The floods inspired many acts of self-sacrifice. Here, Steve Snelling looks back at the story of a teenager who died trying to save his neighbours.

Peter Beckerton: died trying to rescue his neighbours

Peter Beckerton was a good neighbour. Considerate, kind and willing to put himself out to help people in trouble. As a teenager, he had a reputation as someone who would do anything for anyone. And it was that generosity of spirit which would cost him his life on the storm-battered beach that had become his playground.

He died, aged 19, while making a vain attempt to rescue an elderly invalid and his wife as the sea reduced vulnerable bungalows to matchwood along the Norfolk coast near the village of Snettisham.

Yet what appeared then, and still does now, an act of sublime courage in the face of appalling odds, would, undoubtedly, have been dismissed by the lad himself as nothing exceptional.

“It was so typical of him,” his sister, Hazel Bolton says, a note of understandable pride in her voice. “That was just the sort of thing he would do. It was nothing out of the ordinary. As a little boy, Peter was always rescuing things...”

He had a particular soft spot for animals. While living in King’s Lynn, where the Beckertons ran a hotel, Peter collected strays like other youngsters collected comics. “At one time,” recalls Hazel, “we had 14 cats in the hotel, because whenever Peter saw a cat in the street, he assumed it was lost and brought it home.”

By the time he was a teenager, that urge to help those in distress had been extended to include novice sailors caught out by the sea’s changing moods. The Beckertons had moved to Snettisham in 1952, converting their substantial beach bungalow from a weekend retreat into a temporary home to help Peter’s mother recover from a serious operation.

It was a move which had allowed the teenager a chance to indulge his passion for sailing. “We all sailed,” recalls Hazel, “my two brothers and I, but Peter particularly was a wonderful sailor. He was a member of Snettisham Beach Sailing Club and, as young as he was, he’d won a number of trophies.”

When he wasn’t “messing about” in boats, Peter, remembered by his sister as “a happy-go-lucky boy with wavy fair hair, blue sparkly eyes and a smile to match”, worked as an apprentice carpenter with a firm of builders in Hunstanton, cycling the few miles back and forth each day.

The sea wrought havoc among Snettisham's beach homes

But sailing remained his main interest. “He loved it,” says Hazel. “He helped other people learn to sail and if anyone got in trouble out on the Wash, he and his friends would push a boat out and go and rescue them.”

By the New Year, however, Peter had found another outlet for his caring instinct – helping and watching out for his elderly neighbours who, like his own parents, had taken in foster children.

Albert Walton, in particular, was a source of worry. The 64-year-old former electrician had been in poor health for some time. But by January things had grown worse and he was confined to bed.

On the day of the great surge, Peter had visited the Waltons as usual. And it was while returning to his own home, around teatime, that he had the first inkling of trouble. Hurrying back with the howling wind tugging at his coat, he fairly burst into the bungalow which until that moment had been filled with a near-party atmosphere as the Beckertons, Vera and Fred, their daughter Hazel and two foster children, Johnny and Michael, were joined by two youngsters who were being looked after by the Waltons.

“We were watching television, which was something of a rarity then, when Peter came back,” recalls Hazel. “He turned to dad and said, ‘the tide’s higher than I’ve ever seen it. We’d better lift the rugs up’.”

Even then, there was no sense of imminent danger. After all, minor flooding was an occupational hazard of living on the beach, albeit separated by a large garden and a broad band of shingle which fell away for the best part of 200 yards towards the water’s edge.
But, as Hazel helped her mother lift rugs and furniture, Peter kept a wary eye on the sea. Driven on by gale-force winds, it was pounding the beach with unfathomable ferocity as it clawed its way steadily up the shingle bank. This was clearly no ordinary storm and his thoughts turned immediately to the Waltons.

Without anyone to help them, small, frail, bedridden Albert Walton would be trapped, unable to escape the sea’s rush. Hazel recalls Peter turning to his father and saying, “It’s getting far worse. I think, if it’s all right, I’ll bring Mr Walton down to the bungalow”.

“He then asked me to get his thighboots, which I did, and he and my dad set off to fetch Mr Walton. Or, at least, that was the plan. I think Peter intended to carry him back, while Mrs Walton, who could walk quite adequately, came with them.”

But things didn’t work out that way. “The next thing I knew,” recalls Hazel, “dad had come back. In fact, he’d been sent back, actually. Apparently Peter had told him, ‘you go back and I’ll carry on. I can manage Mr Walton on my own. I’ll give him a piggy back’.”

Unbeknown to any of them, they were to be the last words any of the family heard Peter Beckerton utter.

His father’s last sight of him was a lonely figure, head bowed, forging on through the icy gale, with the sea surging about him, as he battled on towards the Waltons’ exposed bungalow.

“By then,” says Hazel, “I’m sure he knew how bad things were and, knowing Peter, he probably thought it best that dad went back to look after mum and us children, while he took care of the Waltons.”

What followed as the tidal wave smashed an 80-yard-wide hole in the shingle bank and engulfed all those beach bungalows that lay in its path must remain a matter of conjecture, although not to Hazel.

She is convinced that Peter reached the Waltons’ bungalow before the sea overwhelmed them and washed them away. “You see,” she says, “his body, which was one of the last to be recovered some six weeks later, was found in the gravel pit, opposite the Waltons’ bungalow.

“And it was a strange thing, but after the flood, Peter’s pet dog, a spaniel called Judy, wouldn’t leave the beach. So, my father and uncle built her a kennel down there, and they went down every day to feed her and to look for Peter. And, do you know, when they eventually found Peter’s body, it was lying opposite Judy’s kennel.”

For his last, selfless act of bravery, sacrificing his own life in a desperate attempt to save others, Peter Beckerton was awarded the Albert Medal, one of the country’s highest posthumous honours.

The boy who had always put others before himself was buried in Snettisham churchyard, though such was the pain of loss his mother could not bear the thought of seeing his name on a gravestone during her lifetime.

It was not until 1988, 35 years after the tragedy and three years after Vera Beckerton’s death, that his mother’s will allowed for a headstone to be raised to mark the last resting place of one of the East Coast flood’s youngest heroes.