The Queen sees flooded area
After a morning service at Sandringham Church the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh motored to Wolferton to view the floods. There the water had come across the marshes within a comparatively short distance of the station.
Several emergency council meetings were held in the coastal towns yesterday and councillors inspected the damage. Cromer Urban District sent a request to the Minister of Housing and Local Government to pay a personal visit to the North Norfolk coast.
"Food Flying Squads"
On Saturday night and again yesterday the Mayor and Mayoress of King's Lynn (Mr. and Mrs. C. A. Freestone) visited the scenes of the flooding. Yesterday Comdr. R. Scott-Miller M.P., visited South Lynn. Practically the whole of the South Lynn housing estate was affected and by last night some 2000 people had been evacuated, mostly from homes still standing in several feet of water. Many found accommodation with friends and relatives in the town but a number were sent to rest centres.
The Regional Food Officer at Cambridge yesterday sent out two "food flying squads," one from Cambridge to King's Lynn and one from Watford to the 13,000 homeless from Canvey Island, where at least 40 are believed to have been drowned. Staffed mostly by members of the W.V.S., they are intended to supplement local Civil Defence organisations with emergency feeding services in stricken areas.
Seas, regarded by older fishermen in North Norfolk as more violent than any other they have ever seen, whipped by a gale which reached over 110 miles an hour, brought havoc and destruction to one of the most picturesque and popular holiday strips of coastline between Cromer and Walcot. Along this strip sea walls were breached, holiday bungalows were blown down, blown out to sea or torn to pieces and strewn over a large area. At Bacton three houses at least disappeared over the cliff and at Walcot a number of bungalows, possibly as many as a dozen, have disappeared or been destroyed. At Walcot also, the coast road, for the protection of which a temporary sea wall was built recently, was washed away.
The Automobile Association reported last night that many roads on and near the coast in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent are impassable.