed was St Paul’s Cathedral. The 500 year old cathedral was being repaired and was covered in wooden scaffolding. When a fire broke out in the roof it quickly spread to the scaffolding with John Evelyn writing of the scene “… the stones of St Paul’s flew like grenades, the lead melting down the streets in a stream.”
It is thought that only six people lost their life in the fire but over 100,000, a quarter of the population, had been left homeless. Thousands of people took shelter in tents in the fields surrounding the city boundaries. For most people this was to be temporary but some ended up living in tents for eight years. The King established a national fund to help the homeless and poor effected by the fire. Over £16000 (around £2.4 million today) was collected over the next few years. The Lord Mayor of the time, Sir William Bolton, was in charge of distributing the wealth but it is alleged that he reduced the funds total by embezzling large sums from it.
After the fire theories abounded as to what and who had started the blaze. Rumours spread that it was a deliberate act of arson by the French or Dutch who were on the brink of war with the English. Or that it was Catholics wanting to punish London which was a Protestant city. The King even had to intervene to reassure the public the fire was not a plot. In September 1666 the government set up a committee to investigate the causes of the fire. The questioned and searched the houses of foreigners and Catholics to find evidence of the plot.
However before the investigation was completed a Frenchman by the name of Robert Hubert confessed to starting the fire. Although his story was unreliable, first stating that he had started the fire in Whitehall before changing his story to say he had in fact started the fire some miles away in Pudding Lane, and he was not deemed to be of a sound mind he was a convenient scapegoat and was hanged on the 27 October 1666.
In 1677 a stone column known simply as The Monument was opened and still stands today and I will tell you about that next time...
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Thanks for reading. To be continued…
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