The Fire of London

On Monday, September 3, 1666, as the good ship Rebecca, laden with a cargo of Spanish wine from Cadiz, reached the Nore, the signs of a mighty burning, five-and-forty miles away in the west, were plainly visible.

Great billowy masses of smoke rose up unceasingly above the horizon as if the fires of Hades had burst forth from below, and as the stout old craft slowly worked her way up stream, it gradually became evident that all London was ablaze.

Off Woolwich, though night had fallen, it was so light that the ship-master decided to push on; and the Rebecca came to an anchor off the Tower.

It was high tide, and, from the masthead, Captain Baxter looked down upon an awful sight.

The bridge was alight from end to end, and along the river bank, warehouses stored with oil and tar were burning fiercely, the strong wind carrying great flakes of fire far and wide, until the whole city was one mass of roaring flame that rendered inaudible the crashing of falling walls and lofty towers.

Lighters and heavy boats full of goods covered the Thames, and, pitched frantically into the water from wharves and riverside house, ownerless bags and bales and casks and household effects floated in every direction.

It was a sublime and awful spectacle, and no wonder the Puritan captain, who regarded the fire as a judgment upon the nation, turned to his well-thumbed Bible, and devoutly read the fall of mystic Babylon and how all who traded by sea stood afar off and saw the smoke of her burning.

Evelyn and Defoe's accounts of the Great Fire are admirable and graphic; but Pepys gives us in his inimitable style, details of the domestic side of the event.

We are told of the poor pigeons, loth to leave their homes, hovering over the flames until they lost their senses and fell in; and of how a wretched cat was taken out of a hole in a chimney, alive, but with all her hair scorched off.

He relates how he buried his wine and his Parmesan cheese in his garden, and took his gold coin by water to Woolwich; and he naively tells of the great inconvenience of being unable to cook anything at home, and how he and his wife had to dine off cold scraps, but were cheered the next day by a hot shoulder of mutton from the cook's-shop.

He describes the scenes in the streets, the sick being carried away in beds, the crowds, some with goods on their backs, and others leading horses and carts full of furniture, and remarks how hard the women worked, how they scolded for drink and then became as "drunk as devils."

Finally, he tells us how, on September 7, when all was over and the fire had burnt itself out, he got a bed at Sir William Pen's, the Comptroller of the Navy, and for the first time for many nights slept in comfort, but with an ever-present fear of fire in his heart.

Never in the memory of Englishmen had such a burning been seen, approached in our day only by the fire at Tooley Street (1861), and the holocaust of warehouses in Cripplegate (1897).

London was practically wiped out, five-sixths of it within and without the walls being consumed, and its ruins covered a little more than the area of Regent's Park.

There are only a few relics of the Great Fire.

In the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral are some fragments of its predecessor; and in the Guildhall Museum there are several mementoes - statues, "tokens" of metal and leather signboards, and the like.

There is the Monument in Fish Street Hill to remind us where the Fire began, and the inscription at Pye Corner, Giltspur Street, to tell us where it ended.

A few churches escaped its ravages, and remain with us in almost their original condition.

But the bulk of the city churches - eighty-nine in number - perished, and in the records the dismal entry occurs repeatedly, "destroyed by," or "rebuilt after the Great Fire of London."

The three immense squirts (about twenty-seven inches long) still preserved in the Vestry Hall of St. Dionis Back church, Lime Street, remind us of the insufficient means they had of extinguishing fires in those days.

They are probably survivals of the ancient Roman syphones, and were strapped to the fireman's body, or held by two men while a third worked the piston.

(From 'Imperial London', by Arthur Henry Beavan, 1901)