The Great Fire of London - Research Paper Example

The Great Fire of London In the year 1666, the of London was still reeling from the effects of the Black Plague that had reached its peak in that metropolis the previous year. It was to suffer yet another disastrous occurrence, though one of an accidental beginning rather than one born of malevolent Nature. The Great Fire of London is believed instead to have been the result of simple human negligence, initiated when a maid working in the establishment of the Kings Baker failed to properly secure one of the ovens for the night. The live coals in the firebox of the oven rekindled and spat out sparks that started a small fire in the dry confines of the bakery, whose ramifications may be seen even into the present day. There are a number of factors that came into play and that worked together to turn a small, simple fire into the greatest conflagration in the history of England. Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist of Stuart England, experienced the Great Fire first-hand, and was instrumental in the successful efforts to halt the inferno. Pepyss diary entry of September 2, 1666, states that one of the household maid-servants, on her arrival at the Pepys household that morning, told of a great fire that was at that moment raging in the city. The entry further relates what Pepys himself found when he went personally to investigate the situation in his duty as Clerk to the Royal Navy. Much of what is known about the Great Fire comes from Pepyss own account and subsequent investigations undertaken after the event. The fire itself was ignited in the premises of Thomas Farynor (or Farriner), the Kings Baker (perhaps an appropriate name for a baker or one who works with flour, taken from the old French word for flour, farine). It is believed that cinders or sparks were ejected from one of the bakers ovens earlier in the evening, at about 10:00pm, and started a small fire in the bakery. In the investigation Farynor swore that this fire had been extinguished. This may in fact have been the fire that Lord Mayor Bludworth was thinking of when he described the Great Fire as being so small that “a woman might piss it out”, perhaps unaware of the magnitude of the actual conflagration that had by then taken hold. In any event, the bakers home was an inferno by 1:00am, and the Great Fire grew from there. The fire spread from Farynors residence in Pudding Lane east towards the Tower of London, south towards the Barbican, west towards Temple Bar and north toward the Thames River and London Bridge. Pushed forward by strong easterly winds, it progressed north from Pudding Lane to Fish Street and down Fish Hill towards London Bridge, then along Thames Street, through Old Swan Lane, St. Lawrence Lane and Dowgate. From Cheapside, the fire spread along Cornhill, Tower Street, Fenchurch Street and Gracechurch Street to Banyards Castle. From Leedgate, the fire spread to Fleet Street, the Old Bailey, Newgate and Billingsgate. What were then essentially four separate fires came together after that first day at the Cheapside corner. By the following morning it was stopped at Fetter Lane in Holborn, but was still moving forward near the Tower of London and to the north by Cripplegate. As can be seen from this progression, the movement of the fire from building to building was very rapid. It is reported (Fritze and Robison) to have destroyed 373 acres out of 458 that lay within the citys walls, and another 63 acres outside of those walls. Some 13,200 homes and buildings were destroyed in the Great Fire. Most burned, but some were purposefully destroyed in efforts to halt the spread of the fire. When Pepys reported his observation of the magnitude and danger posed by the fire to King Charles II, he recommended to His Highness that what may have been the only way to stop the movement of the fire through the city was to pull down houses that lay in its path and so create firebreaks. Pepys writes that the King sent him to deliver the order to the Lord Mayor and “command him to spare no houses” (Pepys, 1666). Efforts in this vein were hampered, however, by the reticence of the Lord Mayor, and by the intensity of the fire and the speed of its actual movement. That Lord Mayor Bludworth was reluctant to undertake such a drastic action of his own accord are understandable, given that the laws of the time required that anyone who destroyed the home of another was required to bear the cost of rebuilding the dwelling. Reports obtained from eye witnesses to the Great Fire during the subsequent investigation described it as a wall of flame some 300 feet (about 100 metres) in height, moving through the structures faster than work crews were able to pull down houses in its path with axes and fire hooks. Other efforts to extinguish the flames with water carried in leather buckets or blown from “water squirts” were completely ineffectual. (A “water squirt” was in essence a gigantic syringe that was used to shoot out a few litres of water in a stream when its plunger was rammed home. Two men were required to hold and point the device while a third pushed home the plunger. The device then had to be disassembled and refilled with water before it could be shot again.) As Clerk to the Royal Navy, Pepys then conferred with the Admiralty and recommendations were accepted to create firebreaks quickly by using gunpowder to destroy houses in the path of the fire. But according to Fritze and Robison “...blowing up houses with gunpowder...was not done until Tuesday [September 4, 1666], when Charles II and the Duke of York...rode the fires perimeter, ordering the houses blown and watching to see it done.” (p. 307) This method proved successful in creating firebreaks that halted the rapid movement of the Great Fire. There were a number of factors that combined to favour the growth and spread of the fire. The summer of 1666 had been inordinately hot and dry. The buildings in the city were primarily of simple wood frame construction, with thatched roofs. The weather conditions had essentially turned this construction into massive piles of dry tinder. The construction style also contributed to the spread