Thomas Dagger – The Man who discovered The Great Fire of London

By the time it was extinguished, an area about a mile-and-a-half (2.4km) wide along the River Thames was devastated, with 13,200 houses, 87 churches and the old St Paul’s Cathedral destroyed.

The huge fire left some 100,000 people homeless but led to widespread changes in the city, many of which still resonate to this very day.

It needn’t have been so bad though. The Great Fire of London (so named to distinguish it from the many large and destructive fires right up to The Blitz) began in the King’s Baker’s house on Pudding Lane in the City of London. Rather than making fresh loaves for the King, baker Thomas Farynor produced the dry and bland biscuits called ‘hard tack’ that filled the bellies of sailors in the Royal Navy.

In the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666, the Farynor family woke to smoke coming from the bakery on the ground floor of their house. They escaped out of the upper floor window although their maid, too frightened to leave, perished. The long hot summer and the strong wind allowed the fire to spread rapidly.

The Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bludworth was called. Being a Freeman of the City of London, I have quite a thing for Lord Mayors of the City but Sir Thomas was not perhaps the best of them. Afraid to order the pulling down of houses to make firebreaks, he ensured his place in the history books by exclaiming that the fire was so weak a ‘woman could piss it out’. He then returned to bed.

The calamitous events of the Great Fire of London were to continue and are well known though it is not known what caused the initial blaze, or who had first witnessed it.

Professor Loveman, from the University of Leicester, used letters, pamphlets and legal and guild records to discover Thomas Dagger’s identity as being the person who discovered the Great Fire of London.

One note from MP Sir Edward Harley stated that Farynor’s “man” (meaning his servant or journeyman) had woken after 01:00 “with the choke of the smoke”, and that Farynor, his daughter and Dagger had then escaped out of an upper window. Other sources also suggested Farriner’s son was present.

The names of those members of the household – including Farynor’s adult children Hanna and Thomas – were then found in other records with journeyman baker Dagger being among those. Documents also reported him to be the person who raised the alarm.

Professor Loveman said that while the Farynor were well-known by historians, “Thomas Dagger’s role has gone unrecognised”, and his name “didn’t become associated with the fire at the time”

• Building regulations introduced after the blaze banned the use of wood “to erect any house or building, whether great or small”
• Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral, now one of the capital’s most iconic buildings, was created to replace the medieval cathedral destroyed in the blaze
• While the city’s layout remained mostly similar, new architecture was brought to the city with Wren overseeing the rebuilding of 52 churches, 36 company halls, and the memorial to the Great Fire, Monument
• The fire is considered by many to have led to the creation of the modern insurance industry, with the first insurance company, called the Fire Office, being set up in 1667
• New rules were brought in to ensure every parish always had various fire equipment available due to the lack of a fire brigade at the time of the blaze.

To learn little about The Monument that remembers the Great Fire then try https://stephenliddell.co.uk/2017/08/24/of-mice-and-men-the-smallest-monument-in-london/

Alternatively for another look at the various great fires in the history of London https://stephenliddell.co.uk/2017/03/09/great-fires-of-london-those-who-fought-them/