The pre-war rampart known as “Puddicombe’s Folly” had just about withstood the “Great Flood”, for so long both “foreseen and dreaded”,3 that broke over the island, still without adequate warning, during the fatal storm tide of 29–31 January 1953. In the Netherlands 1,836 people died, and 307 lives were lost in eastern England, including considerable numbers at two of the plotland paradises on the north shore of the Thames Estuary (thirty-seven died at Jaywick and fifty-eight on Canvey Island). There were no fatalities on the Isle of Sheppey, but much of the island had found itself “under deep water” once again.4 The Sheerness dockyard was properly drowned — a frigate capsized and a submarine sank — and residents in the town were once again awakened by the sound of their furniture knocking against the ceilings of downstairs rooms. Much of the water came through the town’s western defences, but a thirty-foot breach was opened at Cheyney Rock, with “great slabs of concrete being torn away as though by a high-explosive bomb”.
In “An Unfathomable Ship”, Johnson had described how the devastation of that year still haunted Sheerness a quarter of a century later — a memory but also a dire prospect that “might well return, bringing its waterlogged homes, drowned sheep, flooded telephone connection boxes, short-circuited power lines, burst gas pipes, and disappointing valuations from insurance companies”. And all that despite the reassurances of the Duchess of Kent, who had arrived on the scene a few days after the flood. Clad in a “clover pink fur-lined tweed coat, brown hat and trim Russian boots”, she had stepped ashore at the Sheerness dockyard before touring the island and promising the impossible to locals who knew better: “I will see that things are put right”.5
That job, as Johnson was now finding out, had been taken up more consequentially by one of the Kent River Authority’s leading engineers. A modernist whose customary materials were shingle, marram grass and concrete rather than paint or words, Roland Berkeley Thorn was a pioneering figure in the rethinking of the county’s sea defences following the fatal surge of 1953. He would draw heavily on his Kentish experience in The Design of Sea Defence Works, a textbook in which he set out to establish “a satisfactory theoretical basis” that would at last allow sea defence engineers to avoid the “costly failures” caused by the “trial and error methods” of the past.6 Preferring the scientific “principles and findings of coastal hydraulics” as expounded and tested by, once again, the government’s Hydraulics Research Station in Wallingford, he specified ways of calculating every aspect of a wave’s movement, be it reflection, refraction or swash. He also tried to solve the key of all mysteries by establishing how waves might be calculated to conspire not just with tides but with weather systems too.
When it came to Sheerness, Thorn and his fellow engineers knew there was work to be done. Tim Kermode, who joined Thorn’s team as a graduate engineer in 1974, remembers that they were at that time still operating in the climate established by the Waverley Committee on Coastal Flooding, set up by the government after the floods of 1953. This had restated many of the demands of the pre-war Bledisloe Commission, recommending higher standards of protection for sea defences around populated and important agricultural areas, the development of an adequate early warning system, and an increase in the maximum “precept” that river boards might raise from local authorities as a contribution towards the cost of sea defences. It had also demanded urgent investigation into the possibility of placing a barrier across the Thames to protect London. Since it was actually understood from the start that a closed Thames barrier might increase sea levels in the estuary, it was also accepted that the defences downriver from the barrier had to be both strengthened and raised on both shores
In Kent, the plan was to extend these improvements all the way from the barrier to the Isle of Grain. Although Sheerness lay further to the east across the Medway, it too was singled out for attention as a low-lying “cell” that could only be defended by provision of a more adequate sea wall running continuously for some six miles from Scrapsgate at the eastern end of Marine Parade, all the way round the town and former dockyard, and then south along the Medway, past the now extinguished settlement of West Minster where so many breaches had occurred since the nineteenth century, to Queenborough. By the end of 1974, when the Johnsons arrived in the town, the responsible bodies were already embarking on this Sheppey Sea Defences Improvement Scheme, announced by the Southern Water Authority a year or two earlier. £10 million would be spent defending Sheerness and Queenborough. The scheme, which was intended to proceed at an expenditure of £1 million a year, was approved for grant aid by the government in 1975.
Between Scrapsgate and the pub named the Ship on Shore, a mile or so to the east of Johnsons’s house, Thorn’s engineers were content to bolster the defences with a process known as “shingle recharge”, in which split-bottom barges were used to release shingle onto the beach at high tide so that it could be bulldozed into position when the sea retreated.7 In Sheerness itself, however, “massive sea walls” remained necessary even if some locals, including the residents of Marine Parade, disliked the prospect. The sea clinched the matter soon enough.
In January 1977, it was the turn of Mr Henry Bugden to find himself in the local paper: eighty years old and disabled, he’d been obliged to stand on his sticks in the dark in knee-deep water for two and a half hours before being rescued from his living room in Estuary Road.8 A year later, on 6 January 1978, the Sheerness Times Guardian tried to reassure its readers with an article headed “Tide turns on Sheppey sea battle”, which commended the progress being made on a £220,000 re-engineering of the sea wall near the Yacht Club by Cheyney Rock, further East along Marine Parade. Only a few days later, on 13 January, the paper was forced to return to the more familiar type of headline: “When the Sea Vented its Anger”. “Forewarned by police, people had tried once again to barricade their doorways with anything that came to hand. Great chunks of concrete were chewed out of the sea defences near the town playground, and debris was strewn along the length of overwhelmed Marine Parade”. Once again, the island’s reporters searched up emblematic stories: such as the “distraught woman” who was seen “staggering away” from her ground floor flat in Short Street when the water reached the top of her cooker. They also tried to wring a few drops of humour out of the misery: who, for example, was the man who waded up to two Times Guardian reporters as they stood in three feet of water at 4am, and asked: “Can you direct me to the railway station?”
