Six Things You Never Knew About the Great Fire of London by Catherine Randall

Everyone knows about the Great Fire of London. When I go into Year 2 classes dressed as a bookseller from 1666, the children tend to know almost as much about it as I do, which says a lot about how well it is taught.

But when I wrote The White Phoenix, my novel for 9 to 12 year olds set in London 1666, I had to delve deeply into the history of the Great Fire of London and I found out lots of things that I hadn’t known before.

I thought you might like to know them too – so here are Six Things You Never Knew About the Great Fire of London!

1. It wasn’t the first Great Fire of London

If you’d talked to a Londoner in 1665 about the ‘Great Fire of London’, they would probably have assumed you were talking about the Great Fire of July 1212 – also called the Great Fire of Southwark. As its name suggests, this began in Southwark, just across the river from the City of London, at the south end of London Bridge.  The fire destroyed most of Borough High Street and then began to spread across London Bridge, which at that time was covered with wooden houses and shops. To make matters worse, the wind blew embers across the river igniting the northern end of the bridge. Hundreds of people became trapped on the bridge – some fleeing the fire from the south, and some coming across from the north to help fight the fire. There are no reliable contemporary reports of the number who died, but a later historian suggested it could have been as many as 3,000. That seems very high, but whatever the truth, it is clear that many more people lost their lives in the fire of 1212 than in the fire of 1666. 

Picture credit: London Fire Brigade. (c) Mary Evans Picture Library

There was another big fire in 1633 which destroyed premises on the northern third of London Bridge. You can see from this painting of the Great Fire of 1666 that there are no buildings on the north (left) side of the bridge. This is because these buildings had not been rebuilt after 1633,  which proved to be a very good thing in 1666, because it created a firebreak on the bridge, preventing the Great Fire of London spreading to the opposite bank of the Thames.

2. England was at war!

In 1666, England was at war with two countries – the Netherlands and France. This was the Second Anglo-Dutch war, begun in early 1665, mainly due to rivalry over overseas trade. The stakes were raised in February 1666 when the French joined in on the side of the Dutch.

A sea battle during the Anglo-Dutch war (credit: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)

The war was fought mainly at sea, but all through the hot, dry summer of 1666 there was a very real fear of invasion. When the fire broke out, many people believed it was an act of war by the French or the Dutch, and that they'd deliberately set fire to the city. It meant that among all the chaos of people trying to save their houses and their possessions, mobs were going round attacking anyone thought to be French or Dutch. It was a terrifying time to be a foreigner on the streets of London.

3. The Mayor’s Nightmare...

Obviously, the big question about the Great Fire of London is how a city which was used to fires and had lots of procedures in place to deal with them allowed a fire to spread so far and so fast that it practically destroyed the whole city? 

We’re taught lots of reasons for this – a hot summer, the wooden buildings all crammed together, a strong wind – but in fact there is one person who deserves to be better known, for all the wrong reasons: Sir Thomas Bludworth, the Lord Mayor of London.

The most important thing about controlling fires is to contain them straightaway. Sir Thomas Bludworth soon arrived at the scene of the fire, but he refused to let the firefighters pull down the houses on either side of Farriner’s bakery without the permission of the owners, and he didn’t know where the owners were because most houses were rented. So he just blustered and said the fire wasn’t as bad as all that, or words to that effect, and went home to bed. By the time he returned in the morning, the fire was out of control.

Both contemporaries and later historians consider Bludworth’s failure to contain the fire a crucial factor in its unprecedented spread.

Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, blamed Sir Thomas Bludworth for not preventing the calamity of the Great Fire, as did many others in the aftermath (picture credit: National Portrait Gallery)

4. Fire engine falls in the Thames!

Believe it or not, an early type of fire engine already existed at the time of the Great Fire, and there were several in London. Of course they were nothing like our modern fire engines, being basically pumps mounted on carriages.  Sadly they were too large and too heavy to be of much help, and one of them even fell in the Thames!

A seventeenth-century fire engine

5. A Frenchman was hanged for starting the Great Fire

A young French watchmaker called Robert Hubert confessed to starting the Fire by throwing a fireball through the window of Thomas Farriner’s bakeshop on the night of 1st/2nd September. It had already been established by the authorities that the fire had been started accidentally, and not maliciously, but Hubert insisted that he had done it and was brought to trial. When questioned, his story kept changing, he seemed to have no motive, and then it emerged that he hadn’t even been in London at the time. Nevertheless, he insisted that he had done it, and he was hanged for it.

