The Great Flood

by Edward Platt

  Yet not everyone wanted the Fens to be drained in the first place, and, recently, nostalgia for the pre-drained richness that outsiders regarded as a trackless waste has been growing. In Cambridgeshire, the Great Fen is being stitched together from surviving wetlands, and patches are being restored within Vermuyden’s grid of rivers in the Fens as well. It wasn’t until I walked into the birch-clad visitor centre at the Welney Bird Sanctuary, which lies at the base of Vermuyden’s New Bedford River, that I realized how accustomed I had become to monotonous tones of clay and peat. It wasn’t just the warmth inside the building that came as a relief; the tall windows at the back overlooked a green field with grazing horses and pools of water ringed by clumps of reed, which seemed rich and luxurious compared to the flat brown fields elsewhere.

  Yet Vermuyden had not entirely excluded wildernesses from his scheme. On the map, the New Bedford River – or the Hundred Foot, as it is known in reference to its original width – is a thin blue line, like all the managed rivers of the Fens, but, when I clambered up its steep bank and stood beside it, it did not seem neat and disciplined. The wind was veering along its length with bullying strength, and the ruler-straight banks seemed to be wavering and dissolving as the water within them faded to the colour of the dark grey sky. Beyond it lay the Ouse Washes, the empty space between the Old and New Bedford rivers that Vermuyden had left as a floodplain. He called it ‘a room in which the water could rise’ and it had become a stopping-off point for the birds who travelled on unseen paths from the Arctic, borne on the winds that rattled the open windows of the hide at Welney.

  ~

  There was a light in the main chamber of the Hundred Foot Pumping Station. Two men were working inside, and they both remembered John. His accent changed as he spoke to them, picking up a Fenland intonation that must have been as natural as the way he spoke to me. His grandfather, Horace J. Martin, chairman of commissioners, had inaugurated a new oil engine in the Hundred Foot Pumping Station on 2 April 1926, according to a report in the Cambridgeshire Times. It said that Mr Martin ‘has more service on the commission – 42 years – than any other Commissioner present that day.’ A poem engraved above the entrance of the old engine house caught everyone’s attention, the report said:

  These fens have oft times been by water drowned,

  Science a remedy in water found;

  The power of steam, she said, shall be employed,

  And the destroyer itself destroyed.

  Yet, even steam, ‘with all its undoubted reliability’, had to ‘give way to oil’, and soon, oil gave way to diesel. The engine in the end room was the size and shape of a train, and it drove a massive waterwheel housed in a dark green casing with a pipe that stretched to the ditch below. The wind was rippling the water in sudden, isolated flurries; even in the lighted interior of the old pumping station the wind was visible.

  ~

  We drove back across the Deep Fen, which was reserved for small farmers. It was divided and subdivided into plots that were a fraction of the prairie-style fields common in East Anglia. A group of cottages sheltered beside a grove of trees and the road was strewn with clumps of mud. Strips of young crops and grass on the verges unrolled unevenly on either side of the car: they were the only spots of colour between the dark sky and the rich, black earth, and they seemed to be glossed with a faint luminous sheen, as if they were already under water.

  ~

  At seven p.m., the storm reached the mouth of the Humber, driven by the usual combination of a low-pressure system that drew the water higher and strong winds that pushed it into the narrow channel of the North Sea, which forced it higher still. The gales had died down by the time the surge reached Spurn Head, the fragile comma of land that curls across the mouth of the Humber, but, even so, the sea was almost two metres higher than expected. At Kilnsea, where the land has retreated 374 yards (342 metres) in 157 years, it picked up caravans and tumbled them together, breaking them beyond repair, and leaving a club house standing on the cliff edge. It punched through the protective bank and flooded the few buildings that stand on Spurn Head, including ‘Barry’s old bungalow’, as one report called it, and the bird-ringing lab on the peninsula’s southern tip.

