The hurricanes of 1987 and
the floods of 1953 . . . all terrifyingly memorable
events. But for truly ferocious weather, we have
to look back 300 years this week to the Great Storm
of November 1703, a benchmark date in the records
of British weather.
Reporter MARK NICHOLLS Pictures DENISE BRADLEY.
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| Peril on the seas –
Rear Admiral Beaumont is lost on Godwin Sands. |
The weather had been foul for weeks. Storms had lashed
the coast, strong winds buffeted large tracts of the
country and East Anglia had stood square on in the face
of the tempest.
Long-standing structures seemed ever more vulnerable
as the weather showed no mercy.
Yet 300 years ago, when weather forecasting came down
to little more than personal experience, few could have
predicted what the night of November 26/27 had in store
for a fearful nation already feeling battered and bruised
by the elements.
When it was over, thousands of lives had been lost,
including 8-10,000 at sea. Church steeples had been
toppled and across the Fens a number of windmills stood
as blazing beacons. The friction from the uncontrolled
spinning of sails had set the landmarks alight.
It remains difficult to directly compare the ferocity
of 1703 with other storms that have delivered havoc
across the UK, such as that of 1987.
Buildings are now constructed differently, ships more
able to withstand the seas and, despite the now famous
weather forecasting blunder of that evening 16 years
ago, communications over imminent bad weather are better
than they were three centuries ago.
Loss of life and structural damage are not accurate
criteria for comparison. But as one leading weather
expert for the eastern region, Jim Bacon of Weatherquest,
states: “The storm of 1703 was in a class of its
own.”
Yet we do know significantly more of the storm that
night than of many other weather phenomena from that
period, particularly of its aftermath.
Accounts were written, parish records refer to it, the
devastation – particularly to the naval fleet
– was referred to in Parliament, and there were
ships’ logs and contemporary newspaper reports,
which survive.
One of the prime reasons for the amount of detail we
have on the impact of the storm lies with author Daniel
Defoe, who decided to write an account of it.
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| The title page of Daniel Defoe’s The Storm. |
His book, The Storm, was published in 1704 and is as
close to a definitive record as we get.
“What he did for the time was quite a novel idea,”
explains writer Martin Brayne.
“Defoe put adverts in newspapers asking people
to tell him of their experiences of the storm and what
happened where they lived.
“He got a lot of people writing to him from all
over the country saying what the storms had been like
for them. This had never been done before and at the
time it was quite a novel piece of journalism and provided
him with a large number of eye witness accounts on just
how bad the storm was.”
Mr Brayne is responsible for a more recent account,
as author of a book published earlier this year called
The Greatest Storm – Britain’s Night of
Destruction, November 1703.
The storm happened on Friday night, November 26, 1703,
and lasted into the Saturday morning of November 27.
“The storm was significant,” explains Mr
Brayne, “perhaps because of the number of deaths.
Daniel Defoe puts that figure at 8000, though we cannot
be at all sure how accurate that figure is.
“What we also find of the Great Storm is the kind
of structural damage that occurred. It seems to be significantly
greater than has been the case, for example, of the
storm of October 1987 or of January 1990.
“Those storms did not bring the stories of steeples
falling down or church windows being blown in that we
have from cross the country in 1703, when East Anglia
was hit on a terrible scale.
“Take for example the church at Stowmarket where
the steeple had been up for only about 30 years, replacing
an earlier medieval structure. That was fairly new but
it came down. We also find examples of not only old
windmills, but recently erected ones, being demolished.
We have evidence that it was not just very old buildings
that suffered.
“There are several cases of windmills in the Fens
built as part of the drainage system where the sails
went round so quickly that the friction caused them
to catch fire and whole windmills went up in flames.”
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| 1953 – flood damage at Sea Palling –
but how does it compare to 1703? |
In East Anglia the wind speed was variable, but there
were gusts in excess of 100mph. The damage was equally
variable. Norwich does not seem to have been particularly
badly damaged while Cambridge, Beccles, Stowmarket and
the Essex coast suffered terribly.
“Some places escaped without too much damage,
while others were almost flattened,” explained
Mr Brayne.
Loddon suffered a different fate.
At some point during the storm, a fire broke out. Normally
villagers would rush from their homes laden with buckets
of water to attempt to douse the flames but because
the weather was so violent, no-one ventured out and
the flames, fanned by terrifying gusts, spread quickly.
Villagers then fled as their homes were threatened by
flames, rather than tackle the fire.
There were many victims across Norfolk. Among them were
Lady Elinor Drury and her niece Mary Fisher, who were
killed as they lay side by side in bed when a stack
of chimneys fell through the roof of their home at Riddlesworth.
Memorial stones to them are set in the nave at St Peter’s
Church, Riddlesworth. One reads: “In Memory of
the Pious and virtuous Mrs MARY FISHER Whose Soul tooke
her Flight to heaven in ye Furious hurricane on November
ye 27th 1703.”
The Riddlesworth parish register records that:
The Ladye Elinor Drury Buryed Nov. 30:
1703:
Mary Fisher her Neece buryed ye same day.
It is from many similar parish records that we get
the finer detail of the great storm.
As Mr Brayne adds: “Very often clergymen would
make notes of what happened on that date and quite a
lot of them would appear alongside records of people
that died in the storm.”
There were also discussions in Parliament of the number
of naval ships lost. Parliament did not seem concerned
with civilian losses but it was concerned about rescuing
wrecks and stranded ships or replacing those that were
lost. More
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