Even at the time, this was seen as a bizarre miscarriage of justice, but for Londoners it did have a significant upside. When it came to the question of deciding who should pay for the rebuilding of London, the judges ruled that as the Frenchman Hubert had hung for it, the fire had legally been caused by an ‘enemy’, and therefore owners, not tenants, should pay for the rebuilding. Excellent news for ordinary folk!

6. The rebuilding

Despite many eminent people having lots of great ideas about new designs for rebuilding the City after the Fire, it was pretty much built on the same lines as pre-Fire London with the addition of one or two new streets. In fact, the layouts of the streets and buildings in the City of London didn’t change much until after the Blitz in 1940 during World War II.

Richard Newcourt's rebuilding scheme for London, 1666

WRITING CHALLENGE

After the Great Fire of London, there were appeals to towns and villages throughout the whole country to raise money to help the homeless citizens of London.

Imagine you are responsible for telling people in another town what has happened in London and why the city needs help. Can you describe what has happened and persuade people to give money? Your letter can be quite short, but you need to get some crucial information in there so that people realise just how much of a calamity it is, and how much of the City has been destroyed.

Catherine Randall is the author of The White Phoenix , an historical novel for 9-12 year olds set in London, 1666. It was shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021. Catherine is currently working on a children's novel set in Victorian London.

The White Phoenix is published by the Book Guild and available from bookshops and online retailers

For more information, go to Catherine’s website: www.catherinerandall.com.

Twitter: @Crr1Randall.

Catching the Post by Catherine Randall

One of the things I used to associate with those quiet days after Christmas was having to write thank you letters. Before computers and smart phones, it was the only way to thank all the relatives and friends that I didn’t actually see at Christmas for the presents they’d kindly given me. Making a quick phone call to thank them was not an acceptable option in my family! Anyway, I quite enjoyed writing letters, which I suppose is not surprising given that I am now a writer. 

Of course, nowadays, most people will have expressed their thanks in an email or a text message. I wonder how many actual physical thank you letters are written and put in the post these days? 

One of the fun things about writing historical fiction is getting to discover how people did ordinary things in the past. In both my novel, The White Phoenix, and the novel I am currently working on, set in Victorian London, I’ve had to work out how my characters would communicate with each other without being able to pick up a phone, or send a text message or email. It got me thinking about how communicating has changed over the past 500 years.

To find out more, I visited the Postal Museum in London (on a rather windy day!)

From my research for The White Phoenix, I knew that the Royal Mail already existed in 1666, and that the General Letter Office in central London had burned down during the Great Fire with the loss of a huge number of letters. It was called the Royal Mail because it used the distribution system already in place for royal and government documents. This system had been put in place originally by Henry VIII (who else? He always gets involved!) and then in 1635 King Charles I made it legal to use the royal post to send private letters. The General Post Office, the state postal system, was formally and legally established in 1660 with post offices throughout the country connected by regular routes.

But, as I learnt at the Postal Museum, post in those days did not necessarily remain private. Staff at the General Letter Office would open letters to check that no one was plotting against the King or the government, so if you wanted to make sure your letter was truly private, you needed to find another way to send it.

Luckily, people could also send letters by the carriers who plied between towns, taking people and goods, or by giving it to a friend travelling to the right town, or – if you had money – you could use a private messenger. In The White Phoenix, letters are often sent by carrier.

When the Post Office was first established, the mail was distributed by post boys travelling on foot. But post boys were slow and sometimes unreliable, and – unluckily for them – they were also vulnerable to highwaymen and pressgangs trying to forcibly recruit men for the army and navy. In 1784 smart new mail coaches replaced the post boys along many major routes which really speeded up mail delivery.

A mail coach on display in the Postal Museum in London

The next great innovation came in 1840 with the introduction of the Penny Black, the world’s first postage stamp. Until then, the cost of sending a letter depended on the number of sheets of paper included and the distance the letter had travelled and it was the recipient of the letter who paid for its delivery. You could choose not to pay, but then you didn’t receive the letter. I will never forget a story I once heard about two old and poverty-stricken friends who sent each other a blank sheet of paper every 6 months– they never accepted the ‘letter’ so they couldn’t pass on any news, but at least they knew that they were both still alive! 