  The tide flowed across the spot where the port of Ravenser Odd used to stand, before it was destroyed in the ‘Grote Mandrenke’ – or Great Man-Drowning – of 1362, and moved inland, flooding 7,000 hectares on both shores of the estuary. The Albert Dock – the only one in the city with an eastern-facing entrance on the Humber, which I had walked through in the summer – took the full force of the surge. The pub where I had stayed flooded, and the water spread inland, flooding the Hull Arena, where people had gone ice skating. They had to wade out through waist-deep water, passing stranded cars and flooded shops. The barrage on the River Hull recorded its highest ever level. If the water had been forty centimetres higher, it would have overtopped the barrier and spread out through the centre of the city – the flood would have been as bad, if not worse, then the one six years before.

  On the south bank, the surge travelled up the River Trent, and breached its banks in the Lincolnshire village of Burringham, twelve miles from the Humber. According to one eye-witness account, its high street became ‘a river’. On the north bank, the water broke over the wall of a car park in Ferriby, the village where my grandmother used to live, and flooded fifteen houses.

  The Fens didn’t flood, though the water in the Tidal River, which I had stood beside at lunchtime, nearly reached the top of the bank. It was a reminder that you could never be complacent, John Martin said, in an email. There had been flooding throughout his old territory on the east coast, from the Humber to the Thames, and police had evacuated the Essex town of Jaywick, where sixty people had drowned on the night of 30 January 1953.

  ~

  I drove out to Jaywick two days later.

  The flood warnings were still in place on the A12, as far inland as Chelmsford, where I was born. My father had worked at the oil refinery at Coryton, on the Thames beside Canvey Island, where fifty-seven people drowned in 1953, though we lived in a village outside Chelmsford. He used to say that the A12 divided Essex in two, with the industrialized foreshore to one side and the villages inland on the other – though, as I drove into the low sun, which cast a blurring halo across the road, I felt like I was following a line drawn between two zones of a different kind: one that was floodable and one that wasn’t.

  I parked on the Broadway at Jaywick and walked back to the beach. It was very quiet; there was one shop open, but the amusement arcade was closed for the winter. The sea wall rose above the level of the unmade streets. Signs warned of the dangers of soft sand. A rainbow hung above the marshes, framing the houses that faced the beach – they were of different heights and sizes, with wide windows to take in the view. Most stood on flimsy-looking stilts planted in the unpaved streets below the sea wall.

  The two lads on the path by the sea wall said they had never felt at risk. They had gone to the shelter because they were told to, but they didn’t stay for long. They had left at two a.m. and walked back along the shore to Jaywick. It was only two miles, but it must have felt further in the dark, with the gale shoving them inland and the sea threatening to break over the defences. Yet they were temperamentally inclined to dismiss it: ‘Nothing happened,’ the first one said. The cowl of his hoodie hid his face, but he made no attempt to conceal the spliff cupped in his palm. The sea had reached the wall, but it had only splashed over it. ‘You don’t normally get puddles on the beach,’ he said. Dope smoke merged with the marine tang of seaweed and salt-soaked sand as they walked away.

  A woman walking her dog on the beach said her son had ignored the warnings and stayed in Jaywick, but she had been scared enough to obey, and so had many others: there was no room in the shelter in Clacton, and she had slept outside with her dog, a Jack Russell. It was freezing – nothing like the summer evenings, when she was often on the beach until ten p.m. ‘It’s very untidy,’ she
said, as if that was the greatest concern, gesturing at the pools of standing water and ribbons of mud-streaked sand between the breakwaters, which had the sleek black sheen of a mussel shell.

  A man brushing sand off his porch, further down the beach, was equally relaxed. The last time the streets of Jaywick had flooded, human error was to blame – they’d forgotten to close the gate in the sea wall.

  He had grown up on a Caribbean island where the lights were powered by a windmill, and it amused him that he could see the turbines of Gunfleet Sands from his front door: ‘They’re going back to the past.’ I doubted that he would have been so dismissive if he had seen the massive turbines close up. He was more preoccupied by local distinctions than what was happening offshore. According to some measures, Jaywick is the poorest place in England. In 2011, sixty-two per cent of its working-age population were receiving benefits – more than four times the national average. For several years, it was the setting for a Channel Five series called Benefits by the Sea.

