Who discovered the Great Fire?

by Kate Loveman, University of Leicester

In the early hours of 2 September 1666 a blaze began in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane. Over five days the fire destroyed more than 80% of the City of London, burnt 13,200 houses and left 65,000 people homeless. There are plenty of eyewitness reports of the disaster, including famous diary entries by John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys. However, some key details about what happened at the very start of the fire haven’t been resolved. Who exactly was in the bakery that night? And who first raised the alarm about the fire? While helping with research for the Museum of London’s new gallery on the fire, I pieced together records, many already known to Fire historians, to try and find out.

After the fire there were two official investigations into its causes. The first investigation was for the prosecution of Robert Hubert, a Frenchman who had confessed to starting the blaze. Hubert was thought to be mentally ill and there were serious doubts about his claims (he was later discovered to have been out of London when the fire started). Nonetheless, he was convicted and hanged on 27 October. The evidence from Hubert’s trial itself does not survive, but we do have a copy of the indictment describing the charge against him. This includes the names of those who gave evidence for the prosecution.

The second investigation was carried out by a committee of the House of Commons, which reported in January 1667. A partial version of evidence given to the committee was surreptitiously printed. This pamphlet, A True and Faithful Account of the Several Informations (1667), was designed to promote the idea that the fire was a Catholic conspiracy. It gave few details about the events in the bakery, other than to say Farriner had checked the house himself after midnight, and swore the fire could not have been an accident.^[1]

With no direct detailed testimony from the eyewitnesses at the bakery surviving, we have to turn to reports of their evidence. On 20 October 1666, the MP Sir Edward Harley wrote home to his wife. He had heard:

On 24 February 1667, Samuel Pepys heard about the Farriners’ testimony from Sir Robert Vyner, sheriff of London. Vyner said:

The presence of Farriner’s son in the house was also mentioned by an anonymous pamphlet, Englands Warning (1667), which reported that Farriner ‘being in his bed with his Son, hardly escaped the fury of those irresistible Flames’.^[4]

We therefore have two rosters of people reportedly in the bakery. Harley specifies Farriner, his daughter (Hanna, an adult), an unnamed ‘man’ (meaning a servant, apprentice, or journeyman), and a maid. Other sources don’t mention the man and maid but put Farriner’s adult son Thomas there. The indictment naming the witnesses against Hubert helps resolve this difference. The names on bill are:

“Robertus Penny, Johanes Lewman, Franciscus Grive[?], Thomas Farriner senior, Hanna Farriner, Thomas Dagger, Thomas Farriner Junior” ^[5]

The first two names are men who, according to A True and Faithful Account, could testify to Robert Hubert’s confession and his knowledge of the bakery’s location – this may also be the case with the third.^[6] The last four would be surviving members of the Farriner household who could testify that fire had not arisen by accident: Farriner, his adult son and daughter, and between them the name of a ‘man’ working for him, who can now be identified as Thomas Dagger.

A bit of sleuthing in the Bakers’ Company records shows that Dagger had arrived in London from the village of Norton in Wiltshire after his father died. In 1655, he had been apprenticed as a baker to Richard Sapp for nine years, but in 1663 was transferred over to Farriner.^[7]  At the time of the fire, he was two years out of his apprenticeship and had stayed on with Farriner as journeyman. Neither he nor Thomas Farriner junior had officially taken their freedom of the Bakers’ Company, so they could not set up business for themselves. Soon after the fire, Thomas Dagger did strike out independently: he took his freedom in 1667, and by January 1668 had a wife, Joanna, and a baby, Frances. He established a bakery in the parish of St Mary at Hill, Billingsgate, and started taking on his own apprentices.^[8]

In sum, the fragmentary reports of that terrifying night can form a consistent account. Shortly before 2am on 2 September 1666, Thomas Dagger was woken by choking smoke, and became the first witness to the Great Fire of London. He alerted members of the household who were sleeping upstairs (Thomas senior and junior perhaps sharing a bed). The three men and the injured Hanna escaped out of a window. The maid – whose name is still unknown – died. In the wake of the fire, the survivors united to clear themselves of responsibility, which meant supporting the case against Robert Hubert. Then Thomas Dagger, the discoverer of the fire, set up on his own. Unburdened by an infamous surname, he has passed unnoticed among the routine records of seventeenth-century life.

How to cite this page: Kate Loveman, ‘Who Discovered the Great Fire?’, Reimagining the Restoration project, <https://pepyshistory.le.ac.uk/who-discovered-the-great-fire/>

First published 25 Aug 2023; updated 19 Sept 2023.

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^{[1] A True and Faithful Account of the Several Informations Exhibited to the Honourable Committee Appointed by the Parliament ([London], 1667), pp. 8-9.}

^{[2] London, British Library, MS Add. 70010, Edward Harley to Abigail Harley (20 Oct 1666), fol. 337r-v.}

^{[3] The Diary of Samuel Pepys, A New and Complete Transcription, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: Bell, 1971-83, repr. HarperCollins, 2000), VIII, 82.}

^{[4] Englands Warning or Englands Sorrow for Londons Misery (London, 1667), p. 14.}

^{[5] London Metropolitan Archives, CLA/047/LJ/01/0177, Sessions of the Peace, 8 Oct and Gaol Delivery, 10 Oct, Indictment of Robert Hubert; translation available at Museum of London: <https://www.fireoflondon.org.uk/assets/uploads/2016/08/Transcript_LMA_CLA_047_LJ_01_0177.pdf> [accessed 23 Aug 2023]}

^{[6] Robert Penny and John Lowman were present when Hubert identified the bakery ruins as the building he’d fired (A True and Faithful Account, p. 11). Francis’s surname on the indictment is not easy to read. It’s been variously transcribed as ‘Gunn’ and ‘Gurne’ (Walter Bell, The Great Fire of London (Bracken, 1994, p.354) and Museum of London translation).  I’ve identified two bakers named Francis Gunn in the early 1660s (a master and his apprentice), but they were working in Greenwich and I can find no evidence that links either to Pudding Lane. A merchant called ‘Mr Greaves’ or ‘Mr Graves’ is reported by Harley and A True and Faithful Account (p. 8), to have given evidence for Hubert’s guilt. As ‘Griue’ (Grive) is a plausible reading of the name on the indictment, this could be the same person.}

^{[7] London, Guildhall Library, CLC/L/BA/B/001/MS05177/005, Bakers Company, Court minutes 1648-,1677, pp. 156, 392, 492.  There are two places called ‘Norton’ in Wiltshire; the evidence points to Dagger being from the one known as ‘Norton Bavant’.}

^{[8] London Metropolitan Archives, CLC/199/TC/002/MS09659/003, registers of St Katharine’s by the Tower, baptism of Frances Dagger, 9 January 1667/8. Guildhall Library, CLC/L/BA/B/001/MS05177/005, p. 492. LMA, P69/MRY4/A/001/MS04546, registers of St Mary at Hill, baptism of Robert Dagger, 19 Aug. 1669; London, National Archives, ADM 106/317/1, Thomas Dagger to the Navy Board, 3 Jan. 1675/6.}

Image Credits

^{Sir Edward Harley, by George Vertue, after Samuel Cooper, 1749, National Portrait Gallery D29963}

^{The Family of Robert Vyner (detail) by John Michael Wright, 1673, National Portrait Gallery 5568}