Empire: World History - The Great Fire of London

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

William and Anita are joined by historian and co-host of Goalhanger’s Journey Through Time, David Olusoga, to discuss their new series on The Great Fire of London.  What caused the capital to go up in flames on 2nd September, 1666? How did a fire that started in a bakery grow to engulf so much of the city? Who was Samuel Pepys, the great diarist who documented the fire?  Listen to Journey Through Time, a podcast telling history from the bottom up, to get the full story.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire Kinders, Sorda Kinder, with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William, Durember. Yeah, I mean, we are definitely us, but this is a little bit special. at the top of the program because we're going to tell you about another goalhanger podcast, Journey Through Time, which is hosted by historians David Ollashogha and Sarah Church,

well, both very good friends. And they're brilliant. And it tells the story of, well, not a story really, it's history from the bottom up, if I can put it that way, an attempt to understand pivotal moments through the eyes of those who lived through them. And David's here with us to discuss the podcast and the new series on the Great Fire of London. Can I tell you something, David? I, with these hands and a small child and some Prit Stick, have created a Tudor house with flames coming out of the window, and upon his insistence,

stick figures going, ah, I'm burning. So, you know, I feel like I'm an expert too, frankly. What are we going to learn? Listeners of podcasts may not realise that Anita actually has a talent for these things. And if you go to her house, you can see that she has transformed flower pots. into sort of boutiques and done amazing murals on her children's walls, the whole range of talents. Crafty, David, crafty is what I am. But anyway, look, tell us what do we have to look forward to in this podcast?

So we're going to tell the story of the Great Fire. And as you said, and as everybody who went to school in the UK knows, this is a story that we're taught. It's absolutely essential part of history at school. It's one of the first things my daughter learned and came back. Putting Lane, isn't that where it all started? I remember that from my eight-year-old history classes. Exactly.

There's so much that we know about it, but actually so much that we don't. And what we try to do in Journey Through Time is paint a picture of what it was like to actually live through those events. So much of histories taught through palaces and parliaments, what it was like to be the decision-makers, rather than what it was like to actually be there on the ground going through this. And what you get, if you look at the Great Fire through the social history lens, is a story of people's sort of desperation.

The thing which most amazes me is that people would spend a day fighting the fire, then they would be exhausted, they'd go to bed and wake up and London would still be on fire. People would move their possessions to the next street and then that would catch fire. Then they would move it again further away. People are recorded as having moved their most precious possessions four, five, six times as this fire spread and spread and spread. I've always wondered actually, whatever happened to the baker or the baker's boy or whoever got, you know, the blame for all of things. And what was the pudding that set this thing alight? Was it a brandy, a flaming brandy? Or what was it? But there's sort of more than that. Was that anger as well as sort of, you know, exhaustion? You're fighting a fire. But you also want somebody to blame at the time. Are there records of what people were saying, thinking of it? There's a lot of records. And you will not be surprised to hear that,

as so often in history, the people who get blamed are entirely innocent and those who should be held to account getaway Scott Fried. You don't say, David. Yeah. The Baker survives. He has a normal career, lives out the rest of his life, is never blamed for what had happened. And the people who are blamed are the foreigners. Anybody with a foreign accent, particularly anybody French or Dutch, Britain is at war with France and the Netherlands, they are attacked in the streets. Anybody who's got a foreign sounding name or a foreign accent. That sounds oddly familiar. It is strange. I know. It's the past is another country that sometimes it's very like the one we live in. Wow. Yeah. God, that is going to be mind-blowing.

to a lot of people, because as you say, this is an inculcation from youth, especially in this country, if you're listening in Britain, it is the story that we grow up with. So when you talk about records, I mean, are there newspapers? I mean, what are the official records that you have or that you can dig into and find out? Well, anybody who was writing a diary, and diaries were new and fashionable at the time, of course, peeps, but also there were other people who were recording their events, and there's lots of official documentation. Dispressingly, there are accounts of exactly the violence I was talking about. And there is a court case, which is really not well remembered. A man called Robert Hubertoubertoubert, who was a young Frenchman who was almost certainly suffering from some

form of mental illness, who confessed to the fire, confessed to having started it for reasons that nobody understands. Presumably he was tortured, and that's normally why people confess to that period, isn't it? It's stranger and darker than that. It was, as some people at the time suspected, at an attempt at what we might call judicial suicide. He was said by one of the members in his court to have been weary of this life. He confessed, and even though the evidence proving he wasn't in London at the time,

he couldn't possibly have started the fire mounted. He was convicted and he was hanged. So we followed that court case as well as the details of the fire. Wow, I mean, that's what they call an American series, you know, death by cop is what they like to call it. That's, again, something that you think is a rather contemporary thing. And that's what I love about, you know, these stories that you tell, is people, are people, are people. No matter what era they're in,