 A Penny Black stamp, featuring the head of a young Queen Victoria

After the arrival of the Penny Black, it cost just one penny to send a letter weighing up to 14g (half an ounce) anywhere in the United Kingdom. This made the whole postal system cheaper to use and more efficient, and letter writing flourished. 

However, it wasn’t until 15 years later that post boxes were introduced - before that you had to take your letter to the nearest post office. The first post boxes were green, not the red we are used to today. 

An early post box at the Postal Museum

I was very happy to discover that post boxes began to appear on the streets of London at around the time my new novel is set – it made it so much easier for my main character to sneak out and post a letter! In a nice literary link, the famous Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope is credited with introducing the post box when he worked for the Post Office. The first post boxes in the UK were in the Channel Islands. 

Post boxes have changed in colour and size and design since the mid-nineteenth century, but they are still instantly recognisable, whatever their age. The post box where I live has been painted gold since 2012, in honour of Mo Farah’s gold medal at the 2012 Olympics. 

We might marvel at how much slower Victorian communications were than ours are today, but in Victorian London, you could expect to receive 12 deliveries of post a day – that’s one an hour! – and it was possible to send a letter by post and receive an answer the same day. Imagine that happening nowadays!

Of course, the fascinating displays in the Postal Museum cover the story of the Post Office right up to the present day, including such things as the introduction of the postcode, and the role post boxes played in the Second World War. If my next historical novel is set in the twentieth century, I will certainly be paying another visit, so that I can add authentic historical detail to my story. After all, people will always need to communicate with one another, and there’s nothing like an unexpected letter or a mysterious parcel to move a plot along!

Watch Catherine's YouTube video on Catching the Post by clicking here

The White Phoenix by Catherine Randall is an historical novel for 9-12 year olds set in London, 1666. It was shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021.

Published by the Book Guild, it is available from bookshops and online retailers.

For more information, go to Catherine’s website: www.catherinerandall.com

Stories in maps by Catherine Randall

I’ve always loved books with maps in the front, so that you can really picture where the action takes place.

Some books don’t tell you in the text exactly how different places in the story relate to each other, so a map is an extra way into the story. I love the map in the front of the classic Winnie-the-Pooh, so I can see exactly where Pooh and Piglet live, and where Eeyore’s Gloomy Place is (‘rather boggy and sad’, as it says on the map). Maybe it’s my lack of imagination, but I have always found that maps really help me to visualise the world I am reading about.

The endpapers in my 1970 edition of Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A.Milne, published by Methuen

When I was a child, I was a bit obsessed with the Swallows and Amazons books by Arthur Ransome, about adventurous children having a wonderful time sailing and camping on an island in the middle of a lake, without any adults. The map at the front of Swallows and Amazons shows that the lake where these adventures take place bears a very strong resemblance to two lakes in the English Lake district. As well as showing me the geography of the stories, there was an extra thrill in this map as I tried to work out which bits of the fictional lake were taken from which bits of the real lakes, Coniston and Windermere.

 

The map in the front of my 1974 Puffin Books edition of
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

In the second book of the series, Swallowdale, the map in the front does not just show the setting for the story, it also shows exactly where some of the events in the book take place.

It is not very easy to read, partly because it is drawn as though by one of the characters themselves, but that adds to its charm.

The endpapers from my father’s 1943 copy of Swallowdale, published by Jonathan Cape

When I am writing a book, especially a book based on real events, I like to have a map in front of me so that I can see exactly where my characters are playing out the action of the story. Although the characters are fictional, the setting is not, and it is important to me to get things right.  When I was writing about the Great Fire of London in The White Phoenix, I spent a long time looking at maps showing how fast and how far the fire spread, so that I could work out where my characters needed to be and when, and also how quickly they would have been able to get from one place to another.

 

Part of a famous map drawn by Wencelaus Hollar in 1666,
showing the extent of the fire damage in London after the Great Fire.
You can see the shape of St Paul’s Cathedral just to the left of the centre

Maps can be just as helpful when you are writing about an imaginary place. Creating a map of your own can help you to write the story. Drawing a map – however basic – is a great way of getting to know your setting, and as you do that you might see where somebody needs to be, how the villain escaped, or where the treasure had to be hidden – important plot stuff. You may not be able to work out the whole story in a map, but it can certainly spark ideas, help you to solve plot problems, and put you with your characters right in the middle of the action.

