The Great Fire of London

In the early morning hours, the Great Fire of London breaks out in the house of King Charles II’s baker on Pudding Lane near London Bridge.

London was a city of medieval houses made mostly of oak timber. Some of the poorer houses had walls covered with tar, which kept out the rain but made the structures more vulnerable to fire. The streets were narrow and dark because so many of the houses had projecting upper floors, known as jetties, which blocked out the light. There was no sanitation and the lanes, alleys and passageways stank because of the open drains.

Moreover, the cobbles were slippery with dung, rubbish and slops. Water, which was in short supply as well as being sluggish and filthy, was provided via a complex and inefficient system of elm pipes partially fed by waterwheels under London Bridge. Illegally tapping the conduit, known as ‘bringing a quill into the home’, was commonplace and had the effect of further reducing the overall flow.

The firefighting methods of the day consisted of neighborhood bucket brigades armed with pails of water and primitive hand pumps. Citizens were instructed to check their homes for possible dangers, but there were many instances of carelessness.

So it was on the evening of September 1, 1666, when Thomas Farrinor, the king’s baker, failed to properly extinguish his oven. He went to bed, and sometime around midnight sparks from the smoldering embers ignited firewood lying beside the oven.

Sparks from Farrinor’s bakery leapt across the street and set fire to straw and fodder in the stables of the Star Inn.

From the Inn, the fire spread to Thames Street, where riverfront warehouses were packed full with flammable materials such as tallow for candles, lamp oil, spirits, and coal.

These stores lit aflame or exploded, transforming the fire into an uncontrollable blaze.

Bucket-bearing locals abandoned their futile efforts at firefighting and rushed home to evacuate their families and save their valuables.

It had been a hot, dry summer, and a strong wind further encouraged the flames. As the conflagration grew, city authorities struggled to tear down buildings and create a firebreak, but the flames repeatedly overtook them before they could complete their work.

People fled into the Thames River dragging their possessions, and the homeless took refuge in the hills on the outskirts of London. Light from the Great Fire could be seen 30 miles away.

Fire was a constant fear. All but a handful of buildings were constructed of wood, often sealed with tar or pitch and roofed with thatch.

Foundries, smithies, glaziers and, of course, bakers, all posed a risk, as did domestic fireplaces, candles, ovens and stores of combustible materials (not least gun-powder left over from the Civil War).

Indeed, there were frequent outbreaks of fire and an established system for dealing with them.

Residents were alerted by a muffled peal of bells and would assemble to fight the conflagration, sometimes with the help of the local militia.

Long ladders, leather buckets, axes and fire hooks were stored in parish churches sometimes  there were also primitive fire engines.

 

If the flames couldn’t be doused, the usual stratagem was to demolish the surrounding houses in order to create a firebreak.

It’s telling that, when the Great Fire started, a little after midnight on Sunday, September 2. The personal experiences of many Londoners during the fire are glimpsed in letters and memoirs.

The two best-known diarists of the Restoration are Samuel Pepys  and John Evelyn , and both recorded the events and their own reactions day by day.

Samuel Pepys was initially was fairly blasé about it. ‘Jane called us up,’ he writes, ‘about 3 in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City.’ After watching briefly, however, he returned to bed.

The aristocracy shunned the City and lived either in the countryside beyond the slum suburbs, or in the exclusive Westminster district(the modern West End), the site of Charles II’s court at Whitehall.

Wealthy people preferred to live at a convenient distance from the traffic-clogged, polluted, unhealthy City, especially after it was hit by a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in 1665.

The relationship was often tense between the City and the Crown. The City of London had been a stronghold of republicanism during the Civil War (1642–1651), and the wealthy and economically dynamic capital still had the potential to be a threat to Charles II, as had been demonstrated by several republican uprisings in London in the early 1660s. The City magistrates were of the generation that had fought in the Civil War, and could remember how Charles I‘s grab for absolute power had led to that national trauma.

They were determined to thwart any similar tendencies in his son, and when the Great Fire threatened the City, they refused the offers that Charles made of soldiers and other resources.

Even in such an emergency, the idea of having the unpopular Royal Troops ordered into the city was political dynamite. By the time that Charles took over command from the ineffectual Lord Mayor, the fire was already out of control.

