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Extended Work
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| The Great Flood - Postscript | |
| By jean.day | ||||||
| 17 August 2006 | ||||||
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As you know, most of my writing is a mixture of what really happened and what I make up. The physical description of Cley is pretty much true, and it hasn’t changed much today from how I described it. The houses along the main coast road still have downstairs walls that continue to leak salt, 53 years after the event. The local pubs have photos on their walls with pictures of how high the water came, and the rescue boats. At Wiveton Church there is a big oil painting from the 1700’s showing how the area looked when it was a port. Malcolm and Mollie and their family are real people although Malcolm died fairly recently. I changed their names and they never lived in Cley. The other things I have said about them are true except for Mollie getting lost the night of the storm. Malcolm often told stories of his supernatural experiences. A few months before he died, when he had very little short term memory left, he was still able to tell the results of the Norwich City football matches the day before they took place, and he even got the scores right. The people who are mentioned from 1853 existed, as documented from the Norfolk registers and census details of the time. My husbands’ family were involved in the rescue and clean up operations, but he didn’t actually take anyone back home in a boat. References: An Historical Atlas of Norfolk, Peter Wade-Martins, Norfolk Museums Service, 1994, p78,137,178 A Village Shop, by Fred Starr, The Old Butcher’s Bookshop, Cley, 1979, p.36-41. Cley, by Peter Brooks, Poppyland Publishing, reprinted 1998. East Anglia, Paul Jennings, Gordon Fraser Publishers, London, 1986. p 41. East Anglia, Hammond Innes. Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1986 p 79-81. Norfolk, A Shell Guide, Faber and Faber Ltd. London, p 29, by Wilhelmine Harrod and Rev. C.L.S. Linnell. North Norfolk, Illustrated Guide Books, Ward Lock and Cop, p. 97. The 1953 Floods at Cley, Salthouse and Blakeney, by Buttercup Joe, Buttercup Publishing, 1992. The 53 Floods, by Godfrey Sayers, Glaven Valley Newsletter, January 2003. The Glaven Ports, by Jonathan Hooton, Published by Blakeney Historical Group, reprinted 1997. Other issues of Glaven Valley Newsletter used: March, 2006, April 2006. Internet site for the Eastern Daily Press. Ancestry.co.uk Historical Directories: Pigotts Directory of Norfolk, 1839 Post Office Directory of Cambridge, Norfolk, Essex and Suffolk, 1869. Details of the flood from the Eastern Daily Press – excerpts The afternoon of Saturday, January 31, 1953 was bleak. Strong gusts of wind dropped the temperature and a dull pallor hung across the eastern skies. The North Sea – cold, icy and treacherous – lashed the shorelines of the Norfolk coast but, apart from the grey and menacing tides, gave little clue as to what it had in store for that fateful evening. It has been suggested there was no warning, no clues, to alert people living in King’s Lynn, Hunstanton, Salthouse, Sea Palling, Yarmouth, Lowestoft or Southwold, as to what fate lay ahead. There was also no warning for the whole of eastern England, from Yorkshire, through Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex to Kent, or across the North Sea to the lowlands of Holland. For the casual observer, this was true. Nothing in the lemon yellow of the afternoon or the strange twilight bode of things to come, though sea-wise men may have felt something within that all was not well. Yet elsewhere, the warning signs were there… and had been picked up. The difficulty lay in predicting how the approaching abnormal weather phenomena would develop. It was around noon on Thursday, January 29 that a routine weather report from a merchant ship steaming to the south-west of Iceland gave the first indication that a disturbance was developing in the North Atlantic. Forecasters at the Meteorological Office plotted it as an ordinary secondary depression that had broken away from the major low pressure system to the north of the Azores. While the weather was changing for the worse, there was still nothing in the conditions to suggest that it would develop into the most disastrous storm since 1703 and the greatest northerly gale in British meteorological history. There was no hint that it would become Norfolk’s worst peacetime tragedy, leaving exactly 100 dead across the county’s northern coast among a national death toll of 307 from the floods. Twenty-four hours after the routine message from the merchantman, the depression was deepening at an alarming rate, accelerating to 50mph. It was still 250 miles north-west of the Hebrides, but Scotland was already bearing the brunt as gale-force winds lashed the country and then extended over the rest of Britain. The weather then took a turn that was to lead hours later to tragedy along the east coast. After passing between Shetland and Orkney, the depression tracked to the right and then began a south-eastward plunge down the central North Sea. It was this development that produced the conditions responsible for the floods. As this was unfolding, people went about their daily business on the east coast. Families were thinking about the evening, young people had their thoughts