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Samuel Pepys. History from Stories. Samuel Pepys lived in the 1600’s. He was an worked for the Admiralty. The Admiralty were responsible for the British Navy. He kept a diary of the things he did.
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Samuel Pepys History from Stories
Samuel Pepys lived in the 1600’s. He was an worked for the Admiralty. The Admiralty were responsible for the British Navy.He kept a diary of the things he did.
Samuel and his wife lived in London.On night in September 1666 Samuel was woken by his maid Jane calling, “ Wake up master, there is a fire in the city.”
Samuel looked out and although it was the middle of the night he could see an orange glow over the rooftops
Next day the fire had grown bigger. Samuel went to the Tower of London and climbed a high wall to see better.
He could see the closely packed wooden houses on fire and people running trying to save their belongings and escape from the fire.
A strong wind was blowing the flames from house to house. Samuel went to the palace at Whitehall to tell the King what was happening. There were no fire engines in those days so the King sent Samuel to find the Lord Mayor of London.
Samuel told the mayor that the King had ordered houses in the path of the fire to be pulled down so that the flames would run out of things to burn.
“What can I do ?” said the mayor. “The people will not obey me, I have been pulling down houses but the fire keeps catching up with us before we have finished.”
The fire raged destroying hundreds of houses,churches and even St. Paul’s Cathedral. Thousands of people were driven out by the flames.
In the end the king got sailors from his ships to blow up houses with gunpowder to try to stop the flames. After three days the wind dropped and the fire died down.
Samuel was lucky his house was safe. The next day he wrote everything down in his diary so hundreds of years later we know what happened during the Great Fire of London.
Did you know? Fires in the 17th Century were quite common Pepys records 15 fires in his diary in addition to the Great Fire.Most houses in London had timber frames. They were often high and were crammed together with little if any space between. Heating was by fires and lighting was by candles, Everywhere there were flammable materials - hay in stables, pitch and tar by the river for ships and boats, wood in yards everywhere, kindling in bakeries such as the one where the Great Fire began.Fire fighters were not organised and had often little more than buckets and large syringes to spread the water. More effective was gunpowder to force a firebreak and grappling irons to pull down thatch or weak timbers.In January 1673 fire destroyed Pepys own house and in 1684 a later house was saved only by having his neighbour's house blown up.One of the results of these fires was that insurance companies began to take some responsibility for property loss and after about 1772 they established fire brigades. Houses rebuilt after the Great Fire were built to stricter regulations which included brick construction and improved water supplies.
Sources • Pepy’s diary-September 2nd 1666 • History 5-7 K. Andretti and K. Doull (Scholastic 2000) ISBN 0-439-01789-0 • Google (Images) – ‘Samuel Pepys,’ ‘Great Fire of London,’ and ‘The Tower of London.’
