The Three Fatal Months
The history of gale and flood damage in Norfolk and Suffolk shows a regular pattern of disasters occurring nearly always between January and March, and associated with a northerly gale piling up the water in the North Sea at the spring tides. Often the disasters have been associated with heavy rains inland or with a thaw after a big snowfall. The gale then, preventing the normal fall of the tide, has kept the flood water pent up in the rivers, which, overflowing their banks have inundated thousands of acres, both in the Fens in the west of the two counties and in the Bure, Yare and Waveney valleys in the east.
But whether or not the effect of the gale and high tide has been aggravated by flood water coming down the rivers from inland, it has always spelt danger to the seaports of Yarmouth, Lowestoft and King's Lynn, and to the towns and villages fronting the salt marshes of the north-western and northern coast of Norfolk, from Snettisham round to Cley and Salthouse. The danger to the north and north-west, however, is limited by the fact that high ground lies at the back of the marshes, and the river valleys are small and shallow.
Apart from the flooding of the great agricultural area of the Fens, so much of which lies at or below sea level, the gravest danger is to the east, where all the flat, sandy coast from Happisburgh southwards, through Eccles, Palling, Horsey, Winterton, Hemsby and Caister, to Yarmouth itself, is divided only by sandhills from the basin of the Broads. A big sea breach there could flood the whole of the East Norfolk marsh lands. There is geological evidence that all of this district was once a great bay with two entrances to the sea - one at Yarmouth and one to the Northward - and it is a matter of historical record that in 1805 the sea made a breach a mile wide at Horsey, which was eventually closed by an artificial bank of sand and shingle. There was another breach there in 1897, when the sea flooded thousands of acres of marsh and farm land.
The next great breach at Horsey - still vivid in memory - was on the night of February 12th-13th, 1938, when the combination of northerly gale and spring tide forced a gap 600 yards wide in the sandhills, flooded 15 square miles with salt water, drowned cattle and left villages like Horsey, Somerton and Hickling standing like islands in a new arm of the sea.
At the same time there were floods in the Fens, and ports and seaside resorts all the way round from Hunstanton to Southwold were damaged by the rising sea and the fury of the gale. The harbour works at Lowestoft were breached. Thousands of tons of cliff, together with two unoccupied houses, fell into the sea at Pakefield. In North Norfolk the coast road at Salthouse was flooded and water rushed into the ground floors of houses at Cley and rose above the window-sills.
These other misfortunes, however, were almost forgotten in anxiety over the breach at Horsey, where the sea continued to pour in at every high tide. Two attempts to close it with piles, clay and sands bags failed - on April 3rd a fresh breach was opened. Eventually the gap was filled with a massive wall of concrete, reinforced by groynes to seaward, but the land took a good three years to recover from the flood.
Similar concrete reinforcements have since been built at two other weak points on this coastline - Eccles and Caister - but now the news of a breach at Palling portends that the defences of the East Norfolk marshes and the Broads have once more been outflanked.
The great Fen floods of March, 1947, were caused primarily by heavy rain following the deep snow and prolonged frost which had held the whole country in their grip since the beginning of the year. The rivers of six counties drain into the Great Ouse and reach the sea through its single outlet at Lynn, but here again northerly winds and high tides helped to keep the immense volume of flood water bottled up in the river, with the result that the Little Ouse at Southery, the Great Ouse near Ely and the Wissey at Hilgay all burst their banks and flooded hundreds of thousands of acres of the eastern Fens. Hundreds of men toiled day and night to fill the breaches with clay, while behind them their land was flooded and their families took refuge in the upper rooms of their houses.
Afterwards Dutch pumps were borrowed to help clear the flood water. Miracles of industry and ingenuity by the Fen farmers contributed to raise a harvest that year from some of the richest land in England, which in April had lain under water. The outcome of that flood was a six-million-pound scheme, which is still proceeding, to make relief channels to contain the water of the Fen rivers and give it a second outlet to the sea.
However, the banks strengthened in 1947 withstood the effects of the gale and high tides of March, 1949, although the tide rose in the Great Ouse to the highest level ever recorded, and again patrols were out along all the banks and men worked furiously with clay and sandbags wherever the water threatened to break through.
On the east coast the beaches were badly scoured, but again the defences held. The north and north-west were not so fortunate. The village of Cley was under four feet of water, scores of bungalows were inundated at Snettisham, and thirty families were rescued by boats. Eighty yards of Hunstanton promenade were smashed and all along the coast there were reports of cliff falls and eroded beaches.
Norwich was not directly affected either by the Horsey floods of 1938 or their successors. Its greatest flood, in August, 1912, was caused by a deluge of rain - 6½ inches in 12 hours - which inundated the river valley both above and below the city. The Wensum broke out of its narrow channel through Norwich and flooded the low-lying and then thickly-populated districts of Heigham, Westwick and Coslany. As in a similar flood caused by the thaw of a heavy snowfall in November, 1878, thousands of houses were damaged, hundreds of people had to be rescued in carts and boats, and there was great distress, for this was not only the most populous but the poorest part of the city.
After 1912 the river was widened. Further widening is still contemplated, but in the meantime slum clearance and war damage have removed the greater part of the population from the area which used to be subject to floods.
Yarmouth and Lowestoft have constantly been subject to coast erosion and flood damage. Many houses in the old Yarmouth Rows had their floorboards to set in the doorways when the river lapped over the North Quay, and the history of the town is in great part a history of the struggle to maintain the harbour against gale and tide. Lowestoft has three times rebuilt its mile-long sea wall to the north of the town - the last time since the late war - and to the south there is constant erosion at Pakefield.
The examples quoted have most of them been from recent history, but the more remote history of Norfolk and Suffolk is also punctuated with records of coast defences breached, rivers overflowing, towns and villages inundated, fields and marshes flooded - and most of them relate to the three fatal months of January, February and March, when the gales conspire with the tides to wreak havoc. But it has been left to 1953 to provide one of the most melancholy records of all, by reason not only of the widespread damage but the toll of human life.