Sunday 10th September 2023
John Baker, in an article for the Wiltshire Times, writes:
A Wiltshire bakery worker has been identified by historians for the first time as being the first person to raise the alarm of The Great Fire of London in 1666.
Thomas Dagger, 24, from Norton Bavant, Warminster, was a journeyman baker who was living in Pudding Lane where the fire started.
The inferno that ensued destroyed most of the medieval city of London and famously led to the writer Samuel Pepys burying his cheese in his garden to protect it from the flames.
Mr Dagger was identified by historians researching the details of the fire for the Museum of London for a new exhibition when it reopens on a new site in 2026.
Kate Loveman, an associate professor of English literature at the University of Leicester, who conducted the research, said Mr Dagger was the first to witness the fire and the first person to raise the alarm.
Thomas Dagger was a journeyman baker who left Wiltshire for London after his father died, becoming a baker’s apprentice aged around 15.
He had been apprenticed to Thomas Farriner, whose bakery in Pudding Lane was identified as being where the fire broke out in the early hours of September 2 1666.
For the first time, Mr Dagger has been identified as the servant who, according to contemporary accounts, was first woken by “the choke of the smoke” coming from the fire.
He roused the household to escape from a window above the bakery 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, Professor Loveman said.
To identify Mr Dagger, she pieced together contemporary accounts, legal documents and apprenticeship and guild archives, as well as parish and other public records.
She added: “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.
“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.”
Mr Dagger’s name also appeared with others on a court indictment against Robert Hubert, a Frenchman who confessed to starting the fire and was executed, although he was later shown not to have been in London at the time.
Other records allowed Professor Loveman to fill out more of Mr Dagger’s biography and apprenticeship history.
She said that Mr Dagger was married and his wife may have been pregnant at the time of the fire. In later years, they had more children and he went on to work as a London baker in his own right, right into the 1690s.
Professor Loveman said that Mr Dagger was an otherwise unremarkable young man who was “swept up in history”.
She added: “Ordinary people should be remembered – we shouldn’t just have the names of the really famous people.”
Thousands of children study The Great Fire of London as part of the national curriculum for England at Key Stage 1.
Simone Few, audience and interpretation manager for the Museum of London, said: “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.”