Johnson had described the aftermath in “An Unfathomable Ship”: “After the flood of January 1978, the residents of Sheppey were given a promise by an elected official that the island would never again be flooded as long as he was in office, and if it did he would resign. They had almost twelve months to watch the sea promenade being made walkable again, for the sake of the daytrippers from London, and to wonder why the flood wall was being reinforced in such a secretive way, with construction work on it remaining invisible even to the keenest eye”.
The flood of January 1978 had actually goaded the Southern Water Authority into speeding up their plans for sea defences on Sheppey, raising an extra £6 million from the government for works over the next two financial years. The engineers had decided to bring about some immediate improvement to the existing sea wall running along Marine Parade, and they were by no means just acting for the sake of the day-trippers as Johnson had suggested. Tim Kermode remembers there being an obvious risk of an exceptional tide simply washing over the promenade forming the roofs of the reinforced concrete garages facing Marine Parade below. The best the engineers could do in the short term was to solidify the railings running along the landward edge of the garages by encasing their lower part in concrete. This “dwarf wall” had to be light, given the poor condition of the garages below, but at least it would not be an ordinary vertical wall like the pitiful thing that had been stuck on the seaward side of the promenade in the years before 1914. Though temporary, it was designed on scientific principles with help from the busy exper
ts at the Hydraulics Research Station.
If this “dwarf wall” really was constructed in a “secretive” manner, as Johnson suggests, this would have been to avoid irritating the residents of Marine Parade who, as Kermode recalls, strongly resented this further encroachment on their sea view. Writing from “Sheerness (Shivering-on-Sea)” to his American publisher, Helen Wolff, on 16 March 1978, Johnson revealed himself to be among the unimpressed: “Sheerness underwent a flood in January, and the residents of the low-lying parts of the town brought rescue, and milk, to each other in whatever boats the flood hadn’t smashed to pieces. Our part of town, although not in as much danger, has now been given additional protection in the form of an almost two-foot high shoe for the promenade’s railing. So you would not have a view of the sea from the guest room any more, and I must ask you to consider one storey higher”.9
None of this, as Johnson would soon enough have reason to explain in “An Unfathomable Ship”, would prevent the return of the sea:
On December 30, 1978, at 11 p.m., shortly before an unusually high tide predicted in advance by the official tide tables, water did in fact splash over the much-scrutinized little wall, and the authorities had learned so much in the meantime that the alarm was not sounded until two hours later — with loudspeakers, not the promised sirens. With a predictable storm behind it, the hale and hearty water went for a vigorous stroll about the island, made itself at home in more than five hundred homes and businesses, blew fuses, burst gas pipes, swamped telephone connections, and spoiled an enormous quantity of things that could otherwise have been used as food and clothing. And then, since it had had such an easy time of it, the water came back again on the 31st, in the afternoon, wiping out all of the morning’s pumping and cleaning efforts and contaminating the farmland and pastureland even more thoroughly. This time, again, only sheep died as an immediate result. But the insurance companies withdrew from a region where they would have to fork over an enormous amount of money whenever the weather decided so. The affected parties will have to pay over a quarter million pounds more in property taxes as a result of the new damages, starting in January. And once again, an investigatory commission will ask how this could have happened, and numerous people will promise that this time they are going to learn a very important lesson from the whole affair. (That resignation? Hasn’t happened yet.)10
In some houses in Sheerness, the damage from the floods of 1978 would remain visible for ages. Fifteen years later, the performance artist Ewan Forster, who was then preparing a never realised project connected to Johnson’s residence in the town, had dealings with a woman who worked in tourist information on the island. Invited to the house she shared with her son (remembered as a composer of TV theme tunes), he heard of the pair’s annual holidays in various Eastern Bloc countries. He also remembers that they had a collection of communist posters, brought back from these partisan vacations, which they had pasted over the lower area of their interior walls in an attempt to cover up salt marks left over from the flood.11
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The floods of 1978 really were the limit for the Sheppey Chamber of Trade and Industry, which was not going to settle for makeshift or temporary solutions, even one as scientifically tested as the “shoe” Kermode and his colleagues had fitted to the railings along Marine Parade. As the president explained in that year’s “Christmas message” to the people of Sheppey, the Chamber had been tireless in campaigning for an end to Sheppey’s trials as “the neglected area for adequate sea defence”.12 Obviously, the flooding was bad for the residents, but it also hindered the island’s economic development, since nobody wanted to move to a place that might suddenly find itself underwater. The Chamber of Trade had beseeched “all the authorities concerned” including the Queen. It was time for a proper wall, and in the New Year its leaders would be joining an island deputation to meet “the appropriate authority whose responsibility is the funding of such defences”.