of the fire, as most of the buildings overspanned their foundations, further reducing the distance between them and making it easier for fire to spread form one to the other. As mentioned above, the fire was pushed to the northwest by a strong easterly wind, to the banks of the Thames River. There it was fed by the large quantities of shipping materials stored in the warehouses along the river: timbers, spars, canvas, hemp ropes, tar, turpentine and quantities of sundry other items needed to maintain a thriving shipping industry and the Royal Navy. The conflagration along the river prevented access to the only supply of water in the city that was large enough to have an impact on the fire. Nor was there at the time any sort of organized fire-fighting service. The efforts of individuals with no experience of fire outside of a cooking stove were thoroughly and quickly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the fire before them. After four days, the progress of the fire was finally stopped by the combination of firebreaks made through the use of gunpowder, and by the easing of the wind that had been driving the fire relentlessly through the city. While it is known that the fire began in the bakery of Thomas Farynor, in the aftermath of the fire suspicions arose that it had been set purposefully in the Protestant city by Catholic spies. It quickly became the popular chant that foreigners and papists were to be held accountable for the blaze. To that end, efforts were made during the investigation to identify an arson responsible for the Great Fire, and a confession was obtained from a French silversmith and watchmaker named Robert Hubert. He was summarily hanged for the crime, based on his admission, even though he claimed to have started the fire in Westminster, a portion of the city that had not been touched by the fire, and later changed his story to have the fire start at the bakers residence even though he had no idea where the bakery was located and could not describe it in any way. A fortuneteller by the name of William Lilly was also investigated for having predicted a great fire a year earlier, but he was able to convince his examiners that the prediction had been made in innocence, and he was not prosecuted. The blame given on religious grounds held until the ascension of a Catholic king some decades later, and was engraved on a monument commemorating the Great Fire until that time, when it was removed. Some decades afterward, when the Crown again came into Protestant hands, the inscription was returned, and remained until 1837, when the Royal Courts determined for once and for all that the cause of the Great Fire had in actuality been accidental, and that no person had instituted the blaze on purpose. The judgment was nonetheless rather too late for M. Hubert. The physical destruction wrought by the Great Fire was on a scale unimaginable at the time, though much greater conflagrations have occurred since, notably the Great Chicago Fire of 1906 and the burning of Dresden, in Germany, during World War II. Surprisingly, almost no lives were lost in the Great Fire of London. Farynors maid became the first victim as she succumbed to the smoke and fire as she and the Farynors were making their escape from the bakers residence. Despite the destruction of 13,200 buildings only six people are definitely known to have perished in the Great Fire (Alagna, 2004). Pepys recorded descriptions of poor people waiting to the last possible moment before abandoning their homes to the flames and running to the river with whatever possessions they could carry. There they could be seen trying to load their goods onto anything available that would float upon the water, or in many cases simply scurrying back and forth in an attempt to find some way to ferry their goods out of harms way. Pepys himself is known to have had his larder of expensive cheeses and wines buried to avoid their destruction by fire. The effects of the fire were far-reaching, both in physical dimension and in time. Pepyss diaries contain entries in February, 1667, stating that smoke could still be seen issuing from cellars of houses that had burned in the Great Fire, fully six months after the inferno had been put down. The Great Fire ruined not only the construct of the old city, but its economy as well. Insurance companies placed a total value on the near-total destruction in the city of some ten million pounds, at a time when the citys total revenue amounted to a mere twelve thousand pounds per annum, and official records show claims for the loss of some one hundred and fifty million pounds worth of wine, tobacco, sugar and plums. It may be readily understood from these figures alone that the monetary value of the havoc wreaked by the Great Fire was probably entirely inestimable. The poor of the city were devastated, and many who had once been financially secure suddenly found themselves to be financially ruined. The debtors prisons afterward filled quickly to overflowing. As a direct result of the Great Fire, insurance companies established their own various “fire insurance brigades” whose task was to ensure that such a fire never again took place. From this beginning the London Fire Engine Establishment was eventually started with nineteen fire stations and eighty men. In addition, the fire ravaged the rat population and living conditions that had contributed to the spread of the Black Plague that had been so deadly in Europe the previous year. The rebuilding efforts undertaken were based, by Royal Decree, on brick construction rather than wood and thatch, and a modern new city grew in the place of the old. Works Cited: Ronald H. Fritze and William B. Robison, Historical Dictionary of Stuart England 1603 – 1689, Magdalena Alagna, The Great Fire of London of 1666, New York, NY: The Rosen Publishing Group Inc., 2004 London Fire Brigades, “London in 1666”, http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/Londonin1666.asp Accessed April 18, 2010 “Samuel Pepys”, http://www.pepys.info/fire.html Accessed April 18, 2010 “The Great Fire” http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A3851129 Accessed April 18, 2010 Read More