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| London Fire reached Ludgate, September 4, 1666 |
I
understand this is a subject that may have been slightly overdone, especially
since 2016 marked the 350 year anniversary of the vast destruction that
occurred within a short 4 day timespan. To celebrate, London had a lovely old
city effigy burned on a barge in the Thames. BBC had a television show on how
it happened, where it started. It looks like Pudding Lane wasn’t quite where we
thought it was all these years. The bakery was a block or so farther away. A
marker that shows where it was is in a nice, clean street where cars now
parallel park.
My current
work in progress (WIP) takes place in London 1666. Since the fire was a big
event in that year, I cannot not mention it, now can I? The reader would wonder
why I’ve listed every other important moment but not that one, which to this
day marks many souls as a living catastrophe.
In
1666, England was at war with the Dutch (fought entirely at sea). It was really
a merchant’s war, caused by skirmishes over ports of call in the East and West
Indies. The English felt the Dutch should share in the profits of spices, new
fabrics (cotton), exotic fruits, differently manufactured furniture and fine pottery.
After all, the Indies included vast areas of land and people. It wasn’t fair that
one country take everything.
Fighting fire with a 'squirt'. It held 4 pints of fluid, and took 2 men to operate.
Almost
18 months into the war, as the English fleet prepared to meet the enemy in a pitched
battle, on September 1, 1666, a gale entered the Channel. A wind so strong, it
felled the fleet. Sails ripped from masts. Bowsprits shattered. Ships collided
and listed. Gun ports were closed to keep the seas from flowing onto the gun
decks, swamping everything in its wake. The winds tore the fleet to shreds,
then moved onto England. In the wee hours of Sunday morning, September 2,
London winds whipped a spark and London began to burn.
The
fire was so fierce, it created its own weather. Lightning slashed, thunder
boomed. Warehouses along the Thames contained oils, pitch and tar, which burned
fiercely.
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| People weren't this calm as they ran |
Most
homes were squeezed along narrow, dark lanes, cantilevered so that top stories
were only inches apart. Made of half-timbers, wattle and daub, a material that
if maintained did not burn easily, many houses were not maintained. Leased
houses and shops were the responsibility of the renters. They had to fix
anything that broke, burnt or toppled over. They were responsible for the
walkway and road outside their doors. Not many followed these regulations. And
with the winds so fierce, it was fodder for fire.
People
took their goods to neighbors’, thinking the fire wouldn’t reach them. They
took furniture and clothing to churches, thinking the walls were too thick for
fire to burn them. As the fire moved west along the river and northwest through
town, people removed what they had stored and moved them farther away, into a
neighborhood they were sure would not burn.
Black
smoke could be seen over 56 miles away. The city looked like daylight when it
was nighttime. A contemporary wrote the firestorm sounded like “a thousand iron
chariots beating on stones”. It was deafening. Stone facades exploded like
bombs. Church steeples engulfed in flame toppled over onto streets and houses.
Booksellers
lived in the vicinity of St. Paul’s Cathedral. They sold their wares in Paul’s
Yard. Their parish church was St. Faith’s located under St. Paul’s church in
the undercroft. They called it St. Faith’s under St. Paul’s. They took their
presses, paper and books to St. Faith’s knowing with the massive pillars of
Paul’s it would never burn. By the time the flames licked Paul’s outer walls,
St. Faith’s was stuffed. St. Paul’s was filled with goods up to the choir loft.
St.
Paul’s was in disrepair. Over time, the heavy, lead roof had spread its walls
outward. Pillars were crumbling. Scaffolding supported some of the pillars and
the outside of the church. Just a few days prior, a meeting had been held to
discuss renovation of the building.
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| The Burning of St. Paul's Cathedral |
By 8
o’clock Tuesday evening (September 4), fiery debris had fallen on Paul’s roof. Shoddy
repairs of timber caught and burned so hot, a gentleman who stood over a mile
away saw the inferno.
“Large
parts of the roof, both stone and burning timber fell in, and the Cathedral
became a roaring cauldron of fire…”
“Molten
lead dripped in silvery beads from the roof, raining down upon the broken
stones and tombs that strewed the Cathedral floor, and there collecting, ran
out into the streets in a stream.”
Paul’s
choir and lower floor crashed into St. Faith’s. When St. Paul’s collapsed, the
whole building exploded with an earsplitting roar. Burning papers and books
sailed in the air, some of the pages landing miles away in the English
countryside.
St.
Paul’s was a mass of smoking ruins within an hour.
London after the fire. It poured beyond the old Roman walls into west London.
~*~*~*~
Many
thanks to Wikicommons, public domain,
By
Permission of Heaven, the True Story of the Great Fire of London, by Adrian
Tinniswood, Riverhead Books, NY 2004
The
Story of London’s Great Fire by Walter G. Bell, Butler & Tanner, Ltd.,
Frome and London, 1923
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