on a Saturday night out. American servicemen based around Hunstanton perhaps had their eye on a local girl, while the older generation stoked fires and wrapped up warm against the howling winds, ironically feeling snug and safe in the comfort of their own homes. Many were mindful of the ferocity of the sea and their thoughts were with the families of those who had lost their lives in the sinking of the Princess Victoria in the Irish Sea a few days earlier. At the time it was the country’s worst ferry disaster and of the 176 on board only 44 had survived, among them Trooper Dennis Peck, of Council Houses, Brewers Yard, Saxmundham. Out on the waves of the North Sea, trawlers struggled against the wind and mountainous seas. Among them, the Lowestoft-based Guava, at 100 tons and 127ft long, a solid vessel capable of riding most conditions. A few hundred miles to the north, and in the midst of the seas, storm-force north-westerly winds on the western flank of the depression swept the whole of the northern approaches to the North Sea, dragging vast quantities of surface water. The rise in sea level then rushed down the east coast of Britain in the form of a coastal surge – in more dramatic terms, a tidal wave. This coincided with the natural rotation of the earth, deflecting the surge to the right of the airflow, resulting in an even greater increase in sea level. Unbeknown to those living in the shoreline towns and villages of the east coast, they were already at the mercy of the mightiest storm for hundreds of years, oblivious to the fact that they lay directly in the path of the coastal onslaught. Every second, vast quantities of water were being forced into the narrowing funnel of the southern North Sea. Tides along the coast were heading towards shore more than 7ft above predicted levels. Across the North Sea, it would be even worse. By the time the water hit Holland, the sea level had risen by 14 feet. Around 15 billion cubic feet of water from the Atlantic had been deposited in the North Sea by winds that were raging at between 140mph and 175mph. As the clock ticked towards 5pm on the Saturday afternoon of January 31, the weather was foul. Norwich City had just earned a 1-1 draw with Coventry City at Carrow Road in conditions where the wind was the victor. On the coast, the colossal wall of water was crashing ashore, smashing the coastal defences of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire and racing inland in scorn of sea walls and defensive banks. As the water surged towards Norfolk, the people of King’s Lynn were already alarmed, though not by any official warning. The lack of that formal alert was to lead to controversy later. But the Great Ouse was already at the top of its banks, way before high tide. When the water finally arrived in the town, it caused massive flooding, turning roads into rivers and leading to 15 deaths. One fifth of the town was under water. The water, predicted to reach 22ft 9in at Lynn Dockhead, peaked at 31ft. The sea smashed ashore at Hunstanton and caused tremendous devastation in Heacham and Snettisham, where three sisters were among the dead. Within moments, as the water engulfed homes without warning, sweeping them away or trapping people in the surge, more than 70 people lost their lives. Soon after the 7.27pm train left Hunstanton for King’s Lynn it was halted by a wall of water and moments later a bungalow swept along by the water smashed into the smoke box. The onslaught continued. Sea Palling was crushed, Salthouse wrecked and Brancaster, Cley, Wells, Blakeney, Mundesley, Bacton, Walcot, Overstrand, Sheringham, Cromer and Yarmouth, wallowed under feet of mud and water, their seafronts smashed and homes destroyed. Many coast roads were rendered impassable. The speed and ferocity of the surge left little time to escape and within minutes had created a huge inland sea. In Cley, families barricaded themselves in their homes and were forced upstairs as the water rose. The unfortunate Gordon Lee, a 19-year-old who went to release his pigs on his allotment as the water struck, found himself marooned. He spent three hours clinging to the roof of his allotment shed as attempts to reach him by boat failed. He was later rescued by a group of soldiers. The animals, like thousands of others that night, perished In Mundesley, witnesses spoke of waves rising 80 ft in the air, sweeping buildings over the promenade. A crewless tanker, which had broken its tow in the North Sea, ran aground at Brancaster, one of 22 ships in the North Sea reported as missing, stranded or in danger. At Salthouse, 30 houses were destroyed in half an hour. The emergency services were inundated with calls and police, ambulance and fire crews joined in the massive rescue operation. The devastation swept down to Yarmouth and then to Lowestoft, which despite being split in two by the waters, suffered no immediate deaths. At Southwold, five died as the water ravaged homes and sea defences. The devastation was repeated further south on the Essex coast and across into Kent. In Holland, the flooding was even more serious than in Britain. It is estimated that 1800 people lost their lives. As the storm raged, people clung to their roofs and hung on to whatever they could in the pitch darkness as the icy water swelled around them. The water was deep, the sky dark and unfriendly, power had failed and there was little hope as the deathly