Sunday morning

The neighbours tried to help douse the fire; after an hour, the parish constables arrived and judged that the adjoining houses had better be demolished to prevent further spread. The householders protested, and Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth was summoned, who alone had the authority to override their wishes.

When Bloodworth arrived, the flames were consuming the adjoining houses and creeping towards the paper warehouses and flammable stores on the river front.

The more experienced firemen were clamouring for demolition, but Bloodworth refused on the grounds that most premises were rented and the owners could not be found. Bloodworth is generally thought to have been appointed to the office of Lord Mayor as a yes man, rather than by possessing requisite capabilities for the job.

He panicked when faced with a sudden emergency and, when pressed, made the oft-quoted remark, “Pish! A woman could piss it out”, and left. After the City had been destroyed, Samuel Pepys looked back on the events and wrote in his diary on 7 September 1666: “People do all the world over cry out of the simplicity [the stupidity] of my Lord Mayor in general; and more particularly in this business of the fire, laying it all upon him.

Pepys was a senior official in the Navy Office by then, and he ascended the Tower of London on Sunday morning to view the fire from a turret. He recorded in his diary that the eastern gale had turned it into a conflagration. It had burned down several churches and, he estimated, 300 houses and reached the river front. The houses on London Bridge were burning.

He took a boat to inspect the destruction around Pudding Lane at close range and describes a “lamentable” fire, “everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another.”

Pepys continued westward on the river to the court at Whitehall, “where people come about me, and did give them an account dismayed them all, and word was carried in to the King. So I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of York what I saw, and that unless His Majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire.

They seemed much troubled, and the King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him, and command him to spare no houses, but to pull down before the fire every way.” Charles’ brother James, Duke of York offered the use of the Royal Life Guards to help fight the fire.

Young schoolboy William Taswell had bolted from the early morning service in Westminster Abbey. He saw some refugees arrive in hired lighter boats near Westminster Stairs, a mile west of Pudding Lane, unclothed and covered only with blankets. The services of the lightermen had suddenly become extremely expensive, and only the luckiest refugees secured a place in a boat.

Sunday afternoon

The fire spread quickly in the high wind and, by mid-morning on Sunday, people abandoned attempts at extinguishing it and fled.

The moving human mass and their bundles and carts made the lanes impassable for firemen and carriages. Pepys took a coach back into the city from Whitehall, but reached only St Paul’s Cathedral before he had to get out and walk. Pedestrians with handcarts and goods were still on the move away from the fire, heavily weighed down. The parish churches not directly threatened were filling up with furniture and valuables, which soon had to be moved further afield.

Pepys found Bloodworth trying to co-ordinate the fire-fighting efforts and near to collapse, “like a fainting woman”, crying out plaintively in response to the King’s message that he was pulling down houses. “But the fire overtakes us faster then [sic] we can do it.” Holding on to his civic dignity, he refused James’s offer of soldiers and then went home to bed.

King Charles II sailed down from Whitehall in the Royal barge to inspect the scene. He found that houses were still not being pulled down, in spite of Bloodworth’s assurances to Pepys, and daringly overrode the authority of Bloodworth to order wholesale demolitions west of the fire zone. The delay rendered these measures largely futile, as the fire was already out of control.

By Sunday afternoon, 18 hours after the alarm was raised in Pudding Lane, the fire had become a raging firestorm that created its own weather. A tremendous uprush of hot air above the flames was driven by the chimney effect wherever constrictions narrowed the air current, such as the constricted space between jettied buildings, and this left a vacuum at ground level.

The resulting strong inward winds did not tend to put the fire out, as might be thought;instead, they supplied fresh oxygen to the flames, and the turbulence created by the uprush made the wind veer erratically both north and south of the main easterly direction of the gale which was still blowing.

Pepys went again on the river in the early evening with his wife and some friends, “and to the fire up and down, it still encreasing”. They ordered the boatman to go “so near the fire as we could for smoke; and all over the Thames, with one’s face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops“.

When the “firedrops” became unbearable, the party went on to an alehouse on the South Bank and stayed there till darkness came and they could see the fire on London Bridge and across the river, “as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it”. Pepys described this arch of fire as “a bow with God’s arrow in it with a shining point”.