 

Example of a map drawn to help work out the characters’ movements in a story

WRITING CHALLENGE

Imagine you are an explorer visiting a distant island, or a mysterious valley, or maybe an ancient forest - anywhere you think you might have an adventure. It could be a place that might really exist or a magical place with extraordinary creatures and strange beings. Using your imagination, draw a map of this place, including all the important features like mountains, rivers and caves and any houses, palaces or creepy castles that you find there.  Then write little labels on the map, showing where things happen in your story – where you first arrived, where you met that mysterious stranger, where you had to stay the night, where you ran away from whatever strange creature you come across in your adventures. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, although it is helpful if you can read the writing! If it grips your imagination, you might want to write it up afterwards as a written story, or maybe a comic strip.

Catherine Randall is the author of The White Phoenix an historical novel for 9-12 year olds set in London in 1666. The White Phoenix was shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021. Catherine is currently working on her second novel, an adventure set in Victorian London.

 

 

Finding the story in old objects

Do you ever feel like writing a story, but don’t know where to start? Maybe you keep promising yourself you’re going to make time to write, but when you finally manage to sit down at the keyboard, or with a pen and paper, your mind suddenly goes as blank as the paper.

You need something to write about. But don’t worry, you don’t need to have a plot or a fully developed character to start writing. All you need is an object. And if you want to write historical fiction, then the most useful thing to start off with is an object from the past.

I have recently inherited some old things from my parents. My favourite is this little clockwork pig. 

 

When you wind up the key in its back, it starts to play its drum in a lovely rhythm – Ta Ta Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, Ta Ta Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta – and turn round in a circle. As you can see from the photo, the pig’s clothes are badly in need of repair now, but that’s not surprising because he is nearly 100 years old. He belonged to my dad when he was a child, back in the 1930s. He must have been a very special toy because my father kept him safely all his life.

If you want to use the clockwork pig to inspire a story, you just start asking questions. Why was he so special? Who gave him to my dad? Imagine you were a child in the 1930s and the clockwork pig was yours. Where would you keep him? Would you keep him on display or would you hide him away because he was so precious? What if you took him to school and he got lost? Who would mend him if he was broken?

You could even write a story from the point of view of the clockwork pig. There’s a classic book by Russell Hoban called The Mouse and His Child, written from the point of view of a clockwork mouse, so you would be in good company if you decided to do this. 

The Mouse and his Child by Russall Hoban

 Another thing that my father left me is this model Spitfire.

 

This is a very special model because it is made from the same materials that were used to make real Spitfires. My grandpa worked in a Spitfire factory during World War II, and someone there must have made it for Dad. I imagine that this would also have been a very precious toy, maybe something that other children would have liked to own themselves. But the great thing is that you don’t need to know anything about my dad to use his model Spitfire to start building a story. You can completely make up the person it belonged to. How had they come by it? Why was it special to them? Maybe they had seen real Spitfires flying overhead? Maybe their dad was a pilot who flew Spitfires? Maybe their mum had an important job in an aircraft factory?

My mum also left me some treasures, including this box with her name on it. 

 

Inside the box I found some of her costume jewellery, but also this Victorian locket with a very old photograph in it. 

 

The sad thing is, I have no idea who it is! But this is another ideal starting point for a story. Who could this lady be? Why did a picture of her end up in Mum’s jewellery box? Of course, there could be a simple explanation, but as writers looking for a story we are not interested in simple explanations. She is quite hard to see, but if you look carefully you can see that she is very elegant and well dressed. I particularly like her hairstyle. Photographs were usually only taken on special occasions in those days, so I wonder what she is dressed up for?

So, this week’s writing challenge is simply to find an object – you can use either a real object or a picture of something – and start asking lots of questions about it. Before you know it, you will have the makings of a story. Don’t worry if the story turns out to be nothing to do with the original object – the point is to use it as inspiration and see where your imagination takes you.

And if you want to hear Dad’s clockwork pig drumming, go to the Time Tunnellers’ YouTube channel, where you can see him in action!

Catherine Randall's debut novel, The White Phoenix, is a thrilling adventure story set during the Great Fire of London for 9-12 year olds. It was shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021. The White Phoenix is published by the Book Guild, it is available from bookshops and online retailers including Waterstones, Bookshop.org and Amazon.

