Peter Beckerton made the gallant sacrifice of his life rescuing neighbours from the floods. Here STEVE SNELLING tells the incredible story of how the rest of his family survived against the odds

Never in her life had Hazel Bolton heard a gale like it. There was something almost demonic about its wild, high-pitched whine as it ripped and ravaged anything standing in its merciless path.

After the storm, Vera Beckerton returns to her bungalow, where only the presence of a boat had saved her family. Although badly damaged, it was among the few left standing.

“As long as I live I don’t think I’ll ever forget that noise,” she says. “It was so ferocious and so terrifying. It’s hard to find words adequate to describe how frightening it all was.”
Hazel was just 12 when the worst storm in living memory turned her life upside down.
Adopted as a three-year-old by Fred and Vera Beckerton, she’d been living with them and their sons, Peter, 19, Michael, nine, and John, seven, in their beach bungalow at Snettisham for more than six months without so much as a second thought that their proximity to the sea might one day be a source of sudden, life-threatening danger.

“I absolutely loved it there,” recalls Hazel, who now lives near Reading, in Berkshire. “We sailed and messed around in boats and we had the beach as our backyard.

“Of course, we had high tides and high winds, but we were used to them. We had a big, glass-enclosed verandah at the front of the bungalow, I suppose you’d call it a conservatory these days, and we’d take the rugs and anything else off the floor and, perhaps, you’d get an inch or an inch-and-a-half of water in there. But that was all.”
And it wasn’t as if they were on the shoreline. In normal circumstances, they were separated from the sea by a large garden and a broad expanse of shingle that sloped down towards the water’s edge some 200 yards, maybe more, away.

In any case, by the standards of the timber shacks freckling the beach at Snettisham, their home was a little palace, substantial in size and construction, complete with its own “windmill”-generated electricity supply. The Beckertons’ cosy bungalow consisted of three bedrooms, with additional bunk beds in a neighbouring building known to the children as the “log cabin”, a sitting room with a piano, a bathroom, an enormous pantry and a kitchen with hot water provided by the Rayburn cooker. And, unusually for the period, it also boasted a television.

“We’d only had it a short time,” says Hazel, “and I remember on the morning of the storm I was so excited because the reading on our wind-powered generator was on “full’.” Suitably inspired, she’d invited two foster children, 11-year-old Shirley Baxter and nine-year-old Michael Bryan, who were living in a neighbouring bungalow, to come over and watch TV.
They were still glued to the screen when Hazel’s elder brother, Peter, returned with word that the tide was running higher than he’d ever seen it.

“We immediately began lifting up the rugs in the verandah,” recalls Hazel. “And I was still busy doing that when my mother said, ‘I think we’ll do the same in the bedrooms, just in case it comes in’. At that time, I didn’t think any more of it. When you’re a child, you just do as you’re told. You’re not worried. You don’t foresee any danger. So, I just went on putting things on beds and tables, while the rest of the children carried on watching the television.”

Vera Beckerton and the five children she helped to save. Hazel, who was 12 at the time, is standing on her left.

That air of unreality continued even as her brother, Peter, and father set out in an unavailing attempt to reach and bring back two elderly neighbours, one of them an invalid, from their frail bungalow half a mile away.

But any doubts about the ferocity of the storm were soon removed by the sudden return of Fred Beckerton. Realising the danger to his own family, he had made the agonising decision to retrace his steps, while his son pressed on alone.

By then, the sea was already washing over the shingle bank and pouring through the gaps between the bungalows. The Beckertons’ car was only a short walk away in a garage, their own having been converted into a kennel for the family’s three dogs, all of which were now sitting on the kitchen table. But any hope of out-running the surge had already vanished.
“The speed at which it all happened was unbelievable,” recalls Hazel. “Suddenly, there was just an almighty bang and the sound of breaking glass and I could see water pouring through into the bungalow.”

Their only hope of salvation now lay not inside the building, but outside, in the shape of a leaky old rowing boat called Annie.

“Annie was wonderful,” recalls Hazel. “We used to mess about in her on the gravel pits behind the bungalow. And every winter we’d tar Annie’s bottom. We’d bring her up to the back of the bungalow and sit her on supports, up-turned, ready for the tarring. And that’s how we came to be saved.

“When the sea burst in, mother and father got Annie, quickly turned her over and threaded a single cotton sheet through the mast-hole and fixed it to the back door of the bungalow. At the same time, we children were instructed to put our warmest clothes on, macs, scarves, gloves, pixie hoods, caps, whatever we could find, and climb into the boat.”

It was, Hazel estimates, around 6.30pm on January 31, 1953, and, in no time at all, they were floating in an icy, black ocean, with Fred and Vera Beckerton waist-deep in water, clinging desperately to the two ends of the boat to keep it steady and to prevent it being swept away from the bungalow.