these sort of behaviours, these ebbs and flows, are so familiar. That's right. And I think it's really exciting to try to get into people's minds. Obviously, we're not psychologists or historians. I do think we have, as historians, the right to speculate about how people reacted to the moments they were in, how the societies they've been brought up with shape their thinking. We should also tell our listeners that David and Sarah are two of the greatest. communicators of our time. David, I'm sure everyone is familiar with from his amazing documentaries on the BBC. I can't think anyone I've actually sent more email fan letters to, than David over the years. Particularly that series you did on Union, I thought was one of the greatest things I've ever seen

on British television. Are you very kind about that? Thank you very much. But Sarah may be less well known to listeners of Empire, and she is fabulous. We've had several times at the Joy Poy Literature Festival. She's a brilliant speaker and the combination of the two of them together is one of the great treats of the podcasting world. I just have to keep up with Sarah's energy. I mean, she is just powered by some kind of nuclear fission or something. I've never met anyone like it. There is no off switch, David.

No off switch at all. But she knows so much. I mean, she's kind of my go-to person when I need some historical context for what's going on in America. And she'll just rifle through at lightning speed, the filing cabinet in her brain, and pull out all of these extraordinary things you've never heard of. We've just done two episodes on the history, the rather strange history of the National Rifle Association, the NRA, which began in the 1870s. What a brilliant subject.

Very few people know this. It was modelled on the British National Rifle Association, which still exists, has its little museum in Bisley, is there about built around the idea of gun safety, as was the American NRA. So Sarah, with that energy you describe, tells the story of how this gun safety organisation became the gun rights movement. that it is today. Well, I mean, there's so much in your treasure trove already. And the Great Fire of London, again, I can't wait to listen to this because it's, again, those are my favourite stories, the ones that you think you know, that sort of holiday chalet you think you've lived in, and it's in, all the furniture is not where you supposed it would be. It is all different. So, I mean, I'm really looking forward to it. So thank you very much, David. Now, as a treat for listeners, you've got a clip from this week's journey through time. Well, the next report we have of the fire is from

probably about an hour later, 3 a.m. And this is when it comes to the attention of the great diarist Samuel Pepys. Now, we should explain Peepes, who is famous for his diary. But at the time, his job was he worked at the Navy Board. He was a member of Parliament. He was a sort of member of the elite,

a supporter of the Stuart Royal Family. But you mention his diary. And of course, that is why he's so famous today. He kept this incredibly detailed daily account all the way through the 1660s of what life was the life was. like. So it's a complete social history gold mining. He writes about everything from the prices of food to gossip, to who he saw at the theater, to what everybody's wearing. And his complicated

love life. Well, you could call it a love life. I was not going to let him let, I'm very fond of Samuel Peep's, but right, I was not going to let him get away with that. We would call him handsy at a minimum. Even during the fire. Oh, yeah, even during the fire. Everything's an opportunity for Samuel Pepys. So, I mean, he records in his diary, groping maids and assaulting shop girls and molesting his friend's wives. So, I mean, and this is what he records. So in between the molestations, he describes the politics of Restoration Britain. Pepes in his diary gives us this amazing account of the fire. But he's not just a witness.

He's not just someone who's writing down what happens. He's involved. That's what makes, I think, this moment in his diary so interesting and so exciting. Because, yeah, because often he's just observing, right? But here he's actually the protagonist, or not the protagonist, but he's a protagonist, and he's telling the story of the ways in which he was actually very actively involved in the fire. So suddenly his funny, gossipy diary just leaps to life in the catastrophe. Yeah, and it becomes tragic and it becomes dramatic, and it comes very, very visual in the way he describes this calamity.

At 3 a.m., he's woken up. He underestimates the fire. His maid, Jane Birch, wakes him up to say there is a great fire in the city. Peep's goes to a window, and for the first time, he sees the fire. Now, his house is pretty close to putting lane. He's on a place called seething lane. But he decides the fire is not serious enough for him to really worry about. So he goes back to bed.

Not for the last time in this story that someone's going to go back to bed. One of the really amazing things about his diary over these few days is it gives us something like a timeline. Four hours later, he's working up again by the same May, Jane Birch. who tells him that she hears that above 300 houses have been burnt down tonight by fire. That's what Peep's writes in his diary. So between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m., this fire has enormously expanded. And Peep's now realizes that this is not just another house fire. Well, while he was snoozing, his maid was on the job, actually, you know, finding out what was happening.

And, you know, other people are doing the work and monitoring. But I'm having a little bit of fun at Peeps' expense, but now he actually starts to rise to the occasion. We think the maids are up late because Peeps had a dinner party planned for that evening. So they were up getting ready for the dinner party, which allowed them to be awake to witness the fire to wake him up twice. But at this point, 7 o'clock, he knows it's serious. He goes to the Tower of London. He's close to the constable of the tower. And he climbs up and he gets his first view.

By this point, the fire started in putting late. has been fanned by the flames of the gale that is blowing over London for six hours. And it's at that moment in his diary that Pepys uses the word that we use, the people in the 17th century use to describe the fire. Great. He calls it an infinite great fire. To hear more, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.