Exhibition at museum’s new site will focus on Thomas Dagger and other ordinary Londoners caught up in 1666 inferno
The Great Fire of London, as so many schoolchildren learn, began in a bakery in Pudding Lane and prompted Samuel Pepys toLess is known, however, about the thousands of ordinary people who witnessed the fire and had to rebuild their lives after it.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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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