The situation was also judged unacceptable by Roger Moate, who represented Sheppey as the Conservative MP for Faversham. He may have tired, over the years, of the press-stoked alarms about the Richard Montgomery, but on 25 January 1979, he stood up in the House of Commons to declaim about the floods in Sheerness. He condemned the Meteorological Office for trying to justify their failure to issue any warning before the recent floods on the grounds that they were due to “unusual weather phenomena” causing unpredicted “wave actions”.13 The Right Honourable Member wanted both the House and the Minister to understand “what it is like for a town to live in fear, knowing that the only defence against the North Sea is a Victorian sea wall some 6 ft lower than it should be”. Governments and Whitehall might dither, but “Alas, the cruel sea does not wait on committees”. It must be recognised that “The one and only thing that will satisfy the island and cannot be refused in all humanity is the fastest possible construction of a sea wall”. Given the rising sea level he could accurately note that “much of the land area of Sheerness” was now “2 metres below the level of the annual spring tide”.
In support of his demand for a nice, big, reassuringly visible wall, Moate announced that he had received many letters describing the “suffering, loss, hardship and heartbreak” in Sheerness. One had come from the Bishop of Maidstone, who declared himself “desperately sorry for those who had only just completed the work of drying out and redecorating their houses and now have to begin all over again”. The bishop also pointed out that it was the poor, elderly and vulnerable who were most affected, since “the roads affected house many in low-income groups who are unable to move to a safer place”. In the past Moate had tried not to be too “alarmist”, but the latest floods had “swept away” his inhibitions, and he urged his colleagues to understand that “hundreds of lives” were at risk and that “no other town of comparable size in Britain” was “exposed to such danger of flooding as Sheerness”.
In answer to Moate’s charges, the Minister for Agriculture, E.S. Bishop, had pointed out that other towns were also facing inundation: far from being completely exceptional, Sheerness was in the same category as Wisbech and King’s Lynn in the fens, other towns on the east coast and, for that matter, parts of London too. Even so, this agitation did eventually produce results, which were in turn to be a nightmare for Johnson. Having complained about the inaction of the authorities, he now experienced the consequences of their awakening.
The new wall would enclose the often-flooded Georgian houses of Neptune Terrace, and extend east along the entire length of Marine Parade. Started in 1980, the construction continued through the last months of Johnson’s life. It was given extra drama, as the artist Martin Harris recalled, by a discovery made in the garages and storerooms under the western end of the promenade opposite Johnson’s house. Some of these spaces had been used by the council to keep deck chairs that might be hired out to visitors, a declining trade that had been taken over by a lone operator who stepped in, somewhat piratically Harris thought, after the council had abandoned the trade as insufficiently worth the time of its staff. Others, however, were found to be filled with unexploded ordnance left over from the Second World War — opening the way for further disturbances, as people started amusing themselves by “chucking the stuff about” and contriving noisy explosions on the beach.
Like the designers of “Puddicombe’s Folly”, Southern Water’s engineers were aware of the tension between protection and amenity value, and how easily one could diminish the other. They started by demolishing and removing the existing wall with its garages and storerooms, and then preparing a new site for the replacement, which would at least be set further back from the road to create a wider pedestrian area along Marine Parade. On the seaward side the engineers integrated the new structure into the stepped revetment of its predecessor; on the landward side above Marine Parade the new wall was topped with a “wave wall” significantly higher than its temporary predecessor. The aim of this latest view-blocking product of modern hydraulic engineering was to force each
incoming wave to roll back on itself as it crested and to do so within the height of the wall — enclosing a cylinder of air that was duly photographed and studied during the Hydraulic Research Institute’s trials.14 For the engineers, the rolled-back crest of these strictly managed waves may well have articulated the hidden principles of hydraulic mathematics, in which a wave is conceived as “a perturbation that travels in space and time”.15 It was not for them to consider the implications of their exactly theorised wall for the more poetic “secret” that Johnson had ascribed to the free and unrestrained crests of the Atlantic waves breaking forward as they approached the New Jersey shore in the opening paragraph of Anniversaries.
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Even to the partisan enthusiasts at the Cement and Concrete Association, it was obvious that building “a prominent sea-defence wall in front of small-scale terraced houses of the Georgian and Victorian periods in the conservation area of a seaside town” could be a sure “recipe for disaster”.16 To mitigate this problem, Southern Water and its consultant engineers decided to bring in a firm of architects to work on the landward side of the scheme. The job was handed to Garnham Wright Associates, a firm chosen for its previous experience in designing and casting concrete in a manner that might improve the appearance of large blast-resistant buildings required by petrochemical companies. As Jack Garnham Wright’s daughter Penny Pope remembers, their design for Marine Parade’s wall was intended to address two problems. First, that a long surface of smooth concrete would be both boring to look at and very easily disfigured by graffiti. Second, that, even though a new pedestrian space had been created by setting the wall further back from the road than its predecessor, the wall would remain a looming and formidable thing, which should be encouraged, if only by visual trickery, to “step away” from the houses opposite.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 61