For more information visit www.catherinerandall.com.

How the Great Fire of London sparked my debut book! - Catherine Randall reveals the inspiration behind The White Phoenix

355 years ago today, on 2 September 1666, Londoners woke to the news that a fire was raging in the southeast of the City and spreading rapidly. In an early draft of my children’s novel, The White Phoenix, set in a London bookshop in 1666, I had my characters living by St Paul’s Cathedral, and finding out about the fire when hordes of people started streaming past them through the narrow streets, pushing handcarts piled high with children and furniture.

Londoners flee the burning City in September 1666

Then I realised that it would be far more exciting to put my characters slap bang in the middle of the action, so in the final version, 13-year-old Lizzie Hopper and her family are staying with their uncle in Pudding Lane when the fire breaks out. They witness first-hand the efforts of the firefighters to put out the flames, becoming part of the human chain passing leather buckets up and down the lane from where someone had pierced the water pipes running below the streets. They hear the bells of St Magnus’s church ringing backwards – the equivalent of an emergency siren sounding today - and experience the fierce heat and falling embers blowing around in the wind. They also witness the failure of the one person who might possibly have been able to stop the fire at this early stage and prevent it becoming the Great Fire of London – the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth.

Seventeenth-century firefighters using buckets and firehooks to fight a fire in Tiverton, Devon

The firefighters wanted Bludworth’s permission to use firehooks to pull down some of the unburnt houses nearest the blaze, creating a firebreak. The Lord Mayor said that he couldn’t do this without the permission of the owners, but as most of the houses were rented, the owners were not around to ask. Bludworth then famously declared that the fire wasn’t that bad anyway: ‘A woman could piss it out,’ he said and went home. Later that day, he did start to pull down houses but by then the fire was burning out of control. Who knows what would have happened if he had been more decisive?

In The White Phoenix, my character Lizzie experiences what actually happened next. Like thousands of other Londoners, she and her family flee east to Tower Hill, then an open green space near the Tower of London, on the outskirts of the City. Many others fled north to Moorfields, another wide open field. Remarkably, according to contemporary accounts, all the refugees had gone within four days – some leaving the City for good, others returning to see what they could salvage from their burnt homes, or moving to stay with family and friends in untouched neighbourhoods.

Nevertheless, the Great Fire was a deeply traumatic experience for Londoners. Samuel Pepys records in his diary on 2 September how he wept to see the City burn. In my book, Lizzie and her brother Ralph have tears streaming down their faces as they watch St Paul’s Cathedral engulfed in flames.

Near the end of my story, Lizzie goes back into the burnt City. She finds it almost impossible to work out where the streets had been because there is so much rubble and fallen timber everywhere. The ground was too hot to walk on for several days after the fire died out.

Of course today barely anything remains of the City that Lizzie knew - many of the buildings rebuilt after the Fire were destroyed in the Blitz during World War II. The exception is some of the City churches, many of which were rebuilt after 1666 by Sir Christopher Wren, and rebuilt again after the Blitz. You can still visit St Magnus, for instance, at the south end of Pudding Lane, where the bells first rang out to warn of the Fire. The street names and the line of the streets also remain broadly the same, so it is possible to trace Lizzie’s footsteps through the City, both during and after the Fire. The sketch map below shows the extent of the Fire, as well as Tower Hill and Moorfields where Lizzie and the real refugees fled. It also shows the fictional site of the White Phoenix, the bookshop that Lizzie Hopper fights so hard to save in my novel.

Discussion points for teachers/parents :

The people who lost their homes in the Great Fire of London often did not travel far from the City, but they were still refugees, relying on the goodwill of others to feed and house them. What places can you think of in the world today where people have been forced to become refugees in their own countries because of natural disasters?

For what other reasons, besides natural disasters, might people have to flee their homes?

In 1666, lots of towns across England sent money to Londoners to help them rebuild their homes. Often, money was collected at Sunday church services. Other people opened their homes to the refugees while they rebuilt their homes and businesses. In what ways can we help refugees today?

What possessions would you save if you had to leave your home very quickly? Do you think they would be the same sort of things that fleeing Londoners took with them in 1666?

The White Phoenix by Catherine Randall is an historical novel for 9-12 year olds set in London in 1666, and is shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021.

Published by the Book Guild, it is available from bookshops and online retailers.

For more information, see www.catherinerandall.com.