Samuel Pepys Diary KS1

Who was Samuel Pepys?

Samuel Pepys was born in London in 1633. He was a Member of Parliament and also worked for the Royal Navy. He made his first diary entry on 1st January, 1660. He wrote about his everyday life, as well as important political and social events, including the Great Fire of London in 1666.

His diaries are a very important historical source - much of what we know about the Great Fire of London comes from his writing. He wrote them using a secret code and didn't mean for anyone else to read them! However, 150 years after the fire, they were published.

Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys and the Great Fire of London

Pepys saw the fire the night it started when his maidservant woke him up to tell him about it. He walked around the city, later recording that he saw ''an infinite great fire'.

Through his diary, we know that Pepys looked after his possessions by taking them out of London, or burying them in a friend's garden to keep them safe. He put his wife on a boat to Woolwich to distance her from the fire.

Because of his position as a Member of Parliament, Pepys knew a lot of people in power, and so found out a lot about how the fire was tackled. In his diary, he wrote about the decisions the Lord Mayor and King Charles II made on how to deal with the blaze. Here is an excerpt:

At last I met my Lord Mayor in Cannon Street, like a man spent, with a [handkerchief] about his neck. To the King's message he cried, like a fainting woman, ‘Lord, what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses, but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.’ . . So he left me, and I him, and walked home; seeing people all distracted, and no manner of means used to quench the fire.

Samuel Pepys' diaries (this edition was published in 1899).

Where is Samuel Pepys diary?

Pepys continued to keep a diary until 1669, only stopping because his eyesight was deteriorating and he could no longer see well enough to write. He died in 1703 at the age of 70.

His diaries, along with a vast number of books that he had collected during his life, can be found at Magdalene College in Cambridge, in the Pepys Library.

We also have a Great Fire of London Topic Bundle for KS1, which includes full schemes of work for History, Geography, English, Art and DT, if you are looking for more ready-to-teach cross-curricular lessons based on this historic event.