cold water rose. Long before daylight brought the full extent of the disaster into clearer focus, a rescue operation began amid a landscape where homes had been washed away, streets in villages and towns were flooded and many were dead, or missing. Among the rescuers were local emergency- service personnel who were joined by American servicemen. As dawn broke, a list of the dead was already being compiled. At the same time another list was being written, with the names of heroes upon it. Behind each honour was a dramatic – and often a tragic – story. Perhaps the saddest went to 19-year-old Peter Beckerton for his courage at Snettisham. While his mother Vera, who later received the British Empire Medal, struggled to keep afloat a boatload of children, Peter set out to rescue neighbours from a bungalow. He never made it and his body was recovered days later. Peter Beckerton received the Albert Medal posthumously. It was sometime before the final death toll for Norfolk and Suffolk was known. In the early stages, no-one really knew who was missing, who had died and who had escaped. In some cases it was months before all the bodies were recovered. In Norfolk, exactly 100 people died – Hunstanton (32 – including 17 Americans), Snettisham (25), King’s Lynn (15), Yarmouth (9), Heacham (9), Sea Palling (7), Salthouse (1), Wiveton (1) and Watlington (1). In addition five died at Southwold and 11 were lost from the Lowestoft trawler Guava. Later one person died from exposure at Lowestoft and a Wroxham man was killed in a bulldozer accident on flood relief work. Along the Norfolk coastline, more than 5,000 homes were either destroyed or damaged. As the rescue and clearing up operation began, the Queen and Prince Philip, who were staying at Sandringham at the time, toured the areas worst hit. President Eisenhower sent a message of sympathy. The floods were acknowledged as East Anglia’s worst peacetime disaster and Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared it a National Disaster. The overall death toll from the 1953 east coast floods is widely accepted as 307. As MARK NICHOLLS reports, Norfolk suffered badly Many of the victims of the 1953 floods died in the place they felt safest - their own homes. As the howling winds forced millions of gallons of water down into the narrow funnel of the southern North Sea, there was only one escape route for the raging torrent and that was on to the flat lands of the east coast. On the night of January 31, people in the towns of King’s Lynn and Hunstanton, Sheringham and Yarmouth and the villages of Snettisham, Heacham, Salthouse and Sea Palling were among thousands huddling in their homes as the storm became ever-more fearsome. But against a huge wall of water bursting through sea walls and over flood defences, their homes crumbled or were smashed into wooden fragments with householders within. In some areas, neighbours banged on doors urging their friends to leave before the water level rose too high. Those who stayed often became the casualties. Others who died lost their lives courageously trying to save others. But many were too infirm, frail or young to withstand the tidal onslaught. Other villages such as Cley, Wiveton and Watlington had one death in each. In Salthouse there was the case of a husband who carried his wife on to the kitchen table after she broke her leg when water burst through the front door. But as he laid her on the kitchen table another wave swept her away to her death. The Three Fatal Months The history of gale and flood damage in Norfolk and Suffolk shows a regular pattern of disasters occurring nearly always between January and March, and associated with a northerly gale piling up the water in the North Sea at the spring tides. Often the disasters have been associated with heavy rains inland or with a thaw after a big snowfall. The gale then, preventing the normal fall of the tide, has kept the flood water pent up in the rivers, which, overflowing their banks have inundated thousands of acres, both in the Fens in the west of the two counties and in the Bure, Yare and Waveney valleys in the east. But whether or not the effect of the gale and high tide has been aggravated by flood water coming down the rivers from inland, it has always spelt danger to the seaports of Yarmouth, Lowestoft and King's Lynn, and to the towns and villages fronting the salt marshes of the north-western and northern coast of Norfolk, from Snettisham round to Cley and Salthouse. The danger to the north and north-west, however, is limited by the fact that high ground lies at the back of the marshes, and the river valleys are small and shallow. However, the banks strengthened in 1947 withstood the effects of the gale and high tides of March, 1949, although the tide rose in the Great Ouse to the highest level ever recorded, and again patrols were out along all the banks and men worked furiously with clay and sandbags wherever the water threatened to break through. On the east coast the beaches were badly scoured, but again the defences held. The north and north-west were not so fortunate. The village of Cley was under four feet of water, scores of bungalows were inundated at Snettisham, and thirty families were rescued by boats. Eighty yards of Hunstanton promenade were smashed and all along the coast there were reports of cliff falls and eroded beaches.
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