Many of us can recall the Great Storm of 1987. I slept right through it, whilst staying with my sister at her house on the Downs, south of Oxford. When I awoke it was a surprise to see the house surrounded by hundreds of fallen trees – none of which had touched the house or our cars. It was described as the worst storm in living memory; actually, it was an extratropical cyclone. Going back to before the memory of anyone living, there was a far worse storm in the early 18th century. One that it would seem makes 1987 look as if it was just a bit breezy.
On November 26 1703, a terrible and destructive extratropical cyclone hit the southern part of England, with widespread damage as far as the west country and Midlands. Modern analysis has likened it to a category 2 hurricane. So terrible was the damage that the Church of England said that it was the vengeance of God for “the crying sins of this nation”. The government’s response was to make January 19 1704 into a day of fasting, the message being that it “loudly calls for the deepest and most solemn humiliation of our people”.
The damage really was catastrophic. In London alone, more than 2,000 big chimney stacks were blown down. The sheet lead on the roof of Westminster Abbey was stripped off by the force of the wind. At the main royal residence, St. James’s Palace, chimney stacks fell, along with part of the roof. Queen Anne was obliged to take shelter in the cellar to escape the danger. There were real waves on the Thames in the centre of London, raising its level to six feet higher than it had been in recorded history and wrecking some 5,000 homes on its banks. In the Pool of London, the area of the river east of London Bridge, about 700 ships were jammed together by the force of the wind. The floods in London drowned 22 people whilst 21 were killed and 200 injured by the debris whirling around or falling on them. In Cambridge, the pinnacles on the roof of King’s College chapel were blown down.
The west country was inundated with floods, especially in the Bristol area. Several hundred people drowned in the Somerset Levels and thousands of sheep and cattle. The land was unusable for years afterwards, because of the amount of salt it absorbed. Travel and communication were hampered by the loss of bridges. So intense and invasive was the flooding that one ship was washed 15 miles inland from where it had been in harbour. There was terrible destruction in the small city of Wells, with a part of the cathedral’s mediaeval west window blown in, and the bishop, Richard Kidder, and his wife, killed in their bed by two chimney stacks smashing through the roof of the Bishop’s Palace and onto the bed where they were asleep. Windmills were especially vulnerable, with their great sails designed to catch the wind. Even with the brakes set, the wind set the sails spinning, the friction causing their wooden mechanisms to catch fire and burn the mill down. Altogether 400 mills were destroyed in one way or another. Further west, one of the towers of Llandaff Cathedral at Cardiff was severely damaged. Bristol, Portsmouth, Cowes and Plymouth were shattered by the storm. Off the coast of Plymouth, the Eddystone lighthouse was blown and washed away, taking with it six men, including its builder, Henry Winstanley.
If the devastation on land was terrible, at sea it was almost unimaginable. HMS Association, the flagship of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell, broke free of its mooring in Harwich, on the east coast, and was blown by the wind as far as Gothenburg in Sweden. Off the coast of Deal, the Goodwin Sands were the scene of a naval disaster. A flotilla was returning to harbour, after helping the Archduke Charles do battle with the French navy during the War of the Spanish Succession. Archduke Charles was claimant to the Spanish throne. At least three Royal Navy ships foundered on the sands, with the loss of about 1,500 lives. The entire Channel Squadron foundered. Daniel Defoe wrote that the storm was God’s punishment for poor Protestant action against the Catholic armies of Europe during that war.
HMS Vanguard was sunk in Chatham dock. Along the south coast, the Resolution was wrecked at Pevensey whilst the Newcastle was washed out of harbour at Spithead and wrecked off the coast near Chichester. It is estimated that the Royal Navy lost 300 ships along the south coast. Further west, 130 merchant ships, together with a Royal Navy escort of six ships, were forced to take shelter at Milford Haven. Within 24 hours 30 ships were sunk.
There is no accurate number of known dead from the storm, but it has been estimated at between 10 – 30,000. Daniel Defoe, writing in 1704 said it was “the tempest that destroyed woods and forests all over England. No pen could describe it, nor thought conceive it unless by one in the extremity of it”. He said of Portsmouth that it, “looked as if the enemy had sackt them and were most miserably torn to pieces”. The storm became the first piece of weather news to be reported nationwide. Newspapers were published with details of what had happened and how people had been killed. Those stories included a ship being lifted up and taken onto land by a tornado and a cow being whirled away and later found in a tree.
As so often happens after a disaster, the price of the goods needed to repair the damage increased considerably. As an example, before the storm, ordinary roof tiles cost £1 for 1,000. This increased to £6 per thousand, whilst more elaborate tiles known as pantiles went from £2.50 per thousand to £10. There is money to be made from the misery of others. The increased prices were beyond the means of many, so it wasn’t unusual for houses not to be re-roofed during the winter, or for some, a tarpaulin had to suffice. The overall price of repairs nationally was put at £2 million, more than half a billion now.
Image Credits: John Wray/flickr https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:After_The_Storm_(5887924274).jpg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en .