The Great Fire of London, as so many schoolchildren learn, began in a bakery in Pudding Lane and prompted Samuel Pepys to bury his cheese in the garden.
Less is known, however, about the thousands of ordinary people who witnessed the fire and had to rebuild their lives after it.
Research for the Museum of London has now revealed the identity of one Londoner who played a brief but important role – as the first witness to the fire and the first person to raise the alarm on an inferno that would go on to destroy most of the medieval City of London.
His name was Thomas Dagger, a journeyman baker who had been apprenticed to Thomas Farriner, at whose bakery the fire broke out in the early hours of 2 September 1666.
Dagger, aged around 24 at the time of the fire, has been identified for the first time as the servant who, according to contemporary accounts, was first woken by “the choke of the smoke” and who roused the household to escape from an upper window with his employer and Farriner’s daughter.
Although the role of Farriner’s bakery was quickly established, Dagger’s name was not associated with the fire at the time, said Kate Loveman, an associate professor of English literature at the University of Leicester, who conducted the research. “Soon after the disaster, he merges back into the usual records of Restoration life, having children and setting up his own bakery. His is a story about the fire, but also about how Londoners recovered.”
To identify Dagger, Loveman pieced together contemporary accounts, legal documents and apprenticeship and guild archives, as well as parish and other public records. His name appeared with others on a court indictment against Robert Hubert, a Frenchman who confessed to starting the fire and was executed (though was later shown not to have been in London at the time). Other records allowed her to fill out more of his biography and apprenticeship history.
Taken together, “we can be pretty confident that Thomas Dagger was in the Farriner household [on the night of the fire], and we’ve got a source that seems to be credible that says he was the person who first woke up”, she said. “So if we’re looking for someone who ‘discovered’ the Fire of London, it’s him.”
Originally from the village of Norton Bavant near Warminster in Wiltshire, Dagger seems to have gone to London after his father died, becoming a baker’s apprentice aged around 15. He was married and his wife may have been pregnant at the time of the fire; they certainly had children in later years, and he went on to operate as a London baker in his own right, perhaps into the 1690s.
Dagger was an otherwise unremarkable young man who was “swept up in history”, said Loveman. “[Ordinary] people should be remembered – we shouldn’t just have the names of the really famous people.”
That principle has been at the forefront of the planning of the new Great Fire exhibit for when the Museum of London reopens in 2026 on a new site, said Simone Few, its audience and interpretation manager. As part of the national curriculum for England at key stage 1, thousands of very young children each year study the fire, “and it’s obviously a story that really captures their imagination and sparks a love of history. We wanted to dig deeper into the research and make sure that the stories we’re telling [about it] reflect the diversity of the population of London in the 17th century.”
That will include bringing other, previously overlooked people into focus, such as a young “dumb boy” who impressed Pepys with his fluent use of sign language to warn of a separate, smaller fire, and Mingo, the possibly enslaved black servant of Pepys’ neighbour, who may have gone on to be a lighthouse-keeper in Harwich.
