344: Today: The Great Fire and the Initial Ignition of the Great Fire of London

September 2^nd, 1666. London, England.

About 24 minutes into the first episode of the series, it’s nighttime we’re in the city with the typical Tudor style architecture you’d expect to see in 1600s London. In the center of the frame, we can see a man walking to one of the buildings. He’s wearing khaki-colored pants, a blue coat, and a wide brimmed hat. After a moment, the camera cuts closer in as the man takes off his hat to enter the building.

The camera cuts to inside now as we see him closing the door behind him. Now that he’s inside, we can see his face easier now to recognize him as Thomas Farriner.

A young woman is inside, asking him how it went. It sounds like he has bad news. Holding a piece of paper, he says they won’t take the Navy contract away, and they won’t pay what’s owed. Then, as quickly as he entered the room, he’s on his way back out. He has to go talk to someone about this.

Before he walks out the door again, she asks if he wants her to rake out the ovens. He says no, it’s still early, and he’ll do it later. She shrugs, saying she can do it before she goes to sleep, but he makes no indication of hearing that as the door closes behind him.

Alone in the room now, she stares after him for a moment before returning to her tasks at the oven. Using a rag to grasp the metal handle, she opens the door on one of the ovens revealing something cooking in the flames inside. She grabs the long handle next to the oven and pulls what looks like a pie that was baking in the oven out and places it on the table.

“Hannah!”

Someone off the screen says that name, letting us know the woman is Hannah Farriner. She’s played by Polly Dartford in the series.

Hannah walks off the screen, and the camera stays still to show us that she left the oven door open. As the camera slowly zooms into a couple flames dancing happily in the oven, there’s a pop and a tiny spark flies out of the open door. A close-up camera shot of the building’s wooden floor shows the spark lands amongst a few scattered pieces of hay. As it does, the spark dissipates into a tiny flame that eagerly eats up the hay underneath it.

The camera cuts to where Hannah is, now, and we can see who called her off screen a moment ago. It’s a little girl, and Hannah climbs into bed with her in a sweet moment between what I’m assuming are sisters. By the way, it’s not mentioned here in the show, but the younger girl is named Mary. She’s played by Trixiebell Harrowell in the series.

Meanwhile, though, the camera cuts back to the flame and we can see it wasn’t happy with just the hay directly underneath it. What was a single flame is now a little larger as it seems to have found a little larger clump of hay to feed on. Oh, look at that, there’s more hay off to the right side of the camera’s shot, too, so as the camera pans over we can see the flames following the hay’s path—the flames are growing larger as they have more fuel.

Meanwhile, Hannah is oblivious to the fire below as she sings a lullaby to Mary. Before long, Mary’s eyes close as she drifts off to sleep. Hannah stops her lullaby, but just lies with Mary for a bit in the calmness of the night.

At this point, the show cuts away from Hannah and Mary to follow where Thomas went. Whatever he planned on doing when he left Hannah a moment ago, it looks like he’s decided not to do it because once he sees Charles Dance’s character, Lord Denton, he hides behind a nearby building.

Looking on for a moment from behind cover, Thomas seems to make a decision as he looks at the paper in his hand. Looking dejected, he starts going back in the direction he came from. A quick cut to inside and we can see Hannah has fallen asleep next to Mary on the bed.

Back with Thomas, turning the corner to his street, he looks up to see flames coming from one of the windows. It doesn’t look like a huge fire, but the glow from between the wooden slats of the building suggests there’s a lot more inside we can’t see.

Thomas jumps into action, running to the building. Without hesitation, he runs inside the burning building yelling at the top of his lungs, “Fire! Hannah! Fire!”

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the TV series The Great Fire

That sequence ends at about 29 minutes, so overall it’s about five minutes of screen time that you just heard.

Let’s start with the people we see, because that can often give us a good indication of how accurate something is. And in this case, the series centers around Andrew Buchan’s character, Thomas Ferriner. We also see Hannah Ferriner, and little Mary dozing in bed as the first starts.

In the true story, Thomas Ferriner really was the name of the man who owned the bakery where they think the great fire started. “They think” it’s where the fire started because, well, a lot like we see in the series, it’s not the kind of thing people document until afterward—I mean, when the fire started, they were a little preoccupied trying to put the fire out.

And although the series doesn’t name the street in the segment I described, it correctly identifies the street as Pudding Lane. Something else the series got right was the mention of the Navy. Although we don’t know for sure if the specific issue of some sort of payment not being made is true, we do know that the real Thomas Ferriner provided bread for the Royal Navy. So, it’d make sense that he would be talking about contracts or something of that sort. We just don’t know if he did that in the early morning hours of September 2^nd.

The series was also correct to show the bakery downstairs while upstairs being where his family lived.

Something the series got wrong, though, is showing Thomas not in their home/bakery when the fire started. As the true story goes, Thomas was awoken in his bed by the smoke coming under the door from the bakery downstairs.

He grabbed Hannah, and escaped out the window to avoid going through the flames below just like we see in the series.

What about Mary, though? Well, we don’t know if she was a real person. In fact, the historical record only shows Thomas and his daughter Hannah. It’d stand to reason that Hannah has a mom, but we don’t know who she was. We also don’t know if Thomas had any other children like we see in the series. Just Hannah.

Another thing the series got wrong was to show everyone escaping the bakery. You see, Thomas had a maid. She was too scared to jump out of the second-story window…and sadly, she became the first victim of the fire.

So, with that said, it’s probably not a surprise to find out that we just don’t know if the fire started because Hannah left the oven door open.

Something else we see in the series when the fire starts is to see it spread along dry hay on the ground as a sort of kindling to grow out of control. That’s impossible to verify, of course, but it’s plausible because we do know the fire spread fast.

You see, all those buildings packed into the densely populated area of London were made out of wood. On top of that, there just happened to be some strong winds that helped the fire jump from building to building. People desperately tried to both get it under control as well as get out of the way of the flames.

I didn’t mention him because he’s not in the segment from this day in history, but in the series there’s a character by the name of Samuel Pepys. He’s played by Daniel Mays.

The real Samuel Pepys kept a diary that survived the fire, and as someone who lived through the experience, that diary has helped historians piece together what happened. I’ll include a link to the diary in the show notes if you want to read some of the entries, one of the things he wrote about was how people were throwing their belongings into the River Thames that runs through London in an attempt to save their possessions from the flames…that gives you an idea of the level of chaos that ensued in the flames.

Will the entire city go up in flames? Obviously, we know London still exists today…or does it exist, again? Will they be able to put the flames out, or will it only be extinguished when the flames have nothing left in the city to consume?

It’s amidst these burning questions that I’ll have to leave you for today…because that’s how it really was for the citizens of London on this day back in 1666.

https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1666/09/