  Yet, even within Jaywick, the Brooklands and Grasslands estates are set apart. They are the ‘badlands’, the man said, gesturing along the beach, towards the south, and offering a succinct explanation for their decline: ‘The council keep putting crap in.’ I thought it was crude to refer to people as ‘crap’ – though, when he said they were thieves and addicts who nicked anything they could get their hands on, I suppressed an urge to go and check my car.

  ~

  Jaywick was established in the 1930s by a property developer called Frank Stedman, who bought twenty-four acres of unused land on the Essex coast. He was hoping to emulate Clacton’s success by attracting Londoners who wanted to escape the East End. He laid out the streets of Brooklands in the shape of a Bentley’s radiator grille, and named them after makes of cars, such as Bentley, Hillman, Austin, Sunbeam, Wolsey and Talbot. The names conveyed the optimism of an era in which ‘motoring’ put the sea within reach of millions of people.

  Within the plots, owners could build how they liked. Beach huts, cabins, chalets and bungalows, which had entered the British architectural vocabulary in the Raj, emerged in the unpaved streets behind Jaywick Sands, and, despite the effects of the storm of 1953 and the antipathy of the local council, they had survived. Jaywick wasn’t connected to the main sewers until 1977, and, in the 1990s, the council tried to remake it completely: it built forty new prefabricated houses on the site of a former holiday camp beside Brooklands, with the aim of rehousing the occupants of the older properties and replacing their buildings. Yet people didn’t want to be rehoused, and only five original properties were demolished. As the architectural historian Clive Aslet wrote, ‘Jaywick has succeeded where many more architecturally prestigious schemes have failed: it has personality, and woe betide anyone wanting to threaten it.’

  Yet it has hardly prospered. One measure of deprivation suggested Jaywick had six of the ten cheapest streets in the east of England, and it wasn’t hard to see which they might be. Most were unadopted, and hence unsurfaced, and they were pitted with potholes filled with water that seeped up from below. The houses were strikingly frail: single-storey cabins or bungalows with roof spaces, which must have provided precarious shelter in 1953, fronted by wooden steps and enclosed by crumbling walls of breeze block or mortar. Some were clad in wood, others pebble-dashed or whitewashed, though most had faded to the grey of the sea. Some looked abandoned. A caravan stood in the knee-high grass in a garden plot, and telephone lines hung above the rooftops. Even the sea seemed remote, hidden by the sea wall that protected the estate, though the tang in the air was a reminder of its proximity.

  There was no one in sight, and I got no answer at any of the houses. Cyclists glided past on the concrete platform high above the crumbling streets. I reached the end of the estate and climbed up on to the sea wall beside the Martello Tower, which had stood like a dark lighthouse in the flood, a useless fortification in the sea that had risen up around it. Beyond it lay the marshes that had become a channel for the surging tide on 31 January 1953.

  ~

  An effective warning system would have saved many lives, for the severity of the storm was apparent for at least two days before it reached the east coast. Early on the morning of Friday, 29 January 1953, a trawler called Michael Griffiths sank off the Hebrides. None of the fifteen crew members survived. At one forty-five in the afternoon, the passengers and crew of the British Rail ferry Princess Victoria abandoned ship east of Belfast: 132 of the 176 people on board drowned. It was the worst ferry disaster in British history, and yet news of the accident did not precede the storm as it rounded Scotland and travelled south.

  ‘By the afternoon of Saturday 31st January, the sea was hammering mercilessly at the eastern coastline,’ writes Michael Pollard, in North Sea Surge. ‘It smashed huge gaps in Scarborough’s massive North Bay sea wall. Sweeping down past Spurn Head and curling inwards, the storm cut off the community of lifeboat men and coastguards on the headland and carried away the transmission masts of the Humber radio station. Racing on to Cleethorpes, it smashed the railway embankment and swept away buildings on the foreshore. Large areas of neighbouring Grimsby were flooded.’ But, so far, this was ‘merely severe storm damage,’ Pollard says, ‘bad enough, but within the scope of the emergency services. The worst was yet to come.’