Monday

The fire was principally expanding north and west by dawn on Monday, 3 September, the turbulence of the fire storm pushing the flames both farther south and farther north than the day before. The spread to the south was mostly halted by the river, but it had torched the houses on London Bridge and was threatening to cross the bridge and endanger the borough of Southwark on the south bank of the river.

Southwark was preserved by a pre-existent firebreak on the bridge, a long gap between the buildings which had saved the south side of the Thames in the fire of 1632 and now did so again. Flying embers started a fire in Southwark but it was quickly stopped.

The fire’s spread to the north reached the financial heart of the City. The houses of the bankers in Lombard Street began to burn on Monday afternoon, prompting a rush to get their stacks of gold coins to safety before they melted away, so crucial to the wealth of the city and the nation.

Several observers emphasise the despair and helplessness which seemed to seize Londoners on this second day, and the lack of efforts to save the wealthy, fashionable districts which were now menaced by the flames, such as the Royal Exchange—combined bourse and shopping center – and the opulent consumer goods shops in Cheapside. The Royal Exchange caught fire in the late afternoon, and was a smoking shell within a few hours. John Evelyn, courtier and diarist, wrote:

Evelyn lived in Deptford, four miles (6 km) outside the City, and so he did not see the early stages of the disaster. He went by coach to Southwark on Monday, joining many other upper-class people, to see the view which Pepys had seen the day before of the burning city across the river.

The conflagration was much larger now: “the whole City in dreadful flames near the water-side; all the houses from the Bridge, all Thames-street, and upwards towards Cheapside, down to the Three Cranes, were now consumed”.In the evening, Evelyn reported that the river was covered with barges and boats making their escape piled with goods. He observed a great exodus of carts and pedestrians through the bottleneck city gates, making for the open fields to the north and east, “which for many miles were strewed with moveables of all sorts, and tents erecting to shelter both people and what goods they could get away. Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle!”

Suspicion soon arose in the threatened city that the fire was no accident. The swirling winds carried sparks and burning flakes long distances to lodge on thatched roofs and in wooden gutters, causing seemingly unrelated house fires to break out far from their source and giving rise to rumours that fresh fires were being set on purpose. Foreigners were immediately suspects because of the current Second Anglo-Dutch War.

Fear and suspicion hardened into certainty on Monday, as reports circulated of imminent invasion and of foreign undercover agents seen casting “fireballs” into houses, or caught with hand grenades or matches. There was a wave of street violence.  William Taswell saw a mob loot the shop of a French painter and level it to the ground, and watched in horror as a blacksmith walked up to a Frenchman in the street and hit him over the head with an iron bar.

The fears of terrorism received an extra boost from the disruption of communications and news as facilities were devoured by the fire. The General Letter Office in Threadneedle Street burned down early on Monday morning, through which post passed for the entire country. The London Gazette just managed to put out its Monday issue before the printer’s premises went up in flames. The whole nation depended on these communications, and the void which they left filled up with rumours.

Source: Letters of Note

There were also religious alarms of renewed Gunpowder Plots. Suspicions rose to panic and collective paranoia on Monday, and both the Trained Bands and the Coldstream Guards focused less on fire fighting and more on rounding up foreigners, Catholics, and any odd-looking people, arresting them or rescuing them from mobs, or both together.

The inhabitants were growing desperate to remove their belongings from the city, especially the upper class. This provided a source of income for the able-bodied poor, who hired out as porters (sometimes simply making off with the goods), and it was especially profitable for the owners of carts and boats. Hiring a cart had cost a couple of shillings on the Saturday before the fire; on Monday, it rose to as much as £40, a fortune equivalent to more than £4,000 in 2005.

Seemingly every cart and boat owner within reach of London made their way towards the City to share in these opportunities, the carts jostling at the narrow gates with the panicked inhabitants trying to get out.

The chaos at the gates was such that the magistrates ordered the gates shut on Monday afternoon, in the hope of turning the inhabitants’ attention from safeguarding their own possessions to fighting the fire: “that, no hopes of saving any things left, they might have more desperately endeavoured the quenching of the fire.” This headlong and unsuccessful measure was rescinded the next day.

On September 5, the fire slackened, and on September 6 it was brought under control. That evening, flames again burst forth in the Temple (the legal district), but the explosion of buildings with gunpowder extinguished the flames.