“By this time,” recalls Hazel, “the waves were starting to come over the roof of the bungalow and it wasn’t long before the mast that generated our electricity came crashing down. Everything was breaking up around us. There was debris everywhere. It was pitch black and it was so cold, so deathly cold. And, of course, the boat was constantly filling with water. I was trying to bail it out as fast as I could with a cake tin, but as fast as I bailed it filled again.”

Incredibly, the younger children showed no sign of panic. “They were absolutely marvellous,” says Hazel. “Petrified, of course. I remember looking at Johnny, who was sitting next to me, and he looked so frightened, as we all were, and I shouted, ‘what’s the trouble?’ and he just said, ‘the water’s going down my neck’. So I took off my scarf and wrapped it round him.”

Not long after, feeling around in the pocket of her coat, she found a small torch. “I got it out and shone it on my mother, and I thought she was dead. She was just standing there, her mouth open, her hands gripping the boat as though they were welded to it. I was so frightened I stood up, something we’d been told we mustn’t do for fear of overturning it, and just screamed and screamed at her.

“Much later, she told me that if I hadn’t screamed like that she thought she’d have been a goner. How on earth she and my father stood it I’ll never know. They must have been in that freezing water for the best part of six hours, buffeted by the wind and bashed by debris.”

By the time the wind began to lose some of its brutal force and the sea started slowly to subside, they were all numb with cold and terrified beyond imagination but they were still alive and on a night filled with so many human tragedies that was in itself a miracle.
“I think it must have been about one in the morning, though I can’t be sure, that we managed to get into the log cabin, next to our bungalow, and found some dry blankets which mother and father wrapped us in to try and get us warm.

“Then, after we’d calmed down a bit and stopped shivering, they said we’d better try to reach a safer area. The home we knew wasn’t a home any more. It was full of gravel and debris and water. So, we all wrapped up and started walking northwards, towards the gravel pits. But, of course, it wasn’t like walking along a road. The sea had churned the ground and washed away whole bungalows. It was very rough going.”

Stumbling on, they managed after a struggle to reach the pits, where they took shelter in one of the crane cabs. But just as Hazel was climbing inside she noticed what seemed like a light, flickering in the distance. “I tried to tell my mum, but she told me in no uncertain terms not to be such an idiot. But I was so sure it was a light that I just ran off towards it. It was a stupid thing to do, but that’s what I did and I ran straight into PC Nobbs.”

Henry Nobbs had been hard at it since dusk, improvising and leading the village’s rescue effort. When the water retreated, leaving a waist-high lake in the pits behind the shingle bank, he had set off, trailing a rope-line to help guide any survivors back to safety.
He still had a coil of rope round his shoulder when he suddenly found himself confronted by this 12-year-old girl.

“He couldn’t believe it,” recalls Hazel. “He couldn’t believe there was anyone still alive out on the beach. I tried to tell him where we all were, but the wind was so loud I couldn’t make myself heard and, in the end, I got hold of his hand and dragged him to the crane where the others were sheltering.”

Anxious about the threat posed by the next high tide, PC Nobbs decided to get the family back as quickly as possible. “To make sure none of us got lost in the water, he linked us all together with the rope and led us back,” says Hazel. “It wasn’t easy. I remember Johnny, he was so brave, trudging along with his Wellingtons full of water and me trying to lift him. But eventually we got to the village hall.

“They were amazed to see us. They thought anyone living on the beach would have perished. But they were all so kind to us. They gave us porridge to warm us up and I remember asking a lady who was serving it to save some for my brother, Peter, because he’d be along later.” But Peter Beckerton never made it back. He died along with the elderly couple whose foster children, Shirley Baxter and Michael Bryan, had been saved by the quick thinking and selfless bravery displayed by Fred and Vera Beckerton.

The family’s bungalow, much damaged and swamped with debris, survived, too, though the Beckertons did not return to live there. Instead, they gave it to Snettisham Beach Sailing Club as a temporary base – their own having been destroyed – and it is still standing to this day.

After the flood, the Beckertons moved back to King’s Lynn, where they owned a block of flats, and later, Vera, whose courage that night earned her a British Empire Medal, had a new home built at Ingoldisthorpe.

“When we arrived in Lynn, we had nothing to wear. No clothes. Nothing,” says Hazel. “I remember going with a friend of my mother’s to the WRVS to get clothes for everyone.
“We’d lost our home and our possessions, including the car which was washed into one of the pits. And, do you know, my parents didn’t get a single penny in compensation. The insurance company said it was an ‘act of God’.

“But then again, I was lucky. As well as my brother, I lost a lot of friends, not only at Snettisham, but at Hunstanton, and had it not been for my parents’ bravery I wouldn’t be here talking to you...”