  The police in Clacton were told of the risk of flooding at 9.52 p.m. on Saturday, but they were preoccupied with events in Harwich, and three local bobbies were left to deal with Jaywick on their own. At midnight, there were reports of water breaching the sea wall behind the Broadway, and, half an hour later, ‘mountainous waves’ were seen rolling towards Adrian’s Wall, the wall named after the chairman of the Jaywick Sands Freeholders Association.

  Yet Jaywick was not only vulnerable from the front. At one a.m., a police inspector turned inland to see a river ‘raging’ through the marshes behind the town. The water swamped his car, and nearly swept away an elderly couple rescued by the police. Witnesses called it a ‘wall of death’, and a ‘shining silver mass, gleaming brilliant in the moonlight’. It had poured through twenty-two breaches in the sea wall to the west, and poured across the marshes, carrying with it ‘a tangled mass of debris from smashed caravans,’ writes Patricia Rennoldson Smith, in The 1953 Essex Flood Disaster, an oral history of the events of the night. The water swamped Meadow Way and other streets behind the Broadway. Twenty-two people drowned.

  Once the water had breached the walls and flowed through the low-lying streets, it couldn’t drain away. Grasslands, which lies between the Essex River Board Wall and the Counter Wall, was also enclosed: ‘it resembled a saucer, brimful of water, adrift in a turbulent sea.’ One young boy said that his mother had got up to go to the toilet and found the carpet lifting off the floor. ‘She tried to run to wake everyone, but it was like trying to run on a hammock.’ Caravans were carried past on the waves, and the bungalows were shifted off their foundations, some with people clinging to them. Even huts raised on piles two feet (sixty centimetres) high were waist-deep in water. Some of the bungalows were submerged.

  At midday on Sunday, the water in Brooklands and Grasslands was ten feet (three metres) deep in places, and it was still coming over the wall. ‘Rescuers found people near collapse with shock and exposure, standing on windowsills and clinging to house eaves with their fingertips. Some, numbed by the cold, dropped into the water and drowned.’ An observer on higher ground watched a whole family, ‘one by one, slip into the water and disappear.’

  People who had taken shelter in roof spaces were hauled out by firemen, though even experienced boatmen found it hard to reach the houses; the water was full of ‘hidden obstacles and live with electricity’. People were lighting matches to show their positions, unaware they might ignite the water, which was suffused with petrol.

  More boats arrived, and the ‘tired, dirty, soaked policemen, firemen and civilians’ went back and forth to the flooded houses. At first, they used loudspeakers to call for survivors, but, by
Monday, the nature of the rescue effort changed: instead of saving the living, they were retrieving people who had drowned, their bodies ‘frozen in grotesque shapes’. Some had been tethered to the lamp posts so they wouldn’t float away.

  ~

  The deaths were not random: the average age of those who died was sixty-five, and most lived in prefab houses or summer homes, like the ones in Jaywick, which could not withstand the tide. Such homes were found all along the coast. The inhabitants of a Victorian terrace in Felixstowe had watched, disbelievingly, from the safety of their upper floors, as the wooden huts that occupied a site on the end of the road were borne past them. Yet the highest death toll was in Canvey Island, in the Thames Estuary. The sea broke through at Smallgains Creek, in the south-east corner of the island, in the early hours of the morning, and surged inland, through an area of ‘shack-like’ chalet bungalows ominously named Sunken Marsh.

  Frank Harris was on leave from national service and he was staying with his grandmother and his aunt, who had a small baby, in Rainbow Road, near Sunken Marsh. He had been out on Saturday night, and he was in bed when his aunt woke him up and told him there was a leak. ‘The house was ankle deep in water,’ he told me. ‘I thought, God, that’s a big leak. And I looked out of the window and I said, “That ain’t a leak – it’s a flood.” And I went into the bedroom just in time to whip the baby out of the cot before the water reached the mattress.’