Hot on the trail

Who started the fire that destroyed London? Books editor MARGIE THOMSON meets a writer who raked through the embers in search of an answer.

If London is, as Daniel Defoe described it, a great body which "circulates all, exports all, and at last pays for all", then in the quarter century leading up to and including the days of the Great Fire of London in September, 1666, that monstrous city paid and paid and paid again.

It has been written about many times: how at the end of a 10-month drought, with the city's wooden houses like tinder, and a persistent hot fan of a wind that was like a dragon's breath, a fire broke out in a bakery in Pudding Lane which, over the next three days, destroyed the city and was still flaring up even six months later.

But history is never inexhaustible, and it seems there is always room for one more re-telling.

After a year of research, in which he read, he thinks, every book published about the Great Fire, as well as every relevant document from the period, British author Neil Hanson was sure he could add something considerable to our knowledge of that cataclysmic event. It's not giving too much away to say that while he failed, to his "eternal regret", to find a 17th-century smoking gun, his investigations into the matter of who started the Fire of London include some fascinating speculations which lead all the way to King Charles II.

On the other hand, it could have been an accident of human error, or even an accident of science and nature, as Hanson painstakingly explains.

Also, the more he read, the more he was struck by the fact that previous writers had not questioned the seemingly fantastic assumption that only a handful of people died in the inferno.

"All common sense, circumstantial evidence and the experience of every other major urban fire down the centuries, suggests that the number of those lost to the fire cannot have been four or six or eight, but must have been far, far greater," he says.

He has unearthed eye-witness accounts which indicate the true level of carnage, and brought modern science to bear on the problem - interviewing arson investigators, and visiting fire stations, forensic laboratories and crematoriums in order to better understand just what happens to the human body when it is trapped in a fire storm raging over 1000 deg C.

But, while such speculations make for interesting reading, at the heart of the book is Hanson's concern to understand how people in those troubled times lived, to capture the sights, sounds and smells - and there were certainly plenty of smells, he says - of 17th-century London life.

It was a terrible time for the mass of people, who lived impoverished, without sanitation, in terribly overcrowded conditions.

"The Great Fire came at the end of a quarter of a century of absolute turmoil," Hanson says. "There was the Civil War, the turmoil of the Cromwell years, the Restoration - which began with a great wave of optimism which had rapidly turned to bitter disillusion - then the Great Plague, which wiped out 100,000 Londoners in the year before the fire.

"But the Londoners showed incredible resilience. For instance, by the time of the fire the city had returned almost to normal. The plague was still there, although it wasn't carrying off nearly so many. People were going about their daily lives. The dead had been replaced by people flooding in from the country.

"I think there was almost a desperate gaiety, almost like the last years of the 19th century, where they were out to do whatever they could to turn their back on their troubles."

Until now, Hanson has been best-known for his book about shipwreck, murder and cannibalism, The Custom of the Sea - although he has written around 40 books, many of them as a ghost for people such as football stars, SAS men, even an IRA informer.

He ruefully describes himself as the Shelley Winters of literature. "Every time you see her in a movie you know that disaster is about to strike. Every time I turn on my word processor it's to put down carnage and mayhem. But I think in these desperate situations you see mankind in the raw.

"You see the very best and worst of human nature.

"You see acts of incredible self-sacrifice, and also of brutal self-interest. That's the most interesting thing about it. All pretences are stripped away and you see the true nature of people.

"I think that people will take extreme steps to save themselves and those they love in those circumstances, and there are many fewer people who will take desperate measures to save others."

As with many historical events, there are resonances from this event of 335 years ago in our lives today, in particular with the events flowing from the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11.

It is not just the physical fact of humans losing their lives in fire, but the question of how society copes with such loss, the desire for vengeance, and the fear and hatred that are unleashed against those who are different to society's mainstream, that make interesting comparisons with Hanson's account of the Great Fire.

"In this heated atmosphere every stranger was equally suspect," Hanson writes of London, 1666, and the index to his book, under "rumours", lists the scapegoats: Catholics, French, Dutch, and several individuals including the King.

Hanson is a tall, thin Englishman who seems far too serious to have lived the unorthodox life he has. "My career hasn't taken the normal route," he admits.

Since his days at Oxford he's been a plasterer, a holiday camp redcoat (he got scurvy there as a result of eating the appalling food), a publican, editor of the Boozers' Bible, art critic and art gallery manager.

His books reveal similar side-stepping. He was in New Zealand researching or a book set in the South Pacific, although he won't reveal what it is to be about.

That project must go on the back burner for now, though, as his publisher wants more on English social history. It seems the public can't get enough of it, or of Hanson's particular approach, blending high-class, original research with a pacy narrative style that mimics fiction in order to breathe excitement and life into his subject.

Horrific subjects have served this man well, and he has a knack for plugging into the dark themes that run like molten rivers beneath our social veneer.

"Fear of fire is absolutely universal," he says. "It is our oldest fear, or one of our oldest fears, the source of our worst urban nightmare: a city in flames."

* The Dreadful Judgement by Neil Hanson (Doubleday, $37.95).